Open Thread - 16 April, 2015

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[The Twisted Genius]

I got a kick out of yesterday's flight of the disgruntled postman. He flew his single seat gyrocopter from Gettysburg to the Capitol lawn evading all the radars, air defense systems, police and Secret Service agents to deliver letters of protest to all members of Congress. This is after telling the world exactly what he was planning to do. I'm surprised that gyrocopter could carry that postman's big brass balls in addition to the letters.

Next thing to do is send a huge herd of sheep to graze on the Capitol lawn. I think this would be appropriately symbolic.

[Imagine]

The George Washington University launches a historical web project detailing Israel's hidden nuclear bomb program.

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/israel/

Featuring newly released documents from the National Security Archives. A profound Thank You to Prof. Avner Cohen.

Israel will be safer when it joins the NPT.

And America will be safer when the combination of hypersonic ICBMs and neutron bombs is inspected and licensed. (It is, of course, inconceivable that some kind of Jewish Underground would ever nuke Washington. Why, that would be as improbable as an airline pilot deliberately crashing a plane full of people.)

Anyway, please tell your congresspeople that the need for ignorance is over.

[Imagine]

better article than the front page:
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb510/
more approachable but less detailed version of the previous:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/israel-nuclear-weapons-117014.html

[David Habakkuk]

TTG,

This takes me back to May 1987, when the German amateur pilot Mathias Rust flew his single-engine Sessna from Finland to Moscow, made several circles over the Kremlin in the immediate vicinity to Gorbachev’s office, and then landed on the Red Square.

From the account given in an article published in 2000 by the liberal Soviet historian Vladislav Zubok, under the title 'Gorbachev's Nuclear Learning':

'Shevardnadze and the KGB’s Chebrykov suggested that Rust should not be arrested for his crime and the whole incident should be portrayed as "a peace mission."

'Gorbachev, however, preferred to give the military establishment a humiliating whipping at the Politburo. Like the leaders of the Soviet nuclear complex after Chernobyl, the top Soviet military were blamed for laxness, grave shortcomings, and professional inadequacy. Minister of Defense Sergei Sokolov resigned on the spot, and more than 150 Soviet officers were tried in court and removed from their posts. In this political execution Gorbachev was assisted by Akhromeyev and Shevardnadze, with eager approval of most Politburo members, including Ligachev, Gromyko, and Ryzhkov. Ligachev threw in the face of the military that "the Army undercut its authority." Gorbachev picked a new defense minister, Dmitry Yazov, who was a congenial general with no expertise or will to take a stand on arms control. The quiet purge of the military ranks continued after that, and by the end of 1988 the entire top echelon of the ministry, the General Staff, the Warsaw Pact commander, and all the military district commanders had been changed. As one American expert commented, "even during Stalin’s bloody purge of the Red Army in 1937-38, the percentage of change in top level posts was not as high." The Soviet military establishment was politically and morally crushed.'

(See http://new.bostonreview.net/BR25.2/zubok.html .)

[GulfCoastPirate]

All:

This is bad news:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/16/fast-track-trade_n_7078804.html

'That fast track authority would likely pave the way for both the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreement with the European Union, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership with a dozen Asian nations. Both deals are larger than NAFTA.'

'Word of a deal came as a surprise to most members of the committee, as the two leaders announced it at a hearing on tariffs that was not called until late Wednesday night. Thursday's meeting featured three of the administration's top officials on trade: Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and United States Trade Representative Michael Froman.

Indeed, members of the committee had so little information that Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) felt compelled to ask if they were going to be voting Thursday "on an agreement that we have not yet even seen and that hasn't been reached."

[William R. Cumming]

Time for Condi Rice to testify under oath?

When did Tom Clancy write the Japanese terrorists using a 747 to hit the Capitol on STATE of the Union speech night?

D.C. undefendable and time to relocate the SEAT OF GOVERNMENT?

[Ishmael Zechariah]

TTG,

Thanks for putting this up. What an amazing feat. I wonder what will happen to the postman. IF the elites had any sense, they would let him go. I am sure they will not.

I disagree with you about the sheep. I have been around quite a few. They are very decent animals.

Col. Lang, SST;

Spurred by a recent article in this Committee of Correspondence I did some research on mules in the US Army. I highly recommend "Shavetails and Bell Sharps: The History of the U.S. Army Mule by Dr. Emmett M. Essin". Worth borrowing from your local library.

P.s: Mules are very decent animals as well.

Ishmael Zechariah

[Charles I]

I love Don Quixote, salute his flight, wonder whether the mail will be delivered,read.

Seriously did he "evade" it all, i.e. even though announced, the gyro did not show up anywhere, or rather did he proceed noticed, tracked but unmolested? If the former, where do the treetop flying jihadi gyros line up?

What is the resolution of the systems monitoring that airspace?

[Valissa]

Drone Flies Using a Digital Honeybee Brain http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/drone360/2015/04/09/drone-honeybee-brain/ [article includes 3 min. with more technical detail]

Some delightful satire from The Onion… New Evidence Suggests Middle East Conflict Predates All Human Civilization http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-evidence-suggests-middle-east-conflict-predate,38428/
Based on an analysis of the fossil record, scholars have determined that the Middle East conflict includes a vast array of violent events spanning more than four-fifths of the earth’s history, including a mid-Paleozoic massacre that wiped out nearly all millipedes on the Gondwana supercontinent, a vicious marine life territory dispute during the Silurian period that left millions of organisms floating dead in the bitterly contested waters above present-day Yemen, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and a key battle fought 700,000 years ago in the Golan Heights by members of the species Homo erectus who had just discovered fire.

[oofda]

Reminds one of the flight in a light plane by Mathias Rust into the Soviet Union in May, 1987. He flew through several layers of Soviet anti-air defense and landed near the Kremlin. The result was a number of Soviet military officers being cashiered. Reportedly some were shot for dereliciton of duty.

[BabelFish]

Neither rain nor snow, nor dead of night nor multi-billion dollar defense systems shall keep us, the Gyro Express, from our appointed rounds.

He's become our very own Matthias Rust.

Roger on the sheep but: 1) which Federal agency will be responsible for their well being? 2) How will we distinguish them from tourist, or congresspeople, or various government ministers, or.......

[HankP]

Col. Lang -

Thought you'd find this interesting. By a 2 - 1 ratio, Republicans say the U.S. should support Israel even when its stances diverge from American interests.

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-04-15/bloomberg-politics-national-poll-finds-deep-partisan-split-on-israel-and-iran

Hard for me to believe, but there it is.

[Fred]

TTG,

Perhaps those manning (and womaning, gotta be pc these days) the radar and otherwise aware of the flight of Eagle are in agreement with the sentiments expressed.

[anna-marina]

Here is a citizen' comment on Guardian, which posts a simple and grave question, namely, how come that the facts have no weight for the mainstream media anymore.
"I used to hope for a Watergate-type blow-up... The Nuland/Pyatt call should have stopped the coup before it started, the Ashton/Paet leak should have blown the Maidan killings wide open - but after a couple of days half-hearted murmuring, the juggernaut just rolled straight on. I hoped for a breakthrough after Odessa, after Mariupol, after Lugansk, after MH17, but one by one all these tragedies were allowed to disappear into oblivion. We have primary source video, recorded telephone calls, leaked e-mails and Facebook messaging, we have infinitely more evidence than Woodward or Bernstein ever had, but there's not a single western newspaper now with the kind of guts or integrity the old Washington Post used to have."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/15/ousted-ukraine-president-ally-shot-dead#comments

[The Twisted Genius]

David,

I forgot about the depth of the blood letting after the Rust flight. It was ugly. We probably won't see anybody losing his job over the postman's flight. Congress will throw more money into security theater after throwing a few overly pompous hissy fits.

[confusedponderer]

MEMRI has put out a recent piece that warns that Iran has developed "suicide drones". Yes, these fiends with their suicide obsession, they're at it again.

Now stop whatever you are doing right now and start shake in your boots in terror of this new threat!

One would however be mistaken to assume that the Iranians, say, bind a suicide bomber to the drone in order to have him suicided while bombing something - these drones are apparently something far less outlandish than what the (deliberately misleading) label "!suicide drone" suggest:

Apparently these are drones drone with a warhead instead of sensors, that either loiter the battlefield or fly towards a designated target and attack targets by self-destructing into them (suicide!) - i.e. drone based guided weapons.

There you go. Bah, how mundane is that?

The IDF has a high tech weapon of that sort in service for well over a decade, namely the Harpy drone (origionally the MBB DAR) and they are developing a successor, the Harop. Here's the evolution:

http://www.panzerbaer.de/helper/bw_drohne_antiradar-a.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Harpy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Harop

As for Harpy/Harop - highly interesting sytems with great potential.

I wished Germany had procued DAR in the late 1980s and had used it as a standard drone for use by army as the Kampfdrohne Heer and by the air force for SEAD mission as the DAR. That would have been ample time to gain valuable experience with such systems.

Alas, that was not to be ... and so MBB exported the blueprints to Israel who built the design and called it Harpy - i.e. it is as Israeli as Sauerkraut.

[William R. Cumming]

Thanks for this comment and link!

[William R. Cumming]

For some reason wondering how much has to be donated to obtain a non-career SES position now and in the past? IMO the donation required from 1993-2001 was $25,000!

And service for one-year in the non-career SES ames you eligible for the Career SES?

[Ted B]

It's way past time to "repurpose"a good chunk of our military mission (ie) green it up/infrastructure abroad and here.. Bechtel, MK, Seabees, Army Engineer Corps are alive/with bona fides. Granted repurposing a nation's army/military will be discounted by military stiff dicks/MIC neocons as pissing-in-the wind talk. So be it. Same money: repurpose half of it.

[TedBuila]

It's way past time to "repurpose"a good chunk of our military mission (ie) green it up/infrastructure abroad and here..at home. Bechtel, MK + et als, Seabees, Army Engineer Corps are alive/with bona fides.

Granted repurposing a nation's army/military will be discounted by military stiff dicks/MIC neocons as pissing-in-the wind talk. So be it. Same money: repurpose half of it. It works for the nation's dignity, infrastructure, and honest work.

[turcopolier]

TedBuila

I am informed by AS that you posted this comment three times. Be advised that all comments on my blogs are personally vetted by me or the author of the piece for relevance, civility, a lack of personal invective, etc. This is an amateur and part time job for me and it will remain that way. Comments get posted when we/I get to them. pl

[Fred]

TTG,

I would add that Congress won't read letter one either.

[TedBuila]

Apologies Col//pretty much just getting started..won't happen again. ted

[oofda]

Colonel,
On another note, Elizabeth Pryor, former State Department official and historian was recently killed in a car accident in Richmond. She wrote a biorgraphy of Robert E Lee- she was the first to get access to a trove of letters that Lee's daughter had stored in a trunk and given to a bank. Below is her obit. She had this note: “Just before [Lee] died,” Ms. Pryor said in a 2008 interview with Humanities, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities, “he told a friend that ‘the great mistake of my life was taking a military education.’

Had you heard taht?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/elizabeth-brown-pryor-biographer-of-robert-e-lee-and-clara-barton-dies/2015/04/16/4560d6e2-e44e-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html

[Medicine Man]

Well, the sheep differ from the congresspeople by the quality of their output... so there's that distinction to judge by.