December 13, 2019

Cory Booker's Statement on Jersey City Attack

The text of it is here:

https://www.insidernj.com/booker-statement-jersey-city-slayings/

Curiously missing from the statement about the slaughter of Jewish people is any mention of Jewish people, Judaism, antisemitism, or anything else.

A more cynical person than myself would call this a silent dog whistle to a more-important-voting-block than mere Jews that happens to be overwhelmingly antisemitic. I'm not ready to go there yet. But I'm darn close.

This is the kind of crap that started the JDL (for those of you old enough to remember). Those were not great days.

June 27, 2019

How to steal a Navy, by Israel

Ever hear of the "Cherbourg Project" or "Operation Noa"?

No? It was the most amazing legal (OK, kind of legal) heist of a Navy in 1969 -- right from France.

It was an Israeli military operation that took place on 24 December 1969 and involved the escape of five armed Sa'ar 3 class boats from the French port of Cherbourg. The boats had been paid for by the Israeli government but had not been delivered due to the French arms embargo in 1969.

The Israeli naval command had reached the conclusion by the early 1960s that their old Second World War-era destroyers, frigates and corvettes were obsolete and new ships and vessels were needed. A survey was undertaken and the German shipyard of Lürssen was recommended. The shipyard was asked to design a new generation of small missile boat platforms and to modify the suggested wooden Jaguar-class torpedo boats according to Israeli Navy requirements. Due to Arab League pressure on the German government, this plan was not continued and a new builder was sought. The Israeli Navy survey recommended that the Cherbourg-based CMN shipyard owned by Félix Amiot would build the boats, based upon the Israeli demands. The boats were constructed by the French and the MTU engines were German-designed. The project received the codename "Autumn".

Crews were sent to France in early 1965. The technical team was headed by Commander Haim Schachal. The administrative and operational side was headed by then-Captain Binyamin (Bini) Telem, who later became the Israeli Navy's commander in chief during the Yom Kippur war. This was during the "Golden Age" of relations between Israel and France. After the Six-Day War, relations began to worsen. The French president — Charles de Gaulle — stopped the export of weapons to Israel.

In 1968, Israeli paratroopers commanded by then-Colonel Raphael Eitan (who later became IDF chief of staff), carried out a raid on Beirut airport during operations against the Palestine Liberation Organization. As a result, President de Gaulle ordered a full arms embargo on Israel. The resignation of de Gaulle and the election of Georges Pompidou to be the president of France inspired hope among the Israelis. The Israeli government assumed that Pompidou would lift the embargo, but Pompidou maintained it.

While the French government ordered an arms embargo on Israel, construction of the boats continued according to the original plan; and while the Israeli naval mission was in Cherbourg, controlling the project, Israeli crews were aboard the completed boats and the whole project was fully paid for by Israel.

The plan to take the boats was formulated by retired Rear Admiral Mordechai "Mokka" Limon, formerly the Israeli Navy's commander in chief, who was the head of the Israel Defense Forces mission in Paris. Limon's affiliation with the Rothschild family provided him with important connections in France with the French government, and more widely in Europe as well.

During that period, several events worked in favor of the Israelis. In 1967, the seventh boat of the twelve boats ordered, INS Mivtach (Reliance), was completed and launched. A telecom from Israeli Navy command informed the Israelis in Cherbourg that the embargo was expected to escalate, and the boats would have to sail immediately to Haifa during sea trials, ignoring the French protocols for leaving port. This angered the French, and they ordered the Israeli Navy and the other boats to leave the French harbour, and dock instead at the commercial port, which was unguarded.

The boats were transferred to a front company called Starboat, registered in Panama, allegedly a Norwegian company for oil drills. The front company was Limon's idea, aided by his connections with Mila Brenner, a retired naval officer with a rank of commander and the owner of the Israel-based "Maritime Fruit Carriers", a company that operated cargo ships transporting fruit. Milla Brenner knew the Norwegian businessman Martin Siem, who was able to provide assistance. The front company people were Mossad members led by Benyamin Vered, one of the highest ranking commanders of Mossad.

The front company feigned interest in the boats as potential survey ships for searching for oil, and declared that the boats' specifications met their needs. To add to the deception Limon pretended to have "tough negotiations" with Starboat. The terms agreed were that the boats would be transferred to Starboat and would be crewed by members of the Israeli Navy due to their experience with the boats. The boats were sold and transferred legally by the government of Israel to the front company with the approval of Michel Debré, the French Defense Minister. This was the first part of the deception.

The next stage of the operation was to build a day-to-day routine with the aim of ultimately misleading the French at Cherbourg. Israeli skeleton crews took over the boats and maintained a routine of short voyages, heading north into the Atlantic. The skeleton crews were secretly reinforced by 80 Israeli officers, ratings and sailors in civilian clothes who arrived in groups of two at different destinations throughout Europe as tourists, and then travelled to Cherbourg. It was feared that sending them all to Cherbourg at once would alert French intelligence. They were ordered to keep moving between hotels, and not to stay in any one hotel for more than one night. The crews traveled on Israeli passports so that in the event they were caught, they could not be charged with passport fraud. By 23 December, all crews had arrived, and were scattered around the city. Mossad director-general Meir Amit considered the risk to the operation to be very high, recalling "it just needed one suspicious French policeman to ask why so many Jews were coming to Cherbourg for Christmas and the whole operation could be blown.”

Prior to the escape, the boats had to be fuelled with large amount of diesel and stocked with enough food to sustain an eight-day voyage. Stocking and fueling this amount all at once could have alerted observers to the fact that a long voyage was planned. Commander Rinat, the head of operations, instead ordered the boats to be gradually fuelled using a small 5-ton tank truck. A quarter of a million litres of fuel was smuggled in drums and hidden below decks. By 24 December, the boats had been fully fuelled and stored. The supply officer bought fresh and dry food from local grocery stores to stock on the boats. To prevent arousing suspicion, the supplies were purchased in small quantities each time.

Since sudden engine noise during the night of the escape would alert the French, the operation's commander, Captain Hadar Kimhi, ordered the boats' engines to be regularly started at nights, causing the inhabitants of Cherbourg to become accustomed to the noise. The local police visited the boats in response to inhabitants' complaints, and received the explanations that the electrical supply from the shore was not enough to warm the boats during the cold days of December. The boats received an authorization from the electrical company and police to operate their engines at night. The noise was loud with twenty Maybach main engines running.

Meanwhile, the ZIM navigation company Europe Lines were approached to help in providing fuel, once the boats had left Cherbourg. Assistance was provided by Edmond Wilhelm Brillant, a retired navy officer and a naval architect. He designated MV Lea to provide fuel at Gibraltar and MV Nahariya as a backup in the Bay of Biscay (both general cargo ships that were available at that time). The main difficulty at this stage of the plan was the conversion of MV Lea into a fuelling ship carrying 200,000 litres of light diesel fuel. This was solved by conversion of the ballast tank in the ship's bow and bottom into a fuel tank. The pump system was converted to operate as both a fire fighting and fueling pump. Special high pressure hoses were used and a fueling drill was developed prior sailing to the rendezvous point near Gibraltar.

According to international maritime regulations, MV Lea could not sail since safety regulations banned ships from carrying fuel in the bow as fuel vapour may cause an explosion. This issue was solved by Brillant with the aid of Kirstine shipyards and a Lloyd's Register surveyor. Additionally, a special filter was needed to make sure no dirt from tanks would contaminate the boat's tanks and engines. This filter was improvised by Brillant. It was capable of fuelling five boats, but only two at a time were fueled at the ship's stern. The overall conversion and drill took twelve hours. Other Zim divisions provided the Dan, a Ro-Ro ship sister of MV Nili, which would provide fuel near Lampedusa. Captain of MV Dan was Yosef Dror, a retired Navy officer (Commander) and Shayetet 13 commando frogman. In this case, tanker trailers were loaded in the ship's garage. These Zim ships sailed with additional crew made up of members of the Israeli Navy.

The boats were to escape on Christmas Eve. On the eve of the escape, the skeleton crews continued to maintain the boats, while the 80 crews who came to reinforce them hid belowdecks. The Israelis feared that the boats could sink while sailing through the Bay of Biscay in severe winter conditions. The group had a meteorologist assigned to them, who monitored all British, French and Spanish weather forecasts. Despite a forecast predicting rain from the south-west, the crews were ordered to sail out at 20:30. By 19:30, all crews were aboard. There was a force 9 storm on the night of the escape, and after the weather worsened, the departure time was extended to 22:30, but the escape was again delayed by worsening weather. Captain Hadar Kimhi received urgent coded messages from Israel ordering him to set sail despite the weather, but he decided to wait. At midnight, the meteorologist picked up a BBC report indicating that the storm would die down in two hours. At 02:30, the boats left Cherbourg and headed slowly out to sea.

The French were initially unaware that the Israeli boats had left port, and their absence was noticed by a reporter who visited the port and saw that all the boats were missing. He immediately reported it to the BBC almost 12 hours after the escape, and so the French authorities learned of the boats' disappearance from the BBC. The empty berths and an absence of any announcement of the embargo's termination caused speculation that Israel had taken the boats. A television news team flew out over the North Sea to see if the boats were heading towards Norway, to where they had ostensibly been sold, while other news crews headed out over the Mediterranean. The boats crossed the Bay of Biscay before turning south and crossing into the Mediterranean, meeting Israeli support ships along the way. During fuelling by MV Lea at Gibraltar, one of the Israeli navy crew members mistakenly allowed water into the fuel tanks of INS Hetz (Arrow). It was not initially known whether the water was seawater; if it was, it could not be drained and may damage the engines. Commander Rinat asked the crew to taste the fuel and to indicate if it was salty or not. Having determined that it was not seawater, the tanks were drained.

As the boats passed Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, the British monitoring station flashed a signal, asking the boats to identify themselves. The boats gave no reply, and a Lloyd's helicopter circling over them detected no flags or identity numbers. The British personnel, who had heard the media reports of the disappearance of the Israeli boats from Cherbourg, correctly guessed the boat's nationalities and true destination, then flashed the signal "bon voyage". The Israelis took it as a signal that the British understood who they were. The boats were finally spotted by television crews in the Mediterranean as they travelled fast towards Israel, hugging the coast of North Africa. Near Crete, Israeli Air Force F-4 Phantom fighters met up with the boats and flew low overhead in escort.

French Defence Minister Michel Debré ordered an air strike to sink the boats. The French Chief of Staff refused to obey and replied he would resign rather than obey the order. The order was countermanded by Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, who prevented any further escalation. Although the French government was furious, it realized that there was little that could be done, since the boats were already on the high seas when the ruse was uncovered. French Foreign Minister Maurice Schumann warned that if the boats appeared in Israel, "the consequences will be very grave indeed".

The Israeli boats sailed a total of 3,145 nmi (5,825 km; 3,619 mi), beginning in the English Channel, and arriving at the Kishon Shipyard port in Haifa bay on 31 December. The boats were met with public jubilation when they arrived in Israel.

The French government expelled Mordechai Limon from France. It was said that the French president stated "I do not like tea with Lemon and Mokka coffee". Generals Louis Bonte and Bernard Cazelles were suspended by the government. Instead Israel turned to American supplies of weapons and support. The Israeli Air Force began to be equipped by American aircraft, while the United States Navy started to train the Israeli Navy's high command and increased the level of naval cooperation.

According to British intelligence writer Gordon Thomas, following the affair, Mossad agents were watched "as closely as any terrorist" when they were deployed to France to track down and kill Middle Eastern terrorists. Many times, terrorists would escape after being tipped off by a pro-Arab French intelligence officer.

May 22, 2019

The New German Anti-Semitism

New York Times
2019-05-21
By: James Angelos

One of Wenzel Michalski’s early recollections of growing up in southern Germany in the 1970s was of his father, Franz, giving him some advice: “Don’t tell anyone that you’re Jewish.” Franz and his mother and his little brother had survived the Holocaust by traveling across swaths of Eastern and Central Europe to hide from the Gestapo, and after the war, his experiences back in Germany suggested that, though the Nazis had been defeated, the anti-Semitism that was intrinsic to their ideology had not. This became clear to Franz when his teachers in Berlin cast stealthily malicious glances at him when Jewish characters — such as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” — came up in literature. “Eh, Michalski, this exactly pertains to you,” he recalls one teacher telling him through a clenched smile. Many years later, when he worked as an animal-feed trader in Hamburg, he didn’t tell friends that he was Jewish and held his tongue when he heard them make anti-Semitic comments. And so Franz told his son Wenzel that things would go easier for him if he remained quiet about being Jewish. “The moment you say it, things will become very awkward.”

As a teenager, Wenzel defied his father’s advice and told a close friend. That friend quickly told his mother, and the next time Wenzel saw her, she reacted quite strongly, hugging him and kissing his face: “Wenzel! Oh, my Wenzel!” Now a stocky, bearded 56-year-old, Wenzel recalled the moment to me on a recent Saturday afternoon. He raised the pitch of his voice as he continued to mimic her: “You people! You are the most intelligent! The most sensitive! You are the best pianists in the world! And the best poets!” In his normal voice again, he added, “Then I understood what my father meant.”

Wenzel Michalski is now the director of Human Rights Watch for Germany. He and his wife, Gemma, an outgoing British expat, live in a cavernous apartment building in the west of Berlin. In their kitchen, Gemma told me that after arriving in Germany in 1989, she often got a strangely defensive reaction when she told people she was Jewish; they would tell her they didn’t feel responsible for the Holocaust or would defend their grandparents as not having perpetrated it. And so, to avoid conversations like these, she, too, stayed quiet about being Jewish.

Recently, the Michalskis’ youngest son became the third generation of the family to learn that telling people he is Jewish could cause problems. The boy — whose parents asked that he be called by one of his middle names, Solomon, to protect his privacy — had attended a Jewish primary school in Berlin. But he didn’t want to stay in such a homogeneous school for good, so just before he turned 14, he transferred to a public school that was representative of Germany’s new diversity — a place, as Gemma described it, where he “could have friends with names like Hassan and Ahmed.”

(Excerpted -- very long and good read.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/magazine/anti-semitism-germany.html

This strikes close to home. My great granddaughter (8th grade, going to 9th) recently had a mild spat of teenage antisemitism directed her way by good friends who had been to our home -- mix of Mescalero Apache, Anglo, Hispanic (native New Mexico, not immigrant), and Lebanese (first generation) kids. They were studying the Shoa and lots of crude comments were made -- picture of Hitler held up and asked "Does this scare you?", some swastikas drawn on a book, and the common insult between the kids is to call someone a "Jew". Been going on for a bit; parents finally informed. With one noted exception, with a kid who no longer speaks to her, it has been resolved. Ironically, my grandson (and his father before them) was the trusted family doctor to all of them. He even delivered a few when they could not make it to the larger city hospital.

May 2, 2019

LA Judge Rules Against San Diego Jewish Family Over $30M Painting Looted By Nazis

KCAL9 CBS Los Angeles
May 2, 2019 at 11:34 am

A 15-year court battle has seemingly come to an end after an L.A. federal judge ruled Tuesday that a Spanish museum which acquired a $30 million painting looted by the Nazis is the work’s rightful owner, and not the San Diego Jewish family of a woman who surrendered it 80 years ago to escape the Holocaust.Camille Pissarro’s “Rue Saint-Honore: Afternoon, Rain Effect,” which depicts a 19th century Paris street scene, has been housed at the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid since 1993. Pissarro created the stunning oil-on-canvas work of a rainy Paris street scene from what he saw out the window of a hotel room in 1897. It is valued at around $30 million. In his 34-page ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Judge John F. Walter found no evidence the museum knew it was looted art when it took possession in 1993.

According to the lawsuit first filed in L.A. federal court in 2005, the Nazis confiscated the painting from Lilly Cassirer, whose Jewish family owned a prominent art gallery in Berlin in the 1930s. Lilly Cassirer was among the last of the family to flee ahead of the Holocaust. As she tried to leave Germany, a Nazi official forced her to surrender the painting in exchange for the exit visa she needed. Her sister, who remained, was later killed in a Nazi death camp. The painting had been sold and resold after Cassirer and her family fled Germany. Swiss industrialist Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza purchased the painting in 1976 from a St. Louis art collector for $300,000. In 1993, Spain bought Thyssen-Bornemisza’s collection for $350 million to hang at his namesake museum, which repeatedly refused to return the painting to the Cassirer family. Thyssen-Bornemisza died in 2002.

Under Spanish law, Walter ruled, the painting is legally the museum’s. However, Walter also criticized Spain, calling its decision to keep the painting “inconsistent” with international agreements that it and other countries have signed “based upon the moral principle that art and cultural property confiscated by the Nazis from Holocaust (Shoah) victims should be returned to them or their heirs.” Walter, who has seen the case returned to court twice by appeals, conducted the non-jury trial in December. A lawyer for Lilly Cassirer’s great-grandson, David Cassirer of San Diego, didn’t say whether the family plans to appeal.

More at:

https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2019/05/02/la-judge-rules-against-san-diego-jewish-family-over-30m-painting-looted-by-nazis/

April 29, 2019

L.A. terror plot thwarted: Army vet planned 'mass casualties,' FBI says

Source: Los Angeles Times

A Reseda man planned to detonate improvised explosive devices at several Southern California locations to cause “mass casualties” in a terror plot thwarted by law enforcement officials, authorities said Monday. Mark Steven Domingo, 26, an Army veteran, was arrested Friday night after he took delivery of what he thought was a live bomb from an undercover law enforcement officer posing as a bomb-maker, officials said. He was charged with attempting to provide material support to terrorists.

According to a federal affidavit, “after considering various attacks — including targeting Jews, churches, and police officers — Domingo decided to detonate an IED at a rally scheduled to take place in Long Beach this past weekend. As part of the plot, Domingo asked his confederate — who actually was cooperating with the FBI as part of the investigation — to find a bomb-maker, and Domingo last week purchased several hundred nails to be used as shrapnel inside the IED. “Domingo said he specifically bought three-inch nails because they would be long enough to penetrate the human body and puncture internal organs,” the affidavit states.

John C. Demers, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department national security division, said Domingo wanted to use improvised explosive devices that “would make the bombs even more deadly to the victims he targeted.” “His arrest today mitigates the threat he posed to others in the Los Angeles community,” Demers said.

Prosecutors said Domingo sought retribution for the attacks on New Zealand mosques and said he was willing to become a martyr. “There must be retribution,” he said in an online post, according to the federal criminal complaint. He also allegedly expressed allegiance to Islamic State.

Read more: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-los-angeles-terror-plot-20190429-story.html

---

Not sure I'd lede with "Army Vet" as this description. It plays into the false narrative that veterans are more violent and destructive -- a narrative proven false by the insurance actuarials and entire business model of USAA Insurance.

April 29, 2019

Mein Kamf, the CA Internet Loser's version

Know your enemy:

https://pastebin.com/vxxfqmtw

It's the dickweed San Diego shooter's manifesto. Not particularly political in any way (other than to dump on Trump and gun control people in the same breath). A reminder that antisemitism exist wholly outside of the political spectrum.

Smart, clever, writer. Not insane that I can see, but rather just brim full of irrational hatred.

Reminds me a bit of Martin Luther's "Of Jews and Their Lies" (an author from whom he cites inspiration, as did Hitler).

March 26, 2019

New Zealand Mosque Chairman Accuses Mossad, 'Zionist Business' of Orchestrating Christchurch Shootin

Source: The Algemeiner

The chairman of a New Zealand mosque was caught on video telling a rally in the city of Auckland that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad and “Zionist business” were behind the recent shooting attack on two mosques in Christchurch. Fifty people were killed and dozens more wounded in the attacks on March 15. Australian citizen Brenton Tarrant, a white supremacist, was arrested and charged with the crime.

According to New Zealand news outlet Newshub, the Saturday rally was intended to memorialize the victims of the attacks, but at one point Ahmed Bhamji, chairman of the Mt Roskill Masjid E Umar mosque, stated, “I really want to say one thing today. Do you think this guy was alone? … I want to ask you, where did he get the funding from?” “I stand here and I say I have a very very strong suspicion that there’s some group behind him and I am not afraid to say I feel Mossad is behind this,” he added. A bystander then responds, “It’s the truth. Israel is behind this. That’s right!”

After the video of the speech was posted on Twitter, the New Zealand Jewish community quickly responded. “These conspiracy theories are dangerous lies. They put the Jewish community at risk, at a time of heightened security concerns,” said New Zealand Jewish Council spokesperson Juliet Moses. “Conspiracy theories — particularly the idea that Jews (whether through the Jewish state or otherwise) are a malevolent controlling force in the world — are at the very core of antisemitism.”

Referring to Love Aotearoa Hate Racism, the group that organized the rally, Moses said, “It is unfortunate that they did not appear to put its anti-racism message into practice by challenging or condemning the racism in their midst. We must call out hateful dehumanising language, whatever the source, target, and circumstances, and even when it is not politically expedient to do so,” she admonished. Bhamji himself was contacted by Newshub and proved unapologetic about his remarks. “Mossad is up to all these things,” he stated. “When I talk about Mossad, why should the Jews be upset about it? Give me an answer.”

Read more: https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/03/26/new-zealand-mosque-chairman-accuses-mossad-zionist-business-of-orchestrating-christchurch-shootings/?fbclid=IwAR0pU2okZ-mipI6dpMCDW2LLvun9YZWq3CMMmmziAGHfP5dVSGHEzkSpP0A

---

Unfortunately, this is predictable.

March 26, 2019

Facebook, Axios And NBC Paid This Guy To Whitewash Wikipedia Pages

Huffington Post
May 14, 2019
By: Ashley Feinberg

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/wikipedia-paid-editing-pr-facebook-nbc-axios_n_5c63321be4b03de942967225

Executives at the news company Axios were outwardly unperturbed when Jonathan Swan, one of the Politico-for-kids site’s star reporters, attracted widespread condemnation last November for gloating about getting President Donald Trump to consider ending birthright citizenship. “Our profile is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger, and we’re going to have more cool successes,” Axios editor-in-chief Nicholas Johnston told staff later. Executive editor Mike Allen acknowledged that Axios had, perhaps, erred ever so slightly, but seemed otherwise unconcerned with the criticism. “You can’t buy the amount of public exposure we got this past week for our journalism,” he wrote.

hat may be true. What you can buy, however, are the services of a verbose, relentless Wikipedia editor willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that that public exposure is as flattering as possible. So, Axios did. Axios may not have expressed its worries about its reputational problem publicly or even to its own staff, but the company did hire Ed Sussman, a former head of digital for Fast Company and Inc.com who’s now a paid Wikipedia editor at WhiteHatWiki.com, to do damage control.

Axios had previously hired Sussman to beef up its Wikipedia page (mostly with benign — if largely flattering — stats about Axios’ accomplishments) in February 2018. A week after Swan’s Trump interview aired, Sussman was hard at work on the reporter’s Wikipedia page, arguing that the entry was unfair to Swan and used “sensationalistic language” instead of the “dispassionate voice” Wikipedia requires. To correct the issue, he suggested a total overhaul of the description.

bout a month later, Sussman proposed a list of extensive edits to Swan’s page. Some were clearly in service of his original argument about the Trump interview; others, such as his suggestion that Wikipedia editors add an “Awards and Honors” section, seemed focused on promoting Swan himself. He also asked editors to remove a sentence noting that Swan had once incorrectly reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had verbally resigned. Sussman then suggested the following paragraph be placed in its stead:

(excerpted; remainder of article at link)

February 19, 2019

Teen builds working nuclear fusion reactor in Memphis home

By Charles Watson | Fox News

02/19/2019

MEMPHIS, Tenn.- Some kids spend their time on social media, other kids spend their time playing video games. When it comes to 14-year-old Jackson Oswalt, his time is spent in a laboratory working on a nuclear fusion reactor.

The Memphis teen finished his reactor and achieved fusion at the age of 13. He’s regarded by experts as the youngest in America – maybe even the world – to accomplish it. Jackson built a steel machine made up of vacuums, pumps and chambers that is capable of smashing atoms together through force in a smoking hot plasma center that releases a burst of fusion energy. If you’ve ever wondered how the sun and other stars are powered, the process within Jackson’s nuclear fusion reactor is comparable.

He began working on the fusion reactor at 12 years old, after concluding that he didn’t want to dedicate his leisure time solely to playing games like Fortnite. He began scouring the Internet for nuclear-related things because that’s what he says held his interest. Yes — at 12 years old.

During his research, Jackson came across Taylor Wilson, who in 2008 at 14 years old garnered international recognition as the youngest person to achieve fusion after building a nuclear fusion reactor in his parents’ garage in Texarkana, Ark.

https://www.foxnews.com/science/teen-builds-working-nuclear-fusion-reactor-in-memphis-home

Jackson, like any 12-year-old would, thought he could at least try to beat the record set by Wilson. From there he got to work.

“The start of the process was just learning about what other people had done with their fusion reactors,” explained the mild-mannered teen. “After that, I assembled a list of parts I needed. got those parts off eBay primarily and then often times the parts that I managed to scrounge off of eBay weren’t exactly what I needed. So, I’d have to modify them to be able to do what I needed to do for my project.”

Building the nuclear fusion reactor was no game for Jackson. He converted an old playroom in his Memphis home into a functioning lab. With the financial support of his parents – he spent between $8,000 and $10,000 over the course of a year collecting the parts he needed to build his nuclear fusion reactor – that was apparently the easy part.

Putting the fusion reactor together and testing to see if it worked was the real challenge. Since there isn’t exactly a manual on how to build something like that he relied on trial and error and the Open Source Fusor Research Consortium, an online forum for amateur physicists, to ensure that he was taking the proper steps toward successfully building a fusion reactor and hopefully achieving fusion.

“After a while, it became pretty simple to realize how it all worked together, but at the start it was definitely figuring out one aspect of it, memorizing what that actually meant and then moving on to a different aspect of it,” Jackson said. “Eventually all those pieces of the puzzle came together to make a good project.”

ackson’s father, Chris Oswalt, had no real understanding of what his son was working on. To make sure Jackson was safe he had experts speak to him about the dangers involved with working on a potentially deadly fusion reactor, like being exposed to high levels of radiation or being electrocuted by the 50,000 volts of electricity he uses to warm the fusion reactor’s plasma core.

Outside of his safety concerns, Chris Oswalt was astonished at what his son was attempting to do.

“Being a parent of someone that was as driven as he was for 12 months was really impressive to see. I mean it was everyday grinding; Everyday learning something different; everyday failing and watching him work through all those things,” he said.

Throughout the process, Jackson posted his results to the Open Source Fusor Research Consortium up until the point when he was able to achieve fusion on Jan. 19, 2018 — hours before his 13th birthday. In Jackson’s case that meant combining two atoms of deuterium gas in the fusion reactor’s plasma core which ejected a neutron into a device that slowed it down and detected nuclear fusion.

“You have to jump through the right hoops, and we have to believe you and see what you’ve done,” said Richard Hull, 72, a verifier with the research consortium and an administrator for its website Fusor.net.

Hull, a retired electronics engineer from Richmond, Va., verified both Jackson’s and Wilson’s results. He now regards Jackson as the youngest in America – possibly the world – to achieve fusion.

On a larger scale, scientists have yet to figure out how to produce a nuclear fusion reactor that, like the sun, is able to release more energy than it takes in to power things like homes and buildings.

“We are still far away from making a working nuclear fusion reactor to produce electricity so you can think about how challenging it is to make a fusion reactor,” said Dr. Jingbiao Cui, professor and chair of the Physics department at the University of Memphis.

With a young mind like Jackson interested in becoming a “nuclear engineer working on more projects like this,” scientists could work out the kinks of fusion reactors sooner rather than later.

February 14, 2019

A brief response regarding Judea and Samaria (JEWISH GROUP)

I posted this elsewhere, but I cobbled this together regarding the common canard about Israel having illegal settlements. Now there are many kinds of settlements going on, but I picked Judea and Samaria as my example because it's the most common.

Here are the facts:

Let's talk about Judea and Samaria, commonly called the "West Bank" (as in, the west bank of the River Jordan) in the Western press.

Go back in time to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire that accelerated after WWI, and the division of the stateless land into two states -- now Jordan (largely Arab) and Israel (largely Jewish).

At the time of initial division of this stateless land, the land on both sides of the river Jordan were to be part of the Jewish National Home by the 1920 San Remo Conference, including Judea and Samaria. This was confirmed by the League of Nations (predecessor to the United Nations) in the 1922 League of Nations Mandate to Britain, and affirmed by article 80 of the United Nations charter in 1945. When Israel’s leaders declared sovereignty in all territory relinquished by England on May 15, 1948 (including the land west of the Jordan river) it was recognized as the State of Israel by the General Assembly and Security Council by May1949.

At that point in time, Judea and Samaria (again the "West Bank " ) were legally Israel.

Well, the Arab homeland (again, Jordan, interestingly with an Army staffed with former Nazi officers) didn't like that much, so Jordan invaded (along with four other Arab states) and conquered Judea in 1949, annexed it in 1950.

Jordan's actions were illegal under Article 2 of the UN charter, which forbids the acquisition of territory through war, so no one recognized Jordan's occupation, except England (who was pissed off at the new Israel for a rather nasty war).

In 1967, Jordan again initiated war against Israel (along with two other Arab states) but Jordan was pushed out of the territory (back to Jordan’s recognized boundaries on the east bank of the Jordan river) by Israel. This re-acquisition of the territory by Israel was legal because article 51 of the U.N. charter permits a nation to defend itself from attack.

Given the fact that Israel had legal title to the territory that was recognized by the international community and Israel’s final control of Judea was a result of self-defense rather than aggression (while Jordan’s control of the territory was never recognized as legitimate by the international community), common sense shows that Israel merely won back territory that legitimately belonged to it in the first place.

Regardless, Jordan (the only potential claimant) relinquished all claims to Judea and Samaria in 1988 and recognized the territory as part of Israel in a peace treaty signed in 1994.

So, no, settlements in Judea and Samaria are not illegal occupation of Jordanian land.

The various proclamations by certain committees of the UN have no binding effect under international law. It's just like Senate resolutions from whomever condemning things. Lots of sound and fury, but they don't actually mean anything.