Is that for real? A fake? Does she need instructions on breathing?
Reminds me of one of Brian Regan’s classic bits about how there are instructions on Pop Tart packages and imagining the type of person who would actually need them.
Day Three of smoke from fire just north of us, Loveland,CO. Yesterday morning it was really bad, you could see heavy smoke haze around the area. It has been hot (95degrees+) and dry and humidity has dropped. Last night another fire SW of us, in Lyons. Northern Front Range is burning.
It’s good to know that even in your most embarrassing moments, someone will be there to record your predicament.
After Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s political leader in Iran, there’s a lot of handwringing about MAD (mutually assured destruction) which I find a little puzzling. I was under the impression that while Iran likely has produced some amount of fissile material, I haven’t heard anything about their ability to produce a warhead and mount it on a missile that then could successfully be launched. Does anyone around here know about Iran’s actual nuclear capabilities?
Shirehome,
My brother keeping me up on the Loveland and Lyons fires…not a good situation. Hope they get them under control.
I responded to our CU/CSU discussion on yesterday’s OT, but thought I’d put it here for you:
I’m accommodating to all the Colorado universities. MS grad of CSU, 1974. And yes the contrast between the two was/is stark. I was accepted for undergrad by CU, CSU, and Mines. At the time, CU had a top 10 physics dept, so that’s where I went. Also, being a naive 18 yr old, I didn’t understand that “top 10” meant grad school and research. I did get a good undergrad physics education, but a bit impersonal as compared to what I could have obtained at the much smaller CSU department. I went to CSU for grad school as it had a Radiation biology dept and I was thinking medical physics. I took courses in both physics and rad bio. After 2 years I decided that wasn’t the path for me and ended up way south and east at UGA for the doctorate.
BTW, one huge benefit of CSU at the time was Christman field and the Ram Flying Club. Where else could someone on a grad stipend get their PPL in 2 years??!
If this assassination was actually Israeli, as the IRGC says, this is the second recent demonstration from Israel of what they can do inside Iran if they choose to. The first was the destruction of the radar facilities near the Iranian nuclear research plant. Iran might want to step carefully.
Indeed it is queer, but where there is a will it may be weird.
sdferr – Yeah, I assumed that they had enough weapons grade material to produce perhaps 2 or 3 weapons. But I wonder how difficult it is to produce a warhead to be mounted on something like SCUD Shahab or Qiam missile or any number of the ballistic missiles they currently have in their arsenal. And if it’s relatively easy for them to do so, have they done it yet?
HAMAS terrorist leader dies in Tehran.
Israel hasn’t credit for it. My guess it was his ‘bodyguards’ who feared for their own lives if he was still breathing.
Too bad for him that Hef made sure he won’t find any virgins where he’s going.
May that HAMAS murderer burn in Hell forever,
Staged.
That “Police” shoulder patch is a Department of Veterans Affairs patch. After 21 years active duty and another 21 years as a retiree, I’d recognize that emblem anywhere.
Not the type of cop you’d see making house calls. That anomaly caused me to look deeper.
His “armor” has no body armor in it, it’s just an empty chest rig.
He’s not wearing a duty belt. In fact if you pause it exactly 2 seconds in while he’s crossing in front of the camera…he’s not wearing any belt at all. His trousers’ belt loops are empty. He’s got a couple of things dangling from the bottom of his not armored chest rig to give the impression he’s got equipment hanging from a belt, but there’s no belt…no gun…no radio…no handcuffs, etc.
That’s a costume.
Which leads me to the conclusion the whole thing was staged…and if you ask me, the acting was pretty stilted and dialog a bit wooden. No Oscar for them.
After a bit of internet research it seems that while it’s relatively easy to produce what’s known as a “Gun Type”* weapon like the bombs dropped on Japan (Fatman and Little Boy), thankfully producing an actual thermonuclear warhead is far, far more complex. So while Iran almost certainly could produce a simple bomb, it’s pretty unlikely they could produce a warhead.
*”Gun Type” weapons literally shoot sub critical material from multiple points along the internal surface of a sphere into a central point that results in critical mass.
Fatman was no gun type, and the IRGC has long been known to have been researching and developing the components necessay to construct a nuke-fissile bomb of that sort. Their risk is not testing what they’ve built once they assemble the whole enchilada. The rest of the world’s risk is not actually knowing when and whether that assembly will have (or has) been done.
Physicsguy, not sure what kind of education you would get from CSU now, has gone very woke.
I started at CSU in 1964, the first group of Babyboomers. Saw lots of new building on campus, which CSU started before we hit the campus. My old dorm, Newsom, is gone, for the new football stadium. Proposed to my Wife in the Library.
Very Unconfirmed Reports right now, but some Sources in Syria are claiming that Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Forces, has been Assassination in an Attack near the Syrian Capital of Damascus. Hajizadeh is believed to have been the Senior Commander who planned and ordered the Iranian Ballistic and Cruise Missile Attack in April against Israel.
Yeah you’re correct, Fatman was an implosion type. Either way, even if Iran produced such a bomb, and even if they foregoed testing it, they’d still have to find a way to deploy it. It would be very bulky and heavy. Fatman reportedly weighed 10,800 lbs. Does Iran currently have a bomber that could accommodate such a bomb? And how would it avoid getting shot down? Could they truck it in through Syria?
Shirehome,
Yeah I see what you mean about woke from the alum magazine I get. I lived in Braiden first year as it was a senior/grad dorm. Then moved off campus to a small house on W Magnolia in the block just west of the railroad tracks…house torn down and now a bank. The Fort was a good place to be. Went to Mishawacka up Poudre Canyon for beer and bands. Much nicer place than Tulagis on the Hill in Boulder.
Last time I was there I was shocked at how Loveland and Ft Collins have just become one city. Like I said, the whole Front Range is now L.A.
Think too, Nonapod, the IRGC has long drawn on the practical expertise of others, such as Pakistan’s nuke sector and the Norks (and who knows who else? They’ve had plenty of cash to spend down these years).
Terrorists with electromagnetic weapons is a greater threat and if reports are true becoming more likely. They answer the question of how to disarm a high-tech enemy before they can strike.
That video made my day. I was a bit down in the dumps but made me laugh and cured them. Thanks Neo.
Why wouldn’t Iran have viable warhead designs from the same ahole the designed the Pakistani weapons?
@Shirehome,
Proposed to my Wife in the Library.
That sounds like a neat story. Did you use the Shakespearean sonnets?
For those following the Trump Assassination attempt.
Gary Melton from Paramount Tactical has several videos planned. One that will be potentially important is a livestream with Melton and Chris Martenson from Peak Prosperity tomorrow Aug 1 at 3 pm eastern. Martenson has spent a lot of time analyzing the audio of the shooting.
The video I linked includes a short interview with Stewart who’s video shows LEO, some with guns drawn walking around the AGR building. He heard on the scanner that the LEO found blood in the bathroom at the building and some confusion whether or not that was evidence of a second shooter. Local LEO has said that the deputy that saw the shooter on the building while hanging on the roof cut his hand– which could account for the blood. Anyone who has worked around metal roofing knows how sharp that edge is.
In re the Trump Assassination Attempt:
(I quote myself from the SS thread, and until we get some answers, I will use the shorter and less complimentary version of USSS)
More on the increasingly awful revelations about the Secret Service’s dereliction of duty.
David Strom has two good posts at Hot Air, which cover most of the information known to date (and there isn’t nearly enough of it), but look particularly at the update of Crooks clambering around on the roof, and then consider the observation from Bongino.
I have really bent over backward to give the Secret Service more than reasonable slack to explain how they could fail so catastrophically in their duty to protect once and future president Donald Trump.
I really have, and am still pretty certain that nobody in the government was involved in the specific attempt on the life of Trump in Pennsylvania. It doesn’t bear thinking of, so I am not going to unless there is extraordinary evidence to prove it. It seems beyond belief that Secret Service agents around Trump, who have been with him a long time, would participate in something so evil. And Trump is confident that his agents didn’t.
But I am well past the point where I have to conclude that the Secret Service was set up to fail in protecting Donald Trump and that it was a goal of the Biden Administration to have him put in danger and possibly killed.
It actually pains me to say that because, while I think that the Establishment has been getting increasingly scummy and have malicious plans for Americans, I thought there were limits beyond which they would not go. This is the United States of America, and we should still be able to assume that our leaders are not outright evil, or at least that they would recoil from anything this evil.
I no longer believe that, and serious Members of Congress–not the fringy ones you might expect to go there–are voicing the same concern.
…
Now, Alejandro Mayorkas has replaced Director Cheatle with the man whose job was to oversee the protective details, which failed.
Let that sink in. The man who should be one of the investigated is RUNNING the investigation.
… The “investigators” haven’t been talking to the local police who were there, if you can believe that. The snipers from Pennsylvania were supposed to meet with the snipers from the Service before the event, but were stood up.
It was the locals’ fault? The Secret Service didn’t meet with the local snipers on the day of the rally–they blew a scheduled meeting off! The Secret Service was warned by the locals that a man with a gun was on the roof and sent an armed response, and the Secret Service ignored the warning and allowed Trump on stage.
…
Rowe shouldn’t just be fired; he should be investigated for complicity in what increasingly looks like a plot to put President Trump at risk of assassination.
We’ve learned that the assassin flew a drone hours before the shooting. Rowe says that the Secret Service couldn’t for some reason. A technical failure?
Hard to believe. A kid could do it but not the Secret Service?
…
There are too many unanswered questions, and both the FBI and the Secret Service keep pleading ignorance and a need to investigate weeks after the shooting. They can’t answer the most basic questions, which means that they WON’T answer them. It is impossible to believe that they don’t know why posts were abandoned. That is not exactly rocket science to figure out. There is no deep psychological profile needed.
…
UPDATE: There is video of him [Crooks] on the roof shot from the grandstands behind Trump.
He also revealed a couple of things that he expects outlets to widely report next week, including why counter-snipers waited so long to shoot the would-be assassin.
“I’ve got from as close a source as you’re gonna get to this, okay?” he said before going into detail about what he found out. “The reason they waited and hesitated was because they were unsure if that was in fact the locals who were supposed to have that post. Apparently, they waited for the muzzle flash, which is an unbelievable lapse in security, before they realized ‘That’s not us.‘”
Impossible to believe is right: the security people from Butler and the SS (variously) knew there was a suspicious character, saw a guy on the roof with a clear view of Trump, and waited for the muzzle flash?
They had no idea if he was a champion sharp-shooter or a dud, and even the latter could get lucky. He wasn’t wearing the usual LEO uniform-style clothing, he didn’t seem to handle his weapon like we’re used to seeing in pix of LEOs on the news, in TV shows, and in this instance.
But they weren’t sure if he was one of “us?”
Trump survived because the grace of God used his own impulsive nature to nudge a decision to use a Jumbotron chart at just the right time. (IMO; YMMV)
But the curious thing to me, putting all of the revelations together as they have dribbled out, is that Crooks did not seem to have any fear that he would be stopped for acting suspicious with his drone and bike and backpack and ladder and explosive-rigged car, be questioned about his range finder, be found climbing onto the roof, or be shot before he could act.
NONE.
Was he that naïve?
I suppose that’s possible.
Or did he have some assurances from someone that the improvised explosive device in his car really would create a distraction so he could escape after shooting Trump?
(Never mind that the forensics gurus afterward could identify the owner of the car.)
And, more importantly, that the sniper teams who would HAVE to respond to the “muzzle flash” would somehow not hit him?
Pick one of the doors.
They are both unbelievable.
Investigative reporter James O’Keefe is interviewed by Alex Jones. He has three takeaways regarding the news forthcoming about the election.
First, a week or two before the J13 attempt to assassinate Trump, he told a friend over dinner that a Black Swan event like a Trump shooting might be coming.
Now, he says he expects at least two more before the election is over. It might be war somewhere. But other than that he’s pretty nonspecific, except that these will be consequential surprises — they may alter events like the election outcome.
Second, he explains that there are many FBI/SS whistleblowers waiting in the wings. While they are eager to have their say, whether because of conscience or outrage, he’s working to arrange fallback protection. They expect to lose their job or posts. And this keeps many in the closet.
O’Keefe says they have reached to him because they trust him. And feels obliged to make arrangements they can fallback upon.
Finally, he tells us that the ActBlue campaign laundering scheme is wildly out of control.
ActBlue is a Democrat PAC, and people without much means are “donating” thousands of times to it in amounts pushing over $100,000.
He’s convinced this is an organised money laundering operation, often involving money from abroad, in hopes of buying the election outcome.
I don’t know about you — None of this surprises me. As we keep saying, these are such interesting times.
Reply to nonapod and sdferre on the earliest atomic bomb devices like Fatman and the prospects and hurdles for the Islamic theocracy of Iran to produce one.
I have long wondered about this, too. Did last summer’s “Oppenheimer” suggest that there’s more to the story? It turns out that a gunshot style trigger was not going to work. The movie did indeed imply that there’s more crucial ingredients needed to build an A-bomb!
Somebody produced and shared on YouTube a fast paced yet brilliant little 10 minute primer answering the question: how do you trigger an atomic fission device” Welch Labs title for this is, appropriately, “Oppenheimer’s Gamble.”
As readers may well know, the key ingredient used was plutonium. Except that this transuranic material existed in minute if not infinitesimal amounts.
Of course, scaling up man-made production was only the start. The next problem was designing a trigger to focus the fissile material sufficiently to reach supercriticality in microseconds!
The road to resolution involves a tank and scientists who managed to start a forest fire while testing out machinable designs in a remote location near Los Alamos, New Mexico.
The level of precision required had never been done before. Perhap’s Oppenheimers gamble was overseeing this trigger building project for about 18 months (IIRC), and the ultimate distribution of 20,000 triggering devices (!!!) throughout the half-dozen or so Federal labs.
Did this means that the solution was reached only after many trial and error engineering experiments? I believe so.
Although I’ve watched “Oppenheimer’s Gamble” twice, I’m going to view it again (I book marked this fascinating story). Perhaps our resident experts like physicsguy will give it a go and enlighten us beyond my layman’s rubric?
Cutting back to the chase raised by our aforementioned posters here, is there more to building a fission atomic bomb than having sufficiently enriched uranium? Yes. And this gets demandingly technical and specialised. Iran has more obstacles to overcome. (Although I’m sure Iran would like to buy this information from either Pakistan or North Korea. But I’m sure they’re jo prepared to have a US bulls-eye effectively painted on they’re backs.)
A fun and fine cinematic footnote to this drama comes to us in the form of the origins tale of Hitchcock’s great spy-noir, “Notorious” (late 1945, IIRC).
Ben Hecht wrote this masterpiece screen play. The story find’s Cary Grant seducing Ingrid Bergman as the daughter of an unrepentant Nazi, to go and spy for the OSS in Brazil where her father’s German scientist buddies are working on something, immediately after the war ended. Only late in the film do we learn the object of all the secrecy is…enriched uranium!
In the Spring of 1945, this notion was so unknown that the producers were very dubious about the plot premise concerning an obscure metallic ore! They leaned on Ben Hecht’s insider word on the secret US developments lucidly explained in “Oppenheimer.”
Thus, Hitch and Hecht arranged to interview a research scientist at CalTech.
They asked him about how uranium could be enriched? The very question resulted in a fast conclusion to the interview, as the scientist blurted out “Why are you asking me such questions? Do you want to get me arrested?” he said, obviously alarmed by their query.
This “Maguffin” was thus revealed as, indeed, the right one to hold post-August 1945 audiences in climactic suspense! Hitch then ditched his backup plan, a diamond heist.
Nevertheless. The FBI tailed Hitchcock for three months after this encounter at CalTech.
}}} Fatman was no gun type,
He’s correct on this. Fatman was a “modern” compression-type bomb, with an explosive surround designed to force two sub-critical halves of a sphere to a critical sphere, and hold it there long enough for the chain reaction to initiate and at least partly succeed.
Most such are fairly “dirty” — they don’t actually split a lot of the Plutonium mass, which gets vaporized and spread around with all the other crap that is irradiated by the event.
H-bombs have, at their heart, an A-bomb, which creates the thermal requirements for the hydrogen to fuse which causes the “H” part of the explosion, much much more energetic than the “A” part, by at least two orders of magnitude (10-20 kilotons vs. 500k-50 megatons**)
============
The Tsar Bomba was 50mT. Typical of the 60s was more like 5-10mT, with smaller and smaller yields being used as the technology became much more accurate (a sniper, rather than a shotgun) and also backed up by MIRVs, which allows a single missile to “shoot multiple targets”. The higher accuracy and numeracy led to missiles being aimed at other missile silos rather than at cities, the idea being to, hopefully, take out the other side’s weapons before they were even launched. By the collapse of the USSR, a typical individual MIRV warhead may have been down to as little as 500kT — still 25-50x what was used in Japan.
}}} CE: Why wouldn’t Iran have viable warhead designs from the same ahole the designed the Pakistani weapons?
It’s not just the design that is significant (and you’re assuming the Pakis are enamored of the Iranians getting weapons… The only thing Muslims hate more than America and Jews is other Muslims of other sects and nations — otherwise Israel would have long since been wiped from the map), but also the exacting calculations that need to be developed as well as the very precise machining techniques and the physio-chemical separation techniques.
Realize, enriching uranium and plutonium isotopes cannot be done chemically — they are, by definition, chemically, the same element… they are just different isotopes. This is where high-quality centrifuges come into play. You have to separate them out like milk from cream.
And even there — suppose you separate out 10 pounds of the Uranium or Plutonium you seek to use (mind you, its not “pure” even there — it has to be a certain percentage of both isotopes within a very fine difference) — you still have to machine this stuff into amazingly fine tolerances — the USA in the 1940s just barely had the capacity to do it! — You have to make very very perfect hemispheres, with an amazingly flat surface between them with no bumps, bubbles, or other imperfections — and they have to fit together perfectly as well, no bumps, bubbles, or imperfect “angles” to keep the two hemispheres apart AT ALL. I am dead serious when I say the tolerances are in a similar realm as that needed for making high end electronics — keeping a surface truly flat and unwarped over a 10 sq. cm area is not easy to do, even with modern equipment… most of which is not set up to those kinds of tolerances (there are some wonderful machining videos out there on general machining which discuss this general problem, not applying to nuclear weapon creation.. look into “Inheritance Machining” as one source, if this seems of any interest)
OK, now, having done this — you have to also construct a mechanism with just the right explosive values — a sphere that sets off all at exactly — i do mean EXACTLY — the same time, at precisely the right distance to force those two hemispheres together, and keeps them together, without blowing them to pieces or making them strike imperfectly, so one piece chips off another… and so forth.
This complexity is the reason why nothing short of a government has the ability to manage it, at least, so far. It requires a whole array of different types of expertise at very high levels to produce such a weapon, spy-terrorist fantasies aside. Any actual “small group” built bomb will probably be from some absolute lunatic genius who has figured out an entirely different approach from the “brute force” means we currently know how to do it with. Hopefully, said genius will have much better things to do with that same genius.
And then, lastly, you have to get it within a mile or so of your target location — which itself is not likely to be too easy, as I’m willing to bet we have a lot of sensors up in space able to spot a moving bit of radioactive material. Remember, the Voyager Satellite is basically US getting a signal from a 10w light bulb that is 5x the distance to the sun away from us. That same kind of sensor-sensitivity can probably (my guess) be applied to look down at the earth for certain likely sources of radioactivity. This is not advertised, but it seems to be pretty likely to exist.
So — missile — probably nothing in their arsenal can handle weight of the payload — bomber — probably likely to be shot down by the very very good Israeli Air Force — or a truck. I could see a truck, but again, that’s where those “eye in the sky” things come in. As well as any ground-based sniffers planted by the very competent IDF on the approaches to Israel from all the surrounding areas.
Small, fist-sized sensors that point towards roads and routes towards Israel and scream bloody murder if they spot something radioactive crossing their paths. To block that radioactivity requires enough lead to make the truck unable to move…
@ TJ > “He’s convinced this is an organised money laundering operation, often involving money from abroad, in hopes of buying the election outcome.”
This was revealed, at least to people willing to see it, during Obama’s elections.
Powerline was all over the story of suspicious donations, disabled credit card checkers, and other hall-marks of fraud and illegal operations.
The FEC pretty much ignored all of it, except IIRC one or two low-level wrist-slap fines.
And we all know that the Clinton Foundation, an alleged charity, was a money laundering scheme for their personal and political benefit.
Addendum to my prior comment on an assassination scenario supposing actual agency involvement with Crooks:
Upon reflection, the exploding car may not have been to cover his escape, as most pundits have suggested, but to cover his shooting.
When he set off the bomb, everyone’s attention would be immediately drawn to the explosion, taking eyes off of him just long enough to shoot at Trump without drawing sniper fire (either by his own calculation, or as a plausible excuse by his alleged handlers).
The Butler cop peeking over the roof at him was NOT in the plan, and threw him off his sequence.
Worthy of Mission: Impossible, if so.
buettner’s my enemy’s enemy, suggest a scenario where the germans did build a gun trigger nuke, and managed to fly it to the Rockies, where it crashed like Hydra’s flying wing, and then is recovered by a Egyptian terrorist, the asp,
it posits a scenario where Himmler set up a parallel program to Heisenberg, headed by a more talented physicist who did succeed in building the bomb,
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When things get “weird” the weird get to weirding, on cue: https://x.com/RubinReport/status/1818083579445866884?t=PeAtlwyYNKK3mXrj6hcJYg&s=19
Is that for real? A fake? Does she need instructions on breathing?
Reminds me of one of Brian Regan’s classic bits about how there are instructions on Pop Tart packages and imagining the type of person who would actually need them.
Day Three of smoke from fire just north of us, Loveland,CO. Yesterday morning it was really bad, you could see heavy smoke haze around the area. It has been hot (95degrees+) and dry and humidity has dropped. Last night another fire SW of us, in Lyons. Northern Front Range is burning.
It’s good to know that even in your most embarrassing moments, someone will be there to record your predicament.
After Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s political leader in Iran, there’s a lot of handwringing about MAD (mutually assured destruction) which I find a little puzzling. I was under the impression that while Iran likely has produced some amount of fissile material, I haven’t heard anything about their ability to produce a warhead and mount it on a missile that then could successfully be launched. Does anyone around here know about Iran’s actual nuclear capabilities?
Shirehome,
My brother keeping me up on the Loveland and Lyons fires…not a good situation. Hope they get them under control.
I responded to our CU/CSU discussion on yesterday’s OT, but thought I’d put it here for you:
I’m accommodating to all the Colorado universities. MS grad of CSU, 1974. And yes the contrast between the two was/is stark. I was accepted for undergrad by CU, CSU, and Mines. At the time, CU had a top 10 physics dept, so that’s where I went. Also, being a naive 18 yr old, I didn’t understand that “top 10” meant grad school and research. I did get a good undergrad physics education, but a bit impersonal as compared to what I could have obtained at the much smaller CSU department. I went to CSU for grad school as it had a Radiation biology dept and I was thinking medical physics. I took courses in both physics and rad bio. After 2 years I decided that wasn’t the path for me and ended up way south and east at UGA for the doctorate.
BTW, one huge benefit of CSU at the time was Christman field and the Ram Flying Club. Where else could someone on a grad stipend get their PPL in 2 years??!
If this assassination was actually Israeli, as the IRGC says, this is the second recent demonstration from Israel of what they can do inside Iran if they choose to. The first was the destruction of the radar facilities near the Iranian nuclear research plant. Iran might want to step carefully.
ISIS (the good one), “Iranian Breakout Timeline Now at Zero”, link to website where find their paper in pdf: https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/iranian-breakout-timeline-now-at-zero/
Here’s their Iran page with newer product:
https://isis-online.org/countries/category/iran
Indeed it is queer, but where there is a will it may be weird.
sdferr – Yeah, I assumed that they had enough weapons grade material to produce perhaps 2 or 3 weapons. But I wonder how difficult it is to produce a warhead to be mounted on something like SCUD Shahab or Qiam missile or any number of the ballistic missiles they currently have in their arsenal. And if it’s relatively easy for them to do so, have they done it yet?
HAMAS terrorist leader dies in Tehran.
Israel hasn’t credit for it. My guess it was his ‘bodyguards’ who feared for their own lives if he was still breathing.
Too bad for him that Hef made sure he won’t find any virgins where he’s going.
May that HAMAS murderer burn in Hell forever,
Staged.
That “Police” shoulder patch is a Department of Veterans Affairs patch. After 21 years active duty and another 21 years as a retiree, I’d recognize that emblem anywhere.
https://military.americanuniform.com/blue-gold-va-police-shoulder-patch-with-hook-backing/
Not the type of cop you’d see making house calls. That anomaly caused me to look deeper.
His “armor” has no body armor in it, it’s just an empty chest rig.
He’s not wearing a duty belt. In fact if you pause it exactly 2 seconds in while he’s crossing in front of the camera…he’s not wearing any belt at all. His trousers’ belt loops are empty. He’s got a couple of things dangling from the bottom of his not armored chest rig to give the impression he’s got equipment hanging from a belt, but there’s no belt…no gun…no radio…no handcuffs, etc.
That’s a costume.
Which leads me to the conclusion the whole thing was staged…and if you ask me, the acting was pretty stilted and dialog a bit wooden. No Oscar for them.
After a bit of internet research it seems that while it’s relatively easy to produce what’s known as a “Gun Type”* weapon like the bombs dropped on Japan (Fatman and Little Boy), thankfully producing an actual thermonuclear warhead is far, far more complex. So while Iran almost certainly could produce a simple bomb, it’s pretty unlikely they could produce a warhead.
*”Gun Type” weapons literally shoot sub critical material from multiple points along the internal surface of a sphere into a central point that results in critical mass.
Fatman was no gun type, and the IRGC has long been known to have been researching and developing the components necessay to construct a nuke-fissile bomb of that sort. Their risk is not testing what they’ve built once they assemble the whole enchilada. The rest of the world’s risk is not actually knowing when and whether that assembly will have (or has) been done.
Physicsguy, not sure what kind of education you would get from CSU now, has gone very woke.
I started at CSU in 1964, the first group of Babyboomers. Saw lots of new building on campus, which CSU started before we hit the campus. My old dorm, Newsom, is gone, for the new football stadium. Proposed to my Wife in the Library.
https://x.com/sentdefender/status/1818670645468672450?t=UUkg38_YYzU2AzAfXyBqow&s=19
Yeah you’re correct, Fatman was an implosion type. Either way, even if Iran produced such a bomb, and even if they foregoed testing it, they’d still have to find a way to deploy it. It would be very bulky and heavy. Fatman reportedly weighed 10,800 lbs. Does Iran currently have a bomber that could accommodate such a bomb? And how would it avoid getting shot down? Could they truck it in through Syria?
Shirehome,
Yeah I see what you mean about woke from the alum magazine I get. I lived in Braiden first year as it was a senior/grad dorm. Then moved off campus to a small house on W Magnolia in the block just west of the railroad tracks…house torn down and now a bank. The Fort was a good place to be. Went to Mishawacka up Poudre Canyon for beer and bands. Much nicer place than Tulagis on the Hill in Boulder.
Last time I was there I was shocked at how Loveland and Ft Collins have just become one city. Like I said, the whole Front Range is now L.A.
Think too, Nonapod, the IRGC has long drawn on the practical expertise of others, such as Pakistan’s nuke sector and the Norks (and who knows who else? They’ve had plenty of cash to spend down these years).
Terrorists with electromagnetic weapons is a greater threat and if reports are true becoming more likely. They answer the question of how to disarm a high-tech enemy before they can strike.
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/07/31/lights-out-terrorists-getting-emp-weapons-n4931214
They let male boxers , aka , ” transgender women”, into the female boxing competition at the Olympics.
https://x.com/Riley_Gaines_/status/1818266231062901062
That video made my day. I was a bit down in the dumps but made me laugh and cured them. Thanks Neo.
Why wouldn’t Iran have viable warhead designs from the same ahole the designed the Pakistani weapons?
@Shirehome,
That sounds like a neat story. Did you use the Shakespearean sonnets?
For those following the Trump Assassination attempt.
Gary Melton from Paramount Tactical has several videos planned. One that will be potentially important is a livestream with Melton and Chris Martenson from Peak Prosperity tomorrow Aug 1 at 3 pm eastern. Martenson has spent a lot of time analyzing the audio of the shooting.
The video I linked includes a short interview with Stewart who’s video shows LEO, some with guns drawn walking around the AGR building. He heard on the scanner that the LEO found blood in the bathroom at the building and some confusion whether or not that was evidence of a second shooter. Local LEO has said that the deputy that saw the shooter on the building while hanging on the roof cut his hand– which could account for the blood. Anyone who has worked around metal roofing knows how sharp that edge is.
Trump Assassination Attempt Interview With Eyewitness! New Information On a Possible 2nd Shooter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJgJQvdxGtE
In re the Trump Assassination Attempt:
(I quote myself from the SS thread, and until we get some answers, I will use the shorter and less complimentary version of USSS)
AesopFan on July 31, 2024 at 9:05 pm said:
How did the Secret Service miss this?
Newly released video.
https://notthebee.com/article/new-video-shows-trump-shooter-literally-running-across-the-roof-in-plain-sight
Yes, it really does seem to show that.
“Reports say the video comes from James Copenhaver, one of the people critically injured by the shooter.”
How did the Secret Service miss this?
AesopFan:
I don’t know if the SS missed it at the time, though it wouldn’t surprise me.
However, I’m sure they’ve know it for some time and they know much more than they are saying now because they know how utterly damning it all is.
They are looking for their best “limited hangout route” — to put the coverup into Watergate terms.
A BIG change-story for the Open Thread:
https://twitchy.com/amy/2024/07/31/big-tech-ceo-crosses-the-rubicon-to-endorse-trump-for-president-n2399110
More on the increasingly awful revelations about the Secret Service’s dereliction of duty.
David Strom has two good posts at Hot Air, which cover most of the information known to date (and there isn’t nearly enough of it), but look particularly at the update of Crooks clambering around on the roof, and then consider the observation from Bongino.
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/07/31/members-of-congress-are-now-saying-it-the-secret-service-was-set-up-to-fail-for-political-reasons-n3792498
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/07/31/ridiculous-local-law-enforcement-in-butler-strike-back-at-secret-service-director-n3792512
https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/07/29/bongino-these-trump-assassination-bombshells-are-coming-soon-n4931153
Impossible to believe is right: the security people from Butler and the SS (variously) knew there was a suspicious character, saw a guy on the roof with a clear view of Trump, and waited for the muzzle flash?
They had no idea if he was a champion sharp-shooter or a dud, and even the latter could get lucky. He wasn’t wearing the usual LEO uniform-style clothing, he didn’t seem to handle his weapon like we’re used to seeing in pix of LEOs on the news, in TV shows, and in this instance.
But they weren’t sure if he was one of “us?”
Trump survived because the grace of God used his own impulsive nature to nudge a decision to use a Jumbotron chart at just the right time. (IMO; YMMV)
But the curious thing to me, putting all of the revelations together as they have dribbled out, is that Crooks did not seem to have any fear that he would be stopped for acting suspicious with his drone and bike and backpack and ladder and explosive-rigged car, be questioned about his range finder, be found climbing onto the roof, or be shot before he could act.
NONE.
Was he that naïve?
I suppose that’s possible.
Or did he have some assurances from someone that the improvised explosive device in his car really would create a distraction so he could escape after shooting Trump?
(Never mind that the forensics gurus afterward could identify the owner of the car.)
And, more importantly, that the sniper teams who would HAVE to respond to the “muzzle flash” would somehow not hit him?
Pick one of the doors.
They are both unbelievable.
Investigative reporter James O’Keefe is interviewed by Alex Jones. He has three takeaways regarding the news forthcoming about the election.
First, a week or two before the J13 attempt to assassinate Trump, he told a friend over dinner that a Black Swan event like a Trump shooting might be coming.
Now, he says he expects at least two more before the election is over. It might be war somewhere. But other than that he’s pretty nonspecific, except that these will be consequential surprises — they may alter events like the election outcome.
Second, he explains that there are many FBI/SS whistleblowers waiting in the wings. While they are eager to have their say, whether because of conscience or outrage, he’s working to arrange fallback protection. They expect to lose their job or posts. And this keeps many in the closet.
O’Keefe says they have reached to him because they trust him. And feels obliged to make arrangements they can fallback upon.
Finally, he tells us that the ActBlue campaign laundering scheme is wildly out of control.
ActBlue is a Democrat PAC, and people without much means are “donating” thousands of times to it in amounts pushing over $100,000.
He’s convinced this is an organised money laundering operation, often involving money from abroad, in hopes of buying the election outcome.
Expect more revelations exposing this enormous scam to be revealed soon
https://www.infowars.com/posts/breaking-video-james-okeefe-predicts-multiple-black-swan-events-to-stop-trump/
I don’t know about you — None of this surprises me. As we keep saying, these are such interesting times.
Reply to nonapod and sdferre on the earliest atomic bomb devices like Fatman and the prospects and hurdles for the Islamic theocracy of Iran to produce one.
I have long wondered about this, too. Did last summer’s “Oppenheimer” suggest that there’s more to the story? It turns out that a gunshot style trigger was not going to work. The movie did indeed imply that there’s more crucial ingredients needed to build an A-bomb!
Somebody produced and shared on YouTube a fast paced yet brilliant little 10 minute primer answering the question: how do you trigger an atomic fission device” Welch Labs title for this is, appropriately, “Oppenheimer’s Gamble.”
As readers may well know, the key ingredient used was plutonium. Except that this transuranic material existed in minute if not infinitesimal amounts.
Of course, scaling up man-made production was only the start. The next problem was designing a trigger to focus the fissile material sufficiently to reach supercriticality in microseconds!
This task had never been achieved before, too.
Thus, the video explains how mathematics and theory only took these pioneers so far. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W06g7gIfwRE
The road to resolution involves a tank and scientists who managed to start a forest fire while testing out machinable designs in a remote location near Los Alamos, New Mexico.
The level of precision required had never been done before. Perhap’s Oppenheimers gamble was overseeing this trigger building project for about 18 months (IIRC), and the ultimate distribution of 20,000 triggering devices (!!!) throughout the half-dozen or so Federal labs.
Did this means that the solution was reached only after many trial and error engineering experiments? I believe so.
Although I’ve watched “Oppenheimer’s Gamble” twice, I’m going to view it again (I book marked this fascinating story). Perhaps our resident experts like physicsguy will give it a go and enlighten us beyond my layman’s rubric?
Cutting back to the chase raised by our aforementioned posters here, is there more to building a fission atomic bomb than having sufficiently enriched uranium? Yes. And this gets demandingly technical and specialised. Iran has more obstacles to overcome. (Although I’m sure Iran would like to buy this information from either Pakistan or North Korea. But I’m sure they’re jo prepared to have a US bulls-eye effectively painted on they’re backs.)
A fun and fine cinematic footnote to this drama comes to us in the form of the origins tale of Hitchcock’s great spy-noir, “Notorious” (late 1945, IIRC).
Ben Hecht wrote this masterpiece screen play. The story find’s Cary Grant seducing Ingrid Bergman as the daughter of an unrepentant Nazi, to go and spy for the OSS in Brazil where her father’s German scientist buddies are working on something, immediately after the war ended. Only late in the film do we learn the object of all the secrecy is…enriched uranium!
In the Spring of 1945, this notion was so unknown that the producers were very dubious about the plot premise concerning an obscure metallic ore! They leaned on Ben Hecht’s insider word on the secret US developments lucidly explained in “Oppenheimer.”
Thus, Hitch and Hecht arranged to interview a research scientist at CalTech.
They asked him about how uranium could be enriched? The very question resulted in a fast conclusion to the interview, as the scientist blurted out “Why are you asking me such questions? Do you want to get me arrested?” he said, obviously alarmed by their query.
This “Maguffin” was thus revealed as, indeed, the right one to hold post-August 1945 audiences in climactic suspense! Hitch then ditched his backup plan, a diamond heist.
Nevertheless. The FBI tailed Hitchcock for three months after this encounter at CalTech.
}}} Fatman was no gun type,
He’s correct on this. Fatman was a “modern” compression-type bomb, with an explosive surround designed to force two sub-critical halves of a sphere to a critical sphere, and hold it there long enough for the chain reaction to initiate and at least partly succeed.
Most such are fairly “dirty” — they don’t actually split a lot of the Plutonium mass, which gets vaporized and spread around with all the other crap that is irradiated by the event.
H-bombs have, at their heart, an A-bomb, which creates the thermal requirements for the hydrogen to fuse which causes the “H” part of the explosion, much much more energetic than the “A” part, by at least two orders of magnitude (10-20 kilotons vs. 500k-50 megatons**)
============
The Tsar Bomba was 50mT. Typical of the 60s was more like 5-10mT, with smaller and smaller yields being used as the technology became much more accurate (a sniper, rather than a shotgun) and also backed up by MIRVs, which allows a single missile to “shoot multiple targets”. The higher accuracy and numeracy led to missiles being aimed at other missile silos rather than at cities, the idea being to, hopefully, take out the other side’s weapons before they were even launched. By the collapse of the USSR, a typical individual MIRV warhead may have been down to as little as 500kT — still 25-50x what was used in Japan.
}}} CE: Why wouldn’t Iran have viable warhead designs from the same ahole the designed the Pakistani weapons?
It’s not just the design that is significant (and you’re assuming the Pakis are enamored of the Iranians getting weapons… The only thing Muslims hate more than America and Jews is other Muslims of other sects and nations — otherwise Israel would have long since been wiped from the map), but also the exacting calculations that need to be developed as well as the very precise machining techniques and the physio-chemical separation techniques.
Realize, enriching uranium and plutonium isotopes cannot be done chemically — they are, by definition, chemically, the same element… they are just different isotopes. This is where high-quality centrifuges come into play. You have to separate them out like milk from cream.
And even there — suppose you separate out 10 pounds of the Uranium or Plutonium you seek to use (mind you, its not “pure” even there — it has to be a certain percentage of both isotopes within a very fine difference) — you still have to machine this stuff into amazingly fine tolerances — the USA in the 1940s just barely had the capacity to do it! — You have to make very very perfect hemispheres, with an amazingly flat surface between them with no bumps, bubbles, or other imperfections — and they have to fit together perfectly as well, no bumps, bubbles, or imperfect “angles” to keep the two hemispheres apart AT ALL. I am dead serious when I say the tolerances are in a similar realm as that needed for making high end electronics — keeping a surface truly flat and unwarped over a 10 sq. cm area is not easy to do, even with modern equipment… most of which is not set up to those kinds of tolerances (there are some wonderful machining videos out there on general machining which discuss this general problem, not applying to nuclear weapon creation.. look into “Inheritance Machining” as one source, if this seems of any interest)
OK, now, having done this — you have to also construct a mechanism with just the right explosive values — a sphere that sets off all at exactly — i do mean EXACTLY — the same time, at precisely the right distance to force those two hemispheres together, and keeps them together, without blowing them to pieces or making them strike imperfectly, so one piece chips off another… and so forth.
This complexity is the reason why nothing short of a government has the ability to manage it, at least, so far. It requires a whole array of different types of expertise at very high levels to produce such a weapon, spy-terrorist fantasies aside. Any actual “small group” built bomb will probably be from some absolute lunatic genius who has figured out an entirely different approach from the “brute force” means we currently know how to do it with. Hopefully, said genius will have much better things to do with that same genius.
And then, lastly, you have to get it within a mile or so of your target location — which itself is not likely to be too easy, as I’m willing to bet we have a lot of sensors up in space able to spot a moving bit of radioactive material. Remember, the Voyager Satellite is basically US getting a signal from a 10w light bulb that is 5x the distance to the sun away from us. That same kind of sensor-sensitivity can probably (my guess) be applied to look down at the earth for certain likely sources of radioactivity. This is not advertised, but it seems to be pretty likely to exist.
So — missile — probably nothing in their arsenal can handle weight of the payload — bomber — probably likely to be shot down by the very very good Israeli Air Force — or a truck. I could see a truck, but again, that’s where those “eye in the sky” things come in. As well as any ground-based sniffers planted by the very competent IDF on the approaches to Israel from all the surrounding areas.
Small, fist-sized sensors that point towards roads and routes towards Israel and scream bloody murder if they spot something radioactive crossing their paths. To block that radioactivity requires enough lead to make the truck unable to move…
@ TJ > “He’s convinced this is an organised money laundering operation, often involving money from abroad, in hopes of buying the election outcome.”
This was revealed, at least to people willing to see it, during Obama’s elections.
Powerline was all over the story of suspicious donations, disabled credit card checkers, and other hall-marks of fraud and illegal operations.
The FEC pretty much ignored all of it, except IIRC one or two low-level wrist-slap fines.
And we all know that the Clinton Foundation, an alleged charity, was a money laundering scheme for their personal and political benefit.
Addendum to my prior comment on an assassination scenario supposing actual agency involvement with Crooks:
Upon reflection, the exploding car may not have been to cover his escape, as most pundits have suggested, but to cover his shooting.
When he set off the bomb, everyone’s attention would be immediately drawn to the explosion, taking eyes off of him just long enough to shoot at Trump without drawing sniper fire (either by his own calculation, or as a plausible excuse by his alleged handlers).
The Butler cop peeking over the roof at him was NOT in the plan, and threw him off his sequence.
Worthy of Mission: Impossible, if so.
buettner’s my enemy’s enemy, suggest a scenario where the germans did build a gun trigger nuke, and managed to fly it to the Rockies, where it crashed like Hydra’s flying wing, and then is recovered by a Egyptian terrorist, the asp,
it posits a scenario where Himmler set up a parallel program to Heisenberg, headed by a more talented physicist who did succeed in building the bomb,