Wretchard.com

If they were protesting abortion they would be a hate group

Who writes the new Einstein-Szilard letter?

Legal Insurrection

Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. I believe therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations:
In the course of the last four months it has been made probable—through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America—that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
This phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air…

I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.

Yours very truly, Albert Einstein

The most dramatic aspect of the A-Bomb saga was that it was a real-life race for the secret. Fritz Lang tried to capture the suspense in his post-war “Cloak and Dagger”, complete with OSS agents trying to exfiltrate atomic scientists from Europe.

Did Heisenberg deliberately sabotage Hitler’s A-bomb program? The New York Times cites new evidence that he did not.

With bacteria and fungi alike, hospitals and local governments are reluctant to disclose outbreaks for fear of being seen as infection hubs.

Star Tribune

Our expectations of the future are set by the past. When Stephen Hawking died in 2018 his final warning to humanity was to beware artificial intelligence, climate change and a meteor strike from outer space. Although these are now familiar terms no newspaper editor before 1970 would have heard of them. Until the early 1980s global warming fears did not exist: it was global cooling the press warned about. The now familiar dinosaur killing Chicxulub impact crater was only found in 1978 by “geophysicists Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo … as part of an airborne magnetic survey of the Gulf of Mexico north of the Yucatán peninsula”. Fears of runaway AI only became mainstream in the 21st century. None of these fears are more than 40 years old.

The Belmont Club

“I am going to extend [Israeli] sovereignty and I don’t distinguish between settlement blocs and the isolated settlements.”
A spokesman for Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas told Reuters: “Any measures and any announcements will not change the facts. Settlements are illegal and they will be removed.”

BBC

What may have killed the Palestinian cause was the Arab Spring. After the states that supported them collapsed Israel was the only power left standing. The only way to survive is by succeeding. The USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, the ME dictatorships etc all proved vulnerable to economic and social collapse. Tyranny is no substitute for competence.

In the contest between totalitarian human ant-heaps and reality (ie God), it’s God by a landslide. This is a lesson the West must not forget. The narrative never beats the truth. Triumphs like declining population, racial and gender self-selection and spending trillions on AOC’s GND aren’t real victories. They are just preludes to a crash. Ultimately the PC West is no smarter than Hamas.

Murder in Honduras is nothing new. But the newly sadistic ways women are being killed — shot in the vagina, strangled in front of their children, skinned alive — have people running for the border …

President Trump calls immigrants “criminals” — drug dealers and rapists intent on plundering America. But the truth, as I saw so clearly over a monthlong reporting trip in Honduras, is that migrants are fleeing a society controlled by criminals.

NYT

What’s the use of fleeing to the United State if the murderers can simply follow after them? It’s only a lifeboat if pirates can’t board it. If there’s no barrier the murderers will simply rob the lifeboat.

If the globalists really want to prevent failing states they should make it difficult for any high ranking 3rd world official to move to themselves, their money or their families to the West. Refugees should be armed and encouraged to take back their country from the murderous officials who can either reform or die.

The idea is already there in the Magnitsky act. “Since 2016 the bill, which applies globally, authorizes the US government to sanction those who it sees as human rights offenders, freezing their assets, and ban them from entering the U.S.”

In the case of 3rd world officials the prohibition should be amended to “unless proven not to be human rights offenders”. Unfortunately lobbies want the human rights offender’s money and the refugee cheap labor. Hence “no wall”.

Open borders encourages money laundering and people smuggling and disincentivizes patriotism in the Third World, except of the fake Maduro kind. Speaking of which, where do you suppose the scions of the bolivarian revolutionary elite are? Why living and shopping in Woke Europe to be sure. Because their billions are always welcome. But to hear tell it’s the racist who shops at K-mart has the wrong attitude on borders.

Daily Mail

Is the target bigger than Venezuela?

After an exhaustive 22-month investigation, Mueller found that there was no criminal collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

National Review

Arizona is one signature away from becoming the first state in the country to recognize out-of-state occupational licenses. That means licensed workers will be able to move to Arizona and immediately find work without going through the expensive, time-consuming, and redundant process of getting re-licensed

Reason

Every day, hundreds of people without running water hike up from the city on Avila’s winding trails to bathe, wash clothes and collect water to carry home. To the dismay of environmental activists who fear the damage will be irreversible, people are littering its slopes and creeks with shampoo and water bottles, food wrappers, cardboard and old clothes.

New York Post

As Russian President Vladimir Putin and a convoy of construction vehicles rolled across one of the most controversial new bridges in the world on May 15, 2018, something funky began happening on ships anchored nearby in the Kerch Strait.
The ships’ GPS systems suddenly began to indicate they were actually 65 kilometers away, on land, in the middle of an airport.
The incident is one of many highlighted in a new report that found the Kremlin “spoofed” global positioning systems, or GPS, to effectively place a bubble around Putin or properties associated with him.

CBS

But it may not fool everyone.

Kits that convert unguided bombs into all-weather ‘smart’ munitions, such as the Boeing Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kit, are widely deployed; in 2013 the company marked production of the 250,000^th JDAM kit. These kits guide by an integrated inertial guidance system paired with a GPS receiver; new variants such as the Laser JDAM and JDAM Extended Range providing the ability to prosecute moving targets and deploy the weapon from greater distances.
The Raytheon AGM-154 Joint Stand-off Weapon (JSOW) also uses integrated GPS inertial navigation with thermal imaging infrared seeker. This weapon has been modified under the JSOW C-1 programme to add a two-way strike common weapon datalink to provide a network-enabled weapon with a range of more than 100km.

Air Force Technology

Mrs. May’s plan was to eventually take Britain out of Europe’s main economic structures but give it control over immigration from continental Europe.

Mr. Corbyn has been reluctant to be pinned down on a single alternate plan, but Labour’s policy is to keep Britain more closely tied to European regulations and leave the door open to a second public vote on Brexit.

NYT

“The 196,000 jobs added in March shows the US economy is not stalling out, something investors were worried about following February’s disappointing numbers. And other data in the report showed wages are rising but not at a rate which would spur inflation,” said Chris Gaffney, president of world markets at TIAA Bank. “This was a perfect report for equity investors as it shows the US economy is still marching along while the wage numbers will keep the FOMC on the sidelines.”

CNBC

The travails of the global world and an international “rule based order”

The U.S. is not a party to the treaty that created the international court. Instead of joining the organization when it was founded, the U.S. adopted the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, which broadly prohibits the U.S. from facilitating any ICC investigation of U.S. or allied service personnel — and which blocks ICC staff from conducting such work inside the U.S.
While the U.S. claims its citizens and military personnel are outside of the ICC’s jurisdiction, the court says Afghanistan is within its purview because the country ratified the Rome Statute, which established the court, in early 2003.
“The ICC therefore has jurisdiction over Rome Statute crimes committed on the territory of Afghanistan or by its nationals from 1 May 2003 onwards,” the court said in its summary of a preliminary examination in 2013.

NPR

First, it was Hamas, and then Hezbollah. Now, Syria is threatening to undermine Israel with tunnels. In fact, a Syrian general claims that the Syrian Civil War has turned Syrian soldiers into “experts” at digging holes in the ground. …

In its seventy-five-year history, the Syrian military has rarely had a reputation for being expert in anything. But fighting the Islamic State, which has used underground fortifications extensively, has given the Syrian Arab Army—the official name of the Syrian ground forces—a bloody lesson in subterranean warfare. And not just Syrian government soldiers: American soldiers and U.S.-backed Syrian, Iraqi and Kurdish fighters have had immense difficulty rooting out ISIS from labyrinthine tunnel complexes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Subterranean passages enable ISIS fighters to avoid air strikes and artillery fire, escape encirclement, and allow them to pop out of the ground to spring ambushes.

National Interest

The airmen are considering their strategy against the molemen.

“They’ve gone underground to match our overmatch,” said retired Army Maj. John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies with the Modern War Institute at West Point. …

For the Air Force, once the service has identified such a tunnel or other underground facility and figured out what’s inside, the question is what to do about it.
It’s not always necessary to obliterate the entire structure, the way air forces approached such “hard and deeply-buried targets” during World War II, Baker said. Instead of sending an entire squadron to annihilate the area, the Air Force could use one precision-guided munition from one airplane to target a specific “effect” — take out one particular room or feature of a tunnel, and ruin the enemy’s ability to use it in the process.
Aircraft could also take out a power grid, a ventilation system that hundreds or thousands of troops need to breathe underground, or a communications system necessary for leaders’ command and control, rendering it effectively useless.

Air Force Times

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, said Hayabusa2 dropped a small explosive box which sent a copper ball the size of a baseball slamming into the asteroid, and that data confirmed the spacecraft had safely evacuated and remained intact. JAXA later confirmed the impact from images transmitted from a camera left behind by the spacecraft which showed the impactor being released and fine particles later spraying dozens of meters (yards) out from a spot on the asteroid.

AP

April 5, 2019. A day that will live in famy. But NASA beat them for the first deliberate crash into an asteroid. Deep Impact in 2013. The technology should come in handy though for future asteroid deflection missions to fend off the kind of event that killed the dinosaurs. Here’s an overview of the technology.

Most deflection efforts for a large object require from a year to decades of warning, allowing time to prepare and carry out a collision avoidance project, as no known planetary defense hardware has yet been developed. It has been estimated that a velocity change of just 3.5/t × 10−2 m·s−1 (where t is the number of years until potential impact) is needed to successfully deflect a body on a direct collision trajectory. In addition, under certain circumstances, much smaller velocity changes are needed

Wikipedia

Back in the ’50s there was a plan to nuke the moon.

The recent Chelyabinsk meteorite was the second atomic bomb sized object to hit Earth within a 100 yearWikipedia

Taxman kept quiet while £8bn fraud helped fund Osama bin Laden. For years a UK gang infiltrated government agencies and funnelled cash to al-Qaeda but the watching HMRC kept MI5 in the dark

Times of London

Plus a Pakistan connection.

The files reportedly also show that the gang enjoyed links with a top politician in Pakistan.

Times of India

If price doesn’t set the level, the government does. That’s why a combination of private (price set) and government (rationed to indigents and subsidized for low income) is often the policy mix of choice.

Nearly a quarter of a million British patients have been waiting more than six months to receive planned medical treatment from the National Health Service, according to a recent report from the Royal College of Surgeons. More than 36,000 have been in treatment queues for nine months or more.

Forbes

Following his remarks at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network Conference, Sanders was asked whether he would support a bill, introduced by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D., Texas), that would form a commission to study the institution of American slavery and devise a plan to compensate living descendants of slaves.
“If the House and the Senate pass that bill, of course I would sign it. There needs to be a study. But I think what we need to do is to pay real attention to the most distressed communities in America,” Sanders said.

NRO

AOC weighs in.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called Friday for “examining and pursuing an agenda of reparations” as part of a lengthy list of proposals delivered before an Al Sharpton-sponsored conference in New York — touting a controversial policy that’s increasingly gained support from the 2020 field of Democratic presidential candidates.

Speaking about her cornerstone Green New Deal, which would entail a massive government-led overhaul of the economy and U.S. energy usage, the freshman Democrat also said the plan does not “shy away from bold conversations of health care, housing and education as human rights, of living wages and dignified work, of policy that isn’t just drafted with the next election in mind but also with the next generation in mind.”

Fox