Some Things About Uranium

Our president knows things about uranium! So do I!

“We had Hillary Clinton give Russia 20 percent of the uranium in our country. You know what uranium is, right? It’s a thing called nuclear weapons and other things. Like lots of things are done with uranium, including some bad things” – Donald Trump

Most bombs nowadays are plutonium, but that’s a little detail. Nuclear weapons-making, though, is something that beggars my imagination when it comes to complexity, which is why I’ve always been interested in it. These are a few random factoids that stick in my mind from a lifetime of collecting random factoids…

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Let’s Practice for Some War Crimes

Military ‘exercises’ are a form of imperial messaging. Right now, the US has troops in Poland in what is being described with Orwellian irony as “anti-Russian aggression NATO exercises”[1]

The troops will rotate training in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia for the next nine months. The regional training exercises are also designed to test how U.S. forces respond on short notice to a possible conflict with Russia.

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$1.6 Trillion, Plus or Minus $100 Billion

Whenever you talk to someone who says that they are “fiscally conservative” (and they usually follow it with “… and socially libertarian”) you are authorized to laugh at them. Indeed, you are deputized hereby to deliver derisive laughter. I’ve said many times that it’s impossible to be “fiscally conservative” and not be mind-blown upset about defense expenditures and pentagon financial fraud.

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Hijinks on the High Seas

I’ve always been interested in naval hijinks, mostly because navies are the premier means of “projecting power” for nation-states.* And, of course, gathering intelligence as well. The US’ military has a huge emphasis on naval force-projection because of the logistics of having a navy: a carrier task force group is a movable city with its own inner supply chain. As mentioned elsewhere, you can tell a lot about the purpose of a nation’s military by its force structure.

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Watch the Story Change and Unfold

The initial headline:

“China ‘seizes US vessel’ in S China Sea” (link) isn’t quite deliberately deceptive, though if you look at the page the first thing you see is a great big white non-military-looking ship; you have to read in more detail to realize that it’s a drone that was seized.

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Sunday Sermon: Shooting Back

(Content Warning: war, death)

I’m going to begin today’s sermon with a transcript from a podcast I recently heard. It’s David Wood, speaking at Politics and Prose on “What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars.” Wood’s view is that wars can cause “Moral Injury” – a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder to our sense of right and wrong. The bit that stuck in my mind, which I went back and replayed and bookmarked, was an example that he gave – an example that is very typical of the experiences of many soldiers:

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A Side-Note on Pearl Harbor

The book “Stalin’s Spy: Richard Sorge and the Tokyo Spy Ring” is worth reading for those of you who are interested in spy-craft. He has nothing to do with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and therefore everything to do with the American’s failure to listen to their signals intelligence analysts who had cracked the Japanese PURPLE code system and were desperately trying to warn the state department that something was coming over the horizon.

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