Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Hey Dude, You've Got a Dud!

Our DearLeader, Kim Jong-Il, has detonated a "Nuclear Device".

Or has he?

It seems to depend on who you believe.

And it depends on what "yield" they believe the bomb produced.

The ice is getting a little thin here, and Gawd Forbid I would venture an Opinion. I don't really KNOW anything, and I seem to be in good company.

The Russians are convinced that it was, indeed, Nuclear. They rate it at "5,000 tons to 15,000 tons of TNT", which (if I understand this) is 5 - 15 kilotons. They are really really ("rilly") sure ("shurrrrr").

Why would our good friends, the Russians, lie to us?

But compare that yield to the atomic (uranium based) bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima, producing 12.5 kilotons of blast. It seems respectable.

I wonder how they rate the yield? Somebody ought to google this, then we'll all know.

The Australians ("Seismology Research Centre") rated the blast at 1,000 tons of TNT, or 1 kiloton.

Driving home from work tonite, I heard part of an interview on the Jim Bohanan radio talk show where the interviewee (sorry, I didn't catch the name) declared that the yield from the NK Nuclear Detonation Event was in the range of 200 tons, or 0.2 kilotons.

People are mad as heck about this. After all, we asked them nicely: "Please, oh please, don't detonate a nuclear device". But they went ahead and did it anyway. What ingrates. After all the work that Jimmy Carter, Madelaine Albright and Bill Clinton ("I tried, I really really tried as hard as I could, I tried harder than anybody ...") did to appease Lil' Kim, that rascal went ahead and built an atomic bomb anyway.

Well ....

There are questions about whether the bomb was Uranium Based or Plutonium Based. Apparently, Plutonium Based is ... trickier. For example, the U.S. used an Uranium Based bomb in Hiroshima, without testing it first. They were confident it would work. But the Nagasaki bomb was Plutonium Based, and they conducted a test of the Plutonium Based bomb at Alamagordo before they built the bomb they used on Japan.

Uranium or Plutonium?

Paper or Plastic?

Some people think that the North Koreans jumped to the Plutonium Based design, and it fizzled.

That's not entirely surprising, since the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists thought they (NK) had at least one, perhaps two nuclear devices as early as 2003.

The "Newspaper of Record" suggests that it was a Plutonium-based device, and either the material used was "too old" or it was inexpertly assembled. But they're pretty shurrrrrr that it was at least an attempt to detonate a nuclear device:

The officials said that their current assessment was that North Korea had in fact detonated a nuclear device, and that they were discounting some reports that North Korea had staged a hoax, trying to disguise a large conventional explosion as a nuclear blast.

“The working assumption is that this was a nuclear explosion of some kind,” one intelligence official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The conventional explosion theory doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, even for the North Koreans.”

But that left the mystery of why the explosion appeared to be so small, less than a kiloton, or a fraction of the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Theories ranged from the possibility that North Korea had used old, polluted plutonium to the possibility that it had manufactured imprecise nuclear triggers. But at this point, intelligence officials said, they were just taking educated guesses, and would need hard evidence, or the testimony of spies or defectors, to figure out exactly what happened. The officials agreed to speak about the classified intelligence assessments only on condition of anonymity.

There have even been some suggestions that the device in question was a "suitcase bomb", and the yield indicates a perfect test. Others say that the first bombs developed were HUGE and it requires a lot of testing and technical expertise (and experience) to create a deliverable with a small yield and physical size.

Wretchard, at The Belmont Club, explores the possiblity that the detonation was actually a "suitcase bomb" purchased from some outpost of the now-defunct Soviet Union (remember our old friends who couldn't possibly be lying to us?) He refers to Chester, whose comments I had read earlier, and decides that ... he couldn't really decide. Maybe it's possible, maybe the Russian Suitcase Nuke (if in fact that's what Lil' Kim tested) was small and relatively sophisticated, but old and relatively impotent ... old guys can relate to this ... and the recorded yield would support this theory.

All of this serves only to demonstrate that, at this time, only two things are certain:

(1) North Korea blew up something equivalent to at least 200 tons of TNT in a mining tunnel
(2) After 48 hours, with spy-planes zooming back and forth over North Korea, nobody has picked up atmospheric debris which would definately indicate the a nuclear device has been detonated.

By the time you read this, you may have been told that it definitively was, or was not, a nuclear detonation. I doubt it, but it could happen.

Here are the possibilities as I see them:
  1. It was a nuclear detonation, and it went just as planned.
  2. It was a nuclear detonation, and it fizzled.
  3. It was an attempt to simulate a nuclear detonation, and Lil' Kim is laughing his ass off at our confusion and consternation.
If it was (1), then Kim found an old but relatively servicable ... but technically sophisticated ... device "somewhere else" and used it to create a giant hoax for the furtherance of his international swindle.

If it was (2), then Kim is trying really hard to build an atomic bomb (probably Uranium-based, but perhaps not), and mucked it up. Doesn't matter, he managed to piss off a lot of people and he'll milk it as long as he thinks he can get away with it.

If it was (3), then Kim blew up 200+ tons of conventional explosives in a mine shaft just to piss us off and make some political hay. This is supported by his subsequent aggressive statements, designed to force the United States into a one-on-one talks without the "global 6" participation which would put us back to where Clinton was in the '90s ... trying to talk Kim out of what he had already decided to do, and paying him deceiving us.

What do I think it was?

I think it was (2), and eventually we'll find some radioactive particulate matter in the atmosphere above North Korea, and get scared, and deal with him as a Nuclear Power.

But it really doesn't matter. He could have blown up a whole bunch of Industrial Dynamite along with some medical nuclear waste to contaminate the atmosphere, and even though it would be a fraud ... the rest of the world can't afford to doubt his power.

Sometime, somewhere, some National Power (probably us) will blink, and he'll get whatever he wants.

Eventually it will all come out, and we'll know the real story. At that time, the National Leader who bought into this charade will be revealed for a gullible idiot.

In the words of Mr. T ... "I Pity The Fool".

Monday, October 09, 2006

October Blogmeat

Doug Giles, one of the columnists over at has the second installation of his new series "Raising Girls that Pimps and Thugs Will Hate: Teach Them To Shoot Guns"

I got into this late, so I missed Part 1: Teach Them How To Fight.

We'll be going back to Townhall to see the rest of the series in the coming weeks, and you may find it instructional, too. Here is the whole list:

1. Teach Them How to Fight.
2. Teach Them How to Shoot Guns.
3. Teach Them How to Sense BS.
4. Teach Them How to Rebel.
6. Teach Them to Despise Anti-Intellectualism.
7. Teach Them to Be Visionaries.
8. Teach Them How to Party.
9. Teach Them the Value of Hard Work.
10. Teach Them the Importance of Traditional Convictions.
There are a lot of comments on Part II, and I've found that interesting. I'll be reading Parts III through X over the next two months. I probably won't be updating the above as a Link List, so if you're interested you'll just have to become a regular visiter to TOWNHALL.COM, or at least the Doug Giles portion of it.

Here's the core of his thesis:

Father, if your daughter is doing extra work on soft porn music videos, or posting sex pics on, or bearing it all for a Girls Gone Wild DVD, or inflating their chests to ocean buoy size proportions to appeal to the most appalling, pusillanimous pigs on the planet, then you have clearly not done your job as a father.


Brrrrr ... a chilling thought.


You've got new chrome rims on your ride, and when you hear a car pull into your driveway that night you naturally step outside to see what's happening, bro?

You find a bright red car pulled up behind your truck, and two ski-masked wanna-be desperados jump out.

One of them sticks a gun up under your chin and says "Give me the keys to the truck, or I'll kill you!".

In the immortal words of Karl Malden ... what will you do, what WILL you do?

Answer: you take the gun away from the creeps and put the jackers down.

Clearly, our Florida lad isn't combat-trained, because only one of the GOOBERS dies. But he has the mind-set thingie working for him, and he knows that the only way to stop crime in the streets ... er, driveway ... is to refuse to be a victim.

I'm thinking, we hang a medal on this lad, and buy him a day-ticket to Thunder Ranch.

Let's call him a Talented Amateur.

When you go to the Sun-Sentinal link, be sure to see the video.
No, it's not gory. Geez!


1984 is running a little late this year ...

You think you're not Winston Smith?

Think again.

Our English Friends are busily working to turn Great Britain into "Oceania" by using their largest Insurance Company to mandate the installation of 'trackers' into automobiles.

Ostensibly, this will allow the Insurance Company to set rates based on driving habits.

Essentially, it will allow the Bobbys to track your ass all over the island. Imagine an electronic Big Brother who never sleeps, and whose agenda is anti-Santa who "Knows When You've Been Sleeping, Knows When You're Awake".

The headline for this Daily Telegraph Story is "Insurance Car Tracker is Spy for Police", and if you think it will turn out any different, Bubba, you're nothing more than an undigested bit of gristle from last night's dinner.

The insurance company, Norwich Union, swears that

“We have to provide the data if the police request it but only if it is part of an investigation. It is only right for people who have been breaking the law and driving dangerously to be prosecuted. But we do not use the system ourselves to check speed and it is the insurer’s job to pay out on claims regardless of liability.”
Yeah, right. When is the last time that the Government had a new tool to track the movement of private citizens, and didn't abuse it.

That's correct, we're still waiting for The First Time.

Think It Can't Happen Here?

Think again.

My own native state, Oregon, is champing at the bit to track vehicular milage to determine how much they can tax an individual for automobile usage and mileage. They'll tax you a certain amount for 'normal' miles, and a higher rate for 'rush-hour' miles.

You probably use more 'road-time' in "normal time" than in "rush-hour", so it's probably fair ... right? (Wrong, if you live and commute in The City ... and who decides what is "Rush-Hour" time and what is a "Metropolitan" area? Uh huh, you got it the first guess.)

So, how happy are you about knowing that the police have EVERY mile you drive, EVERY stop you make, on their electronic records?

"I've got nothing to hide" you exclaim.

An honest man has nothing to hide, but who can know how a government which depends on tax revenue will interpret the available data.

Only a Police State keeps this close track on the movement of its citizens. They don't do it for your benefit. It's going to cost you time, trouble, money, or anything else the government can use to shaft your ass.

If I ever bought a GMC car in The States, the first thing I would do would be to take a hammer to the OnStar mechanism.

You can always have CarToys install a CD player in the resulting hole in your dashboard, but remember you have to disable the GPS POS under the hood, too.

The worst thing?

they charge you $17 to $35 a month for the "feature".

I'm a Computer Geek. When a program costs you more in penalties than it provides in Service Benefits, we try to call it "A Feature" instead of "A Bug".

Trust me, it's "A Bug".

Blog Mode ON!

Father forgive me, it has been almost two weeks since I have posted.

During that period, 1800 people have looked at the blog, and my total readership has exceeded 50,000 hits.

That's a slow day for one of the internationally famous Pajama Bloggers, but it took me almost two years to accumulate that kind of traffic. (The first 14 months, there were only 20,000 hits.)

So yes, I'm feeling a little guilty here. I always use to have something to say, but when Blogger software was in a temporary tailspin I got all huffy and said "Huh! I got better things to do than fight a slow server" and I went out and did them.

I have to tell you, for a while it was a liberating feeling. I could spend my evenings writing other things such as an article for the Front Sight which I had been dithering about since July, and catch up on a backlog of books that I had bought. (I generally go to the used bookstore and fill a bag every week or so. The last time, last week, I spent forty bucks there and the clerk finished by saying "That oughta hold you for a week!" It didn't.)

A couple of days ago, I got an email from the Hobo Brasser. It said: "Are you into withdrawal yet? It has been ten days since you wrote anything."


Then this weekend, SWMBO was out of town and there were no IPSC matches. I got into trouble with too much free time.

I started cleaning house.

Sunday Morning, 3am, I was scouring the stove and kitchen counters. I thought to myself "What's Wrong With This Picture?" And then I knew.

Let me give you some background.

I use to be a compulsive house cleaner. It was NOTHING to me to find myself cleaning the bathtub at midnight in the middle of the week.

This was a period when I was not a happy guy ... coming off a divorce, living in a small apartment, generally depressed. I went through a couple other periods like that in the next few years and always reacted the same way. I became a compulsive cleaner.

If you've ever read "Looking For Mr. Goodbar", you know that this can come to A Bad End.

After I met SWMBO, I started to stray from this compulsion. First I left clutter on my dining room table. Then I left dishes in the sink overnight. Then ... well, I leave the details to your imagination, but essentially I found more interesting things to do than clean.

My house was cluttered, I didn't mop or vacuum as often as I should, and I was HAPPY!

Today I am entirely un-compulsive, and I owe it all to SWMBO. I spent my evenings writing, which I love to do, and as long as I could walk through my house without having to actually step OVER things, I was content.

That's why, when found myself cleaning the stove in my bathrobe, I remembered the Mr. Goodbar downside. And it frightened me.

Tonite, instead of completing the job of installing shelves in my new bookcase, or swamping out the master bathroom, I'm going to go through all those old articles that I downloaded from the Internet and go back to speaking my piece.

Gee, I feel better already.

(I sure wish I had finished the bathroom before I came to my senses, though. That floor is a mess.)