Israeli raid on Syria produces many questions

This article is worth reading, but it answers few of the questions it raises.

Was Israeli raid a dry run for attack on Iran? | World | The Observer:
"They were sketchy, but one thing was absolutely clear. Far from being a minor incursion, the Israeli overflight of Syrian airspace through its ally, Turkey, was a far more major affair involving as many as eight aircraft, including Israel's most ultra-modern F-15s and F-16s equipped with Maverick missiles and 500lb bombs. Flying among the Israeli fighters at great height, The Observer can reveal, was an ELINT - an electronic intelligence gathering aircraft."

Fundamentally, Israel has a right to exist (guaranteed by the UN even!) and an obligation to protects it's citizens & residents. Being very unpopular in a very hostile part of the world has forced Israel to become better at many things than most countries. Based on their very good intelligence, they attacked something that the Syrians haven't said much about. I suspect that when the true fact are known, once again most people in the West will support Israel's actions.

Here is another artcile about the raid:

Israelis ‘blew apart Syrian nuclear cache’ - Times Online:
"IT was just after midnight when the 69th Squadron of Israeli F15Is crossed the Syrian coast-line. On the ground, Syria’s formidable air defences went dead. An audacious raid on a Syrian target 50 miles from the Iraqi border was under way. At a rendezvous point on the ground, a Shaldag air force commando team was waiting to direct their laser beams at the target for the approaching jets. The team had arrived a day earlier, taking up position near a large underground depot. Soon the bunkers were in flames."

Science Fiction gradually becomes practical technology

There's no telling whether this technology will scale up to the point where palettes of household goods can be easily moved around a warehouse (or the galaxy), but it is interesting to speculate about.

Physicists have 'solved' mystery of levitation - Telegraph:
"Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists. In theory the discovery could be used to levitate a person In earlier work the same team of theoretical physicists showed that invisibility cloaks are feasible."

In general, practical technology scales up and/or the costs fall dramatically. This doesn't always happen at the same rate for every technology. For example, a modern car offers far more features for a lower portion of the average annual income than in the 1950s, but if the cost of cars tracked to the cost of computers, we could all afford a choice of cars to drive for every day of the week.

It will be interesting to see if the levitation technology depends on rare metals and compounds or if like computers the cost is primarily intellectual property . . . Remember Jerry Pournelle's observation that "steel is expensive, sand (silicon) is cheap".

Who brings what to WW-IV?

This review of a new book contains some sobering thoughts:

WORLD WAR IV? - Yahoo! News:
"Begin with our military superiority, which would appear to make victory inevitable. 'Islamists have nothing like the military machine the Axis deployed in World War II, nor the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

What do the Islamists have to compare with the Wehrmacht or the Red Army? The SS or Spetznaz? The Gestapo or the KGB? Or, for that matter, to Auschwitz or the Gulag?' A thoughtful answer to that question is sobering. The Islamists have:
'-- A potential access to weapons of mass destruction that could devastate Western life.
'-- A religious appeal that provides deeper resonance and greater staying power than the artificial ideologies of fascism or communism.
'-- An impressively conceptualized, funded and organized institutional machinery that successfully builds credibility, goodwill and electoral success.
'-- An ideology capable of appealing to Muslims of every size and shape, from Lumpenproletariat to privileged, from illiterates to Ph.D.s, from the well-adjusted to psychopaths, from Yemenis to Canadians.
' Add to the above 'a huge number of committed cadres. If Islamists constitute 10 percent to 15 percent of the Muslim population worldwide, they number some 125 million to 200 million persons, or a far greater total than all the fascists and communists, combined, who ever lived.'"

If we're going to win the war on terror, then we have an interest in how the Muslim religion is taught & spread. Currently, the Saudis finance more Islamic churches & schools than any other group, and in this, they're subsidizing some of the most radical clerics out there (the Wahhabi sect). Now that they're feeling some pain back home, they're beginning to address the problem of radicalized young men, but they still need to change what is taught in their schools & services.

Islam isn't likely to be transformed by a Christ-like messiah anytime soon, so it needs to be transformed by the clerics and the Muslims themselves. We need to find ways of making moderate beliefs more attractive, while at the same time casting the radical beliefs in a bad light. Perhaps if the media reported terror attacks as failures by the Muslim world instead of failures by the Western world it would help.