Author Archives: RF_Alum

Spying in America

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spying-in-americaThis book by Michael J. Sulick has the subtitle, “Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War.” Sulick was a former director of the CIA’s clandestine service, and his book describes how “…nations large and small, from Russia and China to Ghana and Ecuador, have stolen the most precious secrets of the United States.” The book describes thirty of the most famous espionage cases. The introduction discusses a subject that continues to be importance:  government monitoring of communications to uncover potential terrorist threats versus freedom from government intrusion into our daily lives. “America’s susceptibility to the threat of espionage…developed, ironically, from the very qualities that catapulted the nation to superpower status and made it a symbol of democracy:  an exceptional geography and a tradition of individual liberties. These attributes shaped American attitudes toward national security and bred both disbelief about the threat of espionage and a distrust of countering it at the expense of these cherished liberties.”

I’ve always had the question as to why U.S. citizens would spy against the country. The author explains that the massive Soviet espionage efforts before and during World War II were assisted by the ravages of the Great Depression. “Americans disillusioned with capitalism were lured by the utopian promises of communism and swelled the ranks of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA)…Communist sympathizers attracted by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies flocked to work in the new administration and willingly supported the Soviet cause by passing government secrets. When irrefutable proof of widespread Soviet espionage eventually surfaced, the highest levels of the US government still refused to believe the senior officials of the Roosevelt administration were Soviet spies.” Many in the liberal media expressed “…a highly suspicious distrust of government efforts to combat spying, viewing them as intrusiveness and even persecution of its citizenry.” The focus often was on what was seen as the excesses of McCarthy instead of the revelations from Chambers and Bentley, two Soviet spies who turned and provided lists of spies in the government. The book accurately describes that much of the media could or would not accept their stories until irrefutable proof became available years later. Continue reading →

Wet Blanket

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The literal explanation is “a blanket damped with water so as to extinguish a fire.” However, the common use is to define “…a person or thing that dampens enthusiasm or enjoyment.” The expression has been around for several centuries.

 

A Criticism of Climate Change Science

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The following was provided by Dr. William F. Downs, a Geochemist and friend. I’ve done a tiny bit of editing, and added a comment at the end. The timing is perfect as a contrast to  the review posted today.

earth climate changeThere is little controversy over the fact that the temperature of Earth is currently rising and has been since the end of the “Little Ice Age” which lasted from about 1380 AD until circa 1780 AD.  Previously the climate experienced a warm period which was called the “Millennium Optimum” (c. 850 AD – 1300 AD) when I studied it during the 1960s.  It was considered “optimum” because the Vikings were able to expand into and develop farms in Greenland and grapes that had been planted in Britain by the Romans produced wine.  By the early 1300s, Greenland was no longer able to sustain agriculture and the Viking society in Greenland had collapsed.  There was another warming period termed the “Roman Warm Period” that existed in the first few centuries after the time of Christ.  The “Little Ice Age” was documented by Monks in Monasteries along the roads to Rome as Alpine Pilgrims on their way to Rome told their stories of glacial destruction of their Villages.

The temperatures and CO2 contents of the atmosphere in the past are estimated by measuring the oxygen isotope ratios and concentrations of CO2 released from ice cores collected from Vostok Glacier in Antarctica.  These data have been collected from ice that had formed during the last 100,000 years or so.  These data indicate that the current temperature level is lower than those experienced during the Millennial Warming Period. Continue reading →

Barking Up the Wrong Tree

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Knowyourphrase.com explains that this expression means to “…make a wrong assumption about someone or something.” A person being wrongly accused might use the phrase to tell the accuser they are wrong. The origin is said to be from the use of hunting dogs to trail prey. The dogs give chase; the prey crawls up a tree and perhaps jumps to a nearby tree. Therefore, the dog is “…barking up the wrong tree.” The expression was used in the early 19th century when the Knickerbocker Magazine in 1836 had a statement that read, “’You’ve been barking up the wrong tree, cried the Ohioan.”

Fourth Anniversary of RockyFlatsFacts.com

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It has been an interesting four years since we launched this site to provide the book titled, “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats:  Urban Myths Debunked.” Several hundred people have elected to hold the actual book or to read the Kindle version, which has several interesting pictures. Some think the pictures of two types of plutonium ingots make the Kindle version worthwhile.

Getting some statistics out of the way, the counters have indicated there have been over 1.3 million visitors. There will have been 654 postings when this one is added. Those postings have been just about equally divided between commentaries, book reviews, and expressions. Frequent readers know that there is no way to predict the subjects since we write about whatever attracts our interest on a given day. There was a series of Rocky Flats-related commentaries in mid-year when a three day event was held at the Arvada Center on an anniversary of the government raid on the plant (see “An Insider’s View, etc., above). There was another Rocky Flat’s series when the Department of Energy announced through a subcontractor that health insurance provided to retirees was changing.

Book reviews continued to be mostly non-fiction, but we will post a review about any book we think is interesting. We are still finding new expressions despite posting descriptions of the origin and meaning of over 200. Perhaps the day will come when we run out of new material, but we aren’t there yet.

The two frequent contributors also have been busy writing and publishing books. Ponderer (Kate Rauner) published a sequel to her book “Glitch.” This one is titled “Venture,” and I recommend it to anyone who has interest in space exploration. A sequel to “Angry Pigs Organized Against Gerbils:  The Farmer Island War,” is titled “Farmer Island Magic,” and should be published soon. The four grandchildren who once again served as “Creative Staff and Illustrators” are hoping to have a copy before Christmas. I’m also in the early stages of writing another Rocky Flats book that I think will be interesting to people who worked there and/or protested the place.  More about that later.

Explanation for how the Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) Became Law

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Charles Krauthammer wrote an editorial describing how recently released videos of MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, an architect of Obamacare, describing how Obamacare was written deceptively to allow it to become law. Gruber explained, “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. Basically call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass. Gruber also explained that the authors of the bill realized they had to manipulate the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that is responsible for issuing cost estimates on any legislative proposal. “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CDO did not score the mandate as taxes. If the CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” The President even insisted in his speeches in favor of the law that what must be paid to the government if you fail to buy health insurance was not a tax. We all know that the Supreme Court declared the law constitutional because it was a tax.

There were numerous broken promises. One that was repeated on numerous occasions by the President was that “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Period. If you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance. Period. Then people learned their doctors often weren’t included in the government-approved coverage. People who had shopped for tailored health insurance were told they could not keep their insurance because it was substandard. Thus a fifty year old woman with no children remaining at home was told her insurance did not meet government standards because it did not include maternity benefits or pediatric dental coverage. Continue reading →