RWC Unfiltered 12-8-11

• Obama Hawaii Vacation Costs Taxpayers $20,000 A day
  And It’s worth it!

  

  Well Worth It!

• Post Office Must Cut $20 Billion by 2015
• Sauds and Qatar Funding Radical Takeover Of Egypt
• Panetta Cajols Israel To Make Nice
• Presidential Pardons May Show Racial Bias
• Russia Pushes Back Against Obama Weakness.
• Iran Gets Hands On Super Secret RQ-170 Batwing UAV
• Earthlike Planet Confirmed
• Drone That Crashed in Iran Part of CIA Fleet
• Ancient Atmosphere Analysis
• Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan: Now What?

Ron Paul’s anti Newt ad airing in Iowa accuses him of “serial hypocrisy.” A Perry ad accused Obama of “war on religion”- he should have said Christianity, Christie has waddled onto the Romney bandwagon.

Obama is sending the wrong message by taking his family on a 17-day luxury Hawaiian vacation funded by U.S. tax dollars while millions of Americans settle for a blue Christmas.

Obama and his family will use their own money - that comes from taxpayers — to rent a private beach-front residence in Kailua, Oahu, for their vacation. Described as a “Winter White House,” the rental costs up to $3,500 a day or $75,000 a month, according to AOL travel blog Gadling.

Taxpayers will kick in $2-4  million to cover the added security and accommodations for the president’s entourage and transportation, based on estimates from Hawaiian media organizations.

Last year, the Hawaii Reporter calculated the taxpayer bill for one Obama vacation in Hawaii to be in excess of $1.5 million - for a running total of about $6 million since the Hawaiian native was elected president. Overall taxpayers will be paying $20,000 a day for the luxury vacation considering taxpayers ultimately pay or everything.

If you spent one dollar every second, you would have spent a million dollars in twelve days.  At that same rate, it would take you 32 years to spend a billion dollars.  But it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend a trillion dollars.

The U.S. Postal Service must reduce its operating costs by $20 billion by 2015 in order to return to profitability,” says David Williams, vice president of Network Operations for the USPS, according to a news release. “The proposed changes to service standards will allow for significant consolidation of the postal network in terms of facilities, processing equipment, vehicles and employee workforce and will generate projected net annual savings of approximately $2.1 billion.”

There will be some opportunity for individuals to get their mail delivered the following day: according to a news release from the USPS, individuals who properly prepare and enter mail at destinating processing facilities prior to the day’s critical entry time will have their items sent in one day. Overall, the first-class mail changes are part of an overall savings plan for network optimization, which is projected to save up to $3 billion by 2015.

The Postal Union has demanded lax workplace rules and reduced performance standards while dramatically increasing wages and pensions, for instance: next year a letter carrier wii be paid over $100,000.

“It’s true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?” Ronald Reagan

Saudi Arabia and Qatar reportedly spent millions to boost the Muslim Brotherhood in last week’s Egyptian parliamentary elections to control the direction of political change in Egypt. Meanwhile, tensions are growing between the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis during run-off elections due to differences on how to pursue an Islamist agenda in a new Egyptian government.

Obama was repeatedly warned against disrupting Egypt without a clear, certain path to a successor government, He arrogantly pushed that advice aside saying he understood and knew the outcome. What resulted is disasterous.

Tuesday Barrack Obama continued his assault on “the rich” on his racist book theme of “greedy whites who hold the world in need. ” Some say 1960’s domestic terrorist and murderer Bill Ayers authored that book - regardless Obama agrees with the premises.

IRS figures show that the number of millionaires has declined 39 percent since 2007, leaving those millionaires who remain to continue paying the lion’s share of taxes, The Wall Street Journal reports. A lot of that has been the real estate market crash.

Obama appeared to test a new bumper sticker slogan “Defender of the Middle Class”

In what many or most see as an silly polyannish moment The United States is pressing Israel to take the initiative to improve ties with America’s “allies” in the Middle East.

Officials said the administration of President Barack Obama has been urging Israel to improve relations with Arab and other states in the Middle East. They said the effort was necessary to ensure sufficient cooperation and coordination against regional threats, particularly Iran and Syria.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta spoke during a joint press conference on Oct. 3 at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv saying:

“For example, Israel can reach out and mend fences with those who share an interest in regional stability - countries like Turkey and Egypt, as well as Jordan,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said. “This is not impossible.”

In an address to the Brookings Institution on Dec. 2, Panetta, who visited the Jewish state recently, suggested that Israel could improve ties with its neighbors by renewing peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. The PA has insisted that Israel must end Jewish construction in the West Bank and agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state throughout the entire area as well as major parts of Jerusalem.

“The problem right now is we can’t get them to the damn table to at least sit down and begin to discuss their differences,” Panetta said. “If they sit at a table and work through those concerns, and the United States can be of assistance in that process, then I think you have the beginning of what could be a process that would lead to a peace agreement.”

Officials said the administration has sought to increase coordination between Israel and Turkey amid the revolt in neighboring Syria. They said the coordination has been hampered by poor relations between Ankara and Jerusalem, including Turkish demands for an apology and compensation for an Israel Navy interception of a Turkish-flagged ship in May 2010 in which eight Turks were killed.

“It is in Israel’s interest, Turkey’s interest, and U.S. interest, for Israel to reconcile with Turkey.” Panetta said. “And both Turkey and Israel need to do more to put their relationship back on the right track. That’s amessage I’ve taken to Jerusalem, and it’s a message I’ll be taking to Ankara
later this month.”

Panetta also urged Israel to initiate unspecified measures to improve relations with Egypt, which saw the Muslim Brotherhood sweep parliamentary elections in late November. The defense secretary said he was reassured by the new military regime in Cairo that Egypt would honor its peace treaty with Israel.

“While we share Israel’s legitimate concerns about instability in the Sinai Peninsula and the attack on the Israeli embassy in Cairo, the best way to address these concerns is through increasing communication and cooperation with Egyptian authorities, not by stepping away from it,”Panetta said.

Panetta, who expressed opposition to a military strike on Iran, said Teheran remained the leading threat to the Middle East. He said an Iranian nuclear weapons arsenal would lead others, particularly Saudi Arabia, to procure atomic bombs.

“What’s to stop Saudi Arabia from getting a nuclear weapon?” Panetta asked. “What’s to stop other countries from getting nuclear weapons in that part of the world? Suddenly we have an escalation of these horrible weapons that, you know, I think create even greater devastation in the Middle East.”

Panetta’s remark was either incredibly naïve or simply disingenuous inasmuch as the Saud’s funded Pakistans nuclear weapons program with the proviso that it would have access to nuclear wearhad when requested, Rumors are that two watrhead are awaiting shipment to Saudi Arabia, and it has had pilots and aircraft on standby in Pakistan for months.

There are 100,000 federal bureaucrats authorized to carry a concealed gun,

White criminals seeking presidential pardons over the past decade have been nearly four times as likely to succeed as minorities, a ProPublica examination has found.

Blacks have had the poorest chance of receiving the president’s ultimate act of mercy, according to an analysis of previously unreleased records and related data.

For a closer look at pardons granted and denied during the Bush Administration, explore the interactive.

Current and former officials at the White House and Justice Department said they were surprised and dismayed by the racial disparities, which persist even when factors such as the type of crime and sentence are considered.

“I’m just astounded by those numbers,” said Roger Adams, who served as head of the Justice Department’s pardons office from 1998 to 2008. He said he could think of nothing in the office’s practices that would have skewed the recommendations. “I can recall several African Americans getting pardons.”

The review of applications for pardons is conducted almost entirely in secret, with the government releasing scant information about those it rejects.

ProPublica’s review examined what happened after President George W. Bush decided at the beginning of his first term to rely almost entirely on the recommendations made by career lawyers in the Office of the Pardon Attorney.

The office was given wide latitude to apply subjective standards, including judgments about the “attitude” and the marital and financial stability of applicants. No two pardon cases match up perfectly, but records reveal repeated instances in which white applicants won pardons with transgressions on their records similar to those of blacks and other minorities who were denied.

Senior aides in the Bush White House say the president had hoped to take politics out of the process and avoid a repetition of the Marc Rich scandal, in which the fugitive financier won an eleventh-hour pardon tainted by his ex-wife’s donations to Democratic causes and the Clinton Presidential Library.

Justice Department officials said in a statement Friday that the pardon process takes into account many factors that cannot be statistically measured, such as an applicant’s candor and level of remorse.

“Nonetheless, we take the concerns seriously,” the statement said. “We will continue to evaluate the statistical analysis and, of course, are always working to improve the clemency process and ensure that every applicant gets a fair, merit-based evaluation.”

Bush followed the recommendations of the pardons office in nearly every case, the aides said. The results, spread among hundreds of cases over eight years, heavily favored whites. President Obama - who has pardoned 22 people, two of them minorities - has continued the practice of relying on the pardons office.

“President Obama takes his constitutional power to grant clemency very seriously,” said Matt Lehrich, a White House spokesman. “Race has no place in the evaluation of clemency evaluations, and the White House does not consider or even receive information on the race of applicants.”

The president’s power to pardon is enshrined in the Constitution. It is an act of forgiveness for a federal crime. It does not wipe away the conviction, but it does restore a person’s full rights to vote, possess firearms and serve on federal juries. It allows individuals to obtain licensing and business permits and removes barriers to certain career opportunities and adoptions.

The study appears to understand the severity of the crimes or the type of crimes most pardoned.I n fact there is no provision to report race as a function of seeking clemency. Nevertheless it is a beginning.

Illegal immigrants cost an average of $1,000 per year to every legal family in America.

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev threw down the gauntlet of strategic nuclear escalation in Europe last week. Evidently angry over U.S. missile defense deployments in Europe, Medvedev said Moscow would be bolstering its strategic missiles and planning for new deployments of advanced missiles in southern and western Russia.

Among the measures he called for are new programs to develop cyber weapons designed to attack missile defense computer networks and guidance systems.

“I have instructed the Armed Forces to draw up measures for disabling missile defense system data and guidance systems, if need be. These measures will be adequate, effective, and low cost,” he said.

The  Russians appear convinced that with very little sabre rattling Obama will tuck tail and it will get whatever it wants.

Medvedev continues to be a surrogate for incoming President Putin’s much more aggressive style. Putin seems determined to reunite as much of the old Soviet Union as possible to restore Russian power to counterbalamnce China; cow Europe, and crab back from a weak USA as much as possible.

A Stockton, Ca public school has outlawed poinsettias, Christmas trees and Santa Claus on school property saying that could offend the 100 congregants at the Hindu temple in the city while tens of thousands of local Christians are struck dumb by the astonishing ignorance.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has placed the Iranian Revolutionary Guards on a war footing fearing an attack by the West and Israel on Iran’s nuclear sites, the London Telegraph reports Dec. 6. They have redistributed the Shahab missiles to secret sites ready to launch retaliatory strikes; Guards units are scattered to preset defense lines and air force “rapid reaction units” are ready to respond to enemy air attack. By capturing the top-secret US RQ-170 spy drone, Iran gains a military edge before any overt strike begins.

The super-secret RQ-170 Sentinel is an unmanned jet engine powered aerial vehicle (UAV) developed by Lockheed Martin and operated by the United States Air Force (USAF). It is a tail-less flying wing stealth aircraft with pods, presumably for sensors or SATCOMs it is deployed to Afghanistan, Apparently the things landed intact in Iran. You can bet China and Russia are all over the gadget and trading. It is not armed.

It is radio controlled from a remote location. It is unclear how or why the UAV was downed. Soecyulation range frim it being bumbed by a manned aircraft of some breaking into the raduo control signal.

The RQ-170 replaces the legendary U-2 spy plane.

The epsiode is seen as a very serious setback to the U. S. and Israelis.

The RQ-170’s bat shape culminates decades of experimentation on flying wings that date from the 1920s. The tailess, wedge shape is said to dramatically reduce the radar image.

NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the “habitable or so-called Goldilocks zone,” the region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Kepler also has discovered more than 1,000 new planet candidates, nearly doubling its previously known count. Ten of these candidates are near-Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their host star. Candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets. The telescope is named for Johannes Kepler who published his first two laws of motion in 1609.

The newly confirmed planet, Kepler-22b, It is named for the Kepler space telescope used to discover it and more than 1,000 other candidate planets in its 16 months of operations. Keplaer 22b is the smallest yet found to orbit in the middle of the habitable zone of a star similar to our sun. The planet is about 2.4 times the radius of Earth. Scientists don’t yet know if Kepler-22b has a predominantly rocky, gaseous or liquid composition, but its discovery is a step closer to finding Earth-like planets. The space telescope is in heliocentric orbit around the Sun trailing Earth so our planet does not block its view of the stars.

Previous research hinted at the existence of near-Earth-size planets in habitable zones, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Two other small planets orbiting stars smaller and cooler than our sun recently were confirmed on the very edges of the habitable zone, with orbits more closely resembling those of Venus and Mars.

“This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin,” said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Kepler’s results continue to demonstrate the importance of NASA’s science missions, which aim to answer some of the biggest questions about our place in the universe.”

Kepler discovers planets and planet candidates by measuring dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars to search for planets that cross in front, or “transit,” the stars. Kepler requires at least three transits to verify a signal as a planet.

“Fortune smiled upon us with the detection of this planet,” said William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., who led the team that discovered Kepler-22b. “The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season.”

The Kepler science team uses ground-based telescopes and the Spitzer Space Telescope to review observations on planet candidates the spacecraft finds. The star field that Kepler observes in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra can only be seen from ground-based observatories in spring through early fall. The data from these other observations help determine which candidates can be validated as planets.

Kepler-22b is located 600 light-years away. A light year is a little less thatn 6.000,000,000,000 (trillion) miles. While the planet is larger than Earth, its orbit of 290 days around a sun-like star resembles that of our world. The planet’s host star belongs to the same class as our sun, called G-type, although it is slightly smaller and cooler.

Of the 54 habitable zone planet candidates reported in February 2011, Kepler-22b is the first to be confirmed. This milestone will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Tp paraphrase Albert Einstein when ask if he thought life existed elsewhere said, “I believe God loves life too much to just limit it to here.”

A desperate 38-year old Texas woman shot and killed herself and critically wounded her two children after being denied food stamps and apparently seeing no way to feed her children.

The suicide rate is higher during December than any other month triggered by depression, loss and loneliness.

U.S. officials say a drone that crashed inside Iran over the weekend was one of a fleet of stealth aircraft that have spied on Iran for years from a U.S. air base in Afghanistan.

They say the CIA stealth-version of the RQ-170 unmanned craft was also used to survey Osama bin Laden’s compound before the May raid in Pakistan.

According to these officials, the U.S. has built up the air base Shindad, Afghanistan, with an eye to keeping a long-term presence there to launch surveillance missions and even special operations missions into Iran if deemed necessary. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified information.

The U.S. national debt on January 1st, 1791 was just $75 million dollars. Today, the U.S. national debt rises by that amount about once an hour.

Scientists in the New York Center for Astrobiology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have used the oldest minerals on Earth to reconstruct the atmospheric conditions present on Earth very soon after its birth. The findings, which appear in the Dec. 1 edition of the journal Nature, are the first direct evidence of what the ancient atmosphere of the planet was like soon after its formation and directly challenge years of research on the type of atmosphere out of which life arose on the planet.

The scientists show that the atmosphere of Earth just 500 million years after its creation was not a methane-filled wasteland as previously proposed, but instead was much closer to the conditions of our current atmosphere. The findings, in a paper titled “The oxidation state of Hadean magmas and implications for early Earth’s atmosphere,” have implications for our understanding of how and when life began on this planet and could begin elsewhere in the universe. The research was funded by NASA.

For decades, scientists believed that the atmosphere of early Earth was highly reduced, meaning that oxygen was greatly limited. Such oxygen-poor conditions would have resulted in an atmosphere filled with noxious methane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and ammonia. To date, there remain widely held theories and studies of how life on Earth may have been built out of this deadly atmosphere cocktail.

Now, scientists at Rensselaer are turning these atmospheric assumptions on their heads with findings that prove the conditions on early Earth were simply not conducive to the formation of this type of atmosphere, but rather to an atmosphere dominated by the more oxygen-rich compounds found within our current atmosphere - including water, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide.

“We can now say with some certainty that many scientists studying the origins of life on Earth simply picked the wrong atmosphere,” said Bruce Watson, Institute Professor of Science at Rensselaer.

The findings rest on the widely held theory that Earth’s atmosphere was formed by gases released from volcanic activity on its surface. Today, as during the earliest days of the Earth, magma flowing from deep in the Earth contains dissolved gases. When that magma nears the surface, those gases are released into the surrounding air.

“Most scientists would argue that this outgassing from magma was the main input to the atmosphere,” Watson said. “To understand the nature of the atmosphere ‘in the beginning,’ we needed to determine what gas species were in the magmas supplying the atmosphere.”

As magma approaches the Earth’s surface, it either erupts or stalls in the crust, where it interacts with surrounding rocks, cools, and crystallizes into solid rock. These frozen magmas and the elements they contain can be literal milestones in the history of Earth.

One important milestone is zircon. Unlike other materials that are destroyed over time by erosion and subduction, certain zircons are nearly as old as the Earth itself. As such, zircons can literally tell the entire history of the planet - if you know the right questions to ask.

The scientists sought to determine the oxidation levels of the magmas that formed these ancient zircons to quantify, for the first time ever, how oxidized were the gases being released early in Earth’s history. Understanding the level of oxidation could spell the difference between nasty swamp gas and the mixture of water vapor and carbon dioxide we are currently so accustomed to, according to study lead author Dustin Trail, a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Astrobiology.

“By determining the oxidation state of the magmas that created zircon, we could then determine the types of gases that would eventually make their way into the atmosphere,” said Trail.

To do this Trail, Watson, and their colleague, postdoctoral researcher Nicholas Tailby, recreated the formation of zircons in the laboratory at different oxidation levels. They literally created lava in the lab. This procedure led to the creation of an oxidation gauge that could then be compared with the natural zircons.

During this process they looked for concentrations of a rare Earth metal called cerium in the zircons. Cerium is an important oxidation gauge because it can be found in two oxidation states, with one more oxidized than the other. The higher the concentrations of the more oxidized type cerium in zircon, the more oxidized the atmosphere likely was after their formation.

The calibrations reveal an atmosphere with an oxidation state closer to present-day conditions. The findings provide an important starting point for future research on the origins of life on Earth.

“Our planet is the stage on which all of life has played out,” Watson said. “We can’t even begin to talk about life on Earth until we know what that stage is. And oxygen conditions were vitally important because of how they affect the types of organic molecules that can be formed.”

Despite being the atmosphere that life currently breathes, lives, and thrives on, our current oxidized atmosphere is not currently understood to be a great starting point for life. Methane and its oxygen-poor counterparts have much more biologic potential to jump from inorganic compounds to life-supporting amino acids and DNA. As such, Watson thinks the discovery of his group may reinvigorate theories that perhaps those building blocks for life were not created on Earth, but delivered from elsewhere in the galaxy.

The results do not, however, run contrary to existing theories on life’s journey from anaerobic to aerobic organisms. The results quantify the nature of gas molecules containing carbon, hydrogen, and sulfur in the earliest atmosphere, but they shed no light on the much later rise of free oxygen in the air. There was still a significant amount of time for oxygen to build up in the atmosphere through biologic mechanisms, according to Trail.

“I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency — even if I’m in a Cabinet meeting.” Ronald Reagan

The following is adapted from an article by Brian M Downing :

In the past few years, bombings and assassinations have taken place inside Iran that have killed scores of people. These attacks are almost certainly directed by Israeli, Saudi and United States intelligence services which are pressing Iran to open its nuclear research facilities to international inspection.

In recent weeks, Iran has decried terrorism around the world (somewhat paradoxically, to be sure), put up a clumsy plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador, boasted of its missile strength, and briefly seized the British Embassy in Tehran - an act done not by students as with the US Embassy in 1979, but by toughs of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

The increasingly aggressive nature of these responses suggest the rising ire of the Iranian government, the political ascendancy of the IRGC, and most ominously, the likelihood of sharper hostilities in the region. Iran is signaling the possibility of violent responses well beyond the quotidian rocket attacks on Israel from Hamas and Hezbollah.

These could include encouraging Shi’ite uprisings in the Gulf, attacking US personnel in the region, and embarking on its own wave of bombings against Israel and its US and Saudi allies.

The Shi’ites in the region
The Gulf region has a large Shi’ite population, many of whom constitute majorities in countries ruled by Sunnis. The Shi’ites complain of discrimination in employment and education and seethe at official policies encouraging foreign Sunnis to immigrate into the country to reduce the Shi’ite preponderance.

Such complaints were oft heard in the Arab Spring demonstrations in Bahrain, where on little if any evidence they were judged acts of Iranian subterfuge and harshly repressed. Similar complaints in Shi’ite parts of Saudi Arabia were tamped down last March before they could coalesce into a movement. A legitimate indigenous civil rights movement was squelched and this has piqued the interests of Iranian intelligence.

Yemen, approximately 50% Shi’ite, is amid an uncertain transition to a new president, which is not the same as a new regime. Saudi Arabia and other Sunni powers have negotiated President Ali Abdallah Saleh’s departure but Yemenis suspect an Egyptian-style ploy and the Shi’ites may be open to Iranian influence.

This is especially so in Yemen’s north, which abuts with a Shi’ite region of Saudi Arabia and which already has an armed Shi’ite movement. These Houthi fighters operate along the border with Saudi Arabia and occasionally engage Saudi forces. Iran may seek to encourage the Houthis to expand into Saudi territory and build ties with Shi’ites there.

Shi’ites in the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia have renewed their demonstrations against discrimination. Whether they have done so under Iranian influence or as a result of encouraging events in Libya and Syria is uncertain. Saudi intelligence, however, will have no doubt of IRGC’s hand, nor will they need evidence to form their conclusion and act upon it.

A Shi’ite uprising in Yemen or Saudi Arabia is unlikely, but so is a judicious response from Riyadh to any unrest that does come about. This in turn may only lead to more covert actions in Iran and harsher oppression in Saudi Arabia.

Iraq
United States troops are scheduled to be out of Iraq in four weeks, which maybe be seen as making them an unlikely target. Alternately, they can be seen as one that should be struck soon. It might be remembered that the last Soviet convoy that exited Afghanistan in 1989 suffered attacks until it crossed into the USSR, though the withdrawal had United Nations sanctioning. Beyond the first of the year, there will be US Embassy staff, training missions, and clandestine personnel.

Another response in Iraq would be against the Sunni forces of the central region which have been waging a bombing campaign on Shi’ite targets - government and civilian - for several months now. The Shi’ite have endured this campaign with remarkable and uncharacteristic forbearance, leading some analysts to think a harsh response may be in the offing once the US ground forces are no longer in position to intervene.

The Sunni forces are likely influenced by Saudi intelligence, which seeks to block a feared Shi’ite axis stretching into Lebanon and to establish an autonomous Sunni region in Iraq if not a wholly independent one, perhaps adjoined to a new Sunni-dominated Syria. The potential for sectarian warfare spilling over into Syria and Lebanon is clear and ominous.

US forces in Afghanistan and the Gulf
Iran already gives limited support, in the form of explosives and training, to Afghan insurgents, including the Taliban. This is not out of ideological affinity or broad strategic interests. Iran despises the Taliban as an intolerant Sunni movement that slaughtered tens of thousands of Shi’ites and killed a number of Iranian diplomats as well.

In the latest atrocity to inflict Afghan, 58 people were killed on Tuesday in a suicide bombing at a crowded Kabul shrine on the most important day in the Shi’ite calendar. At least 150 people were wounded when the bomb exploded in a throng of worshippers, including women and children, in a street between the Abul Fazl shrine and the Kabul River. A second bomb, which killed four people in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, also targeted pilgrims on their way to mark the holy festival of Ashura.

In this case, Sunni militants from Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi al-Alami claimed responsibility in a phone call to Radio Mashaal, a Pashto-language station set up by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The group has close links to al-Qaeda.

Iran works against the Taliban as well by supporting development programs in the north and west where Tajik and Hazara peoples have long had cultural and political ties to Iran and deep hatred of the Taliban.

Nonetheless, Iran may increase support for the insurgents as a means of punishing the US and deterring further attacks inside Iran, especially on its nuclear facilities. Iran can provide more weapons to insurgents, possibly to include shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles such as the Stingers given to the mujahideen. Iran purchased a few Stingers from the mujahideen back in the eighties and copied them, with unclear success. The importance of the Stingers in the Soviet war has been greatly overstated in Central Intelligence Agency cant (Soviet pilots altered their tactics and avoided the missiles) but their use in Afghanistan would be unsettling in Washington.

Iran could venture to deploy Qods Force troops into Afghanistan to destroy aid projects, ambush troops, and interdict International Security Assistance Force convoys coming into the southern part of the country from Chaman and Spin Boldak in western Pakistan, not far from Iranian soil. Such convoys are of course already subject to intermittent stoppages by the Pakistani army.

The US’s present antagonisms with the Pakistani generals offer an opening for Iranian diplomacy. Iran could offer more favorable terms for gas and pipeline projects and support for Pakistani interests and aspirations in Afghanistan. In return, Pakistan could further restrict foreign troop convoys into Afghanistan.

The US naval presence in the Persian Gulf offers numerous possibilities. The Fifth Fleet facilities in Bahrain are within missile range, at least one carrier group is always inside the Gulf, and support ships routinely transit the Straits of Hormuz. All would be vulnerable to Iranian aircraft, missiles, and ships - especially if “swarming” tactics were used. Pentagon war-gaming of such attacks has reportedly been less than assuring.

Even a brief skirmish in the Gulf would send oil prices soaring on world markets, perhaps 15% in a day or two. Many economies would be adversely affected and world opinion might not side with Iran’s opponents in affixing blame. Paradoxically, soaring prices would be a boon for Tehran.

Non-diplomatic efforts to press Iran to abandon its nuclear program have thus far been unsuccessful. They are getting out of control and are leading to violent retaliation and regional conflict.

The efforts are also firming government and popular support for nuclear research. They are also solidifying IRGC power in the state and changing Iran from a theocracy with a zealous military to a military-dominated bureaucracy with a clerical body legitimizing it. And militaries often prefer violent actions to diplomatic ones.

Actor Alec Baldwin has apologized to his fellow passengers that his asinine antics causing their American Airlines flight to be delayed but continued to attack crew members, and the airline. The cellphone game he refused to stop playing “words with friends” is said to have added 100.000 new users since the Baldwin brouhaha.