Forgotten US Air Battle over Europe, 1953

Some Reflections On South Africa 40 Years After My Arrival

 

    Yesterday was a day to reflect on what has happened in the 40 years since the Swissair flight from Zurich dropped me in South Africa. The airport was called Jan Smuts Airport. It is now called Oliver R. Tambo International Airport.

    I found myself finally in Africa. I had dreamed of coming here since I was a university student with a dear college friend from Zimbabwe named Mutizwa Chirunga. I saw no jungles or wild animals. Johannesburg is a lot like Denver. It is 6000 feet above sea level. Even 40 years ago it was amazingly modern. I had no hotel reservations. I sighted a shuttle with a familiar name-Holiday Inn. I got on and was taken to the hotel that still exists to this day. I checked in and rested. That night I went down to the hotel dining room. Ironically it was called "The Confederate Room." I met two incredible British people named Graham and Sue Harris. We became fast friends.

     Early 1981 was a heddy time for South Africa economically. Gold went to $800 US per ounce. One South African Rand equaled $1.00 US. (As of this morning you would need 14.25 South African Rand to buy a dollar.) It was also a sad time when Apartheid was still in place. Africans and Indians were hit with terrible discrimination. Chinese, on the other hand, were called "Honorary Whites" and treated decently.

    After five days in the hotel, I rented a room in the home of a wealthy woman architect in the upscale suburb of Northcliff. Her name is Barbara Broadhurst. We stayed friends for many years afterwards.

     I worked at an insurance brokerage named Price Forbes Federale Volkas. I had an Audi company car with all expenses paid. I lived the life of white privilege with servants in the house, etc.

     I soon learned that all was not well in this seeming "paradise." South Africa was engaged in its own Vietnam war in Angola and Southwest Africa (later Namibia) The six o'clock news often contained reports of young men killed "on the border."

       Fear and unease permeated the air. South Africans believed a scenario about the Soviets taking over South Africa. In their minds, a large fleet of Russian Navy ships would appear off the coast of South Africa. The Soviet equivalent of the US Marine Corps would storm ashore. Russian aircraft armed with nuclear warheads would circle overhead. An ultimatum would be given: "Surrender or face nuclear annihilation."

      The US and Europe would view these events as deeply disturbing. They would not come to South Africa's defense because they would not see it worth starting World War III. All would be lost.

        I soon found a life with a different party every night. It was,as the old saying goes: "Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die!" If a man met a woman and did not try to take her to bed on the first date, his sexual orientation was questioned. Under the puritanical laws and attitudes was a wild sexuality. Everyone, South Africans know how to party and have fun!!!

        Let us fast forward 40 years. South Africa survived the difficult transition to black majority rule. It has some economic and political problems. The crime rate is high. It is surviving and viable. My old employer is still going strong. It is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange as Price Forbes (Pty) Limited. My company Waltradecc is still active in South Africa. All the old buildings that I knew well are still around. My beloved Indian restaurant The Curry Tavern is long gone. Anna you and I still have an investment presence in South Africa. It is good to have a story with a somewhat happy ending.

If You Jump The Coronavirus Injection Line In Germany You Could Go To Jail!!!

 

GERMANY

The Jail Card

German authorities have started prosecuting individuals that jump the coronavirus vaccine line, amid a slow rollout of the inoculations in the European Union nation, the Washington Post reported.

The probes follow multiple incidents where politicians and police officers received vaccines earlier than scheduled, prompting prosecutors to charge them with fraud, embezzlement or accepting an undue advantage.

One of the biggest cases involves hundreds of police officers in the city of Dresden, who prosecutors say, illegally accepted early vaccinations.

Line-jumping has also prompted lawmakers to propose fines of up to $30,000. Even so, critics say the authorities should focus their attention on boosting public support for vaccines.

Germany has vaccinated about 16 percent of its population, compared to the nearly 40 percent of Americans who have received at least one shot.

Authorities have been blamed for the slow rollout – the country has held back about 20 to 40 percent of its supply.

This backlog also includes vaccines from AstraZeneca: Almost one-third of about 5.6 million AstraZeneca doses delivered to Germany have not been used.

Meanwhile, some German cities have reported that half of all people with appointments to receive the vaccine do not show up.

Europe’s shifting stances regarding the AstraZeneca vaccine have not helped with the rising vaccine skepticism in Germany: Less than 70 percent of Germans say they want to get vaccinated.

Analysts said that officials are sending a contradictory message through these investigations, instead of persuading as many people to get the vaccine.

“What we could learn from the Americans is to do things a bit less bureaucratically, a bit faster and with somewhat more courage,” said Gerd Landsberg, head of the German Association of Towns and Municipalities.

Nazi Germany Had Tactical Nuclear Weapons

 

What would've happened if the Germans got the atomic bomb early in WW2?

Nazi Germany did use the Atomic bomb from July 1942 on the Russian Front. This was a tactical nuclear weapon known as the Z-pinch hollow charge warhead.

At the heart of the Z-pinch warhead was a 5kg marble of slightly enriched uranium (LEU) within a spherical cavity. Some reports suggest the cavity was a vacuum and others suggest a sphere filled with Deuterium. Germans experimented with different variations on this theme and applied for various patents along the same theme. One had a Uranium marble at the centre said to be coated with Lithium Deuteride. Other descriptions suggest a Conical Lithium Liner was imploded at a sphere filled with Deuterium at the heart of which was a fissile mass.

21D + 63Li → 2 42He + 22.4 MeV

The resulting collision of Lithium with Deuterium released fast Neutrons with 22.4 MeV energy. With just 1 MeV energy even natural unenriched Uranium 238 can be caused to fission.

It is a little known fact that Hitler was threatened with the Atomic bombing of Dresden in October 1944 (via Lisbon) followed by a discreet threat to use Anthrax against Germany made directly by Churchill to Hitler (via the political opposition in Romania) which caused the Nazis to abandon their nuclear aspirations. Hitler concluded a secret peace deal in which he was allowed to fly out of Berlin for Spain on the night of 27 April 1945. Hitler died of a massive coronary at General Franco’s Presidential Palace in the early hours of 2 November 1947.

Western Allies maintained a charade about Hitler’s fate and to conceal Germany’s nuclear achievements in order to prevent the Soviet Union gaining legal access to captured nuclear material & scientists. The mistrust which this spawned caused the ensuing Cold War.

In Germany Franz Thomanek from the Aviation Research Centre at Braunschweig made a breakthrough discovery in 1935 which led to use of Hollow charge explosives with conical Lithium liners and Deuterium to create nuclear fusion. From this research in 1938 by the Physics Institute at the University of Heidelberg led to development of tactical nuclear weapons by Dr Otto Haxel, Dr Trinks and Dr Kurt Diebner.

An excerpt from several pages of the Stockholm signal kindly provided to me by expert nuclear historian William Pellas. This mentions the Uranium Atom smashing bomb used by Germany in 1942. If William Pellas permits me, I can publish the rest of the signal here.

The results of this weapon’s use was witnessed in 1942 and described by a Japanese military liason consular official. It was described in diplomatic signals decrypted by the United States. The Stockholm signal between Tokyo and the Japanese embassy in Sweden dated 9 December 1944 described this warhead as a 5 kilogram Uranium Atom smashing warhead. It was decrypted in WW2 and not opened again until 1978.

Below is another extract from a June 1945 US Navy Intelligence report on German technical transfer to Japan during WW2:

The title page of the US Navy Intelligence report:

Links to the above are found here:

German technical aid to Japan

This tactical nuclear warhead is often referred to as the Schumann/Trinks warhead for those who developed it. The Zinsser affidavit refers to a witnessed nuclear test explosion in October 1944

Today it would be referred to as a Fusion boosted Fission warhead

From October 1944 the SS took over Atomic bomb research from the German Army and Navy.

Furthermore in correspondence with German researcher & lawyer Dirk Finkemeier and his friend Major Keith Sanders (retd) I learned of the capture in April 1945 of an underground nuclear facility at Espelkamp where Sanders’ father father Corporal Llyewellyn Sanders RAOC entered an underground factory to discover 100 Uranium centrifuges and a working “I.G.Farben” nuclear reactor in April 1945. The centrifuges were manufactured by Anschutz & Co., Hamburg, Dr Konrad Beyerle later taught the British how to use them postwar.

After WW2 a number of Nazi scientists (plus Dr Konrad Beyerle) were taken to Farm Hall for internment in a camp at Alswede, next to Espelkamp. Here the UK secretly maintained the German facility in operation until 1948 to serve Britain’s own Atomic weapons program. When USA discovered this in 1947, Britain was expelled from the Manhattan Project.

The Nazis were far more advanced than was ever credited to them. Reports on the Nazi nuclear effort were usually narrowly focused on one aspect in isolation and Allied intelligence report authors were often not privy to an overview of all the facts.

As an example of this was the 1946 report by Jessie Beams (G-344) which downplayed the effectiveness of German centrifuges despite the fact the Manahattan project had tried and failed to develop uranium centrifuges. The Beams report tried to imply that the Germans had copied American work on centrifuges from 1936–38 and ignored the fact that German centrifuges were 30 times more efficient at enrichment than the American porous barrier method.

Allied retelling of Germany’s nuclear effort portrayed Werner Heisenberg as the leader of Germany’s wartime efforts to develop nuclear weapons when in fact he was just a peripheral researcher in development of nuclear reactors, not nuclear weapons development.

Declaration by United Nations - Wikipedia

The 1942 Declaration of the United Nations formally obliged the US & Britain to share with China and Soviet Russia access to all captured scientist and technology. By distorting historic accounts Western Allies were able to refuse to share technology with Russia by denial that anything viable existed.

Try researching the Anthrax threat against germany and you will find very few sources. One however was letters by the Nazi nuclear scientist Dr Paul Harteck to Joseph Borkin after the was which corroborate what I am saying.

The US Government in particular refused to allow nuclear weapons technology to fall into Soviet hands. What these western Allies did not count upon was that many German & Japanese Nuclear scientists preferred to work for the Soviets By distorting the historical account. Another thing was that the Soviet advances in manchuria and at Hungnam Korea captured Japan’s nuclear laboratories.

So in answer to the original Question what would have happened if Germany got the Atomic Bomb first, the result is exactly what did happen. USA used bluf and threats, whilst Churchill intimidated Hitler with use of Anthrax. By late 1944 Germany lacked air superiority over Britain and could no longer deliver warheads to the UK

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Americans in the Battle of Berlin - The Untold Story

Using Coffe By Products To Regenerate Rain Forests

 

A Cup of Joe

Coffee waste is the secret ingredient in accelerating rainforest recovery from deforestation, BBC’s Science Focus reported.

A team of researchers led by Rebecca Cole spread a thick layer of coffee pulp – a waste product from coffee production – across an old agricultural plot in Costa Rica. The pulp helps keep invasive grass species away and allows the trees to recolonize faster.

The scientists explained that the small piece of land – nearly 0.35 acres – went through heavy deforestation in the 1950s.

But two years later, the coffee pulp performed some real magic: Not only did the trees grow four times faster and taller but the soil became richer with nutrients, including carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus.

“The results were dramatic,” said Cole. “The area treated with a thick layer of coffee pulp turned into a small forest in only two years while the control plot remained dominated by non-native pasture grasses.”

Cole’s team is now planning to examine other deforested sites. That’s because accelerating tropical rainforest recovery is an important step in reaching the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

Sometimes, a rainforest needs a simple pick me up, too.

A Sudden Windfall Lands A Louisiana Woman In Jail

 

      An article caught my attention and got me laughing. A woman in the suburbs of New Orleans went online to check her Charles Schwab stock brokerage account. She found that it had magically grown by over $1,200,000 US. She went out on a fast and a wild spending spree. She bought a new house, a new car, etc.

      Charles Schwab caught up to her. They told her that they had deposited the large sum into her account by error. They demanded the return of the money. She could not return it all. The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Department has changed her with bank fraud and grand theft.

    In the US legal system such an erroneous deposit of funds to an account is deemed to be a criminal offense. After all, you knew that the money was not yours. In a country with a British Common Law legal system views such matters differently. Such an error is deemed to be negligence on the part of the financial institution. A civil suit is filed to recover the funds.

     This story takes me back to January of 1988. I was living in L.A. at the time. I was drowsy when I awakened one morning. I opened my mail from the previous day. One letter was from my money market fund Capital Preservation Fund. I looked at my statement. I normally kept $1,000 US in the account. I was shocked to see a balance of $310,000 US. I asked my domestic partner Antonieta to confirm this balance. She confirmed it.

    At that time, I was working as a paralegal at a personal injury law firm. When I arrived at work, I went right into the senior partner's office. I showed him the statement. He laughed long and hard. When he regained his composure, he gave me the following advice:

     "Jack, if you take any of this money, you will go to jail. On the other hand, any interest earned while the money sits in the account is yours."

        It took several months for the financial institution to discover the error and remove the funds. I made a tidy amount of money off the interest. The financial institution praised my honesty. The grandson of the founder became a friend of mine.

I Am Heart Broken-Another Victim Of The Police

 

   I am heartbroken. We have another police shooting that ended with a 20-year old young man dead. It happened in a Minneapolis suburb-Brooklyn Center. In the past year, police in the US killed 901 civilians. At the same time, 48 police officers were killed by suspects.

   Anytime there is a wrongful police shooting, a family is devastated by the loss of a loved family member. The officer who did the shooting sees his/her career end. A criminal trial on charges ranging from manslaughter to murder could follow. Communities are torn apart by civil unrest.

     What also follows is a payment by the town or city to the family that lost its loved one needlessly. In the George Floyd case, his family was paid some $27 million US by the city of Minneapolis. Average awards in such cases range from $1,000,000 US to $6,000,000 US.

    The towns, cities, and counties paying out these settlements are not the US government. They cannot print money. If they had some foresight, they bought liability insurance to cover them against such contingencies. In this case, the insurance company absorbs the loss. Other towns, municipalities, and counties that did not buy such liability cover face a huge loss. In the minimum services like parks, libraries, fire protection, police protection, and health care must be cut. On the other end of the spectrum is the possibility of a bankruptcy with a gigantic legal fee. (A town near us went bankrupt. The legal fee was $9,000,000 US.) Sometimes a political jurisdiction disappears. A county government has to take over all services for a group of people.

      In my personal opinion 98% of law enforcement people are decent, competent, and professional. 1% are hopeless incompetents. 1% have criminal tendencies. The two percent "bad eggs" need to be identified and removed from law enforcement. The remaining 98% need to have further intense training. The answer is not defunding or abolishing law enforcement agencies.

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A Chinese Invasion Of Taiwan?

 

     Elena has been concerned as of late about mainland China forcefully retaking Taiwan. Before we get into the military challenges of such an action, let us look at the geopolitical considerations. The US and Chinese economies are intertwined to a great extent. If one party pulled away, their economy would collapse. The world economy would follow. Let us look at the special case of Taiwan and mainland China. Taiwan provides the mainland with a lot of FDI-foreign direct investment. When a Chinese company has a desperate need for skilled workers, the first place that they look is Taiwan. There is a huge volume of trade between the mainland and Taiwan. A military action would destroy all this economic activity.

    Now let us look at an actual military operation where the Chinese military attempts to invade Taiwan. Ask the Nazis and the US Navy; it is very hard to invade an island. Nazi Germany could not even mount an invasion to overpower the UK. The US Navy struggled with all its island invasions in World War II. To invade an island, you need absolute air and naval superiority. Mainland China has an impressive military with large numbers. They would face US forces, Taiwan forces, and possible Japanese forces. They would not have absolute control of the skies and the sea. The Chinese military could not afford to inflict too much damage on Taiwan for the economic reasons cited above. They would also be sensitive to world public opinion.

    In the end of the day, their only route to reclaiming what they see is rightfully theirs is "winning through intimidation." They will have to use psychology to intimate all opponents. The Japanese did this brilliantly in Singapore at the start of World War II.

Whales Taught Each Other How To Avoid Harpoons

 

Got Any Tips?

Sharing survival tips isn’t exclusively human behavior – Sperm whales do it, too.

A research team recently discovered that the giant marine creatures taught each other how to avoid harpoons when whalers began hunting them 200 years ago, according to Business Insider.

They analyzed digitized logbooks from 19th century American whalers, which contained detailed descriptions of their expeditions in the North Pacific, including the number of whales spotted and harpooned.

The logs, however, showed that out of almost 80,000 recorded ‘voyage days,’ there were only 2,405 successful whale sightings – a meager three percent success rate.

Researchers also noted that the strike rate of whalers’ harpoons fell by nearly 60 percent within two years after they first began hunting in the region.

“Usually, you expect it (strike rate) to increase as they figure out stuff and become more successful,” said lead author Hal Whitehead. “We become more efficient as we learn how to do it.”

But whales got the best of the hunters this time: The authors believe the cetaceans – who live in tight-knit pods – learned how to avoid whalers by swimming against the wind to outrun the ships.

This evasive tactic helped the mammals survive up until the advent of steam engines and grenade harpoons in the 19th century.

“This was cultural evolution, much too fast for genetic evolution,” said Whitehead.

A Dear Friend Gets Ready To Move To Seattle

 Thank you Jack, news travels fast. The house will be listed soon, sold all the cars including my Dodge Challenger T/A that I had for 30 years, it is going to a good house and got a good price for it, Congratulations to Elena on the retirement. We leave home on May 10th.

Good bye to an old friend.

The old Volvo and the one new Volvo that we bought for the trip.

My Friend, Skip Young, Wally of "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" b...

Greenland: Fade To Black

 

GREENLAND

Fade to Black

Climate change is turning Greenland black. Algae growing due to warmer temperatures is darkening the ice sheet on the icy Arctic island, reported Business Insider. Since dark colors reflect less sunlight than lighter ones, the algae will likely speed up the melting that is already occurring in the Danish-controlled territory.

Greenland’s ice used to melt for around 50 days in the summer. Now it’s melting for as many as 75 days a year. That’s around seven times faster than the melting of nearly two decades ago. The island’s lakes are vanishing as a result, too, potentially providing lubrication that helps the thick ice slide over the bedrock below, further causing the ice to dissipate into the ocean, added Scientific American.

The disappearing ice has revealed how plants once lived on Greenland, confirming that a deep freeze is not destined to rule the island, Wired wrote. That means, what Eric the Red, a Viking who lied about how Greenland was a verdant paradise to lure settlers more than a millennium ago, might in fact be coming true.

Ancient plants aren’t the only treasures on Greenland, however. A motherlode of rare earth metals is in the territory, too. That’s where things become political.

On April 6, Greenland voters are scheduled to vote on a new government. In February, wrote Quartz, the governing Siumut party collapsed due to disagreements over a rare earth and uranium open-pit mine called Kvanefjeld.

Some are frightened of the ecological effects of such a large resource-extraction project. The critics argued that such a mine could hurt another growing industry on the island: tourism. Visitors to Greenland can see icebergs, primordial tundra and the aurora borealis, Conde Nast Traveler wrote.

“This is a project that probably really would make a difference, in terms of providing jobs and a healthy dose of income to the national purse,” Danish Institute for International Studies Senior Researcher Ulrik Pram Gad told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “But it’s also a very controversial project. Should we sacrifice this beautiful spot and the kind of life that people live there, for the sake of the greater good – in this case, inching toward national independence?”

Proposed 15 years ago, Kvanefjeld’s proponents of the project argue that it will help Greenland become independent. Home to 56,000 people, Greenland is largely autonomous but leaders in Copenhagen dictate its foreign, defense and monetary policy, Reuters explained.

Under Danish law, Greenlanders have the right to secede from the Kingdom of Denmark. But currently, Denmark pays for half the island’s annual budget, Foreign Policy magazine reported. Without the mining project, it’s not clear if the island’s residents can afford their current level of public services.

That’s the kind of hard choice that comes with standing on one’s own two feet.

An Early Spring In Japan

 

Early Bloomers

Spring in Japan is marked by the beautiful sight of blooming Sakura trees, better known as cherry blossoms.

This March, unusually warm temperatures have caused the beloved trees to flower earlier than usual, raising concerns about the impact of climate change, the Washington Post reported.

Last week, scientists marked a record peak bloom date for Kyoto’s cherry blossom on March 26, the earliest in more than 1,200 years – beating the previous record of March 27 in 1409.

The Kyoto Cherry Blossom record has been maintained for centuries – since 812 CE – by emperors, governors and monks, and served as an important indicator of warming temperatures.

Historical data from 812 to 1800 has shown a relatively stable average peak bloom date of the Sakura tree. But the date began sloping downwards by the 19th century, highlighting the start of an earlier spring.

For example, the average flowering date in Kyoto in 1850 was April 17 but now it’s closer to April 5. Meanwhile, the average temperature in the city has risen by about six degrees Fahrenheit.

But this early bloom is not just seen in Japan.

The Yoshino cherry trees in Washington, DC – gifted by Japan in 1912 – have also started blossoming earlier: A century of records show that the average peak bloom date has advanced six to seven days, from about April 5 to March 31.

Already, officials are bracing for crowds wanting to see the trees’ finery – even though people were requested to stay home because of the pandemic. But the blooming of the cherry blossoms is a celebrated event in the US capital, marked by a parade and other festivities.

While seeing the flowers is a welcome sight, climate scientists warn that early blooms can make the cherry blossoms vulnerable to spring freezes.

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