bý Gordog

Some continue to delude themselves about the so-called US economy, which is nothing but a house of cards—and this meaningless, completely fabricated 'metric' of GDP. In real terms, China's economy is already bigger by half then the US. And that is being charitable.

Let us review some basic facts about how NUMBERS actually work. This is known as MATHEMATICS.

Take for instance the Ponzi Scheme. This is an ingenious bilking scam where a group of investors is promised a guaranteed rate of return. Since there is no PRODUCTIVE business of any kind that can generate any return, the only way to pay those initial investors is to draw in more investors over the next term, usually a year. The incoming investors are likewise paid their return by the next crop of investors, etc. Now it is obvious just from this description that the amount of new investors has to INCREASE each year, in order for this to stay afloat.

The mathematical underpinning of this scheme is exponential growth. This is a mathematical function where the growth of something is a function of the EXPONENT of TIME.

In simple terms: if you start with a single cell that splits in two…then those two each split in two and so on, it is obvious that the number of cells doubles at a given rate of time. In a Petri dish, such organisms will rapidly multiply in number until they have exhausted all the nutrients available…and everybody DIES!

Now let's consider a bank that is lending money at interest. Here we have a group of BORROWERS rather than investors.

If in the first year, the bank has a given number of borrowers, it will receive back not just the amount of money it has lent, but an additional amount of money in interest. This accumulation of interest will continue building in perpetuity, according to the exponential math exactly like the Ponzi Scheme or Petri dish.

This is the fundamental mathematics of both. Only they are mirror images of each other. One is drawing in lenders [investors], while the other is drawing in borrowers. From the wiki entry on exponential growth:

Cont. reading: On The Breeding Of Money – by Gordog

A Technical Look at the Science Behind the Headlines

by Gordog

The Americans are now crying ‘uncle’ about Russia’s hypersonic weapons. After the most recent flight test of the scramjet-powered Zircon cruise missile, the Washington Post on July 11 carried a Nato statement of complaint:

"Russia’s new hypersonic missiles are highly destabilizing and pose significant risks to security and stability across the Euro-Atlantic area," the statement said.

At the same time, talks have begun on the ‘strategic dialog’ between the US and Russia, as agreed at the June 16 Geneva Summit of the two presidents. The two sides had already agreed to extend the START treaty on strategic weapons that has been in effect for a decade, but, notably, it was the US side that initiated the summit—perhaps spurred by the deployment of the hypersonic, intercontinental-range Avangard missile back in 2019, when US weapons inspectors were present, as per START, to inspect the Avangard as it was lowered into its missile silos.

But what exactly is a hypersonic missile—and why is it suddenly such a big deal?

We all remember when Vladimir Putin announced these wonder weapons in his March 2018 address to his nation [and the world]. The response from the US media was loud guffaws about ‘CGI’ cartoons and Russian ‘wishcasting.’ Well, neither Nato nor the Biden team are guffawing now. Like the five stages of grief, the initial denial phase has slowly given way to acceptance of reality—as Russia continues deploying already operational missiles, like the Avangard and the air-launched Kinzhal, now in Syria, as well as finishing up successful state trials of the Zircon, which is to be operationally deployed aboard surface ships and submarines, starting in early 2022. And in fact, there are a whole slew of new Russian hypersonic missiles in the pipeline, some of them much smaller and able to be carried by ordinary fighter jets, like the Gremlin aka GZUR.

The word hypersonic itself means a flight regime above the speed of Mach 5. That is simple enough, but it is not only about speed. More important is the ability to MANEUVER at those high speeds, in order to avoid being shot down by the opponent’s air defenses. A ballistic missile can go much faster—an ICBM flies at about 6 to 7 km/s, which is about 15,000 mph, about M 25 high in the atmosphere. [Mach number varies with temperature, so it is not an absolute measure of speed. The same 15,000 mph would only equal M 20 at sea level, where the temperature is higher and the speed of sound is also higher.]

But a ballistic missile flies on a straightforward trajectory, just like a bullet fired from a barrel of a gun—it cannot change direction at all, hence the word ballistic.

This means that ballistic missiles can, in theory, be tracked by radar and shot down with an interceptor missile. It should be noted here that even this is a very tough task, despite the straight-line ballistic trajectory. Such an interception has never been demonstrated in combat, not even with intermediate-range ballistic missiles [IRBMs], of the kind that the DPRK fired off numerous times, sailing above the heads of the US Pacific Fleet in the Sea of Japan, consisting of over a dozen Aegis-class Ballistic Missile Defense ships, designed specifically for the very purpose of shooting down IRBMs.

Such an interception would have been a historic demonstration of military technology—on the level of the shock and awe of Hiroshima! But no interception was ever attempted by those ‘ballistic missile defense’ ships, spectating as they were, right under the flight paths of the North Korean rockets!

The bottom line is that hitting even a straight-line ballistic missile has never been successfully demonstrated in actual practice. It is a very hard thing to do.

Cont. reading: Why Hypersonic Missiles Are Real Game Changers – by Gordog

by Gordog

lifted from a comment

A little while ago, commenter Karlof1 asked me about the space race, the Apollo Program, and the role of Nazi scientists recruited under Operation Paperclip.

This is a fascinating subject that has also been severely distorted by the American narrative.

What prompted Karlof's query was my earlier, and somewhat lengthy technical discussion of today's state of space technology, where the media narrative is that the US is greatly advanced, due mostly the 'exploits' of Space X—when in fact the situation is quite the opposite.

The US is far behind important core technologies like advanced rocket engines and space station tech, both of which it acquired from Russia. China has similarly acquired nearly all of its core space technology from Russia, but has built impressively on that technology transfer—including developing its very own space station tech, and its own advanced rocket engines.

During the 1990s, many important Russian industries were on the verge of collapse due to the disintegration of the USSR. Hence there was something of a firesale of Russian space tech, something that would have been considered unthinkable previously. The Chinese acquired their entire manned program, Shenzhou, lock, stock and barrel through direct technology transfer from Russia, resulting in the first Chinese man in space in 2003.

The US similarly bought its way into the Mir2 space station that was already built, but not yet launched, abandoning its own effort to build an indigenous station to rival Mir—the Freedom space station that was killed on the drawing board. Those Mir2 modules, now known as the Russian Orbital Segment, would become the functional core of the ISS.

The US also acquired advanced Russian engines and key engine technologies, mostly the RD180, which is in fact the undisputed workhorse for both high profile Nasa missions [such as the current mars rover mission], and the US Space Force, which launches nearly all of its mission-critical payloads on the Russian engines.

Other Russian engines, including the RD190 and even the 1960s era mothballed NK33s were also bought up and pressed into service by the US. That the Russians possessed this advanced engine technology was completely unknown in the west until the 1990s, which had regarded the 'closed-cycle' technology as technically 'impossible.'

So let's take a look back to the 1950s, when spaceflight was first achieved. This was an exciting era, and there is much to discuss here, so I will leave the Apollo story for another time.

By the latter stages of Word War 2, the Germans were the undisputed leaders in rocket technology. The V2 rocket, which was used to bombard London, was a hugely impressive piece of engineering for the time.

Russia, whose rocket technology in the 1930s was considered comparable to the Germans, had fallen behind. But the country did develop smaller, albeit usable rocket engines, for instance the experimental Bereznyak-Isayev BI1 interceptor aircraft. The US really had no rocket engine technology to speak of during this era.

But the US would import most of the German rocket engineers, as well as some working copies of the V2 itself. This would provide a strong base to build on, not just for the space race a decade later, but also the far more important race for strategic weapons, namely the intercontinental ballistic missile.

Cont. reading: The Space Race: Technical Facts vs Popular Narrative – by Gordog