The Case of the Contraband Uranium

It appears that authorities in Moldova seized about four pounds of contraband uranium and arrested several suspects. The material in question turned out to be the isotope uranium 238 (U238), meaning that, unlike the fissile isotope U235, it couldn’t be used to make a bomb. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that whenever I have personal knowledge of what happened in an incident that makes the news, or expertise regarding its subject, the mainstream media, with their layers of editors and fact checkers, manage to botch the story. For example, CNN uncritically quotes Kirill Motspan, a spokesman for Moldova’s Interior Ministry as saying that, “…it was his understanding that 1 kilo of uranium costs $6.3 million on the black market and that is what the smugglers were expecting to get.” I seriously doubt that Motspan meant just any uranium, and especially not U238. If that were the case, the guys who fly A10 Warthog ground support planes armed with Gatling guns that pump out rounds that contain just under a pound each of the stuff at 4,200 rounds per minute must be using caddies to recover them. He was probably referring to uranium highly enriched in isotope 235, which can be used to make a bomb. In other words, the smugglers were intending to snooker their customers. Anyone can Google the fact that natural uranium, which contains at least a little (about 0.71%) U235, is currently selling for just under $50 per pound.

Not to be outdone, the Telegraph reports that the material seized was “enriched uranium.”  Since the caption of the figure that appears in the article notes that the material was U238, commonly referred to as depleted uranium, none of their “fact checkers” apparently has a clue what they’re talking about.

BTW, have you noticed that whenever contraband radioactive and special nuclear material is seized, its usually due to good old fashioned police work, and not to those snazzy new radiation detectors that are being installed hand over fist at ports and border crossings?  That’s not a coincidence.

Terrorism (and Heat) in Russia

Yuri at Russia Blog posted this article about an Islamist attack on one of the country’s hydroelectric plants.  Apparently the US media were too busy keeping us up to date on the latest doings of Sarah Palin and the guest list at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to notice. I hope the folks in charge of security at our own energy facilities were not similarly distracted.

Meanwhile, Weather Underground is predicting temperatures of 100 degrees today and tomorrow in Moscow. That has to hurt in a city with little or no air conditioning, especially when you throw some peat and forest fires into the mix.

“Right Wing Terror” vs. the Real Thing

Remember the recent hysteria on the left about imminent right wing terror and insurrection promoted by subversive institutions such as freedom of speech?  Here’s what the real thing looks like, but I doubt that the “right wing” was involved in an attack on an oil company executive.  It doesn’t fit the narrative.

How do You Recognize Anti-Semites?

By their double standard, like any other bigots. They react with indifference to the cold-blooded murder of 46 korean sailors.

But if Jews act in self defense against a violent attack planned well in advance by “peace activists,” they wring their hands, shed torrents of crocodile tears, and start foaming at the mouth about “atrocities.”

John Brennan Redefines “Jihad”

According to the ideology of our current rulers, religion is good.  Multi-culturism is also good.  Therefore, as expressions of culture, all religions are good.  Not only that, they are all good to a precisely equal degree.  It is impossible for one religion to be “more good” than another religion.  As a caveat of this, nothing done in the name of or on behalf of religion can be bad.  If someone murders your children and tells you they did it because of their religion, they’re simply the victims of an unfortunate misconception.  If religion inspired something bad, than the law of the conservation of religious goodness would be violated.  It therefore follows that such people are delusional, and don’t actually understand their own religion.

In keeping with these truisms, White House counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan has done Moslem terrorists the honor of redefining the word “jihad.”  In the process of explaining the “real” nature of their religion to them, he recently enlightened them with the knowledge that all those hours they spent in the Madrassa memorizing the Koran were in vain. Thanks to careful reading of the New York Times, he is now able to inform them that their understanding of “jihad” is flawed. When they blew all those people up, they were the victims of a terrible imposture. Bringing his profound theological expertise to bear, he sets them straight:

Nor do we describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.

Thus spake Imam Brennan.  In order to fact check the presidential advisor and newly minted Islamic scholar, I consulted Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, circa 1968.  It is one of those wonderful old massive dictionaries that used to be mounted on lecterns in the better libraries, and was published by the great ancient ones long before the dawn of the era of political correctness.  It defines ”jihad” as follows:

1) A holy war waged on behalf of Islam as a religious duty. 2) A bitter strife or crusade undertaken in the spirit of a holy war.

Note the guileless use of the now forbidden term, “crusade.”  I thought that was particularly charming.  It is not recorded that anyone at the time, Moslem or otherwise, objected to the above definitions.

The Times Square Bomber: CNN Finally Gets It

After scratching its collective head for ever so long and wondering what could possibly have motivated Faisal Shahzad in his attempt to murder people who happened to be in Times Square at the wrong time, the answer is finally starting to dawn on CNN. He did it because he’s an Islamist terrorist. Who knew?! Congratulations on seeing the light, CNN. You have our deep thanks for letting the rest of us know it wasn’t because he had fallen behind in his mortgage payments, after all.

Insight of the Day…

“Don’t want things you treasure satirized? Just issue a “prediction” and — voila! Meanwhile, note how entirely real radical Muslim threats and violence are treated as just part of the weather — something you have to adapt to — while nonexistent Tea Party violence is an existential threat to the Republic.” Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.

In other words, never accuse anyone of fomenting violence unless you’re sure they’re nonviolent.

The Hiroshima Fallacy Lives On

In a briefing at the start of President Obama’s nuclear security summit on Monday, his top counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, claimed,

Developing a nuclear device involves a highly sophisticated technical process, and al Qaeda doesn’t seem to have mastered it based on what we know now.

It boggles the mind that someone in his position could believe such nonsense. Unfortunately, he’s not alone. Any number of people who should know better have fallen for the Hiroshima Fallacy; the dangerously mistaken belief that an effective nuclear device would need to be at least as sophisticated as the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima. Here’s a tutorial for the benefit of Mr. Brennan on the “highly sophisticated technical process” necessary to assemble an effective nuclear weapon:

1. Acquire a critical mass of weapons grade plutonium or highly enriched uranium, otherwise known as Special Nuclear Material (SNM), well separated into two chunks of approximately equal size.

2. Purchase a step ladder.

3. Place one of the two pieces of SNM on the ground at your chosen target location.

4. Climb the step ladder with the other piece of SNM.

5. Take careful aim, and drop the piece of SNM you are holding on top of the other piece.

How’s that for a “highly sophisticated technical process,” Mr. Brennan?

The result of such a nuclear attack would not be a 20 kiloton explosion. It might not even cause any fatalities, assuming the attacker could run really, really fast. However, the effect would be the same as detonating a big “dirty bomb.” The immediate area would be poisoned with radioactivity, and the economic impact would be great. The political impact would be incalculable. Assuming the attacker cared to bother with an even more “highly sophisticated technical process,” the critical masses could be accelerated together with a strong spring, or a small explosive charge. One might add a crude gun barrel to enhance the effect. At each stage, more radioactivity would be released, and distributed more widely. Eventually, the device would explode. The size of the explosion would be unpredictable. It would all depend on when a stray neutron happened along.

I have a suggestion for Mr. Brennan. He should contact the weapon designers at Los Alamos and Livermore and ask them to fire up their codes and prepare a study on the likely effects of the weapons described above. He should then gather together as many members of Congress and high government officials as possible and sit down and listen to what they have to say. I can assure Mr. Brennan that, if he really believes the Hiroshima Fallacy, it will be an epiphany for him. If time allowed, it might also be useful for the weapons guys to describe how one might assemble a simple gun type nuclear weapon with an explosive yield in the kiloton range. I rather suspect Mr. Brennan will be surprised to learn the real level of sophistication necessary to build such a weapon.

It is not a good thing for the officials responsible for protecting us from nuclear attack to be ignorant about nuclear weapons. It would not be difficult, nor would it take a great deal of their time, to learn some of the elementary facts alluded to above from people at the weapons labs who know what they’re talking about. I appeal to them to do so.

Worker with plutonium disk

Of Assassinations in Dubai and Ideological Narratives

In the ancient times before the blogosphere, when even Internet forums were still a novelty, and blogs nonexistent, one occasionally ran across mainstream media types who would hilariously claim, with a perfectly straight face, that their news reporting was “objective.”  Nowadays such specimens have become a great rarity, seldom encountered outside of circus side shows.  Even the lowliest of trolls are now well aware of the existence of what is referred to as the “narrative.”  The narrative requires that reality be “adjusted” to conform to a particular ideological point of view.  These adjustments are seldom applied in the form of blatant lies.  In these days of instant Internet fact checking, it has simply become too risky.  Rather, one only reports stories that conform to the narrative, perhaps after trimming them of certain “irrelevant details” and adding some “interpretation” by “experts” to make sure readers don’t miss the point.  In other words, the story is massaged until, as the Germans put it, “Es passt in den Kram” (It fits in with the rest of the crap).

Sometimes events of such a shocking nature occur that even the most carefully crafted narratives must be adjusted to account for them.  One such event was, of course, the demise of Communism.  As one might expect, it left the narrative of the “progressive left” in a shambles.  A new, somewhat ramshackle version had to be cobbled together, from such ideological flotsam and jetsam as bobbed to the surface after the Soviet Titanic slid beneath the waves, combined with some interesting new twists.  One of the more amusing of these is the left’s increasingly steamy love affair with the more extreme Islamists.  It seems odd on the face of it that ideologues who once posed as champions of women’s liberation and gay rights, and vehemently denounced the agenda of the Christian right, are now found in such a warm embrace with misogynistic, homophobe religious fanatics.  However, Homo sapiens has never really been a rational animal.  We are simply better than the other animals at using reason to satisfy our emotional needs.  When it comes to emotional needs, there are those among us whose tastes run to “saving” the rest of us and making us all “happy” by stuffing the messianic world view du jour down our collective throats.  These are the familiar types who love to strike heroic poses on the “moral high ground.”  Marxism scratched their emotional itch admirably for many years, but has lately fallen out of fashion.  When it did, it left something of a psychological vacuum in its wake.  Mercifully, no brand new surefire prescription for saving humanity was waiting in the wings to take its place.  Instead, radical Islamism has rushed in to fill the vacuum.  When it comes to messianic world views, it is, for the time being at least, the only game in town.  Incongruous successor to Marxism that it is, it still scratches that itch.  The “progressive left” jumped on board.  It should really come as no surprise.  After all, back in the day, they managed to convince themselves that they were “saving the world” by collaborating in the mass murders of Pol Pot and Ho chi Minh, not to mention Stalin. 

Artifacts of this Islamist – leftist love affair are not hard to find.  When it comes to the European news media, for example, it takes the form of anti-Semitism Lite, often euphemistically referred to as “anti-Zionism.”  It manifests itself in the form of obsessive, one-sided bashing of Israel for the slightest real or imagined infractions of the left’s version of “morality,” combined with a the turning of a blind eye to the far more egregious misdeeds of her enemies.  For example, deliberate attempts by the Islamists to murder Israeli civilians with barrages of rockets are reported with as much emotional detachment as the next day’s weather, but grossly exaggerated accounts of atrocities in Gaza and “blood libel” fables about the harvesting of organs from Palestinian victims become the stuff of persistent propaganda campaigns without the slightest shred of proof. 

The process is nicely illustrated by the manner in which the news about the recent assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai has been reported in Europe.  There, as in the US, the “progressive left” tends to be over-represented in the legacy media.  It is overwhelmingly the case in Germany, where no equivalent of our talk radio or influential bloggers exists to restore a semblance of balance.  Consider, for example, the coverage in Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading news magazine.  A story about the assassination that appeared last week began with the ominous headline, “How Israel Covered Mossad’s Trail.”  The opening blurb reads, “The Israeli secret service will neither ‘confirm nor deny’ its involvement in the murder of Hamas weapons dealer Mabhouh.  However, the Dubai assassin who went by the cover name Michael Bodenheimer left a trail behind him:  In Cologne and in Israeli Herzliya.”  The rest of the article is a collection of circumstantial evidence combined with suggestions that the crime had all the earmarks of a Mossad hit. 

The “news” here is hardly that Mossad wasn’t involved in the hit.  It’s the disconnect between the way Spiegel reported on this story, which happened to fit its anti-Israel narrative, and the way it reports on similar stories that don’t.  Take for example, the involvement of Al Qaeda in 911.  This was a story that most decidedly did not fit Spiegel’s pro-Islamist narrative at the time.  It also came at an inconvenient time, as Spiegel was in the forefront of a quasi-racist German jihad against the United States that reached levels of obsessive viciousness at about the time of 911 that would scarcely be credible to Americans who can’t read German.   Nevertheless, all the same circumstantial evidence was there, complete with a trail leading back to Germany.  In this case, however, instead of accepting the obvious, Spiegel’s editors dug in their heels, and tried to create an alternate version of reality.  They began what I referred to at the time as the “Spielchen mit den Beweisen,” or “cute little game with the proofs,” coming up with ever more contrived reasons to dismiss the increasing mountain of evidence pointing to Al Qaeda’s guilt.  Even when bin Laden appeared on tape, practically jumping up and down and screaming, “We did it!  We did it!” the editors refused to throw in the towel.  They were nothing if not stubborn.  Reality was what they said it was, and the rest of the world be damned!  They pointed out that (aha, oho), the translators of the videotape had been in the employ of the evil Americans.  They produced their own “translators” from the enormous pool of experts they have constantly at their beck and call, ready to “prove” the most absurd concoctions.  These came up with a “corrected” translation on demand which (surprise, surprise) exonerated bin Laden.  Only after a chorus of native Arab speakers in countries that could hardly be portrayed as “friends” of the United States pointed out that Spiegel’s “translators” were sucking canal water, did the editors finally give over, muttering dark comments about the “exegesis of videotapes.” 

In a word, then, as far as ideologues are concerned, be they on the left or the right of the political spectrum, the “real world” is what fits the narrative.  When it comes to dishing out blame, let him beware whom the ideological shoe fits.

UPDATE:  It’s odd that Spiegel didn’t pick up on this.  Looks like prime material for another “Spielchen mit den Beweisen” to me.

Ethiopian Airlines Crash a Terrorist Act?

DEBKAfile claims it was.  Their record for accuracy has been a bit spotty, but occasionally they scoop the big news organizations. In any case, we’ve had the forensic capability to distinguish crashes caused by lightning strikes from those resulting from explosive devices for a long time now. The people running the investigation should know one way or the other in the not too distant future. When they do, I hope they will inform the rest of us.