RWC Unfiltered 7-21-2011

• Stuxnet Not Wiped Out
• Coburn’s Back in Black Labeled Racist
• Conroversial Breast Feeding Baby Doll On Sale
• Obama Sets Record with 454 White House Staffers + Czars
• Borders Book Stores Into Ash Can
• Gun Running Holder Gone Off-Rails
• Obama Hires Minister of Propaganda
• Chinese UAV Challenge To US

German researchers say the risk of heart attack is higher on Monday than any other day of the week.

The Stuxnet malworm which played havoc with Iran’s nuclear program for eleven months was not purged after all. Tehran never did overcome the disruptions caused by Stuxnet or restore its centrifuges to smooth and normal operation as was claimed. Indeed, Iran finally resorted to the only sure-fire cure, scrapping all the tainted machines and replacing them with new ones.

Iran provided confirmation of this Tuesday, July 19 in an announcement that improved and faster centrifuge models were being installed.

Iran would clearly not have undertaken the major and costly project of replacing all its 5,000-6,000 centrifuges with new ones if they were indeed functioning smoothly. The announcement was made by the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman at a press briefing although no one present had raised the nuclear issue. He said: “The installation of new centrifuges with better quality and speed is ongoing… this is another confirmation of the Islamic republic’s successful strides in its nuclear activities.”

As if Iran gives a tinker’s damn Britain and France immediately condemned the announcement. It proved, official spokesmen commented, that Iran plans to triple the amount of uranium it enriches in contravention of six UN Security Council Resolutions and defiance of ten International Atomic Energy Agency decisions in Vienna. The announcement also “confirmed suspicions that the Iranian nuclear program had no credible civilian application.” 

In recent months, Iran has taken advantage of the West’s preoccupation with the Arab revolt to quietly forge ahead unnoticed with its weapons program. So if everything was moving smoothly forward why did Tehran suddenly decide to raise the touchy subject again?

Indeed, by doing so, the official spokesman placed in doubt the three major strides Iran was generally presumed to have made while the West was otherwise engaged:

• The dramatic speeding-up of uranium enrichment and expansion of the quantities produced.

The West has no credible information, whether from intelligence, research, or nuclear watchdog inspections, as to how much enriched uranium Iran has produced and how much it has in stock. Best estimates predict Iran will have enough to build four nuclear warheads and likely test one in 2012 unless Obama can buy the Mullah’s off during his announced  reelection reapproachment trek there. An Iranian nuke test just before the 2012 election would be disasterous for Obama. But, that makes little sense since having islam sympathizer anti-Israel Obama in office or four more years would be a huge advantage for Iran.

As reported previously, for the past six months, Iran managed to keep the full scope of its enrichment activities hidden from IAEA inspections. Although inspectors were allowed to visit Iran’s acknowledged enrichment facility at Natanz, they were unable to gauge how many active centrifuges were present and how many removed to unknown site or sites. The sophisticated cameras supposed to monitor the Natanz facility were unable to record all of Iran’s enrichment activities because key production sites were moved out of range.

• The glitches bedeviling their centrifuge machines were overcome and all 5,000 were spinning away without interruption. After expunging the Stuxnet virus which first struck in June 2010, all their nuclear program’s control systems and installations, including Natanz and the Russian-built Bushehr reactor, were functioning perfectly. It took Iranian and Russian computer and cyber-terrorism experts a year to cleanse the system. This gave security agencies their first indicator of the time it takes to overcome a large-scale, sophisticated cyber attack.

On July 5, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, head of Israeli military intelligence, said that Iran is currently running 5,000 active centrifuges and aiming for 8,000. He made no reference to their replacement with newer and faster machines - which the Iranian spokesman disclosed suddenly last Tuesday.

•  The Iranians are engaged in the relocation of the centrifuges spinning 20-percent grade enriched uranium to a new underground facility at Fordo, 100 kilometers away near Qom. Tehran has rejected every European and IAEA demand to install monitoring and inspection equipment at the new facility which is therefore functioning without international oversight.
• Those presumptions are now largely suspect.

Western intelligence sources say that until recently, the Iranians believed they had a clear road for enriching large quantities of high-grade uranium after solving technical obstructions and beating back the cyber attack. But then, they were stunned to discover that the Stuxnet virus, far from being eradicated, was back with a vengeance and on the offensive against their centrifuges. Iran was forced to adopt a course it had avoided last year, namely to destroy the entire plant of approximately 5,000 working centrifuges and replace them all with new machines.
This decision led to the foreign ministry spokesman’s one-sentence announcement. He delivered it to pre-empt Iran’s enemies from picking up on the installation of the new centrifuges and making it public with the real reason for dumping the “smoothly” operating ones.

The “West” has generically been blamed for the Stuxnet attack but so far no fingerprints have been found or at least made public for the most successful cyver attack yet known.

Taiwan’s urgent request to purchase 66 advanced F-16 C/D models to bolster its aging air force has again been rejected by the Obama administration, which remains intent on avoiding any dispute with Beijing, and opposes all arms sales to the island nation.

Defense News reported June 27 that Taiwan sought to submit a letter of request for the new jets on June 24 but was blocked under orders from the White House National Security Council.

Suddenly in a new age political correctness everything is racial even Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., “Back in Black” plan for massive debt reduction and four of his former compadres from the Gang of Six are rolling out their less-ambitious deficit plan.

House Republicans, meanwhile, are pushing through the conservative-backed proposal for deep cuts now, spending caps later and a balanced budget amendment farther down the road.

None of these big-ticket items seem to be going anywhere before a projected government shutdown begins sometime in the next few weeks, so why bring them up now?

By putting a plan out now, lawmakers can take the high ground later on. “My plan would have tripled the [cuts/taxes on millionaires and billionaires/savings/etc.] compared to the compromise package.”

Increasingly Republicans seem ready, even eager to dare Obama to default in the believe that even one missed or delayed military paycheck or social security check will doom his reelection chances.

While retread Guv Jerry continues to support the legacy of the amateur Governor, Arnold, the rest of government and society understands that High Speed Rail is dead. It never was anything more than a glorified FDR-like WORK PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION  mega billion dollar boondoggle it deserves official burial beneath the cheapest headstone.

 As a new breast feeding baby doll is making headlines and creating controversy about girl’s as young a 3-years old pretending to breast feed a doll affixed to a special bra making sucking motions and sounds and burping.

The doll is made by Berjuan Toys, a company out of Spain and started selling the U. S, last week on an internet website for $69.00.

A 123-year-old Edison tried to sell a talking baby doll. A recording made by Thomas Edison is believed to be the world’s first attempt at a talking doll and may mark the dawn of the American recording industry.

In the sound recording, a woman can be heard reciting a verse of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Historians believe Edison hired the woman to make the recording less than two years before he unsuccessfully put the first talking doll on the market.

“Based on the date of fall 1888, it is the oldest American-made recording of a woman’s voice that we can listen to today,”

The Edison Phonograph Toy Manufacturing Company made the 23 inch tall doll. The original price for the crank driven toy was $10 with a simple chemise, and $20-$25 with full dress $600.00 in today’s dollars. The steel stylus quickly wore out the wax disk. It didn’t last long nor work well. Nor did it sell well.

China is the source of 70% of the worlds pirated goods- all stolen profits.

Obama’s White House employs 454 people with an annual cost of $37,121,463. The administration can point to the fact that there are 15 fewer people on the payroll this year, representing a savings of $1.7 million dollars a year. (For the record, Czars are excluded from this list.) But, within those numbers are some very interesting facts worth mentioning:

• among the current White House staffers, 21 of them are earning the maximum allowed of $172,200 (very close to what Senators and Congressmen earn)
• Almost one in three makes $100k.

 Every second, Americans collectively eat one hundred pounds of chocolate

The book retailer Borders will wind down its remaining 399 stores starting July 22 after it couldn’t reach an agreement with an earlier bidder, Najafi Cos., about an offer to keep the company running. Borders won’t hold an auction, as there have been no proposals to keep the company operating, it said in a statement Monday-so it looks like liquidation for the once mega bookstore chain. Stiff overhead and declining profits from music and printed book sales appear to have spelled doom for Borders.

Borders has 10,700 employees, and a phased rollout will close its stores by September. The company said it will complete the wind-down under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and expects to be able to pay its business partners.

 Borders once operated more than 1,000 stores, lost business as customers switched to e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle. Barnes & Noble invested in its own Nook e-reader.

In Ohio, one must have a license to keep a bear.

 In a scandal that could cost the Attorney General his career and lead to the Oval Office the Justice Department is trying to protect its political appointees from the Fast and Furious scandal by concealing an internal “smoking gun” report and other documents that acknowledge the role top officials played in the program that allowed firearms to flow illegally into Mexico, according to the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Kenneth E. Melson, the ATF’s acting director, also told congressional investigators this month that the affidavits prepared to obtain wiretaps used in the ill-fated operation were inconsistent with Justice Department officials’ public statements about the program. Justice Department officials advised him not to raise his concerns with Congress about “institutional problems” with the Fast and Furious operation, Melson said.

“It was very frustrating to all of us,” Melson told congressional investigators in a private meeting over the Fourth of July holiday, “and it appears thoroughly to us that the department is really trying to figure out a way to push the information away from their political appointees at the department.”

Not only was the department slow to react, Melson said, but Justice Department officials indicated they did not want him to cooperate with Congress.

A transcript of his comments was released Monday by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Melson said he wasn’t attempting to shield his agency from its share of the blame. He acknowledged an instance in which his agents failed to intercept high-powered weapons when they could have.

“The deputy attorney general’s office wasn’t very happy with us” at the ATF, Melson said, “because they thought this was an admission that there were mistakes made. Well, there were some mistakes made.”

Justice Department officials denied they were stonewalling the congressional investigation. They said they were cooperating and had been providing thousands of pages of documents and other material to investigators.

“Any notion that the department has failed to cooperate with the investigation is simply not based in fact,” said Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokeswoman. She added that the department’s inspector general’s office was reviewing the Fast and Furious operation.

“The department, like the committee, is interested in determining whether Operation Fast and Furious was appropriately handled,” Schmaler said.

The intent of Fast and Furious was to allow illegal straw purchasers to buy guns so ATF agents could follow the weapons and ferret out gun-smuggling routes into Mexico. But many of the approximately 1,700 weapons eluded tracing - some even before they were shipped over the border.

Nearly 200 of the weapons were later found at crime scenes in Mexico (prompting harsh complaints and lawasuit threats from Mexico) and two were recovered at the scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent’s murder in Arizona last December.

Melson said the Justice Department repeatedly thwarted his attempts to tell investigators about the failures of Fast and Furious, which was run out of the ATF’s Phoenix field office. When the ATF reassigned managers in Phoenix, he said, “the department resisted” his offer to tell Congress about the changes. Melson said he was told not to issue any news releases about Fast and Furious and was instructed not to brief rank-and-file ATF agents about the growing scandal.

When Grassley sought to meet with Melson this year, the Justice Department blocked that interview too, Melson said. “This is really just poking [Grassley] in the eye,” Melson said he told Justice Department officials. “He’s going to get it through the back door anyway, so why are we aggravating this situation?”

Melson said he felt “very torn” when he learned after the operation went awry that some of the Mexican drug cartel leaders targeted in the program were paid informants for the FBI.

“Let me say that I am frustrated and disappointed in the way the whole thing has been handled, unfortunately,” he said.

 

There are 100 million internet users in China. Some of the sites they can’t access are BBC news, Amnesty International and Dalailama.com. A few weeks ago the few readers this site has in China were inexplicably blocked and still are. Most of them signed on while working or studying in the US before returning to China.

Obama has created a new position within his regime and has tried to hide it inside his communications department to avoid alerting the taxpaying public to this new expenditure. The title of this new position is the Director of Progressive Media & Online Response and it will be filled by a man named Jesse Lee.

What will Jesse Lee be responsible for in the Obama regime?

The Obama administration has created and staffed a new position tucked inside their communications shop for helping coordinate rapid response to unfavorable stories and fostering and improving relations with the progressive online community. Its timing raising issues of legality since it is clearly a reelection move having nothing to do with the nation. Why critics say are taxpayers funding this latter day Reichsfuehrer Hermann Goebels?

Propaganda control, that’s what this is. It certainly seems as if Lee and his minions will be scouring the internet for anti-Obama writings and will then “coordinate” a response to those stories using a network of progressive bloggers to harass and intimidate people who dare to speak ill of Dear Leader.

Lee’s wife is a top official at Moveon.org and was the promoter of the group’s notorious 2007 NYT ad attacking Gen. David H. Petraeus who is the new CIA Director calling him “General Betray Us”. The Senate overwhelmingly passed a measure condemning MoveOn.org for that newspaper ad. The measure passed in a 72-25 vote with none of the then Presidential candidates voting for it - most notably Obama nor Hillary voted to condemn the disgraceful, libelous ad.

American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first-class.

China’s military just unveiled a new unmanned aerial vehicle that Beijing claims rivals the U.S. strategic Global Hawk, long-range, high-altitude drone.

Official state media and military blogs said the Chengdu Xianglong, or Soaring Dragon, UAV completed high-speed taxi tests in October 2008.

Photos of the drone reveal that the UAV has diamond-shaped wings.

In 2006 at China’s Zhuhai Air Show, China displayed a similar model, also called as Xianglong, indicating possible competition to produce high-altitude, long-duration drones for strategic reconnaissance.

China’s Global Times said the new drone would make the United States and Korea “be vigilant” in the face of China’s military technology.

The report said the drone would have reconnaissance and strike capabilities.

Some reports suggest the drone could eventually be used to carry China’s new long-range anti-ship missiles greatly extending their range.

An internal Chinese document disclosed by the Washington Times in 2008 revealed China was working on advanced unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as part of a strategy to combine civilian and military technology in weapons and nonmilitary equipment.

The document labeled “National Defense Science and Technology Industry Military and Civilian Dual-Use Research and Development Special Project,” said the goal of the project is to produce a high-altitude, low-speed, long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle in two years.

The state-run company in charge of the program is a major Chinese weapons manufacturer, the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp. (CASIC).

According to the document, civilian uses will include aerial exploration, air-to-ground monitoring and other scientific work. Military applications for the UAV are outlined as “military aerial inspection and detection, electronic warfare and other missions.”

China has purchased Israeli Harpy anti-radar drones that home in on enemy radar with an explosive charge. The drone missiles were first detected by U.S. intelligence agencies deployed near Taiwan in the 1990s.

China also has displayed scale models of planned UAVs at arms shows, including a drone that looks similar to the U.S. jet-powered long-range Global Hawk.

The Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Block 10 Global Hawk is currently supporting the U.S. Air Force in the global war on terrorism. During 2006, two air systems logged more than 8,000 combat hours conducting intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. The Global Hawks are operated overseas by USAF pilots from a mission control element stationed at Beale Air Force Base in Northern California. A launch and recovery element and a combined USAF and Northrop Grumman team are forward deployed with the air systems. The Global Hawk is equipped with electro-optical, infrared and synthetic aperture radar sensors to provide high-quality real-time imagery.

Global Hawk’s autonomous high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) flight characteristics are proven. The air vehicle flies at altitudes up to 65,000 feet for up to 35 hours at speeds approaching 340 knots. It can image an area the size of the state of Illinois in just one mission.

The cockroach is the fastest critter on 6 legs covering a meter a second. The world’s termites outweigh the world’s humans 10 to 1!