Quote:The Return of the Dire Wolf (TIME magazine)

Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished. TIME met the males (Khaleesi was not present due to her young age) at a fenced field in a U.S. wildlife facility on March 24, on the condition that their location remain a secret to protect the animals from prying eyes.

The dire wolf isn’t the only animal that Colossal, which was founded in 2021 and currently employs 130 scientists, wants to bring back. Also on their de-extinction wish list is the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. Already, in March, the company surprised the science community with the news that it had copied mammoth DNA to create a woolly mouse, a chimeric critter with the long, golden coat and the accelerated fat metabolism of the mammoth.

“We are an evolutionary force at this point,” says Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer, speaking of humanity as a whole. “We are deciding what the future of these species will be.” The Center for Biological Diversity suggests that 30% of the planet’s genetic diversity will be lost by 2050, and Shapiro and Colossal CEO Ben Lamm insist that genetic engineering is a vital tool to reverse this. Company executives often frame the technology not just as a moral good, but a moral imperative—a way for humans, who have driven so many species to the brink of extinction, to get square with nature. “If we want a future that is both bionumerous and filled with people,” Shapiro says, “we should be giving ourselves the opportunity to see what our big brains can do to reverse some of the bad things that we’ve done to the world already.”

....

Whether the existing dire wolves or others Colossal might produce will be allowed to mate and spawn a next generation of wolves naturally is not yet known. Handlers can monitor the female estrous cycles and separate the animals at key times or employ contraceptive implants that keep the wolves from producing young until it is determined whether they have any abnormalities that could be passed on. The MHA Nation tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) have expressed a desire to have dire wolves live on their lands in North Dakota, a possibility Colossal is studying.

Quote:Dire wolves were the last of an ancient New World canid lineage

Abstract

Dire wolves are considered to be one of the most common and widespread large carnivores in Pleistocene America1, yet relatively little is known about their evolution or extinction. Here, to reconstruct the evolutionary history of dire wolves, we sequenced five genomes from sub-fossil remains dating from 13,000 to more than 50,000 years ago. Our results indicate that although they were similar morphologically to the extant grey wolf, dire wolves were a highly divergent lineage that split from living canids around 5.7 million years ago. In contrast to numerous examples of hybridization across Canidae2,3, there is no evidence for gene flow between dire wolves and either North American grey wolves or coyotes. This suggests that dire wolves evolved in isolation from the Pleistocene ancestors of these species. Our results also support an early New World origin of dire wolves, while the ancestors of grey wolves, coyotes and dholes evolved in Eurasia and colonized North America only relatively recently.

Quote:George Church plan for redesigning humans

Church also made a list of genes that could be targeted through genetic manipulation for the purpose of designing a new version of humans.
...

Here are some selections from the so-called Transhumanist Wishlist, drawing upon the philosophical movement of transhumanism that calls for using technology to enhance human physiology and intellect, leading to a transformation of what it means to be human.

(04-09-2025, 02:51 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: ...That's not really saying much these days as the requirements to be a "journalist" are about the
same as a Wal-mart greeter....

1. Guadalcanal Campaign (August 1942)
   
2. Battle of the Eastern Solomons (August 24-25, 1942)
   
3. Solomon Islands Operations (Late 1942)
   
4. Gilbert Islands Campaign (November 1943)
   
5. Marshall Islands Campaign (January-February 1944)
   
6. Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 19-20, 1944)
   
7. Marianas Campaign (June-August 1944)
   
8. Leyte Gulf Operations (October 1944)
   
9. Iwo Jima and Okinawa Campaigns (February-April 1945)
   

Quote:Since December, Erdogan’s government has been negotiating a defense pact with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Al Qaeda-dominated faction now ruling Damascus. The deal would formalize Turkey as the protector of Syria’s new Takfiri regime, providing air cover and military support.

et, Turkey’s ambitions go beyond mere patronage. Ankara has sought control of the strategic T4 airbase in central Syria, a move that would solidify its military foothold and potentially threaten Israel’s aerial superiority in the region.

But Israel, unwilling to tolerate a Turkish expansion with advanced air defenses, obliterated T4 in a devastating strike. This was more than a tactical hit; it was a message. Zionist Israel will not allow Erdogan to turn Syria into a forward-operating base for neo-Ottoman expansion.

Erdogan’s Double Game: Islamist Imperialism Masked as Mediation

Turkey’s president has long played a duplicitous role in the Middle East. He condemns Israel while maintaining covert trade ties. He buys Russian weapons while remaining in NATO.

He poses as a mediator while bankrolling extremist proxies. His vision is clear: a revived Ottoman sphere of influence, stretching from Syria to Libya, the Mediterranean to Central Asia.

But Erdogan’s ambitions have alarmed a growing coalition of regional players. Egypt, the UAE, Greece, France, and Israel—though ideologically disparate—now see Turkey as a common threat.

Egypt and the UAE view Erdogan as the chief patron of the Muslim Brotherhood, an existential danger to their regimes. Greece and France are pushing back against Turkish territorial claims in the Mediterranean.

Israel refuses to tolerate a Turkish-dominated Syria, especially one controlled by Takfiris who could slaughter the Druze and Kurdish communities, akin to what they did to the Alawites.

Israel’s Endgame: Balkanization vs. Neo-Ottoman Domination

While Turkey and Israel cooperated in ousting Assad, their visions for Syria’s future clash irreconcilably. Erdogan seeks a puppet regime in Damascus, extending his Islamic Brotherhood model across the region.

Israel, meanwhile, prefers a fragmented Syria—weak, divided, and incapable of posing a unified threat. The south, with its Druze and Kurdish populations, is a key Israeli interest.

Federalization or outright Balkanization would ensure that no strong central government emerges to challenge Israel’s security.

The Jihadist Regime’s Hollow Bluster

In Damascus, the HTS-led government’s response to Israeli strikes has been laughable: empty condemnations. Meanwhile, Julani’s supporters call for “jihad.”

But let’s be honest: A so-called "revolution" that invaded and obliterated its own country’s air defenses now claims it’s waging "jihad" against Israel? How exactly do you plan to pull that off?

Will the "jihad" be fought with loud Takbeers against the F-16s and F-35s?

On the other hand, a regime that owes its existence to foreign intervention—and which watched helplessly as its air defenses were annihilated—has no real means of resistance.

Conclusion: A New Middle Eastern Cold War

The fall of Assad did not bring stability—it opened a new front in the struggle for regional dominance.

Erdogan’s Turkey, emboldened by its role in Syria’s destruction, now seeks to reshape the Middle East in its neo-Ottoman-imperial image.

But Israel has a different vision for Syria and an appetite for conquering more lands for the Greater Israel project.

The coming years will determine whether Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman dreams are realized or crushed under the weight of his overreach.

One thing is certain: Syria, already broken, remains the battleground where this conflict will be decided.

THE END.

Quote:Steve Witkoff’s visit to Petersburg today: what do we know?

The number two news item this evening was the visit of Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s personal envoy charged with negotiating a cease-fire in Ukraine.  I call out the order of reporting, because at this level nothing is left to chance. Everything has symbolic value.

Nonetheless, it was reported on state television for perhaps ten minutes, while tidbits of further information about the Witkoff visit appeared on Dzen and various other internet sites.

Let’s for a moment look at the tidbits, because they are also indicative of what is afoot.

We know that following his arrival in Petersburg, Witkoff was met by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russia Foreign Investment Fund with whom he had met a week ago in Washington. Dmitriev is Vladimir Putin’s personal envoy to the talks on ending the Ukraine war and is thus Witkoff’s direct counterpart. The business part of their talks was held in the Grand Hotel Europe, which has been the most distinguished hotel in the city for the past hundred and thirty or more years. It is where Piotr Tchaikowsky spent his first nights in Petersburg when arriving by train from abroad. I can only see in this choice that the Russian hosts wanted to give a personal touch to the visit and to ensure that his time would be concentrated in a very few city blocks in the center.

We also know that Witkoff was accompanied on this trip by his wife and they both, in the company of Dmitriev, did some high level tourism:  they went to the Grand Choral Synagogue and to the St Isaac’s Cathedral.

The logic of visiting the Synagogue was that tomorrow is the first day of Passover, and as a practicing Jew, Witkoff would surely have been interested in seeing the best and largest synagogue from the days of the tsars, when it stood at the center of the Jewish community of the capital. Not in a bad location, by the way: the Grand Choral Synagogue is just a five-minute walk from the Mariinsky Theater from where it recruited its cantors. Moreover, this synagogue was largely renovated with financial assistance from American philanthropists early in the new millennium.  Of course, the only actual Jews Witkoff is likely to have seen there apart from the chief rabbi would be members of the Israeli diplomatic community for whom it is a home away from home.

The visit to St Isaac’s needs no special explanation. It is the most beautiful church in Petersburg and a defining edifice in the city’s skyline.  It also has on its outer facade scars from the shelling of the city by the Hitlerite Germans during the Siege, a useful reminder of who was who that Messrs Merz and Pistorius would rather have us all forget.

I must ask myself whether Witkoff’s bringing his wife is an indication of the growing warmth of relations and good prospects for the war’s coming to an end with a nudge from Donald Trump. Or is it a premonition that this will be her last opportunity to see the sights of Petersburg before the Wall comes down again?

As of 20.00 o’clock tonight Witkoff was in a meeting with Vladimir Putin in downtown Petersburg. The venue is the Presidential Library (full name: Yeltsin Presidential Library), a place that is virtually never used for high level meetings.  Normally, such a meeting would be held outside the city at the glorious Constantine Palace on the Gulf of Finland.  But perhaps because the Witkoff visit is under time pressure in the hope of its being followed immediately by a direct telephone call between Putin and Trump, it was decided to meet downtown, just near the Admiralty buildings where Putin had had his conference with the naval officials.

Russian journalists assume that the talks between Witkoff and Dmitriev, like the ones between Witkoff and Putin, cover many subjects beyond the confines of the Ukraine war.  They mention, for example, the likelihood that they discussed the situation with respect to Iran and its nuclear program. This, of course, is another of Witkoff’s briefs, and it is an area in which the Russians are doing what they can to calm things down, not least of which by arranging the meeting that Witkoff has tomorrow in Oman with his Iranian counterpart.
                        *****

Given the paucity of information released by the parties so far, any prediction of what comes next in the American-Russian rapprochement is highly risky.  But there is reason to think that Washington and Moscow now have agreed on the general contours of a peace settlement.  It was remarked on Russian television that the meeting of the representatives of both sides in Istanbul last week made good progress on normalization of diplomatic relations.  It now appears that there is a tentative understanding on the return to Russia of its six diplomatic properties that were illegally seized in the waning days of the Obama administration and early in the Trump 1.0 administration.  The Russians will now be allowed to visit the properties to ascertain what damage may have been done to them. If this report is true, it is a very good token of good will from the American side.

Gilbert Doctorow, International relations, Russian affairs

Quote:The Private Life of a Cat

At 22 minutes long and full of lingering feline close-ups, your snappy cat meme video this is not. While not as overtly experimental as Meshes Of The Afternoon, the film is still fairly innovative for its time — featuring numerous takes from a cat's eye view, and graphic footage of five kittens being born seemingly unaided by the human hand (a scene which was to see the film banned by some cinemas). Indeed, the film is devoid of humans throughout, the wonderful footage cleverly edited to give an impression of a cat-only world, almost verging on anthropomorphism, as though these cats might be living in their Manhattan apartment independent of any owners.

Quote:"I was aware of the album, and I said 'Well, you know, there have been some other people who have cut this song and it hasn't been a hit...' 'Oh no, the way we'll do it, it'll be a hit. It'll be a hit!' So I said 'Look, I've gotta come to New York so we can record the vocals for the rest of the songs on the Stoned Soul Picnic album. When I'm there, why don't I see the show? Then we can talk about "Aquarius".'

"Beforehand, I listened to the cast album, and I thought 'This isn't a complete song. It's an introduction.' There was so much talk about that show at the time because people were naked on stage, and 'Aquarius' was just part of the opening routine. Well, I went to see the show, and about four-fifths of the way through there was a song called 'The Flesh Failures', which was a typical '60s downer — you know, the world is falling apart, we're all killing each other with poison, and so on. A total environmental downer. But at the end of the song there were three bars just repeating 'Let the sunshine in, let the sunshine in, the sunshine in,' over and over and over again."

James Rado and Gerome Ragni, who were the show's writers alongside music composer Galt MacDermot, were also its star performers. "Rado was running through the audience while Ragni swung from a chandelier," Howe continues, "and they got the whole audience clapping along — 'Let the sunshine in, let the sunshine in...' It was very rousing and went over huge with everyone there, and I turned to my wife Melodie and said 'That's it! That's the other song! We can put the two of them together!'

Quote:There is hardly a boy or a girl alive who is not keenly interested in finding out about things. And that’s exactly what chemistry is: Finding out about things—finding out what things are made of and what changes they undergo. What things? Any thing! Every thing!
—The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments

Then in 1996, Jay Gourley, a correspondent with the Natural Resources News Service in Washington, D.C., came across a tiny newspaper item about the case and contacted David Hahn. Gourley later passed on his research to me, and I subsequently interviewed the story’s protagonists, including David—now a twenty-two-year-old sailor stationed in Norfolk, Virginia.

I met with David in the hope of making sense not only of his experiments but of him. The archetypal American suburban boy learns how to hit a fadeaway jump shot, change a car’s oil, perform some minor carpentry feats. If he’s a Boy Scout he masters the art of starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together, and if he’s a typical adolescent pyro, he transforms tennis-ball cans into cannons. David Hahn taught himself to build a neutron gun. He figured out a way to dupe officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission into providing him with crucial information he needed in his attempt to build a breeder reactor, and then he obtained and purified radioactive elements such as radium and thorium.

I had seen childhood photographs of David in which he looked perfectly normal, even angelic, with blond hair and hazel-green eyes, and, as he grew older, gangly limbs and a peach-fuzz mustache. Still, when I went to meet him in Norfolk, I was anticipating some physical manifestation of brilliance or obsession. An Einstein or a Kaczynski. But all I saw was a beefier version of the clean-cut kid in the pictures. David’s manner was oddly dispassionate, though polite, until we began to discuss his nuclear adventures. Then, for five hours, lighting and grinding out cigarettes for emphasis, David enthused about laboring in his backyard laboratory. He told me how he used coffee filters and pickle jars to handle deadly substances such as radium and nitric acid, and he sheepishly divulged the various cover stories and aliases he employed to obtain the radioactive materials. A shy and withdrawn teenager, David had confided in only a few friends about his project and never allowed anyone to witness his experiments. His breeder-reactor project was a means—albeit an unorthodox one—of escaping the trauma of adolescence. “I was very emotional as a kid,” he told me, “and those experiments gave me a way to get away from that. They gave me some respect.”
You—Scientist!
—The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, Chapter 10

Despite the fact that David was shuffled between households, his early years were seemingly ordinary. He played baseball and soccer, joined the Boy Scouts, and spent endless hours exploring with his friends. An abrupt change came at the age of ten, when Kathy’s father, also an engineer for GM, gave David The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. The book promised to open doors to a brave new world—”Chemistry means the difference between poverty and starvation and the abundant life,” it stated with unwavering optimism—and offered instructions on how to set up a home laboratory and conduct experiments ranging from simple evaporation and filtration to making rayon and alcohol. David swiftly became immersed and by age twelve was digesting his father’s college chemistry textbooks without difficulty. When he spent the night at Golf Manor, his mother would often wake to find him asleep on the living room floor surrounded by open volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

In his father’s house, David set up a laboratory in his small bedroom, where the shelves are still lined with books such as Prudent Practices for Handling Hazardous Chemicals in Laboratories and The Story of Atomic Energy. He bought beakers, Bunsen burners, test tubes, and other items commonly found in a child’s chemistry set. David, though, was not conducting the typical adolescent experiments. By fourteen, an age at which most boys with a penchant for chemistry are conducting rudimentary gunpowder experiments, David had fabricated nitroglycerine.

David’s parents admired his interest in science but were alarmed by the chemical spills and blasts that became a regular event at the Hahn household. After David destroyed his bedroom—the walls were badly pocked, and the carpet was so stained that it had to be ripped out—Ken and Kathy banished his experiments to the basement.

Which was fine with David. Science allowed him to distance himself from his parents, to create and destroy things, to break the rules, and to escape into something he was a success at, while sublimating a teenager’s sense of failure, anger, and embarrassment into some really big explosions. David held a series of after-school jobs at fast-food joints, grocery stores, and furniture warehouses, but work was merely a means of financing his experiments. Never an enthusiastic student and always a horrific speller, David fell behind in school.

During his junior year at Chippewa Valley High School—at a time when he was secretly conducting nuclear experiments in his back yard—David nearly failed state math and reading tests required for graduation (though he aced the test in science). Ken Gherardini, who taught David conceptual physics, remembers him as an excellent pupil on the rare occasions when he was interested in classwork but otherwise indifferent to his studies. “His dream in life was to collect a sample of every element on the periodic table,” Gherardini told me with a laugh during an interview at Chippewa Valley before his 8:20 A.M. class. “I don’t know about you, but my dream at that age was to buy a car.”

Not even his scout troop was spared David’s scientific enthusiasm. He once appeared at a scout meeting with a bright orange face caused by an overdose of canthaxanthin, which he was taking to test methods of artificial tanning. One summer at scout camp, David’s fellow campers blew a hole in the communal tent when they accidentally ignited the stockpile of powdered magnesium he had brought to make fireworks. Another year, David was expelled from camp when—while most of his friends were sneaking into the nearby Girl Scouts’ camp—he stole a number of smoke detectors to disassemble for parts he required for his experiments. “Our summer vacation was screwed up when we got a call telling us to pick David up early from camp,” his stepmother recalls with a sigh.

Up to this point the most illicit of David’s concoctions were fireworks and moonshine. But convinced that David’s experiments and increasingly erratic behavior were signs that he was making and selling drugs, Ken and Kathy began to spot-check the public library, where David told them he studied. In variably, David would be there as promised, surrounded by a huge pile of chemistry books. But Ken and Kathy were not assuaged, and, worried that he would level their home, they prohibited David from being there alone, locking him out when they were away, even on quick errands, and setting a time for their return so that he could get back in. Kathy began routinely searching David’s room and disposing of any chemicals and equipment she found hidden under the bed and deep within the closet.

David was not deterred. One night as Ken and Kathy were sitting in the living room watching TV, the house was rocked by an explosion in the basement. There they found David lying semiconscious on the floor, his eyebrows smoking. Unaware that red phosphorus is pyrophoric, David had been pounding it with a screwdriver and ignited it. He was rushed to the hospital to have his eyes flushed, but even months later David had to make regular trips to an ophthalmologist to have pieces of the plastic phosphorus container plucked carefully from his eyes.

Kathy then forbade David from experimenting in her home. So he shifted his base of operations to his mother’s potting shed in Golf Manor.Both Patty Hahn and Michael Polasek admired David for the endless hours he spent in his new lab, but neither of them had any idea what he was up to. Sure, they thought it was odd that David often wore a gas mask in the shed and would sometimes discard his clothing after working there until two in the morning, but they chalked it up to their own limited education. Michael says that David tried to explain his experiments but that “what he told me went right over my head.” One thing still sticks out, though. David’s potting-shed project had something to do with creating energy. “He’d say, `One of these days we’re gonna run out of oil.’ He wanted to do something about that.”

The force hidden in the atom will be turned into light and heat and power for everyday uses. Chemists of the future, working with their brother-scientists, the physicists, will find new ways of harnessing and using the atoms of numerous elements—some of them unknown to the scientists of today. Do you want to share in the making of that astonishing and promising future?
—The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments

In addition to showing “scout spirit,” Eagle Scouts must earn twenty-one merit badges. Eleven are mandatory, such as First Aid and Citizenship in the Community. The final ten are optional; scouts can choose from dozens of choices ranging from American Business to Woodwork. David elected to earn a merit badge in Atomic Energy.

His scoutmaster, Joe Auito, who lives on a rural road an hour or so north of Detroit and who resembles an aging Deadhead rather than the rock-ribbed conservative I’d expected, says he’s the only boy to have done so in the history of Clinton Township Troop 371. David’s Atomic Energy merit-badge pamphlet was brazenly pro-nuclear, which is no surprise since it was prepared with the help of Westinghouse Electric, the American Nuclear Society, and the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group of utility companies, some of which run nuclear power plants. The pamphlet judiciously states that America is a democracy and “the people decide what the country will do.” The pamphlet goes on to suggest, however, that critics of atomic energy were descended from a long line of naysayers and malcontents, warning that “if America decides for or against nuclear power plants based on fear and misunderstanding, that is wrong. We must first know the truth about atomic energy before we can decide to use it or to stop it.”

David was awarded his Atomic Energy merit badge on May 10, 1991, five months shy of his fifteenth birthday. To earn it he made a drawing showing how nuclear fission occurs, visited a hospital radiology unit to learn about the medical uses of radioisotopes and built a model reactor using a juice can, coat hangers, soda straws, kitchen matches, and rubber bands. By now, though, David had far grander ambitions. As Auito’s wife and troop treasurer, Barbara, recalls: “The typical kid [working on the merit badge] would have gone to a doctor’s office and asked about the X-ray machine. Dave had to go out and try to build a reactor.”

What is a breeder reactor? This simplistic description comes from a publication that David obtained from the Department of Energy (DOE): “Imagine you have a car and begin a long drive. When you start, you have half a tank of gas. When you return home, instead of being nearly empty, your gas tank is full. A breeder reactor is like this magic car. A breeder reactor not only generates electricity, but it also produces new fuel.”

All reactors, conventional and breeder, rely on a critical pile of a naturally radioactive element—typically uranium-235 or plutonium-239—as the “fuel” for a sustained chain of reactions known as fission. Fission occurs when a neutron combines with the nucleus of a radioisotope, say uranium-235, transforming it into uranium-236. This new isotope is highly unstable and immediately splits in half, forming two smaller nuclei, and releasing a great deal of radiant energy (some of which is heat) and several neutrons. These neutrons are absorbed by other uranium-235 atoms to begin the process again.

A breeder reactor is configured so that a core of plutonium-239 is surrounded by a “blanket” of uranium-238. When the plutonium gives off neutrons, they are absorbed by the uranium-238 to become uranium-239, which in turn decays by emitting beta rays and is transformed into neptunium-239. Following another stage of “radioactive decay,” neptunium becomes plutonium-239, which can replenish the fuel core. The nuclear industry used to tout breeders as the magical solution to the nation’s energy needs. The government had opened up two experimental breeders at a test site in Idaho by 1961.

Amid great fanfare, in 1963 Detroit Edison opened the Enrico Fermi I power plant, the nation’s first and only commercially run breeder reactor. The following decade, Congress appropriated billions of dollars for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor in Tennessee. Hopes ran so high that Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission during the Nixon years, predicted that breeders would be the backbone of an emerging nuclear economy and that plutonium might be “a logical contender to replace gold as the standard of our monetary system.”

....

Unlike his predecessors, however, David did not have vast financial support from the state, no laboratory save for a musty potting shed, no proper instruments or safety devices, and, by far his chief impediment, no legal means of obtaining radioactive materials. To get around this last obstacle, David utilized a number of cover stories and concocted identities, plus a Geiger-counter kit he ordered from a mail-order house in Scottsdale, Arizona, which he assembled and mounted to the dashboard of his burgundy Pontiac 6000.

David hadn’t hit on the idea to try to build a breeder reactor when he began his nuclear experiments at the age of fifteen, but in a step down that path, he was already determined to “irradiate anything” he could. To do that he had to build a “gun” that could bombard isotopes with neutrons.

David wrote to a number of groups listed in his merit-badge pamphlet—the DOE, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the American Nuclear Society, the Edison Electric Institute, and the Atomic Industrial Forum, the nuclear-power industry’s trade group—in hopes of discovering how he might obtain, from both natural and commercial sources, the radioactive raw materials he needed to build his neutron gun and experiment with it. By writing up to twenty letters a day and claiming to be a physics instructor at Chippewa Valley High School, David says he obtained “tons” of information from those and other groups, though some of it was of only marginal value. The American Nuclear Society sent David a teacher’s guide called “Goin’ Fission,” which featured an Albert Einstein cartoon character: “I’m Albert. Und today, ve are gonna go fission. No, ve don’t need any smelly bait and der won’t be any fish to clean. I mean fission, not fishin’.”

Other organizations proved to be far more helpful, and none more than the NRC. Again posing as a physics teacher, David managed to engage the agency’s director of isotope production and distribution, Donald Erb, in a scientific discussion by mail. Erb offered David tips on isolating certain radioactive elements, provided a list of isotopes that can sustain a chain reaction, and imparted a piece of information that would soon prove to be vital to David’s plans: “Nothing produces neutrons … as well as beryllium.” When David asked Erb about the risks posed by such radioactive materials, the NRC official assured “Professor Hahn” that the “real dangers are very slight,” since possession “of any radioactive materials in quantities and forms sufficient to pose any hazard is subject to Nuclear Regulatory Commission (or equivalent) licensing.”

David says the NRC also sent him pricing data and commercial sources for some of the radioactive wares he wanted to purchase, ostensibly for the benefit of his eager students. “The NRC gave me all the information I needed,” he later recalled. “All I had to do was go out and get the materials.”

The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff. . . . But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely, “How difficult are these things to manufacture?”
—George Orwell, “You and the Atom Bomb,” 1945

Armed with information from his friends in government and industry, David typed up a list of sources for fourteen radioactive isotopes..Americium-241, he learned from the Boy Scout atomic-energy booklet, could be found in smoke detectors; radium-226, in antique luminous dial clocks; uranium-238 and minute quantities of uranium-235, in a black ore called pitchblende; and thorium-232, in Coleman-style gas lanterns.

To obtain americium-241, David contacted smoke-detector companies and claimed that he needed a large number of the devices for a school project. One company agreed to sell him about a hundred broken detectors for a dollar apiece. (He also tried to “collect” detectors while at scout camp.) David wasn’t sure where the americium-241 was located, so he wrote to BRK Electronics in Aurora, Illinois. A customer-service representative named Beth Weber wrote back to say she’d be happy to help out with “your report.” She explained that each detector contains only a tiny amount of americium-241, which is sealed in a gold matrix “to make sure that corrosion does not break it down and release it.” Thanks to Weber’s tip, David extracted the americium components and then welded them together with a blowtorch.

As it decays, americium-241 emits alpha rays composed of protons and neutrons. David put the lump of americium inside a hollow block of lead with a tiny hole pricked in one side so that alpha rays would stream out. In front of the lead block he placed a sheet of aluminum. Aluminum atoms absorb alpha rays and in the process kick out neutrons. Since neutrons have no charge, and thus cannot be measured by a Geiger counter, David had no way of knowing whether the gun was working until he recalled that paraffin throws off protons when hit by neutrons. David aimed the apparatus at some paraffin, and his Geiger counter registered what he assumed was a proton stream. His neutron gun, crude but effective, was ready.

With neutron gun in hand, David was ready to irradiate. He could have concentrated on transforming previously non-radioactive elements, but in a decision that was both indicative of his personality and instrumental to his later attempt to build a breeder reactor, he wanted to use the gun on radioisotopes to increase the chances of making them fissionable. He thought that uranium-235, which is used in atomic weapons, would provide the “biggest reaction.” He scoured hundreds of miles of upper Michigan in his Pontiac looking for “hot rocks” with his Geiger counter, but all he could find was a quarter trunkload of pitchblende on the shores of Lake Huron.

Deciding to pursue a more bureaucratic approach, he wrote to a Czechoslovakian firm that sells uranium to commercial and university buyers, whose name was provided, he told me, by the NRC. Claiming to be a professor buying materials for a nuclear-research laboratory, he obtained a few samples of a black ore—either pitchblende or uranium dioxide, both of which contain small amounts of uranium-235 and uranium-238.

David pulverized the ores with a hammer, thinking that he could then use nitric acid to isolate uranium. Unable to find a commercial source for nitric acid—probably because it is used in the manufacture of explosives and thus is tightly controlled—David made his own by heating saltpeter and sodium bisulfate, then bubbling the gas that was released through a container of water, producing nitric acid. He then mixed the acid with the powdered ore and boiled it, ending up with something that “looked like a dirty milk shake.” Next he poured the “milk shake” through a coffee filter, hoping that the uranium would pass through the filter. But David miscalculated uranium’s solubility, and whatever amount was present was trapped in the filter, making it difficult to purify further.

Frustrated at his inability to isolate sufficient supplies of uranium, David turned his attention to thorium-232, which when bombarded with neutrons produces uranium-233, a man-made fissionable element (and, although he might not have known it then, one that can be substituted for plutonium in breeder reactors). Discovered in 1828 and named after the Norse god Thor, thorium has a very high melting point, and is thus used in the manufacture of airplane engine parts that reach extremely high temperatures. David knew from his merit-badge pamphlet that the “mantle” used in commercial gas lanterns—the part that looks like a doll’s stocking and conducts the flame—is coated with a compound containing thorium-232. He bought thousands of lantern mantles from surplus stores and, using the blowtorch, reduced them into a pile of ash.

David still had to isolate the thorium-232 from the ash. Fortunately, he remembered reading in one of his dad’s chemistry books that lithium is prone to binding with oxygen—meaning, in this context, that it would rob thorium dioxide of its oxygen content and leave a cleaner form of thorium.

David purchased $1,000 worth of lithium batteries and extracted the element by cutting the batteries in half with a pair of wire cutters. He placed the lithium and thorium dioxide together in a ball of aluminum foil and heated the ball with a Bunsen burner. Eureka! David’s method purified thorium to at least 9,000 times the level found in nature and 170 times the level that requires NRC licensing.

At this point, David could have used his americium neutron gun to transform thorium-232 into fissionable uranium-233. But the americium he had was not capable of producing enough neutrons, so he began preparing radium for an improved irradiating gun.

Radium was used in paint that rendered luminescent the faces of clocks and automobile and airplane instrument panels until the late 1960s, when it was discovered that many clock painters, who routinely licked their brushes to make a fine point, died of cancer. David began visiting junkyards and antiques stores in search of radium-coated dashboard panels or clocks. Once he found such an item, he’d chip paint from the instruments and collect it in pill vials. It was slow going until one day, driving through Clinton Township to visit his girlfriend, Heather, he noticed that his Geiger counter went wild as he passed Gloria’s Resale Boutique/Antique.

The proprietor, Gloria Genette, still recalls the day when she was called at home by a store employee who said that a polite young man was anxious to buy an old table clock with a tinted green dial but wondered if she’d come down in price. She would. David bought the clock for $10. Inside he discovered a vial of radium paint left behind by a worker either accidentally or as a courtesy so that the clock’s owner could touch up the dial when it began to fade. David was so overjoyed that he dropped by the boutique later that night to leave a note for Gloria, telling her that if she received another “luminus [sic] clock” to contact him immediately. “I will pay any some [sic] of money to obtain one.”

To concentrate the radium, David secured a sample of barium sulfate from the X-ray ward at a local hospital (staff there handed over the substance because they remembered him from his merit-badge project) and heated it until it liquefied. After mixing the barium sulfate with the radium paint chips, he strained the brew through a coffee filter into a beaker that began to glow. This time, David had judged the solubility of the two substances correctly; the radium solution passed through to the beaker. He then dehydrated the solution into crystalline salts, which he could pack into the cavity of another lead block to build a new gun.

Whether David fully realized it or not, by handling purified radium he was truly putting himself in danger. Nevertheless, he now proceeded to acquire another neutron emitter to replace the aluminum used in his previous neutron gun. Faithful to Erb’s instructions, he secured a strip of beryllium (which is a much richer source of neutrons than aluminum) from the chemistry department at Macomb Community College—a friend who attended the school swiped it for him—and placed it in front of the lead block that held the radium.

His cute little americium gun was now a more powerful radium gun. David began to bombard his thorium and uranium powders in the hopes of producing at least some fissionable atoms. He measured the results with his Geiger counter, but while the thorium seemed to grow more radioactive, the uranium remained a disappointment.

Once again, “Professor Hahn” sprang into action, writing his old friend Erb at the NRC to discuss the problem. The NRC had the answer. David’s neutrons were too “fast” for the uranium).

[Manhattan Project scientists discovered that some neutrons can move at speeds of about 17 million miles per hour. If they are slowed down or "moderated," to about 5,000 miles per hour, they have a better chance of being absorbed by another atom.]

He would have to slow them down using a filter of water, deuterium, or tritium. Water would have sufficed, but David likes a challenge. Consulting his list of commercially available radioactive sources, he discovered that tritium, a radioactive material used to boost the power of nuclear weapons, is found in glow-in-the-dark gun and bow sights, which David promptly bought from sporting-goods stores and mail-order catalogues. He removed the tritium contained in a waxy substance inside the sights, and then, using a variety of pseudonyms, returned the sights to the store or manufacturer for repair—each time collecting another tiny quantity of tritium.

When he had enough, David smeared the waxy substance over the beryllium strip and targeted the gun at uranium powder. He carefully monitored the results with his Geiger counter over several weeks, and it appeared that the powder was growing more radioactive by the day.

Now seventeen, David hit on the idea of building a model breeder reactor. He knew that without a critical pile of at least thirty pounds of enriched uranium he had no chance of initiating a sustained chain reaction, but he was determined to get as far as he could by trying to get his various radioisotopes to interact with one another. That way, he now says, “no matter what happened there would be something changing into something—some kind of action going on there.”

His blueprint was a schematic of a checkerboard breeder reactor he’d seen in one of his father’s college textbooks. Ignoring any thought of safety, David took the highly radioactive radium and americium out of their respective lead casings and, after another round of filing and pulverizing, mixed those isotopes with beryllium and aluminum shavings, all of which he wrapped in aluminum foil.

What were once the neutron sources for his guns became a makeshift “core” for his reactor. He surrounded this radioactive ball with a “blanket” composed of tiny foil-wrapped cubes of thorium ash and uranium powder, which were stacked in an alternating pattern with carbon cubes and tenuously held together with duct tape.

David monitored his “breeder reactor” at the Golf Manor laboratory with his Geiger counter. “It was radioactive as heck,” he says. “The level of radiation after a few weeks was far greater than it was at the time of assembly. I know I transformed some radioactive materials. Even though there was no critical pile, I know that some of the reactions that go on in a breeder reactor went on to a minute extent.”

Finally, David, whose safety precautions had thus far consisted of wearing a makeshift lead poncho and throwing away his clothes and changing his shoes following a session in the potting shed, began to realize that, sustained reaction or not, he could be putting himself and others in danger. (One tip-off was when the radiation was detectable through concrete.) Jim Miller, a nuclear-savvy high-school friend in whom David had confided, warned him that real reactors use control rods to regulate nuclear reactions. Miller recommended cobalt, which absorbs neutrons but does not itself become fissionable.

“Reactors get hot, it’s just a fact,” Miller, a nervous, skinny twenty-two-year-old, said during an interview at a Burger King in Clinton Township where he worked as a cook. David purchased a set of cobalt drill bits at a local hardware store and inserted them between the thorium and uranium cubes. But the cobalt wasn’t sufficient. When his Geiger counter began picking up radiation five doors down from his mom’s house, David decided that he had “too much radioactive stuff in one place” and began to disassemble the reactor. He placed the thorium pellets in a shoebox that he hid in his mother’s house, left the radium and americium in the shed, and packed most of the rest of his equipment into the trunk of the Pontiac 6000.

WASTE DISPOSAL. If you can dump your waste directly into the kitchen drain (NOT into the sink), you are all right. If not, collect it in a plastic pail to be thrown out when you’re finished.
—The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments

At 2:40 A.M. on August 31, 1994, the Clinton Township police responded to a call concerning a young man who had been spotted in a residential neighborhood, apparently stealing tires from a car. When the police arrived, David told them he was waiting to meet a friend. Unconvinced, officers decided to search his car. When they opened the trunk they discovered a toolbox shut with a padlock and sealed with duct tape for good measure. The trunk also contained over fifty foil-wrapped cubes of mysterious gray powder, small disks and cylindrical metal objects, lantern mantles, mercury switches, a clock face, ores, fireworks, vacuum tubes, and assorted chemicals and acids. The police were especially alarmed by the toolbox, which David warned them was radioactive and which they feared was an atomic bomb.

For reasons that are hard to fathom, Sergeant Joseph Mertes, one of the arresting officers, ordered a car containing what he noted in his report was “a potential improvised explosive device” to be towed to police headquarters. “It probably shouldn’t have been done, but we thought that the car had been used in the commission of a crime,” Police Chief Al Ernst now says sheepishly. “When I came in at 6:30 in the morning it was already there.”

The police called in the Michigan State Police Bomb Squad to examine the Pontiac and the State Department of Public Health (DPH) to supply radiological assistance. The good news, the two teams discovered, was that David’s toolbox was not an atomic bomb. The bad news was that David’s trunk did contain radioactive materials, including concentrations of thorium—”not found in nature, at least not in Michigan”—and americium. That discovery automatically triggered the Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan, and state officials soon were embroiled in tense phone consultations with the DOE, EPA, FBI, and NRC.

With the police, David was largely uncooperative and taciturn. He provided his father’s address but didn’t mention his mother’s house or his potting-shed laboratory. It wasn’t until Thanksgiving Day that Dave Minnaar, a DPH radiological expert, finally interviewed David. David told Minnaar that he had been trying to make thorium in a form he could use to produce energy and that he hoped “his successes would help him earn his Eagle Scout status.” David also finally admitted to having a backyard laboratory.

On November 29, state radiological experts surveyed the potting shed. They found aluminum pie pans, jars of acids, Pyrex cups, milk crates, and other materials strewn about, much of it contaminated with what subsequent official reports would call “excessive levels” of radioactive material, especially americium-241 and thorium-232. How high? A vegetable can, for example, registered at 50,000 counts per minute—about 1,000 times higher than normal levels of background radiation. But although Minnaar’s troops didn’t know it at the time, they conducted their survey long after David’s mother, alerted by Ken and Kathy and petrified that the government would take her home away as a result of her son’s experiments, had ransacked the shed and discarded most of what she found, including his neutron gun, the radium, pellets of thorium that were far more radioactive than what the health officials found, and several quarts of radioactive powder. “The funny thing is,” David now says, “they only got the garbage, and the garbage got all the good stuff.”

After determining that no radioactive materials had leaked outside the shed, state authorities sealed it and petitioned the federal government for help. The NRC licenses nuclear plants and research facilities and deals with any nuclear accidents that take place at those sites. David, of course, was not an NRC-licensed operation, so it was determined that the EPA, which responds to emergencies involving lost or abandoned atomic materials, should be contacted for assistance. In a memo to the EPA’s Emergency Response and Enforcement Branch, the Department of Public Health noted that the materials discovered in David’s lab were regulated under the Federal Atomic Energy Act and that the “extent of the radioactive material contamination within a private citizen’s property beg for a controlled remediation that is beyond our authority or resources to oversee.”

EPA officials arrived in Golf Manor on January 25, 1995—five months after David had been stopped by the police—to conduct their own survey of the shed. Their “action memo” noted that conditions at the site “present an imminent and substantial endangerment to public health or welfare or the environment,” and that there was “actual or potential exposure to nearby human populations, animals, or food chain. . . .” The memo further stated that adverse conditions such as heavy wind, rain, or fire could cause the “contaminants to migrate or be released.”

A Superfund cleanup took place between June 26 and 28 at a cost of about $60,000. After the moon-suited workers dismantled the potting shed with electric saws, they loaded the remains into thirty-nine sealed barrels placed aboard a semitrailer bound for Envirocare, a dump facility located in the middle of the Great Salt Lake Desert. There, the remains of David’s experiments were entombed along with tons of low-level radioactive debris from the government’s atomic-bomb factories, plutonium-production facilities, and contaminated industrial sites.

According to the official assessment, there was no noticeable damage to flora or fauna in the back yard in Golf Manor, but 40,000 nearby residents could have been put at risk during David’s years of experimentation due to the dangers posed by the release of radioactive dust and radiation.

Last May, I made the 90-mile drive from Detroit to Lansing, where Dave Minnaar works in a dreary building that houses several state environmental agencies. Because Patty Hahn had cleaned out the shed before Minnaar’s men arrived on the scene, he never knew that David had built neutron guns or that he had obtained radium. Nor did he understand, until I told him, that the cubes of thorium powder found by police at the time of David’s arrest were the building blocks for a model breeder reactor. “These are conditions that regulatory agencies never envision,” says Minnaar. “It’s simply presumed that the average person wouldn’t have the technology or materials required to experiment in these areas.”

“The real danger . . . lies in the radioactive properties of these elements. [Some] migrate to the bone marrow, where their radiation interferes with the production of red blood cells. Less than one-millionth of a gram can be fatal.”
—from David’s notes

David went into a serious depression after the federal authorities shut down his laboratory. Years of painstaking work had been thrown in the garbage or buried beneath the sands of Utah. Students at Chippewa Valley had taken to calling him “Radioactive Boy,” and when his girlfriend, Heather, sent David Valentine’s balloons at his high school, they were seized by the principal, who apparently feared they had been inflated with chemical gases David needed to continue his experiments. In a final indignity, some area scout leaders attempted (and failed) to deny David his Eagle Scout status, saying that his extracurricular merit-badge activities had endangered the community.

In the fall of 1995, Ken and Kathy demanded that David enroll in Macomb Community College. He majored in metallurgy but skipped many of his classes and spent much of the day in bed or driving in circles around their block. Finally, Ken and Kathy gave him an ultimatum: Join the armed forces or move out of the house. They called the local recruiting office, which sent a representative to their house or called nearly every day until David finally gave in. After completing boot camp last year, he was stationed on the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise aircraft carrier.

Alas, David’s duties, as a lowly seaman, are of the deck-swabbing and potato-peeling variety. But long after his shipmates have gone to sleep, David stays up studying topics that interest him—currently steroids, melanin, genetic codes, antioxidants, prototype reactors, amino acids, and criminal law. And it is perhaps best that he does not work on the ship’s eight reactors, for EPA scientists worry that his previous exposure to radioactivity may have greatly cut short his life. All the radioactive materials he experimented with can enter the body through ingestion, inhalation, or skin contact and then deposit in the bones and organs, where they can cause a host of ailments, including cancer. Because it is so potent, the radium that David was exposed to in a relatively small, enclosed space is most worrisome of all.

Back in 1995, the EPA arranged for David to undergo a full examination at the nearby Fermi nuclear power plant. David, fearful of what he might learn, refused. Now, though, he’s looking ahead. “I wanted to make a scratch in life,” he explains when I ask him about his early years of nuclear research. “I’ve still got time. I don’t believe I took more than five years off of my life.”

The Radioactive Boy Scout

Quote:On April 23, 2007, the FBI received a lead regarding Hahn's alleged possession of a second neutron source in his freezer. Contacted via telephone, Hahn insisted that he was not in possession of radioactive material. The FBI decided no imminent terrorist threat was present but decided to attempt a personal interview. During an interview at an FBI office on May 16, 2007, investigators' questions touched on a variety of topics, such as flyers that Hahn had distributed promoting his book and upcoming film, theft of tires and rims from a vehicle prior to his Navy service, a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, and a few less significant topics.

FBI agents then interviewed an individual (whose identity was not released) who stated that Hahn was using cocaine heavily, was not taking his prescribed medication, was paranoid about people who he claimed "had the ability to 'shock' his genitals with their minds", and had possibly been visited by prostitutes. The individual also stated that he believed that Hahn was still trying to build a reactor and was collecting radium. He stated that he did not believe Hahn had any intentions of hurting anyone but was concerned about his mental state.

Wiki

Quote:And the bean counters saw that the 1998 broadcast of "The Ten Commandments" attracted but 8.5 million households opposite HBO's mightily hyped Tom Hanks miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon" and this year they cast out the Easter broadcast. And they scheduled instead "The Wonderful World of Disney," "20/20" and a rerun of "The Practice" on Easter Sunday.

And it came to pass that a reporter called up ABC to ask wherefore "The Ten Commandments" would not air. And ABC sent forth a messenger to say, We have not a Sunday 9-11 p.m. movie this season and do not wish to disrupt our regular Sunday schedule.

This was said even though ABC had renewed its covenant with Paramount to broadcast "The Ten Commandments" until the year 2009.

But in truth, ABC will disrupt its regular Sunday schedule, during the May sweeps, for a new movie about Cleopatra from Robert Halmi, and another starring divas Diana Ross and Brandy.

And the reporter said unto the ABC messenger, How long shalt thou not broadcast "The Ten Commandments?" For scheduling wise men have decreed no Sunday movie on ABC next season too.

And the ABC messenger did avoid the question and say only that she knew not.

And so it was that nothing in the Land of Television was sacred save the ratings.

The 'Ten Commandments': ABC's Exodus? (April 5, 1999)

(04-13-2025, 02:51 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: Tonight's movie... "Let my people go!" With the exception of 1999, Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" (1956) has been broadcast annually (around Passover/Easter holidays) on ABC since 1973, and it's on right now. In some years it was so jam packed with propaganda commercials that ABC cut it in two and aired it over two nights. "So it was written, so it shall be done."...

Quote:The location of the beloved word game's humble origin, in a church basement in Queens, is today commemorated with a creative street sign that includes the Scrabble value for each letter of 35th Avenue. The Jackson Heights Community Development Corp was responsible for the sign.

After experimenting with this early version of the game, he made updates to the rules and gameplay. Initially, the revised version of the game was called "Criss-Crosswords." When the game became commercially sold it was given the name "Scrabble," and to this day that's the game played by millions of people.

In front of that Queens community church, right on the corner, there is a street sign commemorating Scrabble's local origins, with letters designed to look like tiles of the game. The novel design choice has attracted many admirers to that corner, some of whom have tried to steal the sign, and at least one of whom succeeded.

Most mysterious was the response from the New York City Department of Transportation when asked if they planned on replacing the special sign. The city had no clue who had put it up in the first place. There was no record of the original historical marker. Perhaps a devoted Scrabble fan installed the sign on their own? Despite the original sign's unofficial status, the community's love for it convinced the city to provide a new one retaining the Scrabble numerical values, which remain there to this day.

In addition to the street corner sign, there is an oval plaque commemorating the birth of Scrabble about 12 feet up on the exterior wall of the classroom building that is on 35th Ave.

The Birthplace of Scrabble

Quote:New ‘Scrabble’ street sign will go up in Queens to commemorate birthplace of board game

For years it’s been a mystery as to who installed the witty little street marker more than 15 years ago.

The Daily News learned yesterday that it was the brainchild of Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, the former head of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

She received permission from Hasbro, which manufacturers the game, and asked award-winning designer Massimo Vignelli to create the look of the sign, Diamonstein-Spielvogel said.

“I thought it would be clever and interesting and make passersby aware of what went on in that church,” she said.

The sign became a distinctive feature of Jackson Heights – much like the bronze penguin on 75th St. – until it disappeared.

Diamonstein-Spielvogel theorized that it may have blown away in a storm or was stolen to adorn a college dorm room or den.

Dromm had his own ideas.

“There are conspiracy theories that Scrabble enthusiasts might have stolen it, that the city took it down – which they deny – that it fell down on its own and someone grabbed it and ran,” he said. “Anyone with information should call my office.”

Originally Published: July 21, 2011

Quote:1986 - Operation El Dorado Canyon

Although the mission was deemed a success, it was not without controversy. The Navy later claimed that the entire operation could have been accomplished using Navy assets. Furthermore, the commander of the 48th TFW believed that the original concept of a small group of F-111s had grown too large, leading him to believe that there was little chance to surprise the Libyan defenses and the number of aircraft would allow air defenses time to concentrate on the second wave of attackers. However, proponents of the larger strike force believed it would do significantly greater damage to the targets and was worth the risk. The attack killed 37 people and left 93 injured. Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi and appeared visibly shaken when he appeared on television 24 hours later to protest the strikes. Operation EL DORADO CANYON showed that the Air Force could successfully make precision strikes against targets thousands of miles away, an early example of the U.S. Air Force's Global Reach capability. Problems encountered during the operation were also addressed, and five years later the F-111s Pave Tack targeting system destroyed more targets than any other aircraft during Operation DESERT STORM.

Capt Gregory Ball, USAFR, Ph.D.

Quote:Mount Pony
Culpeper, VA

The Federal Reserve Board operated a 140,000 square foot radiation hardened facility in Culpeper, Virginia. Dedicated on 10 December 1969, the 400 foot long bunker is built of steel-reinforced concrete a foot thick. Lead-lined shutters can be dropped to cover the windows of the semi-recessed facility, which is covered by 2 to 4 feet of dirt and surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guard posts. The seven computers at the facility, operated by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, are the central node for all American electronic funds transfer activities. Until July 1992 the bunker also served as a Continuity of Government facility. With a peacetime staff of 100, the facility was designed to support an emergency staff of 540 for 30 days. But only 200 beds were provided in the men's and women's dormintories, which would be shared on a "hot-bunk" basis by the staff, working around the clock. Until 1988 the facility stored a $1 billion stock of currency to be used to reactivate the American economy following a nuclear attack.

In 1997 Congress approved the transfer of the bunker from the Federal Reserve Bank in Richmond to the Library of Congress, which will use it as a central repository for the library's 150,000 film titles.

Quote:AUTHOR: Bernard Mannes Baruch (1870–1965)
QUOTATION:
Let us not be deceived—we are today in the midst of a cold war. Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home. Let us never forget this: Our unrest is the heart of their success. The peace of the world is the hope and the goal of our political system; it is the despair and defeat of those who stand against us.

ATTRIBUTION: BERNARD M. BARUCH, address at the unveiling of his portrait in the South Carolina legislature, Columbia, South Carolina, April 16, 1947.—Journal of the House of Representatives of the First Session of the 87th General Assembly of the State of South Carolina, p. 1085.

The phrase “cold war” was coined by Herbert Bayard Swope, who occasionally wrote speeches for Baruch, and was first used in this speech. It was popularized by, and sometimes mistakenly attributed to, columnist Walter Lippmann, whose 1947 book was titled The Cold War.

Baruch used the phrase again on October 24, 1947—“Although the shooting war is over, we are in the midst of a cold war which is getting warmer”—in testimony before the Senate’s Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program, part 42, p. 25740 (1948). William Safire, Safire’s Political Dictionary, pp. 127–29 (1978), gives an extensive account of the coinage and use of this term, though the date for Baruch’s testimony is given there as 1948.

Bartleby Quotations

Quote:In Harlan Ellison's disturbing 1967 short story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," a sentient superintelligence named AM has taken over the earth's resources and exterminated humanity after combining the powers of three US, Soviet, and Chinese supercomputers into one. A small group of survivors has been kept alive for AM's amusement, forced to roam the supercomputer's endless electronic innards.

It's a grim setting, but evidently one that billionaire tech tycoon and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt imagines for the future of humanity, if his comments to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce are any indication.

"What we need from you," Schmidt told lawmakers, "is we need the energy in all forms, renewable, non-renewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly."

The wannabe tech overlord was appearing in front of the government panel to talk AI — specifically, what the future holds for it.

"Many people project demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation... an additional 29 gigawatts by 2027 and 67 more gigawatts by 2030," he asserted. "If [China] comes to superintelligence first, it changes the dynamic of power globally, in ways that we have no way of understanding or predicting," Schmidt said, even echoing the backstory of Ellison's cautionary tale.

Schmidt's American exceptionalism — the idea that the US is superior to all other global interests — is nothing new, and neither is his wild-eyed brand of AI hype. In 2023, CNN reported that "42 percent of CEOs say AI could destroy humanity in five to ten years." Yet if today's tech is any indication, AI has a long trek through the slop before it can even think of destroying humanity, let alone siphoning 99 percent of the earth's energy.

What is new is Schmidt's insistence to Congress that Chinese "superintelligence" is coming to get us, a claim Energy committee chair Brett Guthrie called a "sober assessment."

That's a troubling response, given that many AI researchers believe that type of computer intelligence is highly unlikely to hit anytime soon.

So why tell lawmakers the opposite?

Like many other tech billionaires, Schmidt has a personal interest not only in growing the AI industry, but also in scaring lawmakers into handing over the keys to the kingdom. It's a strategy known as "corporate capture," and it's been a particularly effective move for Silicon Valley giants like Uber, which has been given almost complete authority to write its own rules.

When it comes to AI, tech tycoons are particularly anxious about energy, as the data centers powering their soon-to-be-superintelligent algorithms eat megawatts for breakfast. As the race to develop the most advanced AI model heats up, companies like Elon Musk's xAI are resorting to less-than-legal means to avoid waiting for pesky EPA rulings and bothersome power grid assessments.

Late last year, Schmidt was caught hiding direct investments in AI startups throughout his tenure as chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence — no doubt a huge conflict of interest, but "technically legal," according to ethics experts.

Eat your heart out, Ellison.

Former Google CEO Tells Congress That 99 Percent of All Electricity Will Be Used to Power Superintelligent AI

Quote:Two hundred years ago today, American Minutemen raised their muskets at the Old North Bridge and answered a British volley. Ralph Waldo Emerson called it "the shot heard round the world." The British were in full retreat soon afterwards and. returned to Boston. But there was no turning back for the colonists--the American Revolution had begun.

Freedom was nourished in American soil because the principles of the Declaration of Independence flourished in our land. These principles, when enunciated 200 years ago, were a dream, not a reality. Today, they are real. Equality has matured in America. Our inalienable rights have become even more sacred. There is no government in our land without consent of the governed.

Remarks at the Old North Bridge, Concord, Massachusetts

Quote:Writing in her autobiography, “Wings for Life,” Ruth Nichols explained her passion: “To the public I suppose I have often seemed to be the original ‘flying fool.’ While flying over 140 different models of aircraft, I have piloted a plane in a plaster cast and a steel corset, too impatient to wait for bones to knit from the last crash. Maybe it doesn’t make sense…family and friends have urged me to keep my feet on the ground. The only people who haven’t tried to change me are flyers. They comprehend.”

From 101 Trailblazing Women of Air and Space: Aviators and Astronauts by Penny Rafferty Hamilton, PH.D.

The Ninety-Nines

Quote:First Japanese winner of Boston Marathon in 1951 dies at 91 (Oct 4, 2022)

Tanaka was originally from Hiroshima Prefecture.

He was 14 when he saw the bright light from the Hiroshima atomic bombing from a faraway village, which he said made him hate the United States.

Tanaka became a prominent long-distance runner when he was a student at Hiba Nishi High School (now Shobara Jitsugyo High School).

When he arrived in the United States to run in the Boston Marathon, he was taken to an office of a agency linked to the country’s Department of Defense.

Officials showed him pictures of Japanese atomic bomb survivors and asked, “Is this true?”

Later, he looked back on the episode and said, “They were rude.”

Because he was from Hiroshima Prefecture, an American newspaper also called him “atomic boy” when he competed in the marathon.

Tanaka wore a pair of Japanese traditional socks called “tabi” when he ran in the race because he didn’t have good running shoes.

His feet hurt with just his socks on, but he ran in the marathon with the words of his coach in mind, “Let’s win and restore Japanese people’s pride.”

Quote:- Blood Sacrifice To The Beast, a most critical 13-day period. Fire sacrifice is required on April 19.

April 19 is the first day of the 13-day Satanic ritual day relating to fire - the fire god, Baal, or Molech/Nimrod (the Sun God), also known as the Roman god, Saturn (Satan/Devil). This day is a major human sacrifice day, demanding fire sacrifice with an emphasis on children. This day is one of the most important human sacrifice days, and as such, has had some very important historic events occur on this day.
Occult holidays and Sabbats