RWC Unfiltered 11-10-11

• Fed Court Says ObamaCare Legal: Scotus Next
• Giant Rock Zips Past Earth
• Is Obama’s Science Czar a Traitor
• Iran Hurtling To Nukes
• Russians, Pakis and North Koreans Helping Iran With Nukes
• Sarkosy and Obama Dis Isreal’s Top Dog

A notoriously liberal District of Columbia Federal Court of Appeals upheld Obama’s healthcare law on Tuesday as Constitutional, setting the stage for a probable Supreme Court fight regarding the law.

The court, according to The Associated Press, agreed to dismiss a Christian legal group’s lawsuit that said the healthcare law was unConstitutional and in violation of religious freedom.

The lawsuit was one of many challenging Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and appellate courts throughout the Nation have ruled both in favor of and against the act, further ensuring that the issue will eventually reach the Supreme Court.

On Oct. 26, SCOTUSblog reported that the Supreme Court will most likely take its first look at Obamacare challenges at its conference this Thursday.

The court is scheduled to discuss six petitions against Obamacare.

The initial conversations will give Supreme Court Justices a chance to decide which cases and whose arguments they will hear before ruling on healthcare reform. An actual ruling on the law, most experts say, will not take place until next year. Because of the numerous contradictory rulings from lower courts regarding the individual insurance mandate, the Court is expected to focus heavily on that particular issue in discussions about the law in its entirety.

Obama’s Agriculture Department announced a new 15-cent charge on all fresh Christmas trees-the Christmas Tree Tax-to support a new Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees. Obama quickly “delayed” it- but did not repeal or cancel it, Stupidity

An asteroid as big as an aircraft carrier zipped by Earth on Tuesday evening  in the closest encounter by such a massive space rock in more than three decades.

If the thing had hit Earth it would have carved a crater four miles across an           d 1,700 feet deep. And if it slammed into the ocean, it would trigger 70-foot-high tsunami waves.

Asteroids are leftovers from the formation of the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists believe their growth was stunted by Jupiter’s gravitational pull and never had the chance to become full-fledged planets. Pieces of asteroids periodically break off and make fiery plunges through the atmosphere as meteorites.

Norma, age 90, and Gordon, age 94, Yeager an Iowa couple married for 72 years reportedly died as they held hands in a Des Moines hospital last week within one hour of each other after a car accident. They married in 1939. Bittersweet.

John Holdren, President Obama’s “science” czar, visited the Soviet Union during the Cold War as vice chairman of a group whose founder was accused of providing vital nuclear information that helped the Soviets build an atom bomb.

Leo Szilard, a member of the Manhattan Project, was a principal founder of the FAS (Federation of American Scientist). Szilard also was accused of providing vital information to the Soviets that helped them build an atomic bomb.

In 1994, Pavel Sudoplatov, a former major-general in Soviet intelligence, named Szilard as a key source of crucial atomic information to the Soviet Union.

Leo Szilard, a member of the Manhattan Project, was a principal founder of the FAS Szilard. Holdren served on FAS Board and is known to be sympathetic to Szilard’s views and ideology.

“Soviet politician and security chief Lavrentiy Beria said we should think how to use Oppenheimer, Szilard and others around them in the “peace campaign” against nuclear armament. Disarmament and the inability to impose nuclear blackmail would deprive the United States of its advantage,” wrote Sudoplatov.

FAS members founded the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists which quickly becamse a Soviet propaganda tool. Holdren worked on the Bulletin in 1984. At the time, communist and socialist sympathizers still occupied the magazine’s masthead.

Holder spent three weeks in China in the last year and is now accused of giving critical information about America’s space program to China’s People’s Liberation Army that runs its space and satellite programs. Virginia Congressman Frank Wolf  has openly accused Holdren of collaborating with the Chinese. In congressional hearings about China’s espionage in the United States and “the violation of the law by the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy John Holdren. Obama appointe Holdren despite repeated warnings about him.

The main stream media has been mute about Holdren’s treason, and he still has access to secrets and apparently a sympathetic Obama White House. There have been concerns about Robert Holdren long before Obama appointed him to this critical post.

There are an estimated 26,000 nuclear warheads in US, UK, Russian, China, North Korea, Israel, France, Pakistani and Indian arsenals now

The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Adminitration) has chided Iran for years to come clean about a number of apparently weapons-related scientific projects, the new disclosures fill out the contours of an apparent secret research program that was more ambitious, more organized and more successful than commonly suspected. Beginning early in the last decade and apparently resuming - though at a more measured pace - after a pause in 2003, Iranian scientists worked concurrently across multiple disciplines to obtain key skills needed to make and test a nuclear weapon that could fit inside the country’s long-range missiles, said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector who has reviewed the intelligence files.

“The program never really stopped,” said Albright, president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. The institute performs widely respected independent analyses of nuclear programs in countries around the world, often drawing from IAEA data.

“After 2003, money was made available for research in areas that sure look like nuclear weapons work but were hidden within civilian institutions,” Albright said.

The report confirms that Iran has everything it needs to construct a nuclear weapon thanks to help from Russian, North Korean and Pakistani scientist that provided knowledge and information ranging from metallurgy; electronics, and assembly techniques.

Given the level of international angst in the U. S. Israel, Middle East and Europe. Israel has pointedly said it will not accept a nuclear armed Iran. The U. S. UK and France have said that would be unacceptable. The biggest effort appears to keep Israel out of the shooting lest a wider Islamic-Jewish conflict result.

Israel has even warned it could use its Samson Option referring to its own arsenel of nuclear weapons.

It appears the fuse to decisive action has been lighted.

The Sun produces so much energy, that every second the core releases the equivalent of 100 billion nuclear bombs.

Hardly a day has gone by in the last month without new revelations, mostly from US intelligence sources, confirming that Iran has either reached or is within a hand’s breadth of a nuclear weapon capability. Sunday, Nov. 6, Iran was reported to have carried out implosion experiments in a large steel container built as a testing capsule for this purpose at Parchin. Such experiments would be hard to explain away for any purpose other than the development of nuclear arms.

Monday, Nov. 7, a Russian nuclear expert Vyacheslav Danilenko was named as having taught the Iranians how to build the R265 generator used for the implosion in the Parchin experiment.

Since Danilenko was back home in Russia by 2005, Iran must be considered to have mastered the critical nuclear detonation technology as far back as six years ago.

It is critical because before a nuclear weapon can be used, a sphere of conventional explosives must be detonated to create a blast wave that compresses a central ball of nuclear fuel into an incredibly dense mass, triggering a nuclear chain reaction and explosion.

 For six years, therefore, American and Israeli governments have kept their own people and the world ignorant of the true state of Iran’s nuclear program. Indeed in 2007, under President George W. Bush, the American government, military and intelligence agencies published a deliberately misleading National Intelligence Estimate which concluded that in 2003, Tehran had suspended intense work on the design and production of a nuclear weapon.

 The Israeli government under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert tried protesting that the report was false, but when no one listened, he lined up behind Washington. He and his foreign minister at the time Tzipi Livni brushed off anxious queries by retorting that the Iranian nuclear menace was a matter for the international community to deal with, even though the high-wire diplomacy attempted at the time was getting exactly nowhere.

But both the US and Israeli knew the truth - that Iran was getting dangerously close to a nuclear capacity, had obtained nuclear explosives, detonators and the technology for triggering them, as well as building missiles.

Against this backdrop, the Stuxnet malworm made its first appearance in June 2010. The virus embarked on stealthy depredations of the uranium enrichment facility’s control system in Natanz, in order to stall Iran’s stockpiling of large quantities of weapons-grade fuel.

It worked for a year or two - no more. According to US sources, Iran has since managed to accumulate enough enriched uranium for four nuclear bombs.

That explains the comment appearing in the New York Times of Monday, Nov. 6, from a senior US official. He said the virus had run its course but some recently discovered computer worms suggested a new, improved Stuxnet 2.0 may be in the works. “There were a lot of mistakes made the first time,” he said. “This was a first-generation product. Think of Edison’s initial light bulbs or the Apple II.”

 Cyber war therefore briefly stalled Iran’s progress toward a nuclear bomb but never derailed it.

The covert assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists were similarly only temporary setbacks soon overcome.

The Iran report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will show plainly that sanctions, the clandestine assassinations of scientists, the Stuxnet virus and a host of covert operations to damage the equipment on its way to Iran, never diverted Tehran long from its ruthless march on a nuclear arsenal.

Two leaders, US President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, pledged solemnly when they assumed office never to let Iran achieve a nuclear arms capability. 

On their watch, however, Iran has achieved that capability. As things stand today, it is now only a step away from a bomb, separated by little more than a political decision to take it.

 Some experts say Iran still needs several months to produce its first weapon and a shorter period to produce each subsequent one. Does this leave time to intervene?

No one knows what the US or Israeli leaders will decide to do, whether in concert or unilaterally, to rectify their grave lapse. Will they opt for living with a nuclear-armed Iran while downplaying the menace thereof or resort to a military offensive to extinguish it?

The IAEA report dispersed some of the opaque mists blurring the Iranian nuclear reality and making possible the obfuscations of the past six years. It to focuses on Iran’s efforts towards putting radioactive material in a warhead and developing missiles.

Once the facts are laid out on the table for all to see, it will be that much harder for interested parties to continue to spin the facts for political expedience.

“We advise the United States and its ally [Israel] to stop and be ashamed of [their threats] and be aware that Iran will not take one step back [from its nuclear program],” Ahmadinejad said in a meeting with students in Tehran this week.

Over the last week, the possibility of an Israeli air strike against Iran’s nuclear program has dominated the Israeli press and refocused public debate. Official statements, Israeli military activities, and accusations of leaks against former senior intelligence officers leaking against a possible attack has the country on edge and has triggered an unusual public debate reflecting deep divisions within the Israeli government.

 Accusations of Leaks by Former Intelligence Offiicials

 Tensions grew in official Israeli circles late this week after the Netanyahu government accused former senior intelligence officials of leaking Israeli government discussions of a possible attack on Iran, allegedly to prevent such an attack from taking place.  Yesterday, the usually tight lipped and behind-the-scenes minister Benny Begin and Deputy Prime Minister Yaalon leveled unprecedented criticism on former Mossad director Meir Dagan and former internal security chief (Shin Bet), Yuval Diskin, accusing them of having inflicted the gravest damage against the security of the nation.

Minister Begin said on November 2 that the public revelations were “madness,” “utterly irresponsible,” and that they “severely impeded the government’s ability to make decisions . . . and was an orchestrated journey by civil servants and the media.”  Begin accused former Mossad Chief Meir Dagan of “a dangerous breach of trust, verging on megalomania.  It’s just despicable.  These kinds of acts are very severe.”  Prime Minister Netanyahu was less direct and did not name the two former Israeli officials, but ordered an investigation into the leaks.  To date, Israel had never had an investigation at such a high level of a security breach.

Arching over all this is the possibility, some say probability, that Iran would retaliate with missile attacks  on Israel by proxy terrorist groups and even attempt biochemical and biological weapons attacks on the u. S.

The Crab Nebula one of the most photographed features in all the heavens, was produced by a supernova explosion in 1054 A.D. The Chinese and Arab astronomers at the time noted that the explosion was so bright, that it was visible during the day, and lit up the night sky for months.

In a childish episode more like two gossipy adolescents than heads of state — French President Nicolas Sarkozy branded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a liar” in a private conversation with U.S. President Barack Obama that was accidentally broadcast to journalists during last week’s G20 summit in Cannes.

“I cannot bear Netanyahu, he’s a liar,” Sarkozy told Obama, unaware that the microphones in their meeting room had been switched on, enabling reporters in a separate location to listen in to a simultaneous translation.

“You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you,” Obama replied, according to the French interpreter.

The technical gaffe is likely to cause great embarrassment to all three leaders as they look to work together to intensify international pressure on Iran over its nuclear ambitions.

65% of those with autism are left handed.

For the second time in a week Iran has declared its intention to destroy Israel.

Tehran said four missiles would be enough to kill a million Israelis. Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, deputy commander of Iran’s armed forces, said an American or Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would not only result in the Jewish state’s extinction - “Dimona is the most accessible target” - but generate a response that “would not be limited to the Middle East.” 

The smallest action by Israel [against Iran] and we will see its destruction,” Gen. Jazayeri went on to say. “We have plans of reprisal ready for any attack.”

Iranian sources report all this muscle-flexing is a sign of mounting edginess in Tehran as the debate in the United States and Israel over the need for a military operation against Iran gains momentum following the UN nuclear agency (IAEA)’s exposure of its nuclear program as weapon-focused.

Some American papers have responded with stories designed to discourage the Netanyahu government from a military offensive. They claim Israel is short of the bombers and air crews needed to conduct the 1,000 rapid-fire sorties required for a successful operation. The damage would therefore be slight, they argue, enough only to hold Iran’s nuclear progress back by no more than a year or two at best. Israel would have to repeat its operation every few years.

Other US sources maintain that a unilateral Israel strike on Iran would seriously undercut America’s Middle East influence and call for unwilling US intervention in the war to rescue Israel from the fury of Iranian missiles.

According to another view expounded by certain US columnists Wednesday, no American or Israel attack is to be expected in the coming days, but must eventually take place. Obama swore Iran would not be allowed to attain a nuclear weapon. He is bound to make good on his pledge just as he kept his promise to liquidate Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and pull US troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

 In Israel, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has told his office to offer no comment on the nuclear agency’s evidence of Iran’s work on an atomic bomb until he is ready and ordered cabinet ministers to keep silent.

 There is a certain amount of frustration in Jerusalem over the nuclear agency’s report, mainly because it conceals as much as it reveals. Its researches cover Iran’s nuclear and missile developments only in the years 2008 and 2009 whereas both programs took off dramatically and ominously later.
Jerusalem sources have registered two other dominant responses:

 

• 1. If as government sources claim Iran can attain an operational nuclear weapon within a year, why is the Netanyahu government talking about sanctions which everyone knows are useless instead of exercising its military option before it is too late?
• 2. Israeli intelligence and military sources and commentators say the agency’s findings are not new but have been known for some years. If that is the case, many Israelis ask, why was Iran’s nuclear progress kept dark and why didn’t a military attack come up for debate much sooner when it would have been more expeditious?

And if the truth was kept hidden for two or three years, why should anyone believe that the data released this week covers the true picture? The conclusion is inescapable that Iran’s nuclear doings are a lot more dangerous than the agency and the Israeli government would have people believe.

A minority of former government officials in opposition today maintain in response to the IAEA report that Israel should learn to live with a nuclear-armed Iran and in fact has already managed to survive for some years and even prosper in its shadow without coming to harm.

However, most Israelis now suspect that Iran already has the nuclear-bomb but no one responsible is willing to admit it.

Following joint exercises with Israel at an Italian airbase Germany has put its F-16 and Tornado fleets into intensive training for what is reportedly preparation for an attack on Iran,

If you could separate the Earth out into piles of material, you’d get 32.1 % iron, 30.1% oxygen, 15.1% silicon, and 13.9% magnesium. Of course, most of this iron is actually down at the core of the Earth. If you could actually get down and sample the core, it would be 88% iron. 47% of the Earth’s crust consists of oxygen.

For forty years, school districts and unions have collaborated to break the law in California. According to the Stull Act (Section 44660 of the state’s education code), part of a teacher’s evaluation is required to include a student achievement component, but this has not happened anywhere in the state. Last week, after consulting with EdVoice, a reform advocacy group in Sacramento, parents of some students in Los Angeles Unified School District sued the school district and the teachers union for what amounts to a dereliction of duty. While the lawsuit is aimed at LA, it will have state-wide ramifications.

Originally enacted in 1971, the Stull Act, named after State Senator John Stull, was amended in 1999 to include,

“The governing board of each school district shall evaluate and assess certificated employee performance as it reasonably relates to:

The progress of pupils toward the standards established pursuant to subdivision (a) and, if applicable, the state adopted academic content standards as measured by state adopted criterion referenced assessments….”

In other words, a part of a teacher’s evaluation is supposed to be contingent on how well his/er students do on state mandated tests. This is hardly a radical notion, as half the states in the rest of the country now evaluate teachers in part by student performance on these tests.

But in California, what are laughingly referred to as “teacher evaluations” are anything but.  A “Stull” is typically a very rare and brief visit from a principal who helps plan the lesson they will observe and lets the teacher know exactly when the observation will be. And all the while, the teacher is prepping his kids to be at their absolute best when the principal steps into the classroom for the evaluation. Invariably everything goes swimmingly. So consistently good are the results of these Potemkin Village-style “evaluations” that over 99 percent of teachers get a satisfactory rating.

Teachers unions think that linking student performance to a teacher’s evaluation is a grave injustice and have always fiercely opposed it.

In reality, holding a teacher accountable for student learning is about as unjust as holding a chef responsible for the food he cooks.

Still, the teachers unions’ position is understandable because their unions have never demonstrated any real concern for students.

But what about the folks who sit at the other end of the bargaining table? What is the excuse for the school boards? Are they all that easily cowed by union bullies? Or are they part of a club that has forgotten their mission? Are they corrupt? Can they be ignorant of the law? Some or all of the above?

In any event, with judicial lights shining brightly, the jig is up…sort of. What the education code does not stipulate is how much weight to give the student performance component. Therein lies the rub. Without doubt, the teachers unions will negotiate to minimize it to near zero, with little or no consequence for the bottom performing teachers (to the unions, there is no such thing as a bad teacher, and they’ve rigged the system so that getting rid of a stinker is about as prevalent as the occurrence of Halley’s Comet).

If the intent of this lawsuit is seriously embraced, it could have a major impact in California, where a third of all students drop out before completing high school and a great majority of those who do graduate and go on to college need remediation.

Will school boards finally man up and take action to reverse a forty year shame?

Or will they cower and cave, yet again, to union demands and turn their backs on the children of California?