GRU Defector Lunev

Stanislav Lunev (born 1946 in Leningrad) is a former Soviet military officer, the highest-ranking GRU officer to defect from Russia to the United States.

He was born in the family of a Soviet Army officer. He graduated from the Suvorov Military School in Vladikavkaz, and then from Joint Arms High Command Military Academy.

He then worked as a GRU intelligence officer in Singapore in 1978, in China from 1980, and in the United States from 1988. He defected to U.S. authorities in 1992. Since then he has worked as a consultant to the FBI and CIA.  He remains in the FBI’s Witness Protection Program.

Nuclear Sabotage Operations

Lunev is mostly known for his description of nuclear sabotage operations that have allegedly been prepared by the KGB and GRU against the western countries. It was known from other sources that large arms caches were hidden by the KGB in many countries for these planned activities.. They were booby-trapped with “Lightning” explosive devices. One of such cache, which was identified by Vasili Mitrokhin, exploded when Swiss authorities tried to remove it from woods near Berne. Several others caches were removed successfully.

Lunev asserted that some of the hidden caches could contain portable tactical nuclear weapons known as RA-115 "suitcase bombs". Such bombs have been prepared to assassinate US leaders in the event of war, according to him.  Lunev states that he had personally looked for hiding places for weapons caches in the Shenandoah Valley area and that "it is surprisingly easy to smuggle nuclear weapons into the US, either across the Mexican border or using a small transport missile that can slip undetected when launched from a Russian airplane.

US Congressman Curt Weldon supported claims by Lunev but noted that Lunev had "exaggerated things", according to the FBI. Searches of the areas identified by Lunev — who admits he never planted any weapons in the US — have been conducted, "but law-enforcement officials have never found such weapons caches, with or without portable nuclear weapons."

Poisoning of Potomac River

According to Lunev, a probable scenario in the event of war would have been poisoning the Potomac River with chemical or biological weapons, "targeting the residents of Washington DC". He also noted that it is "likely" that GRU operatives placed "poison supplies near the tributaries to major US reservoirs." These allegations have been confirmed by former SVR officer Kouzminov, who was responsible for transporting pathogens from around the world for the Russian program of biological weapons in the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. He described a variety of biological warfare acts that would be carried out on the order of the Russian President in the event of hostilities, including poisoning public drinking-water supplies and food processing plants.
 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Lunev

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Through the Eyes of the Enemy

by Stanislav Lunez
1998Amazon.com review  5 Stars

With the knowledge of one who spent most of his professional life in Russia's most secretive intelligence agency, Colonel Lunev provides a riveting and disturbing -- and very credible -- look at the GRU and how it has resisted the reforms that have swept its country.

Lunev provides an equally troubling yet compelling analysis of how the corruption of the Soviet system hijacked economic reform in Russia and turned the country into what President Yeltsin himself once called the "superpower of crime."

There are few books about the GRU. The best-known ones, written under the pseudonym Suvorov by a former GRU officer named Rezun who defected to the United Kingdom, are excellent works but many scholars suspect that they rest heavily on material provided by British intelligence. While this does not diminish the value of the Suvorov books, it does contrast with that of Lunev who, with the help of a co-author, offers a perspective completely unique to his experience.

Suvorov's books remain valuable, because the GRU has changed little if at all, and its mission remains the same. But being written in the Soviet period, they lack the context of the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War as we knew it.

U.S. intelligence was slow to realize the depth of criminalization within Russia's government and its security and intelligence services, and American policymakers have yet to accept this fact. Policymakers are also reluctant to admit that Moscow has preserved the Soviet-built mechanisms to decapitate the civilian and military leadership of the United States in the event of crisis.

Lunev describes the situation lucidly. One cannot understand the situation in Russia today without reading this book.

J. Michael Waller, Ph.D. Author, "Secret Empire: The KGB In Russia Today" (Westview, 1994). Executive Editor, "Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization." Vice President, American Foreign Policy Council, Washington, D.C.

 

Clarinettist "Acker" Bilk Dies

Bernard Stanley "Acker" Bilk MBE (28 January 1929 – 2 November 2014) was an English clarinettist and vocalist known for his trademark goatee, bowler hat, striped waistcoat and breathy, vibrato-rich, lower-register clarinet style.

Bilk's 1962 instrumental tune "Stranger on the Shore" became the UK's biggest selling single of 1962 where it remained in the UK charts for more than 50 weeks, peaking at number two, and was the first No. 1 single in the United Statyes by a British artist in the era of the modern Billboard Hot 11 pop chart.

On returning home after national service, Bilk joined his uncle's blacksmith business and qualified in the trade.

Bilk played with friends on the Bristol jazz circuit and in 1951 moved to London to play with Ken Colyer's band. But, disliking London, he returned west and formed his own band in Pensford called the Chew Valley Jazzmen, which was renamed the Bristol Paramount Jazz Band when they moved to London in 1951. Their agent then booked them for a six-month gig in Dusseldorf, Germany, playing in a beer bar seven hours a night, seven nights a week where Bilk and the band developed their distinctive style and appearance, complete with striped-waistcoats and bowler hats

On return to Britain and now based in Plaistow, London, the band played the London jazz club scene. It was from here that Bilk became part of the boom in traditional jazz that swept the United Kingdom in the late 1950s. In 1960, their single "Summer Set" (a pun on their home county), co-written by Bilk and pianist Dave Collet, reached number five on the UK Singles Chart, and began a run of 11 chart hit singles. In 1961 "Acker Bilk and His Paramount Jazz Band" appeared at the Royal Variety Performance.

Bilk was not an internationally known musician until an experiment with a string ensemble and a composition of his own as its keynote piece made him one in 1962. Upon the birth of his daughter, he composed and dedicated a melody entitled "Jenny" (her name). He was approached by a British television series for permission to use that melody, but to change the title to "Stranger on the Shore". He went on to record it as the title track of a new album in which his signature deep and quavering clarinet was backed by the Leon Young String Chorale. The single was not only a big hit in the United Kingdom, where it stayed on the charts for 55 weeks, gaining a second wind after Bilk was the subject of the TV show This Is Your Life, but also shot to the top of the American charts at a time when the American pop charts and radio playlists were open to almost anything in just about any style. As a result, Bilk was the second British artist to have a single in the number-one position on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart (Vera Lynn was the first, with "Auf Wiederseh'n Sweetheart" in 1952.) "Stranger on the Shore" sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. The album was also highlighted by a striking interpretation of Bunny Berigan’s legendary hit "I Can't Get Started". At the height of his career, Bilk's public relations workers were known as the "Bilk Marketing Board", a pun on the Milk Marketing Board.

In January 1963, British music magazine NME reported on the biggest trad jazz event to be staged in Britain at Alexandra Palace. The event included George Melly, Diz Disley, Alex Welsh, Chris Barber, Kenny Ball, Ken Colyer, Monty Sunshine, Bob Wallis, Bruce Turner, Mick Mulligan and Bilk. Bilk recorded a series of albums in Britain that were also released successfully in the United States (on the Atlantic Records subsidiary Atco), including a collaboration, Together, with the Danish jazz pianist and composer Bent Fabric ("The Alley Cat"). Bilk's success tapered off when British rock and roll made its big international impact beginning in 1964 and he shifted direction to the cabaret circuit. He finally had another chart success in 1976 with "Aria", which went to number five in the United Kingdom. In May 1977, Bilk & His Paramount Jazz Band provided the interval act for the Eurovision Song Contest. His last chart appearance was in 1978 when the TV-promoted album released on Pye/Warwick, Evergreen, reached 17 in a 14-week album chart run. In the early 1980s, Bilk and his signature hit were newly familiar, due to "Stranger on the Shore" being used in the soundtrack to Sweet Dreams, the film biography of country music legend Patsy Cline. The tune "Aria" featured as a central musical motif in the 2012 Polish film Mój rower. Most of his classic albums with the Paramount Jazz Band have been reissued and are available on the UK-based Lake label.

Bilk has been described as the "Great Master of the Clarinet". His clarinet sound and style was at least as singular as had been those of American jazzmen such as Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Russell Procope, and "Stranger on the Shore" — which he was once quoted as calling "my old-age pension" — remains a standard of jazz and popular music alike.

Bilk continued to tour with his Paramount Jazz Band, as well as performing concerts with his two contemporaries, Chris Barber and Kenny Ball (deceased), both of whom were born in 1930, as the 3Bs. Bilk also provided distinctive vocals on many of his tracks, including on "I'm an Old Cowhand", "The Folks Who Live on the Hill", "White Cliffs of Dover", "Travellin' On" and "That's My Home".

One of his recordings is with the Chris Barber band, sharing the clarinet spot with the band's regular reedsmen, John Crocker and Ian Wheeler. He made a CD with Wally Fawkes for the Lake label in 2002. He appeared on three albums by Van Morrison, Down the Road, What’s Wrong With This Picture? and Born to Sing: No Plan B.

In 2012 Bilk said that, after 50 years, he was "fed up" with playing his most famous tune, "Stranger on the Shore".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acker_Bilk

 

Dada and Anti-Art

Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of World War I. For many participants, the movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests, which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity—in art and more broadly in society—that corresponded to the war.

Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality. For example, George Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest "against this world of mutual destruction."

According to Hans Richter Dada was not art: it was "anti-art." Dada represented the opposite of everything which art stood for. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend.

As Hugho Ball expressed it, "For us, art is not an end in itself ... but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in."

A reviewer from the ;American Art News stated at the time that "Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man." Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, a "reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide."

Years later, Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path... [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization... In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege."

To quote Dona Budd's The Language of Art Knowledge,

“Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of World War I. This international movement was begun by a group of artists and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word. Others maintain that it originates from the Romanian artists Tristan Tzara's and Marcel Janco's frequent use of the words "da, da," meaning "yes, yes" in the Romanian language. Another theory says that the name "Dada" came during a meeting of the group when a paper knife stuck into a French-German dictionary happened to point to 'dada', a French word for 'hobbyhorse'.”

The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature, poetry, art manifestoes, art theory, theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada

Great Anthologist Oscar Williams

Oscar Williams was the pen name of Oscar Kaplan (December 29, 1900 – October 10, 1964), an American anthologist and poet.

Life

Williams was born Oscar Kaplan in Lethychiv, Ukraine, son of Jewish parents Mouzya Kaplan and Chana Rapoport. He immigrated to New York at the age of seven.

His first book, Golden Darkness, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize.

Among his influential anthologies are Master Poems of the English Language, Immortal Poems of the English Language, The Pocket Book of Modern Verse, and the Little Treasury Poetry Series, which were used in colleges and high schools around the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s. During his lifetime, anthologies he edited sold more than two million copies, a nearly unheard amount for books of poetry. Many of his anthologies are still being republished today. Though a friend and promoter of poets like Dylan Thomas and George Barker, Williams' own poetry is not highly regarded by critics, though he published several volumes during his lifetime, and is not nearly as accomplished as the poetry of his wife, Gene Derwood (1909–1954).

Among Williams' poems are "Revenge," "Poem," "Poet," "The Last Supper" and "I Sing an Old Song," and “The City;s Face.

Oscar Williams and his poet-artist wife Gene Derwood sponsored an annual $15,000 poetry award which bears their name. They lived in a penthouse of an office building on Water Street. In his later years, Oscar Williams' home near Wall Street in Manhattan served as a mecca for young poets. Asked how he chose the poems used in his anthologies, he said, "How do you pick one girl to marry? In poetry it's divine polygamy. Generally, when a poem stays with me a long time that poem delivers the goods".

Throughout his life, Oscar Williams eschewed his Jewish background. He was always mysterious about his origins and was buried by an Episcopal Church Church. He was survived by a son, Strephon Kaplan-Williams, who was raised in boarding schools and hardly ever interacted with his parents. His papers are housed at the Indiana University Lilly Library.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Williams

A Blast About Modern Poetry

Modern poetry is a shotgun blast. There are no recognizable standards for universal selection. Plath is recognized because you cannot divorce her from her suicide. Ginsberg you cannot divorce from his beard and little clanging bells, a media invention. Bob Dylan you cannot divorce from his being a song writer and media invention. If you are not a media invention and only a poet, what chance do you have? So Immortal Poems represents classic taste before media took over the American mind. The media is immortal these days, not poetry. Selecting from contemporary poets not using traditional standards would be difficult to do. I would still love to do it. For those interested in Oscar Williams there is information now available on the web. Just search it with oscarwilliams and see what their world was like in the twentieth century.

-- Strephon Kaplan-Williams, in an Amazon.com review of his father’s anthology, Immortal Poems of the English Language, at http://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Poems-English-Language-Williams/dp/0671496107

Afterword by the Blog Author

Master Poems of the English Language was used by the blog author in his undergraduate courses in obtaining an English degree from the University of Washington in 1971.  It is a collection of justly famous poems and spectacularly insightful accompanying essays.  It was perhaps the best collection of English poems and accompanying analyses of the twentieth century.

Coming: Cancer Blood Tests

Step towards blood test for many cancer types

(UK) National Cancer Research Institute, November 2, 2014

Scientists have identified more than 800 markers in the blood of cancer patients that could help lead to a single blood test for early detection of many types of cancer in future,  according to research presented at the [UK] National Cancer Research Institute in Liverpool today (Sunday).

This is the first time that cancer-specific blood markers have been comprehensively reviewed and identified for further clinical development. This study, by the UK Early Cancer Detection Consortium*, funded by Cancer Research UK, has analysed 19,000 scientific papers and found more than 800 biomarkers.

The aim of this research is to develop a screening test from a single blood sample for multiple cancer types.  All cancers produce markers in the blood, so it could be feasible to develop a general screening test for many different forms of the disease.

In the UK, survival rates for cancer are lower than in some other western countries, part of which may be related to late diagnosis.  But developing more ways to spot cancers earlier, including research into new screening technologies such as this, could help give more options for curative treatment, and save more lives in the future.

In the UK, cancer is most often detected after patients present symptoms to their doctor, with a small proportion being detected through any of the three national screening programmes for breast, bowel, and cervical cancer.  This study could open the way for less invasive, new screening tests that could detect more cancers, possibly including some rare types, at an early stage when they are more likely to be treatable.

Cancer Research UK is committed to early diagnosis of cancer, importantly reducing late diagnosis and improving patients’ chances of surviving long term.

Study author Professor Ian Cree, a Cancer Research UK funded scientist at the University of Warwick (link is external)and University Hospital in Coventry (link is external), said: “This is a new approach to early detection and the first time such a systematic review has been done.  A single blood-based screening test would be a game changer for early detection of cancer which could help make it a curable disease for many more patients.  We believe that we’ve identified all the relevant biomarkers; the next step is working out which ones work the best for spotting cancers.”

The identified biomarkers will be reviewed and categorised before they are developed further in clinical laboratory studies.

Sara Hiom, Cancer Research UK’s director of early diagnosis, said: “This is an innovative and promising new approach. And although in its early stages, it shows how our increased understanding of cancers’ ‘markers’ and new technologies are combining to offer new opportunities to detect cancer sooner.  Diagnosing cancer at an early stage generally means more effective treatment and that translates into better survival.  Our goal over the next 20 years is that three in four cancer patients will survive at least ten years after their diagnosis.”

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-us/cancer-news/press-release/2014-11-02-step-towards-blood-test-for-many-cancer-types

Is Dark Energy Eating Dark Matter?

University of Portsmouth, October 31, 2014

New research offers a novel insight into the nature of dark matter and dark energy and what the future of our Universe might be.

Researchers in Portsmouth and Rome have found hints that dark matter, the cosmic scaffolding on which our Universe is built, is being slowly erased, swallowed up by dark energy.

The findings appear in the journal Physical Review Letters, published by the American Physical Society. In the journal cosmologists at the Universities of Portsmouth and Rome, argue that the latest astronomical data favours a dark energy that grows as it interacts with dark matter, and this appears to be slowing the growth of structure in the cosmos.

Professor David Wands, Director of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, is one of the research team.

He said: “This study is about the fundamental properties of space-time. On a cosmic scale, this is about our Universe and its fate.

“If the dark energy is growing and dark matter is evaporating we will end up with a big, empty, boring Universe with almost nothing in it.

“Dark matter provides a framework for structures to grow in the Universe. The galaxies we see are built on that scaffolding and what we are seeing here, in these findings, suggests that dark matter is evaporating, slowing that growth of structure.”

Cosmology underwent a paradigm shift in 1998 when researchers announced that the rate at which the Universe was expanding was accelerating. The idea of a constant dark energy throughout space-time (the “cosmological constant”) became the standard model of cosmology, but now the Portsmouth and Rome researchers believe they have found a better description, including energy transfer between dark energy and dark matter.

Research students Valentina Salvatelli and Najla Said from the University of Rome worked in Portsmouth with Dr Marco Bruni and Professor Wands, and with Professor Alessandro Melchiorri in Rome. They examined data from a number of astronomical surveys, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and used the growth of structure revealed by these surveys to test different models of dark energy.

Professor Wands said: “Valentina and Najla spent several months here over the summer looking at the consequences of the latest observations. Much more data is available now than was available in 1998 and it appears that the standard model is no longer sufficient to describe all of the data. We think we’ve found a better model of dark energy.

“Since the late 1990s astronomers have been convinced that something is causing the expansion of our Universe to accelerate. The simplest explanation was that empty space – the vacuum – had an energy density that was a cosmological constant. However there is growing evidence that this simple model cannot explain the full range of astronomical data researchers now have access to; in particular the growth of cosmic structure, galaxies and clusters of galaxies, seems to be slower than expected.”

Professor Dragan Huterer,of the University of Michigan, has read the research and said scientists need to take notice of the findings.

He said: “The paper does look very interesting. Any time there is a new development in the dark energy sector we need to take notice since so little is understood about it. I would not say, however, that I am surprised at the results, that they come out different than in the simplest model with no interactions. We’ve known for some months now that there is some problem in all data fitting perfectly to the standard simplest model.”

http://www.port.ac.uk/uopnews/2014/10/31/universe-may-face-a-darker-future/

A Comic Opera Summary

Comic opera denotes a sung dramatic work of a light or comic nature, usually with a happy ending.

Forms of comic opera first developed in late 17th-century Italy. By the 1730s, a new operatic genre, opera buffa, emerged as an alternative to opera seria. It quickly made its way to France, where it became opera bouffon, and eventually, in the following century, French operetta, with Jacques Offenbach as its most accomplished practitioner.

The influence of the Italian and French forms spread to other parts of Europe. Many countries developed their own genres of comic opera, incorporating the Italian and French models along with their own musical traditions. Examples include Viennese operetta, German singspiel, Spanish zarzuela, Russian comic opera, English ballad opera and Savoy Opera.

English Light Opera

England traces its light opera tradition to the ballad opera, typically a comic play that incorporated songs set to popular tunes. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera was the earliest and most popular of these. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Duenna (1775), with a score by Thomas Linley, was expressly described as "a comic opera".

By the second half of the 19th century, the London musical stage was dominated by pantomime and musical burlesque, as well as bawdy, badly translated continental operettas, often including "ballets" featuring much prurient interest, and visiting the theatre became distasteful to the respectable public, especially women and children. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas German Reed, beginning in 1855, and a number of other Britons, deplored the risqué state of musical theatre and introduced short comic operas designed to be more family-friendly and to elevate the intellectual level of musical entertainments. Jessie Bond wrote, “The stage was at a low ebb, Elizabethan glories and Georgian artificialities had alike faded into the past, stilted tragedy and vulgar farce were all the would-be playgoer had to choose from, and the theatre had become a place of evil repute to the righteous British householder.... A first effort to bridge the gap was made by the German Reed Entertainers.”

Nevertheless, an 1867 production of Offenbach's The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein (seven months after its French première) ignited the English appetite for light operas with more carefully crafted librettos and scores, and continental European operettas continued to be extremely popular in Britain in the 1860s and '70s, including Les Cloches de Corneville, Madame Favart and others into the 1880s, often adapted by H.B. Farnie and Robert Reece. F.C. Burnand collaborated with several composers, including Arthur Sullivan in Cox and Box, to write several comic operas on English themes in the 1860s and 1870s.

In 1875, Richard D’Oyly Carte, one of the impresarios aiming to establish an English school of family-friendly light opera by composers such as Frederic Clay and Edward Solomon as a countermeasure to the continental operettas, commissioned Clay's collaborator, W.S. Gilbert, and the promising young composer, Arthur Sullivan, to write a short one-act opera that would serve as an afterpiece to Offenbach's La Perichole. The result was Trial by Jury; its success launched the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership. "Mr. R. D'Oyly Carte's Opera Bouffe Company" took Trial on tour, playing it alongside French works by Offenbach and Alexandre Charles Lecocq. Eager to liberate the English stage from risqué French influences, and emboldened by the success of Trial by Jury, Carte formed a syndicate in 1877 to perform "light opera of a legitimate kind". Gilbert and Sullivan were commissioned to write a new comic opera, The Sorcerer, starting the series that came to be known as the Savoy Operas (named for the Savoy Theatre, which Carte later built for these works) that included H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, which became popular around the world. The D’Oyly Carte Opera Company continued to perform Gilbert and Sullivan almost continuously until it closed in 1982.

The Gilbert and Sullivan style was widely imitated by their contemporaries (for example, in Dorothy), and the creators themselves wrote works in this style with other collaborators in the 1890s. None of these, however, had lasting popularity, leaving the Savoy Operas as practically the sole representatives of the genre surviving today. Only recently, some of these other English light operas have begun to be explored by scholars and to receive performances and recordings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_opera

Afterword by the Blog Author

It has been written that serious opera never fully made it in England, especially after John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera.  Thanks to John Gay, opera was laughed off the stage.  The same can be said of the United States, which to a degree has only accepted its own best opera, Porgy and Bess, which was first a success in Europe and, much later, as an American motion picture.  Light opera survives as Broadway musicals, but most of these are recreated from older works and survive because they attract tourists to the New York theatres.  The heyday of American light operas was the 1930s, but even then the popular songs from those musicals were outsold by songs coming out of Hollywood written by Harry Warren.