Christmas Eve – get back to the counting house, BRM, or you’ll be without work and will be turned into the street without references!

 

Bullet Points:

** The Daniel Penny case raises a critical question: How do we ensure our actions are effective and proportional in a high-stress situation? The distinction between self-defense and excessive force isn’t just legal—it’s deeply tied to training, decision-making, and situational awareness. This case is a stark reminder that our preparedness must go beyond physical skills to include moral and legal understanding. Are we teaching ourselves and others to navigate these complexities effectively?

** What if you took your wife out for a deli sandwich, a bag of chips, and a Diet Dr. Pepper – unknowingly?

Sometimes you need to ask yourself, do I have a problem? Am I ammosexual? Hey, there’s nothing wrong with ammosexuality. We have a support group that meets at the range every other Saturday. Many come to me and ask, “How do I know if I’m ammosexual?” If you can watch this video for more than sixty seconds and still want to watch a re-run, with a sense of growing tumescence, you are. Embrace your inner shooter. This is what happens. It just does. Some say that putting rounds downrange is one of the key reasons for the season.

** Christmas is the season of giving presents from the heart.

** When you go to the megachurch concert, 500 ChurchKarens arrive to worship alongside you at the Bible Prophecy Conference. (doesn’t have to be at Christmas)

** With the Scrooge theme in mind, why does the United States provide Canada US$100 billion a year in foreign aid?

** At least half of my job interviews go like this one. And frankly, when people interview me, it’s not all that different.

** Life as a medieval peasant – idyllic.

** Democrats are pushing a propaganda hoax. That Musk is the President, and Trump is the Vice President. This is similar to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, where they attempted to credit Putin for Trump’s amazing victory in 2016 and suggested that Putin was in charge. This time around, Putin has been replaced with Musk.

** Get those pardons signed before Pedo Joe leaves. Unlimited discounts!

** A discussion of physical gold (in China), reserve currencies, and valuation.

** An honest bartender in Wisconsin? It may look and sound familiar.

 

For the USA, Christmas begins on Guam.

Guam is east of Manila, Philippines (by 1,551 miles) and west of Hawaii (by 3,800 miles). Guam is a territory in the U.S. a day ahead of the mainland. So yes, they are from the future… H/T visitors to this blog from Guam – an early Merry Christmas.

 

Meme of the Day (h/t Frank)

 

Military Superpowers in Space

Another interesting clip from Shawn Ryan. “If someone else weaponizes space and we don’t, we’re screwed. There’s a network effect in space where it’s very cheap—for the cost of one aircraft carrier, you can put out probably 150,000 things up there that you can accurately drop on people.” Rods from God — non-nuclear with near nuke level destruction acceleration assist from gravity. Rods from God should be a sermonette, but Christmas Eve is a religious holiday – so there you go.

 

Nuclear Turkey

Turkish President Recep Erdogan expressed his displeasure (2023) at the supposed disparity between the nuclear haves and nuclear have-nots. He mainly focused on the unfairness of Turkey not having nuclear weapons as a deterrent, given the precarious geopolitical position the country has found itself in since the coup attempt against himself four years ago.

In the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt, international observers have turned their attention to the safety of the nuclear bombs at Incirlik Air Force Base. During the coup attempt, the Turkish commander at Incirlik joined the coup and was promptly stranded on his base after the coup’s failure. The post-coup atmosphere saw troops loyal to Erdogan harass the base and temporarily halt all operations. Laying siege to Incirlik did considerable damage to U.S.-Turkey relations because the base is where American B-61 nuclear bombs are housed. These bombs have been under constant pressure and pose a danger to global security if Turkey were somehow to get its hands on them. It is no surprise that there is a raging debate regarding the wisdom of keeping American nuclear weapons on Turkish territory. While the U.S. military chain of command controls the launch codes for those weapons and can easily be locked to prevent Turkish troops from using the bombs, gaining access to those weapons would provide Turkish engineers with valuable information on how American nukes are built.

The nuclear bombs at Incirlik aren’t the only way Turkey can acquire that information. Turkey’s burgeoning nuclear energy industry, aided by Russian nuclear exports, presents serious proliferation concerns, especially if Erdogan’s displeasure with the status quo is turned into policy. In the coming decades, Turkey could acquire enough technical knowledge and experience to pursue its indigenous nuclear capabilities, and the international community could be powerless to stop it.

Turkey is a signatory to all significant IAEA protocols, and its contract with Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear agency, for the nuclear plant at Akkuyu is “proliferation resistant,” according to experts. Rosatom having effective control over Turkey’s nuclear reactor reduces the likelihood that Turkey could attain a nuclear weapon. Still, Turkish engineers working in the Akkuyu plant can gain valuable knowledge that they can apply to a weapons program. Even so, experts believe that it is in Turkey’s best interest to continue abiding by its agreements and that Erdogan’s words are just bluster designed to play into the prevailing domestic anti-Western mood.

There is a history of states violating IAEA agreements, though the mechanism to punish noncompliance can easily be subverted. Consider the following scenario: The IAEA is notified by its inspectors that Turkey is violating its safeguards agreements. Having no authority to punish this noncompliance, the IAEA defers to the UN Security Council to pass judgment. Turkey, being in a military alliance with the United States and a top client for Russian nuclear exports, escapes unscathed after either the Americans or the Russians veto a UNSC resolution sanctioning Turkey and demanding it fully comply with its IAEA obligations, resulting in a green light for Turkey to continue on its path of becoming the world’s newest member of the nuclear club.

So long as Erdogan continues on his revanchist path of returning Turkey to its Ottoman glory, the threat posed by Turkey gaining nuclear capabilities cannot be disregarded.

 

Famous But Incompetent

The following was first published on Sharyl Attkisson’s free Substack. Sharyl’s husband is a retired FBI Special Agent.

“I feel I was led astray last December by the executive branch of the government through the Department of Justice, through the FBI, and through the US attorney for New Mexico…They did not embarrass me alone, but they embarrassed this entire nation and everyone who is a citizen of it.”

Judge James Parker

As President Trump and his picks to head federal agencies contemplate their first steps, it’s helpful to recall one of the most serious abuses by FBI agents I uncovered as an investigative reporter.

FBI agents framed a Chinese man named Wen Ho Lee for spying.

The government misconduct included, as I reported at CBS News in 2000, claiming Lee failed a lie detector test when he’d passed it with flying colors.

Eventually, after I exposed the fraud, Judge James Parker released Lee from prison. He apologized for granting the Justice Department’s request to deny Lee bail and keep him in solitary confinement for a year.

The judge also lit up the government for its misconduct and misrepresentations to the court.

“I feel I was led astray last December by the executive branch of the government through the Department of Justice, through the FBI, and the US attorney for New Mexico,” said Judge Parker. ”They did not embarrass me alone, but they embarrassed this entire nation and everyone who is a citizen of it.”

There is no public record of anybody being held accountable.

In 2006, the federal government settled a lawsuit filed by Lee over the misconduct. Lee received a settlement of $1.6 million from the government (US taxpayers) and five news organizations that Lee had sued for defamation.

 

Wen Ho Lee’s Problematic Polygraphs

February 2000, by Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News

Wen Ho Lee either passed or failed his spy-related polygraphs depending on who interpreted the results.

After he received a passing grade on several lie detector tests, the FBI reversed the results and claimed he failed.

We now know that the first test was administered to Lee by a Department of Energy (DOE) polygrapher on December 23, 1998, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Lee worked as a top-secret nuclear scientist.

Because Lee, a Taiwanese-American, had recently been to Taiwan, had visited China in the past, and purportedly had access to America’s top nuclear secrets, the FBI focused on him as the prime suspect in the emerging case of alleged Chinese espionage, a story broken globally in one of my previous reports for CBS News.

Sources say the government pinpointed Lee even though he had been ruled out as a potential suspect because it needed a scapegoat. The government was embarrassed that the spying had happened on its watch and that ity had no viable suspects.

The FBI hadn’t been close to making an arrest or even beginning an interrogation of any suspect. But the Department of Energy’s head of counterintelligence, Ed Curran, said he was reluctant to leave Lee in his highly sensitive job in the lab’s X-Division without further investigation once the spying was detected, so he ordered the polygraph test.

FBI agents were standing by during the DOE test, ready to interrogate Lee if his polygraph answers proved to be deceptive.

I have obtained the test and its results, and learned that Lee was asked four espionage-related questions:

“Have you ever committed espionage against the United States?”
Lee’s response: “No.”

“Have you ever provided any classified weapons data to any unauthorized person?”
Lee’s response: “No.”

“Have you had any contact with anyone to commit espionage against the United States?”
Lee’s response: “No.”

“Have you ever had personal contact with anyone you know who has committed espionage against the United States?”
Lee’s response: “No.”

The polygrapher concluded that Lee was not deceptive.

Two other polygraphers in the DOE’s Albuquerque test center, including the manager, reviewed the charts and concurred that Lee wasn’t lying.

The polygraph results were so convincing and unequivocal that sources say the deputy director of the Los Alamos lab apologized to Lee, and work began to reinstate him into X-Division.

Furthermore, sources confirm to CBS News that the local Albuquerque FBI office sent a memo to headquarters in Washington saying it appeared that Lee was not their spy.

Here’s where the misconduct enters the picture.

Key decision-makers in Washington stepped in.

Several weeks after Lee passed the polygraph, the DOE assigned it the unusual designation of “incomplete.” Officials in Washington also ordered a halt to Lee’s reinstatement to the X-Division.

When FBI headquarters in Washington obtained the DOE polygraph results, they offered a completely different interpretation of the same test: that Lee had failed the polygraph.

The FBI then repeated a polygraph and, again, would later claim that he failed.

Despite Lee’s supposed failure at the time, sources say the FBI didn’t interrogate Lee at the moment or even tell him he had failed the polygraph — an odd deviation from the procedure for agents who are taught to question anyone who is supposedly deceptive in a polygraph immediately.

Finally, in early March 1999, the FBI decided to interrogate Lee. It happened to be the day I broke the story of the soon-to-be-released congressional report on alleged Chinese espionage at the labs. Following my report, The New York Times published an article that described Lee as a suspect without using his name. Somebody (at the FBI)  leaked those details to the newspaper to put Lee in the media’s crosshairs.

One investigative source tells me that even after the day of belated FBI questioning in March of 1999, the lead FBI agent verbalized that she thought Lee was not the right man.

But a few days later, after the New York Times article following up on my report, the FBI ordered a second interrogation of Lee, this time a “confrontational” style interview.

Sources say the FBI was eager to find someone to pin the spying on.

One special agent doing the questioning falsely told Lee no fewer than 30 times that he had failed his polygraphs and repeatedly demanded to know why.

I obtained a copy of the polygraph questions and results.

Here are some selected excerpts:

FBI special agent: “You’re never going to pass a polygraph. And you’re never going to have a clearance. And you’re not going to have a job. And if you get arrested, you won’t have a retirement…I can tell Washington why you’re failing those polygraphs if I don’t have something. I can’t do anything.”

Lee: “Well, I don’t understand.”

FBI special agent: “I can’t get you your job. I can’t do anything for you, Wen Ho. I can’t stop the newspapers from knocking on your door. I can’t stop the newspapers from calling your son. I can’t stop the people from polygraphing your wife. I can’t stop somebody from coming and knocking on your door and putting handcuffs on you.”

Lee: “I don’t know how to handle this case, I’m an honest person and I’m telling you all the truth and you don’t believe it. I, that’s it.”

FBI special agent: “Do you want to go down in history whether you’re professing your innocence like the Rosenbergs to the day that they take you to the electric chair?”

Lee: “I believe eventually, and I think God, God will make it his judgment.”

During this period, Department of Energy officials began leaking to the media that Lee had failed his polygraphs and that he was “the one” who had given China information on America’s most advanced thermo-nuclear warhead, the W-88.

A stunning charge that, in the end, investigators were unable to back up.

One question is how the same polygraph charts could be legitimately interpreted as “passing” and, by the FBI, as “failing?”

I spoke to Richard Keifer, the current chairman of the American Polygraph Association, who’s a former FBI agent and used to run the FBI’s polygraph program.

Keifer says, “There are never enough variables to cause one person to say (a polygraph subject is) deceptive, and one to say he’s non-deceptive…there should never be that discrepancy on evaluating the same chart.”

As to how it happened in the Wen Ho Lee case, Keifer thinks, “Then somebody is making an error.”

I asked Keifer to look at Lee’s polygraph scores. He said the scores are “crystal clear.” Keifer says, in all his years as a polygrapher, he had never been able to score anyone so high on the non-deceptive scale.

He was at a loss to find any explanation for how the FBI could deem the polygraph scores as “failing.”

The FBI has not explained how or why it interpreted Lee’s polygraph as deceptive.

When asked for an interview, the FBI said it would be “bad” to talk about Lee’s polygraph and that the case would be handled in the courts. The prosecution has not returned the charts and other polygraph documents to Lee’s defense team. And so far, the prosecution has withheld other key documents, including the actual charts from the DOE polygraph.

Since Lee was never charged with espionage (only computer security violations), the content of the polygraph may be unimportant to his case. But the fact that his scores apparently morphed from passing to failing fuels the argument of those who claim the government was looking for a scapegoat — someone to blame for the alleged theft of masses of American top secret nuclear weapons information by China — and that Lee conveniently filled that role.

More coverage of Wen Ho Lee case:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wen-ho-lee-scapegoat-or-spy

 

Identify the Aircraft

1

 

This should be a very easy ID – but I’m sending a second photo just in case.

 

2

It looks like a crop duster, but it’s not. Ok, it still could be, but it’s not.

It’s the USAF’s prime candidate to replace the A-10

 

3

Jagdgruppe 88 Condor Legion Spain 1937

 

Identify the Vehicle

4

We’ve had this photo before, but I’m retreading it.

 

5

 

6

Look before you jump to conclusions.

************

By way of a Christmas gift: I won’t make you guess what this weapon is. It’s a 7.3cm Propagandawerfer 41 rocket-powered propaganda leaflet distribution system. You’re welcome.

 

End