Does any know any more details about this? It's a fun tidbit that gets a link/article on social media every few weeks, but it's never anything more than a tidbit. "The US needed titanium for the SR-71. The only supplier of titanium was the Soviet Union. So the US bought it from the Soviet Union through a shell corporation." But that's it. It's those 3 facts and only those three facts expressed in anywhere between one sentence and 10 paragraphs.
They never mention that the #1 worldwide producer of titanium is Australia. They never mention that South Africa produces a lot as well. They rarely mention the name of the shell company. (Red Sea something?) They don't talk about whether alternatives were considered.
I just feel like there's probably an interesting story there, but we never hear it, just the tidbit that can fit in the headline.
I can add some details, namely that the USofA began development on the SR-71 in 1957 | 1958 at which time the only ilmenite mine in Australia was a relatively low volume affair in Bunbury, Western Australia.
Ilmenite is named after the Ilmenski mountains in Russia where the mineral was first discovered in relatively free abundance, the other principle source for titanium is rutile sands .. typically volume access to rich old sand layers requires strip logging of large areas of old growth forest to then remove acres of overburden to then hoover up a band of sands.
Circa late 1950s if you wanted large volumes of high grade ore your choices were pretty much Russia and ..., err, Russia.
( That or subsidising mineral exploration at scale and developing other sources .. which did happen but over a longer timescale .. meanwhile the first flight of the SR-71 was in 1964 )
There's more on the mining apects at the Geoscience Australia page:
First flight of A-12 the airplane that became the SR-71 was 1962. Shortening the time frame needed to acquire material. Machining of titanium is very time consuming as well.
> Machining of titanium is very time consuming as well.
And it was way worse back then given it was a field being actively developed.
Not to mention the development and characterisation of titanium grades and alloys, and their treatment (heat and solution).
According to the wiki, at some points Lockheed has to reject 80% of the titanium they got due to metallurgical contamination, and they had to rebuild tooling and processes because of corrosion issues with chlorine (from tap water) and cadmium (from tools plating).
Of related interest, here is an old CIA.gov webpage giving an account (from the CIA, keep in mind..) of the United States' realization that the Soviet Union was building the Alfa class of submarine with titanium hulls, which many people believed wasn't possible for various reasons (the difficulty of shaping and welding huge pieces of titanium in dirty shipyards, titanium alloys supposedly dissolving in sea water, etc): https://web.archive.org/web/20080919231406/https://www.cia.g...
I agree there probably is an interesting story, but it’s also worth noting the things that weren’t true back in the 60s. I found some old declassified CIA reports that suggest the USSR controlled 70% of world titanium production, and that this was five times US production. Patents for the processes used in Australian production appear to date from 1960 onwards, and there is also a note that 80% of the titanium bought for these aircraft was rejected due to impurities.
Putting all those things together I would guess that they could not get enough titanium without getting it from the USSR, and that they would have had to use a front company in any event as they had not publicly acknowledged the aircraft’s development.
There is something garbled or simply wrong about this story. The US was the first country to produce metallic titanium on an industrial scale. It has more than adequate domestic ores. Titanium is one of the most common metals in the earth's crust; only the conversion from ore to metal is difficult.
Here's a good primer on industrial titanium (see chapter 3):
"Titanium: Past, Present, and Future" from National Academies Press, 1983
In 1948, based on the Bureau's work, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company built and started production in the world's first titanium sponge production facility. The first commercial titanium from du Pont was melted and processed to sheet by Rem-Cru Titanium and then sold for experimental use to Republic Aviation for the Thunderjet and to North American Aviation for the Sabrejet. Also in 1948, 200 industrial, technical, government, and military leaders met in a Navy-sponsored conference and the titanium industry was off to an enthusiastic start with aircraft designers excited and planning early applications. By 1953, annual production was 2 million pounds, and the Douglas DC-7 flew with titanium nacelles and firewalls. Demand and production grew rapidly. To the aircraft and titanium industries it was euphoria, the first heady upswing in the production curve (Figure 1).
... [by 1958] Military strategy shifted from dependence on manned aircraft to emphasis on missiles, and military demand (then the life-blood of the titanium industry) dropped dramatically and, consequently, so did titanium production and sponge prices.
... The U.S. titanium industry has suffered from these periodic reversals. In the 1950s it was the world leader in both technical know-how and quantitative production but now has lost its early worldwide lead to the Soviet Union and Japan although it continues to meet most domestic titanium needs.
So in the early 1960s it sounds like the US actually had more than adequate titanium production capacity. Why use Soviet titanium instead of domestic for the SR-71? Were they trying to conceal the construction of a new titanium aircraft line from domestic titanium suppliers or other domestic parties?
Titanium ore reserves are abundant and widely distributed throughout the world (Figures 7 and 8). U.S. self-sufficiency has declined from 75 percent in the mid-1960s to 45 percent in 1980 because of the ready availability of low-cost concentrates from other countries rather than from a lack of U.S. reserves. In terms of contained titanium, the manufacture of titanium dioxide (TiO2) in the United States is about 15 times greater than the production of titanium metal. An emergency need for additional raw material for metal manufacturing could be met readily by diversion of ore, or of titanium tetrachloride, from the TiO2 industry. Ore cost, about $0.35 per pound of contained titanium, is a minor part of the price of titanium metal.
Titanium ore is not rare, expensive, or difficult to find domestically. Producers of titanium minerals listed later in the report include the United States, Canada, Finland, Norway, South Africa, India, the Soviet Union, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka. As of 1983 Canadian and Norwegian production were higher than US production. Soviet production was lower than Norway, Canada, or the US.
This report was published 20 years after the SR-71 started flying, but titanium minerals were never rare and they have long been produced in the United States and in closely allied countries. That's why I wonder if there is something to explain "The US worked through Third World countries and fake companies and finally was able to ship the ore to the US" or if it's just a story.
To me it reads a bit like a story about how the US tricked the USSR into shipping lead ores to the American small arms industry during the Cold War by saying that deer season was coming up [1]. It sounds clever and funny. But it doesn't make a lot of inherent sense that the US sector would need to clandestinely obtain a common mineral resource from its rival. The very fact that it is good as a story makes me want to understand more before accepting it, because good stories have a way of propagating themselves regardless of their relationship with the truth.
[1] Note: I have never heard this story about lead ores. I just made it up on the spot as an example of a story that sounds so good that I would be inherently disinclined to believe it without further evidence.
I found a bit in Ben Rich's memoirs that said their US supplier for titanium alloys didn't have enough available for them, so they had to purchase from worldwide sources.
I read the 2013 release a few years ago and recall that I found it quite entertaining, but I don't remember any specific quotes or factoids about the consideration of alternative sources.
That is what China is doing to US now . Decades from now , Chinese will joke about how they get chips and other secret tech from shell companies in us. They will also joke about how they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable.
> they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable
That is quite a non sequitur. Who is being forced to take drugs or listen to extremist propaganda? Those are deliberate choices made by people with low impulse control, and China has nothing to do with that.
The instability of American culture is currently seen as an intrinsic virtue. China is not causing any change. They're just apparently exploiting what was already the dumbest part of America. Even America's allies do this. If America finally grows up it would be a good thing and the only way that will probably happen is more self-inflicted disaster.
4 out of 5 pharmacy-filled prescriptions are opioids.¹
In almost every single case, those using these drugs are trying to escape the physical and/or emotional pain. They didn't wake up one day and say "I want to have fun, I'm going to do heroin"
Almost every fentanyl user I've talked to in harm reduction work started out on prescribed painkillers. Whether they got the taste and moved up quick, or just couldn't get their fix and couldn't deal with the horrible weeks of withdrawal and found a place to get it, they didn't just up and start shooting fentanyl one day.
There are also a ton of people who think they're buying real pills with much weaker opioids in them that are actually just fentanyl. It's a tragedy because it can kill first time users and those who assume they're much weaker than they truly are.
4 out of 5 pharmacy-filled prescriptions is not 4 out of 5 prescriptions, let alone 4 out of 5 patients, nor does that statistic say anything about unfilled pharmacy prescriptions or the rate at which people did not develop an addiction. Also you would expect the proportion of pharmacy-filled prescriptions for opioids to go up if the more common prescription for pain is not opiods from a pharmacy.
While 4/5 is shocking any way you look at it, the stronger argument for why this stat is misleading is because it does not take into account how long the prescription lasts. Anecdotally, I was given basically a week's worth after all 3 of my surgeries. Tough to find stats on these things but I could see opiod prescriptions being 2x the number of prescriptions because the number of "doses" are half what other non-addictive substances are. Still, that would make opiods 2/3 of pharmacy-filled "doses".
While that is a good point, there are many other frequently prescribed drugs with shorter rx periods - antibiotics, benzodiazipines, sleep medication, emergency medications like inhalers and Epi pens to name a few. If you look at the list of most commonly prescribed drugs¹, opioids aren't even in the top 15, which makes that statistic even more concerning, albeit obvious in hindsight.
Yes, lots of opiod prescriptions for like 4-7 days, but there's got to be more for chronic treatment when you factor in thewy might be 30-90 days between refills.
> Those are deliberate choices made by people with low impulse control, and China has nothing to do with that.
Not only this is counterproductive, it would be definitely something those hypothetical Chinese agents would say! This sentiment is what you call "the dumbest part of America" - one of personal responsibility when facing dangers that are by design above most people's threshold of self-control. If there is one thing that's likely to destabilize and destroy the western society, it's marketing and advertising industry - it's your own companies that rely on and encourage people blaming failures on themselves, because it lets them use psychological tricks to move wares.
Also:
> Who is being forced to (...) listen to extremist propaganda?
These days, everyone consuming the Internet and western mass media? There are (at least) two extremes in the US politics and culture, and while listening to one may be a choice, it's partly because the other extreme won the meme spreading battle.
Which extreme do you consider to have “won the meme spreading battle”?
Genuine question: I purposely don’t spend any time on social media or any other blog/forum that makes use of Internet “memes” so I’m blissfully unaware of what kind of content is circulated. Also, as (another) European, I try to not let myself be overly distracted by American political drama. I need to have some awareness of what’s going on in the US as it influences the political discourse in the rest of the Anglosphere (Hacker News posts like this one suffice for that level of awareness).
You call it 2 extremes, from European point of view there are just mild variations of the same right wing approach, and result differences are even milder (ie democrats starting/expanding wars, conservatives allowing recreational cannabis etc).
Not criticizing or anything, but actual extremes look significantly different, wake me up when a proper anarchist sits in White house for example
I call it two extremes because a lot of people insist on viewing them as Completely Different Things. After all, they have opposite names - "right wing" and "left wing". I'm from Europe too, and to me the extremes both look the same. The specific beliefs may be opposite, but that's just a free variable. The intellectual dishonesty, the belligerence, the hatred, they're all the same.
Hate to break it to you but the 2 party system is and has been broken for a very long time. You're choosing between two choices that are mostly identical. Introduce some extra parties if you want healthy politics.
While the alternative to a 2 party system may seem obvious, a 2+ party system that's not what you actually get. From a US-type "winner take all" with influential groups & individuals, to preportional representation you end up shifting negotiations into shadowy back rooms amongst unelected officials. In addition, that 3rd option is never coming from the middle. The sizeable movements are even more extreme, pulling the major parties further to some sort of preceived binary position on every topic.
I mentioned I'm in/from Europe, not the US, so the 2-party system doesn't really concern me. More importantly though, my comments aren't about the two US parties, but rather the two seemingly opposite extremes of political ideas, that are typically referred to as "left" and "right".
Yeah, PRC isn't so much doing an opium war on US as watching US doing an opium war on herself and not helping. Which PRC did when relations where good. Now the relationship is bad, there's no reason to waste PRC domestic resources to assist the US war on drugs.
Also important to note it wasn't the Opium in Opium War that led to the century of humiliation - the humiliation was due to the War that weakened the Qing mandate and economic consequences of the unequal treaties. Great Britain via gunboat diplomacy forced Qing to open trade to opium that Qing tried to ban domestically by seizing stocks from British merchants. The shame/damage wasn't having citizens tripped up on drugs and the social ills that entail, but loss of sovereignty/state capacity over economic affairs that drained silver reserves and reversing trade surplus, which had knock on consequences. Wasn't addicts that brought down Qing, but the throne being weakened due to loss of sovereignty and inability to put down multiple uprisings due to loss of treasure. PRC waging opium war on US comparison only works if PRC was militarily coercing the US to not enforce domestic drug policies. As if that can happen. Does PRC propaganda benefit from US inability to curtail drug use domestically? Yes. But not enough to not cooperate with the US on drug trade when the relationship was good.
> PRC waging opium war on US comparison only works if PRC was militarily coercing the US to not enforce domestic drug policies.
Things can be similar even if they're not identical. If a state actor supports criminal forces to transport harmful substances into a country, it's not so different from supporting the East India Company in doing so.
Also, the purpose matters. When the EIC sold opium in China, the motive was probably profit. If China sponsors sale of opioids in the US, it's more likely to be motivated by a desire to cause harm, which most would consider worse.
> Does PRC propaganda benefit from US inability to curtail drug use domestically? Yes. But not enough to not cooperate with the US on drug trade when the relationship was good.
Well, this implies that you agree that the main purpose is not their own gain, but the harm they can inflict on their perceived rival.
What would it look like if the US developed the same kind of desire to inflict pain and suffering in China, as a goal in itself?
The British committing navy for East India company is not remotely similar to PRC inaction to curtail organized crime operations in LATAM when they'd rather direct resources domestically or in ASEAN. The primary attack vector of Opium War was military force, i.e. an actual war. The primary victim throne and treasury not civil society via gunboat diplomacy. One is a state actively investing large diplomatic and military resources to target a specific opponent, another is a state doing nothing / not going beyond to assist another state for what happens in their borders.
Besides, the US drug epidemic predates PRC/fentanyl for decades. PRC is fine with reaping benefits of US dysfunction on the sidelines - most of the world and their politicians get propaganda value from mocking dysfunctional US drug policy. America the Great not being able to control drug use within their borders is an quintessential American problem through and through. Again being indifferent schadenfreude =/= supporting. PRC hasn't even unscheduled fentanyl yet, a legal drug previously scheduled at US request. If PRC was actively malicious, they would go back to skipping Mexico/LATAM as middle man and coordinate at state level to swamp the US directly at scale.
IMO the main benefit of poor US drug enforcement for PRC is MSS (PRC intelligence) being able to exploit opportunity to coordinate with LATAM based PRC triads to build out intelligence networks and influence. Their primary business is money laundering, largely for PRC capital flight. It doesn’t matter who actually provides the drugs/precursor (India/Mexican producers are in the game as well), or if it even needs to be drug trade in the first place.
>inflict pain and suffering in China, as a goal in itself
If US wants to reverse fentanyl trade into PRC they can go ahead. PRC state capacity is much better at dealing with domestic drug trafficking - like many other Asian countries. Otherwise the US has been trying to infiltrate PRC civil society to ideologically undermine CCP for decades despite PRC protest. PRC's ultimately decided to crack down domestically - see western NGO closures, eradicating CIA spy network, or HK protests. Something is uniquely dysfunctional with the US approach when PRC can fight ideas/influence better than the US can fight drug trafficking.
That was a general remark on western influence, i.e. western NGOs. On HK specifically, see the amount of prominent HK activists who shook hands with US politicians including pompeo, asked US to sanction HK politicians hoping US can exert pressure on domestic PRC affairs. HK also spy hub or Asian with biggest US embassy in region. That connection is now severed with NSL.
I was about to comment on the obvious projection inherent in the "the Chinese are forcing drugs on the US" narrative. But it's a classic. If you want to know the nefarious things the US is doing, just look at what the claim their adversaries are doing.
Anyone being unbiased who claim to know enough about PRC to point at the state being behind it doesn't use the wrong and derogatory term for the Communist Party of China ("CCP", it's CPC). That's like 60 minutes making a documentary about the Federal Investigation Bureau or the Party Republican.
That's like claiming it would be derogatory to label the URSS as USSR or the KPD the German Communist Party.
Then again, I don't care if someone thinks that a reference to a communist party is negative, as long as the negativity is about the communism aspect (as opposed to the ethnicity or general culture of that country). Just like I don't care if the NSDAP would find it insulting if I call their party the Nazi party.
I skimmed that page, and all I found was some group stating that placing the country name before the party name is somewhat racist. Which I suppose could be an artifact from when Lenin and Stalin were trying to incite world revolution through the Comintern, when the communist movement wanted to eradicate all borders and make the whole world communist.
Also in your link is a reference to the official CCP website, where they themselves (or so the talk page claims) state while they prefer CPC, CCP is also acceptable.
So it seems to me that this is a nothing-burger, where some activists are fighting on behalf of a group that doesn't really see the reference as a slur in the first place.
Based on this link, CCP was even the original abbreviation, which was changed to CPC as late as 1943 due to pressure from Comintern/Stalin:
> Chinese will joke about how they get chips and other secret tech from shell companies in us. They will also joke about how they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable.
If they’re useless, how are they making chips and secret tech?
>> Chinese will joke about how they get chips and other secret tech from shell companies in us. They will also joke about how they secretly sell drugs to America to make them useless and make society unstable.
> If they’re useless, how are they making chips and secret tech?
My reading is they are trying to make us useless but we are not there yet?
I assume it takes time, right?
In any case, not like the west can complain after what we did in the opium wars?
Transportation is much faster now, thus peoples are much closer to each other, so they are united at much larger scale. Few hundreds years ago, two town with few thousands were separate countries. Today European Union acts almost like single 0.5B country. In few hundred years, whole Globe will be united. In transition to Global State, whole continents, or hemispheres will be united first by geographic location, race, or religion.
How has this ever worked out? When I look at the world today every terrible action seems to be the nth wrong to make it right; every terrible active situation looks like continual quid pro quo. For you to say this is necessary over huge time frames with almost infinite players is a bold assertion.
> There are definitely cases in history where wrongs made rights, two or more.
I can quote quite a few cases from history where this kind of thinking has led to the worst kind of atrocities. Especially when one side wants to satisfy a resentment that has been built up over decades or centuries.
Including virtually every major case of genocide from the 20th century that I can think of.
> Some sort of moral balance has to be achieved before two forces can move forward. It will feel reasonable to both sides when it happens.
While, I can think of cases where this would apply when the restoration of balance happens directly after the offense (such as actions taken against Germany and Japan from 1944-1950).
However I wouldn't be able to come up with a single example of such "restoration of balance" successfully happening 100+ years after the initial offense in a way that was seen as reasonable by both sides after.
Would the relationship between Germany and Israel be restored if Israel nuked Berlin, killing 5 million people?
Not really - it certainly is wrong to say that because some other country has done XYZ, so now my country have the right to also do XYZ (where XYZ is commonly agreed to be be bad, such as wage war, genocide etc).
Some country might feel that they're justified in what they're doing, because another country previously have done it (and got to a dominant position, perhaps, by doing it). But generally, i dont think this justification is sound, and is an excuse, rather than a real justification. Now of course no country require justification to do what they wish - that is the meaning of having sovereignty, but this also means that other countries must actively stop this sort of practise.
Can US blame China for another two hundred years for Pearl Harbor because both China and Japan are the East?
The duration between the last US-UK war and Opium wars is much shorter than the Opium wars and the present. During this time, US helped China by opening up its market asymmetrically and being on its side during WW2 and even gave China aid.
> President Roosevelt approved $25 million in military aid to China on 19 December 1940, permitting the Chinese to purchase one hundred P 40 pursuit aircraft. By late spring 1941, the United States had also earmarked over $145 million in lend-lease funds for China to acquire both ground and air equipment.
Lots of prominent New England families with their names all over everything got their start that way- Astor, Delano, Cabot, Forbes. "The old China trade" is the phrase to search for.
The thing is, China isn't doing it now. American capitalism is. That's what's different - the opium wars required the exercise of force, today's opium crisis simply requires the wealthy to bribe the powerful.
If there is one thing that was conclusively proven by the now almost 40 year old "War On Drugs", is that controlling their supply does nothing for their demand.
The US is tearing itself from the inside because of the inevitable conclusions of late stage capitalism: there is an unsustainable wealth gap, and entrenched systemic discrimination perpetuated by cultish religiosity.
Blaming China for this (or even Russia) is silly. The US is doing it to themselves. It's a Strong Link culture (vs the rest of the West which optimized for Weak Link). So it's still the best place in the world to go from nothing to riches, and stay rich.
But as a society it doesn't seem like it's salvageable without another civil war.
> If there is one thing that was conclusively proven by the now almost 40 year old "War On Drugs", is that controlling their supply does nothing for their demand.
Quaaludes have been effectively nonexistent globally (with the sole exception of South Africa) since the start of the 1990s and entirely because of the "War On Drugs".
If any of that was true I wouldn't be able to easily purchase MDMA, LSD or dozens of other synthesized drugs.
The reality is that the user base shifted to MDMA based products and other options such as valium or xanax. Quaaludes aren't as enjoyable because they can easily knock you out before you have any real fun..
Synthesised, and natural. The growth in popularity for micro-dosing mushrooms and cannabis speaks for itself, and have weaned many off the really bad 'quaaludes', and also off the really bad, but ' considered lighter' Xannies and other benzo's.
"Made in a factory, or something that grows?", is a big factor in how people approach their ingestion.
I do enjoy, the mathematical difference between manufactured lsd and natural shrooms, though.
So, other than the Westernmost parts of Eastern Europe (which we can start including, since the EU has kickstarted their economic development dramatically), the US is by far the most religious country of any in what we might consider "The developed West".
But it hasn't experienced a lot of the same cultural changes that it's most significant allies have gone through. Why not? There's a number of other reasons: The Strong Link culture (ie optimize for the STRONGEST members of your society rather than the weakest) that is somewhat unique. The fact that it wasn't destroyed in WW2 is another (Though neither were Canada or Australia). The fact that it felt like it was "The Leader of The Free World" for the last 80 years (and therefore had no reason to introspect).
But I think the core of the disagreements within the US between the Left and the Right come down to easily 40-50% of the country fundamentally believes that there is a magical man in the sky who will reward them from being good (for a fairly regressive perception of good) with infinite blissful life after death. And this is what they fall back to when it comes to justifying white supremacy (in every extreme), the discrimination of the LGBTQ, immigrants, etc.
Before you get to any other matters of policy or values, this is a fairly fundamental hurdle to get past. You either believe in a magical sky monster based on faith, and consider this to be more important than anything else you might do in your finite earthly life, or you...don't. And Americans DO at a rate more than most.
Everything else flows from this. How can you even conceive of getting on the same page of what a sensible tax policy, an introspection of the culture of police, the segregation of the cities, or the crumbling education system when you can't get past a fundamental belief.
So the systems prevail. The GDP grows. And just like wars stimulate scientific progress, so does the knowledge that if you fail you will wind up dead in a ditch, inspires some great entrepreneurship and ideas. A lot of which continue to change the world.
Then people on this website and others wonder why the same parts of the country generating the highest GDP also have the most human misery on the streets. It's because it's the other side of the same coin.
I would respectfully suggest you are mixing cause and effect here.
Given that the religion of the US is individualism, of might-makes-right, of look-out-for-number-one, I'm not sure you can blame this on the belief of existence of God.
Indeed the -actions- of many religious Americans seems completely at odds with the tenants of their pronounced beliefs. They elected a thrice-married, self-confessed sexual-predator as president, and would like to do so again. They are anti welfare, pro gun, pro white,and so on.
By contrast, those "heathen" European states have care for the sick, care for the poor, respect for society as central pillars. They are countries (very imperfectly) following religious ideals while not having particularly religious people.
Personally I think American Christianity is an embarrassment to Christians elsewhere. Their disconect between professed beliefs, and actions is the very hypocrisy Christians are often accused of.
In the US religion and politics are tied together, which is unfortunate. There are plenty of religious Democrats, and plenty of non-hypocritical Republicans, but their voices are drowned by those with political intentions.
But make no mistake, the primary religion in the US, as evidenced by actions (not words) is money.
I'm an Atheist but: if people actually believed in God they would be kind and generous, turn the other cheek and be humble about it.
Those who do behave like this are obviously not the ones we hear the most noise from.
What we're dealing with is some other phenomenon which has labeled itself as "Religious" but doesn't believe in the core philosophy. People can see the value of being part of the "religion club" or "religion tribe" and realise straight away that they only have to pay lip-service to its values or that they can argue their way from the values to what they want to do with a bit of sophistry.
Hence the Spanish Inqisition, Cusades, Holy Wars, Terrorism, Subjugation of native populations, religious racists and so on.
thank you. I greatly appreciate an Atheist making this point, cause I have often tried to make it, but when it comes from a christian, it sounds more like a "no true scotsment" sort of argument.
Yes, because communism and atheism has such a great track record. The Salem witch trials killed about 25 people. Mao, Stalin, Lenin, pol pot, etc etc killed 100’s of millions.
”When asked about such tragedies Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn explained, “Men have forgotten God, that’s why all this happened.” Another preeminent Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky explained, “If God is not, everything is permitted.”
> there is a magical man in the sky who will reward them from being good
You might want to look up Jihad.
Communism is definitely a religion as the Catholic Church has claimed for more than a century. It's an atheistic religion. It's a religion created by atheists, celebrated by atheists and defended by atheists. It comes with its own prophets and prophecies, sacred items, soteriology, hierotopy, pseudo-spirituality, pseudo-morality, pilgrimages, temples, theophany, soteriology, cultic practices, sacred texts and exegetical commentary.
Xi has said that China was a great nation until the First Opium War, which he blames for plunging China into darkness until the Party took control. Though he will never say it out loud, in his mind, he might be running that same playbook in reverse on the West. http://gh.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/sgxw/202107/t20210704_906...
The opium war wasn't bad for china because Chinese domestic opium use went up.
The war was bad for China because a foreign nation managed to force China to change domestic policy, and then managed to set chinese trade policy to allow the British to exploit China.
It was a war about power and sovereignty. Losing those is bad. It's only related to opium because the inciting incident was British worry over an opium law.
> The opium war wasn't bad for china because Chinese domestic opium use went up.
Neither I nor Xi made that claim.
China told the British to stop selling opium because it was damaging China's economy (by extracting silver, which Chinese taxes were denominated in), making more Chinese turn to drugs, creating a virtuous cycle for British East India Company and other drug traders. The British refused because they wanted Chinese tea but were unwilling to pay in silver, which was the only payment China would accept because China didn't want British goods, so the British used military power to establish British-owned ports to import opium for silver (using some of it to buy all the tea the British could drink) and dictate Chinese trade policy.
Without the opium trade, none of this would have happened. China likewise doesn't care what the US thinks about fentanyl damaging the US economy, with the total damage estimated at 7% of GDP in 2020. https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/democrats/issue-...
> Nobody wakes up one day and says hey, I’m going to try fentanyl.
That's actually what is happening... people who are already addicted to other drugs are losing access to those drugs (or realizing that fenty is cheaper) and then switching to it.
That’s exactly the point I’m making. First they get addicted to pharmaceuticals, then move to street drugs. Whoever thought the advertising campaign behind OxyContin being non-addictive deserves the death penalty.
You can use the same analogy for the Opium wars. It’s a moot point. It doesn’t change the fact that what the British Empire did and what CCP is doing now are both disgusting and wrong.
US and US/British army have a weird addiction for drug. China is only a very recent player. Golden Triangle and Golden Crescent were developed by US/British armies and FBI as a drug powerhouse.
Basically a replay of "opium wars" with USA as "18th-19th century China" while China is the Brits back then. Instead of opium, you get the fentanyl, T-bills purchases, cheap labor and "chips". This time, however I dont USA rebounce like the Chinese in the 1950s-2010s. American historical never reach Chinese level of industrious culture unless the entire American population replaced by another one (maybe similarly happened to native Indians dying of plaques, perhaps biological war wiping Americans and some other nationalities taking over).
data simply doesn't support this. US economy, including manufacturing has already rebounded. unemployment is already below NAIRU (or close to it, labor market slack is small, the productivity slack is considerable, but that's because structural inefficiencies)
contrast this with the current drop in Chinese economic output due to sanctions
As I understand it Soviet material science was ahead of everyone when it came to titanium alloys in the 60s. Both in the compositions of alloys and in the production of alloys with precise heat treatment.
>They rarely mention the name of the shell company. (Red Sea something?) ...
I'm curious if you have any citations for that. If I google it, your guess is the top result.
In The Rock (1996), the Red Sea Trading Company is the name of a shell corporation used to launder proceeds from illegal arms sales. Wonder if the writers put it in there as some kind of nod.
I can also supply a bit of the why, from what I remember of the exhibit at the Wright-Patterson air force base museum.
The SR-71 needed a specific grade of titanium, something of extreme purity. Only the USSR sold that purity with regularity, I believe what I read said something like 90%+ of what they bought from other suppliers had to be discarded
Not saying that these articles are specifically ChatGPT or other primitive generative tool but it is a journalist stupidity and/or copy/pasting/generative.
> I just feel like there's probably an interesting story there, but we never hear it, just the tidbit that can fit in the headline.
They say that the trade was done under cover, but they don't tell why the Soviet Union was doing that trading at all.
USSR was absolutely existentially dependent on its foreign exchange streams, and what little they were able to sell to the West, was sold it prodigious quantities, no questions asked. The Soviets have probably tried to upsell them again, and again. USSR needed USD like water to maintain the supply of Western luxuries for CPSU higher ups, but what was even more important than that was USSR's near complete reliance of the Western high tech goods up until late eighties.
That's why selling things like titanium was taking a precedence for them over making their own jet fighters out of said titanium in the first place. Luxuries, and technologies were taking far higher precedence in CPSU's minds over that.
The US "intelligence" apparatus created a particular cover story. There's no actual information as to what the USSR actually believed at the time. If they weren't particularly interesting in competing in aerial surveillance then it may have been seen as worth the money they got in return. They were already in the business of exporting it, it's not as if we got them to create a special market based on this cockamamie story.
It does make great propaganda for the supposed capabilities of the CIA, though.
Almost every thing about the 60+ year old SR-71 Blackbird still seems like something out of the future...except for the leaking fuel while not flying part. It's as close to a real deus ex machina as we can get, and it captures geeks' imaginations as such in ways like you describe.
They were already in the business of exporting it, it's not as if we got them to create a special market based on this cockamamie story.
Yes, I really don't think there is much more to the story. The US used shell corporations to buy titanium so that the Soviets didn't know that the final customer was actually the US Air Force.
> If they weren't particularly interesting in competing in aerial surveillance then it may have been seen as worth the money they got in return.
You really bend it to fit your narrative. Not sure what the Soviets believed, but no sane country would want to help their adversaries to achieve stronger offensive capabilities, which surveillance would no doubt help.
Bribery though, that wouldn't be too outrageous. I don't see why CIA want to hide that fact though. Bribery along with blackmailing are common spying tools.
> but no sane country would want to help their adversaries to achieve stronger offensive capabilities, which surveillance would no doubt help
This was an arms race, not a single tactical battle decision. A shrewd opponent may be able to use your new technology to internally launch development of their own. They would likely recognize that after Gary Powers you weren't performing overflights anymore. They would also have had satellite imaging, and there is some data that they did use them to image the plane during testing.
So.. you let your enemy build an expensive new toy that isn't particularly useful outside of a full scale nuclear war while you build yourself some fast new fighters and some high altitude missile technology.
Is either that, or you seemingly have to accept that the KGB could not have possibly have seen through the that titanium pizza ovens story. It's much more likely that even trying to pass this off made the entire ruse all the more obvious to them.
> but no sane country would want to help their adversaries to achieve stronger offensive capabilities
Yet here in Australia, we're still happily selling iron ore to China. The same iron ore that gets turned into weaponry for China and its friends (among other things).
It is worth comparing it to today with China [0]. The situation isn't so tense, these materials can be traded and if the US couldn't get them then they'd diligently start mining their own materials.
It wouldn't be surprising if major players were obscuring their activities in critical markets and while it might be militarily significant they are better defended by people not really being interested than the strength of their cover story.
Perhaps a more accurate headline would have been this buried deeper in the article
"The US worked through Third World countries and fake companies and finally was able to ship the ore to the US to build the SR-71."
And to complete the loop, Russia is now importing sanctioned American microchips for its missiles via third parties. I wonder if the order form states they will be used in smart pizzas ovens.
80% of the world's silicon and magnesium comes from Russia/China. US can't make the stealth coating on the F-35 without it. Can't control where the big bang placed mineral deposits...
*Technically silicon is everywhere but until the US and EU are willing to rip up their riverbeds to get at it, it's as good as nonexistent there.
I would word that differently. Different sources of sand are good for different things. River sand is very good for concrete, which cares almost entirely about shape and not chemistry. If your goal is silicon you're usually looking elsewhere.
the * is the important part. Little to do with the big bang, much more to do with where we export environmentally disastrous mining operations to. The countries the West destroyed by (among many other things) putting the mines there now (at least that) reap a dividend in leash power. Good for them.
They were also quite good at processing Titanium, for example the monument to Yuri Gagarin in Moscow is made out of a Titanium alloy (the monument looks like superman, if you ask me).
They had to melt and cast titanium ingots in a vacuum oven, then assemble the components into the statue. This technique wasn't repeated very often, as far as i know.
> They were also quite good at processing Titanium
Yep, and they had a revolutionary (arguably too early for it's time) submarine, Project 705 Lira NATO codename Alfa, that used a titanium hull and a lead-bismuth cooled fast reactor, making it significantly faster than US submarines and even faster than US torpedoes, scaring the US in the process (who bought the propaganda that this sub will be the backbone of the Soviet attack submarine fleet, instead of just a proof of concept that did work, but was expensive and hard to maintain and thus scrapped).
> After all, they fraudulently possibly told their comrades that the United States was a lazy country that probably couldn’t even cook for itself. They need it to go out to buy pizza…
This is a weird dig at the soviets, who were probs just happy to to find some customers to justify having already dug up all the ore. The fraudster seem to be the Americans in this case?
Khachapuri was certainly known but hardly could be ordered anywhere outside few large cities or Georgian SSR. Most people who knew about it have never tasted it (as is still the case with me).
You should fix that never tasting it thing, it's so worth it. Just make sure to eat it when you can afford to have a nice nap afterward, it's that filling and rich.
Their wine is also really worth checking out too. They use a few grape varieties aren't really used outside of Georgia and some of the wine is still stored/aged in big earthenware things called "kvevri" which are pretty unique - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvevri
Oh and they'll also ferment + distill the solids from wine production into chacha - a strong clear spirit. When I was there lots of little shops would be selling it pretty cheap in leftover coke bottles etc. I smuggled a few back with me to share with friends.
Thanks to your comment we ended up eating there yesterday. We had the Ajaruli Khachapuri, Megruli, and Chicken Skewers. Absolutely delicious. Thanks for recommending!
They certainly did! How authentic the outcomes were though I'm not qualified to say. Making exotic food without a reference point is challenging even for most experienced cooks.
Don't exclude corruption as a motive here. Pizza ovens sounds just about like a good enough excuse some corrupt Russian official would be able to use with a straight face while making a nice profit selling titanium.
As a kid I was totally obsessed with this plane. As cheesy as it sounds the movie The Right Stuff served as inspiration. I wanted to become someone to fly it. I must have built this model at different scales 15 different times and devoured everything I could learn about the SR-71. Unfortunately I graduated from high school in 1991 and the peace dividend was in full effect. I also found out in college later that my eyesight and color blindness wouldn’t qualify me to fly. So I studied physics instead. As a professional engineer with 30 years of experience it continues to awe me that they were able to build such a machine in 1964.
Factories in the USSR often had a shortage of parts, but they still had to meet production quotas. This usually meant a reduction in quality, but it goes the other way too. I've heard stories that consumer appliance factories would run out of stainless steel, so they would use titanium alloy instead, as it was more plentiful.
In my country, one of the most unique consumer appliances they made was a potato grating machine. Today the same device continues to made, unchanged since Soviet times.
Is Titanium not famously quite hard to work with? I imagine that it would be hard to sub in for stainless steel, so for normal white goods I don't know if it'd be worth it.
FWIW, for a while (before the war in Ukraine), VSMPO-Avisma, the largest titanium extractor and exporter in Russia, was selling stuff like titanium gardening shovels, rakes etc on Amazon and eBay.
Ahh so maybe the expensive or difficult titanium work is the really high-end stuff like SR-71? I just recall from Skunk Works that they had a tough time working with it.
It's definitely harder to work, but I suspect that once they invest into the appropriate tooling (for military products where it has to be titanium), it's easy and relatively cheap to repurpose for other products.
Highly recommend the recent Acquired podcast episode about Lockheed Martin. They spend a while discussing the development of the SR-71 (and other Skunk Works projects): https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/lockheed-martin
It's mentioned at least in Skunk Works, which is a first hand account from a Lockheed engineer that worked alongside Kelly Johnson during SR71 development.
It's a good read, but I always wondered how much is embellished. I don't know if the pizza ovens anecdote being present there confirms its authenticity, it could be that Ben Rich had just heard about it through the grapevine or even that this book was how the story got spread in the first place.
This; also, the more interesting tidbit is that the US at that point hadnt really developed anything with titanium (for the same reason; most of it was in the USSR) so Lockheed had to develop all the tooling for the SR-71 internally as well, just to be able to work with it --regular steel tools simply couldn't handle titanium.
+1 on the "Skunk Works" book just for the stories...
I doubt any real trickery was involved. The Russians who sold the US the ore wouldn't have cared where the money came from. The US did them a favour by making an effort to disguise who the real buyer was, so the ore sellers wouldn't get in to trouble.
One has to wonder if or how this ever paid off. Once the sr71 showed up the USSR not only met the challenge with the Mig 25 foxbat a few years later, but outproduced the sr 71 to create strong coverage over most of Russia's airspace. Alone it couldn't catch the 71, but its r33 missiles and 600 kilowatt radar could
If you owned a 71 it was probably a pretty bitter realization a plane less than half the price could shoot it down regardless of how much clandestine titanium you imported. And after the U2 incident it was probably a pretty loathesome proposal to send it over Russian airspace at all. The mig 31 basically retired it.
Could a Foxbat shoot down an SR-71? The latter is like 0.6 Mach faster. The former was built out of steel, had an underpowered radar, couldn’t climb as high as a Blackbird and carried AA-6’s, which would have to lock and hit their target before the solid motors ran out [1]. To my knowledge the MiG-25’s claim to fame is shooting down an F-15 in the Gulf War.
In any case, it’s clearly been worth it. The B-2, B-21 and RQ-180, to say nothing of our (sc)ramjet research derives directly from the Blackbird.
Given the difficulties trying to intercept Concorde over the years it looks like it would take an awful lot of planning, equipment working perfectly, and topped off with a lot of luck.
There are some intercept stories [1] and [2] about why there isn't a photo of Concorde at Mach 2. An F14 Tomcat [3] did get close once though. These were all controlled intercept attempts when Concorde was flying on a scheduled flightpath so quite unlike a wartime attempt against a Mach 3 SR71. Not saying it's impossible, just very very hard.
While it would have taken some luck for a MiG-25 or SAM to shoot down an SR-71, for the most part the US Air Force didn't take the chance. Only a few of the early missions actually penetrated Soviet or Warsaw Pact airspace. For the most part they flew along the edges of international airspace and used sensors to look in.
They did overly some other countries with lesser air defense systems.
The Mig top speeds quoted always involve a plane that had no ordinance and was essentially empty. Even then the plane couldn't handle mach 2.83 for longer than 5 or so minutes due to heat generated by air friction damaging both the engines and the air-frame. Meanwhile the SR-71's top sustainable speed was mach +3.
So basically a mig25 would have to be in the perfect spot and ready to have a chance at shooting down a SR-71. Even then the odds of success wouldn't be that great. The way bigger threat were the new generation of SAMs coming online that COULD give the SR-71 a lot of trouble.
The spin off industries related to the SR-71 was massive and well worth the research.
I'm not aware of a mig25 actually shooting down a F15. The only incident I'm aware of was the "ambush" in Samurra. So I'd like to know what incident you're referring to.
If it were in the right place at the right time (e.g. already in the air and in front of it so the SR71 comes to them..) Not impossible, but extremely circumstantial.
They used multiple front companies and routed orders through third-world countries to buy the needed ore. More than likely, pizza ovens--or more likely, I'm guessing unspecified parts for pizza ovens--were just one of many cover stories used by those companies, and at least some of them were probably more believable than pizza ovens. You wouldn't use the same cover story for all the companies making the purchased.
Plus, titanium dioxide is used as a pigment, which would have reasonably explained a great deal of the rutile ore they purchased.
There was no shortage of TiO₂ in the US. It's used everywhere. They were specifically importing the refined metal because the soviets had the only viable production capacity.
This is the case for many materials. The raw material itself is not rare, the bottleneck is the refining/processing capability and thus the refined material is scarce.
- The shortage of lumber in US a few years was due to lack of saw mills, not trees
- Shortage of semi-conductor grade Neon due to lack of plants that can refine the gas to the required purity
- Shortages of oil derived products due to constraints on refining
- "Rare earth" shortages as few countries refine. China is one of the few countries willing to tolerate the pollution generated from the refining processes.
“Back when they were building the airplane the United States didn’t have the ore supplies – an ore called rutile ore. It’s a very sandy soil and it’s only found in very few parts of the world.”
Also, the Wikipedia link above doesn’t show the US to be major producer. It does show ex-Soviet block countries to be major producers.
I mean, you might be right about importing the metal rather than ore. I’m commenting only about whether the ore is widely available in the US.
There's plenty of titanium in the us. They opened a mine in the Adirondacks just for this purpose in WW2, and there's tons of untapped ore. Chances are that it was cheaper to get from the USSR than to make it ourselves
We told the Iranians we were making a space opera movie called Argo, and needed to scout locations as a cover story to get out the embassy employees. Strange is what makes a cover story good!
I swear to you, there is an untapped market for titanium pizza ovens. Maybe for camping gear. Maybe for stationary ovens. But fire + titanium + father's day? It practically sells itself. Titanium pizza peels are already on the market. Who needs this shit?
This information has been declassified for decades, much longer than the quote from the pilot. I first read about it in Ben Rich's memoir, published 1996.
2023 Sanctions blocked exports from the Russian Federation for a wide range of products.
This is not about the CP71, but if we look at the simplest personal aircraft, the paramotor, then almost 100% of their titanium frames are produced by 2-3 companies from Russia. There are a huge number of assembly brands around the world, but they all use Russian titanium frames.
Russian aircraft engines (RMZ500) account for 80% of sales in the two-seat paratrike segment.
In every passenger Boeing and Airbus you will find titanium and magnesium parts produced in the Russian Federation.
What puzzles me is that I think titanium dioxide was already widely used as a pigment for paint in the 1950s, which would make me think it was widely available here.
True, but the article said they were not importing refined titanium alloys. They were importing ore, specifically rutile, which is what TiO2 pigment is made from.
That part of the article is wrong- I just opened my copy of Ben Rich's memoirs and it says they needed alloy, not ore. Apparently their US supplier had insufficient quantities.
This is due a miscommunication. The SR-71 was originally developed for rapid pizza delivery(this was when companies took their pledge, “It’s hot or it’s free” seriously). It could deliver hot pizza to any point in the continental US rapidly allowing there to be full coverage with only a few actual pizza baking locations. Unfortunately, the Air Force saw the potential military implications and repurposed it.
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
* music
* movies
* microcode (software)
* high-speed pizza delivery
The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."
So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.
This is about obtaining the titanium atoms - i.e. raw ore, not alloy.
Even if it were about alloy, it wouldn't have matter that much what alloy Soviet provided, as long as it contained enough fraction of titanium in it that US could refine. US wouldn't have bought it if it didn't contain enough titanium, thus this comment is nonsensical.
They never mention that the #1 worldwide producer of titanium is Australia. They never mention that South Africa produces a lot as well. They rarely mention the name of the shell company. (Red Sea something?) They don't talk about whether alternatives were considered.
I just feel like there's probably an interesting story there, but we never hear it, just the tidbit that can fit in the headline.