Ancient Thoughts and the World Today

 

I read an e-mail article which listed what it claimed in its title to be “20 Quotes From Ancient Greek Philosophers That Liberals Still Don’t Understand” and four of these in particular got my brain reeling, drowning in swirling daydreams and thought perhaps it might be fun to share. I found myself gravitating to three philosophers where one was the most gifted student of the other and the other their sole peer. Below are the thoughts in decreasing order of relevance, or at least in ease of application and understanding. This dictates we tackle them in reverse order working from the sublime imperatives from which we then reach the inevitable brutal and undeniable truth.

 

“Republics decline into democracies and democracies

degenerate into despotisms.” – Aristotle

 

“This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs;

when he first appears he is a protector.” – Plato

 

“A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion,

a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.” — Socrates

 

“The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered

by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.” – Plato

 

 

Plato Socrates Aristotle

 

That places our starting point with Plato and the concept, “The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.” This is true in every government which depends on the opinions of the people discerned through an elective process. Be the system parliamentary, republic, direct democracy or other form where the voting public consists of eligibility of the greater part of the adult electorate and where promises gains votes those promises will come fast and loose. This will inevitably lead to greater and greater promises which will become more and more immediate often inventing problems and difficulties which are designed for easy quick solutions which can be readily enacted and implemented despite there being no reality to both the invented problem and an easy answer. Everything becomes something which requires an immediate solution and this demand continues to grow and now the people soon demand that even the greatest difficulties of the world be solved with the same brilliance, alacrity and without difficulty or complications. The expectations have become unrealistic but then when the people are demanding miracles, those who desire to hold office will make promises which they know cannot be solved with promises which they know will never be solved and only lead to greater problems as the half measures designed as quick actions which are definitive, definitive failures causing more and deeper problems. The demand for immediacy by the public eventually leads to the need for a savior.

 

That brings us to the next quote from Socrates which states, “A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.” This is where taking the false promises of charlatans who are the sole makers of empty promises selling them as definitive solutions to the most knotty and complex of problems starts us down a slippery slope. These have the ability to sell a framing of the problem in such a way that their solution appears obvious but nobody seems to think why if the solution which now appears so simple, easy and immediate that it did not appear for the last body of officials. Nobody wants to question whether the defining of the problem has been molded and crafted simply to facilitate the elevation of the individual and not done to reach a viable solution. These charlatans always play emotional weaknesses and know the desires of the people more than they understand the problems but emotionalism plays well, think Donald Trump with one difference, imagine Trump with a solution to the Middle East which is easy, immediate and apparently just hidden from view in such a way that only Trump could see it. Of course Donald Trump has not put forth such a solution and instead has simply sold that things will be great, trust Trump, great. Well, it is so completely different than Yes We Can. Both “Make America Great Again” and “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth” are empty boasts on which all problems can be put aside as the personality is sufficient to repair every problem. These set up a system of morality which is made of empty platitudes that caught the people up in an emotional defining of the world and choosing a leader purely on emotion which eventually leads to disappointment making the situation primed for the next step.

 

We go back to Plato where we read, “This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.” When the solutions are minimized such that false solutions become the norm, we reach a mire so deep that only a savior is believed to be the only possible solution. A person who is charismatic and has a plan, a plan that sweeps the public up with the promises, causes them to fall head over heels for the man with the plan which will heal their nation and restore it to greatness and return every glory which was once true and real. The savior and restorer of the greatness are seen as one who will revamp the government and streamline the process and accomplish that which formerly was not possible. The protector comes with promises if only you can and will trust what he knows must be executed to bring about the future promised by this protector. The promise is that once they are loosed from the restriction built into government and being freed from the tethers designed to limit and constrain government, but the savior cannot be constrained by such petty inconveniences. The releasing of the tethers and streamlining the methodology leads only one place, tyranny, and tyranny inevitably leads to one thing, despotic ruin.

 

This last revelation finished the slide defined so accurately by Aristotle who stated, “Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.” The Republic was seen as the finest form of governance no matter the style, be it direct elections, parliamentary or anything between or alongside where the people hold the power and the government has to respect the people’s power. With time the republic governance reaches a point where their society actually needs minimal government and definitely does not need any interventions, new laws, programs or anything else but the government has to find relevance in order to form promises around which will grant them the support of the people and result in their next election. This leads to demagoguery and populism which tend to bring an end to the slow and deliberate governance and replace it with governance which has a tendency to divide the populace into groups based on positions on issues, some real and some manufactured by the politicians themselves. Such governance works by promising larger groups of citizens benefits which will be paid for by smaller groups treasure, usually unwarranted wealth made by abusing the workers and these political riders of white horses topped with a wide brimmed white Stetson hat riding off into the sunset after collecting the votes of the masses. This results in a government which will end in bloated inefficiency where the promises have far outstripped revenue collection and has built a deficit which only grows along with the government. The collection institutions are inefficient often using half the collected wealth simply to finance their department making it obvious an impediment to balancing the budget as that cost is rarely figured into the formulas promoted by the political charlatans.

 

As noted above the situation reaches some critical point where the population is primed for a savior, the one who can return sanity and prosperous times. This promise keeps growing and as this savior has made some progress they start to complain how the government itself is preventing them from rescuing the society from itself. Slowly but surely they strip down the government taking over one layer after another until they no longer stand for reelection, their continued leadership has been accepted as permanent. Soon the other governing bodies are replaced with sycophants and lackeys making them simply the echoes of the dictator allowing for them to hold ultimate power and makes for efficiency in all operations which saves revenue which further permits the dictator to show success after success.

 

But even an all-powerful dictator runs into problems eventually as they too continue promising more and more until it becomes necessary to find new sources of revenues. This has historically led to wars which eventually make for the end of the rule of dictators as once they start to attack neighbors, the neighbors are likely to form alliances and end the spread and conquest of the dictator and after conquest the people may eventually make their way back to representative governance. The one rule is that the generation which falls and allows the rise of a demigod will not return to free governance with it more often taking many years, even centuries, before the people will be permitted to rule themselves. This is evident today as Europe and the Western world is slowly lurching its way down that well-worn path to ruin while developing nations have shown a sign of seeking to develop representative republic governance, what Aristotle, Plato and Socrates all believed was the most favorable form of governance.

 

Where on this merry-go-round your nation is can be figured simply by measuring the freedom each has as an individual and the size and scope of the governance. In all situations where the people are more powerful than the government and are capable of changing the entirety of their legislature and their leaders with regular elections, that would point to a society with a great deal of freedom and is a republic. With the power shared or favoring the government agencies over the people, then one is likely no longer in a republic but in a mere democracy, a good place from which an engaged population can turn things around. But if the governance is under a single person or small cabal which is unelected and not dependent on the approval of the people and rule as they wish, that is the final stop of a democracy where it dies and will not be reborn during the lifetime of any of its citizens, even any infants born during the year of the final elections, a meaningless election at that.

 

That is both the end of freedom and the start of the path back to liberty, freedom and the rights of man. The unfortunate truth is that the vast majority of humankind has never known freedom or even truly elected governance and probably never will. For this majority of the planet will require great expenditures by the free world to instruct, educate, form and develop the basics, principles and understanding of the mechanisms required. After the entire world finds itself on the merry-go-round where we slide from freedom to despotism and finally revolution and a return to republic and the new optimism which will eventually end in disappointment until humankind learns to control their appetites and refuse to follow demigods who promise perfection and untold riches and joys, delivering none of them and few promises being realized. Perhaps that is our fate or maybe we will eventually learn to control our slide of our own personal weaknesses. Perhaps we will learn and our species finally break free of petty differences, greed and acting in a manner which eventually leads to our subjugation when our greed outpaces our good sense. Perhaps.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Trump Selling Opposition of Establishment Vision

 

Trump is running a campaign empty of substance, which are the claims from the Establishment and the other Republican candidates opposing him. Trump getting red faced and frustrated when attacked simply feeds the everybody is out to get him, the same exact feeling which much of the populace also feels as their health costs have tripled, the coverage is so limited that it is the cause of much of the increased health costs because the system is not designed to deliver healthcare but to transfer funds to the lower third or even half of the population, the people on public support and who pay no taxes. Even if Trump or a Republican President with a Republican Congress redesign Obamacare into Republicare, the system will still become cumbersome and loaded down with regulations and impossible hurdles to get proper care because government does not do healthcare. Government does regulations and compartmentalization all of which is the antithesis of good healthcare which requires everyone to have access to one another and their opinions. Government had proven to be very poor at interfacing differing areas of every agency and healthcare will end up being no different. The lack of interconnectivity is a large part of the problem in Veterans Healthcare and the public version will be even worse as there will be that many more patients to tangle up in forms, requests and what we from the military knew as SNAFUs, Situation Normal All Fouled Up.

 

One of the main reasons that Donald Trump has won three primaries in a row and might well outperform his rivals today, Super Tuesday, has much to do with the Republican Party deciding that it was best to front-load many of the primary elections when states clamored to place their voting as early as possible. This was seen as important because everyone wanted their race to be the one which put the candidate over the threshold thus making their state appear to be the important and pivotal primary state. It was the race to the front a number of years ago which pressured the parties to change their primary as nobody wanted to have their state primary elections after one candidate had necessarily won making their election results meaningless. This has allowed Donald Trump to make a grab for delegates a viable stratagem by simply playing to the crowds as the one being ganged up and mugged by his apparent closest rivals, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Their tactic to reveal Trump as an empty suit would have had far greater effect had they started earlier and had the time to reveal his lack of any form of plan, as Trump has basically made a campaign around his phrase of, “I’m going to make America great again.” He is basically running a campaign as this election’s Hope and Change candidate offering change we will all hope will change the stuff needing change or the people will lose all hope. The other candidates would have served themselves far better had they come up with a theme around which they actually built their argument as that would have given them a rivaling theme and one with substance and not relying on hot air, something which has lifted Trump like a hot air balloon. The other two main rivals attempting to poke a hole in Trump’s balloon has left them standing on the ground while he soared to apparent victory.

 

 

Trumps Vehicle to the White House
A Hot Air Balloon
Filled With Hot Angry Rhetoric

 

Again, it is really possible that there will emerge a winner by the Ides of March and the United States will be left fearing two-thirds of a year of Trump being Trump. What is even more astounding has been the Republicans and not so insignificant number of Democrats who have claimed they want a president with substance and grit with an actual and explained plan to move the United States back to its preeminence in the world, and Donald Trump has captured their minds and left them giddy filled with some intoxicant. The intoxicant is a slogan which expresses the electorate’s desires which claiming “I’m going to make America great again,” fills that need and many believe that there is a real plan behind the slogan. The frightening thing is that President Obama had a plan to go along with his “Hope and Change” and “Yes We Can” sloganeering in 2008 elections. Those slogans and electing the first Black United States President simply intoxicated the American public and here we are two terms of Hope and Change later. The one thing many Americans are now claiming is that those Changes were not what they had Hoped they would be. Eight years ago nobody challenged President Obama to define the Change we were presumably Hoping for so that left it up to each individual to define the Change and that gave them Hope. Here we are eight years later and it appears that the presumed thinking party had fallen for a phrase and no plan, which may prove just as intoxicating as President Obama’s sloganeering. The question the Republicans need to ask themselves is will “I’m going to make America great again,” as a campaign slogan last through to the elections or will the balloon burst and the Republican hopes of taking the White House dwindle and completely blow away on the wind, the same wind they had hoped would change the ownership of the White House.

 

We have been hearing an argument that we do not need another sloganeering campaign despite its appeal and they have claimed that nobody has won based on a slogan before President Obama attempting to pin his election on Hope and Change as an illusion the nation cannot afford another such President. The sorry thing is there have been numerous Presidents elected simply due to an inspirational catch phrase, though often also filled with actual plans and positions deeper than “Make America great again.” President Eisenhower had a slogan which was festooned across the country and it proved accurate that, “I Like Ike,” won the nation’s hearts. The fact General Eisenhower managed the victory in Europe during World War II probably aided his run for the White House. There were cryptic slogans such as Theodore Roosevelt whose single word slogan, “Bully” both won him the White House and redefined that word to mean a winner, a successful achiever and to have the advantage in speaking giving us the terminology “Bully Pulpit.”

 

 

 

Through American history there have always been slogans, some of which proved memorable enough to outlast the campaign and even the candidate such as: ‘Don’t Change Horses in Mid-Stream,’ ‘All Power to the Imagination!,’ ‘Better Dead than Red,’ ‘Four More Years,’ ‘Vote for a Change,’ ‘Remember Pearl Harbor!,’ ‘Remember the Alamo!,’ ‘He Kept Us Out of War,’ ‘Think Globally, Act Locally,’ ‘We are the 99%,’ ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,’ ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,’ ‘The Buck Stops Here,’ ‘There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch,’ ‘Workers of the World Unite,’ and one which sounds eerily applicable to one of the current campaigns, ‘No War but Class War.’ The idea of finding a catch phrase which resonates is as old as politics and even predates elections as slogans can be used to start or end revolutions or can be used to win wars and get the public roused. Rosie the Riveter was used to sell war bonds along with an entire and ongoing campaign which came from an actual advertising agency contracted by the government. Without slogans much of politics would simply be dry rhetoric stating facts, lying about facts, stretching and mutilating facts leaving at least a shred or two of truth in them and the other things as old as politics, mud-slinging. During the 1796 elections between Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Adams, Jefferson supporters described Adams in an article run in Philadelphia as, “old, querulous, bald, blind, crippled, toothless Adams.” In 1828 Presidential election Andrew Jackson was described in a Cincinnati newspaper by John Q. Adams supporter wrote, “General Jackson’s mother was a COMMON PROSTITUTE brought to this country by British soldiers. She afterwards married a MULATTO MAN, with whom she had several children, of which General JACKSON IS ONE!!!” and lastly from the 1800 Adams-Jefferson campaign we get this gem describing John Adams as a, “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” The name-calling today is tame and respectful compared to the early years in politics where anything was fair game including big whoppers of lies.

 

The way to prevent sloganeering of winning the primary campaign in a single burst of well-planned buffoonery would be to spread the primary elections out with the states with sizeable numbers of delegates evenly spaced with them slightly weighted towards the middle to end of the season as they are the likely states where the fight will be the most revealing as we really need to know which candidate has the right stuff to survive an attack calling them a, “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Such a lengthening of the campaign such that it represents a solid four month campaign where the people could really get to compare and contrast the candidates and they will be pressed to give greater insight and depth, not that such things tend to actually matter any longer. Now the elections are decided by the media and the operatives with the people caught in the middle. “I’m going to make America great again.” That is a great slogan and would be even better if we knew how. With President Obama who won not just one but two Presidential campaigns on little if any substance we do not need another sloganeer. The first was sold as Hope and Change. Well, we all hope for better days to come and change is inevitable as the laws of physics explain all too muddled in the math for many of us to understand. Who doesn’t understand this Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann formula from Analytic Algebraic Geometry and Number Theory shown below?

 

 

Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann
formula from Analytic Algebraic
Geometry and Number Theory

 

The problem is obvious; most of us will start to pay attention to the primary elections in our respective states, if we even bother to vote, about a week, maybe two, before the election is held. Then we see who our equally clueless friends are supporting, maybe look up something on-line and then as all too many people too busy to take the time and carefully analyze each candidate’s positions and other pertinent items, not like all who read articles here as they obviously have done and followed since the first person announced over a year ago, thank you Dr. Ben Carson, and finally turn on the radio to hear the news and vote for whoever is ahead in the polls as they want to vote for the winner (yes, I knew somebody who voted with that exact reasoning, voted for the winner). This election in the United States, and if everything does not collapse, or worse, implode, then also the next few Presidential and Congressional elections will decide the fate of more than the United States. They may decide whether the world enters World War III before the United States has redeployed her military so as to have them dispersed and thus many surviving a preemptory strike which simply destroys the power generation grid leaving the people to die a slow death of starvation and Americans shooting each other over a piece of bread or a jar of peanut butter, chunky, of course. That also might decide where the remnants of Europe escape to as the tensions in Europe begin to boil over and fighting breaks out in the streets. What is important for all in the free world to remember was a one singular shameful event where people stood and watched and some shot pictures but nobody stepped forward to lead and prevent this gruesome event from the afternoon of May 22, 2013, a British Army soldier, Fusilier Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, was attacked and killed by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale near the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, southeast London and beheaded.

 

 

Fusilier Lee Rigby
of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers
Honored Posthumously in Parade

 

That a crowd watched and did nothing will be the critical moment when many of us discovered that the world we thought we knew was dead and soon a critical question will be imposed on the Western World, the question of will you stand for your privilege and way of life or will you as well surrender before the coming storm, before Islam. So, which will it be? We and many fear the answer might just be silence, the worst kind of silence which comes right before the storm, and it will be a storm like has been unheard for a very long time.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

 

Radically Changing Power Structures in the Middle East

 

First allow us to note the passing of a great Constitutional scholar and jurist, Antonin Scalia, who was seventy-nine and had served for twenty-nine years on the Supreme Court. There will be a ton of second guessing on whom exactly President Obama will pick to replace the conservative, Constitutional scholar but the one thing we would like to put forth is they will mostly be wrong. President Obama’s previous choices of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan surprised almost all in his previous Supreme Court appointments. Our guess is of a more general nature as we believe his choice will be an academic who shares the leftist view of a living and ever mutating Constitution in which all forms of new and existing rights can be found to be implied if only the founders had the wisdom of the leftists of today. Whoever President Obama chooses will have the effect of changing the nature and status of the Supreme Court likely for a long while into the future. President Obama has had the rare opportunity to leave an indelible mark on the Supreme Court as he has had the opportunity of appointing one third of the current members sitting on the Supreme Court. This will be the true legacy next to Obamacare and the initiating the accepting of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Syrian and other Middle Eastern “refugees” and potentially resulting in millions by the time the entire story becomes known. One can hope to be pleasantly surprised that the President’s appointment turns out to be more of a purist when interpreting the Constitution as being appointed to the Supreme Court has shown some strange and unexpected results as people take the honor to heart and have the importance of the position lay heavily on their minds and their direction of thoughts on the exact definition of protect and defend the Constitution will inevitably mean to them. We can only hope for a discerning and wise person who weighs all the ramification of their decisions.

 

 

Antonin Scalia Supreme Court Judge
79 years old, 29 years on Supreme Court

 

 

Everyone has, including us to some extent, expressed their feelings on the path to nuclear weapons power that Iran received in the Iran Nuclear Agreement 7/14/2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and the inevitable ways it will change the entire makeup and distribution of power across the Middle East and many, again including us, have attempted to predict what the wholesale introduction of nuclear weaponry across the Middle East and potentially slowly seeping across Norther Africa and whether it will make Nuclear Armageddon more likely or usher in an understanding of the new and ruinous implications of starting a war might cause to bring as the outcome. Of course if anyone was looking to bring the greatest possible turmoil, chaos, death and destruction on the world as a whole and not care about the consequences because that turmoil, chaos, death and destruction actually was their only goal, then the nuclearization of the Middle East and beyond is exactly what the doctor ordered. A nuclear armed apocalyptic maniac is the exact formula to a future which could act to set human development back ten centuries or potentially lead to the next round of massive mutations across all surviving life forms eventually leading to the next apex predator to rise to the top of the food chain and with any luck also me closer to human development than the simple brute power of T-rex had attained before they and their species being brought down by an assumed impact wiping clean the slate of development leading to mankind’s rise to eventual dominance.

 

There have been other changes which are probably not as dire or noticeable as yet on how these developments will play out. The biggest has been the introduction of highly effective antiaircraft missile batteries at both ends of the Middle East with Iran to soon have delivery of the Russian S-300 antiaircraft batteries to Iran and the recent deployment by the Russian forces defending their port and the Alawites in the area including Bashir al-Assad of the S-400 antiaircraft batteries. These systems render an air assault or targeting within their range far riskier and problematic. Further, with Russians manning the S-400 antiaircraft batteries in Syria, they are far less likely to be shut-down as was the entirety of the Syrian air defense network by the Israelis when they bombed the nuclear development complex facility in September 6, 2007. These changes in the balance of power brought by these changes are going to be difficult to discern as the variables are significant. One also has to add two other important notes to this volatile mix of conditions, one from the Middle East and the other affecting the Middle East.

 

 

Russian S-400 Antiaircraft Batteries
Now Stationed Around Latakia, Syria
Placing Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport
Easily Within Range for Interception

 

 

The first is the affect that North Korea may play onto the Middle East puzzle as well as the future of the United States. As we and numerous others have pointed out is the fact that both Iran and North Korea have practiced and actually placed satellites into low earth orbits which have polar orbits rather than an equatorial orbit which makes them pass over the United States mainland alternately from the direct north and from the direct south. The northern approach is not that important as it would pass over the teeth of the United States NORAD and other defensive systems placed to intercept any Russian attack during the cold war and thus would be facing formidable defensive structures. The interesting passes are the one approaching from the south, particularly those passing over Mexico or the Gulf of Mexico and crossing over the United States anywhere from New Mexico to Arizona where the entirety of the United States monitoring systems have one of the largest blind-spots and thus vulnerability. Both Iran and North Korea have practiced what is understood by military strategists to be the perfect height and orbit for delivering an EMP, or Super EMP which is the latest craze, device to explode near the center of the United States and southern Canada taking out the entirety of the North American power grid. The resultant damages to the transformers and other high voltage system hardware as well as destroying virtually all of the software run control systems would result in as high as ninety-five percent civilian deaths in the first decade with the largest loss being at the front end two years having the greatest impact.

 

Such an assault could effectively take out almost all of the ground based systems the United States would be reliant on for its defense from invasion or to retaliate against their attacker. This would not mean the perpetrators of such an assault would be free and clear of retribution raining down on their heads as the United States has a large enough contingent of its forces located around the globe that United States power projection would remain credible. The large nuclear missile carrying submarines, often called Boomers (hey, we do not make up these names, honest) would still carry in their tubes sufficient nuclear strike capabilities of destroying virtually the entirety of human existence globally and definitely could remove the populations of North Korea and Iran without losing their critical and definitive threat against any others planning in taking advantage of the problems back home caused by such an attack. Where this would bring little solace to the Americans facing brutish conditions as their entire food and other supply networks would have been destroyed in such an attack, this deterrent power of the United States nuclear powered Navy that eventually the United States would return onto the world stage meaner and leaner but even more determined to take vengeance unto which the world has never known. The last part in this section of the puzzle is that Iran and North Korea have had a high level of cooperation in nuclear development and rocket/missile technology. Keeping such in mind, the recent test carried out by North Korea of a hydrogen powered nuclear device now believed to be, here comes the new buzzword, Super EMP device capable of on detonation generating a series of EMP Gama-radiation waves which could destroy if detonated over Kansas City or St Louis or anywhere between which would be sufficiently potent to effect sensitive electronics in San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington D. C., Norfolk Naval Base, Andrews Airforce Base, the Pentagon (except for its shielded emergency generators), Richmond on down to Atlanta, Georgia. That would include the East and West Coasts leaving potentially the Coronado Naval Base and Marine Base intact and slight possibility of not destroying the Bremerton shipyards. Still, such a wide ranging area of destruction of electronic devices would be devastating and would be felt world-wide as there would be other ramifications such as GPS satellites not receiving update information largely controlled by the United States and a loss of large sectors of the Internet, phone networks and any other functions which pass through the United States communications hubs which carry the largest volume of the entire world’s communications. This would have far reaching effects many of which are irreplaceable and even unpredicted. The best case scenario, and only best case scenario, is that such an attack never occurs; but with a child-like egotistical and maniacal megalomaniac in charge in North Korea who believes himself one of the most powerful people ruling a giant amongst nations who murders any general or even family member who attempts to implant even the slightest glimmer of reality into the equation being executed on the spot, who knows? Just think about the day, which might be today or tomorrow, when Kim Jung-un decides it is time to teach the United States a lesson. Just ponder that for a moment and then try to return to your normally scheduled day as such would never happen, would it? Adding the Iranian fanatical and suicidal Mullahs in Iran and have fun sleeping tonight, they do not really mean it when they claim to desire bringing chaos, turmoil, misery and a general state of conflagration worldwide just so their messiah the Twelfth Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, who will emerge from his hiding place down a well in Qom where he has been hiding since before the year 1000 AD. You cannot make this stuff up. So there is that threat and they share technology and many believe the tested nuclear Super EMP device tested by North Korea recently was actually an Iranian design and was carried out by North Korea for the Iranians so they would not break their treaty quite yet.

 

 

North Korean President for Life Kim Jung-Un
Signaling that He’s Number One!

 

 

The other side of the coin is Israel. The Israelis have not been taking all these developments as fait accompli but instead have been working, one could say feverishly, on their layered missile and aircraft defense systems. The world was given a demonstration of the effectiveness of the Iron Dome on locally launched missiles, mortars and rockets during the last Gaza war. Since then there have been further upgrades made possible by the data acquired during that conflict. Many of the upgrades were software but the other was a new interceptor which would improve the accuracy and lethality of the system, a system which already proved to be over ninety percent accurate in its initial deployment during the last Gaza Hamas war. Israel also has a multi-layered system of interceptor which would make interception possible on an ICBM or Continental Ballistic Missile such as what Iran would need to use if launching from within their borders. Should they launch from Syria or Lebanon then the intercept would be performed by a faster reacting system such as the Iron Dome or other slightly more encompassing system. The kind of layered system which will be required to keep Israel and the Israeli population safe from any device with the emphasis on early detection and removal of threats on their ascendant prefecture over the downward flight as it is most often on the approach to target after apogee that missile systems deploy avoidance technologies. While the Israeli nuclear capability has been pondered and guessed at, it is still not 100% proven if such systems exist or where and how they would be stored and/or deployed, what delivery systems exist and whether these systems kept in hardened bunkers atop ICBM and Continental Ballistic Missiles or if they exist, are they simply bombs requiring aircraft to fly the mission to deliver these weapons which may not even exist. As we covered recently on February 13, 2016 in our article What Israel Must Learn from President Obama concerning, amongst other items of importance, the F-35 JSF and its serious limitations and no freedom of action when using these fifth generation fighters that they make second guessing any nation relying on these systems to come under United States control potentially at the most critical of moments. Further, the fact that an EMP device would necessarily affect the very support systems which would allow the F-35 JSF to deploy would be destroyed or isolated such that they could not release the aircraft when most needed, the F-35 JSF would become just so much advanced electronics and composites composited dead on the runway. There are a number of other links to other articles both ours and outside corroborative articles all worth a quick read as they lay out much of the thought patterns since even before 2010 when we first finally got around to addressing the next generation of aircraft which are going to become a necessity for air defense at close range and possibly further missions run from a control aircraft. Perhaps another article is due on such future systems; we will try to look into such but no absolute promises on when.

 

 

The Mouse that Roared
A comedy to lift the spirits

 

 

As is noticeable the world is changing, the sides are lining up and one errant move could force ramifications too dire to face but face them we must; otherwise, they could occur and have no mitigating systems in place to avoid hostilities falling into place where one act creates another leading to a more vigorous act which forces a full deployment and the next thing you know the Grand Duchess Gloriana XII of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick will order Prime Minister Count Rupert of Mountjoy to deploy their finest archers to voyage across the seas and attack to defend the honor of the wines of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick from a California cheap imitation. The troops under Field Marshal Tully Bascombe, a recent promotion of sorts, assault the United States and , well, you will need to rent the movie “The Mouse that Roared” and enjoy Peter Sellers at his hysterical best, well, next to the Pink Panther. Unfortunately the world today is almost as insane as the Mouse that Roared but all too dangerous to really joke about, but we must keep a balance and our sanity so some light hearted entertainment might mitigate the sense of dread, well, for around an hour and a half. Think we will make some buttered popcorn and watch a movie, later.

 

Beyond the Cusp