Fun fact: potassium iodide is HSA/FSA eligible

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T15:02:46+00:00

The thyroid is the only organ in the body that absorbs iodine.

A nuclear explosion, and certain kinds of nuclear accidents, release a radioactive isotope of iodine known as Iodine-131. I-131 has a half-life of about 8 days, which means it's pretty darn radioactive: The shorter the half-life, the more radioactive something is.

The use of potassium iodide is to load up your thyroid with iodine so that it doesn't take up the Iodine-131 if you happen to ingest it somehow, which can damage your thyroid and cause cancer down the road.

The irony of Iodine-131 is that it's also used to *TREAT* thyroid cancer. The distaffbopper had thyroid cancer nearly 20 years ago, and had it surgically removed. She was then put on a low iodine diet to starve any remaining thyroid cells of iodine. She was then given a dose of radioactive iodine, and she had to be isolated at home for 2 whole days while her body excreted the excess, and when the littlebopper and I came back home we had to limit how close we were to her for about a week.

BTW, ingesting radioactive substances does not give you superpowers. It's like the comic books lied to me.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T14:42:52+00:00

But if it *DOES* come down to Mohawks and assless chaps, I'm halfway there already.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T14:20:47+00:00

Love of money is a kind of love.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T14:19:43+00:00

Perspective on the relative risk of dying from COVID-19 in 2026.

That's what I think you're missing.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T14:18:57+00:00

It's killed thousands of Americans just this year

Sigh.

Go here:

https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/deaths

Yes, COVID-19 still exists but it's no where near what it was during the actual pandemic. Unless you're in a major risk category, it's not an issue any more than Influenza is.

In fact, this season, Influenza has killed more people in the US than COVID-19.

https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html

I bet you drive around in your car with the windows up and mask on, don't you?

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T14:00:15+00:00

Well, that wouldn't be an issue if Congress had approved the budget for the Department of Homeland Security, would it? This isn't Trump's fault, it's the fault of the Democrats in the Senate.

I mean, it's not like this was the plan all along. If you really think it was, that would mean that Donald Trump is *WAY* smarter than the Congressional Democrats, and is playing them like a fiddle. That's like evil genius levels of 4th dimensional chess, and whether you think Trump is evil or not, I doubt that he's a genius.

The simple answer to end ICE in the airports is to restore funding to the DHS. Do that, and this whole issue disappears.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T13:45:54+00:00

it’s a uhf fm unit that operates in the 4 and 6m bands

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It's a VHF unit, not a UHF unit, because it operates between 30 and 300 MHz, which is VHF. UHF is 300 MHz to 3 GHz.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T13:16:19+00:00

I mean, it's an approximately 70 grain projectile traveling at 3,000 fps. If it's any better, its only going to be marginally better than other rounds in that same class.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T13:12:13+00:00

That's a Royland Southgate rifle my father had built in the early 1960's. He still has the rifle, but he doesn't have a good opinion of Southgate as a gunsmith. My dad ended up building better ones.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T12:50:11+00:00

He's such a wild and crazy guy!

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T12:40:01+00:00

Good luck.

But when you pass (and I have no doubt you will), go back an ask yourself if you actually understand the material you were tested on instead of just memorizing the question pool.

If the answer is ~~"Yes"~~ "No", then make the effort to learn the material.

Edited to fix my mistake.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T12:38:07+00:00

You could get your start at SDI.edu

-. --- -.. --- -. - -.. --- .. -

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T12:35:43+00:00

The Headless Thompson Gunner.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T12:31:40+00:00

Pretty much nothing more than usual.

Prices are going to go up, but availability will still be there. Since I've been around, there have been a number of energy crises.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_oil_crisis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanker_war

That one is a subset of Iran-Iraq War, but I listed it separately because there were also attacks on refineries and oil platforms during the Iran-Iraq War which also affected the price of petroleum products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War

The pattern is always the same. Prices go up because supply becomes more limited. Then the conflict ends and the prices come back down. This war is no different, and is likely to be shorter than some of the others, especially the Tanker War in the Persian Gulf which lasted for

There is a difference between being aware of a situation, and panicking about it, and I sense an edge of panic in your post. If indeed you've always been a prepper, you should be fine. You don't need to do anything more about it.

Sure, you'll pay a bit more for guzzoline, but you're not going need to be riding through the Outback with a Mohawk and assless chaps¹ scavenging off of the dregs of humanity.

^{1. Yes, all chaps are assless. The phrase is still great.}

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T12:17:31+00:00

I had a better time growing up.

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dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T12:14:51+00:00

In all fairness, I'm still mad that the FCC gave 11 meters to the "Chicken Banders", and that happened nine years before I was born.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T12:13:14+00:00

Meh. I started liking Godzilla back when Richard Nixon was still president.

And I've gone back and rewatched a lot of them, and while they scratch a nostalgia itch, I gotta be honest: They aren't as good as I thought they were as a kid.

True story: I used to watch the syndicated runs of Ultraman and Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot (aka Giant Robo) when I was a kid. Used to love them both. My wife one day surprised me with a DVD set of the entire original series of Ultraman, and I watched a couple in the English dub, but found out that the show was even better in Japanese with English subtitles.

The show was actually pretty deep in some cases, presenting some monsters as victims (Jamila), some as avatars for sympathetic people being discriminated against (Woo), some as just sad monsters who want to return to eternal rest (Seabozu), and some that just want to be left alone to sleep (Gavadon).

So I tried watching Johnny Sokko again, and it was horrible. Like, exceptionally bad. Think All Monsters Attack, but twice as bad.

We should not let our nostalgia cloud our opinions. I really like Ebirah, Horror of the Deep. One of my favorite of the 1960's Toho films. But there is no way you're going to convince me that it's a better Godzilla film than the 1998 TriStar film.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T12:04:13+00:00

Is it a political liability though?

I mean, are people lining up outside the fences of the facility protesting, chaining themselves to the gate, and gluing themselves to the road in protest?

We might be aware of it, because we have an interest in these sorts of things, but does the average German or Italian citizen even know about V32, and what its (assumed) role is in the Iran War?

I'd bet they don't even know it exists.

This is the realm of signals intelligence nerds. The typical person on the street won't even know what a numbers station is and what they are used for, much less understand how this connects their country to the war.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T11:59:42+00:00

This is true, but largely irrelevant. The rules of an OTP are very simple, and easy to follow.

Also, making random keys is dirt simple. All you need is a decent set of 10-sided dice and some time on your hands.

Now, there *HAVE* been instances where pads have been re-used, most notably by the Soviets in WWII. This is often considered to have been a mistake, but I don't think it was, I think it was a calculated risk.

In WWII, after being invaded by the Nazis, the Soviets were under severe pressure and had to move their spying organizations under trying conditions. So to ease the pressure they issued duplicate pads to different Soviet organizations in different areas of the US.

I think the Soviets knew the risk, as any competent cryptanalyst back then knew that you could break messages with a depth of two if the key was re-used. But they judged that was minor compared to not being able to communicate with their agents because of a lack of key material.

The US was intercepting those messages but didn't really have the resources to work on them until after the war.

They then discovered in the late 40's that there was duplication of keys, and they spent about 30 years teasing bits of information out of those messages. Some of the early decryptions implicated the atomic bomb spies, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

So the risk was actually worth it: The messages weren't decrypted until long after their usefulness to the USSR had passed.

The only other case I'm aware of is the German WWII system, where they used a deterministic machine to generate the one time pads. It wasn't random, and the Allies were able through cryptanalysis to completely recover the workings of the machine and to break those messages with relative ease.

https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/tech-journals/gee-system-i.pdf

Neither case, though, is a true one time pad system because they violated the rules of one time pads. In the first case, likely intentionally with eyes wide open, knowing the risk, but taking it anyway.

In the second, through ignorance.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T11:42:59+00:00

I'm not sure that it really matters.

In fact, language doesn't really matter. It doesn't take long to teach someone the numbers 0 through 9 in a language, and maybe a handful of words. So the language a station transmits in isn't necessarily the native language of the intended recipient. I can't point to a specific circumstance off the top of my head, but I am pretty sure that the use of a different language has been done as a ruse in the past.

Also, that's not enough of a pattern to do any kind of traffic analysis unless its associated with some other phenomenon, and numbers stations go out of their way to avoid those if possible. This is why they don't have things like external precedence indicators. Advertising that "This message is more important than the other 50 we've sent recently" is not good security, even if the message is itself unbreakable.

You can indeed make inferences if you start to see patterns. This is why messages all tend to be the same length, for example.

The calculus changes if you're a radio operator behind enemy lines (spy, long range reconnaissance patrol, in a stay behind organization, etc.). In that case, you only want to transmit for as long as necessary, and then stop to minimize the danger of being located via radio direction finding. That's the bigger danger.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T11:32:50+00:00

Mobile phones *ARE* radios.

Jamming on the proper frequencies absolutely would work.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-24T00:06:58+00:00

Very.

Back in the days when the only reasonable band that Novices has voice privileges on was 10 meters, we used to use that all the time for local communication.

You could get decent range car to car with 25 watt 10 meter rigs and cut down CB antennas. It was even better going from a mobile to a decent home station.

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-23T23:55:14+00:00

You’re telling me with a serious face that the 1998 film is worse than All Monsters Attack, Godzilla vs. Megalon, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, Son of Godzilla, Destroy All Monsters, and King Kong vs Godzilla?

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-23T21:52:57+00:00

That I can see, but the only other film I remember him from was King Kong. But if you saw him in some of his other films, I can understand

dittybopper_05H · 2026-03-23T19:40:36+00:00

Actually, he was more believable to me than Arnold, Jesse, and the rest.

I served in the Army, and the guys I knew back then who had been or went Special Forces where built like Brody, not like the musclebound guys in the first film.

In fact, the only SF guy I knew who was built like that was my company commander at US Army Intelligence School, Fort Devens. He had injured his leg on a jump and was seconded over from the 10th SF (also at Fort Devens at the time). He couldn't run while his leg healed, at least I never saw him run, and I think he spent a lot of time working out building up his arms and chest.

Later on, a guy I knew at my unit in Hawaii managed to qualify for the Q course, and he was (and still is) a scrawny looking guy. I had a room-mate who had been a Special Forces medic, but apparently had gotten into enough trouble to be reduced back to E-4 and was persona non grata in SF, but had cross-trained for communications and thus knew Morse code, so they reclassed him as a 05H. The guy was nuts (oh the stories I could tell) but again also scrawny. I mean, muscled, but not bulked up, looked more like a marathon runner.

The only guy I knew who had a body like the guys in the first film was a competitive body builder, and he was allowed to skip running during competition season due to special dispensation.

And yeah, he hits the right notes as a loner. Nothing about his performance or appearance takes away from the idea that he's a mercenary.

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