Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

At 4:17 p.m. Eastern time on July 20, 1969: "They’re On The Moon" - Yankee Stadium fans are notified that Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin have landed safely on the lunar surface!




Apollo 11/Chappaquiddick share headline space July 20, 1969.



Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, July 20, 1969.



However, the witches - specifically Endora and Cousin Henry - were shown on the moon approximately three months before Neil Armstrong made his small step.


Bewitched, S5E29


Today/yesterday in 1940, Congress passed the Vinson-Walsh "Two-Ocean Navy" Act which increased the size of the U.S. Navy by 70%. It was the largest naval procurement bill in U.S. history, adding 18 carriers, 7 battleships, 33 cruisers, 115 destroyers, 43 subs and 15k aircraft to the fleet.

Navy Raises Battle Force Goal to 381 Ships in Classified Report to Congress (July 18, 2023)

The Navy is now more than 80 ships short of the latest estimate of what the sea service thinks it needs to fulfill the Biden administration’s national security strategy.

The Battle Force Ship Assessment and Requirement, a congressionally-mandated report, requires 381 ships, up from 373 in the 2022 report, the first year it was released. As of Monday, the Navy’s battle force was 299 ships.

Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg failed in the attempted assassination of Führer Adolf Hitler July 20, 1944. Unaware Hitler survived the bomb blast, conspirators then launched Operation Valkyrie in a military coup d'état. Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1944.




Today in scorch earth doctrine in 1956 (5:46am July 21, local time), the United States conducted Shot Tewa (part of Operation Redwing) at Bikini Atoll. Detonated on a barge between Namu and Yurochi Islands, the 5-Mt explosion blasted a crater 4,000 ft in diameter and 129 ft deep.




The Livermore-designed Bassoon Prime device used for Tewa was a "dirty" three-stage design (fission->fusion->fission), with a uranium-238 tamper around the third stage. Its fission yield was 87%, the highest of any US thermonuclear (H-bomb) test. It contaminated an area of 43,500 nautical miles.

Tewa was so powerful, its mushroom cloud was reportedly seen more than 2,500 miles away in Honolulu. The Bassoon Prime device evolved into the B41 bomb, the highest-yield (25 Megatons) thermonuclear weapon ever deployed by the United States (500 were built and stockpiled between 1960-76).


Caption reads: The Mk-41 "hydrogen" bomb, first produced in 1960, is now obsolete and is no longer in USAF service. Designed to be carried by B-47, B-52, and B-70 aircraft, it was to be released at high altitude, using parachutes to retard its fall, thereby permitting the releasing plane to escape from the target area safely. The parachutes used for this 10,500-lb bomb were one 5-ft pilot chute and one 16.5-ft ribbon chute. Having either an air or contact burst option, the Mk-41 was in the megaton yield range.

One could say Operation Annihilation was the primary purpose. Above was the barge used for Tewa. The Atomic Energy Commission utilized barges for 36 tests at Bikini and Enewetak rather than ground-based buildings or towers—starting with the Romeo test at Bikini on March 27, 1954 because high-yield tests were vaporizing the coral islands.

$157,664 per minute on nuclear weapons, an overall increase of $2.5 billion from 2021. That’s what the nine-nuclear armed states spent in 2022. In total, $82.9 billion on nuclear weapons that did nothing to make anyone safer. 


Wasted: 2022 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending


"Arthur C. Clarke's July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century" by (you guessed it) Arthur C. Clarke, 1987 edition, with cover art by Tim White.




The first public graphic claim of Soviet sex schools for spies (male and female) was made by defector Anatoli Granovsky in his 1940s book, "I Was An NKVD Agent". The descriptions are funny and caused a sensation. Image below by pulp illustrator legend Walter Popp.



Reminds me of Mata Hari.

After indirectly denouncing his father, Granovsky was recruited into the NKVD on July 20, 1939, to spy on his acquaintances among his father's former colleagues. Following the horrifying conditions of the prisons, Granovsky was immediately given money, a salary, and exemplary treatment, including medical operations to undo the effects of illness and injury borne on him by the interrogations and imprisonment.

In spring 1945, Granovsky was assigned to begin preparing to infiltrate the West after the end of World War II, particularly the United States, by posing as a refugee with his wife, an alcoholic restaurateur whom he was to seduce and marry. The woman was eventually deemed an unreliable liability and Granovsky was reassigned to the military front.

When Berlin fell, Granovsky was one of the NKVD men who appropriated files and supplies from the Gestapo and other German agencies and sites, including the Reich Chancellery, transferring such resources back to Moscow and Kiev.

Post-World War II

Granovsky was reassigned to appear as a sympathetic Soviet war veteran "fighter-poet" on tour in London, getting acquainted with the West and spreading pro-Soviet propaganda.

Later, working in Prague, Granovsky was charged with helping ensure de-Nazification and the reliability of the local Communist Party and police apparatus.

The Americans refused to grant Granovsky asylum and he was arrested by Swedish authorities. On November 8, 1946, shortly before he was to be repatriated to Soviet authorities, which was a veritable death sentence, Granovsky was granted asylum by King Gustaf V of Sweden.

Granovsky wrote his memoirs under the title All Pity Choked [London 1955], but later paperback editions were published under the title I Was An NKVD Agent.

After moving to the United States, he died in Washington, D.C., in September 1974 at the age of 52.
Wiki

FBI HQ 100-356092, unrecorded, 7/14/61 W.A. Branigan to W.C. Sullivan on Granovsky states: “Granovsky first came to our attention in 1948 in Rio de Janeiro.  He claimed he had been forced into the Soviet Espionage Service in 1937 and that he had held positions with the Soviet Secret Police until September 1946 when he defected in Sweden.”

HQ 100-356092, #92 (10/12/62 R.W. Smith to W.C. Sullivan) reports that on page 179 of his book, Granovsky claimed that “a rich old man living in the South of the United States” had Soviet sympathies which led him to adopt a Soviet agent as his son and that son became a rich man in his own right.  Granovsky claimed the rich man died in 1942 in Texas.  Per memo “Investigation by the Bureau of all wealthy individuals who died in Texas around 1942 as well as the disposition of their fortunes failed to corroborate Granovsky’s allegation.”

His comment from 7/14/61 Washington Post article, page 1, by Rasa Gustaitis, entitled “Ex-Spy Says Anti-Reds Aid Soviet Aims in U.S.”: [reprinted in Edward Hunter’s 1961 Senate testimony on anti-anti-Communists]

“The Soviet Communists would sacrifice a thousand American Communists to save the John Birch Society, for instance.  I don’t mean the Birch Society is Communist-infiltrated.  It doesn’t have to be.  By discrediting prominent Americans, it confuses the population about whom to trust.  In socializing Czechoslovakia…we did everything to divide the armed forces units trained by the British and the Americans by spreading rumors about officers until they were so thoroughly discredited their men would not obey them and they had to be removed.”

Granovsky FBI file (Internet Archive)

He'd been placed on "international hold" by US & S. Korean authorities & shouldn't have been allowed on border tour. US military investigating whether N Korea knew in advance.
The Messenger


NY Post

North Korea Defector History repeats:
Larry Allen Abshier (1962)
James Joseph Dresnok (1962)
Jerry Wayne Parrish (1963)
Charles Robert Jenkins (1965)
Roy Chung (1979)
Joseph T. White (1982)
Travis King (2023)

Maybe Private Travis is a modern day clown plant of "Robert McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War" > McNamara's Project 100,000

Unreal story of the sailor who fell overboard from the USS Canberra (heavy cruiser) during Vietnam war!
"The Incredibly Stupid One"

The "memory palace" method that all memory prodigies use.

Bio on him at the POW Network.


July 20, 1988: Glenn Michael Souther (January 30, 1957 – June 22, 1989), appears on Soviet TV show Camera on the World to badmouth America. Also known as Mikhail Yevgenyevich Orlov, was an American sailor who became a Soviet intelligence officer after defecting to the Eastern Bloc in 1986.


He had a good 3 years in the USSR until he committed suicide.