A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
From the Islamic Republic of Britain:
Separately, I’m amazed that Donald Trump was able to address the Knesset today. I get jet lag just thinking about a trip to Israel. #NotMyPresident is 79 years old. How does he have the energy?
In case the author is arrested and imprisoned and all of her content memory-holed, a screen shot:
Progressive friends who never previously mentioned María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan politician, now celebrate her winning a Nobel Peace Prize. I wonder how carefully they’ve researched this lady. First, let’s have a moment of silence for Hugo Chavez, whose premature death robbed him of the Nobel Peace Prize that was his due. Perhaps we can reflect on the words of Noam Chomsky when he met this lion of democracy and peace:”I write about peace and criticize the barriers to peace; that’s easy. What’s harder is to create a better world… and what’s so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela is that I can see how a better world is being created.”
(Collectively, of course, the Venezuelans created such a great world in Venezuela that the Biden-Harris administration decided that 100 percent of Venezuelans were eligible to live in the United States, thus enabling them to replicate their success on a larger scale.)
Let’s see how truly peaceful the heiress to Barack Obama’s Mantle of Peace truly is. An unbiased “news” article from America’s journalists at The Week:
… many have started to point out that the 58-year-old is a strong ally of Israel and openly backs the country’s decision to bomb the largely unarmed civilians of the Gaza Strip. While there is no known evidence to argue that she supported the one-sided attack on the Palestinian civilians, Machado is undoubtedly an ally of Benjamin Netanyahu. In the past, the centrist-right leader had even declared that if she gains power, she will restore diplomatic relations with Israel.
It’s a fact that Israel launched a “one-sided attack on the Palestinian civilians” and this fake Peace laureate somehow supports the attackers rather than the unarmed and Peaceful Gazans.
(The Week’s article is a little confusing, actually. The “civilians” of Gaza are “largely unarmed”. Does that mean that some civilians in Gaza are armed with rockets, machine guns, etc., but are still considered “civilians” because they don’t also have tanks?)
Related:
“Here Is the Full Text of the Gaza Plan Released by the White House” (NYT):
Gaza will be redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza, who have suffered more than enough. [Gazans can put 100% of their efforts into military activities because outside capital will fund repairs to all damage done during latest war.]
Once all hostages are released, Israel will release 250 life sentence prisoners plus 1700 Gazans who were detained after Oct. 7, 2023, including all women and children detained in that context. [The most experienced Gazan fighters will soon be back in the Gazan military.]
Once all hostages are returned, Hamas members who commit to peaceful coexistence and to decommission their weapons will be given amnesty. Members of Hamas who wish to leave Gaza will be provided safe passage to receiving countries. [The next attack against Israeli civilians can be a lot more brutal than the October 7th attack because amnesty will always be available.]
Upon acceptance of this agreement, full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip. At a minimum, aid quantities will be consistent with what was included in the Jan. 19, 2025, agreement regarding humanitarian aid, including rehabilitation of infrastructure (water, electricity, sewage), rehabilitation of hospitals and bakeries, and entry of necessary equipment to remove rubble and open roads. [Gazans can put 100% of their efforts into military activities, have 8 children each, etc. because US and EU taxpayers will fund all of the essentials for daily life.]
A special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries. [The Swiss, who last perpetrated a war against neighbors in 1815, are subject to a 39% tariff. Gazans who took and held hostages, on the other hand, will enjoy most favored nation status.]
The United States will work with Arab and international partners to develop a temporary International Stabilization Force (ISF) to immediately deploy in Gaza. The ISF will train and provide support to vetted Palestinian police forces in Gaza, and will consult with Jordan and Egypt who have extensive experience in this field. This force will be the long-term internal security solution. The ISF will work with Israel and Egypt to help secure border areas, along with newly trained Palestinian police forces. [Gazans who killed and raped Israeli civilians will now be paid to carry guns around inside Gaza.]
Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza. [Gazans can start wars and have a chance in each new war of winning some territory, but unlike for any other group of humans on this planet who’ve ever waged war, there is never a risk of losing any territory.]
Given that the above are the consequences of starting the October 7, 2023 war, why wouldn’t the Gazans rationally rearm and start another war a few years from now? The plan promises a continuation of a fully-funded lifestyle for Gazans: shelter, food, health care, education, etc. With US and EU taxpayers funding all of the day-to-day essentials, Gazans will be able to devote 100 percent of their productive efforts to rearming and planning their next attack.
Loosely related, here’s the kind of pot belly that a resident of Gaza can suffer from after two years of “starvation” and “famine” (Reuters, September 20, 2025):
Also in the NYT, “Tony Blair Emerges as Potential Figure in Postwar Gaza”:
Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, has emerged as a potential figure in the reconstruction of Gaza.
He has been trying to build support for a plan that would create a Gaza International Transitional Authority, a U.N.-mandated administration that would include a multinational security force to stabilize the war-torn enclave. Now he has emerged as a candidate to head that authority.
Every group of Brown people, in other words, needs a white man as a leader.
Full post, including commentsClimate change no longer being an issue, apparently, Greta Thunberg and friends have spent the past month headed for a visit to the noble Gazans via diesel-powered flotilla (“Global Sumud Flotilla”). It’s a strange situation because the flotilla participants seem to have no respect for Palestinian religious and cultural norms, e.g., they permit females to roam the decks of their yachts without wearing hijab. The photo below could perhaps be a prostitute with two clients by Gazan standards:
Israel has established a blockade against its military enemy in Gaza and, therefore, under international law can repel (or sink, if necessary?) any ship that crosses the dashed red line below.
But Israel gets a lot of bad press when it uses standard military procedures. What about robot tugboats that could intercept the selfie yachts and push them out of blockade area? That would deny Greta Thunberg and other diesel-powered climate activists the photo opportunities that they seek. The flotilla folks claim that to be unarmed so they don’t have any means of destroying robot tugs. Robot tugs could be built in different sizes to match up to the different size yachts in the flotilla. They’re intercepting uncooperative vessels so should have a higher top speed than conventional tugboats. The Israelis could start with simple skiffs equipped with modern outboard engines. Since the skiff doesn’t have to hold any cargo or humans it could hold a tremendous amount of fuel for endurance. Surround the skiff with used car tires so as to get some extra points for recycling.
For maximum reliability with minimum fuel consumption and pollution, the Israelis could use Honda’s only V8 engine (350 hp; Mercury makes one with 600 hp if necessary):
Loosely related, Israel has invited the hostile vessels “to dock at the Ashkelon Marina and unload the aid there”, which would certainly be anticlimactic compared to a climate activists-v-robot interaction!
As of September 24, 2025, the yachts had survived 14 attacks by warships and warplanes, without sustaining any damage, and were using their inoperative radios to report a “communications jam” that has rendered their radios inoperative:
See also “Posing with Hamas chief, activist who’s joined Greta on Gaza ‘freedom flotilla'” (Daily Mail):
Full post, including commentsGrinning as he gives a Churchillian ‘victory’ sign, the spokesman for Greta Thunberg’s Gaza ‘freedom flotilla’ poses with a Hamas chief weeks before setting sail.
Wael Nawar was draped in a scarf emblazoned with the terror group’s emblem as he stood with other pro-Palestinian activists beside Youssef Hamdan, who runs Hamas’s North African operation, during a meeting at its Algerian headquarters in June.
Mr Nawar is listed alongside Swedish campaigner Ms Thunberg as part of the 13-strong ‘steering committee’ orchestrating the Global Sumud Flotilla, which left Spain last week to deliver food and medical aid to Gaza.
Another committee member, political activist Marouan Ben Guettaia, was also a guest of Hamdan a few days after and later posted a picture of the pair sitting in front of a Hamas flag.
A third committee member, Brazilian Thiago Avila, attended Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral in Beirut in February and praised him as an ‘inspiration’.
If we accept the White House’s tweet as true, the U.S. military has destroyed a boat, some drugs, and some Tren de Aragua members (before they had a chance to enrich us via immigration):
Even if everything that the White House says is true, how is it legal to do this? We didn’t know for sure that these noble enrichers/merchants were heading to the U.S., right? They could have been going to some other country. Maybe there is some country on this planet where whatever cargo was in the boat was legal to possess. Or maybe the enrichers were going to dump the cargo overboard prior to docking and meeting for margaritas with Maryland Senator Van Hollen?
We were informed that we couldn’t drive an AC-130 up and down the coast of Somalia and destroy pirate vessels from the air, thus ending the Somali pirate industry at a negligible cost. We had to use multi-$billion Navy ships and board the Somali vessels, take the noble future Minneapolis residents into custody, etc. But now we’re allowed to do “Death from Above” in international waters?
I asked ChatGPT “Can a military legally destroy a boat that it knows to be carrying drugs if the boat is in international waters?” and it gives a long answer with the following conclusion:
A military cannot simply destroy a drug-carrying boat in international waters under international law. The lawful course is to seek flag-state consent, board, seize, and possibly scuttle—but not to sink the vessel outright with people or cargo on board. Destruction without consent or imminent threat would generally be illegal.
Maybe part of the answer, which eludes our future AI Overlord, is that the U.S. has refused to sign the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. We are, literally, lawless (see “Unmoored from the UN: The Struggle to Ratify UNCLOS in the United States”).
Loosely related…
Today’s question is how the Gaza Health Ministry operates. This organization is as authoritative for progressives today as Anthony Fauci was during coronapanic.
We are informed by CNN that Gazans are starving. Maybe if they walk 10 miles they can get a few scraps, but probably they will be shot by Israeli “snipers” if they approach the feeding stations. We are informed by the New York Times and CNN that all buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. We are informed that Gaza has no electricity or Internet. So a group of people (the “Ministry”) with no food, no building, and no Internet manages to work together all day every day and produce reliable precise-to-six-digits statistics and press releases. Here’s a recent example from taxpayer-funded PBS… “Over 60,000 Palestinians have died in the Israel-Hamas war, Gaza’s Health Ministry says”:
Over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in the 21-month Israel-Hamas war, Gaza’s Health Ministry said Tuesday. The ministry, part of the Hamas-run government, said the death toll has climbed to to 60,034, with another 145,870 people wounded since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack. … An additional 14 Palestinians were killed while attempting to access aid near the American and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Fund site in central Gaza, according to local hospitals. … Gaza, which has teetered on the brink of famine for two years
A starving double-chinned woman and a starving man (gender assumed based on wearing of abaya/hijab or not) in a yellow shirt with an ample belly lead off in this August 21, 2025 video from the Guardian:
Underneath the video, the journalists quote the ministry that works without an intact building, food for its employees, or Internet yet gathers precise statistics:
On Sunday, the Gaza health ministry said eight more people had died of malnutrition and starvation, raising deaths from such causes to 289 people, including 115 children, since the war started.
From the Islamic Republic of Minneapolis, “Gaza Health Ministry says more than 63,000 Palestinians killed as Israel-Hamas war drags on” (Star Tribune, August 29, via AP):
Gaza Health Ministry says more than 63,000 Palestinians killed as Israel-Hamas war drags on.
But they don’t say where this ministry is located or where its press releases are to be found?
Full post, including commentsExcept for a handful of Deplorables, New Yorkers whom I met recently were 100 percent aligned with Hamas in terms of what they’d like Israel and the Israel Defense Forces to do. At the same time they say that they are “anti-Hamas”. How does it work? Note that most of these folks are non-observant Jews whose principal current religion is expressing hatred for Donald Trump and contempt for Americans in “Red States” (they’re stupid and unproductive and survive only as parasites on the hard workers and heavy taxpayers in Blue States).
The New York Righteous say that, yes, Israel has the right to try to arrest or even kill Hamas fighters, but only if there is no possibility of injuring a civilian or a child. In other words, a Hamas fighter who keeps a child strapped to his chest would be permanently off limits. They accept at face value assertions that Israel is starving the Gazans, not noticing that the moms of the purportedly starved children have double chins. Here’s the most persuasive photo that CNN could find, for example:
One New York Jew in his 60s, despite being a 100 percent loyal Democrat and frequent spontaneous expresser of Trump hatred, seems to have found an area of agreement with Marjorie Taylor Greene of Jewish Space Lasers fame. He believes that Israel knows exactly where each Hamas fighter is located and has weapon systems capable of killing those fighters without harming anyone else. For reasons that aren’t clearly specified, Israel has chosen not to push the buttons in a control room somewhere that would result in the deaths of 100 percent of Hamas-affiliated Gazans. Israel is instead bombing and shelling Gaza for no reason other than Israelis enjoy killing civilians and making the noble Gazans suffer. So… he says that he is “anti-Hamas” but also that he is “pro innocent children” and that the IDF is free to fight Hamas so long as it does so in a way that no other military in the history of the world has managed to fight or win.
Full post, including commentsHere’s a recent BBC story from a part of the world where, our media informs us, the entirely peaceful population has been subjected to starvation/famine and genocide. The BBC tells us that there was an explosion at “a bustling seaside cafe in Gaza City”:
The article goes on to refer to apparently reliable power and Internet within Gaza: “We were sending reels to each other.” We’ve been informed that all of the hospitals in Gaza were destroyed, but the BBC tells us that people wounded in the café explosion were taken to a hospital and, if necessary, received surgery. The BBC article also tells us that Gazans aren’t afraid to sit right next to Hamas fighters:
In a quiet corner of the cafe overlooking the sea, a Hamas operative, dressed in civilian clothing, arrived at his table, sources told the BBC.
Nobody ran away in fear as soon as the Hamas operative showed up even though the people who were there, interviewed later, said that they recognized him.
Here’s another example of our critical-minded journalists (NBC):
The doctor was “renowned”, but a Google search doesn’t yield any results about his achievements prior to being killed. (Nor is there any source for him having been killed by Israeli fire other than “a Palestinian monitoring group”.)
What is actually known about this person who met a violent end?
Sultan was the director of Indonesian Hospital, one of the largest medical facilities in northern Gaza,
Since Hamas has been running Gaza (after winning a free and fair election, according to Jimmy Carter and the EU), it seems that he was a Hamas-approved manager.
Full post, including commentsEAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) opens today so it is time for an aviation-themed post…
The F-35 played a role early in the recent fighting between Israel and Iran, but after air defenses were neutralized, Israel bombed targets using older non-stealth fighters. From Topgun: An American Story, by Dan Pederson, one of the founders of the Navy Fighter Weapons School:
One question deserves to be whether we even need such expensive capabilities as stealth in our planes. I’m not so sure. New sensors that are within the current capability of Russia and China to field don’t even use radar waves. These infrared search-and-track devices can detect the friction heat of an aircraft’s skin moving through the atmosphere, as well as disturbances in airflow.
Maybe the cost-effective approach is to use drones to perform all of the attacks against an adversary’s air defenses and then send in legacy aircraft? The author says that we can’t afford to provide human fighter pilots with enough combat hours to stay proficient, which is another great argument for AI/drones:
At Topgun in my day, a pilot had to log a minimum of thirty-five to forty flight hours every month to be considered combat-ready. This is no longer possible. As the F-35 continues to swallow up the money available to naval aviation, the low rate of production all but ensures that our pilots will not soon gain the flight hours that they need to get good. For the past few years Super Hornet pilots have been getting just ten to twelve hours per month between deployments—barely enough to learn to fly the jet safely. The F-35 has far less availability. Its pilots have to rely on simulators to make up the deficit. Its cost per flight hour is exorbitant.
There are quite a few reminders in the book of the high cost of war against a near-peer, e.g., in Vietnam:
What else is in the book? Here’s a passage that can be used by the pro-open-borders folks:
My parents were immigrants and I was a first-generation American. Dad, named Orla or Ole, was born in Denmark in 1912 and his parents, Olaf and Mary Pedersen, immigrated the next year. My mother, Henrietta, was one of three beautiful sisters from the Isle of Man.
Immigrants, regardless of which society they come from, make the best Americans.
Serving in the Navy is a bad idea for anyone who wants to be a parent:
One night I was aboard ship, ready to take my first ship command, when I got a phone call. Somehow my eight-year-old son had found my direct number. I answered. He was crying. He begged me not to leave. “Please, Dad. Come back… everyone else has a dad home with them. I don’t.”
It worked okay, apparently, in the pre-no-fault (unilateral) divorce world, but it seems that Navy wives eventually turn plaintiff if the officer-pilot doesn’t get killed in an accident or combat. The author himself seems to have been sued by two wives:
My first marriage did not survive the many deployments of the 1970s. Being gone so much finally drove a wedge between us that could not be removed. I married a second time while serving in surface ships. Ever the optimist, I guess. It wasn’t meant to be.
The Vietnam war wasn’t winnable from the air for a variety of reasons:
Afraid of escalating the war, the Johnson administration refused to sanction attacks on Haiphong Harbor or the shipping there. As we started flying missions up north, we would pass near those cargo ships as they waited their turn to offload at the docks. We could see their decks crammed with weatherized MiGs and surface-to-air missiles that would shortly be used against us. But we couldn’t hit them. And we couldn’t mine the harbor, either. What a tragedy. The simple execution of an off-the-shelf aerial mining plan, long before perfected during World War II and carried out in three days, could have shut down that big port—the only one of its kind in North Vietnam. But the word from the White House was no. Those big surface-to-air missiles, as large as telephone poles, would spear up into the sky after our aircraft, homing on their radar signatures. They took a heavy toll. We could seldom bomb the missile sites for fear we might kill their Russian advisers.
When the North Vietnamese began flying Russian-and Chinese-built MiG fighters, the Navy and Air Force asked Washington for permission to bomb their airfields. The request was denied. Categories of targets that could not be struck under any circumstances included dams, hydroelectric plants, fishing boats, sampans, and houseboats. They also included, significantly, populated areas. Seeing the military value of these restrictions, the North Vietnamese placed most of their SAM support facilities and other valuable cargo near Hanoi and Haiphong—places we were forbidden to strike. The airfields around Hanoi became sanctuaries for the MiGs; the commander in chief of U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, who had overall responsibility for the air war, urged the Joint Chiefs of Staff to lift the crippling restrictions. Meanwhile, the enemy fighter pilots could sit on their runways in their planes without fear of attack, waiting to scramble when our bombers showed up.
Postwar research suggests that Hanoi occasionally received updated target lists about the same time we did on Yankee Station. Our own State Department passed the list to North Vietnamese via the Swiss government in hopes that Hanoi would evacuate civilians from the target areas. Of course they cared little about that. They simply used the valuable intel to duck the next onslaught, moving MiGs out of harm’s way and bolstering antiaircraft artillery and surface-to-air missile batteries in the target areas for good measure. Destroying the MiGs on the ground proved difficult enough, but we were also ordered not to attack them in the air unless they could be visually identified and posed a direct threat.
Those rules of engagement negated the way we had trained to fight in the air. The value of our F-4 Phantoms was their ability to destroy enemy planes from beyond visual range. The AIM-7 Sparrow was the ultimate expression of that new way of fighting. Track and lock with the radar system, loose the missile from ten miles out, and say goodbye to a MiG. This is how the Navy trained us to fight. We abandoned dogfight training because of the Navy’s faith in missile technology. Most of our aircrews didn’t know how to fight any other way. Yet our own rules of engagement kept us from using what we were taught. The rules of engagement specifically prohibited firing from beyond visual range. To shoot a missile at an aircraft, a fighter pilot first needed to visually confirm it was a MiG and not a friendly plane. The thought of inadvertent or accidental shootdown of our brothers was of course intolerable. It did happen, sadly, in the heat of combat. Yet three years along, the training squadron in California was still teaching long-range intercept tactics to the exclusion of everything else. Our training was not applicable to the air war in Vietnam.
Assumptions used in engineering turn out to be wrong:
The MiG-17 was a nimble fighter armed with cannons, but no missiles. It was old school, derived from the lessons the Soviets learned in the Korean War. With such a plane, the North Vietnamese needed to get in close and track our planes with their gunsights. They would sometimes wait to open fire on us until they were within six hundred feet. Here we were, trained to knock planes down at ten miles. The F-4 carried only missiles; it did not have an internal gun because contractors and the Pentagon believed the age of the dogfight was over. We brought our expensive high tech into this knife fight in a phone booth. The result? The MiG pilots scored a lot more heavily than they should have.
And the engineering didn’t work:
Over Vietnam, our Sparrow missiles usually malfunctioned or missed. So did the AIM-9 Sidewinders. How could we not have known this prior to 1965? Well, history repeats: The weapons were so expensive that the Navy could not afford to use them in training. Live-fire shooting was done against drones flying straight and level, like an unsuspecting bomber might be caught doing. We didn’t know we had a problem until the weapons had to be deployed against fighters.
Politicians in Washington, D.C. managed to convince themselves that everything was going great:
We had to find a way to win in spite of these technical problems and political interference. Robert McNamara was a numbers guy. Under him, the Pentagon measured success in the ground war by the body count. In the air, the metric was the number of sorties flown over North Vietnam. One sortie equals one plane flying one mission. A ten-plane raid resulted in ten sorties. This became a delusional world. A sortie counted in the total even if our bombers were forced to dump their payloads short of the target, which often happened when MiGs appeared.
Is Trump the first president to give an adversary (Iran) a safe space? No:
At the end of March, in a speech declaring that he would not run for reelection in November, Lyndon Johnson changed the entire dynamic of the air war. He announced an immediate suspension of all bombing attacks north of the 20th parallel. Just like that, Rolling Thunder was over, neutralized by a lame-duck president. Up until then, the MiGs had been forced to operate from China, reducing their effectiveness. When LBJ told the world where we would not be bombing anymore, he essentially told the North Vietnamese we were giving their fighter regiments a safe space again. At the same time, the new restrictions greatly reduced the Air Force’s role in the air war over North Vietnam. The onus to continue it fell on the Navy.
I might print this out and tape it to the panel of the Cirrus SR20 to look at when I’m complaining about the lack of air conditioning:
Some time later, leading a strike mission at low altitude, Skank Remsen took a rifle round through the cockpit, straight through both thighs. He took his leg restraints, slid them up both legs, cinched them tight, and used them as tourniquets. He then flew one hundred and fifty miles and successfully landed aboard the carrier. Flight deck medical staff got him out of the airplane and rushed him to surgery. He refused medical evacuation to a stateside hospital and remained on board to heal. Two weeks later that tough old hombre was back in the saddle, flying combat missions with his boys. Now that’s my idea of real leadership.
Trigger warning: Nobody from Harvard or Columbia should read this book.
The Mediterranean, home of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, became a powder keg on October 6[, 1973]. That was the day our Israeli friends awoke to the greatest crisis of their lives: an imminent Arab invasion. The nation of Israel responded to that gathering storm with a massive preemptive strike. When the Yom Kippur War started, I was at Norfolk with the Dogs. All I could do was hope my Israeli friends, Eitan Ben Eliyahu and Dan Halutz and the rest of them, were out there knocking MiGs down and laying waste to ground targets.
The author eventually was promoted to command an aircraft carrier. The challenge of managing disgruntled and/or drug-addicted personnel turned out to be enormous. His Navy career ended when a sailor died and Michigan senators Carl Levin and Donald Riegle (both Democrats) faulted Pederson’s management of the ship.
Full post, including commentsA young airman named Paul Trerice collapsed and died while we were in Subic Bay about three weeks after we rescued the refugees. … The ship had just returned from a five-day visit to Hong Kong, where he was an unauthorized absentee. He was next in the CCU that April of 1981. My understanding from
Assuming that they can get their hands on $100 billion (or maybe $200 billion, or maybe $300 billion) in federal tax dollars, Californians will eventually have a high-speed rail line (the groundbreaking ceremony was 10.5 years ago). In light of recent drone attacks within Russia and Iran, the question for today is whether the fancy new train will be a sitting duck for jihadis. From the Wall Street Journal:
From the BBC:
Maybe anti-drone defense systems could be built around U.S. airports and an airplane should be safe from low-tech attack at 30,000′, but how would a 500-mile rail line conceivably be secured? California has already experienced jihad from Syed Rizwan Farook, born to immigrants from Pakistan, and Tashfeen Malik, a legal immigrant from Pakistan (they killed 14 of their neighbors/coworkers with guns and had hoped to kill more, but their pipe bombs failed to explode). By the time the high-speed rail is finally ready presumably the knowledge of how to build suicide drones will be far more widespread. A drone can fly from a few miles away, park itself on the ground between the rails a few minutes before the train is due, and detonate when its camera sees the train rolling over it, thus derailing the train. All of this can be fully automated with no need for radio communication back to an operator. The tracks don’t move so the lat/long of the landing spot can be preprogrammed. Nothing drives over these tracks except high-speed trains and, therefore, the “detect a train” logic need not be sophisticated.
(Of course, I continue to be mystified as to how Californians can simultaneously say (a) they hate inequality, and (b) they want all of this federal money rather than seeing it spent in poorer-than-average states. Why don’t they want federal money spent in ways that reduce inequality?)
Maybe the answer will be a grid of sensor-equipped poles arranged along the entire route? They can use radar and optical cameras to look for aerial drones and also drones that crawl over the ground. But given that a drone can pop up from a shipping crate just a minute before a train is due and land 30 seconds before a train is due to pass, how can surveillance alone be effective? Californians didn’t object to a year or two of lockdown and school closure in exchange for a perceived higher level of security from Covid so maybe they would also accept a security corridor for a few miles on either side of the track in which humans are forbidden to enter. On the other hand, a clever jihadi could perhaps make a drone that looks like an animal of some kind.
Note that the same question can be asked about a lot of U.S. infrastructure. We have open borders by design, including to people who say that they hate the United States (an application for asylum is based on a fear of being harmed in some other country, not on any kind of affection for or loyalty to the U.S.). What stops a foreign power from sending a few hundred soldiers over as asylum-seekers and having them quietly build attack drones? The foreign power could guarantee that their asylum application will be accepted by publishing a list of the soldiers’ names and saying “All of the people on this list are sentenced to death due to their political opinions.” Anyone under a definitive sentence of death for a political point of view meets U.S. asylum criteria, right? “Membership in a particular social group” is also a slam-dunk and “LGBTI” is considered a “group” so the foreign power could make sure that its army gets into the U.S. by publishing a list of soldiers’ names and saying “All of the men on this list were discovered at a gay bathhouse and, therefore, are sentenced to death if apprehended.” From a USCIS training document:
