U.S. Special Forces: 133 Countries Down, 17 to Go?
July 19th, 2018Via: Tom Dispatch:
None of this should be surprising, since in Africa and across the rest of the planet America’s Special Operations forces (SOF) are regularly engaged in a wide-ranging set of missions including special reconnaissance and small-scale offensive actions, unconventional warfare, counterterrorism, hostage rescue, and security force assistance (that is, organizing, training, equipping, and advising foreign troops). And every day, almost everywhere, U.S. commandos are involved in various kinds of training.
Unless they end in disaster, most missions remain in the shadows, unknown to all but a few Americans. And yet last year alone, U.S. commandos deployed to 149 countries — about 75% of the nations on the planet. At the halfway mark of this year, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM or SOCOM), America’s most elite troops have already carried out missions in 133 countries. That’s nearly as many deployments as occurred during the last year of the Obama administration and more than double those of the final days of George W. Bush’s White House.
Putin Claimed Associates of Financier William F. Browder Funneled $400 Million to Clinton Campaign [???]
July 19th, 2018Update: Putin Now Says the Amount Was $400,000
Via: The Intercept:
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, dashed the hopes of conspiracy theorists across America on Tuesday by withdrawing the startling claim he made the day before in Helsinki, that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had received $400 million in donations from investors accused of tax evasion in Russia.
What he had intended to say, according to a Russian government spokesperson, was that business associates of the U.S.-born investor William Browder had donated $400,000 to Clinton’s campaign. (According to public campaign finance records, that figure also appears to be inflated.)
Alexander Kurennoi, a spokesperson for Russia’s prosecutor general, told reporters that Putin stood by his demand that the United States should make Browder, and a number of former American diplomats and intelligence officers described as his accomplices in a criminal plot, available for questioning.
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Via: NPR:
For instance, we can bring up Mr. Browder in this particular case. Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over one and a half billion dollars in Russia. They never paid any taxes, neither in Russia nor in the United States and yet the money escaped the country, they were transferred to the United States.
They sent a huge amount of money – 400 million – as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton.
Well, that’s their personal case, it might have been legal, the contribution itself, but the way the money was earned was illegal.
So we have a solid reason to believe that some intelligence officers accompanied and guided these transactions. So we have an interest of questioning them. That could be a first step and we can also extend it. Options abound.
Pentagon Sees Quantum Computing as Key Weapon for War in Space
July 19th, 2018Disclosure: I am long Quantum Resistant Ledger (QRL).
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I had not heard of quantum technologies being applied to inertial navigation systems before.
Check out this 2014 piece from New Scientist:
IN 2016 a British submarine will slip its moorings and set sail under the guidance of the quantum world. The navigation system it will be testing should record the vessel’s position with 1000 times more accuracy than anything before.
If successful, the system, known as quantum positioning, could be miniaturised for use in aircraft, trains, cars and even cellphones. This would provide a backup navigation tool in cities’ concrete canyons, or in autonomous vehicles, where a loss of GPS signal can be dangerous.
GPS doesn’t work underwater, so submarines navigate using accelerometers to register every twist and turn of a vessel after it submerges and loses its last positioning fix. But this isn’t very accurate.
“Today, if a submarine goes a day without a GPS fix we’ll have a navigation drift of the order of a kilometre when it surfaces,” says Neil Stansfield at the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down. “A quantum accelerometer will reduce that to just 1 metre.”
To create the supersensitive quantum accelerometers, Stansfield’s team was inspired by the Nobel-prizewinning discovery that lasers can trap and cool a cloud of atoms placed in a vacuum to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Once chilled, the atoms achieve a quantum state that is easily perturbed by an outside force – and another laser beam can then be used to track them. This looks out for any changes caused by a perturbation, which are then used to calculate the size of the outside force.
The DSTL team wants this set-up to be usable in the real-world setting of a submarine, where the size of the force would correspond to the movements as the sub swings around in the sea.
And more recently: ‘Quantum radio’ may aid communications and mapping indoors, underground and underwater.
Via: SpaceNews:
Top Pentagon official Michael Griffin sat down a few weeks ago with Air Force scientists at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to discuss the future of quantum computing in the U.S. military. Griffin, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, has listed quantum computers and related applications among the Pentagon’s must-do R&D investments.
Quantum computing is one area where the Pentagon worries that it is playing catchup while China continues to leap ahead. The technology is being developed for many civilian applications and the military sees it as potentially game-changing for information and space warfare.
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Artificial intelligence algorithms, highly secure encryption for communications satellites and accurate navigation that does not require GPS signals are some of the most coveted capabilities that would be aided by quantum computing.
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Quantum clocks are viewed as a viable alternative to GPS in scenarios that require perfect synchronization across multiple weapons systems and aircraft, for example, said Hayduk. “We’re looking at GPS-like precision in denied environments,” he said. “It often takes several updates to GPS throughout the day to synchronize platforms. We want to be able to move past that so if we are in a denied environment we can still stay synchronized.”
Baking Soda for Inflammation
July 19th, 2018Via: Lew Rockwell:
Researchers at the Medical College of Georgia have discovered a nerve center in a cell layer in the spleen that controls the immune response and therefore inflammation throughout the body. Given that virtually all chronic age-related disease involves inflammation (called inflammaging), this discovery is of monumental significance and has widespread application for virtually every organ and tissue in the body as the spleen is not only an abdominal organ that is involved in the recycling of old blood cells but is also a key part of the human immune system.
The striking part of this discovery is that autoimmune reactions responsible for chronic inflammation throughout the body were quelled by consumption of two grams (~half a teaspoon) of baking soda in water for two weeks in healthy humans. Researchers say baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) calms the immune response in the spleen and has a system-wide effect.
The United States of Arms
July 19th, 2018Via: Will Geary:
The United States of Arms from Will Geary on Vimeo.
U.S. weapons exports from 1950 to 2017. Data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's Arms Transfers Database. Units are expressed in trend indicator values (TIV). Each dot on the map = one TIV. Visualization by Will Geary.
Can You Name a Country?
July 19th, 2018Via: YouTube – Jimmy Kimmel Live:
San Francisco: Non-Citizens Legally Register to Vote in San Francisco School Elections
July 19th, 2018Via: Sacramento Bee:
San Francisco began registering non-citizens, including undocumented immigrants, to register to vote Monday in the November election for the city school board, reported The San Francisco Chronicle.
The move follows passage of a 2016 ballot measure by San Francisco voters opening school elections to non-citizens who are over the age of 18, city residents and have children under age 19, reported the publication.
“This is no-brainer legislation,” Hillary Ronen, a San Francisco supervisor, told the Chronicle. “Why would we not want our parents invested in the education of their children?”
“We want to give immigrants the right to vote,” Norman Yee, also a county supervisor, told KGO.
Pentagon Working on Neural Interface
July 18th, 2018Via: NextGov:
The idea of humans controlling machines with their minds has spun off sci-fi blockbusters like “Pacific Rim” and entire subgenres of foreign film, but while today skyscraper-sized fighting robots exist only on the big screen, the Pentagon is building technology that could one day make them a reality.
Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is selecting teams to develop a “neural interface” that would both allow troops to connect to military systems using their brainwaves and let those systems transmit back information directly to users’ brains.
Japan’s Increasing Stockpile of Plutonium
July 17th, 2018Via: Channel News Asia:
Japan has amassed enough plutonium to make 6,000 atomic bombs as part of a programme to fuel its nuclear plants, but concern is growing that the stockpile is vulnerable to terrorists and natural disasters.
Japan has long been the world’s only non-nuclear-armed country with a programme to reprocess spent nuclear fuel from its power plants into plutonium.
On Tuesday (Jul 17), a decades-old deal with the United States which allows Japan to reprocess plutonium was renewed, but the pact can be terminated by either side with just six months’ notice.
Plutonium reprocessing is meant to create a new and emissions-free fuel source for resource-poor Japan, but the size of its stockpile has started to attract criticism, even from allies.
Plutonium can be used to create nuclear weapons. Although Japan has vowed the material would never be used for military purposes, it has now amassed vastly more plutonium than it can use, since many of its nuclear plants are still offline after the 2011 Fukushima disaster.
Experts warn the growing stockpile could be dangerous in case of a natural disaster, like the earthquake and tsunami that set off the Fukushima meltdown, and is also an attractive target for terrorists.
They also fear the reserve could encourage other regional powers, including China, to press for a similar reprocessing capability, boosting the amount of weaponisable plutonium in Asia.
Potential DNA Damage from CRISPR Has Been ‘Seriously Underestimated’
July 17th, 2018Via: STAT News:
From the earliest days of the CRISPR-Cas9 era, scientists have known that the first step in how it edits genomes — snipping DNA — creates an unholy mess: Cellular repairmen frantically try to fix the cuts by throwing random chunks of DNA into the breach and deleting other random bits. Research published on Monday suggests that’s only the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg: CRISPR-Cas9 can cause significantly greater genetic havoc than experts thought, the study concludes, perhaps enough to threaten the health of patients who would one day receive CRISPR-based therapy.
The results come hard on the heels of two studies that identified a related issue: Some CRISPR’d cells might be missing a key anti-cancer mechanism and therefore be able to initiate tumors.
The DNA damage found in the new study included deletions of thousands of DNA bases, including at spots far from the edit. Some of the deletions can silence genes that should be active and activate genes that should be silent, including cancer-causing genes.
