Used to hear of this ever so often with people trying to escape Cuba to the US, I remember at least one person surviving it. But Chicago to Hawaii ? Something wrong there…
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And adding my 2 cents along with others above, Merry Christmas to my fellow Hivers !
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Back at ya! May your coming year be full of joy.
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Leonard Bernstein et al. hosted soirees to support the black panthers and others. Thus generating the trerm “radical chic”.
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Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all. And to all, a good night!
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Thanks for the clarifications. Nixon was ‘off’ from the get-go in politics. He was a savage Red baiter. Eisenhower held him in contempt.
Certainly, Nixon was a very modern Republican - corrupt to the core.
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Thanks, and yes to a degree people forget.
“Richard Nixon represents the dark side of the American character.” - Robert Kennedy (~mid-60s?)
Nixon, along with Joe McCarthy (both winning post-War in '46, as did Jack Kennedy), pioneered the politics of resentment, which is certainly modern today. We do get a lot of younger folks who think it started with Reagan; no, there were Reaganites who used Nixon as their template (although Reagan had a far, far lower body count than Nixon / Kissinger), certainly, but it was Nixon. Nixon’s pioneering the politics of resentment has been with us ever since. Over the half-century (!) after Nixon’s resignation, we had purveyors of the politics of resentment, everyone from Newt Gingrich to Rush Limbaugh to Lee Atwater to Karl Rove to Sarah Palin (highly underrated in her savant ability to stir the politics of resentment); it is no wonder Trump was able to take over so effortlessly in 2016; the field was so well-plowed.
But Ike chose him - his very first decision as President was to give us Nixon. In 1952, after 20 years in the wilderness (still the record), the Republican party was so starved for the White House, and that they got Ike to run, he could have picked just about any one. Eisenhower was the last great American to become President already as a great American. But he gets points off here.
Actually, you do have a point here on Ike and Nixon. And do you know when Ike softened towards Nixon? It was when his grandson David Eisenhower became engaged to Julie Nixon. On that note, in the middle of Watergate around '73, the late great Nora Ephron described Julie Nixon as a “chocolate-covered spider.” That line endures 51 years now.
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strong textGo Jolly everyone!
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It’s a Jewish plot to destroy Christmas. It started with 1942’s Fred Astaire/Bing Crosby vehicle, Holiday Inn, with music by Irving Berlin that included as one of its major songs Happy Holidays. /snark
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OH SHIT!!
From india.com
Did Israel explode a small nuclear bomb in Syria? Spike in radiation report says…
Reports have added that the European Union’s Radioactive Environmental Monitoring found that the amount of radiation increased in Turkey and Cyprus hours after the intense blast, pointing towards a small nuclear attack.
Updated: December 24, 2024 11:44 PM IST
The blast was at Tartus, Syria on 12/16/24 on a scud missile factory. Blast so large it made ground tremble 100’s of miles away
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With this most unsettling news I bid you, me peeps, sweet dreams …
Speak truth to power
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Have been sending texts all day today, to my maga acquaintances, " may the true Spirit of the Holiday fill the hearts of you and yours".
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It’s definitely unsettling news, but until we get more information, particularly including the nuclides the EURM picked up it’s probably premature to conclude that the Israelis released a nuclear weapon. The SCUD and its variants use RP-1 (kerosene) as fuel and some variant of nitric acid as the oxidizer. That combination isn’t hypergolic (i.e., it requires an ignition source), although hydrazine and fuming nitric acid do combust spontaneously. In any event, a supply of depleted uranium on hand along with some hypergolic combination of fuel and oxidizer could explain the elevated radiation readings and the ground shaking.
If the Israelis had released a nuclear warhead, we have to understand why Putin and the Russians aren’t going ape-shit about this.
Color me concerned, but wanting more information.
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I wonder where the Syrians would get depleted uranium?
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The Russians or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are the obvious answers. The bigger question is, “Why?”
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Using depleted uranium (DU) in a missile warhead or other ammo would make it penetrate armor or some other hardened defense maybe? It’s a very dense metal. Alpha particles are stopped by skin , beta by clothing and gamma would be low content. I’m just speculating. But higher radioactivity was detected in Cyprus and Turkey within 20 hours of that israeli attack on that factory in Tartus, Syria. But even before the current instability there in Syria ,it should be one of the last places anything like DU should be present.
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That’s the only plausible use I can think of–238U has been used as a tamper in nuclear weapons, but there is no evidence that the Syrians have any nuclear development program.
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You are spot on with “why?”. Still radioactivity (I don’t know what type) was detected in Cyprus and in Turkey the article said. Knowing what type and relative amounts would be diagnostic. I’d know more if I had my clearance. That lapsed when I retired in 2012
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Yeppers. I’m just not going to hit the panic button until we get some more information. Every answer raises a bunch of additional questions which lack good answers.
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I’m not sure if the story is from a reputable source. I’m going to wait for confirmation.
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