Dealing with Terrorists

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In the ongoing “negotiations” with the Iranian government over the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear weapons program, our politicians are beginning to have rubbed in their faces the utter duplicity of the men and women reigning over Iran.

Though Iranian negotiators have sought to move forward on talks, the Revolutionary Guard, Iran’s powerful paramilitary force, has undermined talks with repeated attacks, according to multiple US officials.

The civilians in Tehran profess to be…negotiating…the status of the Strait while, at the same time, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is attacking shipping in the Strait and claiming that the Strait is closed.

The fact of the matter is that the IRGC—paramilitary or formal military—is an arm of the Iranian government. Either the Tehran civilians are using the IRGC to carry out the terrorists’ duplicity, or—as increasingly seems likely—the IRGC runs the government and is using the civilian arm to carry out the terrorists’ duplicity.

Either way, the words of the Iranian government men and women are completely worthless. It’s time to leave off from the current Trumpian love taps in reaction to Iran’s attacks on shipping through the Strait and the terrorists’ disingenuousity regarding “negotiations” over their nuclear weapons program. It’s time to impose a full scope—kinetic, cyber, economic—attack on Iran, and keep it up until the terrorists are physically incapable of any further kinetic or cyber activity.

President Donald Trump (R) has said that Iran has asked for talks as these love taps have resumed. In order for those talks to occur, Trump should require the Iranian government to publicly and in writing ask for those talks. Only when that happens, should we agree to them. Even then, those talks should be allowed only if Iran sends decision-makers to a negotiation site and “makes a deal.” Any professed need for Iran’s negotiators to consult with Tehran before agreeing should be taken as further proof that Iran remains unserious, and our full scope attacks should continue apace until that deal is made.

Trump’s terms of the deal [and my addenda] are simple and straightforward.

  • Iran[—both the Tehran civilian government arm and the IRGC arm—in writing] must confirm that the Strait of Hormuz[, along with the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman,] are international waters over which Iran has no influence whatsoever.
  • Iran[—both the Tehran civilian government arm and the IRGC arm in writing] must forswear that it has no designs on obtaining nuclear weapons.
  • Iran[—both…—] must permit an international inspection force to enter and inspect [any site] in Iran the force wishes, and do so [on a no-notice basis].
  • Iran[—both…—] must permit an international team to recover the processed uranium and remove it from Iran altogether or confirm that any processed uranium remaining is unrecoverable.

The terrorists will never agree, though. The only way to get the safety of these waters restored and Iran’s ability to obtain nuclear weapons eliminated is to destroy the terrorists’ ability to act and to destroy the terrorists themselves.

The Next Carrington Event

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“Authorities on space weather” are worried about a Carrington Event, a solar storm of civilization-destroying magnitude, happening in the relatively near future. Three scientists, including Brian Walsh, Boston University Associate Professor of Engineering; Daniel Welling, University of Michigan Assistant Professor of Climate & Space Research; and Allison Jaynes, University of Iowa Physics Professor—have dreamed up a program called StormWall that entails launching a half-dozen school-bus-size satellites into geosynchronous orbit, holding in their aggregate 838,000 pounds of barium, lithium or sodium. On warning of an inbound Carrington solar storm, the satellites would release that material, sunlight would “quickly” ionize it, and the resulting plasma would mitigate the surface effects of the storm as well as shield, mostly, satellites in orbits below geosynchronous, for a few hours.

It would be a single-use system that, like the automobile airbags to which the designers liken it, then would need replacement. They sell their system’s tens of billions of dollars cost as trivial compared to the losses an unprotected modern population would suffer, and in this much they’re correct. Further, in the best-case scenario, just the research would require at least five more years just to develop the rockets capable of launching such mass so high.

As often is the case in academia, they’re overthinking and over-engineering a solution to the real, once a century threat of a Carrington event. The Carrington Event of 165+ years ago burned a few telegraph stations. The threat today is the wave guide that is our electrical power grid. It would be much cheaper to harden our grid by installing surge-protecting circuit breakers in a multiplicity of places throughout the grid to break up the wave guide. This also is a well-established technology, easily emplaced, and far cheaper to do so. All that’s necessary is the political will (tacitly assumed to be extant for those satellites and their launches) to install them.

A not very distant secondary threat is the fragility of all of our computing requirements, primarily financial, control nodes of our distribution networks, defense establishments. Faraday cages would protect them—even older, more established and cheaper technology—as would surge protectors.

Of course, the surge protectors are one-use affairs, too, but they’re much more cheaply and easily replaced than those half-dozen school-bus-size satellites with their heavy payloads. The Faraday cages themselves would be undamaged by the electrical surges the Carrington event would generate.

In orbit, our satellites still would need protection, but hardening them is equally straightforward, and it could be done as we replace them–which we ought to be doing anyway to protect them from EMP that our enemies would create in any kinetic war.

A Question

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With all the hyped up fears of a coming crash in the stock market and in the economy overall—some pundits are claiming the coming crash will make the Panic of 2008 look like a little burble (e.g., the Federal government will have to make a choice between letting banks and other financial institutions fail en masse or firing up its printing presses)—more and more folks are pushing buying gold and silver or bragging about the gold and silver they already hold.

So my question: what’s the value of all that gold and silver in such a catastrophe? Do these folks really think they’ll be able to exchange their gold or silver for their rent/mortgage payments? Their grocery and utility bills? Their gasoline down at the filling station? Or get those things with markers for their gold and silver held in brokerage accounts rather than in their closets in physical form? What if their broker is one of those financial institutions that went bust? Those holdings, if not lost forever, will be inaccessible for weeks or months while the broker’s assets wend their way through bankruptcy courts and the innumerable legal fights over distribution.

And: how will the holders sell their gold or silver, whether held in physical form or in brokerage accounts? Who will be willing to spend their cash on hand to get those metals?

Guests and Wedding Expenses

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A letter-writer to Market Watch had this, even as she offered some money-saving tips that he thinks he’s found:

I found I may be in danger of spending close to $7,000 as a wedding guest this year—and that’s while I’m also trying to save up for my own wedding.

That’s just…foolish. Even for the several weddings aggregated that he plans to attend.

As long as enablers like these…guests…keep supporting deliberately ostentatious ego-trip weddings, those costs are only going to rise.

Who Can Afford Obamacare?

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The lede:

Rates for many Affordable Care Act plans rose by double digits this year. Insurers want to do the same next year.

It’s especially bad in Progressive-Democrat-run States. For instance:

In Washington state, Centene is asking for a 28% hike, after boosting rates by 35% in 2026. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois wants 15%—on top of a 28% increase this year.

Who can afford Obamacare? Nobody. Not the individual, not the nation at large. That’s what those unconscionable Federal subsidies, only recently cut back, kept hidden for so long, at the Progressive-Democratic Party government dependency pushers’ behest. Dependency is votes, as they’ve long known.

It’s time the Republican Party stopped dithering and cowering. The party needs to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with an interstate commerce-centric, lightly regulated (which would entail rescinding a double potful of regulations) free market for health insurance, one in which insurers could offer plans that customers actually want, and at competition-driven prices and deductibles, and coverages. Especially that last would drive costs down. Plans that don’t try to cover everything, unless that’s what enough customers want to make a market, plans that cover only a few things, that cover only catastrophic medical events, and every coverage level in between—whatever the customers want in sufficient aggregate to make a market.