Life takes us in many strange directions and wonderful discoveries. It never turns out the way we thought it would.
Friday, January 5, 2018
Iran: Spring Is Not Here
IRAN
Spring Is Not Here
The sight of thousands of Iranian protesters raising slogans against not only the country’s president but also Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may be a welcome one for most Americans and others who view it as a fight for democracy.
But an Iranian version of the Arab Spring is not here.
Since late last week, protesters have thronged cities and towns across Iran. The largest anti-government rallies since protestsrelated to the 2009 presidential elections, the demonstrations have gone beyond the usual urban elite to draw the rural masses. Even more rare, demonstrators have directed as much ire toward Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader since 1989, as toward President Hassan Rouhani, Reuters reported.
That prompted online cheering and a vague promise of “support” from US President Donald Trump and inspired some pundits to hope a democratic revolution could soon be on the way, noted the Washington Post. But by sheer numbers, the protests never came close to matching those in 2009, the Economist argued. Tehran faces none of the limitations that prevented Egypt or Tunisia from ruthlessly crushing their own popular uprisings. And the regime’s “thug elements — including the Revolutionary Guard Corps — appear to remain fanatically loyal,” opines David French in the National Review.
On Wednesday, the Revolutionary Guard deployed forces to three provinces to put an end to the protests – redoubling their efforts when demonstrations cropped up again. Thousands of Iranians took part in state-sponsored, pro-government rallies where marchers waved Iranian flags and portraits of Khamenei. And the head of the Revolutionary Guards declared that the “seditious” protesters had been defeated, reported CNN.
It’s also not clear that the protests are such a good thing for Washington and others keen on a new form of government in Iran.
While they have since spun beyond the control of any one group, the Economist noted that the demonstrations were begun by hardliners seeking to cause trouble for Rouhani – who is a moderate and a reformer, despite butting heads with Trump over the status of Iran’s nuclear program. And disgust with Rouhani’s failure to deliver economic prosperity on the back of the nuclear deal he negotiated could linger on after criticism of Khamenei is silenced.
The immediate spark for the protests, after all, was Rouhani’s most recent budget, New York Times reporter Thomas Erdbrink told PBS Newshour. Revelations in the budget about spending on religious institutions and the Republican Guards, as well as price hikes for fuel and the elimination of a monthly cash handout to 30 million Iranians, sparked angry responses on social media.
Before that, hardliners had already been making hay over Trump’s decertification of the nuclear deal, saying the US betrayed and made a fool out of Rouhani. Though Iran’s economy has grown since the nuclear deal, thanks to resumed oil exports, unemployment among young people, half of Iran’s population, is at 40 percent, the New York Times reported. On Thursday, the US sanctioned five new entities it says are involved with Iran’s ballistic missile program, Reuters said.
Meanwhile, the demonstrations have broadened in scope. Protesters were chanting slogans like “We don’t want an Islamic republic” and “People are paupers while the mullahs live like gods,” noted the Economist, but not those alone.
“No to conservatives and reformers alike,” was another popular slogan.
Thursday, January 4, 2018
A Formidable Russian Spy Ship
What makes Russia’s new spy ship Yantar special?
The Yantar seen in the Bosphorus en route to Syria in 2017
The Russian navy is very proud of its new spy ship, the Yantar, which is now doing Argentina a favour by helping to search for a missing submarine.
Argentina has given up trying to rescue the 44 crew aboard the ARA San Juan, which disappeared on 15 November. But it still wants to find the diesel-electric submarine.
Enter the Yantar, officially an oceanographic research vessel, but actually bristling with surveillance equipment, and the mother ship for manned and unmanned deep-sea submersibles.
A Russian ROV - remotely operated underwater vehicle - is scouring the ocean floor off Argentina.
The disappearance of the ARA San Juan remains a mystery
But what else has the Yantar (Russian for "amber") been up to?
Targeting undersea cables
The Yantar's movements were apparently what prompted a warning last month from the UK military that Russia could disrupt or cut vital undersea communications cables.
The chief of the UK defence staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach, said such a strike against internet and other communications cables could be "catastrophic".
Dozens of fibre-optic cables span the globe and Nato also has dedicated military cables on the ocean floor.
The Yantar is capable of tampering with them, says Igor Sutyagin, a London-based expert on the Russian military. But there is no evidence that it has done so.
"It's difficult to tap into optical fibres - it's just light inside, not electrical data," he told the BBC. "It would be easier just to cut the cable."
Mr Sutyagin noted that in the 1970s, during the Cold War, the US Navy had lost control of a Sosus undersea listening post for tracking submarines in the Atlantic. Sosus stands for "Sound Surveillance System".
The US military concluded that a Soviet submarine had cut the cables.
In the same period the US military, reports say, planted listening devices on Soviet undersea cables in the Sea of Okhotsk, where Soviet submarines were based.
A news report from the Russian parliament says the Yantar can do just such clandestine work, using deep-diving submersibles.
"The Yantar has equipment designed for deep-sea tracking, and devices that can connect to top-secret communications cables," said Parlamentskaya Gazeta (in Russian) last October.
Read more on Russia's military:
- Could Russia knock out undersea cables?
- Russia's new military - should Nato worry?
- What happens when a submarine vanishes
Mr Sutyagin, of the Royal United Services Institute, says the Yantar belongs to Russia's Main Directorate of Underwater Research (GUGI in Russian), part of the defence ministry.
The 108m-long (354ft) vessel has a crew of 60 and went into service in 2015. It was built in the Baltic port of Kaliningrad in 2015, the first in a series called Project 22010. A second, called Almaz, will soon be on its way to the navy.
Russia already has several older spy ships. In April, one of them, the Liman, sank off the Turkish coast after being breached in a collision with a freighter. All its crew were rescued.
The Yantar can deploy the three-man submersibles Rus and Konsul, which can dive to about 6,000m (20,000ft).
The Rus submersible has a crew of three and dived to 6,180m in the AtlanticSpying on the US
The Russian parliamentary report noted that in the summer of 2015 the Yantar had deployed near the US Kings Bay naval base in Georgia.
"According to Pentagon officials, the Russians were gathering intelligence on US submarines' equipment, including underwater sensors in the DoDIN network," the Russian report said.
Mr Sutyagin said the US underwater sensors near Kings Bay would be interesting for the Russian military, which might wish to copy the US technology.
In late 2016 the Yantar was found to be loitering over undersea communications cables off the Syrian coast, including some links to Europe.
The ship's strange movements were tracked by a website called Covert Shores. The Yantar's frequent stops at points along a cable route suggested that a submersible was examining the sea floor, the report said.
Search and rescue
Besides the Argentina mission, the Yantar has been used previously for search and recovery.
The Russian parliamentary report said the ship had located two Russian fighter jets - a Su-33 and a MiG-29 - that crashed into the Mediterranean in 2016, during the Syria war.
The Yantar "recovered secret equipment from the planes in good time", the report said.
That could be secret radar or missile data, or the "identification, friend or foe" system, Mr Sutyagin said.
In 2000 a ship like the Yantar might have saved some Kursk sailors' lives and literally salvaged the Russian navy's reputation.
Mystery of ARA San Juan
Wednesday, January 3, 2018
What Does $1 Trillion Dollars Look Like?
No matter what you show, a 'trillion dollars' is still very hard to comprehend.
And Mr. Trump has budgeted to add $1.5 trillion per year to the $20 trillion current debt!
What does one TRILLION dollars look like?
(calculations & dimensions)
1) We are using $100 dollar bills, not $1 bills.
2) We are using the following definitions of million, billion and trilli
| MILLION | = | 1,000,000 |
| BILLION | = | 1,000,000,000 |
| TRILLION | = | 1,000,000,000,000 |
We'll start with one packet...
(I've removed the graphics for clarity)
This packet is a stack of one hundred $100 dollar bills. It's about 6" by 2-1/2" by 0.43" high.
100 x $100 = $10,000
Next we'll arrange 10 packets on the ground like so...
10 x $10,000 = $100,000
If we increase it to 10 layers high, we get $1,000,000 (one million dollars)...
10 x $100,000 = $1,000,000
The pile is 12" wide (2 x 6"), 12.5" deep (5 x 2.5") and 4.3" high (10 x .43").
Now we'll look at a pallet. We'll start with one layer, 7 packets wide by 16 packets deep, with each packet being $10,000.
7 x 16 = 112 packets per layer
112 x $10,000 = $1,120,000 per layer
Increase that to 90 layers and you have a stack 38.7" tall (plus 4" for the pallet) that is worth a little over $100,000,000 (one hundred million dollars)
90 x $1,120,000 = $100,800,000
For the sake of simplicty, we'll round this down and consider a pallet to be exactly $100,000,000 (one hundred million dollars). We'll just put put the extra $800,000 aside and have ourselves a party. With all this money sloshing around, who's gonna miss it?
Next, ten pallets of $100 million are $1 billion...
10 x $100,000,000 = $1,000,000,000 (one billion dollars)
Next, a row of 50 double-stacked pallets (50 x 2 = 100 pallets total).
100 x $100,000,000/pallet = $10,000,000,000 (ten billion dollars)
Multiply that by 100 rows....
100 rows x $10,000,000,000 = $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars)
(Notice the little guy at the bottom left corner.)
Here's another view oriented a little more to the front...
So, one hundred rows x 100 pallets per row is 10,000 pallets.
That's a LOT of $100 bills!
And hopefully that puts to rest any notions of "errors".
You know, it occurs to me.... if you were the guy stacking all those pallets and you swiped one single bill from the top of each pallet, after you were done you'd have yourself a cool $million.
|---------Dimensions---------|
Each individual pallet is 42" wide by 40" deep. The height of the bills is 38.7". Add 4" for a pallet and the total height of one pallet of bills is 42.7". In the field of pallets above, the pallets are spaced 12" apart.
The field is 50 pallets x 100 pallets by 2 pallets high, so...
width = (50 x 42") + (49 x 12") = 2100" + 588" = 2688" = 224 ft
depth = (100 x 40") + (99 x 12") = 4000" + 1188" = 5188" = 432.33ft
height = 2 x 42.7" = 85.4" = just a little over 7ft high
So our field of pallets is roughly 224ft x 432ft x 7ft high.
At 96,768 square feet, it's about 2.2 acres and well over the size of a football field.
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