(CNN) Trump calls on Israel to ‘stop the bombing of Gaza’ after Hamas agrees to hostage negotiations.

This is merely a tactical move by Hamas, from the realization that the hostages are a liability, not an asset.  The same goes for Israel, for which there is an unresolved physical reality. See Israel, Qatar Strike. Quoting,

If the tunnels were comprehensively eliminated, the problem of Hamas would be reduced to manageable proportions. The tunnels are the constant of the problem.

This brings to mind the death of the famously devious French diplomat, Talleyrand. Upon learning of his rival’s death, the  Austrian diplomat Metternich said,  “I wonder what he meant by that?”

Wonder, indeed. Perhaps A.I. can give us the answer that has eluded since 1838.

***Die Hard***

(CNN) Hegseth orders hundreds of senior military officers to Virginia for highly unusual meeting

This is an invitation to a decapitation strike.

CBW is feasible and deniable. See Weapon of mass destruction.

(CNN) International health agencies hit back against Trump’s claims about Tylenol and autism .

Ruling HHS by hunch, guess, and caprice, Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. has been immensely destructive to the public health establishment. But like the broken clock that shows the correct time twice a day, he may be about to have his moment. Kennedy bases his determination on a paper that does not claim to prove the point. But proof in the biological sciences is a murky concept. When does correlation between a drug and morbidity transition to  the stronger statement of causality?

Quoting (BMC) Evaluation of the evidence on acetaminophen use and neurodevelopmental disorders using the Navigation Guide methodology,

Numerous well-designed studies have indicated that pregnant mothers exposed to acetaminophen have children diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), including autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), at higher rates than children of pregnant mothers who were not exposed to acetaminophen.

This is a metastudy, which uses Bayesian statistical analysis to combine the results of multiple clinical studies. This methodology can reduce the effect of confounding variables. As a simple though unlikely example, pain could be a confounding variable, the actual cause of ASD, rather than the pain reliever.

A study by Gustavson et al. attempted to remove confounding variables, comparing the rate of ADHD (but not ASD) among sibling with differing prenatal exposure. Quoting,

This study carried out extensive bias analyses and showed that the entire effect disappeared in the sibling-controlled analyses.

The statistical evidence of the constituent clinical studies is weighted depending on the likelihood the results are not from chance; this is called statistical power. Gustavson’s study had a small number of patients,  so it was given small weight. Studies with larger numbers of patients, or less likelihood of confounding relationships, were given more weight.

All of this is so far about probabilities. When does probability become fact? In every field that uses Bayesian statistics, the form of the answer is exactly the same. Every study, no matter how careful or how large, can produce a result that arises purely from chance. That chance is provided by the statistics of the study.

If that chance is smaller than a certain number, we say “proven.” If it is larger, we say “unproven.” But how is the cutoff decided? It is a choice, not a given. In physics, the  number is 0.00006% . In the biological sciences, it is more like 3%. Practicality rules; we are unlikely to do better than 3% in medicine; the confounding variables cannot be further unwound.

There is an obvious problem with 3%. If you have enough random ideas, and test all of them, a certain number will satisfy rigorous studies, and come to be accepted as (false) fact. The scientific method as defined by John Dewey, early in the 20th Century, provides further safeguards against nonsense. It begins with observation and follows with a hypothesis, a possible explanation, followed by a theory which can be tested and proven wrong. If you can’t develop a hypothesis, you stop, while continuing to observe. If it can’t be proven wrong, you’re not doing science. This prevents the random proof of nonsense.

Unfortunately, it is easy to generate a hypothesis relevant to acetaminophen and ASD.  Like NSAIDs, this drug inhibits inflammation. Unlike NSAIDs, it also acts directly on the brain, raising the threshold for a neuron to fire.  Quoting (Wikipedia) Paracetamol,

In 2018, Suemaru et al. found that, in mice, paracetamol exerts an anticonvulsant effect by activation of the TRPV1 receptors[121] and a decrease in neuronal excitability by hyperpolarization of neurons.

In the prenatal brain, this could interfere with Hebbian learning. See Hebb’s Rule Applies During Early Brain Development, With Subcellular Precision.

ASD children are born with an excess of neurons.  A hypothesis:

The increased neuron firing threshold, caused by acetaminophen, inhibits pruning associated with prenatal Hebbian learning, leading to the excess of neurons associated with ASD.

Robert Kennedy’s war on the scientific establishment is abhorrent. But he may yet have his day,  reminding us that knowledge does not guarantee correctness, and bureaucracy can blunt intellect.

(ABC) Congressman shows never-before-seen video at military UFO hearing. In this video, a Hellfire missile is alleged to have been deflected by a UAP resembling the “tic-tacs” of previous reports.

The current assessment follows, informed by valuable data from the intercept:

The target was a miniature hybrid airship of Chinese origin.

The shell is fabric stretched over a tensegrity frame.

In cutting edge application, the deformable tensegrity shell is collapsible and inflatable for trans-medium underwater deployment, and modifiable in flight to vary  the tradeoff of aerodynamics with endurance.

The impact tore the fabric of the tensegrity shell, with jagged edges visible even in low resolution IR. The drone was badly damaged, spinning out of control from angular momentum imparted by the Hellfire. If it continued to fly, it would be due to compensations by the heavier-than-air component.

The target did not “continue on its way”,  because it was almost stationary. The illusion of movement is provided by the change in perspective of the gimbal-mounted tracking sensor of the MQ-9 Reaper, resulting from the velocity of the Reaper, not the target.

The  false appearance that the Hellfire was deflected was produced by loss of laser lock when the Hellfire punctured the target, briefly enveloping the laser sensor in fabric. The Hellfire transitioned from the laser lock program to the inertial backup program, causing a control response that superficially resembled deflection.

The video is a teaching moment for adversaries who wish to jam the Hellfire guidance system, which explains why the video was leaked without accompanying engineering data.

The control of a deformable tensegrity is cutting edge technology, involving nonlinear controls and recently, neural networks. A hybrid buoyancy design, with extended endurance compared to pure heavier-than-air designs, is particularly valuable to a power seeking to extend its reach. See  (China) Soft Multicopter Control using Neural Dynamics Identification and (U.S.) Morphing-Enabled Path Planning for Flying Tensegrity Robots as a Semidefinite Program.

Since DoD, for good reason, does not provide Congress with technical data and specialist briefers, the UAP brouhaha will remain fertile ground for those who, intentionally or not, misrepresent these events to an audience utterly incapable of informed judgement.

One of the most enduring myths, endlessly exploited by extraterrestrial advocates, is that an observer can even crudely estimate the altitude and velocity of an unfamiliar object. No one, even a pilot with thousands of hours, can do this without supplementary, non-optical assumptions. For example, you might be able to estimate the distance of an airliner, because you know you are looking at an airliner. When a UAP offers no assumptions of how big it is, this becomes impossible — for everyone.

This is what you’re up against:

Optical illusion

(CNN) FBI releases images of person of interest in Charlie Kirk’s fatal shooting. Quoting,

The weapon is a “high-powered, bolt action rifle” that was “recovered in a wooded area where the shooter had fled,” Bohls said at a news conference.

Historically, bolt action rifles have had the greatest potential accuracy, especially when subjected to a refinement  called “accurizing.” Because of the low rate of fire, the bolt action rifle has not been the choice of mass shooters and has not been the subject of illicit manufacture.

An accurized bolt action rifle is the U.S. Army choice of sniper rifle designs. It remains popular in competitive target shooting.  Considerable practice is required to achieve a moderate rate of fire. This strongly implies that the shooter is likely to have had an association with a gun club or sporting team.

(CNN) Israel faces growing backlash over unprecedented Qatar strike.

You don’t read Intel9 for moral judgments.  You can bring your own scales of justice. The purpose of intelligence is to bring insight or foresight to a problem. The current question: Why did Israel find it necessary to eliminate the Hamas leadership in Qatar, in spite of the egregious violation of diplomatic norms, which may in the short term overshadow the mortality of the Gaza civil population?

Identification of constants of the problem can facilitate, as  with Crime Deterrence; Our Groundhog Day of Slaughter, Part 2. This may involve peeling the problem like an onion, as one constant peels to reveal another underneath.  A political constant may give way to a deeper physical one. For example, Vladimir Putin’s ultimate goal in Ukraine is not a political settlement, but seizure of territory, lines on a map.

A particularly neat example:  CNN Editorial, Meredith McCarroll, Anthony Bourdain listened; Appalachia’s Three Percent. The region has long been the subject of sociological hand wringing. The constant of the problem is a problem of geography, the scarcity of flat land. Poverty and social degradation, hauntingly captured by WPA photographers, stem from a physical reality.  Poverty did not create the hills; the hills created poverty.

With this preamble, a  constant of the Gaza conflict  more basal than human intransigence, reveals: the tunnels, alleged to be twice the size of the tunnels of Cu Chi, with some buried so deeply as to be impervious to most ordinance.  The Wikipedia article, and the book, The Tunnels of Cu Chi,  analogize closely to the undisclosed and undocumented IDF experience in Gaza, where the enemy has a dimension of mobility unknown to the attacking force.

• It is due to the tunnels that estimates of Hamas numbers, and their casualties, vary so widely as to negate confidence.
• After 23 months of conflict, the size of the tunnel network, and the percentage destroyed, are not confidently known.
• By extension, it is impossible, using tactical demolition techniques, to disable the network, or even know if it is possible to do so.
• As long as the tunnel network remains functional, civil control is impossible.
• As long as there is civil population on the surface, Hamas fighters can blend with the civil population to sustain themselves underground.
• When measured in decades rather than years, both sides consider this a fight to the death. This is why, as with Ukraine, the problem  is  one of absolutes, where both sides seek to avoid a negotiated solution.
• If the tunnels were comprehensively eliminated, the problem of Hamas would be reduced to manageable proportions. The tunnels are the constant of the problem.

One could assert that the strike against Hamas leadership is intended to silence a voice that would interfere with the  relocation of the Gaza population. But ghosts often have louder voices than the living, which  implies a more visceral exigency that requires silencing what remains of command-and-control of a government-in-exile.

The tunnels cannot be destroyed by tactical placement of demolition charges, because mapping tunnels deeper than near surface is beyond current technology. Far less knowledge is required with deep explosions of the magnitude to create seismic events. Detonations equivalent to kilotons of TNT can fracture rock strata over a  radius of kilometers, permanently robbing the rock of the strength that can sustain a tunnel. Tunnels cannot be built or rebuilt through fractured rock at reasonable cost.

World  War II use of the earthquake bomb indicates that few, if any surface structures would survive. Evacuation of Gaza City is required. Placing the charges, deploying kilotons of industrial explosives deep underground, requires the near absence of enemy combatants.

Conventional explosives are not the only option. To gauge the risks to aquifers, see Geology, geomorphology and hydrology of the Wadi Gaza catchment, Gaza Strip, Palestine. The Gaza aquifer drains into the Mediterranean, sparing areas inland.

We continue from Crime Deterrence; Our Groundhog Day of Slaughter, Part 1. You might also look at

• (CNN) Trump says administration will seek death penalty in murder cases in DC.
• (CNN) Plans to execute Robert Roberson paused after judge approves restraining order just 90 minutes before his scheduled execution.
• Nashville Elementary School Shooting; The Mind Virus Spreads.
• Could AI Stop Police Brutality? Are the Memphis Scorpion Five Psychopaths? Part 1.
• (CNN) Trump Homeland Security official says he believes George Floyd would not have been spared if he were white.
• (CNN) Minneapolis City Council members intend to defund and dismantle the city’s police department; Police Brutality Part 4
• Part 3, titled U.S. protesters call to Defund the Police.
• Police Brutality, Derek Chauvin, George Floyd, Rousseau’s Social Contract Part 2
• Police Brutality, Derek Chauvin, and the Death of George Floyd Part 1.

Like the other great social issues, attitudes towards crime are cyclic. As American attitudes oscillate between liberal and conservative poles, crime follows the swing. News outlets, so responsible for informing us on where we are today, tend to focus on a single point in time. This resulting collective amnesia about where we have been leads to Santayana’s curse: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” There are still some constants:

Even more  than the past, attitudes towards crime are tightly bound to political identity.

The bumpers of argument are the occasional-but-too-frequent brutality of law enforcement, and the suffering of victims.

Recidivism among those who have served sentences is extremely high.  Since 8% of American adults are felons, incarceration of all of them would multiply the prison population by a factor of 12, to 24 million.

The skewing of felony convictions along socioeconomic lines results in perceptions that compromise consent of the governed.

Implied arguments, violating strong taboos, remain unspoken. The liberal point of view is that the state must  act in a blameless fashion, even when possibly compromising law-and-order. The no-cash-bail laws are so motivated, by the deaths, or at least deprivations of liberty, of incarcerated individuals before trial has disposed of the presumption of innocence. The unspoken conservative counter argument is based on the arithmetic of victims of those released without bond.

When crime statistics improve, they are used by some, frequently representing disadvantaged communities, to assert that society is curing itself, reducing or eliminating the need for policing and incarceration. When crime statistics worsen, broad support for law enforcement resumes. This cycle is interrupted by infrequent but noteworthy errors of law enforcement that range from manslaughter to murder.

Tearing  down the old jail and building a new one, as per Rikers Island, will not stop misbehavior of correctional officers. The problem of Rikers, or any jail, is not in the real estate.

Instinctive approaches, “Let’s get tough”, and “Let’s be lenient” remain popular memes, because of the poverty of alternatives.

Religion, formerly the custodian of both morality and law, has been supplanted by systems more respectful of the individual. As a nonreligious person, I am personally fine with that. But the sophistication of modern liberalism may not be as compelling, or even understandable to the potential criminal as an omniscient god whose punishments are inescapable. Nevertheless,  Western Europe, where crime rates are far lower, is less religious than the U.S. This implies there is a secular, cultural factor in U.S. crime rates.

Deterrence does not work as well as it should. Ideally, one incarceration should prevent the transition to criminality of a hundred individuals, but it doesn’t.  Every apprehension, trial, and incarceration is a burden on the state, and the loss of a potentially productive individual.

Ingrained attitudes, both religious and secular, are barriers to innovation.

This is the cycle, the swing of a pendulum. How can we stop the swing?

To be continued.

(CNN) Trump says administration will seek death penalty in murder cases in DC.

While I am not in principle opposed to the death penalty, in the U.S., as historically applied, it has  fatal flaws, which have several flavors.

Criteria for guilt. The instruction to the jury, by which the presumption of innocence is replaced by, “guilty beyond all reasonable doubt”, lacks an objective standard. In practice, the judgment of twelve angry people who debate beyond eye and ear, cannot be codified objectively. The combination with defective rules of evidence has on a number of occasions resulted in miscarriages of justice. When the death penalty is applied, these become fatal and irrevocable.

Quality of evidence. See (CNN) Plans to execute Robert Roberson paused after judge approves restraining order just 90 minutes before his scheduled execution. Quoting,

Robert Roberson was convicted of shaking his child, causing her death. The conviction relied on expert testimony that the injuries were caused by shaking, not by a fall from a bed. Expert testimony which is not validated by the law of large numbers is frequently contradicted by other experts, with spectacle in the courtroom.

Just between you and me, there’s a good chance Roberson is guilty. Does the evidence imply “beyond all reasonable doubt’? The detective who ran the case doesn’t think so. Now place yourself in the jury room, where the phrase “baby killer” swirls like thick tobacco smoke. The result of tangled emotions is a codified blend of justice with street justice, which is no justice at all.

Roberson is on death row due to evidence which has not been  qualified by the law of large numbers, considered by a jury who could not be expected to be mathematicians, powerfully influenced by the heinous nature of an unproven crime, until they prove it. Notice the circularity: the heinousness demands conviction.

The plea bargain. A legitimate way for a defendant to bargain for himself, it can be an illegitimate tactic to deflect a capital charge onto another defendant. See Derek William Bentley, dramatized in the movie Let Him Have It. The trigger-man escaped the noose; Bentley did not.

Quoting from the Death Penalty Information Center ,

A Death Penalty Information Center database of every death-row exoneration since 1972. For every 8 people executed in the United States, one other person has been exonerated from death row.

How can we encapsulate this flaw of the criminal justice system? By this oxymoron: One standard of “beyond all reasonable doubt” is insufficient. Capital cases require an enhanced standard, with restricted rules of evidence.  it would be an admission that the system is not perfect enough. But if we fail to make that admission, we perjure ourselves.

***Let Him Have It***

The manned space program, entrenched as a sacred cow, has deflected critical examination for decades with promises and visions of utopian attractiveness. Since the end of the Apollo program, there has been little evidence of tangible scientific benefit. Yet it remains uniquely popular, enjoying the personal pronoun “we” for hopefully exciting vicarious adventures. “We” do not have car accidents. “We” go to Mars. Sharing a religious vocabulary, space mania evokes the unreasoning beliefs of the “Electric Monk” of writer Douglas Adams. Quoting Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency,

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

I propose that you believe too much. Readers will search this post, and prior, for unreasoning signs of anti-scientific prejudice or  political agendas.. You will be more receptive to my arguments if I tell you a little bit about my beliefs:

• Climate change is real, and largely anthropogenic.
• I am a fan of Dr. Anthony Fauci and RNA vaccines. Though I did warn against vaccine mandates, and  was skeptical prior to proofs of effectiveness and safety, I’ve had about 10 shots and hope for another.
• I am a fan of the scientific method, and horrified at the politicization of science. There is bad science, but it does not discredit the whole. If there is to be a future, it must be a collaboration of man, his knowledge, and his inventions.
• I am a fan of unmanned, robotic space probes, and the great space telescopes. I am an enthusiastic backyard astronomer, and not entirely skeptical of UFOs.
• I want to know.

Science has on many occasions been co-opted for political goals. Some have been as narrow as ending World War II. Others have been as broad as nurturing the national spirit. On September 12, 1962, JFK gave the “Moon  Speech” at Rice University (text). Quoting,

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

My eyes get a little wet, as I remember some of my older engineer friends, as they began what they would later call the best years of their lives.  They were not hard to find; the Apollo program had 100,000 subcontractors, at a time when making things smaller, faster, more powerful, and more reliable was the secular religion of this country. They were making the modern equivalent of a national myth: We can do damn near anything.

They say that “we” went to the moon on slide rules, which is not literally true, but what they did, with what they had, is an epic that surpasses the Odyssey by many powers of ten. My view was not of The Right Stuff riding the rocket, but of unsung heroes, of how a balding, pudgy nondescript man and his buddies, called by NASA to solve an emergency, managed to reduce the astronaut’s life support monitoring electronics, without which Apollo could not fly, from the size of several bricks to a few cubic inches. They did it with things just out of the lab called PMOS, and Bunker-Ramo Planar Coax. They had to build a hundred for every one that worked, but there was never a failure in service. Countless advances like this one gave rise to the term spin-off, which provided the U.S. with a technological  lead that endured into the 90’s.

Then, in August, 1971, Nixon’s commitment to the program wavered.  Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were cancelled. Quoting Canceled Apollo missions,

John Young, who flew on Apollo 10 and 16, believed that fear of losing astronauts was a reason why NASA canceled Apollo 18, 19, and 20.^[14]

Consider: The largest conventional bomb in the U.S. arsenal weighs 15 tons. The Apollo rocket contained 2700 tons of explosive fuel. Accidents will happen. Suddenly, the dream was over, for 100,000 companies, and for the engineers, the best years of their lives.  I felt a personal void. Yet the end of Apollo was inevitable. The myth was too costly, requiring 5,400,000 pounds of explosives for what the Greeks did with poetry.  New spinoffs would not occur with repetition.

***Next: The Big Tent Revival***

What follows is informed fiction, in which Putin conveys to Trump an assessment and a persuasive alternative alignment of powers. Despite some missteps of U.S. policy post the 1991 breakup, and  of NATO immediately prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,  I am not in sympathy with any of it:

Putin:  Look at this brief, prepared by our general staff. The Ukraine manpower pool continues to decline. Their stockpiles continue to decline. According to this assessment, see these front lines. We will have Kherson by October, Kharkiv by December, Odessa by February. Once we cross the Dnieper, their lines will no longer be lines.

With your cooperation, we  will leave a small rump state  around Lviv. Maybe we will not hang Zelinksy in Maidan Nezalezhnosti — I’m joking, of course.

Trump: What about all the Russian casualties? With all the land you already have?

Putin: A mere speed bump. Our technology may not be quite your equal, but we know how to suffer for Mother Russia. We suffered much, much more in the Great Patriotic War. Do you know how to suffer, if war comes to you?

beat

The land is more than part of Russia. It is Russia.

Trump: Let’s keep the World safe between us.

Putin: Between us, not under American domination, where America imagines it runs the whole world. I would rather talk about business deals, where you and I run a part of it together.

Trump: We have partners. No one is excluding you. And from what I’ve been hearing lately, China wants a piece of you.

brief silence, as Trump enjoys the dig

Putin: Your main and worthless partner is NATO, who started this war to prepare the inclusion of Ukraine, who have this convenient fiction, dare I call it a lie, that they are not allied against Russia.

Trump:   Let’s not talk about who started this. Let’s finish it.

Putin:  It’s not too early to talk about what America needs. The only country that aligns with your need to secure raw materials  is Russia. Or do you consider Beenie Babies from China strategic raw materials?

Trump: We’re looking for other partners now. We’re looking for a balance.

Putin: Then why not Russia? Why do you necessitate our Navy’s participation with China against a nation we should not perceive as a threat?

Trump: What about guarantees, like boots from other countries on the ground to keep a peace?

Putin: NATO in disguise. We have a saying, Trust but verify. Trust comes first.

An attempt has been made to make this imagined conversation amenable to analysis. Your first tool is a lawyer joke:

How can you tell when a lawyer is lying?

Your answer?