Saturday 30th of March 2024

seeing the future from the cross. amen..

jesus

Directed energy weapons are finally set to play a serious role on the battlefield.

The idea of the death ray was proposed as long ago as 1935. But inventors soon ditched the idea after calculating it needed vast energy impossible to muster at the time. Their research instead spawned a different electromagnetic device: radar.

Eighty-five years later, and the technology for what is now known as Directed Energy Weapons has matured enough for them to start playing roles normally filled by artillery and missiles.

The military has been developing directed energy weapons of one kind or another since the 1960s—but only now is the missile-zapping technology envisioned by Reagan’s Star Wars a near-reality.

The original 1935 vision of anti-personnel death ray has been explored from time to time, but has now generally been put aside in favor of machines that target other machines.

In May this year, an operational laser mounted on a Navy ship shot down a drone during a test over the Pacific.

The breakthrough isn’t just from technology that can focus so much energy at one point in space. The beam also has to precisely track the same spot, within inches, on a target moving at 500 miles an hour several miles away, for about five seconds.

Another type of directed energy weapons use microwave radiation like a mini pulse bomb to disable the electronic components of targets, instead of causing physical damage like the lasers.

“Lasers are being matured right now within the Department of Defense.  There are several programs for doing so,” Bryan Clark, a senior defense technology analyst at the Hudson Institute, told The Epoch Times. “The Navy has a laser on one of its ships right now.”

That 60-kilowatt laser is designed to take out drones, or perhaps rockets, according to Clark. “It wouldn’t really be useful against cruise missiles or ballistic missiles.”

Missile Killers in the Pipeline

“The idea is that this is a stepping stone to a more powerful laser,” he says.

From next year, the Navy is planning to mount lasers on its latest class of destroyers with a 150-300 kilowatt output.

“Once you get up into the 300-kilowatt range those lasers would have capability against cruise missiles—depending on which cruise missile it is and how fast it’s going,” says Clark.

Missile defense is a priority for U.S. generals who are trying to counter Russia and China’s large array of missiles, built up over the last decade.

China, in particular, has amassed the biggest arsenal of long-range missiles in the world over the last decade specifically to neuter the supremacy of U.S. aircraft carriers and their jets in the Pacific.

At one point, it was thought that one answer to countering missiles might lie with the development of the rail gun, which uses electromagnetic energy in place of explosives to launch projectiles.

But Clark says that the railgun hasn’t turned out to be as much of a game-changer as was hoped. Rail guns wear out quickly, have a similar rate of fire to a regular artillery gun, and cost more.

“The only benefit is that the projectiles go out faster and potentially could hit different classes of targets,” he says.

(The Pentagon is instead adapting the hypersonic projectiles developed for the railgun to work as regular artillery rounds.)

When it comes to missile defense, Clark says that directed energy weapons have turned out to have more potential than the rail gun, but still have limitations.

He says that they provide new options, but they won’t be as much of a game-changer for future battlefields as autonomous systems.

“What directed energy does is simply replace what is done today with surface-to-air missiles or replaces a gun-type weapon.

Of course, directed energy weapons have the advantage of not running out of ammunition.

Unlike projectiles or missiles that can maneuver and arc around the curvature of the earth, lasers can only shoot in the line of sight.

Clark notes that air-craft mounted lasers won’t have such problems.

Another way of avoiding the line-of-sight problem for missiles defense would be to mount weapons on satellites, he says.  But that raises the problem of how to charge up a power-hungry weapon in space.

“Satellite power generation systems are designed to provide low levels of voltage or low levels of current over a very long period of time, not large amounts of current over a short period of time. That was one of the challenges that Star Wars ran into.”

A Star Wars Spin-Off

Brent Sadler, a defense analyst at the Heritage Foundation, agrees that directed energy is not a panacea.

“Some traditional or rail gun capability will be needed if atmospheric, range, or system maintenance requires a secondary armament that is not Directed Energy.”

On the whole, however, Salder says that the advent of directed energy weapons “will be big and alter the design of future warships.”

“Directed Energy (DE) weapons have different power requirements so ships of the future will need to consider this in their design, as well as maintenance requirements.”

“That said, not having to carry hundreds of rounds of ammo frees up space and weight—think faster ships that are potentially smaller with some reduced manning.”

Sadler says that the development of directed energy weapons goes back to Reagan’s Star Wars initiative which produced AEGIS BM intercept ability and interceptors.

He says that directed energy technology has been held back by difficulties in producing the power levels and also in being able to mitigate atmospheric impacts.

“I think what you are seeing is the culmination of better processing power, new material breakthroughs for power level, as well as increased investment in these systems.”

 

 

Read more:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/directed-energy-weapons-are-a-near-reality-on-the-battlefield_3491942.html

 

 

 

harder is life without independence...

Addressing a session of the UN General Assembly, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said his country will not give in to US pressure and Washington will not bully Tehran, into neither “negotiations nor war.”

Speaking on Tuesday at the UNGA – held this year in a virtual format due to the coronavirus pandemic – Rouhani blasted the recent US decision to unilaterally re-impose now-defunct international sanctions against Iran.

“The US can impose neither negotiations nor war on us,” Rouhani said, insisting that “today is the time to say ‘no’ to bullying and arrogance.”

Life is hard under sanctions. However, harder is life without independence.

He expressed Iran’s gratitude to the nations who rejected Washington’s move. The US measure has not been particularly well-received, as 13 out of 15 UN Security Council members firmly opposed it.

“I should express our appreciation to the presidents of the Security Council for the months of August and September 2020, as well as to 13 of its members–especially Russia and China–who twice said a decisive and resounding ‘no’ to the unlawful US attempt to exploit the Council and its Resolution 2231,” the president said.

The most recent package of US sanctions against Tehran was unveiled by Washington on Monday, targeting Iran’s defense ministry. The announcement came just a few days after the US declared “snapback” UN sanctions on Iran to be reimposed under the landmark 2015 nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Washington unilaterally pulled out of the agreement back in 2018, accusing Iran of somehow violating its “spirit,” while other signatories of the multilateral treaty have repeatedly argued the US now no longer has any say in enforcing the deal.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/501428-iran-us-sanctions-un/

 

going with the garbage flow...

In an interview with The Christian Post, neuroscientist Adam Green, senior investigator in a new Georgetown University study that found the strength of an individual’s faith in God is likely linked to the brain, explained how the new data point to a common thread among people of all faiths.

Green and his neuroscientist colleagues conducted the study "Implicit pattern learning predicts individual differences in belief in God in the United States and Afghanistan" published this month in the journal Nature Communications.

They found that an individual’s ability to unconsciously predict complex patterns, through an ability known as implicit pattern learning, had a strong correlation with the strength of their belief in a god who creates patterns of events in the universe.

The study, which involved a predominantly Christian group of 199 participants from Washington, D.C., and a group of 149 Muslim participants in Kabul, Afghanistan, is the first of its kind to explore religious belief through implicit pattern learning.


Read more:
https://www.christianpost.com/news/study-of-god-in-the-brain-points-to-a...

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Here one must be careful… and study the original research in detail. There are several problems not so much with the research itself — which was published in “Nature Communications”, a journal that is a "lower order" than Nature, though part of the same family of publications — but with the interpretations of its values, by believers. 

First, Nature Communications is a multi-disciplinary, open-access, online-only journal which publishes articles from all fields of natural sciences. Part of its scope is to fill a gap for high-quality, cross-disciplinary research articles with no dedicated specialised-branded journal available. 

The journal accepts submissions from authors willing to pay an article processing charge. All content is now freely accessible. Nature Communications allows for a rapid dissemination of results, and offer a deposition service to authors for pre-prints of articles "under consideration" as part of the submission process.

The last answer in the interview of Green seems to be misunderstood by the CP interviewer who can’t wait to be told that religious people are smarter… 


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CP: Any final thoughts about what this research could do for people of faith?

Green: The thing that I would say is at least from my perspective, is that it’s very encouraging when people who are believers across different faiths who sometimes consider themselves different from each other, and in some cases opposed to each other, can identify something shared that makes them human in the same way. And to me that’s what this research hopefully can say to believers. What I think it isn’t and I hope people take it as this, as I said, a number of people on both sides of these divides, is justification for sort of the veracity of belief or the falsity of belief. That’s not what the data show. That’s not the question we asked and it’s not the answer we got.

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All the research has shown is that believers seem to behave/react similarly, independently of their belief. That’s all… And the CP interviewer starts to froth up a bit about the god gene…

Overall, the study seems to rely more on religious people than on non religious people. Thus the whole thing does not have a neutral comparison group. The study, involved a predominantly Christian group of 199 participants from Washington, D.C., and a group of 149 Muslim participants in Kabul. The purpose was to show that religious people reacted the same, independently of the faith —Christianity or Islam.

Another ambiguity comes from the simple fact that religious people are more likely to be submissive and follow “orders” like when told about following dots on a screen. "God asks you so"… Most atheists who respect themselves would have said “get fucked”, I’m not playing this stupid electronic Wack-A-Mole game, even if only subconsciously thinking so while pressing buttons, possibly retarding their reflexes now bathed in analysis of purpose — as "I have more important things to do — say like expose the religious hypocrisy.”

Another major problem which the study alludes to, is that no matter what, most people from being a young kid are educated (brainwashed) in the concept of god rather than equipped with understanding of say Quantum Mechanics or such. The Pavlov’s dog comes to mind. Ring ‘em bells… Most Atheists have had to eliminate their belief in god and create a new understanding of the universe without the religious bullshit. This can be VERY hard work and demands efforts that few people are prepared to do. IT IS EASIER TO BELIEVE IN BULLSHIT, than discover and investigate complex scientific concepts. 

Having looked at the original data of research and the calibre of the people conducting this research I could imagine my now-dead “friend”*, Oliver Sacks, saying that this has been a grand waste of resources, badly interpreted by religious nuts, while laughing his head off. He was very good at laughter… At one stage in the research, there is a mention that some of the people in Afghanistan "were not asked about their religious affiliation” in order to protect their sensitivity or such… Hum...

But the survey shows that there could be a common thread between believers, that people who accept bullshit rather than question the religious fantasies are more attune to press buttons. The survey does not seem to point that believers are smarter than atheists... And this goes both ways. I know some clever believers and some dumb atheists. 

Accepting the religious bullshit is a bit like going with the sewage flow, rather that create one’s own understanding which to say the least will be far closer to the truth of life than the rubbish of having an original hypocritical sin tainting one’s humanity or a banquet with 27 virgins. This research headed "Implicit pattern learning predicts individual differences in belief in God in the United States and Afghanistan” starts with:

Most humans believe in a god, but many do not. Differences in belief have profound societal impacts. Anthropological accounts implicate bottom-up perceptual processes in shaping religious belief, suggesting that individual differences in these processes may help explain variation in belief. Here, in findings replicated across socio-religiously disparate samples studied in the U.S. and Afghanistan, implicit learning of patterns/order within visuospatial sequences (IL-pat) in a strongly bottom-up paradigm predict 1) stronger belief in an intervening/ordering god, and 2) increased strength-of-belief from childhood to adulthood, controlling for explicit learning and parental belief. Consistent with research implicating IL-pat as a basis of intuition, and intuition as a basis of belief, mediation models support a hypothesized effect pathway whereby IL-pat leads to intuitions of order which, in turn, lead to belief in ordering gods. The universality and variability of human IL-pat may thus contribute to the global presence and variability of religious belief.

So, "the strength of an individual’s faith in God is likely linked to the brain" — LIKE ALL OF WHAT WE CONSCIOUSLY DO, THINK OR INVENT, HELLO! — explains how the new data point to a common thread among people of all faiths. Excellent. One could say the same about people who don’t believe in god, and have ordered their own life around the reality of evolving nature and its complexities. While religious people share a place of worship to reinforce their common delusions — most atheists don’t have a meeting place despite a few websites, most don’t even have a dunny to gain inspiration from like-minded people… We like it this way.


Gus Leonisky
Rabid atheist



Note: I say “friend”*, because at one stage of Oliver Sacks' life and my life we exchanged a couple of letters after he complimented on some of my work, back in the 1980s...

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