Category Book & Movie Reviews

Dec 1 2025

Thoughts from the book Scorpion Down


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This post is based on information found in the book Scorpion Down written by Ed Offley and published in 2007. The book is based on Ed’s work conducted over almost a quarter century digging into government records and interviewing former navy NCO’s and Officers at all levels. He also intervened may others including former soviet military. Almost the entire book is fact and the parts that are not are hard to dispute because they are based on the over welling number of facts presented.

This paper is not about the Russian’s sinking the Scorpion with a torpedo on May 27, 1968 but of the revelations that came out of all that work of Offley that relate to finding that is what happened. Although he refers to Vietnam in the book his focus is the cover up of what happened to the Scorpion and why it was covered up so tightly. However I think it goes much deeper and this story relates indirectly to the conflict in Vietnam and why it took so long to get out.

Key facts:

  • Sometime likely as early as 1965 but for sure no later than early 1967 navy Chief Warrant Officer John Walker begins selling classified information to the Soviets, including radio cipher cards.
  • January 23 1968 The Seizure of the USS Pueblo by North Korean Forces including the INTACT KW-7, KLB-47, KWR-37 AND a KLB-47 encryption devices.
  • March 8, 1968 Soviet diesel-electric submarine K-129 a Project 629 strategic ballistic missile submarine is lost in the pacific.
  • May 27 1968 the sinking of the SSN Scorpion by Russian torpedo
  • May 20 1985 John Walker arrested and his activities of his spy ring uncovered over the next several years
  • December 26, 1991 after the collapse of the USSR some but not all of information related to all of the above become available from Russian and US sources.

Obviously the story starts with Walker who in his position in the navy’s Atlantic Submarine Force Headquarters message center who had access to radio cipher card which were used with the devices used to communicate with ships at sea including submarines. During this period the US Navy submarines and the Soviet Navy submarines were playing cat and mouse games with each other which included underwater maneuvering which in many cases caused collisions between the two subs. This is described in detail in the book.

It is very likely that the Soviets had the Koreans capture the Pueblo to get the encryption devices that were on board and we do know that within a few weeks of being captured those devices were in Russia.  The US military was not that worried about the loos since without the radio cipher cards they would be of only marginal use to the Russians. Had the navy know about Walker they would have realized how wrong they were since Walker had been supplying the Russians with the cards for years. But since they didn’t know the rest followed.

The sinking of the K-129 was probably the result of an encounter with a US submarine since the US knew where it went down and the Russians didn’t. The US CIA attempted to recover the K-129 from 16,000 feet down and did get part of it. The effort to recover the sub was named Project Azorian and it was partially successful. The Russians probably knew of the reason for the sinking because they had the radio cipher cards and the matching devices.

Two months later the Scorpion is torpedoed and sunk probably in retaliation for the Russian loss of the K-129. The US knew it was a torpedo since they had hydrophone readings that proved it. Offley interviewed an Ocean Systems Technician (analyst) that saw the actual Top Secret Sound Surveillance System (Sosus) tape in training and it clearly showed an underwater dog fight between the Scorpion and a soviet Echo-II nuclear submarine including the torpedo trace as it tracked the Scorpion and the hit on her that sank her. There is some evidence that the Scorpion also fired a torpedo and the Soviet sub was hit but didn’t sink. There are pictures and discerptions of an Echo-II sub being repaired and towed back to Russia in the area of the dog fight.

Now if you are interested in the story read the book it is worth reading. But my point to writing this is that since the Soviets had the encryption devices and the radio cipher cards during the period from just after TET in Vietnam through the end of that conflict and the Russians were the primary supports of the North Vietnamese — did the Russians keep the North Vietnamese informed of US activities such that the Vietnamese knew how badly we wanted out and that they had nothing to lose by stalling as long as they could? For the Soviets could intercept and decode all messages sent on the devices that they had captured on the Pueblo.

Cross section of Skipjack class nuclear submarine

Skipjack-class submarine drawing: 1. Sonar arrays 2. Torpedo room 3. Operations compartment 4. Reactor compartment 5. Auxiliary machinery space 6. Engine room

Dec 1 2025

“The Good Bad & the Ugly” – The Best Rendition Ever


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Experimenting with the T-10 military chute when it came out in 1967

We are All Connected & for an End Ga

Feb 14 2022

Book Review “The Real Anthony Fauci”


Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health Published on November 16, 2021

I have been Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the last year or so as he traveled to world giving talk about what was happening to Western Civilization. I was impressed by his knowledge of what was going on as I also had come to many of the same conclusions, maybe even more, because of my military background as a Green Beret and set up a blog in 2014 to promote my views. I used the Special Forces Green Beret motto De Oppresso Liber (liberation of the oppressed) since i felt that the citizens of Western Civilization, and in particular the United States home of the free because of the brave was under assault by enemies both foreign and domestic. The image below is of Robert F. Kennedy taken from the January 23, 2022 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Robert Malone ‘Defeat the Mandates’ march on National Mall.

Kennedy’s book is a masterpiece of detail and fact foot noted extensively more so then any book I have ever read and I have read a lot of them. I already knew maybe 1% of what he wrote on and I have no reason to doubt the other 99% so I highly recommend reading this book. But I do caution you as the fact Kennedy has unconverted will disturb you and result in your questioning the very foundations of our entire medical system. Kennedy’s book with be viewed in the future as the cornerstone of breaking down and exposing the corruption in our medical system and the federal, State and local governing bodies.

If you have read Alexis de Tocqueville’s book Democracy in America Part I published in 1835 and Part II in 1840 you will understand how far we have fallen form the genius of out Founders and their U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We stropped teaching about the “importance” of our Constitution in public high schools and colleges a long time ago. Today its just a obsolete historical document. And in fact the National Archives now has ‘harmful content’ warning for the US Constitution, and all other related documents.

Feb 22 2021

Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases


Excellent Physics Written by W. A. van Wijngaarden and W. Happer Published on June 8, 2020

The atmospheric temperatures and concentrations of Earth’s ve most important, greenhouse gases, H2O, CO2, O3, N2O and CH4 control the cloud-free, thermal radiative flux from the Earth to outer space. Over 1/3 million lines having strengths as low as 10􀀀27 cm of the HITRAN database were used to evaluate the dependence of the forcing on the gas concentrations. For a hypothetical, optically thin atmosphere, where there is negligible saturation of the absorption bands, or interference of one type of greenhouse gas with others, the per-molecule forcings are of order 10􀀀22 W for H2O, CO2, O3, N2O and CH4. For current atmospheric concentrations, the per-molecule forcings of the abundant greenhouse gases H2O and CO2 are suppressed by four orders of magnitude. The forcings of the less abundant greenhouse gases, O3, N2O and CH4, are also suppressed, but much less so. For current concentrations, the per-molecule forcings are two to three orders of magnitude greater for O3, N2O and CH4, than those of H2O or CO2. Doubling the current concentrations of CO2, N2O or CH4 increases the forcings by a few per cent. These forcing results are close to previously published values even though the calculations did not utilize either a CO2 or H2O continuum. The change in surface temperature due to CO2 doubling is estimated taking into account radiative-convective equilibrium of the atmosphere as well as water feedback for the cases of xed absolute and relative humidities as well as the eect of using a pseudoadiabatic lapse rate to model the troposphere temperature. Satellite spectral measurements at various latitudes are in excellent quantitative agreement with modelled intensities.

A sample from Page 6 in the paper

A sample from page 35 in the Paper

Click on the Download box below to get the full 37 page paper it is worth reading if you are a serious researcher on climate physics.


2006.03098Download

Jan 27 2019

“The Good Bad & the Ugly” – The Best Rendition Ever


Jan 5 2019

Product Review on PC Matic


While watching Fox News a while back I started seeing ads for PC Matic now and then and since I was not happy with the existing system I had and the subscription was over in December 2018 I decided to check out PC Matic in November.  I found a lot of good reviews and the price was right so I decided to make the switch.  Just for reference I have been on PC’s since  the introduction of the IBM PC AT back in the early 80’s way before windows when everything was command line.  So I have used over the years just about every protection package that there was.  PC Matic was the easiest to install by far, there was no system I have ever used that was as easy to install as PC Matic’s product lines, and the service they provide is top of the line!

Here is their website … check them out!

http://www.pcpitstop.com/

Nov 28 2018

Thoughts from the book Scorpion Down


This post is based on information found in the book Scorpion Down written by Ed Offley and published in 2007. The book is based on Ed’s work conducted over almost a quarter century digging into government records and interviewing former navy NCO’s and Officers at all levels. He also intervened may others including former soviet military. Almost the entire book is fact and the parts that are not are hard to dispute because they are based on the over welling number of facts presented.

This paper is not about the Russian’s sinking the Scorpion with a torpedo on May 27, 1968 but of the revelations that came out of all that work of Offley that relate to finding that is what happened. Although he refers to Vietnam in the book his focus is the cover up of what happened to the Scorpion and why it was covered up so tightly. However I think it goes much deeper and this story relates indirectly to the conflict in Vietnam and why it took so long to get out.

Key facts:

  • Sometime likely as early as 1965 but for sure no later than early 1967 navy Chief Warrant Officer John Walker begins selling classified information to the Soviets, including radio cipher cards.
  • January 23 1968 The Seizure of the USS Pueblo by North Korean Forces including the INTACT KW-7, KLB-47, KWR-37 AND a KLB-47 encryption devices.
  • March 8, 1968 Soviet diesel-electric submarine K-129 a Project 629 strategic ballistic missile submarine is lost in the pacific.
  • May 27 1968 the sinking of the SSN Scorpion by Russian torpedo
  • May 20 1985 John Walker arrested and his activities of his spy ring uncovered over the next several years
  • December 26, 1991 after the collapse of the USSR some but not all of information related to all of the above become available from Russian and US sources.

Obviously the story starts with Walker who in his position in the navy’s Atlantic Submarine Force Headquarters message center who had access to radio cipher card which were used with the devices used to communicate with ships at sea including submarines. During this period the US Navy submarines and the Soviet Navy submarines were playing cat and mouse games with each other which included underwater maneuvering which in many cases caused collisions between the two subs. This is described in detail in the book.

It is very likely that the Soviets had the Koreans capture the Pueblo to get the encryption devices that were on board and we do know that within a few weeks of being captured those devices were in Russia.  The US military was not that worried about the loos since without the radio cipher cards they would be of only marginal use to the Russians. Had the navy know about Walker they would have realized how wrong they were since Walker had been supplying the Russians with the cards for years. But since they didn’t know the rest followed.

The sinking of the K-129 was probably the result of an encounter with a US submarine since the US knew where it went down and the Russians didn’t. The US CIA attempted to recover the K-129 from 16,000 feet down and did get part of it. The effort to recover the sub was named Project Azorian and it was partially successful. The Russians probably knew of the reason for the sinking because they had the radio cipher cards and the matching devices.

Two months later the Scorpion is torpedoed and sunk probably in retaliation for the Russian loss of the K-129. The US knew it was a torpedo since they had hydrophone readings that proved it. Offley interviewed an Ocean Systems Technician (analyst) that saw the actual Top Secret Sound Surveillance System (Sosus) tape in training and it clearly showed an underwater dog fight between the Scorpion and a soviet Echo-II nuclear submarine including the torpedo trace as it tracked the Scorpion and the hit on her that sank her. There is some evidence that the Scorpion also fired a torpedo and the Soviet sub was hit but didn’t sink. There are pictures and discerptions of an Echo-II sub being repaired and towed back to Russia in the area of the dog fight.

Now if you are interested in the story read the book it is worth reading. But my point to writing this is that since the Soviets had the encryption devices and the radio cipher cards during the period from just after TET in Vietnam through the end of that conflict and the Russians were the primary supports of the North Vietnamese — did the Russians keep the North Vietnamese informed of US activities such that the Vietnamese knew how badly we wanted out and that they had nothing to lose by stalling as long as they could? For the Soviets could intercept and decode all messages sent on the devices that they had captured on the Pueblo.

 

Cross section of Skipjack class nuclear submarine

Skipjack-class submarine drawing: 1. Sonar arrays 2. Torpedo room 3. Operations compartment 4. Reactor compartment 5. Auxiliary machinery space 6. Engine room

 

Jun 17 2018

Book Review, Confronting the Deception


Confronting the Deception is a book written by By Tabitha Korol. I have known Tabitha for many years now and she has been a prolific writer on subjects of national importance, the US Constitution, Judeo-Christian ethics and the dangers of radical Islam. Her work is detailed and accurate and is mostly short and to the point essays and I will add for full disclosure that I post many of her essays on my blog under her By Line.

I have just finished reading her book, Confronting the Deception and found it a very thorough and detailed analysis of the march of Islam into Western Civilization and how we appear to be incapable of seeing the dangers of trying to assimilate a culture that does not want to assimilate into the belief structures that have been developed and debugged over the past 5,000 years in Europe and the Americas. Although many today are spoiled because of the great political system we have, they have lost the historical perception of how hard it was to get to where we are now. The Social Justice Warriors (SJW) today only see past wrongs and conclude the present is therefore unjust; this is a very dangerous view and civilizations have fallen because of this view in the past.

Tabitha has 90 of her essays broken down into three sections: Part One Islam, Part Two: Academia, Part Three: Media, and Part Four: Conclusion, generally running from the fall of 2011 to early 2018. In these 90 essays she develops the argument that there is a distortion of the subject within in each of the three categories, showing how the truth is distorted by the JSW movement and political correctness. Her work is well documented and sources appropriately footnoted with 822 listed in her book.

This is a serious academic study and I highly recommend it for anyone with an open mind that wants to study the subject of merging the Islamic belief system into the Judeo-Christian ethics that were used to develop our present political systems, in particular, that which we have in The United States.

I have not studied Islam to the degree that Tabitha has, but I have read extensively on the subject of Moral Philosophy and it is my opinion that Judeo-Christian ethics and Islamic ethics are not compatible. If you read her book Confronting the Deception you will be given ample evidence that that statement is, in fact, true.

Confronting the Deception, Inflamed by 9/11, Fired Up By Eight Bad Years, was written and published by Tabitha Korol in May 2018, Lexington, KY with the ISBN 978-1-986925-50-1

Jan 26 2018

Move Review 12 Strong


In the wake of Sept. 11, Capt. Mitch Nelson (really was Captain Mark Nutsch) leads a U.S. Special Forces team ODA 595 into Afghanistan for an extremely dangerous mission. Once there, the soldiers develop an uneasy partnership with the Northern Alliance to take down the Taliban and its al-Qaida allies. Outgunned and outnumbered, Nelson and his team do what needs to be done there were, after all American Green Berets so how could they lose.
As a former Green Beret from way back in the day and who served in Vietnam as a A team XO I can tell you that a movie is a movie: But this team didn’t need much glamor added. What they actually did no one else but a Green Beret could have done.  When you are in hostile territory supporting local militias and can barely speak the language and then have to lead them in battle on a horse you have to be crazy! But then we were Green Berets.
Captain Mitch Nelson actually did what the move showed and there is now a statue in NYC of a Green Beret with an M4 with the M203 grenade launder on horse back.  The Statue was written up in our Special Forces Association magazine  the winter 2011 issue of the The Drop a couple of years after the book,  Horse Soldiers, the movie was taken from came out. I was in combat and from my experiences the move came a good feel for the way it really is. I recommend this movie if you want to feel what it is like to be on your own in a hard place.
OH I must add that the Air Force B-52’s helped some!
Link to more information on the operation History vs Hollywood

 

May 30 2015

Movie Review “Lone Survivor”


This movie is based on the book by the same name co-written by Patrick Robinson and Marcus Luttrell’s and his experiences in Afghanistan. The book is a fictional account of Operation Red Wings in Kunar Province Afghanistan in 2005.  Luttrell and three other Navy Seals from Seal Team 10 were on a mission to capture or kill a high value Al-Qaida operative, Ahmad Shah, that goes terrible wrong. Luttrell played (and produced) by Mark Wahlberg, Michael P. Murphy played by Taylor Kitsch, Danny Dietz played by Emile Hirsch and Matthew Axelson played by Ben Foster are caught in a moral dilemma soon after arriving between killing three Afghanis’ and completing the mission or letting them go and aborting.  Lt (Army Captain) Murphy, the team leader, lets them go and the team tries to extract.

Those of us that have served in combat know that no mission goes as planned once the mission starts, SNAFU (Situation Normal All F’ed Up).  Operation Red Wings is no exception starting with poor radio contact then being discovered and ending with the loss of one MH-47 Chinook helicopter, 8 Navy Seals and 8 Special Operations aviators on the helicopter and 3 Seal’s out of 4 on the mission, Luttrell being the only one that lived and that was just barely. Although the move doesn’t portray exactly what happened on that mountain in Kunar Province it’s close enough to being true (Google Operation Red Wings pick the Wikipedia link) that it just doesn’t matter one bit.

The heart of the movie is when Luttrell and the other three Seal’s are found by the Taliban and an intense running fire fight ensues.  The lack of radio communications means the Seal Team 10 commanded Lt Commanded Erik S Kristensen played by Eric Bana doesn’t know what happened to his Seals, and from personal experience that is one-hell-of-a-bad feeling.  After the fire fight starts Lt Murphy fights his way to high ground where he is killed but he does make contact with Kristensen who then loads a rescue mission on a Chinook helicopter and tries to save the team, he doesn’t get gunship support, in part because of command conflicts, and after reaching the site he is shot down by an PPG rocket and he and more seals and the air crew are all killed.

While Kristensen is trying to save his Seals Luttrell, Murphy, Dietz and Axelson are fighting their way down the mountain where they are picked off one by one in a very intense running battle that is one of the best acted and realistic portrayal of combat that I have seen — it was very close to what I experienced in Vietnam at a Green Beret in 1967. This is a must see move for anyone that wants to experience what Special Operation solders go through in combat. Like Luttrell I experienced a combat situation where I was the only one to survive and two others died and I can state unequivocally  that losing your comrades is something that you never forget and you will wonder why till the day you die why your were spared and they were not?