The Tweeter in chief is claiming that the vast majority of terrorists since 9/11 come from outside the US. That is simply false. Most of the Islamic terrorists in the US were born here and all of those who were born elsewhere were radicalized after they were already here. Apparently they discovered that the streets of the new country are no more paved with gold than those of the old country were. All of these seem to be people who had mental health issues unrelated to Islam and chose rationalize their attacks with Islam.
A few examples:
Nidal Hasan, the 2009 Fort Hood shooter, was born in Virginia. It's pretty clear that he was having mental health issues that had little to do with his ethnicity, but that he used it to rationalize what he was doing. He killed 13 with a gun.
Rizwan Farook, the 2015 San Bernardino shooter, was born in Chicago and grew up in Riverside, CA, not far from San Bernardino. His wife, Tashfeen Malik, was born in Pakistan but had lived most of her life in Saudi Arabia. Neither country is on Trump's proposed ban. He seems to have had anger issues for most of his life and chose to marry a similarly inclined person that he'd met on the internet. They killed 14.
Omar Mateen, the 2016 Orlando Night Club shooter, was born in Hyde Park, New York. He seems to have had self-hatred over his own sexuality, exacerbated by misguided fundamentalist teachings and bullying over his heritage and his sexuality. He targeted gay people in the night club and killed 49 of them
Naveed Haq brought two guns into a Jewish Federation office in Seattle in 2006 and began shooting the workers there, all women. One was killed. Haq is of Pakistani descent but he'd gone to school in Kennewick, WA. He was 30 at the time of the shootings. He seems to have been bipolar and had been arrested for public exposure, and had anger towards both women and Jews.
John Muhammad, originally John Williams, committed the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks. He was born in Baton Rouge and had converted to Islam at age 27. He had fantasized about creating a terrorist training camp in Canada, but he had always had violence issues and was probably a psychopath.
Abdulhamid Mujahid Muhammad, the 2009 Little Rock shooter, was born in Tennessee as Carlos Bledsoe to a Baptist family and converted to Islam. He killed one, injured one. He seemed more angry at the military than at non-muslims.
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers, were born in Kyrgyzstan of Chechen and Kyrgyz ancestry, and brought to the US by their parents with their two sisters as small children. Tamerlan enjoyed fighting and seems to have been radicalized as a teen, and pressured his younger brother to participate in the bombing.
Zale H Thompson attacked 4 New York police officers with a hatchet in 2014, killing one and injuring another before the cops killed him and injured an innocent bystander. Thompson, a native New Yorker, had been active in various black power groups before converting to Islam.
Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi attacked a 2015 cartoon exhibit in Garland, Texas which had been organized by an Islamophobic group to display cartoons of the prophet Mohammad. While images of the prophet are not banned by Islam, many fundamentalist groups regard them as blasphemous. Simpson and Soofi didn't get many shots off before they were killed by police guarding the exhibit. Simpson was born near Chicago and had converted to islam in high school, Soofi was born and raised in Dallas.
Muhammad Abdulazeez shot up two army recruiting centers in Chattanooga in 2015. He'd been born in Kuwait and was brought to Tennessee as a 6 year old, 19 years before the shootings. He'd been having drug problems and his parents had recently divorced.
Abdul Artan crashed his car into a crowd of people at Ohio State University in 2016, and then lept out and began attacking them with a knife. He injured 11, mostly with the car. He was killed by police who injured one or maybe two innocent bystanders. Artan had been born in Somalia and had come to America with his family at age 8. He is the only "Islamic Terrorist" in the US that I've been able to find that actually did come from one of the countries in Trump's ban.
The September 11th attacks of 2001 were carried out by 19 Arabs, 15 of them from Saudi Arabia, 2 from UAE, one from Egypt and one from Lebanon. None of these countries are on Trump's list. All 19 of the hijackers had entered the US legally and most were still legal at the time of the attack, although a few had overstayed their visa. They killed 2996 people including themselves, and injured about 6000.
06 March 2017
Terraforming Jupiter
One of my favorite TV shows was the short lived Firefly series. The premise of the show was that the Earth had been "used up" and that a bunch of humans had headed into space, finding another star system with dozens of planets that were near enough in size and temperature that they could be terraformed and turned into habitable enough planets they could be colonized. The recent discovery that there are 7 roughly earth sized planets in the "habitable zone" around the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 suggests one way this could happen. TRAPPIST-1 is about 40 light years from earth, which would take thousands of years to reach with a plausible rocket, which predicates effective hibernation or perhaps even full stasis for such a colony to get there.
But there's another alternative. What if we blow up Jupiter and move the fragments into orbits close to that of earth? Jupiter is a gas giant, which means it's mostly hydrogen, but there's a metal and rock core--it's been catching asteroids, meteors and comets for 5 billion years. Estimates are that the core is between 12 and 45 times the mass of Earth. The show predicates cheap, safe energy of sufficient efficiency that it can power a Firefly-sized spaceship between planets with no visible fuel tanks. This can only be nuclear or perhaps something even better. Since we don't really have such a technology yet, it's not exactly clear how to make a bomb that would get deep enough into Jupiter to blow up the core into suitably sized chucks, but if we have such an abundance of nuclear or better energy, we can probably figure that out. Once the Jupiter fragments are out there, we can use solar sails or our nuclear rockets to move them into orbits at a distance from the sun to keep them comfortable, and at a sufficient density to accommodate billions of people fleeting Earth. This will take a lot of energy, but the spin and kinetic energy of Jupiter is substantial and if we can figure out a way of redirecting it, there's more than enough for the purpose.
Once we have a bunch of rocks that are big enough to have gravity appropriate for human habitation--between .3 and 2G--they will quickly turn themselves into spheres on their own, and the terraforming process can begin. Left to their own devices this would take a billion years and if we're fleeing Earth we won't be able to wait that long, but presumably the terraforming technology will be able cool them down quickly enough.
Since we're engineering these new planets, it seems to me the way to do it is to have them in groups. The Earth and Moon orbit each other around their common center of gravity--there's no reason they shouldn't be about the same size. A third planet could orbit their common CG at a greater distance. A bunch of such groups could be placed in such groups around the Sun, all in the same circular orbit...We'd probably use the same orbit that Earth-that-was is in. If the mass of each is about the same, it'll be billions of years before they collide with each other.
But there's another alternative. What if we blow up Jupiter and move the fragments into orbits close to that of earth? Jupiter is a gas giant, which means it's mostly hydrogen, but there's a metal and rock core--it's been catching asteroids, meteors and comets for 5 billion years. Estimates are that the core is between 12 and 45 times the mass of Earth. The show predicates cheap, safe energy of sufficient efficiency that it can power a Firefly-sized spaceship between planets with no visible fuel tanks. This can only be nuclear or perhaps something even better. Since we don't really have such a technology yet, it's not exactly clear how to make a bomb that would get deep enough into Jupiter to blow up the core into suitably sized chucks, but if we have such an abundance of nuclear or better energy, we can probably figure that out. Once the Jupiter fragments are out there, we can use solar sails or our nuclear rockets to move them into orbits at a distance from the sun to keep them comfortable, and at a sufficient density to accommodate billions of people fleeting Earth. This will take a lot of energy, but the spin and kinetic energy of Jupiter is substantial and if we can figure out a way of redirecting it, there's more than enough for the purpose.
Once we have a bunch of rocks that are big enough to have gravity appropriate for human habitation--between .3 and 2G--they will quickly turn themselves into spheres on their own, and the terraforming process can begin. Left to their own devices this would take a billion years and if we're fleeing Earth we won't be able to wait that long, but presumably the terraforming technology will be able cool them down quickly enough.
Since we're engineering these new planets, it seems to me the way to do it is to have them in groups. The Earth and Moon orbit each other around their common center of gravity--there's no reason they shouldn't be about the same size. A third planet could orbit their common CG at a greater distance. A bunch of such groups could be placed in such groups around the Sun, all in the same circular orbit...We'd probably use the same orbit that Earth-that-was is in. If the mass of each is about the same, it'll be billions of years before they collide with each other.
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