I suspect that they don’t housebreak.

HT: Vanderleun.

Awwww. This is heartbreaking. Please, somebody tell her #Bernie needs another house in the south of France. Surely he’ll run in again in 2024. Until then she should buy a kitten. pic.twitter.com/y82bi9PKbQ

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) March 10, 2020

Did Gus Weiss, a secretive White House and Intelligence Community insider, informally mastermind a plot to bring down the Soviet Union by sabotaging the crucial technologies stolen from the West that were required to prop up its failing economy? Did Weiss’s Operation Kudo successfully blow up, circa 1982, a Soviet gas pipeline delivering to Moscow some $30 billion-a-year in hard currency, resulting in an event classified by NORAD as the largest non-nuclear explosion in recorded history? Was Weiss’s death in 2003 a suicide or Moscow’s belated revenge? The stories are out there, but Wired Magazine’s Alex French found no official sources will confirm any of this. How odd!

Is it a tale too far-fetched to be true, or too bizarre not to be? Allegedly, a disgruntled KBG agent code-named “Farewell” gave away Soviet secrets to the French, who then promptly shared them with the US — giving the American government a veritable shopping list of the US technology most coveted by the Soviets. Enter Gus Weiss, an eccentric and brilliant insider in the US intelligence community. According to Alex French at Wired, Weiss devised the perfect plan to thwart the Russians: sell them what they want, but first make sure that technology is programmed to self-destruct, taking down a natural gas pipeline vital to the cash-strapped Russians.

Weiss proposed using the Farewell shopping lists to supply the Soviets with the products they sought.

But Weiss wanted the gadgets altered, pre-improved so that they would eventually fail. “The scheme was so goober-pea simple that nobody had come upon it,” Weiss wrote of his solution. Even if the Soviets sniffed out the American trickery, Weiss wrote, “the stratagem would still work as the Agency’s Red Star clientele would be forced to test and retest each recalcitrant unit, provoking delays and finger pointing in the Center, its puffed up potentates sniffing a Gulag behind their next performance appraisal … Real fake devices, false fake devices … The Soviets had set themselves up in exquisite fashion.”

That alternative plan is at the core of the legend of Gus Weiss. The best-known version of the tale goes like this: High up on the Soviet tech shopping list was software to regulate the pressure gauges and valves for the critical Siberian gas pipeline. According to Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, the Soviets sought the software on the open market. American export controls prohibited its sale from the US. However, a small industrial software company located in Calgary called Cov-Can produced what the Soviets wanted. As Weiner writes, “The Soviets sent a Line X officer to steal the software. The CIA and the Canadians conspired to let them have it.”

The faulty software “weaved” its way through Soviet quality control. The pipeline software ran swimmingly for months, but then pressure in the pipeline gradually mounted. And one day—the date remains unclear, though most put it in June 1982—the software went haywire, the pressure soaring out of control. The pipeline ruptured, igniting a blast in the wilds of Siberia so massive that, according to Thomas C. Reed’s At the Abyss, “at the White House, we received warning from our infrared satellites of some bizarre event out in the middle of Soviet nowhere. NORAD feared a missile liftoff from a place where no rockets were known to be based. Or perhaps it was the detonation of a nuclear device. The Air Force chief of intelligence rated it at three kilotons.”

The pipeline explosion is said to have cost Moscow tens millions of dollars it could ill-afford to waste.

RTWT

HT: Karen L. Myers.

Is Old Ephraim hanging about your backyard? Cat Urbigkit, in Cowboy State Daily, shares some new guidance from the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Got a grizzly bear hanging out near the house? Fire up that paintball gun and give it a go! U.S. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt has confirmed that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) has issued new guidance on actions the public can take to haze grizzly bears that may pose a threat to human safety.

According to a letter Bernhardt sent to Montana’s Congressional delegation, “These actions include the use of paintballs, noise-making projectiles, and visual deterrents.”

While I’ve wickedly fantasized about paintballing well-dressed float fishermen passing underneath a bridge on the New Fork River, I didn’t know how small and lacking my daydream was. I should have dreamed bigger; grizzly sized dreams.

FWS quickly issued the new guidance, which includes methods that are allowed to deter grizzlies away from the immediate vicinity (200 yards) of a human-occupied residence or potential conflict area, such as a barn, livestock corral, chicken coop, grain bin, or schoolyard. In addition to using paintballs, also allowed is the use of stones or marbles, either thrown or sent out of a slingshot.

When you mention the Yellowstone region’s grizzly bear population, most people think of Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, and the federal parkway that connects the two. But WG&F large carnivore staff report that the grizzly population’s occupied range includes more than 7,000 square miles of private property. That’s more private property within occupied grizzly bear range than the two national parks and parkway combined.

Let’s hope the irritated bear doesn’t charge.

RTWT

Ann Althouse did a nice tribute.

HT: Bird Dog.

Bookworm Room has it right.

Bernie is evil. I know I’m not supposed to say that. I’m supposed to say that he’s just the crazy uncle who’s a straight shooter with his consistent beliefs, something that must earn him respect.

No. This is a man who lived through more than 50% of the 20th century, a century that saw socialism in its various forms send around 100 million people to early graves through murder, war, torture, and slave labor. Bernie was around for that. He was born during WWII; he saw what happened in North Korea; he saw what happened in Vietnam; he saw what happened in Cuba; he saw what happened across Latin America and Africa; he saw what happened in the Soviet Union; and he saw what happened in China. That he can still believe in socialism despite seeing the misery it relentlessly inflicted around the world means that he’s either completely evil or he’s a fool . . . and I don’t think he’s a fool.

Moreover, Bernie is a grossly dishonest person. Back in 2016, when he was merely a parasite who lived off of government and wives, one could say that he was an honest man who lived in accordance with his belief system. Since then, though, as Bloomberg was good enough to point out during the debate, Bernie has become a multimillionaire with real estate holdings and fast cars, who flies around American in private jets.

Rather than give up this wealth as a good true believer should, Bernie has instead given up his attacks on millionaires and now only attacks billionaires. While Trump may puff about statistics, he’s completely honest about his core beliefs. Bernie, however, applied his apparent core beliefs to himself only because he was incapable of earning money (angry communists usually are).

When Bernie finally earned money, he didn’t act like an honest man and say, “I was wrong in my beliefs.” Instead, like every tyrant in the world, he said, “I don’t have to live by the rules I intend to impose on others.” That’s hypocritical and, because socialism and death march hand-in-hand, evil.

————————

Bookworm understates Socialism’s death toll, I’m afraid.

Yuri N. Maltsev discussing the Staggering Toll of the Russian Revolution:

The late Rudolph Rummel, the demographer of government mass murder, estimated the human toll of twentieth-century socialism to be about 61 million in the Soviet Union, 78 million in China, and roughly 200 million worldwide. These victims perished during state-organized famines, collectivization, cultural revolutions, purges, campaigns against ‘unearned’ income, and other devilish experiments in social engineering.”

HT: Vanderleun.

Dominic Van Allen was not just a spaced-out junkie. He worked, but found it impossible to earn enough to pay London rents. So he improvised, and in the process demonstrated major amounts of initiative, enterprize, and ingenuity. Unfortunately, in the end, he became a victim of contemporary urban tyranny. He was accused of ownership of a crude pipe gun found buried in the ground and convicted. Unless his appeal succeeds, he won’t have to deal witrh homelessness for five years.

Camden New Journal

The Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham died in 1832 but, in accordance with his own instructions, he still gets to travel and to attend academic meetings. Atlas Obscura