The difference between the war in Iraq and the Vietnam War is simple: Vietnam was winnable and Iraq is not.
Now I am not casting aspersions on the success of the surge or anything like that. In any kind of military terms the US army has done well. This is especially true if you compare them Click Here to continue reading.

This photo essay from Zombie Times is this week’s essay of the week. Thankfully, the situation it documents is confined to Berkeley. But we should not forget that the contest between revolutionaries and nationalists has been fought out for real on a national scale in many countries. And the results have never been pretty.

There was a strong wind in northern New York on Sunday and it caused a mass causality event in Rochester. This from America’s North Shore Journal….

At about 12:38 p.m. EST today, the Monroe County 911 Center received a cellphone call reporting a 20 car pileup on I390. In the next few moments, a dozen more calls flooded in. Gates Volunteer Fire and Volunteer Ambulance were dispatched.

Just six minutes later a State Police officer on scene requested “as many EMS rigs as possible”. As late as 12:50 a caller reported that collisions were still occurring.

Gates responded, declared a Mass Casualty Incident, and additional resources were requested. The professionals in Monroe County and Rochester City Fire and EMS responded. Chili, Churchville, Greece, Henrietta were among the initial responders from the local region. Rochester City Fire and Airport Rescue responded with extrication tools and manpower. The commercial agencies, Rural Metro and Monroe Ambulance sent ambulances and personnel.

It’s flu season. The local hospitals were jammed. Space was made, people called in, trauma beds made available. One by one the ambulances rolled out with the injured.

Apparently the total number of cars involved in this accident was 36.

This demonstrates why you will be on your own in any major disaster. If 36 cars can strain first responders, just think what would happen if hundreds or thousands of people got hurt.

We here at the Ethereal Voice don’t much care for the factory method of educating kids. But if you are going to throw 30 odds kids and put them under one teacher, it is foolish to make them 30 odd kids with vastly different needs. The only way one teacher can have a hope teaching 30 kids is if their needs are roughly similar.

This is the basic fact of life that lies behind Scott Walker’s rant. Only, he wants to save public schools so we don’t think that he shares our views on factory education.

The hysteria on the on the political right that makes radical Islam out to be this great horrible threat is a dangerous thing. It is dangerous because it obscures the real problem. Even if radical Islam was wiped off the face of the earth, western society would still be in danger of collapsing. The problem is not that radical Islam is so dangerous but that western society is so rotten.

Popular conservative columnist Rod Dreher comes close to admitting as much in his rant entitled Dildos versus scimitars.

The growing tension between Black and Hispanic communities has not received much attention in the main stream press. But it is a very real problem that could lead to lot of blood being shed in the years to come.

The Rainbow Coalition Evaporates by Steven Malanga is a good introduction to this issue. It is main problem is that Mr. Malanga is obviously not sympathetic to the immigrants, and that leads him to be unfair on a number occasions.

For example, he says….

A recent study by Harvard economist George Borjas and colleagues from the University of Chicago and the University of California estimates that immigration accounted for a 7.4 percentage-point decline in the employment rate of unskilled black males between 1980 and 2000.

Given that incarceration rates for black males also went up during that time period, I am highly skeptical of any study that can precisely pinpoint the porportion of the the fall in black male employment can be blamed on Hispanic immigrants. Even after you get out of jail, a record is a hard thing to get a job with.

You cannot blame Mr. Malanga for the conclusions of Borjas study of course. But Mr. Malanga does not seem inclined to even consider the alternate explanations.

But one Mr. Malanga’s unfairness is one of the things that helps makes “The Rainbow Coalition Evaporates” a good introduction to issue of Black and Hispanic tensions. After reading his piece, you will have no doubt about how many in the Black community have come view the immigration issue.

So the Navy has built a working rail gun….

Science got one step closer to science fiction Thursday morning, when the Navy used an electromagnetic railgun to fire a 7-pound slug at seven times the speed of sound.

The record-breaking shot, witnessed by a roomful of VIPs via remote camera at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, also moved the armed forces further down the road to a faster, safer, lighter, cheaper form of firepower.

So what are they going to use if for?

The Navy’s ultimate goal is a ship-mounted weapon capable of firing missiles 200 nautical miles in a six-minute arc into outer space and back to land, guided by GPS.

This dwarfs the range of the Navy’s current workhorse gun, the 5- inch MK 45, which shoots about 13 nautical miles.

The railgun uses electricity to propel its missiles, so they carry no fuel. The damage is caused purely by the kinetic energy of the missiles’ descent, which is projected to reach Mach 5, so they carry no warheads.

This means the missiles are cheaper. They are also smaller and safer, making them easier to store aboard ships and allowing for more variety in a vessel’s design.

For the Marines the gun would support, there are further benefits.

A ship carrying a rail gun would be able to begin bombarding the shore much sooner, far beyond radar range. It also would be able to fire more quickly.

The gun has a projected accuracy of 5 meters, which would minimize risk to Marines on the ground as well as any collateral damage.

I am sure that this gun has some uses as a ground support weapon. But I think that navy is being willfully blind here. A rail gun will only be an incremental improvements on the navy’s ability to blast ground targets. But it could change naval warfare completely. Just how would you defend a carrier from a rail gun?

Cruise missiles you can shoot down. In theory you can also shoot down ballistic missiles. But how are you going to stop an accurate rail gun that can fire from outside of radar range from sinking your carrier?

Five NATO generals (A German, a American, A Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Dutchman) got together and wrote out “Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World.” It made headlines mostly because of its advocacy of the necessity of being willing to launch a nuclear first strike.

But to my mind, the most striking thing about the document it the mismatch between what they fear and their proposed solutions. For example, how is an improved NATO going to deal with the problems posed by European demographic problems?

It seems to me the basic problems they are laying out are twofold. Those trends that will lead to reduced western military power (such as Europe’s demographic issues) and there are those trends that will lead to a more unstable world (such as increased competition for natural resources do to the rise of China and India). Given the scale of both of those trends, their solutions seem inadequate.

Their logic demands an entirely new world order.