They're Everywhere :)

They're everywhere, rocky planets abound thanks to the newest treasure trove of data garnered by Kepler, the little telescope that can.

Rocky planets are probably a whole lot more common in our galaxy than astronomers previously believed — according to the latest release of Kepler Space Telescope data last week — a scenario that enhances the prospects for extraterrestrial life in nearby solar systems. 

Kepler's final tally of exoplanets in the Cygnus constellation — the most comprehensive and detailed catalogue of exoplanets to date — indicates 4,034 possible planets, of which 50 are Earth-sized and reside in the habitable zone of their stars. The set includes KOI 7711 (short for Kepler 'object of interest'), which is just 30 percent larger than Earth and roughly the same distance from its star as the Earth is to the sun, meaning it receives a similar amount of energy. 

What are the chances of life in the universe? To yours truly, 100% without question.

New planet candidates from the eighth Kepler planet candidate catalog show numerous terrestrial worlds that are near the size of Earth and within the habitable zone of their stars. The dark green span represents an optimistic estimate for habitable zone, while the brighter green a more conservative estimate. Blue circles are confirmed exoplanets, while yellow circles are new planet candidates that require follow-up observations. Credit: Wendy Stenzel/NASA/Ames Research Center

Kepler has discovered a remarkable quantity of exoplanets (yellow dots) and significantly advanced the edge of the unexplored "frontier." Rocky planets now account for a significant number of exoplanet discoveries. Credit: Natalie Batalha/Wendy Stenzel/NASA/Ames Research Center

Any questions? :)

Jupiter yet again

The Enablers

These are the guys that enable Trump to survive as POTUS as described in the excellent Hive piece titled A Definitive Guide to the G.O.P. Insiders Enabling Donald Trump. In reading Sarah Ellison's article, one sees that the big six are bottom feeders of the 1st order.

Blame for the ongoing destruction wrought by the Trump administration will always attach to Donald Trump. But Trump cannot help himself. He is a pathogen, doing what pathogens do, and as surprised as anyone to have found himself replicating in the nation’s bloodstream. Equal blame will attach to a small group of experienced and seemingly rational politicians who knew exactly what Trump was like; who had cause to loathe and distrust him; who understood firsthand that he knew nothing about government and did not care to know anything; who could see clearly that he was dangerous, brutal, and corrupt; and who nonetheless decided, after occasional protests, to help him achieve and hold power. These are people who have been repeatedly belittled and mocked by Trump, who have sometimes been forced to voice their disgust at his words and actions, and who—for reasons that range from ambition and fear to denial and moral blindness—not only have declined to stand in his way but continue to prop him up. One or more of them may ultimately decide to defy him, but nothing will absolve them of the damage already done.

Postscript...

What about those of us who knew better, we who knew the words were lies and worse than lies? Why did we sit silent? Why did we take part? Because we loved our country. What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights? What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights? It is only a passing phase.”

These words, spoken by Ernst Janning in Judgment at Nuremberg, Abby Mann’s drama about the war-crimes tribunals that took place in Germany in the late 1940s, reflect horrors far greater than those we face today. Nevertheless, coming from Janning, a distinguished jurist and patriot and a man who knew better but who turned a blind eye to what was going on around him, they have a certain relevance. And they must surely echo the private thoughts of Republican mandarins who stand by while their leader ravages the institutions and tenets that keep American democracy in place.

Truer words never spoken.

Why?

QC - For real?

Photo: INRS University

Scientists have built a microchip that can generate two entangled qudits each with 10 states, for 100 dimensions total, more than what six entangled qubits could generate.

Quantum computing, the holy grail of true parallel processing of the highest order, may finally be at hand if this innovative approach of bypassing the inherent fragility of qubits rings true.

Instead of creating quantum computers based on qubits that can each adopt only two possible options, scientists have now developed a microchip that can generate “qudits” that can each assume 10 or more states, potentially opening up a new way to creating incredibly powerful quantum computers, a new study finds.

Classical computers switch transistors either on or off to symbolize data as ones and zeroes. In contrast, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits that, because of the bizarre nature of quantum physics, can be in a state of superposition where they simultaneously act as both 1 and 0.

The superpositions that qubits can adopt let them each help perform two calculations at once. If two qubits are quantum-mechanically linked, or entangled, they can help perform four calculations simultaneously; three qubits, eight calculations; and so on. As a result, a quantum computer with 300 qubits could perform more calculations in an instant than there are atoms in the known universe, solving certain problems much faster than classical computers. However, superpositions are extraordinarily fragile, making it difficult to work with multiple qubits.

2 vs 6 using existing tech to make it happen, awesome. BRT has talked copiously about the potential of QC. Maybe this approach will make it a reality. If so, the Matrix looms.

Image: Nature

Researchers used the setup pictured above to create, manipulate, and detect qudits. The experiment starts when a laser fires pulses of light into a micro-ring resonator, which in turn emits entangled pairs of photons. Because the ring has multiple resonances, the photons have optical spectrums with a set of evenly spaced frequencies (red and blue peaks), a process known as spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM). The researchers were able to use each of the frequencies to encode information, which means the photons act as qudits. Each qudit is in a superposition of 10 possible states, extending the usual binary alphabet (0 and 1) of quantum bits. The researchers also showed they could perform basic gate operations on the qudits using optical filters and modulators, and then detect the results using single-photon counters.

2049 looks to be a keeper

If Blade Runner 2049 stays true to this featurette, it could become a true SF classic of the 1st order.

Nature never disappoints :)

A Little Touch of Yellow

Hogweed CU.

Honeybee Blue

Water Lines

The Big 5

Moonlighting

Wasps are intense. Equipped with powerful toxins, they are most formidable and manipulative, especially when it comes to certain solitary species' insidious ways of raising their young by paralyzing and/or altering the host's behavior to enable the young to eat the host alive with little undo effort.

“I’ve been working on parasitoid wasps for a very long time,” remarked Jack Werren, a professor of biology at the University of Rochester. His fascination with these animals centers on their specialized venoms, which allow the wasps to be masterful physiological puppeteers. Parasitoid wasps are an enormous group of between 100,00 and 600,000 species that are parasitic when they are larvae, living on or frequently inside a host they eat alive. As free-living adults, they must find and subdue an appropriate creature to play host to their young, which they do with the aid of behavior-altering venoms. The emerald cockroach wasp, for example, transforms its formidable targets — cockroaches many times its size — into complacent meals for the wasps’ hungry offspring by manipulating the animals’ brain chemistry. The Glyptapanteles wasp goes even further, turning its caterpillar offerings into zombie bodyguards that protect the young wasps that have just eaten their way out of the caterpillars’ tissues. Another wasp, Reclinervellus nielseni, forces its arachnid victims to transform their webs into sturdy nests that will continue to protect the wasp larvae after the spiders expire.

A social wasp, Vespula germanica

Nature never ceases to amaze ...

The weird & the wonderful

Quantum Mechanics is based on probabilities and duality whereby a subatomic particle can be a wave or a particle depending on how said entity interacts with its environment, including on whether said entity is measured or not because measuring it (which requires energy) determines whether it's a particle or a wave at the time it's being measured.

Our general logic would assume that the object is either wave-like or particle-like by its very nature, and our measurements will have nothing to do with the answer. But quantum theory predicts that the result all depends on how the object is measured at the end of its journey. And that's exactly what a team from the Australian National University has now found.

"It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it," lead researcher and physicist Andrew Truscott said in a press release.

To yours truly, the experiment is wonderful but saying reality does not really exist is misleading as the entity does exist as a duality and only by applying energy to it by the act of measurement do we assign a specific state of the entity to either being a particle or a wave. This fact has been known for a long time but this elegant experiment proves this to be true without question.

Weird & wonderful indeed. :)

Schrodinger's cat lives. 

Be careful what you wish for

The CF known as Trumpcare or the repeal of Obamacare, being hatched in secret by McConnell and company, will incur blowback in ways that truly boggle the mind. Besides screwing 23 million Americans out of insurance for HC, it's also a tax break for the rich, something that augurs not well for the millions of Trump voters & the middle class who thought this guy was going to protect Social Security, Medicare and last but not least, health care with a new and improved version that's cheaper, more efficient and able to provide coverage for all Americans without question. 

A few days ago a Republican Senate aide was asked by a reporter why the GOP leadership felt the need to keep all the discussions for the health care bill completely under wraps and he replied, “We’re not stupid.” Leading Republicans know that what they’re planning is so poisonous to the voters that if they let anyone see the monstrosity they’re constructing before the bill is hurriedly voted on and signed into law by President Donald Trump, it could well cause riots. After all, according to recent polling, only 17 percent of the American people approve of the bill as it currently stands.

The fact is that Republicans are willing to destroy the health and financial security of millions of Americans so they can give massive tax cuts to Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and others like them who are lucky enough to be vastly wealthy. This is their first real chance to enact permanent tax cuts since 1986. (This Vox article explains why that is.) Republicans have been chasing this dream a very long time. It is their white whale, so important that even the prospect of millions of people suffering and going bankrupt is not enough to make them think better of it. They are willing to hold hands, jump over a cliff and commit political suicide for it.

From this writer's perspective here's hoping blowback will be a bitch for these venial bastards who are throwing millions under the bus in order to reap the paltry amounts of money they are getting from the real owners of the country. 

What America really needs

While America focuses on never ending war to finance the MICC, America is falling apart as we speak. BRT has talked about this impending catastrophe on numerous occasions as my loyal readers know but at this point in time, nothing is happening to rectify this very serious situation. Here's a graphic take on why repairing the country's infrastructure is absolutely essential to the continued existence of this once great nation.

It’s no secret that America’s infrastructure is in dire need of repairs. Earlier this year, America received her infrastructure report card from the American Society of Civil Engineers’ and received a repulsive D+. The ASCE guesstimates the US would need to spend $4.5 trillion by 2025 on infrastructure.

Here’s the breakdown of the report card:  

• Aviation: D
• Bridges: C+
• Dams: D
• Drinking Water: D
• Energy: D+
• Hazardous Waste: D+
• Inland Waterways: D
• Levees: D
• Parks and Recreation: D+
• Ports: C+
• Rail: B
• Roads: D
• Schools: D
• Solid Waste: C+
• Transit: D-
• Wastewater: D+

With that being said, I’ve spent the entire weekend inspecting America’s infrastructure at the Port of Baltimore. At some locations, I was given special access to a behind the scenes view of America’s crumbling infrastructure that the public is not allowed to see. The reasons you’re left out of the know is because it destroys the mainstream narrative that everything is awesome. Even Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group says, “the US wasted trillions on warfare instead of investing in infrastructure”.

Stockboard Asset gets it without question. 

Here's yet another video on America's biggest problem.

Less is More ... & ...

Channeling Congress ...

Rumor has it ... the Russians did it.

Kepler yet again :)

Exoplanet numbers keep rising and Kepler's a major reason why. Enjoy. 

3D on a large scale :)

3D on a very large scale. :) https://earth.google.com/web/

95%

How little we know about the ocean is truly staggering.

In the battle for mind-share, space vs. sea is no contest.

From the epic race to reach the surface of the moon, to the well-documented trials and tribulations of SpaceX’s rocket launches, space is widely regarded as mankind’s natural next step.

For centuries, we’ve gazed at the night sky attempting to decode the messages of the cosmos, but we’ve treated the ocean as a dumping ground or as a nemesis. In the era of big data, it’s strange to note that an estimated 95% of the world’s oceans still remain unexplored.

Nature never ceases to amaze

Toons yet again

Blessed servitude

Wheel of misfortune

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. - Macbeth

Us vs. Them

The definition of insanity

The predators are winning .... this time :)

KILLER DRILLERS  Predators such as moon snails (Naticarius orientalis shown) that kill by drilling through other animals’ shells offer a rare chance to test an idea about the power of enemies.

The predator/prey arms race has been around for a very long time as seen by the chart below and by data garnered by researchers regarding, in this case, shell drillers of the carnivorous kind. 

“Predators got bigger — three words!” is Klompmaker’s bullet point for the work. Over the last 450 million years or so, drill holes have grown in average size from 0.35 millimeters to 3.25 millimeters, Klompmaker and an international team report June 16 in Science. Larger holes generally mean larger attackers, the researchers say, after looking at 556 modern drillers and the size of their attack holes.

Prey changed over millennia, too, but there’s no evidence for a shift in body size. The ratio of drill-hole size to prey size became 67 times greater over time, the researchers conclude.

It’s “the rise of the bullies,” says coauthor Michal Kowalewski of the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Nature, like money, never sleeps.

Bigger and bigger

Drill holes (example from a shell about 4 million years old from the Netherlands, left) tended to get larger in relation to the size of the attacked shell as the periods in geologic history marched by (graph, right). This trend and other ways of analyzing drill holes suggest predators outpaced their prey in body size.

Life finds a way ... always/rev II

The more we mess with livestock, the larger blowback becomes. To whit.

Eighteen months ago, a gene that confers resistance to colistin — known as an ‘antibiotic of last resort’ — emerged in bacteria from pigs in China. Since then, the resistance gene, called mcr-1, has been found around the world at an alarming rate, according to several presentations at the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, last week.

In some places, nearly 100% of farm animals carry mcr-1, and an increasing number of people do as well. The gene’s spread is one of the clearest examples of how antibiotic use on farms can lead to resistance in human infections, says Lance Price, an antibiotic researcher at George Washington University in Washington DC.

Colistin has been around since the 1950s, but was rarely used in people because it causes kidney problems. Instead, many countries use it to promote growth in livestock — a practice that seems to have selected for colistin-resistant bacteria. That’s a problem, because physicians have increasingly turned to colistin over the past decade to treat patients who don’t respond to other antibiotics.

“It’s a crappy drug and I think this is a sign of our desperation that we are so concerned about the loss of a toxic antibiotic,” says Price.

Now take this manipulation of nature a step further with increased use of pesticides, herbicides and GMOs and add to this potent mix, environmental degradation and globals warming and one sees slow motion disaster looming with initial evidence pointing to less honeybees to pollinate crops, less monarchs to spread beauty around the world and corporate ownership of our food supply not to mention rampant pollution of the world's oceans and the acceleration of global warming that is rendering researchers speechless. Mankind is at a crossroads in terms of survival, the question here is, are we going to do something about it before it's too late?

No one knows, do one? - Fats Waller

Wild Ones :)

Tiny white flowers 

Two of a kind

White flower 

Buttercup

The largest of these is 1" and all are wild. :)

A crack in the world

A Crack in an Antarctic Ice Shelf Is 8 Miles From Creating an Iceberg the Size of Delaware

Once the shelf is gone, there is no cork holding back the groundwater of the glaciers that reside on land. Comforting thought, right?

According to Dr. Rignot, the collapse of Larsen C would add only a tiny amount of water to the global sea level. Of greater concern to scientists is how the collapse of ice shelves can affect the glaciers that flow behind them, because the melting of those glaciers can cause much greater increases in sea level. Scientists see the impending Larsen C collapse as a warning that far larger amounts of ice in West Antarctica could be vulnerable.

“I think of the Larsen C as a natural laboratory that almost lets us do an experiment on an ice shelf,” said Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s effort to study the polar regions. “When it breaks, what the heck happens next?"

Houston, we have a problem.

Liquid Light

Thanks to Quantum Mechanics, we know subatomic particles, like photons, can be a particle and/or a wave depending on how said entity interacts with it's environment. In the elegant Thomas Young interference experiment, the duality of same was shown to be true by one of the most beautiful experiments done in science.

Supposing the light of any given colour to consist of undulations of a given breadth, or of a given frequency, it follows that these undulations must be liable to those effects which we have already examined in the case of the waves of water and the pulses of sound. It has been shown that two equal series of waves, proceeding from centres near each other, may be seen to destroy each other's effects at certain points, and at other points to redouble them; and the beating of two sounds has been explained from a similar interference. We are now to apply the same principles to the alternate union and extinction of colours. - Thomas Young

Now it seems liquid light can do the same thing if one has the smarts and hardware to make it happen.

In recent years, however, research has indicated that light can also behave like a liquid — flowing around objects and reconstituting on the other side. Previously, this phenomenon has only been observed under certain extreme conditions, such as laboratory chambers chilled to near absolute zero.

New research published this week in the journal Nature Physics reveals that light can behave in an even stranger "superliquid" state, in which light particles flow around objects with no friction or viscosity at all. In this state, light exhibits the dramatic effect of "frictionless flow," bending around obstacles with no ripples or swirls whatsoever. Interestingly, this effect can be observed at room temperature and ambient pressure. 

Isn't science grand? :)

Had to put this in to show why Young was a visionary to the max. 

Glass-Steagall yet again

BRT has talked often about the disastrous repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall act separating investment banks from commercial banks to insure fiscal stability, legislation that served this country well until Phil Graham and Bob Rubin axed it in 1999 under the presidency of Bill Clinton in order to "improve" efficiency and lower costs of all financial transactions conducted in America. Needless to say, the end result is rather interesting to say the least.

For 66 years the Glass-Steagall act reduced the risks in the banking system. Eight years after the act was repealed, the banking system blew up threatening the international economy. US taxpayers were forced to come up with $750 billion dollars, a sum much larger than the Pentagon’s budget, in order to bail out the banks. This huge sum was insufficient to do the job. The Federal Reserve had to step in and expand its balance sheet by $4 trillion in order to protect the solvency of banks declared “too big to fail.”

The enormous increase in the supply of dollars known as Quantitative Easing inflated financial asset prices instead of the consumer price index. This rise in bond and stock prices is a major cause of the worsening income and wealth distribution in the United States. The economic polarization has undercut the image and reality of the US as a land of opportunity and has introduced political and economic instability into the life of the country.

These are huge costs and for the benefit only of the rich who were already rich.

So, what we can say about the repeal of Glass-Steagall is that it turned a somewhat egalitarian democracy with a large middle class into the One Percent vs. the 99 percent. The repeal resulted in the destruction of the image of the United States as an open prosperous society. The electorate is very much aware of the decline in their economic situation, and this awareness expressed itself in the last presidential election.

Remember, it's all about the money.

It gets better.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Fed Chariman Alan Greenspan

The deregulation philosophy would pay unwelcome dividends for years to come. In November 1999, Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act—the culmination of a $300 million lobbying effort by the banking and financial-services industries, and spearheaded in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm. Glass-Steagall had long separated commercial banks (which lend money) and investment banks (which organize the sale of bonds and equities); it had been enacted in the aftermath of the Great Depression and was meant to curb the excesses of that era, including grave conflicts of interest. For instance, without separation, if a company whose shares had been issued by an investment bank, with its strong endorsement, got into trouble, wouldn’t its commercial arm, if it had one, feel pressure to lend it money, perhaps unwisely? An ensuing spiral of bad judgment is not hard to foresee. I had opposed repeal of Glass-Steagall. The proponents said, in effect, Trust us: we will create Chinese walls to make sure that the problems of the past do not recur. As an economist, I certainly possessed a healthy degree of trust, trust in the power of economic incentives to bend human behavior toward self-interest—toward short-term self-interest, at any rate, rather than Tocqueville’s “self interest rightly understood.”

Remember yet again, it's all about the money.

Dangerous Beauty

Something else altogether. 

Visualizing the unseen

Using the best scientific data garnered on exoplanets, talented artists visualize distants worlds that remain, in effect, invisible due to the immense distances said planets are from terra firma. :)

Hurt, a visualization scientist at Caltech’s IPAC center, was walking outside his home in Mar Vista, California, shortly after he learned of the discovery of these rocky worlds around a star called TRAPPIST-1 and got the assignment to visualize them. The planets had been revealed by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and ground-based observatories.

“I just stopped dead in my tracks, and I just stared at it,” Hurt said in an interview. “I was imagining that could be, not our moon, but the next planet over – what it would be like to be in a system where you could look up and see continental features on the next planet.”

So began a kind of inspirational avalanche. Hurt and his colleague, multimedia producer Tim Pyle, developed a series of arresting, photorealistic images of what the new system’s tightly packed planets might look like -- so tightly packed that they would loom large in each other’s skies. Their visions of the TRAPPIST-1 system would appear in leading news outlets around the world.

Here are three gems for us rubes to check out. Stellar says it all. :)

JPL/NASA - The site will blow you away.

More Eye Candy from the Jovian side :)

Glorious says it all. 

Botany 101 :)

A short clip showing a potpourri of plants and insects in the environs of Easton & Redding. :) Enjoy.

On the take

Being on the take is the rule of law in congress where our so called representatives mooch for money in order to get reelected no matter what the cost may be. We have a healthcare system that's an unmitigated disaster and a drug policy environment gamed for big pharma that, in effect, kills people by making drugs too expensive to buy thanks to the trolls in congress who are on the take from lobbyists representing, you guessed it, big pharma.

 Amidst all the angst and acrimony of last year's trench-warfare presidential campaign, there was one area in which the two major-party candidates purported to agree. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump favored allowing the importation of cheap drugs from Canada.

After another demoralizing loss to a monstrous candidate, Democrats need a reboot

Drug reimportation would be a no-brainer policy move if actual human beings ran our government. Disgust with high prescription drug prices is nearly universal – 77 percent say drug prices are "unreasonable" – and 71 percent of respondents favor allowing the importation of cheaper drugs from Canada.

The entire pharmaceutical industry is floated by a protectionist racket. Drugs that are in fact very cheap to make are kept artificially expensive – we have drugs that cost $1,000 a pill here in America that sell for $4 in India, for instance.

The means of keeping prices high vary, but include lengthy patents to push production of generics into the future, the barring of foreign competition (usually on "safety" grounds), and the prohibition of negotiations to lower prices for bulk purchases by both the federal and state governments. Without government intervention, the pharmaceutical industry would be profitable, but it wouldn't be the massive cash factory it is now. In 2015, for instance, the 20 largest drug companies made a collective $124 billion in profits.

All the industry needs to protect those sums is the continued cooperation of Congress.

So naturally it spends money – not a lot by industry standards, but a ton by the standards of the ludicrously cheap dates we call federal politicians – to make sure they always have just enough dependable people in office to block change.

The sad thing about it is the fact these trolls are so easy to buy while they continue to be supported by us rubes to include complete coverage of HC including, of course, drugs. Make sense to me, right?

Surf's Up :)

Surfs up, Cassini style. :)

Daphnis creates waves in the edges of the gap through its gravitational influence. Some clumping of ring particles can be seen in the perturbed edge, similar to what was seen on the edges of the Encke Gap back when Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004.

Awesome without question.

Missteps

Attack after attack by ISIS, the entity from hell, created by military and diplomatic missteps perpetrated by Bush and Obama, continues yet unabated thanks, in large part, to a neocon foreign policy mired in failure for over 60 years beginning with the CIA's removal of Iran's Prim Minister elect Mossadegh in 1953. Since that time, the US won exactly one war, Grenada, and lost Vietnam, and, in effect, Iraq, based on lies and incredibly stupid strategic blunders that have cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives, maimed and killed thousands of Americans, destroyed legitimate nations and have generated an immigrant crisis that threatens the very existence of Europe and for what, besides lining the pockets of the MIC as you got to have a boogeyman in order to maintain profits for an entity that does not benefit the country, or the world, in any way, shape or fashion.

Most of the terrorist attacks in Western Europe in the past few years have had some link to the Islamic State. Two of the deadliest, the attacks in Paris in November 2015 and in Brussels in March 2016, were directed by the Islamic State, and carried out by operatives who trained with the group in Iraq and Syria.

Five of the deadly attacks involved gunmen, and five used a vehicle as a weapon, including the attack last year on the promenade in Nice, France, that killed 86. The Manchester attack is one of three that used explosives.

Anthony Zinni was right back in 2003 and he's right today. 

"There has been poor strategic thinking in this," says Zinni. "There has been poor operational planning and execution on the ground. And to think that we are going to 'stay the course,' the course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change course a little bit, or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course. Because it's been a failure."

Zinni spent more than 40 years serving his country as a warrior and diplomat, rising from a young lieutenant in Vietnam to four-star general with a reputation for candor.

Now, in a new book about his career, co-written with Tom Clancy, called "Battle Ready," Zinni has handed up a scathing indictment of the Pentagon and its conduct of the war in Iraq.

In the book, Zinni writes: "In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption."

"I think there was dereliction in insufficient forces being put on the ground and fully understanding the military dimensions of the plan. I think there was dereliction in lack of planning," says Zinni. "The president is owed the finest strategic thinking. He is owed the finest operational planning. He is owed the finest tactical execution on the ground. … He got the latter. He didn't get the first two."

Anthony Zinni