Olympus Mons may or may not be visible on a clear night with a telescope because it’s close to 14 miles (22 kilometers) high, easily making it the tallest mountain in the Solar System.

It’s three times taller than Mount Everest, to give you an idea of its massiveness. It also stretches 375 miles, just over France’s length.

To put it in perspective…

• 120,000 square miles is roughly the size of Poland. In fact, if Tamu Massif were a country, it’d be the 71st largest nation.
• It’s 400 miles wide. This is around the distance from New York to DC, in case you were wondering. It’s tip also sits around 6,500 feet below the Pacific Ocean’s surface, so any tourist visits to the volcano will be unlikely in the foreseeable future
• The largest active volcano is Hawaii’s Mauna Loa, whose area comes in at about 2,000 square miles. This is barely 2% of Tamu Massif’s area, by the way.

It is interesting to note that the United States' primary strategic ally, Britain, has been revealed to have been providing Syria with chemical weapons, more specifically the direct chemical precursors, for the duration of the civil war.

The United States has a policy about chemical weapons, referenced in the AUMF draft, which is something like:

If you give weapons of mass destruction to a state which uses them illegally, we will bomb you

Of course, if you attempted to apply this policy to the United States and its own allies, you would get blank stares and be called insane. Relativism is the name of the game and so this development will go unpunished, meanwhile Britain loudly screams for war that it may have very well helped grow into full out conflict.

#Let’s break it down…

By far the most important aspect of the authorization for the use of force against the Syrian government (internationally illegal without UNSC approval according to the charter) mainly for the exemplary word choice here that allows this section to have a very constrained objective in mind but allow for an incredibly broad array of methods utilized to achieve any goal(s).

First off, the AUMF authorizes the President to use:

the Armed Forces of the Untied States as he determines to be necessary

This is tantamount to giving the president an explicit okay to utilize whatever element of the Armed Forces he wishes to (including troops) and any method he wishes to (perhaps the deadly accurate drones) which is tantamount to kicking in the door to a house you plan to rob then standing outside with a gun promising not to enter as you inch forward.

This comes just days after Obama’s flurry of statements arguing for an authorization of military force in Syria, arguing:

[the authorization is] proportional, it is limited, it does not involve boots on the ground,

Clearly that door is left open.

Second, there is no limit as to what targets are being pursued. Obviously military targets will be attacked but whose? He does not explicitly state that the military targets are Assad’s, al-Nursa’s, Iran’s (should they send units to assist their ally), Hezbollah’s, the Free Syria Army, or any of the host of forces of Islamist militant groups descending upon Syria (such as Lebanese Sunnis).

Third, the most narrow part of this law is in fact the statement “legitimate military targets in Syria” for other than stating that the justification for authorization is the use of chemical weapons, there is not much else in the way of details.

Fourth, while the destruction can hamper and cripple the production of WMDs by Syria, they do have allies in the region that can produce the chemicals (most of the nations in the Middle East have stockpiles of WMDs). Specifically, the United States' self-declared enemy in rhetoric, Iran, can alledgedly produce not only chemical weapons but nukes (despite there being no evidence for over 3 years that they have even pursued nuclear weapons. It is no secret that Syria and Iran have been strategic allies for decades, much to the chagrin of the Untied States, and as Iran’s closest ally, it can be seen as a necessary leg to wipe out from under Iran if there is any hope to “stabilize the region”. As thus, Section 2.a.1 effectively leaves the door open on “preemptive action” (a war crime) against any perceived threat, real or fictitious, of the use of weapons of mass destruction.

Further Implications

Along side those four main points, we must also ask ourselves about what could and may very well be intended or unintended consequences of such an authorization:

• The President can now take preemptive action to ensure Syria never again has the capacity to use weapons of mass destruction (note it was not limited to chemical weapons in the authorization, only in the lower subsection). Preemptive action, a war crime, would allow the use of force against any Syrian allies which may or may not provide weapons at any point in the future to hurt the United States and its “allies and partners”, Israel for example. Instantly, one can begin to see that Iran fits the description for such a possible target of preemptive action as it has repeatedly stated that it and Syria are a part of a resistance front against Israel that could be taken to threaten the nation with future WMD attacks.

• Again, ground troops are authorized by this action. The phrase “The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate” is giving the President the room to use any aspect of the military, whether it be drones or troops, in an effort to complete the situation which urges this authorization.

Nas is addicted to fiat currency AKA money. He’ll get it

BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

In fact, if it weren’t for all the money that he was getting from rap, he would stick up YOU–his loyal rap fan. Despite all you’ve been through with the rapper, all the music of his you’ve listened to, you would not be above his crime spree.

A powerful depiction of the addiction that befalls those who sniff wealth.

Clever line over here…

Two meanings:

• Drug dealers that once made a killing off of their product are now back again to lives of mediocrity after being caught or backstabbed. Regardless of how they fell, they fell and are back at the bottom with the rest of us regular people either working and pumping gas into their car, sharing the problems of the regular citizens, or reduced to the menial job of filling up someone’s gas

• Once caught, drug dealers that were once rich now see their money is basically gone. They snitch and release alot of pent up heat or gas, vital information that will eventually make the whole operation hot for everyone else. Similar to how under pressure a gas gets hot and expands, a snitch gets uncomfortable and expands their fat mouth letting out heat.

There is a sort of cynical disapproval of those who deal with drugs to get money, but at the same time who is the one that decided to escape through the drug use?

It’s not an easy question, Nas raps this seemingly superficial but thought-provoking line in an appropriately named song, Silent Murder, where the violence (lyrical or physical) lies below the surface and is not immediately apparent.