Philip Smyth

BREAKING: TSA RECOMMENDS DRIVING

Houston (IAH) remains the leader in the clubhouse with the LONGEST TSA lines in America. Really impressive to maintain this type of lead over the course of several days.

Here we go again: Bernie Sanders says he doesn’t have his birth certificate or know how to get one. “I don't have my birth certificate. God knows how I get it." Just incredible.

I would like to offer to pay the salaries of TSA personnel during this funding impasse that is negatively affecting the lives of so many Americans at airports throughout the country

BREAKING NEWS: Elon Musk is offering to pay the salaries of TSA workers during the government funding standoff. The tech mogul said the funding impasse "is negatively affecting the lives of so many Americans at airports throughout the country."

Check out these shades in 1940 a Brooklyn!

This is Obama’s former National Security Council staffer Tommy Vietor. His post goes the distance in explaining the collapse of global security dynamics under that administration, when he invokes the Ayatollah’s prohibition on nuclear weapons and the US intel community’s assessment that the Islamic Republic would not be able to develop an ICBM capable of reaching the United States until 2035. First, Ayatollah Khemanei’s so-called nuclear fatwa was a verbal proclamation never codified into law; it was always reversible by him. Khamenei himself called non-pursuit “our own decision… for certain reasons” last year. It was never a red line, it was a tactical shield -- nothing more. Second, and this is directly related, Khamenei also issued a limitation on missile range: “I myself said 2,000 kilometers; otherwise, they wanted to extend it to 4,000–5,000 kilometers. I did not allow it. I prevented it.” The IRGC Aerospace Force just targeted Diego Garcia some 4,000 kilometers away. This goes to show how quickly the systems Iran has developed can be turned into categorically different threats. From a modular nuclear program with a robust enrichment pipeline and medium range ballistics to a rapidly operationalized nuclear weapons programs and intermediate range platforms that can strike US bases across most of Europe in less than a month. Since we have no visibility into Iran's covert military engineering sites, we cannot know exactly how much of their weaponization research was already completed in the dark, beyond what the Amad archive and Iaea assessments have revealed. We know they mastered uranium-metal production, implosion testing, and UD3 neutron initiators. We know they had the warhead designs for delivery. We also know they were rapidly advancing research in dual use tech that lowered technical hurdles. For instance, a breakthrough in Aug last year at Amirkabir University on radiation-hardened components announced the development of a $200 "high-precision, high-G vibration sensor" with metal structures on transparent substrates rather than silicon, utilizing combined micro and optical technologies. Most assessments agree that miniaturization for a deliverable was a matter of several months, perhaps a year. We also have credible reports from late last year that they IRGC were developing biological and chemical warheads for the same medium range missiles that just went intermediate-range. Vietor’s point is that attacking Iran is what has catalyzed these threats, but this misconception represents the most dangerous flaw in his thinking. Iran was on the doorstep of nuclear break out and intermediate range missiles. The only thing preventing it was a political decision. The Diego Garcia strike just proved how quickly supposedly latent capabilities become active threats. The widespread targeting of Gulf states including Bahrain’s desalination plants, Omani civilian sites and even Qatar’s Ras Laffan liquidied natural gas facility -- this all goes to show how dangerous this concept is, that a heavily armed, threshold nuclear state is operating in good faith and bound by verbal proclamations. As an aside, but also important to note is the hostility and lack of decorum, publicly calling a wartime ally prime minister a “despicable liar.” There is no good reason to take Vietor seriously, but it certainly highlights a lot of what went wrong under Obama. He regards “Netanyahu” -- really a convenient placeholder for the vast majority of the Israeli security establishment’s warnings about the JCPOA, dating to before his prescient but controversial congressional address in 2015 at House Speaker Bohner’s invitation -- he regards that as the “lie”, not out own lying eyes as a Middle East nuclear and missile threat crisis has unravelled into a rash of blazing craters across the region. It’s high time to retire this cohort of ideologues and their Iranian foreign ministry interlocutors at the ICG. Better now than never.

I have missed many flights due to my own fault but today was not one of them. Got to JFK T5 priority line 74 minutes before 6:59am domestic flight. Probably the earliest I’ve ever got to the airport because people said “there’s a line” and I said “ok I’ll get there early.” Priority line was two hours wait. So now I am … early … for the next flight … at 10.