Worldwide Nightmare Theatre, Empire of Chaos Enhanced and Expanded

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by kladner

Umm...Your ears rang like after four or five hours of high-intensity rock concert?

Or 30 minutes of a Spin̈al Tap concert. :)

Basically what happened was that our crude system for piping the 2 gases into the combustion chamber was such that about 2 times out of 3 we'd get a nice "whump" and the potato shooting out at high (say ~100mph) speed, but roughly every 3rd time we would accidentally get the mix right for a deflagration-to-detonation transition to occur, as evidenced by a deafening bang and shredded pieces of spud coming out. After the 1st time this happened we started using earplugs, and promoted it as a feature: "It slices, it dices, it makes perfect Julienne fries every [third] time!"

@chalsall: Ouch! Yes, larger volumes of such mixtures are very dangerous - if you grew up in Canada you surely were acquainted with the propensity of grain silos to occasionally explode in spectacular fashion. Grain dust suitably dispersed in air can be a highly explosive mixture.

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Basically what happened was that our crude system for piping the 2 gases into the combustion chamber was such that about 2 times out of 3 we'd get a nice "whump" and the potato shooting out at high (say ~100mph) speed,

Which is why the hairspray fueled guns are better. They can be made out of ABS drain pipe.

@chalsall: Ouch! Yes, larger volumes of such mixtures are very dangerous - if you grew up in Canada you surely were acquainted with the propensity of grain silos to occasionally explode in spectacular fashion. Grain dust suitably dispersed in air can be a highly explosive mixture.

One of my maths instructors had a relative that had work on prevention of dust explosions.

Earlier in my working life I worked at a facility that burnt a powder in a fluidized bed combuster. I worked with the material (it was 95-98% dry solid with a little bit of heavy oil). In storage and during transfer it was kept in a nitrogen atmosphere. Years before I got to the facility there had been an accident. Lives were lost in a fire..

[kladner]

Robert Fisk is one of the very few excellent investigative journalists still employed in the UK. He is twice winner of the British Press Awards‘ Journalist of the Year prize, and seven time winner of the British Press Awards’ Foreign Correspondent of the Year. He is extremely smart and knows the Middle East very well. He has just made his way – not accompanied by Russian or Syrian government officials – to Douma and this is what he reports.

If you care to search for Robert Fisk on twitter, the attacks on his reputation and integrity at this very moment from achieve nothing neo-con trolls and media lackeys are astonishing. He is in Douma – they are at their desks.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49234.htm
What else can be said? Fisk's words on the ground, in my book, outweigh all the claptrap emanating from countless flacks for three governments, speaking from their nations' capitals.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by kladner

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49234.htm.

What else can be said? Fisk's words on the ground, in my book, outweigh all the claptrap emanating from countless flacks for three governments, speaking from their nations' capitals.

Hmm. It still seems odd to me that there is no humanitarian concern about the cities of Syria being smashed to rubble, or for the people trying to live in them. I am reminded of the siege of Vicksburg during the US Civil War. The residents took to living underground to protect themselves from the nearly constant shelling, and took to calling their fair city "Prairie Dog Town."

The fact that a British reporter was able to go to Douma and report from there, begs the question of why the Russians and Syrians are keeping the inspectors out until Wednesday. If the situation is as indicated in Mr. Fisk's report, you'd think they would want to get the inspectors in ASAP, rather than citing "security concerns" which are belied by the reporter's ability to function there without any problems.

Why should libelous twitter attacks by "achieve nothing neocon trolls" be "astonishing?" It's SOP for them, just like it is for Il Duce.

[ewmayer]

International chemical weapons inspectors reach Syrian town - Chicago Tribune

Note that the Tribune piece cites AP reporters whose accounts conflict with Fisk's "no chem-weapons" one - but still point away from the regime:

On Monday, the AP visited a two-room underground shelter where Khaled Mahmoud Nuseir said 47 people were killed, including his pregnant wife and two daughters, 18-month-old Qamar and 2 1/2-year-old Nour. A strange smell lingered, nine days after the attack.

Nuseir, 25, said he ran from the shelter to a nearby clinic and fainted. After he was revived, he returned to the shelter and found his wife and daughters dead, with foam coming from their mouths.

He and two other residents accused the rebel Army of Islam of carrying out the attack. As they spoke, government troops were nearby but out of earshot. Nuseir said a cylinder was found leaking the poison gas, adding that he didn't think it was dropped from the air because it still looked intact.

Separately, the AP spoke to a medic who was among those who later were evacuated to northern Syria. Ahmed Abed al-Nafaa said helicopters were flying before the attack and when he reached the site, people were screaming "chlorine." He said he tried to enter the shelter but was overcome by a strong smell of chlorine and his comrades pulled him out.

Now that the OPCW people are on-site, how about we just - as I urged yesterday in the nextdoor thread - let them do their jobs before jumping to any further conclusions (or to any further retaliatory strikes, or retaliatory economic/diplomatic sanctions, etc.)?

[ewmayer]

In other WNT news:

North, South Korea may announce official end to Korean War: report | TheHill

Many people have opined that an eventual reunification of the Korean peninsula is flat-out impossible given the economic, social and cultural disparities that have resulted from the long and hostile partitioning. I am more optimistic - in my estimation, South Korea has the wealth (and continuing economic & industrial-ouput capacity) to sufficiently cover the most dire needs of the North, but yeah, if it’s gonna happen it’s gonna need to be an unprecedented (even by German-reuni and post-WW2 Marshall Plan standards) effort, several multiples-of-SK-GDP-worth of investment. And it’s going to need to be a sustained long-term effort, I figure at least a full generation long. Considering that the 2 Germanies were physically hard-divided for around 1 generation whereas the 2 Koreas have been so for roughly 3, it would be foolish to expect otherwise.

But I have read reports that the South Koreans are more keenly aware of the details of what-would-be-needed than anyone else, and have been engaged in long-term contingency planning along these lines. Despite the profound political differences the two Koreas are not as culturally divided as many would have you believe – and this was reinforced for me during the recent Winter Olympics. I find the fact that the level of detente dialogue has come this far, this fast to be highly encouraging. Should we gloss over the immense hardship a reunification project would bring? Of course not. On the flip side, nor should we consider the difficulty and simply give up because “it’s too hard”. But if you want to entertain a truly daunting prospect, consider that of rebuilding the peninsula (and god-knows-wherever-else) after a full-scale war-likely-involving-nukes-on-both-sides. Me, I’ll take the difficult-but-peaceful option any day.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

In other WNT news:

North, South Korea may announce official end to Korean War: report | TheHill

Many people have opined that an eventual reunification of the Korean peninsula is flat-out impossible given the economic, social and cultural disparities that have resulted from the long and hostile partitioning. I am more optimistic - in my estimation, South Korea has the wealth (and continuing economic & industrial-ouput capacity) to sufficiently cover the most dire needs of the North, but yeah, if it’s gonna happen it’s gonna need to be an unprecedented (even by German-reuni and post-WW2 Marshall Plan standards) effort, several multiples-of-SK-GDP-worth of investment. [snip]

I wouldn't ignore the possible role of China on the Korean peninsula after a peace treaty is formally concluded.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

I wouldn't ignore the possible role of China on the Korean peninsula after a peace treaty is formally concluded.

Well, the Chinese government has long played a role by way of its support for NK, so it will boil down to what kind of role China wants to play. Having a less-fraught situation on the peninsula is clearly in China's interest, and due to a long history of the various proto-Korean kingdoms being vassal states of imperial China I'm sure the Chinese have no illusions about Koreans' (both in the south and north) tolerating any kind of heavy-handed overt influence by the Middle Kingdom.

W.r.to my previous post above, I should add that I actually consider the political hurdles to be higher than the economic ones in this case. Even if there is a good-faith-on-both-sides rapprochement between North and South, how does one conceivably achieve a peaceful merger between the democratic (albeit suffering from the kind of capitalist-oligarch-driven corruption the North decries in its domestic propaganda) system in the South and the dictatorial Stalinism based on a multigenerational familial personality cult - and one which, unlike Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, appears in no danger of toppling - of the North? As with the economics, I expect any solution would need to be a multigeneratioal one.

And by way of a bit of Friday humor:

Mike Pompeo Defects To North Korea After Learning About Kim Jong-Un’s Torture Program | The Onion

[kladner]

.....where the good lord splitcha!

Mike Pompeo Defects To North Korea After Learning About Kim Jong-Un’s Torture Program | The Onion

[ewmayer]

Cure Worse Than Disease: Bill to Restrict Trump’s War Powers Would Actually “Endorse a Worldwide War on Terror” | Jon Schwarz, The Intercept

On Monday, three Republican and three Democratic senators, led by Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Tim Kaine, D-Va., released a draft of a new “authorization for use of military force,” or AUMF.

This AUMF would repeal the AUMF passed on September 14, 2001, which gave the president the power “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” It would also nullify the October, 2002, AUMF that authorized the president to use the military to “defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.”

Not surprisingly, Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump have each taken this extremely broad language and run with it. A 2016 Congressional Research Service report found 37 examples in 14 different countries of Bush and Obama using the 2001 AUMF to justify the use of military force. When a U.S. jet shot down a Syrian government bomber in June 2017, the Trump administration explained that it could legally do so because the jet was there as part of the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State — which is somehow an organization that committed the 9/11 attacks, even though it didn’t exist before 9/11.

So, something needs to be done about this. “For too long, Congress has given presidents a blank check,” Kaine recently said. “Our proposal finally repeals those authorizations and makes Congress do its job by weighing in on where, when, and with who we are at war.”

That sounds good. But the actual language of the Corker-Kaine bill appears to do almost the opposite of what its authors claim.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, it may be “far broader and more dangerous than even current law.” The ACLU’s Christopher Anders calls it “a monumental shift that will amp up war everywhere.”

See rest of article for the ugly details. But, but - "spirit of bipartisanship". what's not to like?

[kladner]

https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/04/w...ave-in-common/
I don't believe that I have seen these factors pulled together in quite this way, before. The combination seems plausible to me. All that military training for mass killing comes home to roost.

There’s actually no need to generalize. Looking at a long list of mass shootings in the United States, almost all of the shooters are men, and almost all of them are between ages 18 and 59. Above age 59, the percentage of men in the general U.S. population who are veterans leaps up dramatically. Between 18 and 59 — by averaging the percentages for each age year — about 14.76 percent of U.S. men are veterans, but at least 35% of these shooters were veterans. I determined that by quickly reading available news reports online about each shooting, so the percentage is likely to be significantly higher. I found no news reports that stated that any of the shooters had not been in the military.