Glenn Greenwald, an amazing blogger everyone should read, has a post today about Iran, and whether or not the President has the right to invade without authorization from Congress. In the post, he describes an epilogue he had written in his book:

The Epilogue emphasizes that the radical theories of presidential power adopted by the administration (and applied to general lawbreaking, warrantless eavesdropping, torture, indefinite detentions of U.S. citizens) applied clearly and fully to Iran, i.e., that those theories — which were and still are the formally adopted positions of the Executive Branch — absolutely mean that the President has the power to commence a war with Iran, and that not only would he not need Congressional approval to do so, but Congress would lack the power to stop him even if it tried

And therein lies the point. I honestly don’t think we’re about to go to war with Iran. The military is stretched out too thin as it is. And so I wouldn’t read too much into Tony Snow and Condoleeza Rice refusing to answer whether the president needs the authority of Congress to invade Iran. It doesn’t in any way mean we’re about to do it. I wouldn’t expect either of them to say that their boss needs the authority of Congress to do anything. He doesn’t like it when people say that.

For the record, I think Iran is a looming danger, just like Iraq wasn’t, and a confrontation seems inevitable, whether military or otherwise. But what strikes me the most about the video linked above is that Tony Snow and Chris Matthews agreed that Iran’s population was largely young and pro-American. It almost makes one feel there might be some cause for long-term optimism after all. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to be able to wait that long.

Well, as long as I’m already being blocked by the filter, I may as well share this with you.

It’s an eight-minute adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour starring Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street. What more needs to be said?

(Warning: Adult Language and Content)

This film was shown at Sundance in 2002 to great acclaim, but Sesame Workshop’s lawyers put the kibosh on it, and it was pulled from release.

For another fascinating story about Bert, check out the Bert Is Evil page of one of my all-time favorite websites, Snopes.com, to find out how Bert accidentally ended up at an anti-American protest rally in Bangladesh:

The Osama bin Laden poster – with the muppet – was displayed at rallies by pro-bin Laden protesters and appeared in photographs carried by news agencies such as Reuters and Associated Press.

The technology of today has an incredible potential to make the physical distances between us much less of a barrier. Other distances between us may take some more time.

I came across this via a post by my cousin, TheMediaDude. It’s an animated map of who has controlled the Middle East for the past 5000 years, and it is quite simply the reason why computers were invented:

There are some other animated maps at Maps of War including one showing the History of Religion.

What’s there is great, but there’s not much of it, so if you’re like me, you’ll start to get a thirst for more historical maps. You can quench that thirst at the University of Texas Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection.

I gave a full-day workshop today on the value of blogging in the literacy classroom for school-based literacy coaches and technology coaches from across the city, and I never once mentioned that I had my own blog. I don’t want to be annoying “Hey, you gotta read my blog” guy.

But if I never tell anyone about the blog, then who will come and watch my postings of grainy Animaniacs cartoons from the mid-’90’s?

There’s a good article in this week’s Economist about Mongolia’s dispute with China over which of the two peoples are the true heirs of Genghis Khan:

In a country of only 2.7m people scattered over an area four times the size of Germany, national heroes are few and far between. This makes it all the more galling that Genghis is claimed by China too. Unlike the Russians, the Chinese have got round their subjugation by the Mongols by insisting he was one of their own. Genghis’s grandson, Kublai Khan, founded China’s Yuan dynasty in the 13th century. That, in China’s view, makes Genghis himself an honorary Chinese emperor.

The dispute was apparently sparked by a new Genghis Khan theme park. Is it possible that Khan is viewed differently over there than he is over here?

Anyway, what drew me to this article was that it reminded me of a study published a few years ago, also concerned with the legacy of Genghis Khan:

An international group of geneticists studying Y-chromosome data have found that nearly 8 percent of the men living in the region of the former Mongol empire carry y-chromosomes that are nearly identical. That translates to 0.5 percent of the male population in the world, or roughly 16 million descendants living today.

16 million descendants. And that’s only men descended from Khan directly through the male line, father to son, for the past 800 years. The total number of Khan’s descendants living today is truly incalculable.

So, China and Mongolia should probably stop arguing over which of their people are the true heirs of Genghis Khan. My guess is, almost all of them are.