Tom McMahon

You're In The Ukrainian Army Now

You're In The Ukrainian Army Now

From EnglishRussia.com:

Looks like nothing has changed from Communistic times. Same old tradition to stand pants down before a group of lady doctors for every young man in the country.

A Cold War Flashback: Who Dealt This Mess?

A Cold War Flashback: Who Dealt This Mess?

From the glory days of National Lampoon

Why The Kids Never Learn About Pol Pot

From The Fourth Checkraise:

John Derbyshire, the cranky old paleo among the neocon crew of the National Review, is certainly my favourite writer in that outfit, plus his "Derb Radio" podcasts always lighten up the Friday afternoons considerably. He now has a new book out, aptly titled "We Are Doomed" which I would immediately put on hold at the library, if they had it... dang, I guess that will have to wait. Meanwhile, in his September diary Derb discovers that kids can go through the whole K-12 without learning about Pol Pot. Heh, really, Derb, this was news to you? I remember wondering about that exact same question like ten years ago. Of a random sample of one hundred high school seniors, I'd bet that 90 would know who, whom, where and when (within a decade) about Adolf Hitler, but only 50 could answer these questions about Joseph Stalin, and at most one or two would have even heard of the Old Pol from Sorbonne. Which is indeed strange... actually, no, it's not. This seeming paradox follows with crystal clear logic from the ideology that is currently dominant in humanities and education. To tell the kids why exactly Pol Pot was bad, unlike Hitler who can be easily associated with eugenics and highways and many other bad things that progressives dislike, they would have denounce most of their own ideology of anti-individualist equalism that this vanguard of the masses simply took to its logical conclusion.

Because The Whole Foods Crowd Doesn't Give A Damn About North Korea

An excerpt from Mark Krikorian:

I know it won't come as any surprise to Corner readers, but Monday's front-page Post story on the North Korean gulag highlights yet again how loathesome that gangster regime is. The reporter's point appears to be that the United States needs to take a stronger stance against the Reds' barbaric treatment of their subjects. The hypocrisy — or just shallowness and stupidity — of human rights types was nicely summarized by one activist: "Tibetans have the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, Burmese have Aung San Suu Kyi, Darfurians have Mia Farrow and George Clooney. North Koreans have no one like that."

And that's a big part of the problem with making human rights a central element of our foreign policy. It's inevitably going to be driven by the celebrity fad of the moment, whether Lord Byron and the Greeks in the 1820s, Hungary's Kossuth in the 1850s, or George Clooney today, and if a cause doesn't have a cute bumper sticker and catch the fancy of the Whole Foods crowd, it will be ignored.

After The American Left Caused and Then Ignored The Slaughters in Vietnam and Cambodia, That Was The Turning Point For Jon Voight

Jon Voight:

And then I saw the end of the war. I saw us pull out, and then I saw the communists move in and slaughter 2 1/2 million people in South Vietnam and Cambodia. And I saw the left that had precipitated this turn away, just walk away from it. ... They didn't take seriously the blood that they had been directly causing.

Do you think you'll ever see such an admission by James Rowen or Paul Soglin? I wouldn't wait for one.

Vyacheslav Molotov

• 9 March [O.S. 25 February ] 1890 – 8 November 1986 
• Protégé of Joseph Stalin
• He was the principal Soviet signatory of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939 (also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact).  
• The Molotov cocktail was named after him by the Finnish military during the Winter War. 
• He was the only Bolshevik leader who always wore a suit and tie 
• In the postwar period, Molotov's position began to decline. In 1949, he was replaced as Foreign Minister 
• Molotov's downfall began in February 1956 when Khrushchev launched an unexpected denunciation of Stalin 
• Eventually he was banished as ambassador to Mongolia.  
• Molotov was one of the few, if not the only person to have shaken hands with Soviet Premiers Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong, German leader Adolf Hitler, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyacheslav_Molotov  

Marching: It's What North Koreans Do Best

Marching: It's What North Koreans Do Best

North Korean Card Section

North Korean Card Section

North Korean Scientists Invent Super High-Calorie Ramen Noodle

From Matthew Firestone:

In a failed state that does not produce enough food to feed its population, and is largely reliant on food aid provided by foreign donors, the invention of a super high-calorie noodle is indeed cause for celebration. According to a recent article in the Choson Shinbo, a Japan-based, pro-Pyongyang newspaper, North Korean scientists have created a new type of noodle that has twice as much protein and fives times as much fat as ordinary ramen.

Made largely of corn and soybean, the new noodles are an engineering breakthrough in their ability to leave people feeling fuller, longer. The paper also reports that the new super high-calorie noodles are specially designed to delay feelings of hunger. This culinary achievement is being hailed as further evidence of the mighty and divine power of Kim Il-sung, the deceased 'eternal ruler' of the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea (DPRK).

The Nuclear Submarine In The Middle Of The Desert: The Story Of The S5G Natural Circulation Reactor

The Nuclear Submarine In The Middle Of The Desert: The Story Of The S5G Natural Circulation Reactor

 

From inl.gov (PDF file):

Then in 1961 came the S5G prototype (the 5th submarine design, made by General Electric). As the Cold War intensified, the United States and the USSR poured their latest technology into the theory and practice of undersea warfare. They wired the ocean floors with sound detectors. These called forth technology to quiet the submarines. One source of noise came from the pumps that circulated the coolant through the reactor and kept it under pressure. The art of sound detection became so refined that skilled listeners could identify the unique sound patterns of individual boats. So the mission of S5G was to eliminate noise.

S5G, like S1W, was built in a huge box of a building, its roof presenting an inscrutable flat surface to satellite cameras passing overhead. The reactor went critical for the first time in September 1965. The hull section floated in a “basin” of water. Operators inside the hull used equipment to make the hull rock back and forth, adding more realism to the simulation. In this setting, the Navy developed a method of circulating the reactor’s cooling water without using a pump and exploiting the principle that warm water rises. USS Narwhal was the first boat equipped with the system. At high speeds, pumps were still needed, so the controller could move the coolant either by socalled “forced” or “natural” methods.

And more formerly Top Secret info from Wikipedia:

To further reduce engine plant noise, the normal propulsion setup of two steam turbines driving the screw through a reduction gear unit was changed instead to one large propulsion turbine with no reduction gears. This eliminated the noise from the main reduction gears, but the cost was to have a huge main propulsion turbine. The turbine was cylindrical, about 12 feet in diameter, and about 30 feet long. This massive size was necessary to allow it to turn slowly enough to directly drive the screw and be fairly efficient in doing so. The same propulsion setup was used on both the USS Narwhal and the land-based prototype.

The concept of a natural circulation plant was relatively new when the Navy requested this design. The prototype plant in Idaho was therefore given quite a rigorous performance shakedown to determine if such a design would work for the US Navy. It was largely a success, although the design never became the basis for any more fast-attack submarines besides the Narwhal. The prototype testing included the simulation of essentially the entire engine room of an attack submarine. Floating the plant in a large pool of water allowed the prototype to be rotated along its long axis to simulate a hard turn. This was necessary to determine whether natural circulation would continue even during hard maneuvers, since natural circulation is dependent on gravity.