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Private Snafu is the title character of a series of black-and-white American instructional cartoon shorts produced between 1943 and 1945 during World War II. The character was created by director Frank Capra, chairman of the U.S. Army Air Force First Motion Picture Unit, and some of the shorts were written by Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel. Although the United States Army gave Walt Disney Studios the first crack at creating the cartoons, Leon Schlesinger of the Warner Bros. animation studio underbid Disney by two-thirds and won the contract. Disney had also demanded exclusive ownership of the character, and merchandising rights.

Most of the Private Snafu shorts are educational, and although the War Department had to approve the storyboards, the Warner directors were allowed great latitude in order to keep the cartoons entertaining. Through his irresponsible behavior, Snafu demonstrates to soldiers what not to do while at war. In Malaria Mike, for example, Snafu neglects to take his malaria medications or to use his repellant, allowing a suave mosquito to get him in the end—literally. In Spies, Snafu leaks classified information a little at a time until the Germans and Japanese piece it together, ambush his transport ship, and literally blow him to hell. Six of Snafu’s shorts actually end with him being killed due to his stupidity: Spies (blown up by enemy submarine torpedoes), Booby Traps (blown up by a bomb hidden inside a piano), The Goldbrick (run over by an enemy tank), A Lecture on Camouflage (large enemy bomb lands on him), Private Snafu vs. Malaria Mike (malaria), and Going Home (run over by a street car).

Watch The Goldbrick (Written by DR. Seuss)

Later in the war, however, Snafu’s antics became more like those of fellow Warner alum Bugs Bunny, a savvy hero facing the enemy head-on. The cartoons were intended for an audience of soldiers (as part of the bi-weekly Army-Navy Screen Magazine newsreel), and so are quite risqué Read more »

In this day and age it is hard to believe that one of the most technologically advanced nations in history would be using defensive measures that once protected ancient Egyptian fortresses. Sure the moat is a tried and true technology, but is it superior to laser fencing and phalanxes of cameras with computer brains? Originally designed to make access to fortress walls difficult for siege weapons, such as siege towers and battering rams, moats may also be effective at keeping truck bombs from getting too close to the Embassy.

US diplomats add a moat to their expenses at $1bn London embassy (Times Online)

In an attempt to get patriotic Americans to buy War Bonds the US Treasury commissioned a propaganda film.  The film is replete with the racism of 1940s America and contains some pretty vivid shots of the casualties of war.

Watch My Japan

It was the period in the history of the United States known as Prohibition, from 1920-1933. During this time, the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcohol for consumption was banned throughout the US as mandated in the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Noble Experiment was a colossal failure.  As public use of alcohol was illegal, all drink was driven underground.  Syndicated crime sky rocketed, as the need to provide illegal liquor increased.

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.”

Read the rest of the story at: The Chemist’s War (Slate)

Watch Prohibition – The Last War on Drugs

From Lassie to Top Gun, filmmakers who succumbed to US Military censorship,  got the assistance of the military.  Productions with a favorable view of war get military guidance with their product. Movies like Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket were left out in the cold.

Watch Operation Hollywood, a documentary on the US Military control of Hollywood.

A high-powered laser aboard a modified Boeing Co 747 jumbo jet shot down an in-flight ballistic missile for the first time, highlighting a new class of ray guns best known from science fiction.

The flying laser’s long-awaited test on Thursday showcased a potential to zap multiple targets at the speed of light and at a range of hundreds of kilometers, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency said in a statement.

“The Missile Defense Agency demonstrated the potential use of directed energy to defend against ballistic missiles when the Airborne Laser Testbed (ALTB) successfully destroyed a boosting ballistic missile,” the agency said.

“The revolutionary use of directed energy is very attractive for missile defense,” the statement added.

It cited among other things a low cost per intercept compared with other technologies used to defeat missiles that could be tipped with chemical, biological or nuclear warheads.

Directed energy weapons use highly focused rays to attack a target rather than chemical-powered arms. Those in control can tweak the strength involved, unlike a bullet or a bomb, allowing for less-than-lethal uses.

Lasers are well known from science fiction as a type of ray gun. In the real world, they are used for sighting, ranging and targeting for guns.

The experiment marked both the first time a laser weapon has destroyed a ballistic missile and the first time any system has accomplished it in the missile’s boost phase of flight.

Read more at: Flying laser zaps missile in first for U.S. (Reuters)

Two ex-Blackwater Worldwide employees allege the company charged the government for a prostitute and strippers and kept incompetent personnel for financial reasons, part of what they call a systematic pattern to defraud authorities.

The accusations come in a lawsuit filed by Brad and Melan Davis — who said the fraudulent activity, such as double billing and submitting false invoices, occurred while the security firm, now known as Xe, carried out its work in Iraq, Afghanistan and in Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.

Melan Davis, who was involved in record-keeping, said Blackwater billed the government for prostitution services in Afghanistan from a Filipino female, whose name was on Blackwater’s payroll roster under a category called “Morale Welfare Recreation.”

She said Blackwater billed the woman’s plane tickets and monthly salary to the United States.

Read more at: Suit: Prostitute, strippers part of Blackwater fraud (CNN)

Former U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson, a hard-partying Democrat who played a key role in the United States’ covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, has died. He was 76.

Wilson was taken to Memorial Medical Center-Lufkin after he started having difficulty breathing while attending a meeting in the eastern Texas town where he lived, said hospital spokeswoman Yana Ogletree.

Wilson, who had a heart transplant in 2007 in Houston, was pronounced dead on arrival, and the preliminary cause of death was cardiopulmonary arrest, Ogletree said. Houston doctors had told Wilson, who suffered from cardiomyopathy, a disease that causes an enlarged and weakened heart, that he would likely die without a transplant.

Former U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson dead at 76 (chron.com)

Charlie Wilson on Iraq and Afghanistan

Charlie Wilson’s War at Amazon.com

Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of a stroke on April 12, 1945, shortly before the end of World War II.  A new book, “FDR’s Deadly Secret,” makes a persuasive case that Roosevelt’s stroke was caused by a brain tumor that had metastasized from melanoma over his left eyebrow, which he and his doctors worked hard to cover up.

The authors suggest that Roosevelt was having seizures (which were reported by his Secret Service agents) and difficulty seeing the left margin of his written speeches — indicating an advanced brain tumor — by the time he attended the Yalta Conference with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in February, 1945.

There’s no way of knowing if Roosevelt could have prevented the Cold War if he had been at his fullest faculties.

Roosevelt May Have Had Brain Tumor When He Met Stalin (Bloomberg)

FDR’s Deadly Secret at Amazon.com

The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal ‘Synthetic Organisms,’ Molecular Kill-Switch Included (Wired)

DARPA Wants to Override Evolution to Make Immortal Synthetic Organisms (Popular Science)