News July 27, 2021
Here we go again. We put our faith in our government to keep their defense secrets and our personal data protected. Again, and again, we get disappointed. We are not alone in this endeavor. Other countries including our closest allies say they are doing the same thing. When they do not do it, it puts us in danger also. You just have to wonder how this information can be treated so carelessly. Recently, British top secret defense information was found in a bus stop in Kent, England. Why was this information allowed to be taken out of the office and how could anyone be this stupid to take it out and then leave them in a public area? Could this have been done on purpose by some employee who was tired of the lax security and figured it was the only way to tighten it up by exposing what was going on? If not was is someone who got a job with a top security clearance who was a relative of some politician or lobbyist who was totally unqualified to handle documents like these? The information I have seen on the subject doesn’t name the person who took the documents out, and when it is done by a connected employee it usually never does.
The Pentagon has announced it wants to upgrade our Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles with a new missile, along with test flights on a new plane the B-21 Raider which will replace the B-2 Spirit Bomber. Northrop Grumman is building both. Let’s hope this is not another case of defective hardware which is over budget and grossly over schedule as are some many things lately. One general said the best weapon the Russians had was the F-35 fighter. It is an American plane which is a total disaster in so many ways. We can’t afford any more of these kinds of things. The new missile is being called the Sword of Armageddon and it is claimed this will fly in 2023. Some members of congress just want us to keep the Minuteman III which was developed in 1970. This would be a disaster since missile technology has leapt forward since those days. The military calls the missile GBSD or Ground Based Strategic Deterrent. Hints of it being hypersonic were made when it was said it will be able to hit any target on earth in minutes. Since Russia and China are bragging their hypersonic missiles can change course during flight, something the older missiles could not do, I am betting this missile will be able to do that also.
Archaeologists have discovered a victim of a shark attack. This one is part of a mystery however. The victim is from over 3,000 years ago and the attack doesn’t make any sense. The reason I say this is the number of bytes the victim suffered. Sharks take a few bites and you are dead. This poor guy was bitten 790 times with very deep bites. He lost an arm, then a leg and the shark kept biting. It was determined he died from shock and blood loss. For the life of me I cannot figure out how they can be so sure of that. Maybe he died from fright. Anyway, that is not important anymore, and why a shark would bite so many times is truly at the heart of this mystery. The site where the body was found was in an area of Japan which had been uncovered in 1860 and dug up in 1915. There were 170 human skeletons found there. This was truly a cold case file.
Since I am on the subject of archaeology, Israeli archaeologists think they have found a new species of human and it might be Homo Nesher. It is hard for me to believe we keep finding new races of humans. They noted the Chinese just declared they found a new race of human and called it Dragon man. They named him Dragon man because his skull was found near the Dragon River. The skull was found in 1933 but it was just examined and scientists decided they had never seen anything like it before. The Israelis decided the species Homo Nesher was an early Neanderthal. To me, the recreation of the Homo Nesher does look like a Neanderthal, so I am puzzled why the separate designation. I guess the DNA might be slightly different if they were able to get samples.
An Egyptian farmer found evidence of a murder. He discovered a 2,600 years old tablet which mentions Apries who was pharaoh from 589 B.C. to 570 B.C., but it also says a lot more. Apries was also known as Hophra and was strangled by his subjects. The tablet is rather large, it measures 91 inches high and 41 inches wide. It was found on a farm located about 60 miles from Cairo. Apries is mentioned in the bible and was also known as Wahibre Hasibre, but the bible calls him Hophra. Interestingly he had joined forces with Zedekish who was the king of Judah to help him hold back the Babylonians but they failed and Jerusalem was ransacked and Solomon’s first temple was destroyed.
I guess you should check what you are renting before renting a vacation cottage. Apparently one man fell for the beauty of a cabin in the lake district of England and took his family there for vacation. When he got there, he began to look around and when he got inside the cottage he walked through the rooms. Everything seemed very nice and the place was clean and the furnishings nice. As he was walking through the main room, he notice what looked like a recessed handle in the floor. He pulled on it and a door in the floor opened and inside was a set of concrete steps. He decided to see where they led so he walked down. To his horror they ended in what seemed to be a large basement room filled with some sort of green water or goo. This is not what one wants to be sleeping over.
NATO is aiming at development of a DARPA like agency in a couple of years. DARPA is the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and this is where we keep our smartest scientists and engineers so it would be no surprise to you when I tell you many of our weapons are developed here. Can NATO develop a similar agency? The problem is NATO is a conglomeration of many countries and though they are under one umbrella; they also have different interests in many cases and also it makes keeping projects secret that much harder. An example of this is the member of NATO Turkey, who is buying weapons from Russia.