Very dramatic image at the link shows levels from ground into the air: to GMD Battlespace, then LEO, MEO, and finally GEO. A taste:
[CentristLibertarian] Stuck in 1983: The Golden Dome Panel That Couldn't Leave the Cold War
It seems to me that Golden Dome is not a Cold War thing so much as aimed at Iran and China getting overexcited — Russia, poor darlings, have hollowed themselves out with the Ukraine war that they can’t walk away from if they want to keep the rump of their empire from spinning off altogether.
Brookings convened three of the most credentialed missile defense minds in Washington to discuss a trillion-dollar national security program. They discussed 1983 instead. The occasion was the Congressional Budget Office’s new report on Golden Dome - the president’s homeland missile shield, which is now priced by CBO at $1.2 trillion over its first twenty years.
How much of that number would have been spent anyway, to not nearly as good effect? Like President Reagan’s Star Wars, even the pieces of it are something useful, it seems to me.
The panel had a CBO analyst who led the study, a University of Maryland arms control scholar, and a Brookings senior fellow with thirty years in the field. What it did not have, at any point in ninety minutes, was a frame built for the war we’re actually in.
The name they borrowed and abandoned. The program started life as an executive order called “Iron Dome for America,” which was a direct nod to Israel’s short-range, high-volume, combat-tested interceptor system, that is actually shooting down cheap rockets and drones in sustained saturation attacks right now. The panel mentioned Iron Dome exactly once, to explain the name, and then never returned to it. Not once did anyone run the obvious comparison: Iron Dome’s cost-exchange problem, where a $40,000 interceptor kills a $500 rocket,
…an ugly cost:benefit analysis except that 1) the alternative to spending it is annihilation, and Israel is relatively rich, and 2) that was the first and second gen. cost. Next gen. is the laser thingy they recently added, which kills incoming at pennies a shot instead of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per — and the Israelis are working on the next generation upgrades after that to further decrease costs and increase effectiveness. And they will happily sell the improvement to the War Department, so long as the White House remains friendly, sharing the savings…
is the same math Golden Dome’s conventional drone-defense layer will face at a scale Hamas never approached. Instead the panel spent ninety minutes rebuilding the Strategic Defense Initiative — boost-phase kill chains, absentee ratios, and the ABM Treaty, because that’s the debate they know how to have. They inherited the name of a system built for one kind of war and spent the hour analyzing a different one.
The threat they conflated. Golden Dome’s own executive order covers ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons, cruise missiles, and drones. This is “any aerial threat,” in the CBO analyst’s words, encompassing both nuclear and conventional weapons. That is not one problem. Intercepting a nuclear-armed ICBM in boost phase and shooting down a $2,000 quadcopter are different engineering problems, different cost curves, and different strategic logics entirely. The panel’s real interceptor stockpiles — THAAD, Patriot, and SM missiles, are the same ones being drawn down right now in Ukraine and in the Iran strikes, a live, present-tense depletion problem that got exactly one question from the floor and one non-answer in response. Meanwhile, the panel’s intellectual energy went almost entirely to the nuclear-strategic half of the mandate: MAD, arms races, and McNamara’s threshold. The conventional half — the half with real combat data sitting in Kyiv and Tel Aviv right now was an afterthought.
The word they never defined. “Deterrence” got used a dozen times, and specified maybe twice. Deter whom, from what, and through what mechanism? The Brookings fellow strung together accidental launch, a deliberate North Korean attack, and a generic “one-off attempt at intimidation” as though they were the same problem requiring the same tool. This is odd considering an accident isn’t a deterrence problem at all, a small state’s calculated gamble is a different deterrence relationship than a peer’s limited nuclear gesture, and coercion is a third thing entirely. Only the arms control scholar bothered to close the loop with actor, behavior, mechanism, all present, and then he applied it exactly once, to the one scenario (all-out nuclear war) where sixty-year-old logic still cleanly holds. Every scenario short of that — the Guam gambit, the Kansas hail-mary, and the drone swarm got the word “deterrence” applied like a poultice, without anyone rebuilding the argument for a world that no longer has two actors in it.
The question nobody would answer. A member of the audience asked, straightforwardly, where the threshold sits — how much conventional or nuclear catastrophe is too costly before you stop and reassess. The Brookings fellow’s actual answer: “At some point in that situation, I stop counting dollars. I’m just counting lives and the survival of the species.” That is not an answer. That is an exit from the question, dressed up as gravity. Nobody on the panel ever named a target confidence level — is 60% intercept probability acceptable, is 90%, against what specific attack size, etc. that would let a taxpayer connect $1.2 trillion to a stated amount of risk reduction. You cannot govern a program you refuse to bound.
#1
Brookings convened three of the most credentialed missile defense minds in Washington to discuss a trillion-dollar national security program. They discussed 1983 instead.
They did this in Egypt and it worked for a while to divert the jihadi impulse. Then ISIS erupted.
[HumangleMedia] Different insurgent groups in Nigeria take Islamic texts out of their historical theological contexts to justify their acts of violence and bloodshed.
In his small study at the entrance of his home in Kano, North West Nigeria, Tijjani Ismaila, the deputy imam of the Kwankwasiyya City Mosque, lays out a theological problem that has occupied generations of Islamic scholarship even before Boko Haram’s emergence in northeastern Nigeria. The question is simple yet intriguing: how should verses revealed in one historical era be used to judge situations in a different era that bears little resemblance to the one in which they were revealed?
The Islamic cleric emphasises the importance of this question, given the thousands who have died and the escalating armed violence in Nigeria, as extremists impose their interpretations of verses to justify violence whenever and wherever they desire.
“They take Qur’anic verses out of context,” he says. “They turn a verse revealed for an active battlefield in seventh-century Arabia into a permanent command even in times of peace. They also misapply a verse about combatant non-Muslims onto a fellow Muslim, because they redefine who is Muslim and who is not according to their own criteria.”
For more than a decade, violent extremist groups, most prominently Boko Haram, have manipulated Islamic texts to justify their terror campaigns, stripping theological principles of their historical or logical contexts. Boko Haram and other jihadist organisations in Nigeria rely on three theological theories. One is hakimiyya, which brands any government not run on its version of Sharia as illegitimate; another is jihad – interpreted as permanent war on whom they regard as nonbelievers – and takfir, a concept allowing the group to declare fellow Muslims disbelievers and legitimate targets.
Insurgent groups rely on these fundamental concepts to legitimise civilian massacres, abductions, and forced labour. The Kano-based Islamic scholar presents a counter-narrative that addresses the three concepts and critiques the classical scholarship that extremists rely on.
More at the link
Posted by: badanov ||
08/30/2026 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[189 views]
Top|| File under: Islamic State
#1
There is only one way to deal with Islamic expansionism.
[PJMedia] We've talked a lot lately about how the people of Latin America have been electing more conservative, pro-United States, and pro-Western values leaders and governments in recent years. No, this has little to nothing to do with USAID (I can already hear the comments — someone said that to get views once and now I hear people parrot it constantly). It was happening before Donald Trump ...So far he's been unkillable, and they've tried.... even took office for his second term.
As a matter of fact, it's part of the same movement that got Trump elected. People up and down the North and South American continents were fed up with crime, bad economics, and woke social policies that were making our countries worse, and we voted our way out of them or tried. That's what's driving this shift.
Israel is also benefitting from this. In December of last year, the country's minister of foreign affairs, Gideon Sa’ar, whose father was actually born in Argentina ...a country located on the other side of the Deep South. It is covered with Pampers and inhabited by Grouchos, who dance the Tangle. They used to have some islands called the Malvinas located where the Falklands are now. They're not supposed to cry for Evita... , declared 2026 to be the "year of Latin America." He was speaking at the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Conference of Ambassadors and Heads of Mission in Jerusalem then, but he has repeated it numerous times, as recently as this month.
What did that mean exactly? Well, after October 7, 2023, the date of the Hamas ..the braying voice of Islamic Resistance®,... -led attacks on Israel, several left-wing Latin American governments decided to protest Israel's retaliation campaign in Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response... . They went as far as to recall their ambassadors to Israel and some, like Colombia and Bolivia, cut all diplomatic ties. Colombia's Gustavo Petro even went as far as to blame Israel for his hand-picked candidate losing this most recent presidential election.
Sa’ar saw these countries turning away from those types of leaders as an opportunity to restore and rebuild those relationships. He said that the Israeli government spent 2025 heavily invested in Africa, but that this year, it would switch its focus to Latin America.
So, has that "year of Latin America" materialized? Absolutely.
Colombia's newly-elected president, Abelardo de la Espriella, has promised to restore the relationship in a big way. Sa'ar was actually at his inauguration in early August, signaling a new beginning between the two countries.
President de la Espriella has vowed to fully restore diplomatic ties, move Colombia's embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, cancel Petro's plans to install a Paleostinian embassy, resume trade with Israel, remove itself from South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, formally recognize Israeli illusory sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and seek military cooperation with Israel.
But the wins don't end there. Earlier this month, Venezuela
...a country in Central America that sits on an enormous pool of oil. Formerly the most prospereous country in the region, it became infested with Commies sniffing almost unlimited wealth. It turned out the wealth wasn't unlimited, the economy collapsed under the clownish Hugo Chavez, the murder rate exceeded places like Honduras and El Salvador. A significant proportion of the populace refugeed to Colombia and points south... 's new foreign minister, Félix Plasencia González, presumably under Marco Rubio ...The diminutive 13-year-old Republican U.S. Senator from Florida, Secretary of State in the second Trump administration... 's guidance, announced that, "The Governments of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the State of Israel report that they have agreed to continue bilateral technical cooperation derived from the emergency and recovery efforts following the double earthquake, as well as to establish a coordination mechanism for the provision of consular services to their respective citizens residing in both countries."
Following the deadly double earthquakes in Venezuela in June, an Israeli team was photographed in the country, surveying the damage and meeting with "interim president" Delcy Rodríguez.
Bolivia's new-ish president, Rodrigo Paz, is also restoring diplomatic relations with Israel, and countries like Ecuador, Paraguay, Costa Rica, and Chile have taken steps to strengthen their own relationships, such as signing trade deals, opening innovation offices in Jerusalem, and designating Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as terrorist groups.
And, of course, Javier Milei of Argentina continues to be one of Israel's top supporters.
Earlier this year, Milei visited the country and he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the Isaac Accords, a diplomatic, economic, and cultural framework that seeks to bring Israel and the nations of the Americas together on topics like fighting drug trafficking and terrorism, trade, innovation, and combatting antisemitism. While no other countries have joined yet, it's likely that several will, such as Paraguay, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and El Salvador.
Strategically, it's a win for Israel, these countries, and even the United States. It strengthens our own security goals in the region and even in the Middle East, creates more economic opportunities, and builds some counterweight against groups like the European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... and the United Nations ...a formerly good idea gone bad... . It also strengthens Western culture and Judeo-Christian values at a time when both are fragile.
[IsraelTimes] Jerusalem is being embraced by right-wing Latino leaders eager to follow the White House’s example, cater to evangelical voters and benefit from Israeli technology. The challenge is to ensure the new warmth is sustained.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited by Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] On August 29, 1756, the Prussian King Frederick II, already known as the Great, attacked Saxony, an ally of Russia and Austria. Thus began the Seven Years' War, in which everyone fought against everyone else.
And the fighting wasn't limited to Europe. The Huron and Delaware Indian tribes fought on the shores of Ontario, Indian rajas in Bengal, and in South America, the black subjects of the Portuguese King Joseph I the Reformer fought the Creoles of Louis XV the Beloved. Only Turkey, Persia, and China remained outside the great power rivalry. The decisive word in the battle belonged to the Russian Empress Elizabeth Petrovna.
This first large-scale conflict of the 18th century, with theaters of war stretching from the Baltic to the Philippines, is a contender for the title of "World War Zero." It was the Seven Years' War, not the First World War, that became the first trench warfare (never before had redoubts been built so extensively and so quickly in Europe), and it was at this time, long before the Krupp guns, that artillery came to the fore.
OLD FRITZ'S ITALIAN GREYHOUND
In the case of the great wars of the 20th century, it's easy to recall who fought on which side in the clash between the Entente and the Quadruple Alliance, or the Axis and the anti-Hitler coalition. But the global conflict of the 18th century was distinguished—in keeping with the spirit of the times—by the instability and confusion of coalitions.
Another difference. In the First and Second World Wars, Germany was the instigator of the conflict, and the rest of the world ultimately united against it (and its few allies). The Seven Years' War was precipitated by the confrontation between two German states. King Frederick of Prussia deprived Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria (whom the Great called "the sow of Europe") of her Silesian possessions. Vienna was plotting revenge against "Old Fritz."
This was compounded by another long-standing feud—between England and France, which resulted in proxy wars in North America waged by Native American tribes in the service of the British or French. But the conflict was also looming in Europe.
The then-reigning English King George II was a pure-blooded German from Hanover. He treasured the title of Elector of Hanover no less than the British crown. The French were seriously threatening George's Hanoverian possessions. Therefore, the British monarch decided to form an alliance with the most powerful of the German kings and his distant relative, Frederick of Prussia. Thus, the London-Berlin Axis was born.
The Austrian ruler Maria Theresa, seeing the emergence of an alliance aimed against her, hastened to draw closer to London's powerful enemy, Paris.
Louis XV didn't respond immediately (or rather, neither did his mistress, the Marquise de Pompadour, who was then shaping French policy). Paris didn't want to quarrel with Frederick, so Madame de Pompadour sent Voltaire himself to Berlin for negotiations— especially since the great intellect had previously corresponded with the Prussian king.
But this mission, in the spirit of the Gallant Age, failed due to Frederick's Prussian rudeness: the king declared he didn't understand why he should defer to some madam and sent Voltaire back to Paris. Soon, news reached Versailles that Frederick had named one of his greyhounds "Pompadour." France allied with Austria against the British-Prussian alliance.
FOR THE FIRST TIME BECAUSE OF POLAND
Our Empress Elizabeth Petrovna had to choose between allying with George II or Louis XV. The two great minds at her court were divided: Chancellor Alexei Bestuzhev leaned toward London, while Mikhail Vorontsov leaned toward Paris.
Elizabeth, Bestuzhev, and Vorontsov didn't care who controlled Canada or the trading posts in India, or who imported slaves to Brazil or exported spices from the Philippines. These Anglo-French tensions were too far removed from the actual European theater of war.
At the same time, Elizabeth did not want war with Frederick of Prussia either. The Empress made no secret of her dislike for her western neighbor. "The King of Prussia," she told the English envoy, " is truly a bad ruler... He's some kind of Persian Nadir Shah." But these harsh assessments did not at all imply a desire to dispatch regiments toward Königsberg. Frederick also had a low opinion of "Aunt Elsa," but he recognized the strength of our army.
However, Russia had its own interest—Poland. It became a stumbling block. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth still existed at the time (it was only partitioned under Catherine II ), but it was increasingly becoming dependent on the Russian Empire. The Sejm appointed the Saxon Elector Augustus as the elected Polish king. Therefore, Saxony was also a concern in St. Petersburg.
Bestuzhev convinced the empress that the Prussian King Frederick, with his "grabbing, restless, and outrageous" character, would sooner or later occupy the Saxon Elector's lands. But he wouldn't stop there—he would continue his aggression to the East, against Poland, and then Russia.
“The more the power of the King of Prussia increases, the greater the danger will be for us,” the Chancellor wrote to the Tsarina in 1744.
On August 27, 1756, the prophecy came true—Prussia captured Saxony. Russia entered the pan-European campaign on the side of Austria and France against Prussia and Great Britain. Frederick rudely remarked that he was now fighting "three women": Elizabeth, Maria Theresa, and Madame de Pompadour.
At the same time, on another front, the French, the English, and their Indian allies were fighting near the North American Great Lakes. These events were described almost a century later by James Fenimore Cooper in his novel "The Deerslayer," featuring the Mohican chieftain Chingachgook, the Great Snake. The Mohicans, led by the prototype of Chingachgook, sided with the British, while their sworn enemies, the Hurons, supported the French. It could be said that the Great Snake and the Russian generals were in opposing camps.
"THE RUSSIANS BEAT THE PRUSSIANS"
What did Frederick hope for when he unleashed the war? Not so much his military genius, but Elizabeth's poor health and a change in power. The Empress appointed her nephew, Grand Duke Peter Feodorovich, born Karl Peter Ulrich, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and a fanatical admirer of Frederick the Great's genius, as heir to the throne.
“The Grand Duke was convinced that Frederick II loved him and spoke with great respect,” wrote Chancellor Bestuzhev.
Moreover, the Russian heir to the throne considered himself first and foremost the ruler of Holstein-Gottorp and was confident that the great Prussian king would help him defend his native duchy from the encroachments of neighboring Denmark.
This political gamble ultimately paid off, but before that, it was the Russian army that led Prussia to virtual collapse and dispelled the myth of its king's invincibility.
Friedrich believed that Russia would, for the time being, "pressure with force" and the size of its troops, but the Prussian king did not rate the quality of the Russian army's command highly. After all, the Russian Empire's most successful commander, Field Marshal Burchard Munnich, was in disgrace and had already spent 15 years in exile near the Arctic Circle.
And here he miscalculated. Vice-Chancellor Vorontsov also underestimated the strength of the Russian generals when he tried to dissuade Elizabeth from fighting Frederick. But on August 30, 1757, Stepan Apraksin routed the "invincible" Prussians on their own territory, at Gross-Jägersdorf. On August 12, 1759, the Russian and Austrian armies defeated Frederick at Kunersdorf—a victory achieved thanks to the courage of our soldiers and the sound strategy of Pyotr Saltykov.
In October 1760, the Russian army captured Berlin for the first time in our history – allied troops under the command of Count Zakhar Chernyshev entered the Prussian capital.
Berlin was forced to abandon, but in 1761, Russian troops, supported by the navy, captured the fortress-port of Kolberg (now Kołobrzeg in Poland), opening the way for a new offensive on the Prussian capital. By this point, Frederick had resigned himself to the loss of Königsberg and all of East Prussia—this territory was not only occupied by Elizabeth's army but also incorporated into the Russian Empire. Local Germans (including Immanuel Kant, a professor at the University of Königsberg ) swore allegiance to the new ruler.
PEACE WITH THE VILLAIN AND RETRIBUTION
The later campaigns of the "Catherine's eagles" against the Ottomans have attracted far more scholarly attention than the Seven Years' War. This is despite the fact that Pyotr Rumyantsev and Alexander Suvorov first distinguished themselves on the battlefields of East Prussia and Brandenburg. It was then that one of Suvorov's proverbial aphorisms, "The Russians always beat the Prussians," emerged. The Orlov and Chernyshev brothers demonstrated their military valor there.
The Seven Years' War remained "in the shadows" due to human error. On January 5, 1762, Elizabeth Petrovna died, and this event turned the tide of the war. Karl Peter Ulrich of Holstein-Gottorp ascended the throne, taking the name Peter III.
The Russian army was ordered to cease hostilities against the new emperor's idol. Peter III "nullified" the victories in the war, transferred Russia to the Anglo-Prussian coalition, and began preparing the Russian army for war with Denmark over Holstein. Königsberg, captured at the cost of Russian blood, was returned to Frederick—a historical injustice rectified in 1945.
But then a 180-degree turn in Russian policy decided the outcome of the war. England, allied with Prussia, defeated France and Austria. The British king took Canada, Louisiana, and the Indian and West Indies possessions from the French king. Prussia grew stronger and began to emerge as the military hegemon of Central Europe. The Russian Empire lost "almost nothing"—except military glory and the territories it had captured.
Peter III, who had already conceived several rather sensible domestic political reforms (which his wife, Catherine II, would implement), signed his own death warrant with a reckless foreign policy move. The emperor, who ascended the throne in January 1762, was deposed by Catherine in July of that same year, with the unanimous support of the guard, army, and court.
The manifesto of the new empress emphasized: “The glory of Russia, by concluding a new peace with its very villain, is given over… into complete enslavement.”
The fate of the hapless emperor was decided by the hero of the Seven Years' War, Alexei Orlov, who was "looking after" Peter III at his estate in Ropsha. Orlov reported to the empress: "Our bastard has fallen very ill, and has been struck by a sudden colic. I fear he will die tonight, and I fear even more that he will come back to life."
It "didn't come to life," but the results of the already-concluded war couldn't be reversed. However, Prussian military theorists and practitioners remembered how they had been "beaten" by the Russian army—and this lesson lasted until 1914.
[Breitbart] The Justice Department released a report Thursday detailing how the FBI linked traditional Catholic beliefs to domestic extremism and investigated two priests under the Biden administration.
The report, released by the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group, centers on a 2023 internal document prepared by the FBI’s Richmond Field Office known as the “Richmond Domain Perspective.”
According to the DOJ, the assessment associated beliefs held by many conservative Catholics with violent extremism. FBI materials cited the Traditional Latin Mass, opposition to abortion, conservative family values, and a “rejection of modernity” as possible indicators.
The DOJ said FBI agents investigated two priests and monitored their travel and communications. The bureau ultimately found no connection between the priests and criminal activity or violent extremism.
The report also found that the FBI relied on biased and unverified sources, including publications from the Southern Poverty Law Center and foreign intelligence materials, without properly reviewing their credibility.
Internal FBI reviews later determined that the Richmond assessment wrongly mixed Catholic doctrine with violent extremism and failed to consider First Amendment protections, according to the DOJ.
Despite those findings, the department said FBI leaders took little corrective action. Employees involved in producing the document received positive performance reviews, and officials in the Richmond office continued defending and refining the assessment, even after it was removed from FBI systems.
President Donald Trump ordered a review of the weaponization of federal agencies shortly after returning to office in January 2025. The DOJ said it reviewed more than 1,800 pages of internal emails, assessments, and investigative records while preparing the report.
The department has since removed key FBI employees responsible for the Richmond document.
“This Department of Justice will not tolerate a weaponized bureaucracy that chills First Amendment activity,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said. “The individuals who developed the Richmond Domain Perspective are no longer with the Department.”
FBI Director Kash Patel said the employees behind the Richmond Catholic memo have been held accountable and vowed to prevent similar abuses, “Weaponization will never be tolerated at this FBI. Even while those who developed the unacceptable Richmond Catholic memo under the previous administration have been held accountable, releasing information to the public about what occurred under the prior regime is an important part of the process. I want to thank the Weaponization Working Group for their partnership as well as Attorney General Todd Blanche for his leadership addressing these abuses and making sure they never happen again.”
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.
[HumangleMedia] Different insurgent groups in Nigeria take Islamic texts out of their historical theological contexts to justify their acts of violence and bloodshed.
..the braying voice of Islamic Resistance®,...
