Biden said he would be sending two destroyers to the Black Sea to deliver a message to Putin about not making moves on Ukraine, after Russia had massed thousands of troops on their border with Ukraine.

Putin warned the U.S. to stay away “for their own good.” What did Biden do then? He blinked and decided not to send the ships, an incredibly weak move, making it look like he was caving to Putin, perhaps the worst possible thing he could do. Putin was putting him to the test and he failed it badly.

Now Putin, believing Biden to be all talk and no action, just announced he’s going to close the Kerch Strait, beginning next week until October to block any foreign warships out, including the United States.

Remember that Russian bounties story with which the media absolutely flayed President Donald Trump?

The fake story claimed that, per U.S. intelligence agencies, supposedly, Russia had offered bounties for killing American forces in Afghanistan. Democrats went crazy, using the story to suggest that somehow Trump, who they painted as a Putin puppet, was not doing anything about this and endangering American troops.

Now that just got officially walked back by U.S. intel.

But on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that U.S. intelligence only had “low to moderate” confidence in the story after all. Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unproven—and possibly untrue.

Joe Biden is one efficient guy. On his first day in office, “blue-collar Joe” managed to kill the jobs of 11,000 unionized Keystone XL Pipeline workers, walk back a major American commitment to Canada, and slap a serious question mark on the future of U.S. oil independence — and that’s just for starters.

In contrast, in Donald Trump’s final month in office, for the first time in 35 years, America didn’t import a single barrel of crude oil from Saudi Arabia. Whether or not our friends on the left give credit to Trump is immaterial; facts are facts and numbers are numbers.

Global crude oil prices were under $50 a gallon and the average price of gas was roughly $2.30 at the end of December. Just 30 days into Biden’s “job,” global crude had jumped to $65 a barrel, and the price of gas had climbed to an average of $2.72 per gallon. //

Biden’s policies will be a yuuge benefit to the oil-dependent economies of Russia, Saudi Arabia, and… wait for it… Iran, as the price of crude continues to increase to upwards of $70 per barrel.

“There is no doubt in my mind that the irony of the Russia collusion nonsense was that there was no one who hurt Russia more than Trump and his America-first energy policies. Russia really is nothing more than a third-world country, with oil and gas. Trump’s pro-America energy policies were a disaster for Russia, and the truth is Biden is a godsend for Russia.”

LIVING
Woolly rhino defrosted after more than 25,000 years
By Hannah Sparks

January 26, 2021 | 3:53pm

A young, woolly rhino has been thawed whole after as much as 40,000 years frozen in Siberian permafrost.

During an unveiling for Russian press on Tuesday, scientists in Yakutsk officially cataloged the 8-foot-long beast, believed to have perished between 25,000 and 40,000 years ago, as a healthy adolescent of 3 or 4 years old. //

Plotnikov, whose excavations throughout Yakutia — one of the coldest regions on Earth — has revealed remarkably well-preserved specimens such as a giant wolf head, noted that the teenage rhino had been “very well-fed at the moment it died.”

Although Russia's newest spaceport is located in the far eastern part of the country, it still lies several hundred kilometers from the Pacific Ocean.

This means that as Soyuz rockets climb into space from this location, they drop their stages onto the sparsely populated Yakutia region below. With the Soyuz rocket, there are four boosters that serve as the rocket's "first stage," and these drop away about two minutes after liftoff. Then, the "Blok A" second stage drops away later in the flight. //

as he shared photos and video of these operations on Twitter and Facebook, the chief of Russia's space program, Dmitry Rogozin, could not help but take what he perceived to be a swipe at SpaceX. In his comments, Rogozin referenced Boca Chica, where SpaceX is building a prototype of its Starship Mars rocket, and wondered whether SpaceX would be capable of working in as harsh conditions as his hardy Russian experts.
"This is not Boca Chica. This is Yakutia, and in winter. The team in the area of the fall of the second stage of the One Web mission was deployed two days before yesterday's launch. Temperature - minus 52°," Rogozin wrote on Facebook. "I wonder if gentle SpaceX is able to work in such conditions?" //

The irony, as noted by some users in response to Rogozin, is that "gentle" SpaceX engineers do not need to brave inclement weather to recover their rocket stages. They have built a smarter rocket. SpaceX designed the Falcon 9 rocket's first stage to return to land or set itself down on an autonomous drone ship for future reuse. And its second stage can be commanded to reenter the atmosphere and burn up. //

Rogozin has had a difficult year. As the Falcon 9 has continued to draw commercial launch business away from Russia's Proton rocket, SpaceX's Crew Dragon has also ended NASA's need to buy seats on the Soyuz vehicle for its astronauts to reach the International Space Station.

On Wednesday Russia's state space corporation, Roscosmos, unveiled plans to develop a new "Amur" rocket.

The booster will be powered by new and as yet undeveloped rocket engines that burn methane. Just as significantly, for the first time, Russia is seeking to build a reusable first stage. And Roscosmos is targeting a low price of just $22 million for a launch on Amur, which is advertised as being capable of delivering 10.5 tons to low-Earth orbit.

"We would like our rocket to be reliable, like a Kalashnikov assault rifle," said Alexander Bloshenko, executive director of Roscosmos for Advanced Programs and Science.

What is perhaps most striking about the Amur rocket design, however, is how much it resembles a smaller version of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which can lift about twice as much payload into orbit.

BREAKING: Hunter Biden Received Millions From Wife Of Ex-Moscow Mayor, Paid Suspects Allegedly Tied To Trafficking, Had Contacts With Chinese Military, Senate Report Alleges https://t.co/EjnmpTtgBg

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) September 23, 2020

Chuck Ross
@ChuckRossDC
·
Sep 23, 2020
NEW: Hunter Biden’s Business Dealings Created ‘Counterintelligence And Extortion Concerns,’ Senate Report Says

U.S. banks flagged multiple suspicious transactions involving Hunter, including with a Chinese businessman and a Russian billionaire

Compromised reveals that the FBI found that during at least some of the time the illegals were under investigation, the Russian numbers intended for them were sent not by a transmitter in Russia (which might have difficulty being reliably received in the US), but relayed by the Cuban shortwave numbers station. This is perhaps a bit surprising, since the period in question (2000-2010) was well after the Soviet Union, the historic protector of Cuba's government, had ceased to exist.

The Cuban numbers station is somewhat legendary. It is a powerful station, operated by Cuba's intelligence directorate but co-located with Radio Habana's transmitters near Bauta, Cuba, and is easily received with even very modest equipment throughout the US. While its numbers transmissions have taken a variety of forms over the years, during the early 2000's it operated around the clock, transmitting in both voice and morse code. The station was (and remains) so powerful and widely heard that radio hobbyists quickly derived its hourly schedule. During this period, each scheduled hourly transmission consisted of a preamble followed by three messages, each made up entirely of a series of five digit groups (with by a brief period of silence separating the three messages). The three hourly messages would take a total of about 45 minutes, in either voice or morse code depending on the scheduled time and frequency. Every hour, the same thing, predictably right on schedule (with fill traffic presumably substituted for the slots during which there was no actual message).

If you want to hear what this sounded like, here's a recording I made on October 4, 2008 of one of the hourly voice transmissions, as received (static and all) in my Philadelphia apartment: www.mattblaze.org/private/17435khz-200810041700.mp3. The transmission follows the standard Cuban numbers format of the time, starting with an "Atenćion" preamble listing three five-digit identifiers for the three messages that follow, and ending with "Final, Final". In this recording, the first of the three messages (64202) starts at 3:00, the second (65852) at 16:00, and the third (86321) at 29:00, with the "Final" signoff at the end. The transmissions are, to my cryptographic ear at least, both profoundly dull and yet also eerily riveting.

And this is where the mystery I've been wondering about comes in. In 2007, I noticed an odd anomaly: some messages completely lacked the digit 9 ("nueve"). Most messages had, as they always did and as you'd expect with OTP ciphertext, a uniform distribution of the digits 0-9. But other messages, at random times, suddenly had no 9s at all. I wasn't the only (or the first) person to notice this; apparently the 9s started disappearing from messages some time around 2005.

This is, to say the least, very odd. The way OTPs work should produce a uniform distribution of all ten digits in the ciphertext. The odds of an entire message lacking 9s (or any other digit) are infinitesimal. And yet such messages were plainly being transmitted, and fairly often at that. In fact, in the recording of the 2008 transmission linked to above, you will notice that while the second and third messages use all ten digits, the first is completely devoid of 9s.

I remember concluding that the most likely, if still rather improbable, explanation was that the 9-less messages were dummy fill traffic and that the random number generator used to create the messages had a bug or developed a defect that prevented 9s from being included. This would be, to say the least, a very serious error, since it would allow a listener to easily distinguish fill traffic from real traffic, completely negating the benefit of having fill traffic in the first place. It would open the door to exactly the kind of traffic analysis that the system was carefully engineered to thwart. The 9-less messages went on for almost ten years. (If I were reporting this as an Internet vulnerability, I would dub it the "Nein Nines" attack; please forgive the linguistic muddle). But I was resigned to the likelihood that I would never know for sure.

And this brings us to the second observation from Strzok's book.

Compromised doesn't say anything about missing nueves, but he does mention that the FBI exploited a serious tradecraft error on the part of the sender: the FBI was able to tell when messages were and weren't being sent during the weekly timeslot when the suspect couple was observed in the room where they copied traffic. Even worse (for the illegals), empty message slots correlated perfectly with times that the suspect couple was traveling and not able to copy messages. This observation helped confirm the FBI's suspicions and ultimately led to their arrest and expulsion (along with the rest of the Russian illegals network).

Ironically, this was not the first time that Russian/Soviet intelligence has been burned by sloppy OTP practices. The first was, more famously, the disastrous re-use of OTPs discovered and exploited in the Venona intercepts.

One time pads can be a cryptographic landmine. They have a very attractive property - provable security! - but at the cost of unforgiving operational assumptions that can be hard to meet in practice. OTPs have long been a favorite of hucksters selling supposedly "unbreakable" encryption software. So remember this story next time someone tries to sell you their super-secure one-time-pad-based crypto scheme. If actual Russian spies can't use it securely, chances are neither can you.

Anyway, as they say on the radio...

FINAL
FINAL

If Russia can control half of the US nuclear fuel market, it will be problematic for national security and the economy. //

The Trump administration's recent Nuclear Fuel Working Group report provides a sobering view of the national security threat posed by Russia's aggressive global strategy to dominate the nuclear power and fuel industry to extend its geopolitical influence. The report warns of Russia's efforts to increase its market share of the U.S. nuclear fuel industry and the threat that its below-market prices pose to the survival of the U.S. nuclear fuel sector. If this is left unchecked, the U.S. may find itself dependent on Russia for its nuclear fuel.

Russia's steps to boost its nuclear fuel market share are taking place at a perilous time. The market for nuclear fuel in the United States has weakened considerably in the past decade and the country's production facilities are in danger of being driven out of business. The global industry has been hit with a one-two punch of decreased demand and increased supply; Japan and Germany have greatly reduced their nuclear power generation, and Russia's state-owned nuclear enterprise has expanded production and marketing without regard to profit in a bid to obtain a dominant market share here and around the world. //

Allowing Russia's nuclear import caps to expire would provide only minimal benefit to the struggling U.S. power industry and come at a great cost to future U.S. security. Congress should renew the Domenici Amendment and the Department of Commerce should conclude negotiations with Russia, to continue the caps and ensure that Russia never can dominate this energy market.

In 1981, a Georgetown professor, Jeane Kirkpatrick, remaining a Democrat, became Ronald Reagan's Ambassador to the United Nations. Reagan brought Kirkpatrick, as he did with many Democratic hawks who were dismayed with the dovish position of mainstream Democrats.

Kirkpatrick had worked closely with Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson. As an increasingly influential public intellectual in the 1970s, she criticized not only what she saw as President Jimmy Carter's soft and naive stance on communism, but also the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger "detente" policy of accommodating to the Soviet expansion.

And so for the first time since 1952, the 1984 Republican National Convention chose a keynote speaker who was not a Republican. Kirkpatrick delivered a blistering speech, dealing exclusively with foreign policy. She was appealing to large segment of Reagan Democrats who were terrified Progressive and Democratic Establishment did not understand the mortal danger of the Soviet threat.

Kirkpatrick ran through a litany of recent foreign policy controversies: Grenada, Lebanon, the Soviet walk-out from arms negotiations, and Central America. On every topic, said Kirkpatrick, the San Francisco Democrats "always blame America first." //

I heard Jeane Kirkpatrick give her famous speech. The UN Ambassador went on a tirade about the “blame America first” Democrats who had been meeting in San Francisco.

Kirkpatrick was a Democrat hawk who came into the Reagan Administration in reaction to a Democratic Party that had rapidly drifted left to the point Ted Kennedy would try to get the Soviet Leader Andropov to do an American media tour to defuse tensions in the run up to the 1984 election. Kennedy wanted to advise the Soviets on how to navigate the American media to show they meant peace as a way to undermine the strong “evil empire” stance Reagan had advanced.

In her speech, Kirkpatrick said of the Democrats who had convened to nominate Walter Mondale in San Francisco,

They said that saving Grenada from terror and totalitarianism was the wrong thing to do - they didn't blame Cuba or the communists for threatening American students and murdering Grenadians - they blamed the United States instead.

But then, somehow, they always blame America first.

When our Marines, sent to Lebanon on a multinational peacekeeping mission with the consent of the United States Congress, were murdered in their sleep, the "blame America first crowd" didn't blame the terrorists who murdered the Marines, they blamed the United States.

But then, they always blame America first.

When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn't blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States.

But then, they always blame America first.

When Marxist dictators shoot their way to power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don't blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies, they blame United States policies of 100 years ago.

But then, they always blame America first.

What was different between then and now is that while the media leaned left, it was still mostly run by men who had fought on the battlefields of Germany and the islands of the Pacific. They may have leaned left, but they were not really haters of America even if they thought Reagan was too belligerent.

Now, however, the American media is too willing to spread Chinese communist propaganda to own the President. Because Trump is President, the media would rather believe a tyrannical regime that ruthlessly murders dissidents and runs concentration camps.

Around Washington, insiders vaguely understood Weiss as a mysterious but brilliant eccentric with a thinly veiled penchant for insubordination. Obituaries remembered him as an adviser to four presidents, executive director of the White House Council on International Economic Policy, assistant for space policy to the secretary of defense. According to his obit in The Washington Post, “Much of his government work centered on national security, intelligence organizations and concerns over technology transfers to communist countries. As an adviser to the Central Intelligence Agency, he served on the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board and the Signals Intelligence Committee of the US Intelligence Board … His honors included the CIA’s Medal for Merit and the National Security Agency’s Cipher Medal.” France awarded him a Légion d’Honneur and NASA recognized him with an Exceptional Service Medal.

This is a long and fascinating article about Gus Weiss, who masterminded a long campaign to feed technical disinformation to the Soviet Union, which may or may not have caused a massive pipeline explosion somewhere in Siberia in the 1980s, if in fact there even was a massive pipeline explosion somewhere in Siberia in the 1980s.

Lots of information about the origins of US export controls laws and sabotage operations.

In a remote forest, a few kilometres from the Chernobyl power plant, the huge Duga-2 radar tower stands as relic of Soviet mismanagement.

Video by Adrian Hartrick and Dominika Ozynska

Shkval, on the other hand, uses a rocket engine. That alone is enough to make it fast, but traveling through water creates major drag problems. The solution: get the water out of the path of the torpedo. But how, exactly does one get water of the path of an object in the middle of an ocean?

The solution: vaporize liquid water into a gas.

Shkval solves this problem by diverting hot rocket exhaust out of its nose, which turns the water in front of it into steam. As the torpedo moves forward, it continues vaporizing the water in front of it, creating a thin bubble of gas. Traveling through gas the torpedo encounters much less drag, allowing it to move at speeds of up 200 knots. This process is known as supercavitation.

The trick with maintaining supercavitation is keeping the torpedo enclosed in the gas bubble. This makes turning maneuvers tricky, as a change of heading will force a portion of the torpedo outside the bubble, causing sudden drag at 230 miles an hour. Early versions of Shkval apparently had a very primitive guidance system, and attacks would have been fairly straight torpedo runs. //

the gas bubble and the rocket engine are very noisy. Any submarine that launches a supercavitating torpedo will instantly give away its approximate position. //

Another drawback to a supercavitating torpedo is the inability to use traditional guidance systems. The gas bubble and rocket engine produce enough noise to deafen the torpedo’s built-in active and passive sonar guidance systems. Early versions of the Shkval were apparently unguided, trading guidance for speed. A newer version of the torpedo employs a compromise method, using supercavitation to sprint to the target area, then slowing down to search for its target..

A dozen injured, others reported missing in electrical fire aboard ship damaged by sinking dock. //

The Admiral Kuznetsov, Russia's only aircraft carrier, caught fire today during repairs in Murmansk. //

The Kuznetsov has had a long string of bad luck, experiencing fires at sea, oil spills, and landing deck accidents—including a snapped arresting wire that caused a landing Sukhoi Su-33 fighter to roll off the end of the deck and into the ocean. Its boilers belched black smoke during the ship's transit to Syria in 2016, and it had to be towed back home after breaking down during its return in 2017. Then last year, as it was undergoing repairs in a floating drydock in Murmansk's Shipyard 82, the drydock sank and a crane on the drydock slammed into the Kuznetsov, leaving a gash in the ship's hull. It looked like completion of repairs might be put off indefinitely because repair of the drydock would take over a year, and the budget for repairs had been slashed. //

The fire was caused when sparks from welding work near one of the ship's electrical distribution compartments set a cable on fire. The fire spread through the wiring throughout compartments of the lower deck of the ship, eventually involving 120 square meters (1,300 square feet) of the ship's spaces.

Mr Krenz, a sprightly 82-year-old, is in finer fettle than the country he once ran. The German Democratic Republic - East Germany - no longer exists. Thirty years after the tumultuous events of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mr Krenz has agreed to meet me.

For many years he was seen as the "young prince" - the successor-in-waiting to veteran East German leader Erich Honecker.

But by the time he replaced Honecker in October 1989, the ruling party was losing its grip on power.

A week before the Berlin Wall came down, Mr Krenz flew to Moscow for urgent talks with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

"Gorbachev told me the people of the Soviet Union view East Germans as their brothers," he said.

"At the time I thought Gorbachev was sincere. That was my mistake."

Do you feel the Soviet Union betrayed you? I ask.

"Yes."

On 9 November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. Crowds of ecstatic East Germans poured across the open border.

"It was the worst night of my life," Mr Krenz recalls. "I wouldn't want to experience that again. When politicians in the West say it was a celebration of the people, I understand that. But I shouldered all responsibility. At such an emotionally charged moment, if anyone had been killed that night, we could have been sucked into a military conflict between major powers."

Egon Krenz still takes an interest in politics. And still supports Moscow.

"After weak presidents like Gorbachev and Yeltsin, it is a great fortune for Russia that it has [President Vladimir] Putin."

He insists the Cold War never ended, but instead is "being fought now with different methods".

When we get out of the car in the centre of Berlin, a history teacher and his group of 10th graders come up to us. It's their lucky day.

"We're on a school trip from Hamburg to study the history of the GDR," the teacher tells Mr Krenz. "It's amazing to have you as a living witness. What was it like for you when the Wall fell?"

"It was no carnival," declares Mr Krenz. "It was a very dramatic night."

A Russian Kilo-class submarine was recorded to be in close proximity to a fire in Russia's Pacific Fleet home base in Vladivostok.

• Video has emerged on social media showing a Russian Kilo-class submarine that looks like it's on fire.
• The footage was recorded in the Pacific coast city of Vladivostok, home of Russia's Pacific Fleet, which stated that the fire was part of "damage control exercises."
• The Kilo-class submarine has a history of technical difficulties.

Maybe more than you think... //

Moscow subsequently declared war on Tokyo on August 8, 1945, two days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and one day before the second bomb fell on Nagasaki (though Western historiography has long emphasized the role of the nuclear attacks in compelling Japan’s surrender, newly available Japanese documents emphasize the importance of the Soviet declaration of war in forcing Tokyo’s hand). //

The dispute over these islands has prevented an agreement formally ending hostilities between Japan and Russia (as the USSR’s legal successor) up to the present. //

With both Russia and Japan increasingly wary of Chinese power in the Asia-Pacific, four sparsely populated outposts at the edge of the Sea of Okhotsk remain in many ways the biggest impediment to a rapprochement between Moscow and Tokyo that could reshape Asian geopolitics.

Stalin’s intervention in the war against Japan came late in the day, but in many ways it continues shaping the Asian security environment six decades later.

Atomic research agency acknowledges "isotope power source" of "rocket engine" exploded. //

On August 8, during testing aboard a barge in the White Sea near Nyonoksa, Russia, the nuclear engine of an experimental nuclear-armed cruise missile exploded, killing two technicians and injuring six others. On August 11, officials of the Russian nuclear agency Rosatom acknowledged that five employees had died in the explosion of what they described as "an isotopic power source for a liquid engine installation