Tom McMahon

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.

Jesse Helms

From AtlanticBlog:

Jesse Helms And What It Says About The Left

Something about the obituaries for Jesse Helms caught my attention. The AP piece, by Whitney Woodward, would have been carried by scores of papers. It has this line:

He used the posts to protect his state's tobacco growers and other farmers, and placed his stamp on foreign policy with a strident opposition to Communism.

Can you imagine a newspaper describing as "strident" a politician's opposition to fascism, racism, or Nazism. But object to a system that has murdered and enslaved tens of millions, and he gets called "strident". Next time a lefty says it a smear to say the left is soft on communist murder, remind him.

When Preferential Treatment Became A Death Sentence

From an e-mail to media blog on the subject of the training that Naval Aviators received:

I personally graduated from NROTC in 1976, so can speak of the situation a bit closer to his timeframe, although even my testimony is not definitive — a contemporary to Sen McCain should weigh in.

When I went to Pensacola, prospective Naval Aviators were required to be in good health and have 20/20 vision. Those with less vision became Naval flight Officers (as I did). The GPA required was 2.5 (out of the then-standard 4.0 possible), hardly stellar. Roughly half of those NROTC graduates who requested flight training got it; I have no idea what the success rate was for Academy graduates, but, since Boat Schoolers routinely had an advantage over NROTC graduates, I suspect that they had a higher success rate than we. Keep in mind that, at the time, aviation was considered "better" than surface warfare (and definitely better than all the other jobs a newly commissioned Ensign could get), and Ensign McCain's grades were completely disqualifying for Nuclear Power training.  So I would deduce that he got no special treatment for assignment to aviation training.

Once he got to Pensacola, however, any allegation of preferential treatment because of his family clearly demonstrates the ignorance of the person making it. Being the son of an admiral would not have been unusual enough to have highers-up take an interest in his progress — his father was not the CNO for example. And the training process is merciless; those who fail to measure up are eliminated. That McCain not only completed flight training, but qualified for jets, means that he was an exceptionally good pilot, as those who were not got multi-engine aircraft or helicopters. Tactical jets were reserved for the top pilots, and there is no way to fake that.

I will endorse the comment that someone made that "To give such an assignment to someone unqualified wouldn't be an act of patronage, it would be a death sentence, for the pilot and those on the carrier deck." I have personal knowledge of one instance, a former flight school classmate who was given special consideration purely because of his skin color and later was killed by the very failing that should have washed him out.

Reagan On The Kennedy Assassinations

An extended excerpt from Paul Kengor:

Reagan spoke to Joey Bishop at length about Kennedy, the loss, the “savage act,” and even offered spiritual advice on how to cope with the sadness. “I am sure that all of us are praying not only for him but for his family and for those others who were so senselessly struck down also in the fusillade of bullets,” said Reagan. “I believe we should go on praying, to the best of our ability, to ask for God’s mercy in what has happened to us.” The governor said there was a “pall” over his state of California.

Particularly remarkable was how the Cold Warrior found a way to direct the discussion to what he assured the audience was America’s real enemy: the USSR. Reagan noted that Kennedy’s killer, a radical Arab, committed the crime because of the senator’s support of Israel, specifically during the Six Day War that had occurred exactly one year earlier. As Soviet sources now confirm — and as histories and documentaries today readily acknowledge — that conflict was intentionally precipitated by the Kremlin, which had concocted false intelligence reports about alleged Israeli troop movements upon Arab territory. Moscow shared the phony information with Egypt and other Arab states for the explicit purpose of creating a military confrontation with Israel, which the Soviets believed would advance their broader foreign-policy interests in the Middle East and the world, and would undermine an America struggling in Vietnam. The Soviets stirred the pot, and their shameless maneuver led to a war.

That take on the RFK shooting may even manage to escape the commemorations carried by cable networks this weekend. But it never eluded Ronald Reagan.

Reagan thus linked Bobby Kennedy’s assassination to the USSR. “The enemy sits in Moscow,” he told Joey Bishop. “I call him an enemy because I believe he has proven this, by deed, in the Middle East. The actions of the enemy led to and precipitated the tragedy of last night.”

Reagan was not finished. Later in that same week, he connected the earlier assassination of the other Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, to Soviet Communism. In a largely unreported and unknown speech at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis, on June 13, 1968 — again, a complete transcript has been stored in Bill Clark’s personal files for some 40 years — Reagan was eager to remind Americans of the worldview that had motivated JFK’s murderer: “Five years ago, a president was murdered by one who renounced his American citizenship to embrace the godless philosophy of communism.”

Ronald Reagan had formulated a new outrage toward Soviet Communism: Moscow’s nefarious ways had led, directly or indirectly, to the murders of two of America’s most cherished political figures — the Kennedy boys.

Humane Treatment

An excerpt from Mike Adams:

No other part of McCain’s account of prison life touched me like his reflections upon the humane treatment he received from one particular prison guard. The man pitied McCain after he was left overnight in a prison interrogation cell for his refusal to cooperate. Ropes were tied tightly around his broken arms causing him a great deal of physical pain. But without explanation the guard would enter the cell and loosen the ropes to relieve the future Senator’s pain. Then, at the end of his shift, he would retighten the ropes to avoid detection.

McCain did not understand the reason for this guard’s sympathy until next Christmas Day when the prisoners were given the special treat of being allowed to stand outside their cells for five minutes. During those few short minutes, the guard walked up to McCain and stopped just before him to draw the sign of a cross in the dirt. They both stared silently at the cross for a moment before the guard walked away.

The Taint Of 1968

Via Sykes, an excerpt from Rich Lowry:

The freedoms fought for in the student revolt soon curdled into the opposite: free speech became speech codes; sexual liberation became the regime of sexual harassment; civil rights became quotas. Meanwhile, Mark Rudd and a fringe of the New Left spun off into the Weather Underground, which took the destructive spirit of the campus protests to its logical conclusion in a campaign of terrorist bombings. Jonah Goldberg reminds us in his book "Liberal Fascism" that the radical left committed roughly 250 attacks from September 1969 to May 1970.

If the academics gave in, another segment of the parents resisted. They were the Nixon voters, reacting against the disorder and cultural radicalism with which liberalism became identified. Republicans held the White House for 28 of the next 40 years, and the alternative history of the 1960s is the rise of the right. Even now, with Barack Obama dogged by his association with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, the Democratic Party's challenge is to free itself from the taint of 1968.