Category Archives: View

View 833 Thursday, July 17, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightfully consider it an act of war.

Glenn T. Seaborg, National Commission on Education, 1983

Today is our wedding anniversary. Our 50^th was a few years ago, during the time I was still recovering from the radiation sickness I got from the 50,000 rads of hard x-rays that did in fact cure my brain cancer.

There’s a war going on…

A Malaysian Air jet was shot down over eastern Ukraine killing all 295 people on board, with the government in Kiev blaming pro-Russian rebels. The separatists denied the accusation.

The Boeing 777 flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was hit by a missile and went down near the eastern town of Torez, about 30 kilometers (18 miles) from the Russian border, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said.

The plane crashed in the main battleground of Ukraine’s civil war and is one of a number to have been downed in the region in the past month. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who’s returning to Moscow from a visit to South America, has repeatedly denied his nation is involved in the insurgency. The U.S. said this week that the rebels are getting weapons from Russia and tightened sanctions against it yesterday.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-17/malaysia-jet-shot-down-in-ukraine-near-russia-ifx-says.html

As of Noon today, Russia says it didn’t happen over Russian territory, and Russia had nothing to do with it. Ukraine says they didn’t do it. The Ukrainian separatists say “We don’t have the capability to shoot things down at 33,000 feet. It fell in our territory and we have the black boxes. We have not opened them and we are turning them over to the Russians.”

I don’t usually get involved in breaking news, but this is intriguing. I believe the separatists: they wouldn’t have missiles with that capability unless the Russians gave them and the Russians would have to send some technical advisors too; it’s just not likely. Russia almost certainly did not order the intercept as a matter of policy, but a Russian air defense officer might have seen the aircraft coming and ordered an intercept. Time is short in these situations. I don’t know the level of alert Russian Air Defense is on now, but I’d have thought scrambling an intercept would be more likely than firing a missile. And I can’t think of a good motive for the Ukrainians to have shot down a Malaysian airliner.

The area is on the international warning system as a war zone to be avoided.

One of the passengers on the flight send a message just before departure: it was a picture of the airplane and a tag saying this is what the plane looks like just in case it goes missing…

While we are thinking about that part of the world:

The article should be required reading everywhere.

<http://nationalinterest.org/feature/five-ways-the-soviet-union-could-have-won-the-cold-war-10888?page=show>

————

Roland Dobbins

Those were serious times. Tyrants often cut off the heads of the tallest poppies; it’s one of the side effects of tyranny. Augustus was secure enough that he could give commands and missions to highly competent officers and not fear that they would march on Rome to replace him. Claudius worked to try to regularize the Imperial civil service and not be so dependent on the Army. He was followed by Nero…

The Peer Review Scandal

Jerry,

A quick and easy fix to the peer review scandal could be a simple attitude adjustment in the scientific community. Science must be published or it is useless to all. Science is also going to vary in quality and accuracy even if all parties to the process are being as careful and honest as is possible — it is a human enterprise after all and Nature can be subtle, providing false positive and false negative results under the best of conditions and efforts.

Replication of experiments is therefore highly important to the process, and this is where the attitude adjustment comes into play: publish your results, perish if not enough of them are replicated. On the funding side, fund the principle research, but automatically budget the money for replication research. Additional funding for a researcher will depend upon the quality of the researcher’s work judged by a high replication rate.

Further, a ‘major’ result cannot be declared until the result is replicated. Until then, it is an ‘important’ or ‘interesting’ result of no merit beyond being moved to the head of the replication priority list. Accolades and awards will need to be re-thought as well in order to recognize the importance of replication and reward the efforts of the replication researchers.

Some of the problems with this approach are that it will take a while to make the change, as funding for replication has been light and most work does not get replicated for failure to even try. Also, many results may take years to replicate as the original research may take years to carry out. This can be dealt with the way high-energy physics research is done: build replication into the original experimental setup. Such work deserves two independent teams working simultaneously using different but complimentary methods and results are claimed only if both teams reach the same conclusions. Additionally, some results are important enough to deserve multiple replications.

Science is a large and complex enterprise of immense import to humanity. It is import that it work and work properly and we must be careful not to break science in our efforts to fix it. Changing attitudes to put an appropriate emphasis on replication may well be a simple and effective fix, enhancing science without breaking it.

That might work but I wouldn’t call implementing it quick and easy. One problem is that there is a lot of useless ‘research’ funding: the topic might be useful or interesting, but there the people the money goes to aren’t talented. They might be capable of duplicating someone else’s work – confirming results – but that doesn’t get you on tenure track. And of course the voodoo sciences have to be ‘equal’ with the real sciences, and get lots of money for studies of hermeneutic convergences in James Joyce and e e cummings.

It’s the attitude changes that are tough. There was a time when academics weren’t paid huge salaries and benefits; they wore leather patches on the elbows of their tweed jackets, and lived quite modestly. But that was long ago. Now there’s all that money flowing from the student loans and it has to go somewhere…

Congress says: Americans Too Stupid for GMO Labels

I like to keep an eye on the leftist news; sometimes it’s worth my time. The Huffington Post seems to report more on Kim Kardashian’s butt than it does on anything else. Would you believe, I’d never even heard of Kim Kardashian until she kept popping up in the "Huff Post"

twitter feed? But, every so often, they produce a real story:

<.>

It’s pretty rare that members of Congress and all the witnesses they’ve called will declare out loud that Americans are just too ignorant to be given a piece of information, but that was a key conclusion of a session of the House Agriculture Committee this week.

The issue was genetically modified organisms, or GMOs as they’re often known in the food industry. And members of the subcommittee on Horticulture, Research, Biotechnology, and Foreign Agriculture, as well as their four experts, agreed that the genetic engineering of food crops has been a thorough success responsible for feeding the hungry, improving nutrition and reducing the use of pesticides.

People who oppose GMOs or want them labeled so that consumers can know what they’re eating are alarmists who thrive on fear and ignorance, the panel agreed. Labeling GMO foods would only stoke those fears, and harm a beneficial thing, so it should not be allowed, the lawmakers and witnesses agreed.

</>

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/10/gmo-labels-congress_n_5576255.html

And, as if saying that Americans are too stupid to handle GMO labels wasn’t enough, matters take an Orwellian twist:

<.>

The issue may soon gain fresh relevance on Capitol Hill, where a measure backed by Reps. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) and G.K. Butterfield

(D-N.C.) to stop states from requiring GMO labeling could get marked up as early as September. The bill also would allow genetically engineered food to be labeled "100 percent natural."

</>

Yes, it’s all making sense to me now.. Labeling the food as "100 percent natural" will let those who know avoid GMO while those who do not know will consume it. In fact, people might avoid non-GMO foods thinking those are not natural. It’s a bit of a sick joke, but it’s publicly invisible and privately recognizable while subject to the pact of law.

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

An interesting interpretation. My own view is that the one thing the government ought to be doing is enforcing truth in advertising. I don’t care if you buy snake oil, but it is fraud if I sell you Wesson Oil and tell you I squeezed it out of a snake…

Another reason I don’t Facebook: I’d never do anything else.  My wife follows Facebook including my daughter’s page, on which was posted today something fascinating:  a Great Blue Heron, on what looks like a golf fairway: a large well mowed level grass field, no body of water in sight, nothing around but this big bird walking slowly across the lawn, clearly stalking something.  Slowly he advances. Then stops.  Assumes the pose they take when fishing, absolutely still, neck cocked back, beak aimed a foot or so in front of his feet.  Stands that way for about half a minute.  Then strikes. Out of a previously unseen hole in the ground comes beak and struggling gopher. Bird shakes gopher, finally bangs is on the ground several times.  Gopher is still.  Bird tosses gopher and catches it by the head, aims beak at the sky, and swallows gopher whole.

Of course he’d have to swallow the gopher whole, just as he does fish. He hasn’t got any teeth.  But this was no accidental find.  That bird knew precisely where he was going and watched that hole until he saw the gopher, and grabbed it.  I once saw Sasha, the Siberian Husky we had previous to our last dog Sable, do that with a gopher up on the hill above us, but one expects wolf dogs to do that sort of thing, and Huskies can be very still, alert, and patient when they want to be; and of course you expect herons to be alert and patient when fishing, but I never saw one hunt a gopher before.  Anyway, it was fascinating, and another reason I think I have to avoid Facebook…

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 833 Wednesday, July 16, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Israel is caught in a dilemma. Of course Hamas will launch missiles from areas teeming with civilians, knowing that if Israel uses automatic counterfire against the launch point there will be casualties; you may be sure that some PR people are carrying teddy bears to be placed just before the foreign press photographers get to the strike zone.

Today Israeli forces – it is not clear whether an air strike or naval bombardment – killed four Palestinian children and wounded several others. Israeli authorities say the target was Hamas terrorists, and blames Hamas, but it isn’t clear what the target really was: was there a missile launched form this area? And was this naval bombardment or an air strike? It was fairly close to an international hotel where foreign journalists stay.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/07/16/dispatch-israeli-strike-kills-four-children-at-a-gaza-beach/

The rocket attacks from Gaza have no military purpose, since the accuracy of the best of them will have a CEP of several hundred feet, and in most cases they are simply launched in the general direction of a city – or a nuclear depository – in the hopes that they’ll kill someone – or that the counterfire will kill Palestinians and provide good video for foreign journalists. Palestinian sympathizers say that’s the only weapon the Palestinians have.

One of Niven’s Laws is “Do not throw excrement at an armed man. Do not stand next to someone who is throwing excrement at an armed man.” He formed that forty years ago, and it seems reasonable to me. I would expand it to say do not be near someone launching a rocket in the general direction of Tel Aviv, but of course many Palestinians have no choice: a pickup truck pulls up at a crossroad, men unload a launch platform and missile, the truck drives away and the missile is launched, often by a cell phone call. Your best bet would be to run: counter battery retaliation could be pretty quick even in my day, and doubtless it is faster now.

Israel at some point will have to invade, not the northern part of Gaza where the missiles are launched, but the part of Gaza that borders Egypt. That border teems with tunnels, some quite sophisticated with rails, some running a mile into Gaza, and the missiles are smuggled in through those tunnels. Others come by sea. Gaza can’t make missiles but they can assemble them; if no missiles are imported then none can be launched at Tel Aviv . But taking a strip a mile wide along the Gaza-Egyptian border would let them eliminate the existing tunnels, but unless it is occupied, there will soon be more. Occupation will immediately invite settlers; indeed who else would want to occupy southern Gaza.

Probably better to go in, stomp all the tunnels, raze everything along the border, and be prepared to come back another time. I confess I was one of those who advised the Israelis to abandon Gaza and end that occupation; it was not good advice. There may be no good advice….

Israel is not the only country with a dilemma.

The flood of children without visas into the United States continues.

Allowing illegal immigrant children to go home

On Monday you mentioned that the immigrant children can’t be deported without a hearing.

Could we not simply first ask them if they want to go home, and help them get there if they do? Surely some of the children are homesick? Is it deportation, if they want to return to their family, and we help?

Tom

That might take care of what, 5% of them? Not many of those who went through what they did just to get here are going to volunteer to go back.

Children on the border…

If a bunch of poor American children and their mothers and fathers ‘in search of a better life’ try to trespass on the grounds of a rich person’s gated mansion, or private country club or nature preserve, they will not be allowed in. Large unsmiling men will efficiently and, if necessary, brutally, kick them out. And that will be that.

If a poor American tries to send her kids to a rich school district because they have a dream, they will not be allowed to – and likely the parents will be thrown in jail and the families separated.

The rich have neither moral nor practical difficulties defending what they have from those less fortunate than they are. ‘Sacrifice in the name of compassion’ is so only for little people. Indeed, what is going on with the ‘children’ flooding in over our southern border has nothing to do with morality at all – it is a vicious and cynical attempt to create a population explosion, to drive American wages down to third-world levels, so that the rich can become even richer. Period. (That’s why the poorest countries have so many billionaires).

I also note that, at last report, most of the illegals coming in are adults – and while a 17-year old male MS13 drug gang member is legally a minor, the world ‘child’ seems inappropriate. No, it’s not about ‘the children’ except as a marketing tool.

I have a simple solution to the problem. Let the rich practice what they preach. Let’s settle 10,000 impoverished children in some swanky suburb and see their school district handle it. Let’s stop enforcing the rules against trespassing on country clubs and ski resorts, and make the rich swim in a sea of poverty and chaos like the rest of us. Let open borders with the third-world threaten the profits and comforts of the rich, and the border would be sealed by the end of August at the latest, and there would be no angst about ‘the children’ on the news. Count on that.

What we really need is not a revolution, but elites like FDR and Bismarck, who will forgo short-term profit in the interest of long-term stability. Unfortunately our current elites feel no such long-term stake in the country, and care only about squeezing as much profit out of the nation as they can before it all falls apart, and then they can hop on their yachts and sail away.

Cheap Labor Uber Alles.

Globus Pallidus XI

If the Air Force were ordered to fly them all home, it could do so. It’s not the Normandy Invasion. If need be take some ships out of mothballs for the operation. But the law at the moment says they are entitled to a hearing, and it is not likely the President would sign a Bill removing that restriction even if the Senate would allow it to come to a vote.

Another item in the dark side of the child immigration crisis

And this one is scary, particularly for those with school-age children.

http://www.newsradio1067.com/common/more.php?m=49&post_id=154

Richard White

Austin, Texas

Scary indeed, and the fear is justified.

Important courses for EE

Hi Dr. Pournelle,

Could I suggest that your young friend very much consider taking a statistics course or two? Since he’s good at math, he’d probably find it profitable to commit himself to taking one math course every semester, and I mean EVERY semester, until graduation. It looks to me as though heat transfer, electromagnetic fields, and other subjects requiring finite element analysis are going to be a very big deal going forward, so I think there’s a definite market for people who understand vector calculus and can “roll their own” for some of the trickier problems.

Neil

Actually I have already discussed that with him. He thinks he’d like to be a designer, and I tried to explain – remember he’s an incoming senior in high school – that statistical inference and experimental design require some mathematical sophistications he isn’t likely to know he needs; and most soft science courses in statistics are worthless, being just cookbook stuff. Of course this isn’t the last talk we’ll have; and I completely neglected history and literature, both necessary if you are to be an educated man. But I completely agree: it is necessary to understand something of statistics and the models used for inference if you’re going to be a designer.

We’re still looking at EE because of the engineering specialties, EE is the closest to scientific method: Maxwell’s Equations really do describe phenomena in the real world, and imply insights not expected when they were formulated. The next step up from that is physics, and a lot of Operations Research people, and strategists, and heavy duty thinkers like Herman Kahn were physicists to begin with, just as I sort of had to study a lot of physics to get some of my assignments accomplished. The important thing about an education is that you master something. It’s like learning to be a writer: you have to learn to finish your work, complete what you are doing.

I was never a specialist, but I did learn a lot about how to tool up and learn something new well enough to be able to use it to get a task done.

Government Funded Research and Published paper retraction.

Jerry,

The current scandal regarding the HiJacking of the Peer Review Process and the retraction of papers based on Government Funded "Research," cries out for some system of formal penalties for those who subvert the Scientific Method.

For Government Funded a Research, My suggestion would be a two strike process on the retraction side. First Retraction the penalty is the amount of Government Funding provided. Second retraction, the amount of Government Funding plus a life time ban on receiving any Government Research Funding. In Addition a failure to provide the data or process used so that others can attempt to replicate the results would have a penalty of the amount of Government Funding received plus the Lifetime ban on receiving any Government Research Funding.

The Scientific Method is much too important to Mankind to allow it to be subverted by those with Political and Social agendas.

Bob Holmes

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/14/peer-review-scandal-forces-resignation-of-taiwan-cabinet-minister/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/11/the-most-brazen-peer-review-scandal-anyone-can-remember/

I have long been critical of the peer review process, and I believe that it misallocates public funds for research: I think that a percentage of public funding ought to go into unpopular scientific notions, even some wild ideas; into crucial experiments to test generally accepted hypotheses.  It won’t pay off often, but when it does it will pay off big.  But so long as publish or perish rules academia, the peer review process will be subverted, and science will become more bureaucratized. Depend on it.

A bit long but an interesting read.

By: David P. Goldman

A one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is upon us. It won’t arrive by Naftali Bennett’s proposal <http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/181501#.U6dRlvmwJcQ> to annex the West Bank’s Area C, or through the efforts of BDS campaigners and Jewish Voice for Peace <http://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/> to alter the Jewish state. But it will happen, sooner rather than later, as the states on Israel’s borders disintegrate and other regional players annex whatever they can. As that happens, Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria is becoming inevitable.

Last week’s rocket attacks from Gaza failed to inflict many casualties in Israel—but they administered a mortal wound to Palestinian self-governance. Hamas launched its deepest strikes ever into Israel after the IDF cracked down on its West Bank operations following the murder last month of three Israeli boys, arresting nearly 900 members of Hamas <https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/12643-israel-has-arrested-896-palestinians-since-12-june> and other terrorist groups. Humiliated in the territories, and unable to pay its 44,000 Gaza employees <http://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-decides-to-go-for-broke/> , Hamas acted from weakness, gambling that missile attacks would elicit a new Intifada on the West Bank. Although Fatah militias joined in the rocket attacks from Gaza, for now the Palestinian organizations are in their worst disarray in 20 years.

The settlers of Judea and Samaria have stood in the cross-hairs of Western diplomacy for two decades, during which the word “settler” has become a term of the highest international opprobrium. Yet the past decade of spiraling conflicts in the Middle East have revealed that what is settled in the region is far less significant than what is unsettled. Iran’s intervention into the Syrian civil conflict has drawn the Sunni powers into a war of attrition that already has displaced more than 10 million people, mostly Sunnis, and put many more at risk. The settled, traditional, tribal life of the Levant has been shattered. Never before in the history of the region have so many young men had so little hope, so few communal ties, and so many reasons to take up arms.

<http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/population1524.png>

Source: U.N. World Population Prospects <http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_indicators.htm>

As a result, the central premise of Western diplomacy in the region has been pulled inside-out, namely that a resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue was the key to long-term stability in the Middle East. Now the whole of the surrounding region has become one big refugee crisis. Yet the seemingly spontaneous emergence of irregular armies like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) now rampaging through northern Mesopotamia should be no surprise. The misnamed Arab Spring of 2011 began with an incipient food crisis in Egypt <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MB02Ak01.html> and a water crisis in Syria <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MC29Ak02.html> . Subsidies from the Gulf States keep Egypt on life support. In Syria and Iraq, though, displaced populations become foraging armies that loot available resources, particularly oil, and divert the proceeds into armaments that allow the irregulars to keep foraging. ISIS is selling $800 million a year of Syrian oil to Turkey, according to one estimate <http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/business/2014/06/turkey-syria-isis-selling-smuggled-oil.html> , as well as selling electricity from captured power plants back to the Assad government. On June 11 it seized the Bajii power plant oil refinery <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/12/world/middleeast/the-militants-moving-in-on-syria-and-iraq.html?hp&_r=1> in northern Iraq, the country’s largest.

The region has seen nothing like it since the Mongol invasion of the 13th century. Perpetual war has turned into a snowball that accumulates people and resources as it rolls downhill and strips the ground bare of sustenance. Those who are left shiver in tents in refugee camps, and their young men go off to the war. There is nothing new about this way of waging war; it was invented in the West during the Thirty Years War by the imperial general Albrecht von Wallenstein, and it caused the death of nearly half the population of Central Europe between 1618 and 1648.

As a result of this spiraling warfare, four Arab states—Libya, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq—have effectively ceased to exist. Lebanon, once a Christian majority country, became a Shia country during the past two decades under the increased domination of Hezbollah. Nearly 2 million Syrian Sunnis have taken refuge in Lebanon, as Israeli analyst Pinhas Inbari <http://jcpa.org/article/syrian-war-is-reshaping-the-region/> observes, and comprise almost half of Lebanon’s total population of 4 million, shifting the demographic balance to the Sunnis—while the mass Sunni exodus tilts the balance of power in Syria toward the Alawites and other religious minorities, who are largely allied with Iran. Jordan, meanwhile, has taken in a million Syrian Sunnis, making Palestinians a minority inside Jordan for the first time in a generation. A region that struggled to find sustenance for its people before 2011 has now been flooded with millions of refugees without resources or means of support. They are living for the most part on largesse from the Gulf States, and their young men are prospective cannon fodder.

The remaining states in the region—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran—will alternately support and suppress the new irregular armies as their interests require. Where does ISIS get its support, apart from oil hijacking in Syria and bank robberies in Mosul <http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/12/isis-just-stole-425-million-and-became-the-worlds-richest-terrorist-group/> ? There are allegations that ISIS receives support from Turkey <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/17/pipes-turkeys-support-for-isis/> , the Sunni Gulf States <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/14/america-s-allies-are-funding-isis.html> , and Iran <http://jcpa.org/article/isis-irans-instrument-regional-hegemony/> . Pinhas Inbari <http://jcpa.org/article/isis-irans-instrument-regional-hegemony/> claims that Shiite Iran is funding Sunni extremists “to be certain that a strong Iraqi state does not emerge again along its western border.” There are equally credible reports that each of these powers wants to stop ISIS. Saudi Arabia fears <http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/05/isis-saudi-arabia-qaeda-terrorism-syria.html> that Sunni extremists might overthrow the monarchy. Turkey fears that the depredations of ISIS on its border will trigger the formation of an independent Kurdish state, which it has opposed vehemently for decades. Iran views ISIS as a Sunni competitor for influence in the region.

To some extent, I believe, all these reports are true. The mess in the Middle East brings to mind the machinations around Swedish intervention in the Thirty Years War between 1627 and 1635, when France’s Cardinal Richelieu paid Sweden’s King Gustavus Adolphus to intervene on the Protestant side in order to weaken France’s Catholic rival Austria. At different times, Protestant Saxony and Catholic Bavaria allied with France, Austria, and each other, respectively. France and Sweden began as allies, briefly became enemies, and then were allies again. Looming over this snake-pit of religious, dynastic, and national rivalries was the figure of Albrecht von Wallenstein, the Austrian generalissimo who twice saved the Empire from defeat at the hands of the Protestants. Wallenstein, commanding a polyglot mercenary army with no national or religious loyalty, played both sides, and Austria had him murdered in 1634.

There is more than coincidence to the parallels between the Middle East today and 17th-century Europe. Iran’s intervention into Syria’s civil conflict inaugurated a new kind of war in the region, the sort that Richelieu practiced in the 1620s. Iran’s war objectives are not national or territorial in the usual sense; rather, the objective is the war itself, that is, the uprooting and destruction of potentially hostile populations. With a third of Syria’s population displaced and several million expelled, the Assad regime has sought to change Syria’s demographics to make the country more congenial to Shiite rule. That in turn elicits a new kind of existential desperation from the Saudis, who are fighting for not only the survival of their sclerotic and corrupt monarchy, but also for the continuation of Sunni life around them. Today Iraq’s Sunnis, including elements of Saddam Hussein’s mainly Sunni army and the 100,000 strong “Sons of Iraq” force hired by then-U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus during the 2007-2008 surge, are making common cause with ISIS. Tomorrow they might be shooting at each other. The expectation that the waves of sectarian and tribal violence that have caused national borders to crumble across the Middle East will die down in 30 years may be both incredibly grim and wildly optimistic.

***

In the background of the region’s disrupted demographics, a great demographic change overshadows the actions of all the contenders. That is decline of Muslim fertility, and the unexpected rise in Jewish fertility. The fall in Muslim birth rate is most extreme in Iran and Turkey, with different but related consequences. When Ayatollah Khomeini took power in 1979, the average Iranian woman had seven children; today the total fertility rate has fallen to just 1.6 children, the sharpest drop in demographic history. Iran still has a young population, but it has no children to succeed them. By mid-century Iran will have a higher proportion of elderly dependents than Europe, an impossible and unprecedented burden for a poor country. Iran’s sudden aging will be followed by Turkey, Algeria, and Tunisia.

<http://cdn1.tabletmag.com/wp-content/files_mf/popover65.png>

Source: U.N. World Population Prospects <http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_indicators.htm>

Iran’s disappearing fertility is in a sense the Shah’s revenge. Iran is the most literate Muslim country, thanks in large part to an ambitious literacy campaign introduced by the Shah in the early 1970s. As I showed in my book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying, Too), literacy is the best predictor of fertility in the Muslim world: Muslim women who attend high school and university marry late or not at all and have fewer children. This has grave strategic implications, as Iran’s leaders unabashedly discuss.

Between 2005 and 2020, Iran’s population aged 15 to 24, that is, its pool of potential army recruits, will have fallen by nearly half. To put this in perspective, Pakistan’s military-age population will have risen by about half. In 2000, Iran had half the military-age men of its eastern Sunni neighbor; by 2020 it will have one-fourth as many. Iran’s bulge generation of youth born in the 1980s is likely to be its last, and its window for asserting Shiite power in the region will close within a decade.

The Obama Administration wants to contain Iranian aggression by accommodating Iran’s ambitions to become a regional power. As the president told <http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-02/obama-to-israel-time-is-running-out> Bloomberg’s Jeffrey Goldberg in March, “What I’ll say is that if you look at Iranian behavior, they are strategic, and they’re not impulsive. They have a worldview, and they see their interests, and they respond to costs and benefits. And that isn’t to say that they aren’t a theocracy that embraces all kinds of ideas that I find abhorrent, but they’re not North Korea. They are a large, powerful country that sees itself as an important player on the world stage, and I do not think has a suicide wish, and can respond to incentives.” Any deal with Iran is therefore a good deal from Obama’s point of view. But that is precisely wrong: Iran does not have a suicide wish, but it knows that it is dying, and has nothing to lose by rolling the dice today.

The analogy with the Thirty Years War is apt; and frightening.

This is an update about ISIS:

“Isis fighters have captured much of eastern Syria in the past few days while international attention has been focused on the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Using tanks and artillery seized in Iraq, it has taken almost all of oil-rich Deir Ezzor province and is battling to crush the resistance of the Syrian Kurds.”

http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/syria-crisis-isis-marches-further-into-syria-tipping-the-balance-of-power-in-the-civil-war/

I would point out, ISIS is getting closer to Israel and now they have access to oil. So, instead of stealing money from banks, they could engage in trade to maintain a steady cash flow. ISIS also picked up some materiel that wasn’t reported when they seized those U.S. weapons we discussed:

“The latest reports say ISIS captured 52 M198 howitzers, capable of firing 155 mmshells 20 miles with precision GPS aiming mechanisms.

Though experts expressed doubts over whether ISIS could quickly figure out how to use the GPS systems, the artillery could still do massive damage to Iraqi cities near their territory.”

http://www.businessinsider.com/isis-has-52-american-weapons-that-can-hit-baghdad-2014-7

And the beat goes on…

—–

Most Respectfully,
Joshua Jordan, KSC
Percussa Resurgo

For your bucket list:

Sara Wheat is the 11th woman to make a HALO jump. She goes to XXXX’s church here in Huntsville. Last week she went to Memphis to jump out of a perfectly good airplane at 30070 feet. HALO means high altitude low (parachute) opening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7AzDoIa9o8

Don’t plan on getting me into a $3700 HALO jump for my birthday, like she got.

YYYY

I suspect there was a time when I would have enjoyed that, but no longer…

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 833 Monday, July 14, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Our neighbors’ house is sold and they’ll be moving, and their boy is entering his senior year at a good high school. He’s interested in technology and will be taking AP calculus and such. Top 15% of this class, so not Cal Tech, and not interested in leaving university with enormous debts. No father in the house, and I’ve known him and his mother quite literally all his life. Took him to lunch at the Oyster House to talk things over.

Interested in technology, not really interested in being a teacher, wants to do something in technology, not sure what. Good a math, but not a theoretical type. I suggested electrical engineering. Not as much theory as physics, but based on good science. Maxwell’s equations are a great example of scientific theory at work doing all kinds of practical things. Chemistry is more empirical, and mechanical is more practical. Electrical, then, but be sure to take chemistry through organic, and biology beyond the non-major survey course. And don’t bother with computer science as an undergraduate. You have to learn how to use the little beasts, but teaching them to do things is getting to be a pretty wide spread ability; better to learn how to build them and design chips and practical stuff on the one side, and be able to think of things you want to teach them to do on the other. Get an EE degree and you can have a job or almost anything you like in grad school, and learning organic chemistry and better than elementary in biology puts you in a good place if you decided to go into nanotechnology.

Anyway, that’s how I spent the afternoon. In my judgment it would be pointless to spend the money (and acquire the debts)  for a really top tech school. California Northridge was supported by North American when it was still a college, and has good engineering program. So do the California Polytechnic universities. Just far enough away from home that you’re not living at home, and close enough to come home to get the laundry done…

The business with the child immigrants continues and it’s not going away.

Children on the border

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I read your recent meditations on our border issues with interest. However, I believe your picture of events is not complete; to wit, you seem to suggest that the children who get her have done so on their own pluck and grit. Eliza crossing the ice.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the situation at all.

http://www.cbp.gov/border-security/human-trafficking

Most children who come here are brought in by adult smugglers.

I hesitate to write down just why these children are brought here for, or what uses the underworld can find for young children who do not exist legally and who are completely at the mercy of their adult ‘benefactors’. I suspect I do not have to draw you a picture — here are the things the border patrol is trained to look for:

* Lacks identification documents or travel documents

* Lives and works in the same place

* Lacks freedom of movement

* Seems to be restricted from socializing, attending religious services or contacting family

* Seems to have been deprived of basic life necessities, such as food, water, sleep or medical care

* Shows signs of having been abused or physically assaulted. Such signs range from the more obvious, such as broken bones, to the more subtle, such as branding or tattooing

* Seems submissive or fearful in the presence of others

* Seems not to control his or her schedule

* Seems to lack concrete short- or long-term plans

* Seems to lack knowledge about the place where he or she lives

* Appears to date much older, abusive or controlling men.

Consider, if you will, what a person who exhibits those symptoms has been through in their lives, and what they have been brought to the land of the free to do.

And then ask yourself whether that’s a fit thing to do to adults, let alone vulnerable children.

I see no other answer: If we are to prevent people doing such things, we must take away their incentive. We must send back ALL the kids, to the last and least. As for the adults who do these things … may God grant them repentance and mercy, but as a rule they must be sent to that final accounting ASAP.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Children on the border

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

A case in point. I had barely finished pressing "send" on the last email when this crossed my desk.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/382600/human-traffickers-are-asking-hhs-immigrant-children-joel-gehrke

“Individuals associated with human trafficking organizations are asking Health and Human Services officials to hand over the children who have immigrated to the United States during the recent border surge, according to a congressman who toured a facility where the children are being housed.

“HHS is trying to release the children to sponsors in the United States, but those sponsors aren’t always parents. “There have been cases of people who have attempted to be sponsors actually being identified as associated with trafficking organizations,” Representative Jim Bridenstine (R., Okla) told National Review Online after visiting a housing facility at Fort Sill. “

Respectfully,

Brian P.

The President has asked Congress for several billion dollars to deal with the situation. It is not clear what he wants to do with the money.

The Air Force and Navy could get all those kids back to their country of origin, but it’s not entirely clear what happens then: Do we just shove them out on the tarmac and fly home? Not sure who we send to do the shoving. You may be sure there will be plenty of cameras covering the event.

Adding more Border Patrol doesn’t seem helpful: once they get into the US they are easy enough to catch and often turn themselves in: now what? Congress could repeal the law that says they can’t be deported without a hearing, although one suspects that if the House sends up such a law the Senate will reject it, various law clubs will sue to have it declared racist and unconstitutional, and nothing will happen; meanwhile the kids are here, sleeping in barracks if lucky or in what look a lot like concentration camps, which means as soon as possible released out into the public to anyone who will take them and doesn’t have the obvious appearance of Captain Hook and his merry men.

If they are not sent home, more will come. For many, better to be in an America detention camp that on the streets where they live now.

And more are coming.

The Marine in Durance Vile

Actually, Jerry, I saw something in the last few days.

In an interview with Neil Cavuto, LTC Oliver North USMC (commissioned 1968, resigned commission 1988) pointed out that Federal law requires the President to make essentially the phone call you describe.

Article at http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/oliver-north-jailed-marine-andrew-tahmooressi/2014/07/03/id/580805/ calls out 22 US Code 1732, at http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/22/1732. Actual text: “Whenever it is made known to the President that any citizen of the United States has been unjustly deprived of his liberty by or under the authority of any foreign government, it shall be the duty of the President forthwith to demand of that government the reasons of such imprisonment; and if it appears to be wrongful and in violation of the rights of American citizenship, the President shall forthwith demand the release of such citizen, and if the release so demanded is unreasonably delayed or refused, the President shall use such means, not amounting to acts of war and not otherwise prohibited by law, as he may think necessary and proper to obtain or effectuate the release; and all the facts and proceedings relative thereto shall as soon as practicable be communicated by the President to Congress.”

So far, Obama has apparently neither called the Mexican government nor communicated anything on the matter to Congress.

Impeachable offense? You tell me.

–John R. Strohm

Obama could get that Marine home if he wanted to. Clearly there is some political advantage to allowing the situation to continue. At worst – well, what are the Seals and Marine for, anyway? Which is why I will never be president.

Judge Says Incest May No Longer Be Taboo

Just when I thought our country had problems:

<.>

A judge in Australia has been criticised after saying incest may no longer be a taboo and that the community may now accept consensual sex between adult siblings.

Judge Garry Neilson, from the district court in the state of New South Wales, likened incest to homosexuality, which was once regarded as criminal and "unnatural" but is now widely accepted.

He said incest was now only a crime because it may lead to abnormalities in offspring but this rationale was increasingly irrelevant because of the availability of contraception and abortion.

</>

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/10958728/Australian-judge-says-incest-may-no-longer-be-a-taboo.html

Yikes..

—–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Percussa Resurgo

Historians speak of decadence, but we don’t believe that anything is decadent now.

Buzz Aldrin on SDI.

‘And I believe that that demonstration of the perseverance, the dedication, the depth of the industrial capacity of the United States went a long ways to convince Premier Gorbachev that the Soviet Union could not match – the announcement by President Reagan that we would develop a strategic defense initiative, branded by the media in a detrimental way, as "Star Wars" – it, I believe, was a major factor in the ending of the Cold War and the separation of the Satellite Nations around the U.S.S.R. It gave us peace. It reduced the Nuclear Weapon threat worldwide.’

<http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2a5vg8/i_am_buzz_aldrin_engineer_american_astronaut_and/cirs9ls>

——–

Roland Dobbins

Col. Aldrin was of course one of the participants in the December 1980 space and defense policy meetings held at Larry Niven’s house to write papers for the transition teams of the incoming Reagan Administration.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 832 Friday, July 11, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

More locusts devour time at Chaos Manor, but it is time to comment on the border situation. Fortunately, Peggy Noonan has done that well:

Her conclusion is chilling:

"There is every sign (Obama) let the crisis on the border build to put heat on Republicans and make them pass his idea of good immigration reform. It would be "comprehensive," meaning huge, impenetrable and probably full of mischief. His base wants it. It would no doubt benefit the Democratic Party in the long term.

The little children in great danger, holding hands, staring blankly ahead, are pawns in a larger game. That game is run by adults. How cold do you have to be to use children in this way?"

http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-crisis-on-the-border-1405029753

As to what can be done: First, what do we want to do with them? It is pretty clear that those who get here have passed a survival test of some importance, or have good luck: either is of great value to future Janissaries.

The Turks used to levy tribute on their conquered Christian provinces: send us your children. The boys were then enslaved, forcibly converted, and trained to be the elite of the Sultan’s army. Obviously a Republic cannot do this, but it is rapidly becoming clear that we aren’t living in a Republic.

I start with Los Angeles, where the city owned Department of Water and Power is an independent fiefdom subject to no financial control, and whose Union Business Rep controls a pair of “non – profit” corporations that receive $4 million a year in city tax funds. It has already received and spent $40 million. No one but the union boss knows how that money was spent: it was paid in salaries and expenses, but to whom, and how much to whom, and expenses for what are questions he says are private to the corporations, because the money is no longer public money after the corporations receive it. Two court actions have ordered him to produce the records, but he has appealed, and now appeals the denials of his appeals, and it is clear that years will go by before there is any resolution. And now the City Council has tried to not pay the $4 million that is due, but he has said that they must pay. Since almost all of them were elected with campaign funds donated by his union it looks as if the money will be paid, ‘just in case.’ Otherwise there will be trouble.

If this is democracy (and looking at Greece and Italy it appears to be that) then surely whatever we had back when I was young, whatever you call it, was preferable?

It is the same here: whatever we propose regarding the immigrant children, the lawyers and courts will prevent it from being done. About all we can do is tell the United States Air Force to fly them home. All of them. Take them to their country of origin. How do we determine that? It’s not hard. Perhaps make it one more of the tests: they survived getting here now have they learned survival skills like English and ways to charm or hoodwink Federal Agents? Those who haven’t get sent home. That gets that lesson across. And don’t publicize the exceptions, the one smart enough to get past all that: them we send to good schools where they can learn citizenship. It would be useful to have a supply of young people who grow up with a good education and have been taught patriotism. Let them go to the schools our military people send their own children to. In fact, let some become children of the regiments… It has worked for nations other than the Turks…

I suppose it’s late and I am tired. I can’t be meaning all this. Forget the exceptions. Send them all home. But that’s not a comforting thought either. And I keep thinking, if they’re tough enough to get here, and smart enough to get past our gate dragons, then don’t we want them on our side? And should someone be learning patriotism and love of America in schools, now that our public schools don’t want to teach that?

In Fall 1980 after the election President-elect Ronald Reagan asked General Schriever to write transition team papers on space and defense policy.  General Schriever assigned that task to Dr. Francis X. Kane, Col. USAF Ret., who had been his Director of Plans in Systems Command.  Duke Kane was the unacknowledged co-author of The Strategy of Technology by Stefan T. Possony and Jerry Pournelle. He asked me to help in performing this task.  I asked Larry Niven if he could host about 60 experts, ranging from Buzz Aldrin and Pete Conrad to George Merrick and Dr. Gould of North American, Max Hunter of Douglas, Lowell Wood, General Graham, and a number of others for a long weekend meeting where we would hammer out policy papers.  He agreed if I’d chair the meeting. Mrs. Niven with a crew of volunteers would do the cooking, serving all meals so we could keep working without going out.

The papers were delivered to the President.  There were subsequent meetings. All urged that the United States adopt a policy of strategic and tactical defense.  This was one origin of the SDI policy, and many concepts, and several exact quotes appear in the President’s “Star Wars” speech in 1983.

MDAdigest_2014_07_11

MISSILE DEFENSE AGENCY

MDA DIGEST

July 11, 2014

A daily compilation of excerpted news stories from around the world dealing with missile defense or of interest to the missile defense community. Use of articles does not reflect official endorsement.

NEWS ARTICLES

1) PENTAGON DIALS BACK LONGSTANDING ASSESSMENT THAT IRAN COULD TEST ICBM BY 2015, Inside Defense, July 10, 2014. The Pentagon in a new report to Congress is dialing back a longstanding assessment that Iran could flight-test by 2015 an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking the United States, an apparent break with U.S. intelligence estimates since 1999. An unclassified executive summary of the Annual Report on Military Power of Iran, dated January 2014 and not previously reported, does not — unlike past years — offer an assessment of the technical feasibility of Iran’s potential to demonstrate an ICBM capable of reaching the United States in 2015. Instead, the two-page executive summary states: "Iran has publicly stated it may launch a space launch vehicle by 2015 that could be capable of intercontinental ballistic missile ranges if configured as a ballistic missile."…

2) S. KOREA CONDEMNS NORTH MISSILE TEST AS ‘SERIOUS PROVOCATION’, Agence France Presse, July 10, 2014. South Korea on Thursday condemned a series of missile launches by nuclear-armed North Korea as a "serious provocation" that threatened stability on the peninsula. The South’s defense ministry expressed particular concern over the launch Wednesday of two short-range ballistic missiles from a front-line base near the western section of the heavily guarded border. "We see the recent series of North Korean missile launches as a serious provocation toward South Korea and the international community as it endangers stability on the Korean peninsula and violates UN resolutions," ministry spokesman Kim Min-Seok said. UN resolutions bar the North from conducting any ballistic missile tests. Wednesday’s test was "unusual", the spokesman said, because the missiles were fired from a sensitive location close to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) which has bisected the peninsula since the 1950-53 Korean war ended in a fragile armistice. "It appeared to be aimed at delivering a message… that South Korea could be the target of surprise attacks by North Korean ballistic missiles anytime and from any place," Kim said…

3) RUSSIA’S ISKANDER-E MISSILE SYSTEM READY FOR DELIVERIES TO OTHER COUNTRIES, RIA Novosti, July 10, 2014. Iskander-E mobile theater ballistic missile systems are ready for export, awaiting a decision by state authorities, the head of the Russian delegation to arms and military exhibition MILEX-2014 Valery Varlamov said Thursday. "Iskander-E [NATO reporting name: SS-26 Stone] is ready for deliveries to other countries, as well as S-400 Triumf [NATO reporting name: SA-21 Growler], but the state authorities need to approve it first," Varlamov said. The representative said that Russia "will deliver [the systems] to any country, if there is such a decision of the president and the government." A few years ago, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that S-400 will be produced only in the interests of Russia. Even partners such as Belarus and Kazakhstan will receive them only after the Russian missile defense system is fully equipped, the ministry said…

4) TESTS OF THE NEWEST ANTIMISSILE SYSTEM S-500 ARE UNDERWAY, DEFENSE and SECURITY (Russia) – Rossiyskaya Gazeta, July 9, 2014. Test launches of the long-range missile for advanced air defense missile system S-500 passed successfully. Missiles of this type will be able to kill all types of air targets including tactical and even strategic missiles. This means that it is possible to say that air defense of the country and Ground Forces will receive mobile air defense missile systems with antimissile defense elements. S-500 Prometey is being currently developed by specialists of air defense corporation Almaz-Antey. It will supplement the well-known S-300 systems and the S-400 systems that are being supplied to the troops now.

5) ROCKET FIRE FROM LEBANON STRIKES ISRAEL, JOINING GAZA MISSILES AS OFFENSIVE ENTERS ITS 4TH DAY, Associated Press, July 11, 2014. Gaza rocket fire struck a gas station and set it ablaze Friday in southern Israel, seriously wounding one person as rocket fire also came from Lebanon for the first time in the four-day offensive. The attack on the gas station in Ashdod looked to be the most serious attack in Israel in the four days of fighting that has seen Israel deliver a heavy blow to Gaza’s Hamas leaders… In northern Israel, rocket fire struck near the Lebanese border and the military responded with artillery fire toward the source in southern Lebanon, military spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said. The Lebanese military said three rockets were fired toward Israel around 6 a.m. (0300 GMT) and the Israelis retaliated by firing about 25 artillery shells on the area…Southern Lebanon is a stronghold of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, which has battled Israel numerous times. However, recent fire from Lebanon has been blamed on radical Palestinian factions in the area and Hezbollah has not been involved in the ongoing offensive. A Lebanon-based al-Qaida-linked group, the Battalions of Ziad Jarrah, claimed responsibility in the past for similar rocket attacks on Israel…

6) NORTHERN ISRAEL HIT BY ROCKET FROM LEBANON: ARMY, Agence France Presse, July 11, 2014. A rocket fired from Lebanon struck northern Israel early Friday, causing troops to hit back with artillery fire over the border, the Israeli army said. The rocket hit an open area near Metula at Israel’s northernmost tip without causing casualties or damage, the army said…A military spokeswoman told AFP that Israel had filed a complaint to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), which monitors the border between Lebanon and Israel, following the incident…Military officials told the radio they believed the attack was carried out by a small Palestinian group in an act of solidarity with militants from Gaza’s Islamist Hamas movement who are engaged in a major confrontation with the Israeli army which began on Tuesday. ..Troops "managed to find rocket launch pads, as well as two rockets ready for launching. A military expert arrived at the scene and dismantled the projectiles," the statement said. It added that Israel had launched "25 shells" at Lebanon, causing no casualties…

7) ROCKET HITS ASHDOD GAS STATION, ONE SERIOUS INJURY, Arutz Sheva, July 11, 2014. A rocket fired by terrorists in the Hamas enclave of Gaza hit a gas station in the coastal city of Ashdod on Friday morning, causing at least one serious injury. ..Gaza terrorists have only continued to increase the rate of fire, with sirens being sounded as far north as Haifa on Thursday night, making it the first time since the 2006 Second Lebanon War. The terrorists have fired 407 mortars and rockets that struck Israel, with another 118 rockets being shot down by the Iron Dome anti-missile defense system since the start of Operation Protective Edge on Monday, an IDF spokesperson told AFP. Those rockets were joined by a rocket from a new front on Friday morning, as a Katyusha rocket was fired from Lebanon on the upper Galilee in Israel’s far north. The IDF returned artillery fire on the source of the fire…

8) 3 ROCKETS DOWNED OVER TEL AVIV, HAMAS SAYS FIRED ON AIRPORT, Agence France Presse, July 11, 2014. Three Gaza rockets were shot down over the Tel Aviv area on Friday as Hamas militants claimed they had fired M75 missiles at Ben Gurion airport. All three were shot down by the Iron Dome anti-missile system, an army statement said. "Three rockets were launched at central Tel Aviv. All three were intercepted over the Tel Aviv metropolitan area," it said. The rocket fire was claimed by Hamas militants in Gaza who said they had launched "four M75 missiles at Ben Gurion airport" just outside Tel Aviv. A spokesman for Israel’s Airport Authority told AFP Ben Gurion airport was closed down for "nine minutes" but then resumed operations as normal. Witnesses in Tel Aviv said four or five explosions were heard shortly after sirens wailed across the area, sending people fleeing for cover…

9) TEL AVIV AND JERUSALEM TARGETED AS MILITANTS INTENSIFY ROCKET ATTACKS, The Guardian (UK), July 10, 2014. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were both targeted by rocket fire on Thursday as Palestinian militants launched their most intense barrage against southern and central Israel since the beginning of the latest conflict with Hamas in Gaza. Many residents awoke to explosions that shook buildings even in the north of Tel Aviv, while air raid sirens sounded later in the morning forcing thousands of residents to run to bomb shelters or take refuge in the stairwells of their buildings. Later in the day a volley of rockets was shot down in the skies over the city. On the beach in north Tel Aviv, sunbathers and swimmers stopped to gaze at the sky as Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted rockets. Later on Thursday, residents of both Jerusalem and Bethlehem reported hearing explosions in the skies. There have been no casualties in any of the rocket attacks on Israel from Palestinian militants so far. Iron Dome has managed to prevent any rockets landing in Tel Aviv, but the first barrage this morning saw shrapnel fall over Florentin, a trendy southern neighborhood popular with artists, musicians and writers…"[We’ve had] three interceptions over Tel Aviv in the past 24 hours, so the city is prepared for any scenarios. There might be more missiles. We know that our military believes that there is a long-range arsenal that is not being used," he said…

10) HAMAS’S DEADLY REACH: WILL NEW MISSILES DENT ISRAEL’S IRON DOME?, The Globe and Mail (Canada), July 10, 2014. The Hamas-fired missile that slammed into Hadera – an Israeli seaside town midway between Tel Aviv and Haifa – likely travelled a long, circuitous and murky route from Syria via Iran, Sudan and Egypt before its last flight from Gaza on Tuesday. The missile, believed to be a Syrian-made M-302 Khaibar, eluded Israel’s much-vaunted Iron Dome anti-missile shield and heralds a new and deadlier phase in the vicious war of indiscriminate attacks on population centres. With a range of at least 100 kilometres, the Khaibars give Hamas a fearful new weapon capable of reaching most of Israel’s population, including well beyond Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and the nation’s main airport. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly accused Iran of being the primary arms supplier to Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls the Gaza strip…

11) ISRAELI ROCKET DEFENSE SYSTEM IS FAILING, EXPERT ANALYSTS SAY, MIT Technology Review, July 10, 2014. Even though Israel’s U.S.-funded "Iron Dome" rocket-defense interceptors appear to be hitting Hamas rockets in recent days, they are almost certainly failing in the crucial job of detonating those rockets’ shrapnel-packed explosive warheads, expert analysts say…On Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces said missiles from the system had intercepted 56 rockets fired out of Gaza, preventing strikes in several cities. Yet Richard Lloyd, a weapons expert and consultant who is a past Engineering Fellow at Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems, says that because these interceptions had almost certainly not detonated the rockets’ warheads, the system is essentially failing. The Iron Dome system-meant to hit rockets traveling tens of miles from launch to landing-is a smaller cousin to the Patriot system, which attempts to hit much longer-range, faster incoming missiles. Iron Dome fires interceptors six inches wide and 10 feet long and uses sensors and real-time guidance systems to try to zero in on the rockets. When an Iron Dome interceptor gets close to an incoming rocket, a proximity fuse triggers the interceptor to detonate, spraying out metal rods that are intended to strike and detonate the warheads on the incoming rockets, neutralizing their ability to maim people and destroy things on the ground…

12) GORTNEY: DEFENDING HOMELAND A ‘SACRED TRUST’ FOR MILITARY, American Forces Press Service, July 10, 2014. Defending the homeland is a sacred trust for the military, and U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command are at the center of that effort, Navy Adm. William E. Gortney told a Senate panel today. Gortney, who testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been nominated by President Barack Obama to succeed Army Gen. Charles H. Jacoby Jr. as the commander of these two important posts. The headquarters of both are in Colorado Springs, Colorado…Ballistic missile defense is an important part of his duties. Gortney emphasized the nation needs to make necessary investments in the proper maintenance and modernization of the existing ground-based interceptors. Following that, it is imperative the nation improve "the kill vehicle itself and then improvement to the sensors that would allow us to better discriminate the threats that might be coming to the homeland," he said…

EDITORIAL

1) MISSILE DEFENSES WORK, The Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2014. The Palestinian terror group Hamas continues to attack Israeli civilians with dozens of rockets launched each day from Gaza, and as we went to press on Thursday no Israeli had been killed. This wasn’t due to some Holy Land miracle but to the stunning success of Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system. The Hamas missiles lack accurate guidance systems, so they are essentially shots in the dark. The Israelis don’t activate the Iron Dome system unless they judge that the missiles could hit a civilian or military target. Haaretz.com quotes Israeli defense sources as saying Iron Dome had been activated to intercept about 27% of the roughly 180 missiles that had been fired between Monday night and midday Wednesday, successfully intercepting nine out of 10. U.S. sources have confirmed the Israeli figures. That’s a remarkable record since Iron Dome is essentially firing a bullet to intercept a bullet…

2) MISSILE DEFENSE IS SAVING ISRAELIS, Investor’s Business Daily, July 10, 2014. Israel’s Iron Dome system has intercepted nearly 90% of the Hamas rockets that it has targeted. It’s time that the free world embraced Ronald Reagan’s vision of a defensive shield against all our enemies. Top ex-Soviets cite Reagan’s commitment to building his vision of a nuclear missile defense "peace shield" — the Strategic Defense Initiative — as a central cause of the demise of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Lukhim, for instance, a high-ranking Soviet official who would become Moscow’s ambassador to the U.S., said in 1992 that it was "clear that SDI accelerated our catastrophe by at least five years." Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev so feared a U.S. nuclear missile defense that he offered the U.S. unprecedented concessions in nuclear arms talks in a fruitless attempt to get Reagan to abandon SDI. And this week, the use of missile defense to save Israeli lives from airborne Hamas terrorism confirms how well Reagan’s much-maligned idea ended up working…Israel is one of a dozen nations using Raytheon’s battle-tested Patriot Air and Missile Defense System. Others include Egypt, Germany, Japan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Taiwan… ________________________________________

Missile Defense Agency / Public Affairs

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Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.