RUTHFULLY YOURS

The New Horizons leader on how the mission succeeded, what the distant planet revealed, and where the probe is going next.

Laurel, Md. Pluto is alive—and no one knows why.

On Tuesday the New Horizons spacecraft, having traveled three billion miles since 2006, darted past this orb of rock and ice, gathering data and taking photographs. The first high-resolution shots beamed home showed mountains of water ice roughly the size of the Rockies, and a smooth area without impact craters.

That indicates the section of the planet’s surface is young, renewed and reformed by geological activity. “The solar system, meaning also Pluto, is four and a half billion years old,” Alan Stern, the scientist in charge of the mission, tells me during a Thursday interview. “Already—and this is loose, we can do better later—we can show that surface is less than 100 million years old.”

But geological processes require heat, and therein lies the riddle. “There’s no really good model for how these small planets can have their engines running after four billion years. As planets get smaller, the ratio of surface area compared to their mass goes up. That means that they can’t trap the heat inside very long. They cool off.”

He gestures to the paper cup of coffee on the table in front of him. A small cup of coffee will go cold faster than a large one; a large cup of coffee will go cold faster than a big pot. The point is that without an outside source of energy, such as tidal forces from a nearby gas giant, a planet like Pluto, which is one-sixth the size of our moon and circles the outer reaches of our solar system, should be long dead.

The worldview of President Jimmy Carter– which was resoundingly rejected by President Clinton during the 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns – has been resuscitated throughout the lengthy negotiations – and the July 2015 agreement – with Iran.

Consistent with Carter’s worldview, the negotiation process and the agreement with Iran have highlighted the sacrifice of America’s independent unilateral national security action on the altar of multilateralism (which has rarely been a US home court); the erosion of US confidence in its own (well-established) moral and geo-strategic high-ground and capabilities; underestimation of the intensifying threats, by rogue regimes, to the US national and homeland security; the assumption (which defies precedents) that rogue regimes respond constructively to diplomatic engagement rather than to surgical military threat to vital installations (with no troops on the ground); the voluntary abdication of pro-active US global leadership (at a time when the US and global sanity need it desperately); and the collapse of the US power-projection and posture of deterrence (lower than its breakdown during the Carter era).

A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”
Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

The conservative media who applaud him are hurting the cause.

It came slightly ahead of schedule, but Donald Trump’s inevitable self-immolation arrived on the weekend when he assailed John McCain’s war record. The question now is how long his political and media apologists on the right will keep pretending he’s a serious candidate.

Speaking at a forum in Iowa, Mr. Trump declared that Senator McCain was “not a war hero,” adding that “he’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Mr. McCain spent more than five years in a Vietnamese prison camp, was tortured to the point of lifelong disability, and yet refused an offer to be released before all of his fellow prisoners. Mr. Trump had a more relaxed war due to military deferments. The Trump dump drew immediate condemnations from most GOP candidates and others, but the political apprentice refused to apologize.

One of history’s most important dividing lines was etched in a remote and desolate part of New Mexico exactly 70 years ago today, and the world knew nothing about it at the time.

Ask most people when the nuclear age began and they will probably answer Hiroshima, Aug. 6, 1945. It did not. Three weeks earlier, on July 16, the world’s leading scientists, including Lawrence, Fermi, Teller, and, of course, Oppenheimer, assembled in the middle of the night at an abandoned ranch near Alamogordo. Along with hundreds of engineers and soldiers, they huddled in anticipation, wondering what, if anything, their long labor to create a nuclear bomb would produce.

Years later, Norris Bradbury, the Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1945 to 1970, put the entire event in context: “Most experiences in life can be comprehended by previous experiences. But the [first] atom bomb did not fit into any preconception possessed by anybody.”

Today in the Islamic Middle East, Christians like the Abada family in Iraq suffer real persecution the likes of which most of us can scarcely imagine.

It has been nearly a year now since Ayda and Khader Abada have laid eyes upon their three-year-old daughter.

On August 22 of last year, ISIS militants snatched little Christine from the arms of her mother, Ayda. To this day, her parents haven’t a clue as to her fate.

Ayda and Khader Abada are the parents of five children. On August 6, 2014, a little less than three weeks before their daughter was snatched from them, Islamic State zealots took command of their home city of Qaraqosh. But because Christine’s father, Khader, is blind, he and his family, not unlike many of their neighbors with comparable disabilities, were left with little option but to stay put.

Typical of the delusions being peddled about the Iran nuclear deal is this rundown by Charlotte Alfred, World News Fellow at The Huffington Post. She calls it a “historic accord” that “will roll back Iran’s nuclear work in exchange for the easing of economic sanctions.”

In other words, a triumph, a win-win endeavor. If only there were any truth to that.

Beginning with “Restrictions on [Iran’s] Nuclear Work,” Alfred notes that Iran is supposed to reduce its working centrifuges from 19,000 to 5,060, cut back its stockpile of 3%-enriched uranium by 98 percent, and defang its Fordo enrichment site and Arak heavy-water reactor.Sounds nice until you look into the details. As Iranian President Hassan Rouhani tweeted (crowed is more like it) in reaction to the deal (quoted here):

Our objective was to have the nuclear program and have sanctions lifted. At first they wanted us to have 100 centrifuges now we will have 6,000. They wanted restrictions of 25 years now its 8. First they said we could only have IR1 centrifuges, now we can have IR6, 7, and 8, advanced centrifuges. Heavy water plant at Arak had to be dismantled but now it will remain with heavy water under conditions. Fordo had to be closed now we will have 1000 centrifuges there.

“The war keeps coming home because we have filled our home with the enemy. It’s time we clean house.”

If we really want to stop terrorism, the place to start is the airport.

Tennessee is to Muslim refugees as New York is to Muslim hijacked planes. Chattanooga, the site of the latest Muslim terror attack against America, is a “preferred community” for resettlement along with Knoxville and Nashville.

Nashville was designated a “Gateway City” for Iraqis. Hundreds of Somali Muslims were dumped in Shelbyville and the Murfreesboro Mega-Mosque became national news because of its terror ties.

Over the last decade, middle Tennessee’s Muslim population tripled. The rise of Islam in Tennessee as Muslims from terror zones like Iraq and Somalia flooded its towns and cities brought hate and violence.

In Memphis, Imam Yasir Qadhi was caught on tape calling Jews and Christians filthy and declaring that Muslims can take their lives and property. Last year the FBI warned of an ISIS threat in Memphis.

This year it was Chattanooga’s turn.

Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, the son of a Palestinian man and a Kuwaiti woman living in the United States, killed four marines. One of his targets, a recruiting center, was a gun-free zone. Those inside had no way to defend themselves. Their government had welcomed in the enemy and left them unarmed and helpless against his Jihad.

At the very moment that Pope Francis is warning the world that “doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain,” doomsday is an imminent reality for the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East, most urgently in Syria and Iraq. “What kind of world do we want to leave to those who come after us?” the pope asks in his encyclical Laudato Si’.

“No world at all” is the answer for the 70,000 Christians still left in Aleppo, Syria. ISIS surrounds them on three sides. Aleppo may fall to the Islamic terrorists within weeks, with Damascus following. The slaughter of Christian men and other religious minorities will be immense. The women and girls face abduction and sex slavery. Similarly, although the 120,000 Christians living in the refugee camps around Erbil in Kurdistan, which I recently visited, are comparatively safe at the moment, an ISIS victory in Syria would leave them exposed to great danger: They would have nowhere left to seek refuge. For the Christians of Aleppo, it may be too late to flee. Part of the problem for the Christians across the region has been that these “doomsday predictions” have been wilfully ignored in the West, just as disingenuous dismissals of ISIS as the “JV team” allowed that deadly force to gain large sections of Iraq and Syria.