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A Website of Alternative Thinkers & Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

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PUTIN ON THE POPE

We're a long way from Anthony Quinn's performance of Pope Kiril the first in the 1960s film Shoes of the Fisherman. Back in the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, certain things were a given: American youth were - for the most part, hippies and Woodstock and Marcuse notwithstanding - still convinced that socialism of any form was a bad idea (and so were unwinnable undeclared wars in Vietnam), "they" - the Soviets and the Communist Chinese - were still the "bad guys" and we were the "good guys," and the churches, and in particular, the Roman Catholic Church, were still recognizably Christian and, in Rome's case, Catholic, though the veneer was beginning to rub mighty thin after the Second Vatican Council's liturgical "reforms," which ended up being far beyond those of Martin Luther or Archbishop Cranmer. I'll take a 15th century Lutheran missa brevis to the modern Vatican Two "quickie" any day. But turn the clock ahead a few decades from the 1960s and what do we have?

A pope lecturing us on the need to obey the UN, that unrestricted immigration is good, and holding synods in the Amazon that look suspiciously more amazonian than Roman Catholic, is a new thing. Indeed, as Francis I continues to lecture everyone about this or that political agenda, many people including many Roman Catholics both hierarchical, clerical, and lay are wondering if the current Pope is even Catholic at all.

Well, now you can add Russian President Vladimir Putin to that list, according to this article shared by V.T.:

‘Pope Francis is Not A Man Of God’ | Putin

If this article is to be believed, apparently Mr. Putin minced no words:

“Pope Francis is using his platform to push a dangerous far-left political ideology on vulnerable people around the world, people who trust him because of his position,” Putin said.

He dreams of a world government and a global communist system of repression.

“As we have seen before in communist states, this system is not compatible with Christianity.”

“If you look at what he (the Pope) says it’s clear that he is not a man of God. At least not the Christian God. Not the God of the Bible,” Putin said at the Naval Cathedral of St. Nicholas in Kronstadt.

“He dreams of a world government and a global communist system of repression.

“As we have seen before in communist states, this system is not compatible with Christianity.”

The article also mentions a few more of the Pope's recent pronunciamenti:

The pope has become increasingly brazen this year in pushing the globalist agenda and far-left talking points upon the masses. Earlier this year he called for a global central bank and financial authority, and more recently he said “Americans need to be ruled by a world government as soon as possible for their own good.”

(Gee, you mean by an institution with universal globalist governing claims like the papacy?)

Pope Francis’s idea that Americans would be better off under a world government doesn’t stop there. The radical leftist pontiff also went on record stating that Europe should become one country under one government.

(Gee, do you mean by an institution already claiming to be, and having the infrastructure of, a global government, like the papacy?)

He is also on record calling for a China-style one child policy for Western nations, as well as telling a congregation in Rome that having a personal relationship with Jesus is “dangerous and harmful.”

My how the worm has turned. When I was a boy, the heroism of Joszef Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary for standing up to the Soviets was something drummed into my head by my Roman Catholic paternal grandparents. He was unabashedly and unapologetically Christian and Roman Catholic. The Soviet leadership was unapologetically and unabashedly brutalitarian and atheistic. And now, the roles have reversed, for it's increasingly dubious to many in the West whether Francis I is Christian at all, much less Catholic, and the leader of Russia, a former member of the KGB, and practicing Orthodox Catholic Christian, is wondering the same thing, and going on record to boot.

It would be wrong, however, to assume that Mr. Putin's remarks were utterly devoid of any political context. For one thing, as I've pointed out many times, the Russian government of the post-Yeltsin era seems to be doing everything it can to speak for, and to, the disenfranchised "deplorables" of the West. I've argued that the Russian government, embarked on its own quest to become the first post-post-modern state has led the charge against the dogmas of globalism and tried to position itself as a spokesman for the traditions and virtues of European culture either being eclipsed, or deliberately "murdered" by its ruling class. Nor has this been a "general critique," for if one listens to the speeches of Mr. Putin and other Russian leaders, these are often directed, point by point, at specific dogmas of globalism.

But there's a more specific political-ecclesiastical context for Mr. Putin's remarks, and that is the recently emerging schism between the patriarchates of Moscow and Constantinople. Constantinople, at the "urging" both of the Vatican and the US State Department, recently granted "autocephaly" to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. "Autocephaly" is a term of Orthodox canonical practice that means (literally) "Self-Headedness", i.e., the right of a national church's hierarchy to govern itself freely apart from the jurisdiction of a foreign patriarchate. To draw an analogy that might be more familiar to Westerners, the Orthodox Church is like the Anglican Communion in this respect: all Anglican Churches around the world, from Australia, Canada, the United States, and so on, are independently governing entities, but remain in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church of England, and have more or less a common liturgical practice and ethos. This has changed in recent years, for as the Anglican Communion has become increasingly torn away from its traditional doctrines and liturgical moorings, inclusive of the ordination of women, homosexuals, the advocacy of "gender inclusive" language and abandonment of the liturgical English of the Book of Common Prayer, some Anglican groups have recognized these things as a betrayal of fundamental Anglican principles of doctrine and worship, and have broken communion with any bodies claiming the name Anglican, but engaged in these practices. In other words, it's the content and actual practice and not merely the name that makes one an Anglican, and this is a mentality very similar to that of Orthodoxy. In effect, both conceptually and in terms of practice and doctrine, these groups are the genuine (though few) traditional Anglicans today for they recognize the mainstream institutions have been co-opted and hollowed out and are Anglican in name only.

The situation is similar, now, in Orthodoxy with the recent "grant" of autocephaly by Constantinople to the Ukrainian Church. In the past century, Constantinople has articulated a series of claims and privileges that - to the traditional Orthodox mind - can only be viewed as neo-Papal in nature, and hence, not Orthodox in any sense. This is not surprising, given the Vatican's quiet financial support of the patriarchate, and its current occupant's having studied in Rome itself. The traditional view that the Patriarchate of Constantinople was "first among equals" has turned into its own self-promoted neo-papal view of itself as "king of non-equals," and this has been predictably resisted by most of the rest of the Church, including the Patriarchate of Moscow, which has by far and away the most Orthodox Catholic Christians under its jurisdiction.

In short, you're looking at another brewing schism, and much of it is being concocted in the West, by the West, and for the West, and I would argue, is yet another manifestation of the West's almost subliminal and visceral hatred of Orthodoxy. Why the hatred? That would be a long and involved tome beyond the scope of the present blog, but it can perhaps best be summarized by pointing out that it is an unreconstructed Catholicism with no need for infallible popes nor for high minded reformers. Like all ecclesiastical institutions, it has had its share of black moments and blackguards to be sure, but nothing like on the scale as obtained under the Papal tyranny of the Middle Ages, and that led ultimately to the Protestant revolt. And in spite of the best efforts of organized atheism to kill it, literally to "murder and martyr it by individual murder and martyr to the thousands if not millions," it survived the Western import of Bolshevism to Russia, and with it, Russia survived.

Thus, hidden behind Mr. Putin's remarks regarding the papacy is really an implied question: what's your interest in The Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Church? And is it really to make the Ukrainian church self-governing, or is that self-governing status to serve an ultimately more secular and anti-Orthodox agenda?

This one, folks, is thus a story that is not going to go away any time soon.

And as for Pope Francis, Mr. Putin isn't the only one raising questions about the Pope's actual faith (if any). Some in his own close entourage are doing the same:

Scalfari: Pope Denied Bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ

When confronted with a swamp in the form of co-opted institutions, there are but two courses of action, try to drain it and reclaim the institution, or make a clean break with it. It remains to be seen what will happen here in the case of Rome, and Constantinople.

See you on the flip side...

AMAIRIKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN IS AT IT AGAIN

I'm so angry today that what I want to talk about - pitchforks and ropes and the "g" word and artillery - is what I can't talk about.

But what we can do is take a page from the New Age Gnostic Pabulum-Puking Nonsense that the Lunatic Swamis on the Lamestream corporate media or in the Quackademies are always urging we do: so let's "clear our minds" from "the internal dialogue" and "focus" and "visualize" and reach "higher dimensions" of a "raised consciousness". Visualize a three t0 four story brick building, covered in ivy, with little gun ports ...er... windows in the distance across a body of water, with the Stars and Stripes flying proudly from the tax-payer-funded flagpole. Visualize yourself peering through your telescope or binoculars, and telling your battery commander that he may open fire on the structure in the distance with his 60 and 100 pounders. Of course, Fort Sumter isn't the modern American Quackademy, but it might as well be, because the latter is far more secure and oblivious to the society at large, and unlike General Beauregard, we don't have any 60 or 100 pounders.  Ahh, but we can all dream...

So, keep that visualization exercise in mind, and instead of not talking about that, I'm going to have another rant about Amairikuhn edgykayshun, because (1) it's been a long time since I've ranted about it, and (2) Amairkuhn edgykayshun, and its "higher" edgykayshunal establishmunts in the quackademy are only "higher" in the sense that the drugs used are harder than the Ritalin and Adderall that the edugarchy is pushing on skool childrun below collage age (and, fancy that, the graduates of the quackademy who programmed the spell- and grammar-checkers for this program I'm using to write this blog didn't even underline "collage" in this sentence with a blue line to indicate improper use of a word. Go figure); and (3) because the evidence continues to mount that from any traditional point of view, these institutions are utterly corrupted and academically fraudulent and socially dangerous.

Just keep that visualization exercise in mind as you read this article, shared by both S.D. and V.T.:

The Normalization of Pedophilia is Underway, and a California University Is Already Trying to Push It On Students

Yes, that's right: the Quackademy has(1) teamed up with (2) Nuttyfornia at (3) the taxpayer expense to (4) hire some swamis to (5) sell the snake oil that pedophilia is a legitimate sexual orientation. And as all societal ills seem to spread from that rotten head (Nuttyfornia) to the rest of the country, it will only be a matter of time before this nonsense comes to a "community collage" near you (see? the grammar checker failed again!). Of course, what's not mentioned in the quackademy is the damage this will do to our already damaged Nuttyfornia children, who are exceedingly lucky they weren't born in Virginia, whose governor might have decided to spare them the suffering of being subjected to this claptrap by performing his applauded post-natal abortions (that's infanticide, for those of you still living in the State of Reality), after appropriate "counseling".

The real question is why this is being permitted. Well, beyond the fact that the students didn't get up and walk out of the classroom in disgust protesting this sewage, or that parents haven't stormed the administrative Bastille that permits it, and demanded everyone involved with it be fired, the deeper reason remains untouched. And that deeper reason forms part of today's high octane speculative rant. I strongly suspect that there is a perfectly clear and obviously nefarious purpose to all of this, and that's those networks of human and child trafficking and sex slavery that have been making the news since the Franklin Scandal erupted in the 1990s and reached all the way into the White House of King G.H.W. Schrubb. They've taken a page from the drug legalization movement. Have a drug problem? Simply legalize it. Pronounce it "ok" and, by the Gnostic logic driving the same, it is "ok." Pronounce pedophilia a "legitimate sexual orientation", and voila, it's suddenly ok. In those sick and twisted lights, the Jeffrey Epstein's of the world aren't criminals, they're (martyred) pioneers. In a world without virtue, there are no sins, merely values and "orientations" and "lifestyles."

And prosecution won't occur if enough "expert" swamis from the quackademy can convince people in places like Nuttyfornia or Virginia or (worse) Swampington, D.C., to change the law and legalize it.

See you on the flip side...

DARPA LOOKING FOR TUNNELS FOR TECH AND TRAINING

My inbox was flooded last week and over the long weekend with various versions of this story, and there's so many people to thank for sending it that it would be impossible to list all their initials. Suffice it to say: "thank you!"

What's the story? It seems that our "friends" at the Diabolically Apocalyptic Research Projects Agency (and again, thanks to J.B. for providing that one!) are looking for underground corridors and so on. Here's RT's version of the story, and as one might imagine, its assessment of "totally not suspicious" might represent the tongue-in-cheek intelligence assessments of the Sluzhba vneshney razvedki Rossiyskoy Federatsii as they pondered the whole thing:

‘Totally not suspicious’: DARPA freaks people out with urgent request for underground complex

The request, as the article points out, came in a most unusual manner for an agency of the federal goobernment: it was made not in a contract offering or a notice on DARPA's website, but in a tweet:

“Attention, city dwellers! We're interested in identifying university-owned or commercially managed underground urban tunnels & facilities able to host research & experimentation,” the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) tweeted on Wednesday, sparking a wave of alarming theories ranging from zombie and alien invasions, to psyops and the end of the world.

And sure enough, when one visits DARPA's website, there's a screen capture of the tweet:

‘DARPA tweet

So, DARPA tweeted on August 28th, 2019, that it needed underground complexes to "host research and experimentation" by August 30th, a margin of only two days. Now if you've ever watched those goobernment websites where contract notices are posted, and tried to follow one through the labyrinth, you'll be aware that the process usually moves at the speed of evolution encompassing several geological ages (but hey, they've got your back on health care). But here DARPA wants to hear from you in two days. And that implies that there's some urgency involved in the matter.

The RT article concludes with an outline of various scenarios being debated:

DARPA dismissed one person’s theory they wanted to store monsters down there by responding with a reference to the sci-fi Netflix show ‘Stranger Things’: “Please. Demogorgons are such a Department of Energy thing.”

Many were amused that DARPA would even make such a request on social media. Others offered up their own basements, and some speculated that the tweets themselves were some sort of experiment, pointing out the US government is likely already well aware of the country’s underground structures.

DARPA is the US Department of Defense arm responsible for the development of emerging military technologies, and has a long history of coming up with crazy (and terrifying) ideas.

An article by Matt Novak at Gizmodo had a bit more information:
Why Does Darpa Need a Huge Underground Facility by Friday?

Here's where it gets interesting (citing from most of Mr. Novak's article):

Gizmodo reached out to Darpa and the agency confirmed that the turnaround time was short, but said that it was originally posted last week. That’s still incredibly short notice for a government agency that needs a large space for its experiments. Darpa wouldn’t explain why they needed an underground facility so quickly.

“Complex urban underground infrastructure can present significant challenges for situational awareness in time-sensitive scenarios, such as active combat operations or disaster response,” a Darpa spokesperson who asked to remain nameless told Gizmodo by email.

“DARPA is interested in exploring this domain for researchers to analyze and enhance approaches to improve situational awareness and response times in emergency scenarios,” the Darpa spokesperson continued. “Locations submitted could help the research community identify relevant sites for further field experimentation to accelerate their development of such technologies.”

...

Darpa is currently hosting the Subterranean Challenge, which is a bit like their old Robotics Challenge from 2015 only for mapping and traversing underground environments. Darpa’s “Urban Circuit” challenge is happening in February of 2020, so we can guess that this underground location might be for that, but we don’t know for sure. And it would be strange to only organize something like that on a week’s notice.

Darpa simply isn’t telling us much. In fact, Darpa is making us a bit nervous by its responses on Twitter. When someone said that the urgent need for a tunnel, “sounds both exciting and ominous,” Darpa replied, “even to us.”

(Emphases added)

So... it would appear at first glance that DARPA's sudden request is related to that story that came out a few months ago that the US military was to begin combat training in underground facilities, implying that they sensed a a potential danger that had to be addressed. DARPA's entry into this subterranean warfare theater implies that they have or are developing "technologies" to "analyze and enhance approaches to improve situational awareness", perhaps things like robot drones to map complex labyrinthine underground structures with their tunnels, tubes, corridors, rooms, and so on.

The real question is why? And why the seeming urgency?

Like Wile E. Coyote, I intend to run right off the twig on this high octane speculation, or rather, speculations, because I have three basic versions, and as one might have guessed from my assigning this blog to the "Giza and Archaeology" file, I suspect one of them might be archaeological in nature.  Suppose one has come across vast, interconnected underground facilities somewhere, that one suspects are (1) boobytrapped, and (2) potentially still occupied. Such facilities might be found in - oh, I don't know - Germany, for example, or Antarctica. In that case, one would need to develop technologies to map the layout and spot any potential boobytraps lovingly placed by the Waffen SS, or by ancient Atlanteans, or whomever. Of course, I jest (partially), but the point is clear: technology could both explore dangerous facilities and save lives. And of course, the use of such technologies would also require training humans to use them in such environments, and to do so when time is precious. This seems to me to be the most apparent explanation. And the allusion to the Waffen SS was to underscore the main point: such underground facilities are typical for black projects research in any country, and such facilities have check points, and boobytraps. According to some individuals, there are underground facilities in Germany to this day that have not been explored precisely because of the fear of boobytraps.

Ok, if that's so, then what are the other two possibilities? (This is the part where I've not only run to the end of the twig, but right off of it, and am now, like Wile E. Coyote, suspended in midair, arms and legs flailing wildly, with not a shred of corroborative or supportive evidence to support my speculation.)  If one looks at the implications of DARPA's tweet, at Mr. Novak's article, and my parsing of what he indicated were DARPA's responses to Gismodo's inquiries, there are other potential contexts and scenarios in which this combination of mapping robot-drones and humans operating in an unknown artificial environment and under time constraints would be useful: large spaceships, and facilities not  even on this planet, for if one stops and thinks about it, the technologies and training that are implied are viable or applicable in a variety of contexts, and hence, I would not be a bit surprised to learn that the human component of this training and experimentation will be run through a variety of scenarios along the lines I've outlined. And there's the fact of the recent creation of "the space force" to be considered, which I suspect is related to this announcement that DARPA is seeking elaborate underground structures.

And there's one more feature to note about these speculative scenarios I've advanced; they all fit the conditions of that last sentence cited above:

When someone said that the urgent need for a tunnel, “sounds both exciting and ominous,” Darpa replied, “even to us.”

See you on the flip side...

 

 

 

 

AI AND FAKE NEWS (AND “Q”)

The Fake News is in the Fake News once again. Or rather, artificial intelligence may be in the Fake News. This shouldn't be surprising, as we've seen articles about new technologies that can simulate virtually anyone saying or doing anything. But this story, shared by T.S.,  should sober even the most skeptical:

'Dangerous' AI offers to write fake news

A couple of days ago I blogged about robots replacing humans, even as clergy in a kind of "robo-religion", and how robots are already being quietly and indirectly taxed. But imagine the news being written by an artificial intelligence (and being read by a robo-"anchor-person" on camera). It's not too far off:

An artificial intelligence system that generates realistic stories, poems and articles has been updated, with some claiming it is now almost as good as a human writer.

The text generator, built by research firm OpenAI, was originally considered "too dangerous" to make public because of the potential for abuse.

But now a new, more powerful version of the system - that could be used to create fake news or abusive spam on social media - has been released.

The BBC, along with some AI experts, decided to try it out.

The model, called GPT-2, was trained on a dataset of eight million web pages, and is able to adapt to the style and content of the initial text given to it.

It can finish a Shakespeare poem as well as write articles and epithets.

At the time, the firm said: "Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model. As an experiment in responsible disclosure, we are instead releasing a much smaller model for researchers to experiment with."

As the article also indicates, the BBC decided to test the public version of the program, and came up with this:

The BBC decided to test the system by inputting the first few sentences of a recent story, appropriately one about AI.

We began with the first sentence of the real story:

Chinese search engine Sogou is creating artificial intelligence lookalikes to read popular novels in authors' voices.

Here's what the text generator came up with to complete it:

According to the researchers, this method of reading is not just the brainchild of Amazon Kindle users. Users of Android devices are also a notable market for fake reading. There are several theories to explain this.

Firstly, the device in a user's hand is different from the tablet or computer they are reading on. Secondly, the device used to access the Internet might be tampered with in some way. A third reason is the user may just copy and paste content directly into their virtual characters.

However, another explanation is that the device does not have voice recognition capabilities at all. If this is the case then voice recognition is more advanced than Google's translation engine. As such, these users are tricked into thinking they are reading from a real author - the book is made to sound authentic as soon as they try and read. (Emphasis in the original)

As the article also notes, however, a professor of computer science at the University of Sheffield, Noel Sharkey, tested the program, and wasn't too impressed:

" I tested the software with numerous headlines and got laughable results. For example, for 'Turkeys hate Christmas', I got that 'Turkey is the only nation in the world that doesn't celebrate Christmas' and a number of unrelated sentences.

"For 'Boris Johnson loves the backstop', it produced incoherent gibberish and some stuff about AI and sport. When I input the statement that 'Boris Johnson hates the backstop', I got a more coherent story that appears to have been pulled off a Google search."

Dave Coplin, founder of AI consultancy the Envisioners, also had a play with the system, inputting the first line of a classic joke: A man walks into a bar...

The suggestion from the AI was not what he was expecting: "...And ordered two pints of beer and two scotches. When he tried to pay the bill, he was confronted by two men - one of whom shouted "This is for Syria". The man was then left bleeding and stabbed in the throat".

But it should be noted once again, these results were obtained with the publicly released version of the program. We've no idea of what the private tests yielded, but with a vast expansion of parameters (including search parameters), it's a safe bet that the results were somewhat better. Indeed, there have been stories of computer-AI-generated "science" papers that in spite of being pure gibberish were accepted by serious journals for publication because they "sounded" authentic.

So where am I going with all of this? What's the high octane speculation?  The problem, it would seem, is this: in this era of everyone claiming that such-and-such a story is "fake news", one wonders how much of that actually is being generated, in part, by AIs writing and planting fake stories. Consider only the story of President Trump supposedly saying he wanted to disrupt hurricanes by nuking them. He has denied it of course, and frankly, when I heard the story I thought it was fake. (What's not fake about the story were the 1950s studies of weather modification using nuclear weapons, but that's another blog for another day.) But whether it's fake or not, or whether Trump's denials are fake or not, it raises a crucial issue: with enough search parameters and computing power, the sky may be the limit.  One possibility is that AI's become the editors of humanly-generated stories, modifying texts according to present (and probably ideological) parameters and filters. As I pointed out in a blog just a few days ago, some ebooks have already been marketed which contained texts not written by their original purported authors. Could it be that the "updaters" of these texts were not humans at all? I suspect the answer to that question is a qualified "yes."

Indeed, I've entertained in private discussions with a few people about the whole "Q" phenomenon that it represents not only a clever psyop by a team, but that it had to have access to some sophisticated and not-publicly-available search techniques and computing power. As a result, a powerful "narrative" can be (and has been) created with its own following. What I believe we've been watching is a kind of "beta-test" of sophisticated social engineering techniques to be rolled out in a much more general and dangerous way, one requiring - again - sophisticated search parameters, and a lot of computing power, to generate carefully crafted propaganda.

So how to counter it? Like everything else, I suspect that the answer is in part analogue, in this case, real research by real humans using antiquated things like card catalogues, books, newspaper articles, cross-checking, indices, and so on.

See you on the flip side...

A WOPR OF A BAD IDEA… AI AND NUCLEAR WAR

Do you remember the line "I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought it would do any good"? It was one of many memorable statements that came out of the Reagan era. Another was, of course, Reagan's offhand comment captured by an open mic before the mic was actually supposed to be live. The President made a comment about the Soviet Union, and that "the bombing starts in five minutes." The first comment was made by the American general in charge of the  NORAD nuclear command center at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, in the 1983 movie, War Games, as the USA's latest super computer, specifically designed to "game out" nuclear war scenarios, decides to run its simulations for real. The computer was appropriately named WOPR, War Operations Plan Response. The whole era (and the movie) was "fun" in that grim sort of Dr. Strangelove way...

... until, of course, the articles started to appear that the Reagan administration was seriously considering a computer-run "launch on warning" response to any pre-programmed condition meeting a threat from the Soviet Union. For example, satellites see a "launch" from a Russian missile silo in Byelokorovichye in the Ukraine. That's "the warning," and as a result, the computerized response is either a limited or all-out US nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. I mention Byelokorovichye for a reason, and a few readers of my books or followers of my interviews will recognaize that name. We'll get back to that.

Now the idea is that of updating the USA's strategic nuclear arsenal with an AI-driven response in an "absorb-and-respond" strategy, due to the new upgrades in Russia's own arsenal, which considerably cuts down the response time American leaders would have in the event of a Russian first strike(this article was brought to our attention by G.B., with many thanks for doing so):

America Needs a “Dead Hand”

 

America’s nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3) system comprises many component systems that were designed and fielded during the Cold War — a period when nuclear missiles were set to launch from deep within Soviet territory, giving the United States sufficient time to react. That era is over. Today, Russian and Chinese nuclear modernization is rapidly compressing the time U.S. leaders will have to detect a nuclear launch, decide on a course of action, and direct a response.

Technologies such as hypersonic weapons, stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles, and weaponized artificial intelligence mean America’s legacy NC3 system may be too slow for the president to make a considered decision and transmit orders. The challenges of attack-time compression present a destabilizing risk to America’s deterrence strategy. Any potential for failure in the detection or assessment of an attack, or any reduction of decision and response time, is inherently dangerous and destabilizing.

... Time compression has placed America’s senior leadership in a situation where the existing NC3 system may not act rapidly enough. Thus, it may be necessary to develop a system based on artificial intelligence, with predetermined response decisions, that detects, decides, and directs strategic forces with such speed that the attack-time compression challenge does not place the United States in an impossible position.

And here's the bad news: Russia did develop such a system, deployed it, and it may be in use today:

The use of automation in the NC3 system is not entirely new. In fact, beginning in the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union pursued the development of automated systems within the areas of threat detection, logistical planning, message traffic, and weapon-system guidance. Sometime in the late 1980s, the Soviet Union developed and deployed the Perimeter system, which, according to David Hoffman’s book, The Dead Hand, became “ultrafast and automated” once Soviet leadership gave the order — launching the remaining Soviet nuclear arsenal. The Perimeter system is believed to remain in operation today. In a recent interview, Colonel General Viktor Yesin, who commanded Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces in the 1990s, described Russia’s Perimeter system as both improved and functioning.

Now, I know what you're thinking, and the AI-nuclear advocates are thinking it too, according to the article:

However, artificial intelligence is no panacea. Its failures are numerous. And the fact that there is profound concern by well-respected experts in the field that science fiction may become reality, because artificial intelligence designers cannot control their creation, should not be dismissed. For the United States, every option presents significant risk and uncertainty. Reality, however, is progressing to a point where the United States must address the challenge we outlined above. Russia and China are not constrained by the same moral dilemmas that keep Americans awake at night. Rather, they are focused on creating strategic advantage for their countries. (Emphases added)

But there are to my mind at least three more possibilities that are not discussed by the article, and here is where it gets interesting and where our daily dose of high octane speculation comes in. First, as we've noted in many previous blogs, no cyber system is secure. With all major powers, including the USA, Russia, and China, developing sophisticated cyber-warfare capabilities, the possibility arises that any such system in any country might come under the control of another nation, and its arsenal put to its use, either to create a false flag situation, and additionally, there's always the possibility of a non-state actor gaining such penetration and control capability. Admittedly, such a scenario is highly unlikely, since nations embarking on such a strategy are likely to keep such systems entirely insulated from any connection to the worldwide net, but nonetheless the danger does not approach zero.

By the same token, in the race to acquire sophisticated and genuine AI capabilities, one opens the possibility to the AIs "waking up," and a nightmare scenario could emerge where one AI battles another... with nukes. Again, such a scenario may be highly unlikely, but again, the possibility does not approach zero.

But there's a final possibility that may indeed be out of this world, and it's an omission from the article that I find quite intriguing, because I do not think for a moment that this possibility is absent from the secret deliberations and discussions doubtless taking place in the conference rooms of the nuclear powers. And that returns us to Byelokorovichye in The Ukraine. Robert Hastings published a massive study of UFO incidents over the USA's and the Soviet Union's strategic nuclear bases. In the book, Hastings records several incidents over USA missile silo bases where UFOs were able to interfere with the computerized launch and guidance control systems of American ICBMs, at one time taking down an entire flight of ICBMs. IN the Soviet Union, in 1982, a UFO appeared over the Soviet missile silos around Byelokorochichye, and initiated the launch sequence, leaving Soviet missile crews scrambling to try to regain control of the computer systems and prevent the launch. Just prior to the launch, the program was shut down, the UFO flew away, and "sanity" returned.

So one has to wonder if, indeed, this latest round of talk about turning nuclear war over to computers is really directed at Russia (or the USA) at all. Perhaps there's a "behind the scenes" cyber warfare going on, with some rather sophisticated players...

See you on the flip side...

DISAPPEARING EBOOKS

I knew as soon as I saw this story that I would have to blog about it. Not only did several people send some version of it to me, but the subject is near and dear to my heart. Reason? I've been warning about the dangers of ebooks for some time. And this story more or less concretizes and to some extent confirms my concerns. Suppose one day you logged into your ebook cloud (or whatever it is), and discovered a notice that your ebook was gone. Not just "temporarily unavailble, please check back in a few minutes," but gone.

If that sounds far-fetched, it has already happened to users of Microsoft's ebooks  (thanks to J.T. and F.S. for first bringing this to my attention, and to all the rest of you who also shared the story):

Microsoft is about to shut off its ebook DRM servers: "The books will stop working"

Microsoft's Ebook Apocalypse Shows the Dark Side of DRM

Now, let's give (begruding) credit where credit is due: Microsoft at least had the integrity to refund its ebook customers for snatching away their ebooks.

But my concerns over the years has boiled down to a fundamental truth, expressed in the opening paragraph of the Wired article by Brian Barrett:

Your iTunes movies, your Kindle books—they’re not really yours. You don’t own them. You’ve just bought a license that allows you to access them, one that can be revoked at any time. And while a handful of incidents have brought that reality into sharp relief over the years, none has quite the punch of Microsoft disappearing every single ebook from every one of its customers.

EBooks are a platform, and subject to all the problems of censorship we've seen attached to other" platforms", Facebook, YouTube, and so on: censorship. I've been maintaining for some time that the digitization of books and other information (think music and music scores and librettos and lyrics, folks) is kind of like the old Soviet Encyclopedia, on steroids: now you see a picture of Yagoda, or Yezhov, or whomever, and later, you don't, because the picture, along with the monster man has been purged. Ebooks make it all too easy for a corporate world run amok to censor anything they wish; don't like the content? Just go in and change the text. Or just get rid of it altogether. Sure, Microsoft has not claimed its actions are the result of censorship, but the good old "bottom line." But its actions highlight the dangers inherent in the digital platform, which is why I've been maintaining that the only canonical form of any of my works is the hard copy book, which readers own.

One may thus easily imagine other ebook "platforms" eventually stating that "this service may be terminated at any time by the owner for any reason, without refund." We're not quite there yet, for such a move would basically signal an almost complete corporate takeover of the information field, which is why it's important to prevent that by buying books, scores, and music CDs. And perish the thought that your books, scores, poems, lyrics, librettos or what-have-you do not show enough "diveristy" or inclusion. Don't believe me? The move is already afoot to "level the playing field" there too  according to this article shared by P.S.J.:

Triggered by Bach: Classical Music as Implicit White Supremacy

One friend who had seen this article told me that this was merely another attempt to keep everyone divided. So far as that goes, I suppose that is true. But for me it's another bit of evidence that the cultural Gramscians really do mean a complete makeover of the culture, to the point of destroying its past and cutting people off from its traditions. One can imagine a day, under their malign "leadership" and nihilist agenda, when the mere performance of Bach's cantatas will be viewed as a subversive or anti-semitic act, simply because of the Christian nature of the lyrics, or when a performance of Beethoven's Ninth symphony will be viewed as a pandering to patriarchy with its ringing chords on the word Bruder (Brothers!). They won't stop there: they will go on to attack all the other signs and symbols of "privilege": the Beatles, Abba, REO, ELO, Elvis, and others from the "classical era" of rock, so on. They will attack Duke Ellington as an "Uncle Tom" for liking Bach, or Fanny Mendelssohn for composing music too much like her more famous family member who was male, Haendel will be attacked for his setting of the Dixit Dominus or Haydn for his Die Schoepfung (The Creation) or Dave Brubeck as "cultural appropriation", and on and on it will go.

Which returns us to the matter at hand: there is no digital platform that is secure, especially in the hands of already morally compromised technocrats. There is no replacement for the hard copy, be it the score, the book, the lyrics, libretto, or CD. They are, and will remain, the only canonical form of artistic creations.

See you on the flip side...

 

AMAIRKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN: THE REVENGE OF THE ADJUNCTS

This article starts off this week's blogs in an unusual way, not because I'm long overdue for one of my rants about Amairkuhn edgykayshun, but because this article touches upon me personally. It's about the plight of America's adjunct professors:

The Revenge of the Poverty-Stricken College Professors Is Underway in Florida. And It's Big.

Just in case you didn't know, it is more than likely that if you send your child off to an American quackademy for a college education, that he or she will receive the bulk of instruction from an adjunct professor. We'll get back to why that's not necessarily a good thing in a moment. But consider these two paragraphs from this article:

“Two half-time adjunct jobs do not make a full-time income. Far from it,” Ximena Barrientos says. “I’m lucky that I have my own apartment. I have no idea how people make it work if they have to pay rent.”

We are not sitting on a street corner, or in a welfare office, or in the break room of a fast food restaurant. We are sitting inside a brightly lit science classroom on the third floor of an MC Escher-esque concrete building, with an open breezeway letting in the muggy South Florida air, on the campus of Miami Dade College, one of the largest institutions of higher learning in the United States of America. Barrientos has been teaching here for 15 years. But this is not “her” classroom. She has a PhD, but she does not have a designated classroom. Nor does she have an office. Nor does she have a set schedule, nor tenure, nor healthcare benefits, nor anything that could be described as a decent living wage. She is a full-time adjunct professor: one of thousands of members of the extremely well-educated academic underclass, whose largely unknown sufferings have played just as big a role as student debt in enabling the entire swollen College Industrial Complex to exist.

...

The accepted story of what an “adjunct professor” is—the myth that has drawn so many hopefuls into the world of professional academia—is that adjuncting is not a full-time job at all. It is something that retirees do to keep themselves busy; something that working professionals do on the side to educate people in their field; something that, perhaps, a young PhD might do for a year or two while looking for a full-time professorship, but certainly nothing that would constitute an actual career in itself.

In fact, this is a big lie. The long term trend in higher education has been one of a shrinking number of full-time positions and an ever-growing number of adjunct positions. It is not hard to see why. University budgets are balanced on the backs of adjunct professors. In an adjunct, a school gets the same class taught for about half the salary of a full-time professor, and none of the benefits. The school also retains a god-like control over the schedules of adjuncts, who are literally laid off after every single semester, and then rehired as necessary for the following semester. In the decade since the financial crisis, state governments have slashed higher education funding, and Florida is no exception. That has had two primary consequences on campus: students have taken on ever-higher levels of debt to pay for school, and the college teaching profession has been gutted, as expensive full-time positions are steadily eliminated in favor of cheaper adjunct positions.

That's just the beginning. I not only experienced exactly what Dr. Barrientos in this article experienced, but thousands of others have too. And this article barely even begins to get into the problems adjuncts face, nor does it really address very deeply the consequences to declining academic standards the move towards adjuncts has wrought. On most college campuses, including in the state where I taught (Oklahoma), adjuncts are faced with the following problems:

1) Their classes are only offered if a minimum number of students enroll. Thus, adjuncts never know, until the very last moment, how many classes they will have. Since their income is dependent on how many classes they teach, it becomes extremely difficult to budget. Imagine not knowing if, for the next three to four months your income would be $4,000 or $8,000? (And yes, the pay is that bad.)

2) If an adjunct is known, however, to be a "tough professor," that is to say, if they take their job as a professor seriously and to profess a discipline rather than to "teach a subject", and thus if they take their responsibility as a professor seriously and attempt to maintain genuinely college level academic standards, students will tend not to enroll for their courses, opting instead to enroll in an "easier" professor's course for the same credit. As a consequence of this fact, academic standards have declined in direct proportion to the amount of instruction done by adjuncts. But wait, it gets worse.

3) If an adjunct does attempt to maintain genuinely college level standards - and remember, folks, those standards have declined so dramatically in Amairikuhn quackademia that many professors don't even know them any more - then invariably the student-snowflake will complain to the all-powerful administration to "tone it down," with the ever-present threat of "no longer being needed".

4) In many states - including the one I taught as an adjunct in, Oklahoma - adjuncts are only paid at the end of the semester for their courses, and even then that can be iffy. On more than one occasion I, for example, came in to pick up my paycheck, only to be told, like all the other adjuncts, that a "glitch ex machina" had affected the machines that printed out the checks, and it would be two more weeks. Meanwhile, late fees pile up on bills, and you're losing money because of the institution's or state's incompetence  (and it probably isn't incompetence, they're just using the system, and the adjunct's money, during that time period to make themselves more money). After several examples of the state being late with my paycheck, I had to insist that I be paid on a pro-rated monthly basis. Getting the over-paid administrators to (a) see that the pay schedule was simply immoral, and (b) that they should actually get off their butt, walk to the payroll office scriptorium and do something about it (like having the monks and nuns chisel a check), was like extracting teeth... from an elephant. Without anesthesia.

5) Finally - and let's be honest here - in many cases, as quality of instruction declines for all the above reasons, so does the quality of the adjuncts themselves. The goal is to fill classes, churn out degrees, and make money at the government trough from student loans.  It is not to maintain academic standards in the disciplines. As a result, not much vetting of adjuncts occurs, and usually the people vetting adjuncts are themselves products of the decaying standards.

You might be asking where all your child's tuition money must be going? The answer is very simple: it's going to the overpaid left-wing lunatics in college administrations, who then see to it that their chums and buddies get the few remaining tenured positions open. As administration sucks up more and more of the tuition budget, the first thing to be cut are quality permanent faculty. Why pay a tenured professor a living wage plus benefits, if you can pay an adjunct to carry a full course load, and not provide him or her (1) an office, (2) a timely paycheck (3) or health and dental? Why pay an associate professor on a tenure track $40,000 when an adjunct will do it for $24,000? You can then pocket the rest as an "administrator".  As administration bloats, faculties are trimmed, with all the above-enumerated consequences to falling standards. The fat, in other words, is not in faculties, it's  in administrations, and I'm going to go so far as to say that there is not an administrator, be he dean or department chairman or university or college president, on a campus today, that is earning what they are being paid.

Yes, it's that bad. And the result is this:

Students at Florida’s enormous community colleges (Miami Dade College alone has more than 165,000 students) may not be conscious of this dynamic, but they sit at its center, and they pay the price—not only in their student loan bills, but by sitting in classes taught by teachers who are overworked, underpaid, given virtually no professional resources or continuity of scheduling, and who are often forced to rush from job to job in order to make ends meet, leaving little time for helping students outside of classroom hours, much less for publishing work in their fields to advance their careers. Now, Florida’s higher education system sits at the center of another trend as well: the unionization of those well educated but miserably compensated adjunct professors.(Emphasis added)

One might be thinking here that it cannot possibly be this bad. Well, speaking from personal experience with Oklahoma's miserific and unethical adjunct system, I can say it mirrors that of Florida recounted in the article. Most adjuncts have to carry what would be considered a full course load, and do so at a fraction of the salary of a full time professor. As the article also states, they are given "virtually no professional resources" nor even "continuity of scheduling." Your course in organic chemistry my be at 6:30 PM Tuesdays and Thursdays one semester, and at 10:30 AM Monday, Wednesday, Friday the next. And as an adjunct, oftentimes you will not have the choice of your own textbook, but rather have to use the text that full time professors have chosen for a particular course. And since the standards have already declined, these texts are often of dubious quality. When I taught Russian History, for example, the required text was so bad (it was a Barnes and Noble sort of "Cliff notes" text) that it actually referred to Josef Stalin as a "great statesman." And as adjuncts, another problem is that more often than not, one never even meets the other adjuncts in your field. After all, why have faculty meetings to coordinate, when you're not really faculty? And besides, you have little time anyway.

You're just a stand-in, a proctor for a text book company, doing a book report, trying to evade the "thought police" of the looney left, while the administrators take home handsome salaries, and produce idiotic screaming snowflakes who want their safe spaces.

I doff my hat to the real professors out there having to adjunct. I managed to escape the system. I  know what you're going through, and I hope you escape it, too, because you know the numbers, even with unions, will never add up.

OK. I'm done. Rant over.

See you on the flip side...

 

THE TANKER INCIDENT: JAPAN SAYS NOT SO FAST…

If you're following the story about the attacks on the tankers in the Persian Gulf, then you'll want to read today's story, and the article from the Saker linked in today's "Tidbits", for there appear to be more holes in the story than in the ships themselves. The US-based narrative is saying that the attacks were caused by mines.

But Japan is saying "not so fast" according to this story from Zero Hedge shared by G.B.:

Japanese Tanker Owner Denies Ship Hit By Mine, Says Crew Saw "Flying Objects" Before Attack

What's interesting here is to compare this story to the picture of the "mine" which appears in The Saker article linked in the Tidbit, which pictures a "triangular" shaped object allegedly the "mine", and clearly this is above the waterline. I suppose one could "nitpick" here and call any explosive device attached to an object a "mine", but in conventional usage, a mine is indeed an underwater object designed to detonate below a ship's waterline.   But even that is not what Japan is saying:

For a moment on Thursday, it appeared that the US Navy had produced the 'smoking gun' to which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had alluded during his statement from earlier in the day: CENTCOM footage which the Navy said purported to show Iran's IRGC 'caught in the act' of trying to remove an unexploded  mine from the Kokuka Courageous, one of the two tankers damaged in Thursday's attacks.

CENTCOM said the video it released showed the IRGC removing an unexploded limpet mine from the side of one of the tankers, suggesting Tehran had sought to remove evidence from the scene.

After the video's release, Iran continued to deny any involvement in the attacks. And perhaps now we know why.

In comments that cast the entire narrative promulgated by the US in doubt, Yutaka Katada, the president of Kokuka Sangyo, the owner and operator of the Kokuka Courageous, said Friday that he doesn't completely believe Washington's version of events.

Instead, he said the vessel wasn't damaged by a mine, but by some kind of projectile, like, say, a torpedo. He called reports of a mine attack "false." One reason is because a mine doesn't damage a ship above sea level, like what was seen with the Courageous.

"A mine doesn’t damage a ship above sea level," said Yutaka Katada, president of Kokuka Sangyo, the owner and operator of the vessel. "We aren’t sure exactly what hit, but it was something flying towards the ship," he said. (Italicized emphasis added)

So, the owner of the Japanese tanker that was hit in last week's attacks is stating that it was a flying projectile of some sort, not a mine, and that implies an artillery projectile, a missile, or a drone.

So, look what we have: (1) a claim by the owner of the Japanese tanker, and its crew, that some sort of projectile hit the ship, not a mine, contradicting the American version of events, and (2) the unlikelihood that Iran would conduct an attack on a Japanese tanker while the Japanese premier was on an official visit to Tehran. Thus, if we're to believe the "narrative" coming out of the USA, Iran fired "something" at the tanker while Japan's premier was on a diplomatic visit to that country.

The problem with that whole picture is, of course, that Iran would be running an extreme risk by attacking the ship of a nation - Japan - that is not even hostile to Iran while its premier is visiting, and that Japan would inevitably find out about the attack. If indeed Japan had even remotely suspected this scenario, then Tokyo would already have registered some sort of politely but firmly worded official protest with Tehran, which it has not done. So far, the silence, in other words, is deafening.

But I strongly suspect that with Yutaka Katada's comments, Tokyo has already signaled its response unofficially, for it is difficult to believe that in a government as tightly run as the Japanese, that Katada's remarks were not "cleared" beforehand. And in this instance, registering an unofficial objection to the American narrative via a private corporation rather than through "official channels" would be a very Japanese way of sending the message "we know the narrative is nonsense, but we're not going to embarrass you publicly by stating it officially."

For the moment, then, I am sticking with my high octane speculation that this event may have originated from elsewhere, and principally from rogue elements in The Swamp and their proxies in the region.

You know who I mean.

See you on the flip side...

AMAIRIKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN AND THE MENSTRUAL EQUALITY ACT

Yes, you read that headline correctly. An institution of "high learning"  in Amairikuhn quackademia has decided that menstrual equality needs to be promoted on its campus(note, I said "high", not "higher", because I strongly suspect the people behind this idea - and I'm using the term "people" loosely here - were high when they proposed it). And, lest one leap to what would be under normal circumstances a rational conclusion and believe that this is happening in some explosion of bloviation at Harvard square, the Rockefailure University of Chicago, or the quackademies of Nuttyfornia, think again, for not to be outdone in edublithering lunacy, a quackademy in the Amairikuhn heartland has decided that the absence of access to menstruation products in men's lavatories could, in fact, be construed as an offense and injustice to transgendered women using the men's restrooms on the campus of the "University" of Arkansas' Fayetteville campus, according to this story shared by K.M.:

UA Student Gov’t Seeks Free Access For Menstruation Products

Yes, you are permitted to do a double-take and read that one again:

(The University of Arkansas) currently uses coin-only dispensaries -- mostly in women's restrooms...

Uhmmmm... er... at the risk of exposing my white male patriarchal privilege, I have to ask, where else would one expect them to be located? Oh, I forgot: it's ok now to use whichever bathroom of which ever sex you feel more inclined to "being" on any particular day. My bad; mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

-- which ASG says further limits access to menstrual hygiene.

(Associated Student Government) said 86 percent of individuals experience an unexpected need for menstrual hygiene management (MHM), and having only women's restrooms outfitted with tampons is unequal and limits the ability of members of the transgender community to safely and easily access MHM on-demand.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Being a rational man or woman you're probably thinking that this means that the campus, in order to make this nuttery "completely equal", will inevitably have to distribute condoms or other "men's health products" in women's restrooms to accommodate transitioning transgendered males. That may indeed be the case, but if so, it would only be a sign that the "University" of Arkansas has only progressed as far as the now rabidly traditional and ultra-right-wing conservatism of nth-wave feminism. (I say nth-wave feminism because I long ago lost count of which wave of feminism the culture was surfing. I lost count somewhere between the Margaret Court-Bobby Riggs tennis court confrontation and the Billy Jean King-Bobby Riggs tennis court confrontation. And to be honest, I lost count because I lost interest because it was clear where all this nonsense was heading.  One does wonder how those confrontations may have gone if, perhaps, rather than Bobby Riggs, the men were represented by Rod Laver or Bjorn Borg, but I digress.)  The problem with that analysis is of course that the placement of condoms or "men's health products" in women's restrooms would be an obvious imposition not only of dreaded patriarchy within a female safe space, but a further manifestation of the continuing and insidious disguised presence of patriarchy and female repression.  In order to truly address the Rampant Inequality Caused by the Patriarchy, it would be better to ban all public men's restrooms completely, and convert the ones currently in the infrastructure to women's bathrooms. During the difficulties and dislocations of the Transition Period to Full Equality, men could, of course, use these facilities if they paid a small "men's user fee". A government bureaucracy can be set up for this purpose next to the Clinton Library in Little Rock, and over time, those fees can be gradually raised in order to prevent men from displaying patriarchal privilege and utilizing public restrooms. The benefit of this plan will, of course, force men, whose flatulence is helping create climate change, from eating so much, and confining themselves to urinate, defecate, and flatulate in the privacy of their own homes, or at least move to San Franfreakshow, Nuttyfornia where they can do so on the streets and sidewalks. We can, of course, force compliance by confiscating their homes after installing Elimination Smart Meters. If they are not compliant, these homes can be seized and turned over to the Dreamers, who truly deserve it.

See? Problem solved. We are, after all, the Shining City on a Hill and The Indispensable, Exceptional Nation.

***

All satire and sarcasm aside, this nonsense has to end, and soon, because it is nothing less than an nihilistic assault on men and women, on maleness and femaleness, that is to say, on our humanity.

See you on the flip side...

 

 

 

 

A BIT OF CONFIRMATION ABOUT THOSE PERSIAN GULF ATTACKS?

In the past few months, I've tried to avoid blogging much on this website about politics or geopolitics, because so much of it is just downright disgusting and emotionally draining. But today, I think it may be a kind of moral dereliction not to do so.

Last Thursday I recorded my News and Views from the Nefarium on the tanker attacks in the Persian Gulf. At the time, there wasn't much to go on, except, of course, that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeio was quick out of the gate to denounce Iran as the ne'er-do-well in chief behind the attacks.

I wasn't so sure, and I'm still not. Don't get me wrong: I'm absolutely no fan of the regime in Tehran. They are a state sponsoring terror. But if that is the standard by which we must focus our ire, then the (out)House of Saud is also right at the top of the list, and one could think of a few other countries over in that region as well. Moreover, in some American states, it is now a "hate speech" crime to raise even a minim of suspicion about the treatment of Palestinians by Israel, or to question the legitimacy, not to mention constitutionality, of the whole idea that some people can maintain a dual citizenship in this country and that one, and hold public office in this one! For those paying attention, that was a neat and nifty equation of two concepts hardly related, as anti-Zionism has been equated with anti-Semitism. At a stroke, any theological criticism of the Zionist position or agenda - be it Orthodox Jewish or traditional Christian - has been made a hate crime. And for those really paying attention, those ludicrous laws not only have sanctioned a massive curtailment of the First Amendment right of free speech, they have implicitly sanctioned a form of Christian doctrine - dispensationalism - long understood by traditional Christian confessional positions as a heresy. If you're an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi or a traditional "Book of Concord" Lutheran pastor, you could be in breech of those laws for questioning the theological basis of Zionism and/0r its dispensationalist counterpart that holds sway in many American "evangelical" circles.  By those decrees, one would have to come up with a sort of "anti-Zionist" "Index of Forbidden Books" that the Faithful of the Indispensable Nation must not read, and at the head of that list would have to be books like Alfred Lilienthal's What Price Zionism? or Ben Hecht's Perfidy or Rabbi Marvin Antelmann's To Eliminate the Opiate, not to mention Hannah Arendt and a few others. In other words, Jewish intellectuals and critics of Zionism would themselves be denied a voice. They could not write their books in modern Texas or Florida, two states which have already passed such "anti-Zionism" laws.

I rehearse all of these points because in last Thursday's News and Views I outlined reasons why I'm not at all convinced that Iran is behind those attacks. I don't rule it out, but with the rush to condemn that nation without a scintilla of evidence or argument at the time, my suspicion meter went into the red zone. I found few reasons for Iran to do such a thing, but plenty of reasons for factions elsewhere in the Middle East to do so, and highlighted the Saudis as one possibility, Israel another, and one cannot rule out a kind of "Bay of Pigs" scenario of some rogue intelligence faction in this country trying to pin the executive branch to a course of action by precipitating such an incident. For me it had, and still has, that element of "Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq" quality to it. There is - if I may so put it - a cartoonish quality to it. It's too pat, too obvious, and too unsubtle. It seems designed to persuade opinion in this country, and that is what this article shared by V.T. seems to indicate what has already happened:

Senators Switched Key Votes On Gulf Arms Ban Hours After Tanker Attacks

The key here, in case you missed it, is this, and it occurs right at the beginning of the article:

A brief report from AntiWar.com's Eric Garris suggests Thursday's tanker attack incident in the Gulf of Oman which the United States promptly blamed on Iran has directly impacted bills placed before the Senate which would ban US arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar.

Garris wrote of the vote which came hours after the Gulf tankers incident: "Both votes were considered highly likely to pass up until they were rushed to the floor today. The timing appears almost certainly to have been related to Thursday tanker bombings in the Gulf of Oman, and shifted a number of Senators’ votes in favor of continuing the arms sales." He noted that "some senators switched sides to kill the bills" following news of the tanker attacks.

And there you have it.

Let's not forget that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in Tehran at the time, acting (as many suppose) to clear the air, and potentially (as others suppose) as intermediary for President Trump. But in any case, Abe may have been there to conduct independent diplomacy, and hence the incident could be also construed as a shot across Japan's bows. The idea that Iran would attack a Japanese ship while Abe is there in any capacity, intermediary or otherwise, is, in a word, completely nuts. And the Persians are not nuts. And I strongly suspect that not even their nutty regime is that nuts.

As for the rest of us who believe that "It is finished" means "it is finished," and that there is no longer any special theological dispensation or privilege attaching to Israel, Zionist or otherwise, well, Austin and Tallahassee have decreed such views heresy.

And in doing so, it looks to me like they're not only flying in the face of the First Amendment, but also the establishment clause. But hey, that's ok, because we're already second class citizens required to fund entities like Planned Parenthood...

See you on the flip side...

 

 

 

THE STEAMPUNK SCRAPBOOK: BIGBOY AND 8444 DOUBLE-HEAD

Regular readers here know I have this fascination for three things that I suppose could fall under the category of "steampunk." Those are: (1) artillery (the bigger the better); (2) roller coasters; and (3) steam locomotives, which are I suppose the very essence of "steampunk": clanking, snorting, hissing beasts of valves, tubes, and pressures all bolted together, and dreamed up by engineers doing things the old-fashioned way, on drafting tables, using pencils, and slide rules. When you stop and think what the steam locomotive represents in terms of its engineering achievement, it really is breathtaking.

Well, all that's a bit of context for a story I've followed and blogged about on this website occasionally, and that is the Union Pacific Railroad's purchase and restoration of old steam locomotives to fully functional operations, and their conversion to burn oil, not coal. This effort began in the 1990s, and the railroad restored a 4-6-6-4 "Challenger" articulated locomotive, which you can watch the sheer muscle of this locomotive pulling 143 freight cars over the mountain passes in California, and doing the work of several diesels:

And if you've ever been driving around Wyoming, you might have seen engine 844 chugging along and 75 mph or better (you can find many videos by Skip Weythman on youtube with engine 844; check them out, they're fun to watch).

But a few years ago, Union Pacific brought the largest steam locomotive ever built to its "steam shop" in Cheyenne to begin the process of restoration and conversion, the 4-8-8-4 "Big Boy" articulated locomotive, even bigger than the Challenger in the first video above.

Well, that restoration work has been concluded, and the Big Boy has not only had its first "steam up" and trial run, but has joined engine 844 in a "double-header" expedition to Ogden, Utah:

 

Now, pardon me for cramming so many locomotive videos into one blog. As I say, I can't help it; I have a "thing" for these old beauties and marvels of engineering skill and ingenuity, all done without a scrap of "computer-aided design" in their day, just drafting paper, pencils, triangles, French curves, erasers, and slide rules.

There is, however, method to my madness, and I have blogged about this before, and now, with Big Boy's and 844's double-header to Ogden, it's time for a "revision and extension" of my previous high-octane speculations. As I've mentioned before, the restoration work on these old locomotives has been extensive: fireboxes and boilers needed to be rebuilt, many complex parts needed to be completely manufactured anew. In effect, the process of these restorations has meant - I have argued - that Union Pacific probably now has (re-)acquired the knowledge to manufacture a steam locomotive from the bottom up, from scratch. Additionally, it has had to train engineers to operate and run the monsters, and has had to build out the infrastructure to allow them to operate on the company's track, after all, steam locomotives need fuel and water.

What all this means (as I've also previously argued) is that the railroad is laying out a considerable amount of money, so much, in fact, that I highly doubt it's just because it wants to provide photo opportunities for local "railways heritage days" clubs. Something else is definitely involved, and as I've also speculated, that something may be "EMP," electromagnetic pulse. A conventional diesel electric locomotive will be taken down in a heartbeat; so too, will your automobile (unless, perhaps, it is a model T, but that's another story); likewise most aircraft. But a steam locomotive - all valves and gears and levers - will chug along quite nicely. Hence, behind this "steam locomotive restoration" effort I've suspected a much bigger national security agenda, one to reacquire the know-how to build, repair and maintain, and operate these locomotives. (Since I first blogged about this subject, people both in Australia and in the United Kingdom have written me informing me that similar restoration efforts of steam locomotives are under way in those countries as well.)

Which brings us to the last video above, the one showing engine 844 and the Big Boy "double-heading." Now, if you don't know railroad parlance, double-heading is when two or more locomotives are used to pull a train. You see it all the time with several diesels coupled together at the head (and sometimes the middle and ends) of very long trains. Double-heading is relatively easy to do with diesels, since they are built to be able to do so, with the rates of acceleration and deceleration being controlled from one cab via electronic links to the others so that all the engines are acting in an identical fashion, under unitary control.

But double-heading with steam locomotives is a considerably more complicated business, since these are all analog technologies, and no centralized automated electronic control of the engines is possible (and, if my EMP national-security hypothesis is what lies behind this restoration effort, one wouldn't want to devise such a method anyway since it would be vulnerable to EMP interdiction). Double-heading with steam locomotives requires a great deal of experience from the engineers in the cabs of each locomotive. Yet, double-heading was done in the age of steam, and particularly during the American Civil war when both the Confederacy and the Union used railroads to move massive amounts of troops, supplies, ordnance and so on. And it was done with no means of remote or automated radio communication between cabs.

So what I suspect we're now looking at once again (and under the guise of a "railroad heritage days" event) is a bit of trial and practice, a training exercise on how to double-head with steam locomotives, should the occasion ever arise that it would be necessary to do so.

It does make one wonder, especially since President Trump also recently issued an executive order regarding electromagnetic pulse.

See you on the flip side...