Month: January 2016

I am Calling a Boosted Fission Device

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The DPRK has claimed to detonate a Hydrogen Bomb, but the seismic evidence would indicate otherwise:

The bold claim by North Korea on Wednesday that it had detonated a hydrogen bomb appeared to fizzle under the intense scrutiny of U.S. physicists and nuclear weapons experts.

 The explosive power detected by earthquake sensors around the world was much weaker than would be expected from a hydrogen bomb, experts said.

 “It was not very big,” said Philip Coyle, the former director of nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site and a longtime U.S. national security official.

 An exhaustive investigation into the test, including sampling air for telltale radioactive particles and studying seismic shock waves, will take weeks. The analysis is likely to confirm the size of the detonation, the type of radioactive fuel it used, how the fuel was produced and the sophistication of its design.

 U.S. experts initially estimated the power of the underground explosion was as small as 6 kilotons, less than the atomic bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in World War II.

Some basic technical information: There are 3 types of nuclear weapons:

Fission bombs use Uranium or Plutonium to create a bomb.

Boosted fission weapons use small quantities of the isotopes of Hydrogen deuterium and tritium and achieve a minimal amount of fission, but allows for a greater percentage of fusion fission for a given amount of material because the small amount of fusion emits a large number of neutrons, increasing the reaction.

Among other things, a boosted fission weapon can be a lot smaller than a pure fission device.

Thermonuclear (Teller-Ulam) weapons typically have three stages:

  • A boosted fission primary which has a mirror to focus its energy on
  • A mixture of deuterium and tritium which fuses on a large scale, and releases neutrons which
  • Initiate fission in a depleted (U-238) jacket

A pure fission weapon is typically in the 20 kiloton range.

A boosted fission weapon weapon could go up to an upper limit 1 megaton.

The first thermonuclear weapon, “Mike” was 10 megatons, and the largest one ever detonated was the Soviet Tsar Bomba, which was designed to achieve 100 MT, but only achieved 50 MT because the depleted uranium jacket was omitted to reduce fallout.

Theoretically, there is no limit on the size of a Teller Ulam device.

So, on to the analysis.

The first thing to note is that, much like making watches, it is tougher to make a small bomb than it is a large one, so it is highly unlikely that any true thermonuclear weapon would be under a megaton.

Second, it is likely that the DPRK is looking at miniaturizing their weapons, and a boosted fission device would achieve this.

Third, for one to have a practical thermonuclear weapon, you need to have a boosted fission first stage, otherwise, you end up with something like “Mike” which weighed over 80 tons. (Mike used a boosted fission trigger, it was just f%$#ing huge as a result of being the first such device, the fact that it used liquid deuterium, and the associated support and measurement equipment).

So, my not so expert opinion:

  • It’s a big deal, but applies to any nuclear test.
  • It was probably a test of a boosted fission device.
  • It was likely a fizzle, as the seismology shows a relatively low yield.

So, yes, this is a big f%$#ing deal, and I would suggest that a formal exchange of ambassadors and diplomatic recognition, which was agreed to in 1994, might be a good counter move.

In the mean time, I am sure that China, Russia, the US, Japan, and South Korea are analyzing the information, and sampling the air in the region to get more specifics.

    Excessive Schadenfreude May Cause Dizziness, Euphoria, and a Sense of Smug Satisfaction

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    So now both Donald Trump and Ann Coulter have gone birther on Ted Cruz.

    First, the Donald:

    Donald Trump cast doubt on Republican candidate Ted Cruz’s eligibility for the presidency on Tuesday, on the basis that he may not be a natural-born US citizen.

    In an interview with the Washington Post, Trump said the fact that Cruz was born in Canada was a “very precarious one for Republicans because he’d be running and the courts may take a long time to make a decision. You don’t want to be running and have that kind of thing over your head.”

    The Republican frontrunner went on to claim a “lot of people are talking about … the fact that he was born in Canada and he has had a double passport.”

    Cruz, whose campaign declined to comment, was born in Calgary in 1971. Although his father Rafael was not an American citizen at the time, his Delaware-born mother, Eleanor, was. Article II of the US constitution requires that “no person except a natural born Citizen … shall be eligible to the Office of President.”

    And from the Dennis Rodman of Republican spokesbimbos, we have:

    Conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who once dismissed birthers as “cranks,” suggested Wednesday that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) may be ineligible for the presidency because he is not a “natural born citizen.”

    In a series of tweets, Coulter, an ardent anti-immigration advocate, suggested that Cruz was not a “natural born citizen,” a requirement to run for President outlined in the Constitution:

    I’m amused.

    Your Law Enforcement Misconduct Update

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    First, we have former (Yay!) Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia, who went postal on Sandra Band, has been indicted for perjury and fired by the Texas DPS:

    The state trooper who arrested Sandra Bland, the 28-year-old African-American woman who was found dead three days later in her Waller County jail cell, has been indicted on perjury charges, a special prosecutor said.

     Hours after the decision was announced, the Texas Department of Public Safety said it was initiating termination proceedings against Brian Encinia, the 30-year-old trooper who last July stopped Bland for failing to signal a lane change and arrested her.

     The announcement came late Wednesday afternoon at the courthouse in Hempstead, about 50 miles northwest of Houston, during the grand jury’s fourth meeting since it was convened this fall to deliberate the circumstances around Bland’s arrest and incarceration.

     Darrell Jordan, one of five special prosecutors, said the grand jury’s indictment stemmed from a statement the trooper made in a one-page affidavit he filed in Bland’s arrest, in which he said he pulled her out of her Hyundai Azera to “further conduct a safe traffic investigation.”

    Well, that was fairly clearly a lie, and it was material, which is the basic definition of perjury.

    Meanwhile, in my hometown of Baltimore, the prosecution continues apace, with Officer William Porter, whose trial ended in a hung jury, being ordered by a judge to testify at the trial of Officer Caesar Goodson, Jr.:

    In an unprecedented move, Judge Barry G. Williams ordered Officer William G. Porter on Wednesday to testify at the upcoming trial of a fellow city officer charged in the death of Freddie Gray.

     Porter’s attorneys immediately said they would seek an injunction to block the ruling.

     Williams said he found himself in “uncharted territory” but felt the law was “clear.” He granted Porter a type of immunity that allows his charges to stand, but which precludes his testimony in the trial of Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr. from being used against him.

     Legal experts — and Williams — said the ruling was unprecedented for a criminal defendant with pending charges.

     Williams also warned prosecutors that calling Porter as a witness could have serious implications for their ability to retry him. Porter’s trial on manslaughter and other charges ended last month in a hung jury, and he is scheduled to be tried again in June.

     “The second he testifies, that may change the game,” Williams said.

     After Williams issued the ruling, defense attorney Gary Proctor leapt to his feet and told Williams he intended to appeal to the Court of Special Appeals on Thursday to block prosecutors from calling Porter to testify.

     Should Williams’ ruling stand, Porter would not be able to invoke the Fifth Amendment and would have to testify or face the threat of contempt and jail time.

    I think that the strategy here is to force him to testify in the hope that some of the other officers get angry enough to roll in him, and under those circumstances, the first guy to make it to the prosecutor’s office wins, and everyone else loses.

    Also, the prosecution has let slip some elements of its strategy, and it appears that they will be attempting to prove that Gray was the victim was of a “Rough Ride” where officers use abrupt maneuvers to throw a detainee around a car to punish him:

    The idea has long been floated that Freddie Gray might have been given a “rough ride” — a practice in which police transport vans are intentionally driven erratically to harm unbuckled, handcuffed detainees.

     Now prosecutors have signaled for the first time that they may adopt the theory in the case against Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr., the driver of the van in which they say Gray suffered a fatal spinal cord injury. Goodson faces second-degree depraved-heart murder charges in a trial that begins with jury selection Monday.

     Prosecutors have notified Goodson’s attorneys that they intend to call expert witness Neill Franklin, a retired Baltimore police officer and Maryland state trooper who has testified in Annapolis on policing, to talk about “retaliatory prisoner transportation practices.” Legal experts said that refers to what is colloquially known in Baltimore as a “rough ride.”

     “That is a retaliatory, sort of ‘teach the guy a lesson’ move,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a University of South Carolina professor and an expert in use of force by police.

     Both the defense and prosecution are barred by a gag order from discussing the case, and retained witnesses are not allowed to discuss their intended testimony.

    Here is the kicker:

    Gray was unbuckled, handcuffed, placed in leg shackles and driven around West Baltimore for about 45 minutes before he was found unconscious and not breathing in the back of the van when it arrived at the Western District police station.

    There is no reason for it take 45 minutes to get him to booking.

    I am sure that the defense will attempt to provide an alternate theory for this, but there is no justification for going on a joy ride with a detainee in the back.

    Larry Wilmore and Trevor Noah Just Experienced the Comedy Rapture

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    Kind of like Norman Rockwell ……… On Acid

    Because the crack smoking, peeing in public, murder threatening, formerMayor of Toronto, Chris Farley wannabee Rob Ford has announced his candidacy for Mayor of Toronto:

    Smoking crack, urinating in public and threatening murder might each be the kind of behaviour you’d expect to put an end to any politician’s career.

    But Rob Ford, the former mayor of Toronto, seems to be the exception to the rule. And if he has his way, he might once again represent Canada’s largest city.

    During a Twitter exchange on Wednesday, Ford was asked if he planned to return to office.

    “I’ll be on the ballot running for Mayor in 2018,” Ford replied.

    ………

    But after months of speculation, Toronto police found the recording, and Ford was forced to admit that he had smoked crack – probably during a “drunken stupor”. Yet he refused to resign.

    Over the following months, Ford’s behavior only grew more erratic, and stories of his previous behavior started to emerge.

    In 2003, he called a colleague at a city council meeting a “slithering snake” who “should be back in his cage where he comes from”. A year earlier, while discussing a public meeting on the possibility of a homeless shelter in his district, he asked: “why don’t we have a public lynching?” and he was thrown out of a Maple Leafs hockey game after getting in a fight with fans while drunk.

    In October 2013, he was spotted urinating in public behind an Etobicoke public school. The following month, during a raucous debate, Ford barreled over an elderly politician, Pam McConnell, knocking her to the ground. Also during that month, a video was released of the politician in a dining room raging about killing someone while apparently high, staggering and slurring.

    This guy is comedy gold, and if he is elected, the people of Toronto are stupid beyond belief.

    Bad Day at the Big Casino

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    In China, they had to halt trading on the exchanges following a massive selloff, with oil hitting a 7 year low and the Dow dropping by almost 1½%:

    China accelerated the devaluation of the yuan on Thursday, sending currencies across the region reeling and domestic stock markets tumbling, as investors feared the Asian giant was kicking off a virtual trade war against its competitors.

     Trading on China’s stock markets were suspended for the rest of the day, for the second time this week, as a new circuit-breaking mechanism was tripped less than half an hour after the open.

     The People’s Bank of China again surprised markets by setting the official midpoint rate on the currency at 6.5646 yuan per dollar, the lowest since March 2011.

     That was 0.5 percent weaker than the day before and the biggest daily drop since last August, when an abrupt near 2 percent devaluation of the currency also roiled markets.

    And:

    Wall Street experienced another mini panic attack on Wednesday after North Korea claimed to successfully test a hydrogen bomb. The markets were already being spooked by the financial and economic turbulence out of China and the latest plunge in oil prices below $34 a barrel.

    The Dow dropped 252 points, closing below 17,000 for the first time since mid-October. The S&P 500 fell 1.3% and the Nasdaq lost 1.1%.

    It marks the Dow’s worst start to a trading year through three days since 2008. The index also fell 276 points on Monday due to worries about China.

    If the economy and the markets continue in this direction, get used to saying President Trump.

    Good Riddance, Reptile*

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    Steve Israel, former Blue Dog who became the head of the Democratic Campaign Congressional campaign committee, and used his position to avoid challenging vulnerable Republicans when he wasn’t trying to rebuild the Blue Dog Caucus, is retiring:

    Rep. Steve Israel (D-Huntington) won’t seek re-election to a ninth term in November in order to spend more time writing his second book, he said Tuesday.

    The Democrat, who has held the seat since 2000, said in a statement, “It is time for me to pursue new passions and develop new interests, mainly spend more time writing my second novel.”

    He said he is “looking forward to spending more time home and frequenting my beloved New York diners. Simply put, it’s time to pass on the torch.” He will complete his term and retire at the end of the year.

    Any guesses on how long before he gets a lobbying gig with a seven figure salary for dictators, polluters, or despots?

    I’ll take the under on 2 months after he leaves office.

    *FWIW, Nancy Pelosi, when she made him of the DCCC, she admiringly noted his “Reptilian Tendencies.”

    And Now, Even the Rich People are Throwing Rahm Emanuel Under the Bus

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    Since emails came out revealing the Rahm Emanuel administrations aggressive efforts to manage and suppress information on the Laquan McDonald shooting, Rahm’s old friends, basically rich corrupt people from whom he has raised money from over the years, have been avoiding him like the plague.

    One of his very good friends, they have vacationed together and Rauner was a former client of Emanuel’s, was wingnut, gazillionaire, and now Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner how has announced that he would sign a bill allowing for a recall vote for the Chicago Mayor:

    Fresh from a Saharan Desert holiday where he says he and his family rode camels and slept in tents, Gov. Bruce Rauner did nothing Monday to quell the shifting sands beneath Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

     Rauner told reporters he would sign a bill allowing Chicago voters to recall their mayor from office if it reaches his desk.

     The governor also said he was “very disappointed” in Emanuel and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez over their handling of Chicago police misconduct cases.

     ………

     Asked about state Rep. La Shawn Ford’s legislation that would allow Chicago voters to attempt recall the mayor, Rauner said he hasn’t studied the bill but based on what he’s been told about it, “I would sign that bill.”

     The governor went on to say that he would also be “broadly supportive of the recall concept in general for all elected officials in the state. … That would be the best bill to pass.”

    6 months ago, I would not have predicted the degree to which his power base, once thought to be unassailable, to have collapsed like this.

    It’s gone from a crazy guy on the street corner rant to an implosion in a very short time.

    Additionally, it appears that people appointed after the sh%$ hit the fan have absolutely no interest whatsoever in having his back:

    The new chief of the agency that looks into shootings by Chicago police officers says she wants to hear out an investigator who was fired by her predecessor last July after refusing orders to change findings that the cops were at fault in several cases.

    Sharon Fairley, acting chief administrator of the Independent Police Review Authority, last month reached out to the investigator, Lorenzo Davis, a former Chicago police commander.

    “I’d like to hear about his side of what happened,” Fairley said at a news conference Monday afternoon. “I look forward to that conversation and I think that that will be happening soon.”

    Davis’s lawyer, Torreya Hamilton, said an attorney with the city’s Law Department called two weeks ago to set up the meeting. Hamilton said Davis, who is suing the city for wrongful termination, is eager to meet with Fairley. The sides have not yet set a time and place.

    Fairley, a former federal prosecutor appointed a month ago by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, said she also wants to examine the work that got Davis fired.


    ………



    WBEZ revealed Davis’s termination and his resistance to orders by IPRA superiors that he change findings about at least a dozen incidents, all shootings or alleged excessive-force cases.

    Davis said Monday evening he would welcome Fairley’s review of his findings. “I’d like to be present when she does it,” he said. “It’s better to review a report with the person who wrote it.”

    ………

    Fairley’s predecessor, Scott M. Ando, was forced out as IPRA’s chief administrator after heading the agency since 2013. Ando, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, filled several key IPRA posts with former sworn law-enforcement officers, including two other former DEA agents, a WBEZ investigation found.

    Fairley did not directly criticize Ando’s hiring but said the agency needs “stronger independence.”

    “I was a prosecutor for eight years, where my job was to collect evidence and then make the call,” said Fairley, who worked at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago. “That’s what I’m planning on doing here.”

    Fairley also insisted she is independent from Emanuel despite a pile of email messages that show coordination between his aides and IPRA in recent years.

    “Yes, I’m in communication with the mayor’s office,” Fairley said. “They’ve been very helpful in helping me get situated here but they have not tried to direct my activities or tell me what to do. I don’t have any pressure on me from the mayor to conduct an investigation any particular way.”

    Fairley serves at the pleasure of Rahm Emanuel.

    The fact that she is subtly dismissive of the Mayor’s office is significant.

    I’m hoping that Rahm ends up recalled, and in jail, and it actually looks like these outcomes are no longer outside of the range of possibility.

    I Can Haz Impeachment?

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    I used to say that Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia would die by choking on his own bile.

    It turns out that I was wrong.

    It appears that bile and resentment have driven him insane:

    Government support for religion is not only justified by the Constitution, it was the norm for hundreds of years and it helped the United States become a free and prosperous nation, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Saturday in Metairie.

    Speaking before a small crowd at Archbishop Rummel High School, Scalia delivered a short but provocative speech on religious freedom that saw the conservative Catholic take aim at those who confuse freedom of religion for freedom from it.

    The Constitution’s First Amendment protects the free practice of religion and forbids the government from playing favorites among the various sects, Scalia said, but that doesn’t mean the government can’t favor religion over nonreligion.

    That was never the case historically, he said. It didn’t become the law of the land until the 60s, Scalia said, when he said activist judges attempted to resolve the question of government support of religion by imposing their own abstract rule rather than simply observing common practice.

    If people want strict prohibition against government endorsement of religion, let them vote on it, he said. “Don’t cram it down the throats of an American people that has always honored God on the pretext that the Constitution requires it.”

    BTW, it appears that the first thing to go is a sense of irony, because he unironically quotes Charles de Gaulle insulting the United States:

    Citing a quotation attributed to former French President Charles de Gaulle, Scalia said “‘God takes care of little children, drunkards and the United States of America.'” Scalia then added, “I think that’s true. God has been very good to us. One of the reasons God has been good to us is that we have done him honor.”

    Seriously, He’s lost it.

    I do understand that technically impeachment is for “high crimes and misdemeanors”, but the juxtaposition of batsh%$ insane and just does not give a flying f%$# in a rolling doughnut, particularly when he has no interest at all in recusing himself on cases where he has explicitly stated that his mind is already made up.

    This ain’t the first time.

    One Conflict That I Want to See Resolved with a Maximum of Bloodshed

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    It appears that the Bundy clan, in what seems like a never ending quests to intimidate the have occupied a federal building in a dispute over a poaching trial

    This is not a conflict that the government can deescalate. These folks goals is to use the threat of violence to get as much as they can, and then they will go to explicit violence.

    This is an insurrection, and a fair number of the fellow travelers are not ready for this, but every time the government backs down, this movement picks up supporters and momentum.

    It is not a question as to whether the US government will have to go after them with lethal force, but when.

    Sooner is better than later here:

    A group of armed anti-government activists remained encamped at a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon on Sunday evening, vowing to occupy the outpost for years to protest the federal government’s treatment of a pair of local ranchers set to report to prison Monday.

     The occupation of a portion of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, about 30 miles southeast of Burns, Ore., began a day earlier, after a small group of men broke off from a much larger march and rally held on Saturday evening

     The armed occupation is being led by Ammon Bundy, an Idaho rancher whose father, Cliven Bundy, led an armed standoff with federal agents in Nevada in 2014 and who has described his supporters as “militia men.”

     “Those who want to go take hard stand, get in your trucks and follow me!” Ammon Bundy declared to rally-goers at the conclusion of Saturday’s event, according to several people who were in attendance. Not long afterward, the group had taken over the federal wildlife preserve.

     Harney County Sheriff David M. Ward said authorities from several law enforcement organizations were monitoring the ongoing incident.

     “These men came to Harney County claiming to be part of militia groups supporting local ranchers,” Ward said in a statement Sunday. “When in reality these men had alternative motives, to attempt to overthrow the county and federal government in hopes to spark a movement across the United States.”

     Organizers of the rally say several hundred attended the procession through Burns, Ore. — a ranching town of less than 3,000 residents — in a show of support for Dwight Hammond, 73, and his son Steven Hammond, 46, who in the conclusion of a decades of clashes with the federal government were sentenced last October to serve five years in prison.

     Prosecutors accused the Hammonds of committing arson on federal land in 2001 and 2006. The men and their attorneys argued that the fires had been set  on their own property — once to prevent the spread of an invasive species of plant and once in attempt to prevent the spread of a wildfire — and had inadvertently burned onto public lands. But prosecutors said the fires were set in attempt to destroy evidence that the Hammonds had been illegally hunting deer on the federal lands.

    This needs to be shut down before it metastasizes, if it hasn’t already done so.

    As an aside, I think that we need to minimize the private use of federal land in the west, because history shows that people who derive public benefit for their private benefit are inclined to go to extremes to cling to their undeserved windfall.

    Just look at the behavior of the 2nd Estate around the time of the French Revolution.  They did more to create the Reign of Terror than any other segment of society.

    Our Man in Ankara

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    Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, when discussing the advantage of a stronger Presidency for Turkey invoked the alleged efficiencies of the government of Adolph Hitler, and now he is trying to walk it back:

    The Turkish presidency said on Friday comments by President Tayyip Erdogan about the system of governance in Hitler’s Germany had been misinterpreted and that he had not suggested it was an example of an effective presidential system.

    Asked on his return from a visit to Saudi Arabia late on Thursday whether an executive presidency was possible in Turkey while maintaining the unitary structure of the state, Erdogan said: “There are already examples in the world. You can see it when you look at Hitler’s Germany.

    “There are later examples in various other countries,” he told reporters, according to a recording broadcast by the Dogan news agency.

    I’m not particularly surprised.

    There seems to be an awful lot of admiration of Hitler baked into Islamist politics in the Middle East, and Erdoğan is very much an Islamist.

    Unfortunately, our state security apparatus cannot look at anything beyond the fact that he’s good to foreign capital, so we set ourselves up for another foreign policy clusterf%$#.

    We’re Apple, We Don’t Care. We Don’t Have To.

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    We don’t care, we don’t have to … we’re Apple.

    Apple is being sued by Apple 4S users because the pushed an upgrade that rendered their phones about as useful as a third tit:

    Lawyers in New York have filed a class action lawsuit against Apple, saying that the iOS 9 operating system upgrade slowed their older iPhone 4S handsets into uselessness.

     “Plaintiff and other class members were faced with a difficult decision: use a buggy, slow device that disrupts everyday life or spend hundreds of dollars to buy another smartphone,” reads the lawsuit spotted by Apple Insider.

     When iOS 9 was released in September, the operating system was supposed to fix many of the faults of its predecessors. But the owners of more than 100 iPhone 4S handsets claim Apple knew the new OS would be virtually unusable on the older hardware but released it anyway to force people to upgrade.

     To add insult to injury, Apple won’t allow the aggrieved users to uninstall iOS 9 and go back to simpler times. So 4S owners are left stuck with sluggish screens, hanging apps, and lousy touch use, the lawsuit claims.

     Apple’s internal testing must have shown these effects while the operating system was being developed, but Cook & Co nevertheless advertised the new operating system’s benefits without warning of obsolescent hardware, the plaintiff’s lawyers argue.

     ………

     One suspects Apple’s response will be “well what did you expect?” The iPhone 4S runs a 32-bit A5 processor and packs 512MB of DDR2 RAM, compared to the iPhone 6S’s A9 64-bit core with the M9 coprocessor and 2GB of DDR4 memory. Expecting similar performance ignores certain technical realities.

    Actually, the scenario here is pretty straightforward.

    Apple pushed an upgrade to inadequate hardware that could not handle it.

    Either they did not do appropriate testing, or they did the testing, but decided that they could force users of old phones to upgrade.

    In either case, Apple could have provided a downgrade option, or warned of the issues before the release, but they don’t give a sh%$.

    Class action lawsuits are the corporate ecosystem’s way of making you give a sh%$.

    What it Means to Have Meaningful and Achievable Goals

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    Notwithstanding all the reports from western that the Russians are somehow or other are immersing themselves into a quagmire, a military analysis of the Russian campaign in Syria has concluded that their campaign is well conceived and likely to achieve its goals at a relatively low cost:

    Three months into his military intervention in Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved his central goal of stabilizing the Assad government and, with the costs relatively low, could sustain military operations at this level for years, U.S. officials and military analysts say.

    That assessment comes despite public assertions by President Barack Obama and top aides that Putin has embarked on an ill-conceived mission in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that it will struggle to afford and that will likely fail.

    “I think it’s indisputable that the Assad regime, with Russian military support, is probably in a safer position than it was,” said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity. Five other U.S. officials interviewed by Reuters concurred with the view that the Russian mission has been mostly successful so far and is facing relatively low costs.

    ………

    Yet since its campaign began on Sept. 30, Russia has suffered minimal casualties and, despite domestic fiscal woes, is handily covering the operation’s cost, which analysts estimate at $1-2 billion a year. The war is being funded from Russia’s regular annual defense budget of about $54 billion, a U.S. intelligence official said.

    ………

    Putin has said his intervention is aimed at stabilizing the Assad government and helping it fight the Islamic State group, though Western officials and Syrian opposition groups say its air strikes mostly have targeted moderate rebels.

    The western response to the Russian intervention, which, BTW, is actually legal under international law because the sovereign government of Syria has requested the aid, is completely incoherent.

    Case in point, the absurd and self contradictory statements by the head of Human Rights Watch: On December 25 of this year he said that the killing of Zahran Alloush is an attempt to eliminate any moderate opposition, while on December 30 of this year, he claimed that the initial release of Alloush from prison in 2011 was an attempt to taint the opposition with a jihadist brush.

    Note that the Russians are also supporting the Kurds, while the NATO forces are both supporting the Kurds (most of NATO) and bombing them (our NATO “allies”the Turks)

    The Russian strategy appears to be effective because their goals are limited, and not self-contradictory:

    Rather than pushing back the opposition, Russia may be settling for defending Assad’s grip on key population centers that include the heartland of his minority Alawite sect, said the U.S. intelligence official.

    Russia is taking advantage of the operation to test new weapons in battlefield conditions and integrate them into its tactics, the intelligence official said. It is refining its use of unarmed surveillance drones, the official added.

    “The Russians didn’t go blindly into this,” said the U.S. intelligence official, adding that they “are getting some benefit out of the cost.”

    ………

    Vasily Kashin, a Moscow-based analyst, said the war is not financially stressing Russia.

    “All the available data shows us that the current level of military effort is completely insignificant for the Russian economy and Russian budget,” said Kashin, of the Center for Analyses of Strategies and Technologies.

    “It can be carried on at the same level year after year after year,” he said.

    Compare this to the US policy:

    • Support regime change in Syria with a goal of a democratic and secular replacement.
    • Support for Saudi and Turkish efforts supporting Sunni Salafist Jihadi forces,which included the creation of ISIS.
    • Opposition to ISIS, the declaration that they are of a significant threat to the US, and supporting a massive air campaign against them.
    • Support of Kurdish forces fighting ISIS.
    • Allowing Turkish attacks against those same Kurdish forces by Turkey.
    • Supporting “moderate” rebels that collapse as soon as they end up in conflict with Jihadi rebels.  (Said support ends up in ISIS hands)
    • Demanding the removal of the Assad regime.
    • Demanding that government remains intact in some form.

    This is the stupidest big of mind f%$#ery since Johnson and Kennedy’s “Best and Brightest” believed that they could win the war in Vietnam.

    Basically, the Russians are following Barack Obama’s stated policy, “Don’t do stupid sh%$,” and Barack Obama is ignoring ignoring this policy, which is why their strategy appears to be gaining traction, and ours does not.

    H/t Moon of Alabama.