Transcripts from KGB Cold War Notebooks

Here's a link with translated texts of Alexander Vassiliev's KGB notebooks written during the cold war. I'm not much of a history buff at all, but some of them are spooky as hell to read:

Report on a c/t dated 1.4.42 from NY

Maxim reports that “Chap” learned the following in conversation with an old friend of his, an instructor at Columb. U. named Clarence Hiskey (Clarence Hiskey): Together with a group of prominent physicists and chemists at Columb. U., he is urgently working on a radioactive bomb. It is thought that this bomb will have enormous destructive power with a very large blast radius, possibly hundreds of miles long. Those who know about the bomb fear it could annihilate millions of people... The Germans are far ahead of the Americans in their work in this field. The Germans already have the ability to use the bombs, but fear that the large affected area will be inaccessible to them.

...And then more like this... Juicy!

Letter from Gennady dated 27.10.38

“‘Crook’ is currently selecting materials against the head of the US fascist organization, Fritz Kuhn. To this end he has enlisted a woman named Virginia Cogswell, the mistress of the aforementioned Kuhn... he moved Virginia into the Siric Hotel, installed a microphone in her room and arranged for the recording in another room of the conversation that takes place in Virginia’s room while Kuhn visits her.

[Virginia Cogswell] Met Fritz Kuhn and was his sweetheart for 3 years. Kept a diary of events... thanks to her liaison with F. K. She knew their entire network and was up to date on all of their espionage activities. She was checked out by the Gestapo and could be cordially received in Germany by Hitler.

P.S. F. K.’s vile and underhanded tactics infected her against him and the German-American Union, and she is prepared to do anything and to completely expose their entire organization in this country and everywhere she knows.

You could translate reams of this stuff directly into a movie script! Or, daytime soap opera. One of the two.

Childhood: shat on

Since this weekend was evidently about destroying more of our childhood...

I think I was talking to someone here about the Orson Scott Card rant against gay marriage, which pretty much ruined every happy memory I had of reading his books as a kid. So here's some infuriating, head-exploding examples of his propaganda/fear mongering, "logic", and bigotry, in that order:

"Already in several states, there are textbooks for children in the earliest grades that show 'gay marriages' as normal. How long do you think it will be before such textbooks become mandatory -- and parents have no way to opt out of having their children taught from them?"

"If a court declared that from now on, 'blind' and 'sighted' would be synonyms, would that mean that it would be safe for blind people to drive cars?"

"With 'gay marriage,' the last shreds of meaning will be stripped away from marriage, with homosexuals finishing what faithless, selfish heterosexuals have begun."

My childhood hero is fucking dead to me.



On a happier note, I'm not even a parent and I found this to be an awesome alternative to the horribleness we watched on Sunday!

Both via GeekDad