TBR News June 25, 2019

Jun 25 2019

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. June 25, 2019:

“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.

When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.

I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.

He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.

He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.

His latest business is to re-institute a universal draft in America.

He wants to do this to remove tens of thousands of unemployed young Americans from the streets so they won’t come together and fight him.

Commentary for June 25:”I see another woman has come forth with stories about Fat Donald trying to rape her. With what? Among those who know, he is known as Shrimp Dick Don. Men who go around groping and fondling women in public and bragging about it are very often Closet Queens and enough said on that subject.The Iranians say they won’t deal with Trump because he lies. What a shock! Really? Tomorrow, he will be threatening Portugal with sanctions and possible invasion and the day after that, Madagascar or Malta. Depends on what sort of bovine feces the lunatic Bolton feeds him for breakfast.”

 

The Table of Contents

  • NATO calls on Russia to destroy new missile, warns of response
  • Iran says U.S. sanctions on Khamenei mean end of diplomacy
  • Trump: War President or Anti-Interventionist?
  • Iran Denies US Cyber-Attacks Had Any Effect
  • Intense heat wave hits northern Europe
  • Spy-Satellite Images Reveal How Climate Change Is Rapidly Melting the Himalayan Glaciers
  • Report Looks at Himalayan Glaciers and Water Supply
  • Encyclopedia of American Loons
  • The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
  • The Sabotage Column: Revenge is sweet and flavors all our dealings

 

 

NATO calls on Russia to destroy new missile, warns of response

June 25, 2019

by Robin Emmott

Reuters

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – NATO urged Russia on Tuesday to destroy a new missile before an August deadline and save a treaty that keeps land-based nuclear warheads out of Europe or face a more determined alliance response in the region. NATO defense ministers will discuss on Wednesday their next steps if Moscow keeps the missile system that the United States says would allow short-notice nuclear attacks on Europe and break the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF).

“We call on Russia to take the responsible path, but we have seen no indication that Russia intends to do so,” Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told a news conference. “We will need to respond,” Stoltenberg said.

He declined to go into more details. But diplomats said defense ministers will consider more flights over Europe by U.S. warplanes capable of carrying nuclear warheads, more military training and the repositioning U.S. sea-based missiles.

The United States and its NATO allies want Russia to destroy its 9M729/SSC-8 nuclear-capable cruise missile system, which Moscow has so far refused to do. It denies any violations of the INF treaty, accusing Washington of seeking an arms race.

Without a deal, the United States has said it will withdraw from the INF treaty on Aug. 2, removing constraints on its own ability to develop nuclear-capable, medium-range missiles.

The dispute has deepened a fissure in East-West ties that severely deteriorated after Russia’s seizure of Crimea and its involvement in Syria.

“ALL OPTIONS ON TABLE”

Russia warned on Monday of a stand-off comparable to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis if the United States were to deploy land-based missile systems near Russia’s borders, but Stoltenberg said there were no such plans.

U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison told reporters that at present, Washington was only considering conventional, not nuclear weapons, in any possible response.

“All options are on the table but we are looking at conventional systems, that’s important for our European allies to know,” she said.

European allies are also worried about the deployment of U.S. nuclear missiles in Europe, as happened in the 1980s, and being caught up in nuclear competition between Moscow and Washington.

The INF treaty, negotiated by then-President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and ratified by the U.S. Senate, eliminated the medium-range missile arsenals of the world’s two biggest nuclear powers and reduced their ability to launch a nuclear strike at short notice.

The treaty bans land-based missiles with a range between 500 km and 5,500km (300-3400 miles).

Reporting by Robin Emmott; Editing by Andrew Heavens

 

Iran says U.S. sanctions on Khamenei mean end of diplomacy

June 25, 2019

by Parisa Hafezi

Reuters

DUBAI (Reuters) – New U.S. sanctions against Iran’s supreme leader and foreign minister have closed off diplomacy, Iran said on Tuesday, blaming the United States for abandoning the only route to peace just days after the two foes came within minutes of conflict.

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing sanctions on Monday against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior figures. Sanctions against Foreign Minister Mohmmad Javad Zarif are expected later this week.

The moves came after Iran shot down a U.S. drone last week and Trump called off a retaliatory air strike minutes before impact, which would have been the first time the United States had bombed Iran in decades of hostility between them.

Trump said he decided at the last minute that too many people would die.

“Imposing useless sanctions on Iran’s Supreme Leader and the commander of Iran’s diplomacy is the permanent closure of the path of diplomacy,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said on Twitter.

“Trump’s desperate administration is destroying the established international mechanisms for maintaining world peace and security,” Mousavi tweeted.

In a televised address, President Hassan Rouhani said sanctions against Khamenei would have no practical impact because the cleric had no assets abroad.

Rouhani, a pragmatist who won two elections on promises to open Iran up to the world, described the U.S. moves as desperate and called the White House “mentally retarded” – an insult Iranian officials have used in the past about Trump but a departure from Rouhani’s own comparatively measured tone.

Rouhani and his cabinet run Iran’s day-to-day affairs, while Khamenei, in power since 1989, is Iran’s ultimate authority.

“The White House actions mean it is mentally retarded,” Rouhani said. “Tehran’s strategic patience does not mean we have fear.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the situation around Iran was developing toward a dangerous scenario, RIA news agency reported.

“OPEN DOOR”

Trump’s hawkish national security adviser, John Bolton, visiting Israel, repeated earlier offers to hold talks, as long as Iran was willing to go beyond the terms of a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers which Trump abandoned last year.

“The president has held the door open to real negotiations to completely and verifiably eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons program, its pursuit of ballistic missile delivery systems, its support for international terrorism and other malign behavior worldwide,” Bolton said in Jerusalem. “All that Iran needs to do is to walk through that open door.”

The United States has imposed crippling economic sanctions against Iran since last year, when Trump withdrew from an agreement between Tehran and world powers to curb Iran’s nuclear program in return for the lifting of sanctions.

The crisis has escalated sharply since last month, when the Trump administration tightened the sanctions, ordering all countries to halt purchases of Iranian oil.

That has effectively starved the Iranian economy of the main source of revenue Tehran uses to import food for its 81 million people, and left Iran’s pragmatic faction with no benefits to show for its nuclear agreement.

Washington says the 2015 agreement reached under Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama did not go far enough because it is not permanent and does not cover issues beyond the nuclear program, such as missiles and regional behavior.

Iran says there is no point negotiating with Washington when it has abandoned a deal that was already reached.

The downing of the U.S. drone – which Iran says was over its air space and the United States says was international skies – was the culmination of weeks of rising tensions that had begun to take on a military dimension.

The United States and some regional allies have blamed Iran for attacks on tankers in the Gulf, which Tehran denies. Washington’s European allies have repeatedly warned both sides of the danger that a small mistake could lead to war.

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev came to Iran’s support, saying the drone was in Iranian airspace when it was shot down and that the evidence on the tanker attacks was of poor quality and unprofessional, not enough to draw conclusions.

During a visit to Jerusalem, Patrushev also said it was unacceptable to portray Iran as a threat to international security and called for restraint to help defuse the situation.

Washington says forcing Iran to the table is the purpose of its sanctions. Tehran has said it is willing to talk if the United States lifts the new sanctions first, although Tuesday’s statements appear to toughen that stance.

Trump is leaving a path open to diplomacy with Iran but Tehran would be making a mistake if it interprets his restraint over the downing of a drone as weakness, U.S. disarmament ambassador Robert Wood told a conference in Geneva.

“We will not initiate a conflict against Iran, nor do we intend to deny Iran the right to defend its airspace but if Iran continues to attack us, our response will be decisive,” he said.

U.S. officials have launched a diplomatic campaign to rally their allies in the face of the escalating crisis. Foreign Secretary Mike Pompeo jetted to the Middle East on Monday to meet leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Gulf Arab states that favor the toughest possible line against Iran.

The U.S. envoy on Iran, Brian Hook, is visiting Europe, where he is likely to get a frostier reception from allies who support the nuclear deal. They believe Trump’s decision to quit the accord was a mistake that has strengthened Iran’s hardline faction, weakened its pragmatists and endangered regional peace.

Iran says it still aims to comply with the nuclear deal, but cannot do so indefinitely unless it receives some benefits. It has given European countries until July 8 to find a way to shield its economy from U.S. sanctions, or else it will enrich uranium to levels banned under the deal.

Reporting by Parisa Hafezi; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Jon Boyle/Mark Heinrich

 

 

Trump: War President or Anti-Interventionist?

June 25, 2019

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Visualizing 150 Iranian dead from a missile strike that he had ordered, President Donald Trump recoiled and canceled the strike, a brave decision and defining moment for his presidency.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence had signed off on the strike on Iran as the right response to Tehran’s shootdown of a U.S. Global Hawk spy plane over the Gulf of Oman.

The U.S. claims the drone was over international waters. Tehran says it was in Iranian territory. But while the loss of a $100 million drone is no small matter, no American pilot was lost, and retaliating by killing 150 Iranians would appear to be a disproportionate response.

Good for Trump. Yet, all weekend, he was berated for chickening out and imitating President Barack Obama. U.S. credibility, it was said, has taken a big hit and must be restored with military action.

By canceling the strike, the president also sent a message to Iran: We’re ready to negotiate. Yet, given the irreconcilable character of our clashing demands, it is hard to see how the U.S. and Iran get off this road we are on, at the end of which a military collision seems almost certain.

Consider the respective demands.

Monday, the president tweeted: “The U.S. request for Iran is very simple – No Nuclear Weapons and No Further Sponsoring of Terror!”

But Iran has no nuclear weapons, has never had nuclear weapons, and has never even produced bomb-grade uranium.

According to our own intelligence agencies in 2007 and 2011, Tehran did not even have a nuclear weapons program.

Under the 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA, the only way Iran could have a nuclear weapons program would be in secret, outside its known nuclear facilities, all of which are under constant U.N. inspection.

Where is the evidence that any such secret program exists?

And if it does, why does America not tell the world where Iran’s secret nuclear facilities are located and demand immediate inspections?

“No further sponsoring of terror,” Trump says.

But what does that mean?

As the major Shiite power in a Middle East divided between Sunni and Shiite, Iran backs the Houthi rebels in Yemen’s civil war, Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon, Alawite Bashar Assad in Syria, and the Shiite militias in Iraq who helped us stop ISIS’s drive to Baghdad.

In his 12 demands, Pompeo virtually insisted that Iran abandon these allies and capitulate to their Sunni adversaries and rivals.

Not going to happen. Yet, if these demands are nonnegotiable, to be backed up by sanctions severe enough to choke Iran’s economy to death, we will be headed for war.

No more than North Korea is Iran going to yield to U.S. demands that it abandon what Iran sees as vital national interests.

As for the U.S. charge that Iran is “destabilizing” the Middle East, it was not Iran that invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, overthrew the Gadhafi regime in Libya, armed rebels to overthrow Assad in Syria, or aided and abetted the Saudis’ intervention in Yemen’s civil war.

Iran, pushed to the wall, its economy shrinking as inflation and unemployment are rising, is approaching the limits of its tolerance.

And as Iran suffers pain, it is saying, other nations in the Gulf will endure similar pain, as will the USA. At some point, collisions will produce casualties and we will be on the up escalator to war.

Yet, what vital interest of ours does Iran today threaten?

Trump, with his order to stand down on the missile strike on Iran, signaled that he wanted a pause in the confrontation.

Still, it needs to be said: The president himself authorized the steps that have brought us to this peril point.

Trump pulled out of and trashed Obama’s nuclear deal. He imposed the sanctions that are now inflicting something close to unacceptable if not intolerable pain on Iran. He had the Islamic Revolutionary Guard declared a terrorist organization. He sent the Abraham Lincoln carrier task force and B-52s to the Gulf region.

If war is to be avoided, either Iran is going to have to capitulate, or the U.S. is going to have to walk back its maximalist position.

And who would Trump name to negotiate with Tehran for the United States?

The longer the sanctions remain in place and the deeper they bite, the greater the likelihood Iran will respond to our economic warfare with its own asymmetric warfare. Has the president decided to take that risk?

We appear to be at a turning point in the Trump presidency.

Does he want to run in 2020 as the president who led us into war with Iran, or as the anti-interventionist president who began to bring U.S. troops home from that region that has produced so many wars?

Perhaps Congress, the branch of government designated by the Constitution to decide on war, should instruct President Trump as to the conditions under which he is authorized to take us to war with Iran

 

 

Iran Denies US Cyber-Attacks Had Any Effect

Official Boasts of Internet Defense System 

June 24, 2019

by Dave DeCamp

AntiWar

An Iranian official responded to claims of a successful U.S. cyberattack on Monday. “The media are asking about the veracity of the alleged cyberattack against Iran. No successful attack has been carried out by them, although they are making a lot of effort,” telecommunications minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi said on Twitter on Monday.

U.S. media outlets reported on Saturday that cyber-attacks were launched against Iran’s rocket and missile controls.

Yahoo News, citing two former U.S. intelligence officials, reported on Friday that Cyber Command launched a retaliatory digital strike against an Iranian spy group that the U.S. claims was involved in the bombing of two oil tankers.

The Washington Post also reported on the incident, claiming the cyberattacks had crippled computers and disabled Iranian rocket launch systems.

Jahromi also mentioned the amount of cyberattacks Iran’s internet defense system stopped last year, “We foiled last year not one attack but 33 million attacks with Dejpha shield.”

 

 

Intense heat wave hits northern Europe

Record temperatures have begun in northern Europe this week, with authorities in Germany and France on alert. Experts have said heat waves are on the increase worldwide, further evidence of climate change.

June 25, 2019

DW

A searing heat wave has begun to spread across Europe, with Germany, France and Belgium experiencing extreme temperatures that are set to continue in the coming days.

In Germany, temperatures are expected to exceed 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday, topping the country’s previous June record of 38.2 degrees Celsius, set in Frankfurt in 1947.

Fire fighters braced for busy week

Climate researcher Andreas Marx has said that the lack of rain in much of the country, particularly in the north and east of the country, the site of much of Germany’s agriculture, could have disastrous consequences.

Forest fires are of particular concern for authorities in Germany, particularly in the northeast. Local residents were asked to keep windows and doors closed in Lieberoser Heidi — southeast of Berlin — while emergency services deal with a fire which broke out on Monday and spread to an area of about 10 hectares (25 acres), the size of 140 soccer pitches. It is expected to take a few days to put out, reported Berlin public broadcaster Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg.

‘We must be vigilant’: Macron

Meanwhile, French national weather agency Meteo-France predicted that the hot weather could produce temperatures of up to 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), while German agencies suggested the heat may break records.

“It’s unprecedented because it’s hitting so early, in June. We haven’t seen this since 1947,” said Emmanuel Demael from the French meteorological agency on Monday.

French President Emmanuel Macron has urged for people to be extra vigilant in the coming days.

“As you know, at times like these, sick people, pregnant women, infants and elderly people are the most vulnerable. So we must be vigilant with them and have prevention measures in place in order to intervene as quickly as possible,” he said.

Health Minister Agnes Buzyn said Monday that France was well prepared, but added that people still needed to be wary. “When people are fragile, even when everything is organized, there’s always a higher mortality rate,” she said.

Heat waves on the increase

Scientists say heat waves of this magnitude are on the increase in Europe

Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said “monthly heat records all over the globe occur five times as often today as they would in a stable climate.”

 

Spy-Satellite Images Reveal How Climate Change Is Rapidly Melting the Himalayan Glaciers

June 20, 2019

by Carolyn Kormann

The New Yorker

Over the last several years, on Mt. Everest, veteran alpine guides have reported seeing an increasing number of human skeletons and frozen corpses. One guide named Gelje Sherpa told the Times that when he first summited, in 2008, he found three bodies, and during a recent season he found six. “They often haunt me,” he said. The bones and preserved bodies of climbers who didn’t make it to the summit, revealed as the peak’s glaciers recede, are, for some, more than enough evidence that warming temperatures are melting the Himalayan glaciers at an increasingly quick clip. A new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, added a significant layer of proof, finding that, over the past forty years, the average rate that the Himalayas have lost ice has doubled. While the paper’s findings have dire consequences for the millions of people who live just below Himalayan glaciers, they are also vitally important in aiding officials and engineers tasked with planning for the region’s entire population of 1.6 billion people, all of whom rely on the rivers that these glaciers feed.

The study’s lead author, Joshua Maurer, a doctoral student in earth sciences at Columbia University, used recently declassified spy-satellite images from the nineteen-seventies to observe how the volume of the region’s largest glaciers has changed. Scientists had already documented the rate at which the Himalayas had lost ice mass in the course of the twenty-first century using more sophisticated satellite imagery. Maurer developed computer software that created three-dimensional images from the overlapping pictures, allowing him and his colleagues to digitally “walk” across the glaciers’ surfaces as they appeared in 1975. In the end, they found that the six hundred and fifty largest glaciers across India, China, Nepal, and Bhutan, which together represent fifty-five per cent of the region’s total ice volume, have lost the equivalent of a vertical foot and a half of ice each year this century. That’s roughly twice as much as what they lost from 1975 to 2000, when temperatures were, on average, 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit cooler. (Previous studies that looked at melt since the seventies, like Maurer’s, found similar results, but with much less precision and over a smaller area.) “The correlation we observed between rising air temperatures and acceleration of glacial melt really highlights how vulnerable these glaciers are to climate change,” Maurer told me by phone on Monday. “As temperatures continue to rise, ice loss is going to continue to accelerate.”

Other factors can affect the rate of glaciers’ retreat, such as black carbon, from nearby power plants, or changes in precipitation. But Maurer’s analysis found that warming temperatures seemed to be the factor that overwhelmed others. “With such a homogeneous pattern of ice loss over such a large region that’s also climatically complex, really the only climate driver that makes any sense is atmospheric warming,” he told me. To further test that interpretation, they compiled temperature data for the same timespan from weather stations all over the Himalayas, and ran the data through computer simulations. “We show that the amount of ice loss that we see falls right in the range of what we would expect if these measured air temperatures were the primary drivers of the ice loss. It’s just very good agreement.” If the emission of black carbon, or a decrease in precipitation, were the primary drivers of ice loss, he said, there would be a much more variable spatial pattern of ice loss, because those factors are much more localized.

Maurer’s study builds on an extensive body of research on Himalayan glaciers—sometimes called the Third Pole, for the amount of ice the mountains hold, a quarter of which has already disappeared as temperatures have become hotter in the last century. Scientists who study glaciers and climate change have generally approached the subject at much longer timescales, relying on excavated ice cores from ancient glaciers, which, in their frozen layers of ice and air bubbles, contain evidence of earth’s climate going back tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years. “Usually we’re using the geologic record globally to see how the cryosphere responded to the changing climate in the past,” Joerg Schaefer, a research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and one of Maurer’s co-authors, said. “It always bothered me that, if you look at the geological record, glaciers look like they respond very coherently, as an army, to climate change. But then, if you look into the field of glaciology, where people look at daily, weekly, monthly changes, it really gets complicated, everything seems to be out of phase.”

Based on many other studies, the suspicion already had been that temperature is the main climate driver melting glaciers. “Of course, if it gets warmer, ice melts, we knew that,” Schaefer said. But he would have been happy if the study showed that melting is much more variable, and more strongly impacted by other factors. “We were obviously hoping that for the environment, and the livelihood of society, that it would be a more local pattern,” he said. “Instead, this means that just everywhere these glaciers will follow the temperature curve.” Schaefer added, “Of all the possibilities, that’s the worst result.”

A major report on the state of the Himalayas—“Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment: Climate Change, Sustainability and People”—was published last February and projected that, even in the best-case scenario, if the world rapidly decarbonized and was carbon neutral by 2050, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the Himalayas are very likely to lose a third of their total ice, partly because the peaks are warming at a faster rate than the global average. If things continue as they are now, they are likely to lose two-thirds of their total ice. For a region already plagued by poverty, inequality, and discrimination, that eventuality is catastrophic, and much of the report was an attempt to thoroughly examine all the effects that the glaciers’ retreat will have on agriculture, ecology, and energy, especially hydropower. Densely populated and quickly developing downstream areas in China, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are likely to face even more severe water crises than what they’ve already seen. The report also provides some solutions, including necessary coöperation between China, Nepal, and India on early-warning disaster systems for expected glacial-lake-outburst floods—a type of risk to which Maurer’s new study provides helpful clarifications.

Scientists have long known about the trouble that rapidly increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases would bring. But they have, in the past, stumbled to properly communicate that trouble to the public—especially in complex climates like the world’s highest mountain range. In the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth climate assessment, some scientists made a bad error, predicting that all Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. That has haunted the field ever since. Tobias Bolch, a glaciologist at the University of St. Andrews and one of the lead authors of February’s Hindu Kush Himalayan Assessment, was slightly unnerved by the new paper’s bold message. “I would have liked that the authors would have been more cautious with the main message—‘Glacier ice loss rates across the Himalayas have doubled over the past four decades’—as we do not want other false messages,” he said, recalling the I.P.C.C. error. Bolch noted that, although the evidence is clear that, over all, ice loss has accelerated significantly, there is some degree of uncertainty in the data as to whether this acceleration has fully doubled in speed.

Schaefer told me that people often ask him when the Himalayas are going to be ice-free. “It’s a little bit like asking, When are the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets gonna be gone?” he said. (Greenland’s summer heat is already weeks ahead of average, breaking the record for such extensive melting of its ice sheet at an early date.) “They are interesting questions, but they are not that relevant for us. If the ice sheets are gone, we are toast anyway. We will be gone way before.” The relevant question, he continued, “is what is the societal impact of the doubling in speed of these Himalayan glaciers’ retreats. We know, of course, that it’s really bad, but at least now we have a study that gives us a decently robust point of view of what’s actually going to happen as the temperature rapidly increases.”

 

Report Looks at Himalayan Glaciers and Water Supply

NAS

Himalayan Glaciers: Climate Change, Water Resources, and Water Security concludes that, although scientific evidence shows that most glaciers in South Asia’s Hindu Kush Himalayan region are retreating, the consequences for the region’s water supply are unclear.  The Hindu Kush Himalayan region is the location of several of Asia’s great river systems, which provide water for drinking, irrigation, and other uses for about 1.5 billion people.

Recent studies show that at lower elevations, glacial retreat is unlikely to cause significant changes in water availability over the next several decades, but other factors, including groundwater depletion and increasing human water use, could have a greater impact. Higher elevation areas could experience altered water flow in some river basins if current rates of glacial retreat continue, but shifts in the location, intensity, and variability of rain and snow due to climate change will likely have a greater impact on regional water supplies.

Key Findings

##The meltwater from glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, which covers eight countries across Asia, supplements several great river systems such as the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra. Scientific evidence shows that most glaciers in the Himalayan region are retreating, leading to concerns that, over time, normal glacier melt will not be able to contribute to the region’s water supply each year.

##Glaciers in the eastern and central regions of the Himalayas appear to be retreating at rates comparable to glaciers in other parts of the world. In the western Himalayas, glaciers are more stable and may even be increasing in size. There is uncertainty in projections of future changes in precipitation, but shifts in the location and intensity of snow and rain could also impact the rate of glacial retreat.

##Variations in climate; in the timing, amount, and type of precipitation; and in glacial behavior and dynamics across the vast Hindu Kush Himalayan region mean that it is challenging to determine exactly how retreating glaciers will affect water supply in each location. It is likely that the contribution of glacier meltwater to water supply in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region may have been overestimated in the past, for example by not differentiating between the contributions to water supply of meltwater from glaciers and meltwater from snow.

##Overall, retreating glaciers over the next several decades are unlikely to cause significant changes in water availability at lower elevations, which depend primarily on monsoon rains. However, for high elevation areas, current glacier retreat rates, if they continue, could alter streamflow in some basins. Assuming annual precipitation in the form of snow and freezing rain remains the same, the loss of water stored as glacial ice will likely not change the amount of meltwater that supplements rivers and streams each summer.

##Glacial meltwater can act as a buffer against the hydrologic impacts of a changing climate, such as drought. Thus, water stored as glacial ice could serve as the Himalayan region’s hydrologic insurance. Although retreating glaciers would provide more meltwater in the shorter term as the glacier shrinks, the loss of glacier “insurance” could become problematic over the longer term.

##Groundwater is an integral part of the Hindu Kush Himalayan region’s hydrology, although uncertainties about its contributions to water supply are great. It is clear that groundwater is already being depleted in many areas, with evidence that in the central Ganges Basin, overdraft of groundwater is likely to have an earlier and larger impact on water supplies than foreseeable changes in the supply of glacial meltwater.

##Social changes such as changing patterns of water use and water management decisions, are likely to have at least as much of an impact on water demand as environmental factors do on water supply. Many of the region’s river basins are already water stressed, and this water stress could intensify as populations grow. Water scarcity will likely affect the rural and urban poor most severely, as these groups have the least capacity to move to new locations as needed.

##It is predicted that the region will become increasingly urbanized as cities expand to absorb migrants in search of economic opportunities. As living standards and populations rise, water use will likely increase—for example, as more people eat diets rich in meat, more water will be needed for agricultural use. The effects of future climate change could further exacerbate water stress.

##Water resources management and the provision of clean water and sanitation is already a challenge in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region. The adequacy and effectiveness of existing water management institutions, which focus on natural hazards and disaster reduction, provides an indicator of how the region will likely cope with changes in water supply.

##Although the history of international river disputes suggests that cooperation is more likely than violent conflict, current political disputes in the region could complicate the process of reaching agreements on resource disputes. Changes in the availability of water resources could play an increasing role in political tensions, especially if existing water management institutions do not better account for the social, economic, and ecological complexities of the region.

##To effectively respond to the effects of climate change, water management systems will need to take account of the social, economic, and ecological complexities of the region. This means it will be important to expand research and monitoring programs to gather more detailed, consistent, and accurate data on demographics, water supply, demand, and scarcity.

Encyclopedia of American Loons

Paul Scalia

Paul Scalia – yes, his son – is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Courage apostolate and a wingnut fundamentalist. Scalia is, predictably, a staunch opponent of gay rights, and has argued at length that critics of homosexuality are currently being silenced and mistreated because people do not act the way such critics demand that they should act. Scalia does think, however, that it is unfortunate that his fellow critics occasionally lapse into using the expression “homosexual person” since according to Scalia, those people do not exist: “We should not predicate ‘homosexual’ of any person. That does a disservice to the dignity of the human person by collapsing personhood into sexual inclinations.” Nor is sexuality in general a matter of “orientation”, unless it is an orientation toward “the union of marriage”.

Courage International is the reparative therapy apostolate of the Catholic Church; it is, in other words, the whole business principle of Scalia’s organization that being gay “is not an immutable characteristic or identity,” as he puts it. Courage also operates Encourage, a support group for friends and family members who can’t cope with the thought of there being gay and lesbian Catholics.

Diagnosis: Yes, one of the baddies. Not surprisingly. And while Courage is less famous than, say, Exodus International used to be, they remain determined to cause real, tangible harm to real people.

Victor Martinez

Woody Martin’s “Blood of Jesus oil” is so daft it probably doesn’t even count as a scam, and doesn’t quite qualify him for an entry here. Victor Martinez is hardly a household name either, but he has some influence in UFO circles, and did for instance moderate the maillist that first broke the hilarious Project Serpo story, a poorly written science fiction story (and possibly intended as a hoax) about how a number of American astronauts visited the (fictional) planet Serpo in a spacecraft reverse engineered from the Roswell crash UFO in the 1950s by travelling 40 times the speed of light. (We’ve covered it before). Of course, many of the maillist’s subscribers, already on board with this kind of stuff, apparently accepted the story as detailing real events.

And Martinez himself is a true believer, who implores his readers not to be sidetracked by inconsistencies and nonsense in the story but rather focus on the bigger picture, “that twelve of our citizens from the United States of America embarked on a 13-year mission to live on another world. That’s where the focus should be – not on all of these petty, nit-picky details! [Like evidence, truth, coherence or physical possibility] That’s what everyone should be in awe of.” Awesomeness trumps veracity every time, apparently. Martinez trust the general veracity of the story because of the testimony of impeccable sources like Richard Doty, Whitley Strieber, who “claims to have met a surviving team member of Project Serpo in Florida,” and a number of conveniently anonymous source who ostensibly talked to an acquaintance of fellow UFO enthusiast Bill Ryan, who (the acquaintance) was “amazed that details were now being released” but doesn’t want his name revealed and would deny everything if asked. When your conspiracy is as far out as Project Serpo you’ll take the sources you can get; to Martinez the story is simply too amazing not to be true.

“Why the secrecy?” wonders Martinez – why is the government not willing to share the details of the mission with him and his followers? The answer, of course, is well withing reach, but we wager that Martinez will never figure it out. Instead, he is patiently waiting for “at least some major announcement regarding the UFO subject being made public;” some government person in power needs to step up since “most people need an authority figure to come out and say this-and-that […] because most people can’t think for themselves. In other words, they can’t weigh and evaluate the evidence on its own merits and come to a definitive conclusion on their own; they need someone to do it for them.

Diagnosis: Some people are indeed unable to “weigh and evaluate the evidence on its own merits”, but that obviously doesn’t tend to prevent them from coming “to a definitive conclusion on their own”. Martinez is at least relatively harmless.

The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations

June 25, 2019

by Dr. Peter Janney

On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.

Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.

Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.

After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.

The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.

When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..

A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.

The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.

Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks. ”

Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.

Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publication.

 

Conversation No. 13

Date:  Wednesday, May 8, 1996

Commenced:  9:54 AM CST

Concluded: 10:32 AM CST

RTC: Good morning, Gregory. Have you been reading about the resurrection of brother Colby?

GD: Good morning, Robert. Yes, I saw this piece of news yesterday but I was too busy to call you. I’m trying to finish up the translation of Mueller’s journals and when I get on a rush, I don’t let up. He floated…no some divers found him. Right?

RTC: As I understand it, yes. Oddly enough, they had searched the same place before but without success.

GD: Maybe they took him from a fishpond somewhere and planted him before he got too ripe.

RTC: It’s an odd case, Gregory. Here we have a man in his late ‘70s staying at his little summer place out on Rock Point, coming downstairs about eleven in the evening, putting on the computer and the television and then running outside in bad weather, jumping into his canoe and paddling out onto the river which was very rough about then what with the wind and rain. And, most interesting, he left his life belt behind. Bill always wore his vest when he went out in his canoe but he seems to have forgotten it. Careless.

GD: Getting old.

RTC: But no older.

GD: Can I do a scenario for you, Robert? Just to show you how really clever I am?

RTC: Why not?

GD: Some friends came to visit him a little earlier. Unannounced of course. Friendly talk, maybe a glass or two of wine and then poor Colby drank something that made him a little disoriented. Nothing to remain in the body afterwards, of course. Then I’ll bet they picked him up, took him out and put him in the boat they came in on, hooked the canoe up behind them with a painter and out onto the bounding main. Then into the nice cold water, unhitching the canoe and back to shore and the warmth of home and hearth. There was no mention of a hole in his head or missing body parts at all. A careless and confused old man out for a refreshing little trip and then tragedy strikes. I don’t think they’ve had time for a full post but I’ll just wager you they won’t find any cyanide or ricin in him. Another skillfully planned CIA wet action.

RTC: That’s an interesting analysis, Gregory. You haven’t been talking to anyone about this, have you?

GD: From that, I must have guessed right. The reports mentioned the computer and the bad weather and I put the rest together. I always loved jigsaw puzzles, Robert. In the summer, when Chicago got hot, we had no air conditioning in those days so we used to go up to Vilas County in upper Wisconsin to get cool. Nice summer house on a quiet lake. On the front screen porch, there were two large ping pong tables and boxes of very complex jigsaw puzzles. While everyone else was out swimming or fishing for the really delicious lake trout, I was on the porch for hours, putting the puzzles together. I love puzzles. On this one, the pieces were all there.

RTC: I told Kimmel once that you would have made a first class agent for us and he was outraged that I would even think of such sacrilege.

GD: I don’t disagree with you Robert. Kimmel once told me, seriously, that I suffered from the worst case of hubris he had ever seen. Do you know what I told him?

RTC: Were you rude?

GD: No, merely accurate. I told him that I had thought I was wrong about something once but found out later I was mistaken.

RTC: Delightful response, Gregory. And his?

GD: He was not amused, but I was. Anyway, the errant Colby has returned to the land of the living but in worse shape than when he left it.

RTC: Thank God for that.

GD: We can anticipate solemn statements from the White House, a weeping wife and black-suited friends and then off to the bone yard in a bronze box, tightly sealed lest eau d’Colby annoy people downwind. By now he probably smells like a big Camembert cheese. And soon forgotten by most. And from what you said, you won’t be going to the services.

RTC: I think not.

GD: But you do have your memories.

RTC: So do a lot of others. Perhaps we can discuss something more cheerful than the loss of a valued friend and freedom fighter, Gregory.

GD: How is the blessed box working?

RTC: The birds still flee but no ambulances at the door.

GD: Yes. Wait until valued secretary Mitzi Rumpleberger hangs herself in an electronically inspired fit of depression in the ladies’ lavatory with a pair of silk stockings.

RTC: The Ambassador would be more spectacular.

GD: His office is probably in the back. And one would hope he doesn’t wear silk stockings. Or a bra either.

RTC: Such imagery.

GD: If you don’t laugh, Robert, you will go crazy. People don’t realize that life is a huge practical joke that always has a bad ending. Like Brother Colby, but enough of forbidden topics. Someday, I will tell you how I nailed Pollard.

RTC: This is not another joke?

GD: Not at all.

RTC: I have some knowledge of this business, Gregory, and I would like to compare it to your own. Do go on.

GD: I knew a military collector when I was living in California. He used to collect SS items which was rather weird because he was Jewish. His father had been a host for a kiddie television show and after he and the mother got a divorce, she married a big cheese in the insurance business. Jack Beckett.

RTC: Transamerica Beckett?

GD: The same. They lived in Atherton in a gated house. I used to visit there from time to time and met Beckett a few times. A very decent, down to earth person, easy to talk to and I would say very honest. Did you know him?

RTC: I believe we knew him.

GD: He mentioned he knew Stansfield Turner so you must be right. Anyway, Abenheim, that’s his name, Donald Abenheim, had a fellow student from Stanford named Jay Pollard. Pollard used to come over and the two of them would war game and I sat in on a few sessions. Pollard was a very pleasant, smart fellow but a raging nebbish. A Walter Mitty type, if you know what I mean. Lived in a fantasy world of his own making. Pollard’s father was a dentist or something dull living in Ohio but Pollard was a downright fanatical Israeli supporter and he went on about working as a kibbutz guard, being an officer in the Mossad and so on. Obvious bullshit. It didn’t make him a bad person but he was a little hard to take at times. We never believed a word he said on that subject. Anyway, later, after Abenheim had graduated from Stanford, he told me Pollard had tried to get into your agency as an analyst but they discovered his Israeli lust and turned him down. Don told me that in their yearbook, Pollard put down that he was a major in the Mossad. But then he went to work for naval intelligence….

RTC: Naval Fleet Intelligence. Then he transferred over to the Anti-Terrorist Alert center of the NIS.

GD: The what?

RTC: Naval Investigative Service. They dealt with top secret military communications. Go on.

GD: When Don told me about this, I remarked that perhaps, given his attitudes, this was really not the place for Pollard to work.

RTC: In hindsight, you were perfectly right.

GD: So I pumped Abenheim about what Pollard was doing. Jay was in touch with him and they both had motor mouths. When Abenheim got specific, I suggested that he mention this to someone because he was fooling around with the national intelligence community but he only laughed at me.

RTC: And then what?

GD: Well, I thought about this and don’t forget I knew Pollard’s fanatic attitudes…I mean they were obsessive, believe me…so after stewing about this, I called up someone I knew who was connected with the Pacifica Foundation. He was a friend of Cap Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense. I told him all about Pollard and said that in my opinion, this was a man who should not have any access to secret governmental material dealing with anything in the Middle East. I made it a point to tell this fellow that if he couldn’t get Weinberger’s attention, I would take it to the press. Oh no, he said, give me some time. I did. He called me back in about a week and said he had passed the word along and begged me to keep quiet about it. Fair enough. Then we all know what happened.

RTC: Yes, we all do. So you were the “unidentified source.”

GD: Yes. Beats Mr. Sunshine.

RTC: Did you hear about what Weinberger did to Pollard?

GD: Not really.

RTC: Pollard cut a deal with the government for a lighter sentence but Weinberger hated him and got Wolf Blitzer to have an interview with Pollard and trick him into breaking his agreement. Pollard got life for being stupid.

GD: He wasn’t stupid, but he had no common sense.

RTC: Well, now he’s got life in the slammer.

GD: I told Abenheim what I did and he was terrified I would drag him into it. He was living off of Beckett, who put him into Stanford and bought him new cars and so on, and he was afraid of the consequences if Beckett got wind of his own lack of concern. He used to babble all kinds of family gossip around, including myself, and I always thought that if you take a man’s bread, you owe him at least some loyalty. But Don was not a man to contemplate honor. I remember once when I was having certain conversation with a German diplomat in San Francisco, this fellow encountered Don at some function. Don was an outrageous ass-kisser and at any rate, the German told him he knew me and that I was a “brilliant scholar” on the German scene. He said that Abenheim got annoyed and said I was only self-educated, which I am not and I said that considering that I had written Abenheim’s doctoral thesis, that was hardly appropriate. The German found this rather shocking.

RTC: If Stanford ever found out about that, they would jerk his degree, you know. I don’t think that would do his intelligence career any good. What was the thesis on?

GD: The Imperial German Navy’s etappendienst or resupply system, in the First World War. After this episode, I mentioned it to Charlie Burdick, the German military historian and Dean at San Jose State, very reputable and I’ve known him since ’52…anyway, he said that this paper struck him as much better than Abenheim’s usually pompous and turgid works. He knew my work and said that he could see in an instant that I was right. I asked him, since he was Abenheim’s sponsor for the doctorate, what he was going to do about it. As usual, nothing. But he would never talk to Don again.

RTC: What happened to him?

GD: Burdick?

RTC: No, Abenheim. Does he work for us?

GD: No, although Beckett wanted to get him into the CIA via his contacts with Turner. He does intelligence work for the Navy, I think. After I had a talk with him about his mouth problem, we haven’t spoken.

RTC: You should tip them off. We have too many treacherous people like that.

GD: Well, I don’t worry about it. The Germans and Burdick know, and believe me, and he can deal with that knowledge. I don’t think you have to worry about his selling secrets to Israel. He and his mother hate the Zionists. Reformed Jews usually do.

RTC: What does he think about your writings on Mueller?

GD: I would hate to think. Fortunately, that is outside his interest so I am probably safe.

RTC: What is his specialty?

GD: He likes to think he’s an expert on German military tradition but he most certainly is not. Abenheim is the moon and Beckett is the sun. Abenheim drove expensive sports cars, lived in an expensive house, went to an expensive school and met famous people but only because his mother married an important, and very generous, man. I remember once, Don and his friends were planning on raiding a military storage area in San Francisco when he was working in the Presidio museum. They heard there was morphine stored there and planned to sell it. I told him that I would tell his mother if he didn’t drop that idea and it scared him off. I mean, what an utterly stupid thing to do. He should have thanked me for keeping him out of jail instead of trash mouthing me to others.

RTC: Given what you’ve told me, he’s probably just jealous. I imagine he loved to pick your brains.

GD: Yes, like Corson.

RTC: There are certain similarities there.

GD: God save us from those of the small mind and large ego.

RTC: Anyway, Gregory, you did the right thing in the Pollard matter. And while your name is not known in this, your good deeds certainly are.

GD: But no good deed goes unpunished, does it, Robert? At least, Abenheim will be more cautious in the future or I might start writing nice letters to Stanford. After all, I have all the original work on his thesis. His useless notes and my handwritten pages. I remember once when he told me that brave Israeli commandos raided a Libyan secret plant, deep in the desert, and destroyed it. I got tired of his pomposity so I told him, very offhand, that that was a hoax. I said Kadaffi had put some oil and old tires into 55 gallon drums and set them on fire. I said the satellites showed clouds of black smoke but there was nothing to it. He got very irate and asked me how I knew such things? I said I had seen the side-angle satellite pictures…

RTC: My God, Gregory, you didn’t? Those satellites are very, very secret. He must have had a fit about that.

GD: Oh, he did. It turned out later I was right about the burning tires so he rushed to his superiors to tell them all about the horrid person who had access to the sacred satellite pictures. And about a month later, a military collector friend of mine was approached by someone at a collector’s club meeting. A nice, clean-cut fellow named Mason. Anyway, this fellow made friends with my collector connection and developed a great interest in me and my doings. I checked on this Mason fellow and discovered from Petersen that Chris was a CIA operative so I led him a wonderful chase, feeding him all kinds of nonsense until he finally, after several months, realized he was being made a fool of and he went back to Washington. He was not very bright, Robert. I had written a book on German paratroopers in the campaign on Crete so he had my friend send me a mint copy of the book to autograph. The cover was heavy coated stock so I put on a pair of cotton gloves, went over to my next door neighbor and handed the book to him. I had told him earlier that I had written a number of studies of military actions and he was interested. I said I had hurt my hand and could he autograph the book?

RTC: Gregory, that was a terrible thing to do. Now someone has your neighbor’s fingerprints and handwriting in a file somewhere. What a wicked thing to do.

GD: Ain’t I awful, Robert? And I told my collector friend about all the lovely aerial pictures I had. I was going to get a Russian publisher to do a book called, “The World from the Air.”

RTC: Jesus Christ…

GD: Oh and I said they were Cosmic pictures. From Top Secret/Cosmic of course.

RTC: And I suppose he told his new friend and consternation ensued in Washington.

GD: I said I was meeting a Russian publisher’s rep in ‘Frisco down at his office on Green Street.

RTC: That’s the Russian consulate. That’s a KGB center, Gregory.

GD: No, don’t disillusion me.

RTC: That is really wicked. You never saw any side-angle satellites pictures, never had any secret pictures, had no Russian publisher but just imagine the furor.

GD: Kept me warm at night for months, Robert. Abenheim later told someone that I was pure evil and should never be talked to. He wasn’t specific but my friend thought he might have an involuntary bowel movement at any time.

RTC: I said several times you would make a great agent, Gregory.

GD: Whatever makes you think I’m not, Robert?

RTC: On that depressing note, I’ll let you go. We’re supposed to go shopping and let’s do this again. You’re better than television, Gregory.

GD: And a lot more accurate, Robert.

 

(Concluded at 10:32 AM CST)

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Conversations+with+the+Crow+by+Gregory+Douglas

 

The Sabotage Column: Revenge is sweet and flavors all our dealings

by Ben Dova

 

If one were to obtain a one gallon glass jug, fill it mostly full of gasoline, and then add some concentrated sulfuric acid and cap it, one could also make some fire fudge using a mixture of potassium chlorate and sugar, carefully heated, and soak some paper towels in the mixture.

These can then be wrapped around the jug and held in place with rubber bands.

If you put this jug down into one of those curbside 55 gallon wheeled garbage cans, when the garbage truck people swing by early in the morning, they empty the contents down into the truck and drive to the next can.

Soon enough, someone activates the compressor, the glass jug breaks and all the liquid runs out into the truck.

When the compressor is retracted, the inrushing air causes the acid to react with the potassium chlorate and it ignites.

There goes the truck.

And there go the terrified Mexican attendants, screeching for the Virgin of Guadalupe to protect them.

I also find that if you put two double-ought buckshot into a number 9 gelatin capsule, along with a piece of metallic sodium, dropping it into a car gas tank can prove entertaining in the extreme.

I used to use a bit of sculpting wax stuck inside the gas pipe into the tank and place the capsule onto it.

If and when the car hits a small pot hole or bump, the capsule falls down into the tank and drops to the bottom.

There is condensed water there, water that soon eats through the gelatin capsule and ignites the metallic sodium.

This will result in interesting fireworks and very often the trunk lid is blasted up into the air like a giant tiddlywink.

The car also catches on fire and gives other motorists something to talk about for weeks.

I have also found that the wonderful M-80, which has a fuse that burns under water, if lit and dropped into a toilet and immediately flushed, will result in a terrible eruption deep in the piping system.

 

 

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