Snow crystals form in clouds when the temperature is underneath freezing point. They are created by water droplets freezing on small ice particles. As an ice crystal drops through the cloud it bumps and knocks others and becomes a snowflake. This process of bumping others, along with a little melting and re-freezing aids the creation of their complex design. The air that the snowflake drops through has to be under freezing otherwise the snowflake will simply melt and turn into rain.

What do snowflakes look like?

Amazingly, snowflakes always have six sides and similar to the human fingerprint, it is thought that no two snowflakes are ever exactly the same. Both the form and shape of a snowflake depends on the temperature and moisture content of the cloud. Snowflakes can be categorized into six main types, plate (flat), column, stars, dendrite (lacy, needle, and capped column. When it is extremely cold the snow is very fine and powdery and snowflakes become quite simple in design, usually needle or rod shaped. When the temperature is near to freezing point (0 degrees Celsius), snowflakes become much larger and a lot more complex in design, for example, a star.

Snowflake Facts

The world’s largest ever snowflake to date found was 38 centimetres wide and 20 centimetres thick. This snowflake occurred at Fort Keogh, Montana, USA on 28 January 1887.

The worlds tallest ever snowman made measured a massive 34.63 metres and was made by the people of Bethel, Maine, USA. It took 2 weeks to build, finally being completed on 17 February 1999. The snowman, nicknamed Angus was so big that he had vehicle tyres for his mouth and trees for arms.

Snowflakes encapsulated in rime form balls known as graupel. Snowflakes appear white in color despite being made of clear ice. This is due to diffuse reflection of the whole spectrum of light by the small crystal facets.

16-27

Halal Meat from Hira Farms

By Ilyas Choudry, TMO

Houston (Our Special Correspondent): “There are huge Rewards in serving food to those who are in need. In Quran, it is mentioned in Verses (Aayah) 8-9 of Chapter (Surah) AL-Insaan that they feed food — despite their own desire for it — to the indigent, and the orphan and the captive (saying): ‘We feed you purely for the Sake of God. We desire no reward from you, nor thankfulness.”

This quote was mentioned by some of the speakers at the inaugural ribbon cutting ceremony of the Second ICNA Relief Houston Food Pantry. It has been established in the Desi Heartland of Hillcroft Avenue between Harwin & Westpark, in the Gandhi Business District, located at 5645 Hillcroft Avenue, Suite # 405, Houston, Texas 77036.

Earlier ICNA Relief established a Food Pantry near Downtown Houston just besides the ICNA Relief Women Shelter located at 4021 Baden Street, Houston, Texas 77009 (off I-45 North).

“Interaction of Muslims with the people around is crucial for a healthy society. ICNA Houston Chapter has been doing every Sunday Downtown Feed the Hungry Program for a long time now, and with this Food Pantry Project coming to Houston, we will able to better our outreach to the people living around us,” said Brother FarazKhan, President ICNA Houston.

“We needed something like this for a long time from the Muslim Community and that too in the central area of the city. True Muslims are the ones’ relevant to the society. They are always at service of the mankind, especially taking good care of their neighbors. At times we do not realize that in a country of affluence like USA, there is also abject poverty and hunger. Food Pantry is a huge contribution of ICNA Relief to the society at large around us in Houston,” said the Keynote Speaker of the event Brother Mustafa Carroll, Director of the Council on American Islamic Relations Texas (CAIR).

Musab Abdali, Coordinator of Young Muslims Boys (YM Brothers) was the Emcee of the event.

“It is good to see that this Food Pantry has a section for personal hygiene items. Cleanliness is considered as Half the Faith in Islam, and it leads to neat and healthy life. So this Pantry will not only take care of the food provisions, but also personal hygiene items like soap, shampoo, tooth paste, tooth brush, detergent, etc. will be available, improving the overall well being & health of those, who cannot afford these otherwise basic needs to life,” added ILyas Hasan Choudry, Director of Programs of Sister Organization of ICNA called Helping Hand For Relief & Development (HHRD).

“We at Hira Halal Meat are proud and feel humbled to be associated with this Food Pantry Project of ICNA Relief. We will be supplying donated meat to this Pantry. We will donate meat ourselves, plus people, who will come to us to prepare their Sadaqah, Qurbani, and other donated Meat, they can leave that meat with us and we will bring that to ICNA Relief Food Pantry,” informed Brother Syed Nayyar Raza of Hira Halal Meat Slaughter House, which is located at 19922 Bauer Hockley, Tomball, Texas 77377 (1.281.650.8623).

“This Pantry will serve the food needs of Non-Muslims and Muslims alike, with no discrimination. There will be traditional food section for the immigrant communities, Halal Meat as well as all food items here being halal to fulfill the for Muslim Dietary Requirements; Plus regular food items that we get in USA. We need much help from the community, in terms of In-Kind Donated Food Items, Cash Donations, other In-Kind Gifts like Freezers & Fridge for Meat, etc.,” requested Brother Shabbir Hasan, Coordinator of ICNA Relief USA in Houston.

For more information about ICNA Relief Programs and Services, please call Brother Shabbir Hasan 1.832.302.1681 and/or Sister Seemi Bukhari at 1.713.692.2408 (Office Phone – 11AM – 5PM).

16-27

New York’s Halal Guys to go international

New York’s iconic street carts, the Halal Guys, is all set to go international. Fransmart — the franchise consulting firm  — has signed a deal with The Halal Guys’ founders to turn it into a franchise.
In the next five years, Fransmart plans to open 100 brick and mortar shops branded with The Halal Guys’ logo. They will open in LA, along the East Coast, and into Canada this year. Eventually they will have a presence in Europe as well as the Middle East.

Dan Rowe, Fransmart’s CEO said that he  sees The Halal Guys becoming “…the Chipotle of Middle Eastern food.”

LA declares July as Muslim American Heritage Month

Recognizing Muslim American community’s contributions and rich heritage, Los Angeles city council has declared July 2014 as Muslim American Heritage Month, a decision widely welcomed by the Muslim community.

“It’s a very important resolution. It’s historic,” Najee Ali, the project’s founder, told KCET on Friday, June 20.

“It will help bring Los Angeles Muslims closer to the mainstream and civic life and affairs of our city where we will have a chance every year to highlight the various cultural traditions of the Muslim community.”

“We can share understanding for many of our fellow Angelenos who know very little of the Muslim community, except for what they see on TV and the media, which is mostly negative,” he added.

Uddin, Kuwatly win prizes at mobile app competition

Wayne State University in Detroit announced the winners of its mobile app competition this week. The contest, sponsored by Wayne State’s office of economic development and Blackstone LaunchPad, was open to students, alumni, faculty, and staff, and there were $5,000 in cash prizes awarded courtesy of Detroit Labs, the Detroit Technology Exchange, and The Front Door. Winning the $2,500 first place prize was a team consisting of Sagor Bhuiyan, Lawrence Namait, Terrance Johnson, and Mir Ikram Uddin. Their app was designed to increase awareness of campus events, gauge interest, and incentivize attendance. The second place prize of $1,500 went to Iyad Kuwatly for his app titled Get Involved, which provides easy access to the latest events on WSU’s campus and the city of Detroit.

16-27

By Geoffrey Cook, TMO

San Francisco–From your author’s perspective — on the eastern shore of the Pacific Rim –Mesopotamia is looming large.  What follows is what I hope shall be considered opinion.

As we in both Dar al-Islam and al-“Harab,” are all in “shock and awe” at the raise of ISIS (the “Islamic” State of Iraq and Syria) from an irregular terrorist (a technique of eliminating civilian support of their opponents through fear) guerrilla-based organization into an organized army controlling a great swathe of territory, that is beginning to resemble a proto-State.

I do not think the Iraqi army can hold off DAASH (the acronym from the Arabic, Dulat al-Islam fi al-Iraq wal-Sham, or ISIS as translated into English), are now almost at the doorsteps of Baghdad — although in Syria it appears the government will prevail.  

Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards have at least 2,000 boots on the ground fighting alongside Iraq’s army ostensibly to protect the numerous Shia sacred sites in their neighbor’s territory.  While tens of thousands of Shiite Iraqis – many of whom are former militiamen – have volunteered their service to the nation, simultaneously, the United States has re-deployed 275 servicemen to presumably guarantee the safety of their citizens within the ancient Babylonian boundaries with yet another 300 Special Forces’ military advisors being deployed to aid the Iraqi national army, and an aircraft carrier poised off the Persian Gulf Coast with two missile-capable ships to provide air support if clear targets can be delineated as Iraqi Prime Al-Malaki asks for U.S. air intervention and Obama is considering unleashing America’s air might although Baghdad’s own air force has made significant headway against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant which, hopefully, make Western intervention unneeded. 

Strangely, the U.S. and Iran have met on the sidelines of their seven country nuclear talks in Vienna (Austria) this past week.  The American President Barrack Obama (who, by the way’s, middle name is Hussein – named after a paternal [Kenyan] Islamic uncle, and the current President has lived in Indonesia, which has the highest number Muslims on the globe, in his adolescence) of all American presidents, therefore, has the best grasp of the hopes and aspirations of Islamic peoples worldwide; has approved of Iran’s entry into the fight socce voce.  Further, as I write (U.S) Secretary of State John Kerry proclaim of America’s help if Iran can unite.

ISIS has grown out of the old al-Qaeda in Iraq who were mainly foreign mercenaries that came to fight the American Imperium.

Turkey’s national interests coalesce over Iraq, since a portion of Turkey’s Eastern topography, ISIS has affirmed to be part of their own turf.  If Turkey is attacked or becomes involved to prevent that Republic from being attacked, being a member of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), its European and North American allies would have to come to its aid in a supportive role as NATO did after al-Qaida, who were ensconced in Afghanistan, lingering after the Second Afghani-Russian War (the first was in the Nineteenth Century) in response to the attack upon New York City and Washington (D.C.).  Furthermore, both Iran and Turkey have excellent relations as Turkey, also, has with the United States.  If at all, NATO’s role would be logistical rather than direct military confrontation with ISIS.  (Turkey’s role, additionally, is bond by how its actions would affect its Kurdish issue – positively or negatively.)

Furthermore, the United Kingdom, who was on the edge of rapprochement with Tehran, was pushed over that precipice by the rapid advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (SyrIraq’s) army.  Britain announced recently that they will be re-opening their embassy in the Persian capital.  Can the District of Columbia (D.C.) be far behind?  Yet, for Washington to make full rapprochement, the Americans would have to attempt to suppress Saudi support for the more violent “fundamentalist” segments of the Sunni denominations, and, further, enforce a settlement on the Arab-Israeli imbroglio — i.e. to, finally, thrust the albatross of Israel off its neck.  Your essayist believes this process must be begun for an Iranian-American rapprochement to go fully forward.

The U.S.A. has a moral obligation to the Mesopotamian peoples for being the catalyst to this present humanitarian disaster by their aggression of 2003. 

It is the opinion of many in the establishment within the Beltway (D.C.) that we must cooperate with Iran and Turkey if they intervene to protect their and Iraq’s foot soldiers; to relieve the suffering of the majority of the Iraqi citizenry through Washington’s overwhelming Air Force.  Moreover, air superiority is the only option that the White House has in that the American public does not have much “stomach” for more foreign forays of indeterminate duration after the stupidity of the Bush years.

ISIS has been reported to have overrun the major oil refineries in Iraq and approaching Baghdad as this is written.  Oil still greases the economies of the West South and East Asia and the Middle East itself.  For that reason (a religious-based) radical-right control of those resources not only has the potential for regional, but for worldwide war as well.  This is a very serious situation for the region as well as the world at large that calls for co-ordination by area hegemons, but the major external powers as well.

The salvation for the Iraqi people may depend, curiously, on the rapprochement and military co-operation between Washington and Tehran for the two have become “natural allies” in the redemption of the Middle East from the anarchy of that “state” that has moved out of the remnants of the non-State, actor, al-Qaida.

It is not only advantageous to the United States to protect the native people of the Twin Waterways from the foreign Salafi/Takfiris insurgency, but it is, also, the States’ moral duty to the Iraqi nation-state.  It is, additionally, in the U.S’ present concerns, to prevent a larger regional Sectarian War and to sustain the Middle East’s natural resources flowing across the continents that grease the economies both at the source and at the end user point.  It is Iran’s interests, also, to protect their Sectarian cousin’s resources, and it is, moreover, in the NATO-allied Turkey’s advantage to prevent a region-wide Sectarian War. 

Although it was the Obama government’s goal to end the violent entanglements the previous regime created, Iran, the U.S., Turkey and the latter’s NATO alliance partners must enter the power vacuum now – only if it is require.

16-27

In Tuesday speech, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi refuses clemency saying he cannot interfere with judiciary

CAIRO — Egypt’s president Tuesday said the authorities will not interfere with the judiciary, as protests were staged worldwide in solidarity with Al Jazeera journalists, including an Australian, whose jailing has sparked outrage.

The United States is leading calls for President Abdul Fattah Al Sissi to pardon the journalists convicted of aiding the blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood movement and “spreading false news”.

A Cairo court sentenced award-winning Australian journalist Peter Greste and Egyptian-Canadian Mohammad Fadel Fahmy to seven years in jail on Monday, while producer Baher Mohammad was handed 10 years.

Eleven of 20 defendants who stood trial were giving 10-year sentences in absentia, including one Dutch journalist and two British journalists. Those sentenced can appeal before the court of cassation.
Al Sissi, the ex-army chief who led Mursi’s ouster before being elected president in May, said the authorities “will not interfere in judicial matters”.

“We have to respect judiciary rulings, and not comment them even if others don’t understand them,” he said in a televised speech.

Al Sissi’s comments came a day after the White House urged the Egyptian authorities to pardon the journalists.

But a presidency official told AFP Sisi cannot legally do so until a final court ruling after any appeals.

Monday’s ruling sparked an international outcry, with US Secretary of State John Kerry denouncing “a chilling and draconian sentence”.

Greste’s shattered parents vowed to keep fighting for press freedom as Australia urged Al Sissi to issue a pardon.

“This is a very dark time not only for our family, but for journalism generally,” his father Juris said in Brisbane. “The campaign for media freedom and free speech must never end. Journalism is not a crime.”

Al Jazeera, whose journalists had been working in Cairo without official accreditation, condemned the verdict as “unjust”.

Journalists around the world demonstrated on Tuesday in solidarity with those jailed, including staff at the London headquarters of the BBC, Greste’s former employer, and reporters at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong.

“The verdict is unjust, the case is unfounded,” BBC news director James Harding told the gathering, before a one-minute silent protest was observed exactly 24 hours after the sentencing.

France on Tuesday joined Britain and the Netherlands in summoning the Egyptian ambassadors, after UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said she was “shocked and alarmed” by the ruling.

Amnesty International also spoke of a “dark day for media freedom in Egypt”, and Human Rights Watch said the verdict showed “how Egypt’s judges have been caught up in the anti-Muslim Brotherhood hysteria fostered by President Al Sissi”.

But reactions remained limited to verbal objections, as no Western capital can afford severing ties with Egypt, the first Arab country to have signed a peace treaty with Israel and a strategic US ally in the Middle East.

A day before the ruling, US officials announced that $572 million (Dh2.1 billion) in aid, frozen since October, had been released to Egypt after a green light from Congress.–AFP

Big Story

16-27

By Ramzy Baroud

Western wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not the exclusive harbinger of Muslim youths’ anger, humiliation and the current violence under way in Syria, Iraq and other Muslim countries. The wars were the catalyst.

Ayoung man called on me, “brother, brother,” as I hurriedly left a lecture hall in some community center in Durban, South Africa. This happened at the height of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, when all efforts at stopping the ferocious US-western military drive against these two countries terribly failed.

The young man was dressed in traditional Afghani Pashtun attire and accompanied by a friend of his. With palpable nervousness, he asked a question that seemed completely extraneous to my lecture on the use of people’s history to understand protracted historical phenomena using Palestine as a model.

“Brother, do you believe that there is hope for the Muslim Ummah?” He inquired about the future of a nation, which he believed we both indisputably belonged to, and anxiously awaited as if my answer carried any weight at all and would put his evident worries at ease.

Perhaps more startling than his question is that I was not surprised. His is an intergenerational question that Muslim youths have been asking even before the decline and final collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the last standing Caliphate, by the end of the World War I.

Despite major historical tumults, the Caliphate had remained in consistent existence since the Rashidun Caliphs (the “rightly guided” Caliphs) starting with Abu Bakr in 632 CE, following the death of Prophet Muhammad (s).

The young man’s questions summoned so much history and a multitude of meanings. Few western historians and “experts” (especially those who attempted to understand Islam for the sake of applying their knowledge for political and military purposes) can possibly fathom the emotional weight of that question.

“Ummah” in the young man’s question doesn’t exactly mean “nation” in the relatively modern nationalistic sense. Muslims are not a race, but come from all races; they don’t share a skin color, or a lifestyle per se, or a common language even if Arabic is the original language of the Holy Qur’an.

Ummah is a “nation” that is predicated on a set of ageless moral values, originated in the Qur’an, epitomized through the teachings and legacy (Sunnah) of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and guided by Ijtihad “diligence” — explained as the independent reasoning — of Muslim scholars based on the Qur’an and Sunnah.

Naturally, the breakdown of Caliphate created a crisis with too many dimensions. There was the geographic breakdown of the Muslim Ummah, which despite the cultural and linguistic uniqueness of the various groups of that “nation,” the Ummah always possessed overriding value-based political and societal frameworks. Based on that old, but constantly revived legacy (thus “Ijtihad”), Muslims possessed their own equivalence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, civil codes and much more starting nearly 14 centuries ago.

What was more consequential than the geographic breakdown of the Ummah was the collapse of the very fabric of society, the disintegration of the laws that governed every individual or collective relationship, every commercial transaction, rules regarding the environment, charity, the law of war, and so on.

Another dissolution also took place: That of the authentic and organic moral values which allowed the Ummah to persist as many empires failed and flourish while others decayed. The organic, self-propelled system was replaced by alternatives that have all deteriorated to the very last one.

And that is where the roots of the “angry Muslim” began. The Ummah continues to live as an ideal, which transcends time and place. It persists despite the fact that the last century had taken an incredible toll on all Muslim countries, without exception.

Even the success of many countries to gain their independence from the very colonial powers that brought the Caliphate down didn’t in any way tackle the original crisis of the once predominant, all-encompassing Muslim Ummah. Colonized Muslim societies eventually adopted the rules and laws of its former colonizers and continued to vacillate within their sphere of influence.

Post-independence Muslim countries were a hideous mix of tribalism and cronyism, with a self-serving interpretation of Islam and western laws and civil codes that were all tailored so very carefully to ensure the survival of an utterly corrupt status quo; where local rulers ensure supremacy over defeated, disoriented collectives and western powers sustain their interests of by all means necessary.
Expectedly, such a status quo couldn’t possibly be sustained. A strong and cohesive civil society had no chance of survival under oppressive regimes and with the lack of education or opportunity, or both, generations of Muslims endured in utter despair.

As an escape from their immediate woes, many Muslims sought inspiration elsewhere. They saw in Palestine a rally cry, for the ongoing resistance to foreign occupation there was a symbolic indication of a collective pulse.

The wide support that Hezbollah (a Shiite group) received among Sunni Muslims for its resistance to Israel was an indication that sectarian divides dwarfed when compared to the need for the Muslim Ummah to regroup around principles such as justice, thus reclaiming even if an iota of its past glory.

But it was the US-led western invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that drew the battle lines like never before.

When Baghdad fell in April 2003, and as American soldiers so conceitedly drowned the once capital of the Abbasid Caliphate with their flags, many Muslims felt that their Ummah had reached the lowest depths of humiliation. And while Iraqi men and women were being tortured, raped and filmed dead or naked by smirking US soldiers in Baghdad’s prisons, a whole new nation of angry Muslim youths was on the rise.

Western wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not the exclusive harbinger of Muslim youths’ anger, humiliation and the current violence under way in Syria, Iraq and other Muslim countries. The wars were the catalyst.

Picture a group of “foreign jihadists” as they are called, sharing a meal between battles somewhere near northern Iraq and imagine what they possibly have in common: An Iraqi tortured in Bucca, a Lebanese who fought the Israelis in south Lebanon, a Syrian whose family had been killed in Aleppo and so on.

But it is not only a Middle Eastern question. The alienation and constant targeting of French and British Muslim immigrants, their mosques, their cultures, languages, their very identity, when coupled with the plight of Muslims everywhere could too have its own violent manifestation as well.

British Prime Minister David Cameron is worried about the threat to the national security of his country as a result of the ongoing strife in Iraq, instigated by territorial gains of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). He doesn’t seem to understand or care to understand his country’s role in the violence.

US President Barack Obama continues to preach from the White House about violence and the moral responsibility of his country as if the destructive and leading role played by the Washington in the Middle East is completely removed from the state of hopelessness and humiliation felt by a generation of Muslim youth. It is as if war, foreign occupation and the systematic destruction of an entire civilization — still referred to by many Muslims as an “Ummah” — will come at no price, aside from fluctuating oil prices.

Who are these jihadists? Many continue to ask and persistently attempt to offer answers. CIA agents? Terrorist groups? Misguided youths ushered in by an Iranian conspiracy to justify its appetite for regional hegemony? Foreign jihadists fighting against the Assad regime in Syria? Or perhaps with the Assad regime against his opposition? Conspiracy theories thrive in time of great mysteries.

However, the alienated “angry” Muslim youth is hardly a mystery, but a fully comprehensible historical inevitability. For many of them, even if they insist otherwise, the Ummah and Caliphate is more of incorporeal spaces than actual geographical boundaries. It is an escape to history, from poverty, alienation, oppression and foreign occupations. To understand that is to truly tackle the roots of violence. Ignoring it cannot possibly be an option.

16-27

Dr. Faisal Ahmad will join Princeton University as an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science. He has been a postdoctoral fellow since 2011 at the Oxford University. He was a postdoc at Princeton in 2010-11. A scholar of political science and international relations, Ahmed holds a B.A. from Northwestern and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He had also  spent a few years as an economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

16-27

By Tom Engelhardt

Lost dreams, lost armies, jihadi states, and the arc of Instability across a sensitive region

US Army Spc. Justin Towe scans his area while on a mission with Iraqi army soldiers from 1st Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 4th Iraqi Army Division in Al Muradia village, Iraq, March, 13, 2007. US Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Andy Dunaway

As Iraq was unraveling last week and the possible outlines of the first jihadist state in modern history were coming into view, I remembered this nugget from the summer of 2002.  At the time, journalist Ron Suskind had a meeting with “a senior advisor” to President George W. Bush (later identified as Karl Rove).  Here’s how he described part of their conversation:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.  ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued.  ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

As events unfold increasingly chaotically across the region that officials of the Bush years liked to call the Greater Middle East, consider the eerie accuracy of that statement.  The president, his vice president Dick Cheney, his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, among others, were indeed “history’s actors.”  They did create “new realities” and, just as Rove suggested, the rest of us are now left to “study” what they did.

And oh, what they did!  Their geopolitical dreams couldn’t have been grander or more global.  (Let’s avoid the word “megalomaniacal.”)  They expected to pacify the Greater Middle East,garrison Iraq for generations, make Syria and Iran bow down before American power, “drain” the global “swamp” of terrorists, and create a global Pax Americana based on a military so dominant that no other country or bloc of countries would ever challenge it.

It was quite a dream and none of it, not one smidgen, came true.  Just as Rove suggested they would — just as in the summer of 2002, he already knew they would — they acted to create a world in their image, a world they imagined controlling like no imperial power in history.  Using that unchallengeable military, they launched an invasion that blew a hole through the oil heartlands of the Middle East.  They took a major capital, Baghdad, while “decapitating” (as the phrase then went) the regime that was running Iraq and had, in a particularly brutal fashion, kept the lid on internecine tensions.

They lacked nothing when it came to confidence.  Among the first moves of L. Paul Bremer III, the proconsul they appointed to run their occupation, was an order demobilizing Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s 350,000-man army and the rest of his military as well.  Their plan: to replace it with a lightly armed border protection force — initially of 12,000 troops and in the end perhaps 40,000 – armed and trained by Washington.  Given their vision of the world, it made total sense.  Why would Iraq need more than that with the U.S. military hanging around for, well, ever, on a series of permanent bases the Pentagon’s contractors were building?  What dangers could there be in the neighborhood with that kind of force on hand?  Soon enough, it became clear that what they had really done was turn the Iraqi officer corps and most of the country’s troops out onto unemployment lines, creating the basis for a militarily skilled Sunni insurgency.  A brilliant start!

Note that these days the news is filled with commentary on the lack of a functional Iraqi air force.  That’s why, in recent months, Prime Minister Maliki has been calling on the Obama administration to send American air power back into the breach.  Saddam Hussein did have an air force.  Once it had been one of the biggest in the Middle East.  The Bush administration, however, came to the conclusion that the new Iraqi military would have no need for fighter planes, helicopters, or much of anything else, not when the U.S. Air Force would be in the neighborhood on bases like Balad in Central Iraq.  Who needed two air forces?

Be Careful What You Wish For

It was all to be a kind of war-fighting miracle. The American invaders would be greeted as liberators, the mission quickly accomplished, and “major combat operations” ended in a flash — as George Bush so infamously announced on May 1, 2003, after his Top Gun landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln.  No less miraculous was the fact that it would essentially be a freebie.  After all, as undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz pointed out at the time, Iraq “floats on a sea of oil,” which meant that a “liberated” country could cover all “reconstruction” costs without blinking.

The Busheviks entered Iraq with a powerful sense that they were building an American protectorate.  So why wouldn’t it be a snap to carry out their ambitious plans to privatize the Iraqi economy, dismantle the country’s vast public sector (throwing another army of employees out of work), and bring in crony corporations to help run the country and giant oil companies to rev up the energy economy, lagging from years of sanctions and ill-repair?  In the end, Washington’s Iraq would — so they believed — pump enough crude out of one of the greatest fossil fuel reserves on the planet to sink OPEC, leaving American power free to float to ever greater heights on that sea of oil.  As the occupying authority, with a hubris stunning to behold, they issued “orders” that read as if they had been written by officials from some nineteenth-century imperial power.

In short, this was one for the history books. And not a thing – nothing – worked out as planned.  You could almost say that whatever it was they dreamed, the opposite invariably occurred.  For those of us in the reality-based community, for instance, it’s long been apparent that their war and occupation would cost the U.S., literally and figuratively, an arm and a leg (and that the costs to Iraqis would prove beyond calculating).  More than two trillion dollars later — without figuring in astronomical post-war costs still to come — Iraq is a catastrophe.

And $25 billion later, the last vestige of American Iraq, the security forces that, in the end, Washington built up to massive proportions, seem to be in a state of dissolution.  Just over a week ago, faced with the advance of a reported 800-1,300 militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the opposition of tribal militias and local populations, close to 50,000army officers and troops abandoned their American weaponry to Sunni insurgents and foreign jihadis, shed their uniforms by various roadsides, and fled.  As a result, significant parts of Iraq, including Mosul, its second largest city, fell into the hands of Sunni insurgents, some of a Saddamist coloration, and a small army of jihadis evidently funded by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, both U.S. allies.

The arrogance of those occupation years should still take anyone’s breath away. Bush and his top officials remade reality on an almost unimaginable scale and, as we study the region today, the results bear no relation to the world they imagined creating.  None whatsoever.  On the other hand, there were two dreams they had that, after a fashion, did come into existence.

Many Americans still remember the Bush administration’s bogus pre-invasion claims – complete with visions of mushroom clouds rising over American cities — that Saddam Hussein had a thriving nuclear program in Iraq.  But who remembers that, as part of the justification for the invasion it had decided would be its destiny, the administration alsoclaimed a “mature and symbiotic” relationship between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaeda?  In other words, the invasion was to be justified in some fashion as a response to the attacks of 9/11 (which Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with).  Who remembers that, the year after American troops took Baghdad, evidence of the nuclear program having gone down the toilet, Vice President Dick Cheney, backed by George W. Bush, doubled down on the al-Qaeda claim?

“There clearly was a relationship. It’s been testified to,” said the vice president on CNBC in June 2004. “The evidence is overwhelming.  It goes back to the early ’90s. It involves a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts with Osama bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials.” Based on cherry-picked intelligence, such claims proved fraudulent, too, or as David Kay, the man assigned by the administration to hunt down that missing weaponry of mass destruction and those al-Qaeda links, put it politely, “evidence free.”  By then, however, 57% of Americans had been convinced that there was indeed some significant relationship between Saddam’s Iraq and al-Qaeda, and 20% believed that Saddam was linked directly to the 9/11 attacks.

Be careful, as they say, what you wish for.  More than a decade after its invasion and occupation, after Cheney made those fervent claims, no administration would have the slightest problem linking al-Qaeda to Iraq (or Syria, Yemen, or a number of other countries).  A decade later, the evidence is in.  Sunni Iraq, along with areas of neighboring Syria, one of the countries that was supposed to bow down before American might, now houses a rudimentary jihadist state, a creature birthed into the world in significant part thanks to the dreams and fantasies of the visionaries of the Bush administration.  Across the Greater Middle East, jihadism and al-Qaeda wannabes of every sort are on the rise, while terror groups are destabilizing regions from Pakistan to northern Africa.

Creating an Arc of Instability

In the period before and after the invasion of Iraq, top Bush officials and their neocon supporters spoke with relish about taming an area stretching from northern Africa through the Middle East and deep into Central Asia that they termed an “arc of instability.”  In a February 2006 address to the American Legion focused on his Global War on Terror, for instance, President Bush typically said, “Slowly but surely, we’re helping to transform the broader Middle East from an arc of instability into an arc of freedom. And as freedom reaches more people in this vital region, we’ll have new allies in the war on terror, and new partners in the cause of moderation in the Muslim world and in the cause of peace.”

By then that “arc,” which in the period before 9/11 had been reasonably stable, was alreadyaflame.  Today, it is ablaze.  Almost 13 years after the launching of the Global War on Terror and the first bombing runs in Afghanistan, 11 years after a global antiwar protest went unheard and the invasion of Iraq was launched, and three years after Americans gathered in front of the White House to cheer the death of Osama bin Laden, that arc has been destabilized in a stunning way.

As things recently went from bad to worse in Iraq, jihadist militants in Pakistan attackedKarachi International Airport, an assault that stunned the country and suggested that the reach of the Pakistani Taliban was growing.  At the same time, after a six-month pause, the Obama administration resumed its CIA drone assassination campaign in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, a deeply unpopular program that has been a significant destabilizing factor in its own right.  Meanwhile, in Yemen, where the U.S. has for years been conducting a special operations and drone war against a growing al-Qaeda wannabe outfit, unknown militantsknocked out the electricity in Sanaa, the capital, for days.  The Syrian bloodbath, of course, continues with estimates of 160,000 or more deaths in that multi-sided conflict, while in Libya, now an essentially ungovernable and chaotic land of jihadist and other militias and ambitious generals, tensions and fighting increased.

Think of this as George W. Bush’s nightmare and Osama bin Laden’s wet dream.  On September 11, 2001, a relatively small, modestly funded organization with a knack for planning terror surprises every couple of years had a remarkable stroke of televised luck.  From those falling towers, everything followed, thanks in large part to the acts of the fundamentalists of the Bush administration, whose top officials thought they had spotted their main chance, geopolitically speaking, in the carnage of the moment.

Almost 13 years later, there is a jihadist proto-state, a fantasy caliphate, in the heart of the Middle East.  Now a dime a dozen in the region, jihadists of an al-Qaedan bent are armed to the teeth with cast-off American weaponry.  In northern Africa, other jihadists are using weaponry from the former arsenals of Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, looted in the aftermath of President Obama’s can’t-miss 2011 intervention in that country.  The jihadists of ISIS now have hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from the Mosul branch of the Iraqi central bank for funding and have advanced toward Baghdad.  Even Osama bin Laden might not have assumed things would go quite so swimmingly.

The Guns of Folly

In the wake of Mosul’s fall, ISIS advanced even more rapidly than the American army heading for Baghdad in the spring of 2003.  In some Sunni-dominated cities and towns, the takeovers were remarkably bloodless.  In Baiji, with a power plant that supplies electricity to Baghdad and Iraq’s largest oil refinery (now under attack), the insurgents reportedly called the police and asked them to leave town — and they complied.  In Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq that the Kurds have long claimed as the natural capital for an independent Kurdistan, Iraqi troops quietly abandoned their weaponry and uniforms and left town, while armed Kurdish forces moved in, undoubtedly permanently.

All in all, it’s been a debacle the likes of which we’ve seen only twice in our history.  In China, when in 1949 Chiang Kai-shek’s largely American armed and trained military disintegrated before the insurgent forces of Communist leader Mao Zedong and a quarter-century later, when a purely American military creation, the South Vietnamese army, collapsed in the face of an offensive by North Vietnamese troops and local rebel forces.  In each case, the resulting defeat was psychologically unnerving in the United States and led to bitter, exceedingly strange, and long-lasting debates about who “lost” China and who “lost” Vietnam.

Early signs of an equally bizarre debate over the “loss” of Iraq are already appearing here.  This should surprise no one, as the only thing left to pass around is blame.  Senator John McCain, a fervent supporter of the 2003 invasion and occupation, launched the most recent round of the blame game. He pinned fault for the onrushing events on the Obama administration’s decision to pull U.S. forces out of Iraq in 2011 (thanks to an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration) without leaving a significant presence behind.  Citing himself as if he were someone else, he said, “Lindsey Graham and John McCain were right.  Our failure to leave forces in Iraq is why Senator Graham and I predicted this would happen.”

Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri was typical of the Republican politicians who began promoting this line.  “It’s a desperate situation,” he said. “It’s moving quickly. It appears to me that the chickens are coming home to roost for our policy of not leaving anybody there to be a stabilizing force.”  In a similar blast, the Wall Street Journal editorial page wrote, “In withdrawing from Iraq in toto, Mr. Obama put his desire to have a talking point for his re-election campaign above America’s strategic interests. Now we and the world are facing this reality: A civil war in Iraq and the birth of a terrorist haven that has the confidence, and is fast acquiring the means, to raise a banner for a new generation of jihadists, both in Iraq and beyond.”

And so it goes.  In this case, however, none of it may matter much.  In a country visibly sick of our wars of this century in which even many elite figures find further intervention in Iraq distasteful, “Who lost Iraq?” may never gain the sort of traction the other two “lost” debates did.

In the meantime, however, the world of the Middle East is being turned upside down.  Take the example of Iran.  Once upon a time, Iraq was thought to be just a way station.  As neocons of that moment liked to quip, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad.  Real men want to go to Tehran.”  As it happened, the neighborhood around Baghdad quickly grew so ugly and the Bush administration soon found itself so bogged down in unwinnable minority insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan that it never put the U.S. military on that road to Tehran.

Today, the Iranians, it seems, are riding to Washington’s rescue in Iraq.  It’s already rumoredthat they may be sending, or considering sending, elements of the Republican Guard in to protect Baghdad.  As a result, the U.S. finds itself in a tacit alliance with Iran in Iraq, while still in opposition to it in Syria.  At the same time, it’s still allied with Saudi Arabia in Syria against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, while facing the disastrous fruits of Saudi funding of the brutal newborn jihadi state at least temporarily coming into existence in the Sunni borderlands of Iraq and Syria.

The Middle Eastern system as once known has, with the singular exception of Israel, largely evaporated and where it was, there is now increasingly chaos.  In all likelihood, it will only get worse.  “We” may not have “lost” Iraq, but can there be any question that Washington lost in Iraq?  American goals in the region went down in flames in a fashion so spectacular, so ignominious, that today nothing is left of them.  To the question, “Who won Iraq?” there may be no answer at all, or perhaps just the grim response: no one.  In the end, Iraqis will surely be the losers, big time, as Syrians are just across the now nonexistent border between what until recently were two countries.

As for the future Washington has on offer, the Obama administration is, it seems, considering responding to the crisis in Iraq in the only way it knows how: with bombs, cruise missiles, and drones.  The geopolitical dreams of the Bush era are buried somewhere deep in the rubble of Iraq, while the present White House has neither visionaries nor global dreams, grandiose or otherwise.  There are only managers and bureaucrats desperately trying to handle an uncooperative planet.  The question that remains is: Will they or won’t they send American air power back into Iraq?  Will they or won’t they, that is, loose the guns of folly and so quite predictably destabilize a terrible situation further?

In the meantime, a small footnote to future history: given what we’ve just seen, it might be worth taking with a grain of salt the news out of Afghanistan about the increasingly impressive abilities of the Afghan security forces, another gigantic crew set up, funded, trained, and armed by the U.S. military (and associated private contractors).  After all, haven’t we heard that somewhere before?

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. Previous books include: The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s

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Earth’s rotation is the rotation of the solid Earth around its own axis. The Earth rotates from the west towards the east. As viewed from the North Star or polestar Polaris, the Earth turns counter-clockwise.

The North Pole, also known as the Geographic North Pole or Terrestrial North Pole, is the point in the Northern Hemisphere where the Earth’s axis of rotation meets its surface. This point is distinct from the Earth’s North Magnetic Pole. The South Pole is the other point where the Earth’s axis of rotation intersects its surface, in Antarctica.

The Earth rotates once in about 24 hours with respect to the sun and once every 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds with respect to the stars (see below). Earth’s rotation is slowing slightly with time; thus, a day was shorter in the past. This is due to the tidal effects the Moon has on Earth’s rotation. Atomic clocks show that a modern day is longer by about 1.7 milliseconds than a century ago, slowly increasing the rate at which UTC is adjusted by leap seconds
Among the ancient Greeks, several of the Pythagorean school believed in the rotation of the earth rather than the apparent diurnal rotation of the heavens. The first was Philolaus (470-385 BCE) though his system was complicated, including a counter-earth rotating daily about a central fire.

A more conventional picture was that supported by Hicetas, Heraclides and Ecphantus in the fourth century BCE who assumed that the earth rotated but did not suggest that the earth revolved about the sun. In the third century, Aristarchus of Samos suggested the sun’s central place.

However, Aristotle in the fourth century criticized the ideas of Philolaus as being based on theory rather than observation. He established the idea of a sphere of fixed stars that rotated about the earth. This was accepted by most of those who came after, in particular Claudius Ptolemy (2nd century CE), who thought the earth would be devastated by gales if it rotated.

In 499 CE, the Indian astronomer Aryabhata wrote that the spherical earth rotates about its axis daily, and that the apparent movement of the stars is a relative motion caused by the rotation of the earth. He provided the following analogy: “Just as a man in a boat going in one direction sees the stationary things on the bank as moving in the opposite direction, in the same way to a man at Lanka the fixed stars appear to be going westward.”

In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas accepted Aristotle’s view and so, reluctantly, did John Buridan[9] and Nicole Oresme[10] in the fourteenth century. Not until Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543 adopted a heliocentric world system did the earth’s rotation begin to be established. Copernicus pointed out that if the movement of the earth is violent, then the movement of the stars must be very much more so. He acknowledged the contribution of the Pythagoreans and pointed to examples of relative motion. For Copernicus this was the first step in establishing the simpler pattern of planets circling a central sun.

This was not accepted immediately even by many astronomers due to the widespread conformance to Aristotle and the Bible. Tycho Brahe, who produced accurate observations on which Kepler based his laws, used Copernicus’s work as the basis of a system assuming a stationary earth. In 1600, William Gilbert strongly supported the earth’s rotation in his treatise on the earth’s magnetism[12] and thereby influenced many of his contemporaries. Those like Gilbert who did not openly support or reject the motion of the earth about the sun are often called “semi-Copernicans”.[14] A century after Copernicus, Riccioli disputed the model of a rotating earth due to the lack of then-observable eastward deflections in falling bodies; such deflections would later be called the Coriolis effect. However, the contributions of Kepler, Galileo and Newton gathered support for the theory of the rotation of the Earth.

The earth’s rotation implies that the equator bulges and the poles are flattened. In his Principia, Newton predicted this flattening would occur in the ratio of 1:230, and pointed to the 1673 pendulum measurements by Richer as corroboration of the change in gravity.[16] But initial measurements of meridian lengths by Picard and Cassini at the end of the 17th century suggested the opposite. However measurements by Maupertuis and the French Geodetic Mission in the 1730s established the flattening, thus confirming both Newton and the Copernican position.

In the Earth’s rotating frame of reference, a freely moving body follows an apparent path that deviates from the one it would follow in a fixed frame of reference. Because of this Coriolis effect, falling bodies veer slightly eastward from the vertical plumb line below their point of release, and projectiles veer right in the northern hemisphere (and left in the southern) from the direction in which they are shot. The Coriolis effect is mainly observable at a meteorological scale, where it is responsible for the differing rotation direction of cyclones in the northern and southern hemispheres.

Hooke, following a 1679 suggestion from Newton, tried unsuccessfully to verify the predicted eastward deviation of a body dropped from a height of 8.2 meters, but definitive results were only obtained later, in the late 18th and early 19th century, by Giovanni Battista Guglielmini in Bologna, Johann Friedrich Benzenberg in Hamburg and Ferdinand Reich in Freiberg, using taller towers and carefully released weights.[n 1] A ball dropped from a height of 158.5 m (520 ft) departed by 27.4 mm (1.08 in) from the vertical compared with a calculated value of 28.1 mm (1.11 in).

The most celebrated test of Earth’s rotation is the Foucault pendulum first built by physicist Léon Foucault in 1851, which consisted of a lead-filled brass sphere suspended 67 m from the top of the Panthéon in Paris. Because of the Earth’s rotation under the swinging pendulum the pendulum’s plane of oscillation appears to rotate at a rate depending on latitude. At the latitude of Paris the predicted and observed shift was about 11 degrees clockwise per hour. Foucault pendulums now swing in museums around the world.

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By Mitchell Shamsud-Din

Dr. Donald Smith, former president of the National Alliance of Black School Educators (NABSE), former teacher at Wendell Phillips High School in Chicago and founder of the Northeastern University Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies, has informed The Black Star Project that Dr. Abdulalim A. Shabazz, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Grambling, a valued teacher, mentor, producer of of Black mathematicians and a mathematical genius, is recovering from illiness at Northern Louisiana Medical Center.

Please join the circle of callers concerned about the welfare of our distinguished African-centered mathematics scholar, Dr. Shabazz. It is important that we let Northern Louisiana Medical Center know that the many colleagues, friends, students and supporters of Dr. Shabazz are concerned about his health and recovery.

Please call the Northern Louisiana Medical Center at 318-254-2100 and let them know that the community loves and reveres Dr. Shabazz, and that we want the best medical care possible for Dr. Shabazz.

About Dr. Shabazz (from Wikipedia)

Abdulalim A. Shabazz (born May 22, 1927) is an African American Professor of Mathematics. He received the National Association of Mathematicians Distinguished Service Award for his years of mentoring and teaching excellence. President of the United States Bill Clinton awarded Shabazz with a National Mentor award in September 2000.

Shabazz was born in Bessemer, Alabama. In 1949, he earned a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry and mathematics from Lincoln University. Two years later he earned a Master of Science in Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in mathematics and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1955 in mathematical analysis from Cornell University. The subject of his doctoral dissertation was “The Distribution of Eigenvalues of the Equation: Integral of A(S-T) PHI (T) with Respect to T Between Lower Limit -A and Upper Limit A=Rho (Integral of B(S-T))”.

Shabazz was appointed an Assistant Professor of Mathematics by Tuskegee Institute in 1956. From 1957 until 1963, he served as chairman and Associate Professor of Mathematics at Clark Atlanta University.

Shabazz announced in 1961 that he was a member of the Nation of Islam (later he converted to Islam).

From 1975 until 1986, Shabazz taught in Chicago, Detroit, and in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. In 1986, Shabazz came back to Clark Atlanta, where he served as chair from 1990 until 1995. From 1998 until 2000, Shabazz was Chairman of the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Lincoln University (Pennsylvania). He is currently a professor and endowed chair in mathematics at Grambling State University.

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