h/t Instapundit
[NationalReview] One of the sleeper issues surrounding the debate on amnesty for illegal immigrants -- an inconvenient one that no proponent of a widespread amnesty wishes to acknowledge -- is the devastating effect so-called immigration reform will have on African Americans.
The official black unemployment rate is almost 11 percent, far higher than that of any other group profiled by labor statistics. African Americans are disproportionately employed in lower-skilled jobs -- the very same jobs immigrants take. As Steven Camarota asked in a recent column, why double immigration when so many people already aren't working?
#1
The message to black voters is: “Yes, your ancestors endured unimaginable hardships and helped build this country, and we said we’d help you out. But now we have a new trophy wife.”
New followers [trophy wives] are constantly needed as Communism's older followers eventually gain an awareness of wat is actually taking place and are systematically betrayed. My sympathy meter is still resting comfortably on it's peg.
#6
Huge numbers of people in the US with DUAL CITIZENSHIP is the danger. Especially those who came here illegally. Their allegiance is with the home country before the host country. i.e. Ukraine vs Russia. That is the reason for need for a cap on immigration. When foreign emmisaries are allowed into the Obama immigration camps, yet US representatives are not on American soil, we have already lost this nation to foreign nationals through the treasonous acts of the President of the United States himself.
#8
Tracking and counting the number of mil sats over head from where the garbage is coming from there is no EXCUSE FOR ANY OF IT who SOLD OUT THE COUNTRY?!?
[VOA News] As Sunni jihadists continue to make gains in Iraq, Kurds have taken control of two oil fields in northern Iraq and have pulled out of the Shi'ite government of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki. Experts say that that the country's future may have already unfolded.
"We are seeing the disintegration of the state of Iraq into three nations; the Shi'ites in the south and east, the Kurds in the north and a Sunni Caliphate under the control of ISIL from western Iraq to Syria," RAND Corporation political scientist and former U.S. military adviser Rick Brennan said.
He warns that the Shi'ite-led government would be acquiescent to Iran and argues that any amount of U.S. involvement now is not likely to make much of a difference.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
07/13/2014 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[8 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Iraq
#2
Iraq as a country never made sense. Much as Yugoslavia (remember Yugoslavia?) fell apart after Tito died because of the cobbling together of several mutually hostile ethnic and religious groups, Iraq will do the same.
Drawing lines on a map does not create a country. The only thing that held Iraq in one piece was fear of a monster and his minions and their ruthless imposition of power.
The entire ME needs to be redrawn rationally. Unfortunately, the redrawing will be in blood not ink. The horror is just beginning.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
07/13/2014 2:11 Comments ||
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#3
Bill, the same problem of a "nation" without a demos is taking place in Europe. Demographically the EU makes no more sense than Iraq or Yugo.
The EU will cease to exist in the next five years.
Take it to the bank. No one is happy with the EU.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
07/13/2014 10:34 Comments ||
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#5
In this modern era there is less and less need in the first world for super-states to provide security, distribute wealth and ensure trade. The various parts of Europe that wish to secede from their nation-states might as well do so -- Scotland, Catalonia, northern Italy, and so on. What's the difference in the end? Each will set up a government that will be conniving as the ones they're replacing. Life will go on little different than before.
However, the less developed world, such as Iraq, will have a problem with this -- there security IS a major concern, and the United States is again demonstrating that it is not to be trusted long term (ask the Vietnamese). Independent Kurdistan, Shi'a-land, and Sunni-ville will be unstable and easily victimized: the Kurds by the Turks, the Shi'a by Iran, and the Sunnis by the Saudis. Likewise India, if it were to fall apart into its constituent states, would quickly descend into strife. Balochistan as an independent state would become a tribal pesthole within weeks. Vladimir Putin is trying very hard to present the Russian Federation as an unalienable nation-state knowing that anything else would render its parts into serfdom and anarchy.
In this light, the one major anomaly is the United States, in which there is little (as yet) separatist movement. We josh about the rise of the new South or an independent Vermont but we all see each other as Americans. That's part of our exceptionalism. You wonder why Obama and the hard Left attack that: they wouldn't mind at all seeing America fall apart. It would be to their advantage.
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/13/2014 10:58 Comments ||
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#6
Mr. Bill, I hope you're correct for a number of philosophical reasons. But, I'm not so sure. I think that what we may witness is the success of soft socialism/fascism.
The power comes not from the governed but from the bribed. Use the police and laws to allow the picking off of individuals one at a time and the mass will go along to get along and as long as the bread and circuses continue the masses will never arise.
The wealthier class will have been bought lock stock & barrel. Any rabble from above, the few un-bought, will be crushed by the weight of regulations and the "war" against the rich (see Koch brothers for template).
Obama is trying all these same things but didn't properly lay the foundation.
#7
Iraq was created in the old colonial model. Set up some rivals to help keep the dominant power from every rising against the colonial power. Such a system was never designed with independence in mind. It will not last.
Although it appears to hit incoming Hamas rockets, Israel's system could be falling short of detonating the rockets' warheads. Wotta piece of junk! 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. They should just ditch the whole thing.
As a result, rockets fired from Gaza are probably plunging to the ground with intact explosives. The fact that they aren't causing injuries or deaths in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and other cities is mainly a matter of luck, the analysts add. Yeah. They were better off with what they had before.
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. Money pissed away that could have gone to public works projects and that sort of thing. 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.
Ted Postol, the MIT physicist and missile-defense expert who aided Lloyd's analysis and who in 1991 debunked claims by the U.S. Army that its Patriot missiles were successfully shooting down Iraqi Scud missiles during the first Gulf War (see "Postol vs. the Pentagon" and "Preventing Fratricide"), agrees that Iron Dome's interceptors have not been succeeding at this crucial warhead-detonation job. Anybody remember what 'e pur se muove' means?
Postol had been an admirer of Iron Dome after initial reports of its performance during previous rocket assaults in 2012 (see "Why Israel's Iron Dome Missile Defense System Actually Works"). But later analyses of interceptor contrails showed that its guidance system was behaving erratically. Instead of smoothly rising to meet their targets, the interceptors were making sharp turns and engaging from the side or behind, he says.
Those problems appear to be continuing, he says. "We expected that after more than a year and a half of time, whatever problems there were in the system related to guidance and control would be mitigated, or somewhat mitigated," he says. "As it turns out, this is not the case. As far as we can tell, it is behaving in the same erratic way as it did in November 2012."
The Iron Dome interceptors need to hit an incoming rocket head-on to have much hope of detonating a warhead, Lloyd says. And initial visual analysis of the engagements in recent days shows that the interceptions that are occurring are from the side or behind, which provide "essentially a zero chance of destroying the warhead," based on the basic physics of such engagements, he adds.
Efforts to reach the Israel Defense Forces for comment were unsuccessful.
#1
some (maybe most) of the Hamas missiles don't actually have warheads.
Posted by: lord garth ||
07/13/2014 0:34 Comments ||
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#2
This has always been typical of missile interceptors. A SCUD warhead that was from a missile that was hit by a Patriot slammed into a barracks in the first Gulf War.
The primary goal of the interceptor is to knock the missile off target. Where the Patriot failed at times, was that the interception took place late in the flight path. Iron dome intercepts farther away so hopefully the warhead, after being knocked off target, falls into an unpopulated or lightly populated area.
#4
In the first Gulf War the Patriot intercepts rates were worse in Israel then in Saudi. The reason for that was a more random mix of delay times in the Israeli phone system. In Saudi microwave links were used instead of phone ones. I hope Iron Dome makes no use of said phone network.
#5
The entire conflict becomes a one-sided war of missile attrition if a sweeping ground assault is delayed. Without going after the bastids decisively, and finally putting them to the sword, the economics and time favour Hamas.
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/13/2014 7:52 Comments ||
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#8
In the first Gulf War, the Patriot was in the initial stages of development for theater anti-missile defense. It wasn't designed for that. It was designed for anti-aircraft defense as a replacement for the much older Nike Hercules AA system. As an AA system, all you had to do was get in the proximity of the target and explode a warhead creating shrapnel that would degrade engines and fuselages, making it an unstable air platform or reducing its ability to reach its target. Studies* in the 80s suggested its employment in the other capacity and modification development didn't start till the end of the decade for want of priority funding. As an anti-missile system, you need a kinetic round, hit a bullet with a bullet, or at least near on to direct contact to divert.
When the initial batched were deployed in the Gulf, there was no direct linkage between intel that reported a launch and the units in the field. The detect time even with the local phase array radar only allowed about a second to determine to launch. There was no chance to shoot, then look to see if you hit before you would launch again (shoot-look-shoot). Too quick. Instead, they ripple fired two at a time (shoot-shoot-look) in the hopes that they could direct the second one to vector intercept if the first missed. Statistically, at that rate, the best you can do is 50%. Hip shooting with an initially fielded system. Good luck.
The barracks that got hit was because the Patriot battery was down for an upgrade in its software as begin among the first fielded, they were still working on the system and literally sending software patches as quickly as they could get them out.
* Those studies were funded by an authorization put into the budget by a Senator from Indiana, Dan Quayle. He'd picked up a study paid for by the (then) West German government to study theater missile defense potential of the long in development Patriot system. That Dan Quayle the MSM enjoyed maligning at every turn for things the one gets away with daily.
#9
The Iron Dome system is pretty good. It ignores things that are going to miss, and things that are going to hit something get a hard whack, way up in the air to send it off course.
The key success is that the Israelis do not feel helpless, instead they are confident that they can respond and triumph. War is politics by other means, and this system is great politics.
#10
Mr Postol has obviously never been faced with the project-options of Time, Money, Effectiveness, and Need; with having a choice of only two of those.
#11
What a fundamentally stupid error in his logic. You do not need to detonate the warhead, just render it inoperative. That means taking out the rising mechanism, or damaging the structural integrity of the explosives within it, or similar damage that refers the warhead ineffective. The shock and high speed shrapnel can do that without "detonating" the warheads.
#13
These are also the people who have been saying for the past forty years that a working system would be destabilizing and evil. And have been actively goldbricking US antimissile efforts during that time period.
BUT, of course, we can trust them to tell us whether Iron Dome is working or not, even though a working Iron Dome would invalidate their last forty years of belief systems.
#15
Depends on the nature of the explosive. Some require high energy, some not as much. For instance, you can burn C4 or hit it with a hammer, it will not explode. You need a blasting cap or det cord for that stuff. And if it were shock sensitive, most stuff would not survive artillery shell launch forces. Shrapnel through the casing is likely enough to cause the warhead to malfunction, possibly without detonating it.
Careful accessing the link. Asia Times is not your friend! Do so only with all java and javascript turned off and a strong anti-virus.
So The Caliph is now a global superstar. Ever since Dr Ibrahim al-Badri of Samarra, a minor Sunni cleric who impersonates neo-medieval Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, showed up in the stone pulpit of a Mosul mosque at the start of Ramadan, he's been on a roll.
He fully advertised his piece of transnational real estate - from the suburbs of Aleppo to Mosul (and promised more takeovers). He cut his own video - essentially his own, a monotone rap, dressed in trademark Men in Black regalia. He eliminated the competition, essentially by killing them all. He exalted the mujahid, inviting them to follow jihad in the name of Allah. He condemned miscreants and hypocrites, exalting the "victory of Muslims" from "the West to the East".
Modestly sporting a US$7,000 watch (or Chinese replica) and asking for "corrections" in his behavior, The Caliph announced that his Islamic State (IS) business, former ISIS, is not only about the Levant. Want an IS passport? Just ask The Caliph.
He firmly set his sights on conquering Rome (Saracens sacked St Peter's in 846); "You will conquer Rome and will be masters of the world." It won't happen before Sunday though, so Pope Francis can watch Argentina against Germany in peace without fear of decapitation.
But first, The Caliph seems to be ready to ride his holy camel shouting "Allahu Akbar!" all the way to Baghdad and then Mecca. After all, he also proclaimed that the 1916 Sykes-Picot colonial racket, sorry, agreement between Britain and France is now null and void. No wonder the House of Saud, that pristine fountain of courage, has already massed 30,000 mercenaries, sorry, troops, on their border with Iraq (until six months ago the Saudis were facilitating an Air and Bus Jihad all the way to both Syria and Iraq; now they dread the boomerang effect.)
No more nice jihadis
Still, The Caliph is all over the place. His Salafi-jihadi Declaration of Independence - not only from historic al-Qaeda but mostly from those jaded/corrupt Arab monarchies and the Western intel apparatus which has nurtured International Jihad for decades - is indeed groundbreaking. Which explains the perplexity of the Empire of Chaos. That good ol' "strategy" of projecting imperial/NATO power by proxy - via jihadis for rent - now lies in shambles. The Caliph is the ultimate jihadi Frankenstein.
No wonder the Obama lame-duck dinner, sorry, administration, is contemplating, at least in Syria, the usual plan A, which is to weaponize both sides (let Arabs kill Arabs). In Iraq, the plan still being discussed in the Beltway might be to drone IS convoys. It won't be a walk in the park because the IS military leadership is composed of battlefield-experienced former Iraqi guerrillas. And they are not foolish to start parading those gleaming white Toyotas in open desert all over again now they have become instant celebrities.
In parallel, the really juicy story to be followed is that IS can develop as the ideal, proxy weapon of choice for the Empire of Chaos - and the House of Saud - to fight what could be described as the Iran-Hezbollah-Syria-Iraq alliance. Exactly the opposite peddled by this prodigy of wishful thinking.
Realistically, in geopolitical terms, The Caliph's hypothetical journey to Rome is also a joke. IS is surrounded by hostile powers, from Iran and Turkey to Egypt. If the Men in Black decided to cross 300 kilometers of desert to attack King Playstation's realm, also known as Jordan, they would be all droned to death.
So now that he's announced himself as the new Osama, The Caliph had better watch his back. Most probably he's a one-trick camel. He might realize he's got a better shot at stardom by branding himself as the second coming of Michael Jackson and start doing the Moonwalk (the jihadi remix).
The Caliph, apart from his mighty watch, may now hold a lot of weapons and make money by selling oil, but his Caliphate is a mirage. Only one thing is certain. Before it vanishes into the sands of time, there will be blood. A lot of blood.
#1
I am finding it increasingly more difficult to discuss or comment on what is taking place in our country at the hands of these bastids. I suppose resignation is one of the final stages however.
#2
The nasty surprise for these people will be the last awareness that no one is willing to die to defend them and their rigged 'utopia' when the inevitable barbarians shows up.
#3
Thought Zuckerberg was talking about moving to the Philippines to escape taxes. What's holding him up?
I won't invoke Nazi images and history. Isn't what Obama is doing very similar to what the National Socialists did? They lied and called it truth. They wrote laws to suit their ideology. Executive orders came from Adolph Hitler. Anti-semitic laws were ginned up to persecute the Jewish people.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
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.
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.
