06.13.13
Ricin and the Today Show
Another priceless picture from TV:
Quote from Hollywood Lifer:
What do YOU think HollywoodLifers? Are you shocked that Shannon would go to such lengths for fame?
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As The Bean Turns
White trash, stupidity, castor beans and the recipe for ricin as soap opera, granting first shot at book deal, movie or tv tie-ins and fifteen minutes of fame to nobodies only in the news for dumb perversity.
From the wire (taken with no backlink, network news infinite load page):
The husband of a pregnant actress, accused of sending poison-laced letters to President Obama and then trying to frame him for the crime, says it’s “heartbreaking” to think that his spouse implicated him, but he harbors no anger and hopes to move on with his life.
“The way I look at it, being angry is a waste of energy,” Nathaniel Richardson told ABC News. “She has done this to herself. She has destroyed my reputation and my life but there’s a way up from this and if I sit here and focus on anger, I can’t focus on getting on with my life.”
“I’m sitting there thinking I don’t even know what ricin is,” Nathaniel Richardson said. “I wasn’t even saying it right at first. I was calling it licin. Really, everything I’ve learned about it I’ve learned from [the FBI].”
Meanwhile, Nathaniel Richardson says there’s nothing left in his marriage to love.
“The person she was wasn’t real,” he said. “Just couldn’t believe it. Heartbreaking.”
Shannon Richardson’s attorney said overnight in a statement to ABC News, “I have seen no evidence to even suggest that my client desired to hurt the president or any of the other individuals involved. She is incarcerated for the first time in her life. Her primary concern remains her children and the trauma they are experiencing.”
First baby to come from ricin family, ever.
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06.10.13
Bean Pounding: Hubby made me do it
Not a good look.
From the wire:
Despite the fact that a Texas woman admitted to sending ricin laced letters to President Barack Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg last week, the woman is now apparently trying to pin the crime on her husband.
[An] FBI affidavit says Richardson failed a polygraph test and investigators found inconsistencies in her story. No charges have been filed against her husband. His attorney says the couple is divorcing and the letters were a setup.
And this isn’t the thing to say, either:
Richardson’s court-appointed attorney, Tonda Curry, said there was no intention to harm anyone and noted that it’s common knowledge that mail is checked before it reaches the person to whom these letters were addressed.
“From what I can say, based on what evidence I’ve seen, whoever did this crime never intended for ricin to reach the people to which the letters were addressed,” Curry said.
What? Someone thinks there’s mitigation because everyone knows the President doesn’t read his mail? Pathetic.
What about the poor sods who do actually have to deal with the greasy powder falling out of the letters?
This is going in a video.
Procedural note: I don’t know about you but I’ve come to hate news websites that pull the endless load routine. It’s an increasingly grasping tactic employed by corporate America to tie up eyeballs.
When I run into them the scripting overhead becomes a burden on the machine. And, henceforth, upon encountering such sites, material will be taken without attribution other than “from the wire” and will not contain backlinks.
What are your thoughts on websites that practice the never-ending load?
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06.07.13
Bean Pounding: Ricin babe arrested
First ricin beans pinup girl, ever!
From the wire, the FBI sorts it:
A Texas woman has been arrested in connection with the mailing of three letters containing a form of the poison ricin to President Obama, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, federal authorities said.
Shannon Rogers Guess Richardson of New Boston, Texas, originally called the Federal Bureau of Investigation claiming that her husband had sent the letters, officials said. The investigators found that she had sent the letters herself, they said.
Richardson is an actress with minor roles on television shows like The Walking Dead and the Vampire Diaries, and was arrested in Arkansas on charges that will be filed Friday afternoon …
From her Facebook page, did not like husband or the president, apparently.
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Bean Pounding: Told you so, for years
Ricin will never be a good weapon. But because of the war on terror millions of Americans believe just the opposite. And to this day, many counter-terror experts with zero practical knowledge in biochemistry continue to tell anyone who will listen that it is easy to make.
To wit, this disgraceful bit from a recent AP news story:
Security and counterterrorism expert Michael Fagel, who teaches at Northwestern University and is a veteran of ricin investigations, said ricin may be employed because castor beans are so easy to come by.
The plants grow wild along highways and in other spots in the U.S. They are also considered ornamental by some gardeners and are cultivated for medicinal castor oil and other products.
“And you can go on the Internet and find out any one of a gazillion recipes on how to make ricin,??? Fagel said, adding that it takes only a beginner’s knowledge of science to “weaponize??? it.
That’s irresponsible journalism and “wisdom” from the war on terror. And over a decade of it has relevance to why castor bean-pounding and the mailing of toxic letters to the president has become a grotesque but uniquely American micro-fad.
(Although it’s not the only factor, as I’ve pointed out. Can you think of any other Presidents, in your lifetime, who received ricin letters? No, didn’t think so. Why might that be?)
Castor meal, or what results after castor seeds are ground are about five percent protein. A five percent nitrogen content in castor meal comes with the protein and that is why it was used as fertilizer when the US still had a large castor farming and milling business.
Of the protein content in castor seeds, some is ricin. This is easily illustrated using SDS gel electrophoretic analysis of castor powder samples. (Which is just what the national lab in Maryland does when it receives samples recovered in ricin cases.)
Here is what a sample recovered from a ricin case looks like, analytically.
Examples from a ricin domestic terrorism case in the US begin in the lanes to the right of the clear lane. The single band lane to the left is a lab ricin standard. And the arrow denotes ricin component in the crude mixture from castor seeds.
The above shows a crude but complex mixture, of which ricin is only one part. Active ricin exists within it but it is far from pure.
And this is why the recipes on the Internet are irrelevant, except as lures and news items to be gawked at. They don’t do anything practical in the sense of a biochemical purification process.
No pure ricin is ever produced in domestic ricin case. It’s way beyond the capability of those who’ve been caught doing it.
Today, from a small newspaper, the Daily Mining Gazette from Houghton, Michigan:
Sarah Green, chair of the Tech chemistry department, said ricin stops all cell activities of the organism it attacks. However, ricin is effective as a weapon against humans only under certain circumstances …
In order for ricin to be effective as an airborne substance, Green said it would have to be a very fine powder and a huge quantity, perhaps tons, would be needed to make it a weapon of mass destruction.
A person who breathes or ingests ricin powder would get sick, but as long as an infected person received medical attention, that person would probably not die.
“Most people get sick, but they will survive,” she said.
Despite its possible toxicity, Green said only someone with a training in chemistry could make ricin an effective weapon.
“It takes quite a bit of purification,” she said.
People who actually know the protein chemistry business realize that production of “tons” of ricin is a ludicrous proposition.
Decades ago the US military tried to make a weapon out of ricin. It even filed a patent, one which became a contentious matter after 9/11.
But the patent, which I described many years ago here, was developed by those operating in almost complete ignorance of the true nature of ricin. Because of that, the work actually degrades ricin.
And there has never been any compelling evidence that this old US military work on “weaponizing” ricin was effective.
Despite all this, the US mainstream media will never get with the program. It’s too complicated a story. There’s a book in it, but who reads books? Not enough eyeballs for the website page.
The damage wrought is irreversible. The lore on ricin is deeply dug in and we will always have a small number of very suggestible, angry and disturbed people who pound castor beans, a first among western nations.
06.06.13
Bean Pounding: A dissident in WhiteManistan
And probably going over as good as a lead balloon.
From the Memphis Flyer, by Randy Haspel, excerpted:
These bizarre [ricin mailing] culprits are merely the dull tip of the spear when it comes to the gun-crazed individuals who live among us. The NRA has morphed from an organization that taught firearm safety and responsible gun ownership into a lobbying group for the armaments industry. Their heartless hysteria after the Newtown child slaughter caused gullible gun owners to panic that their rights were in jeopardy, especially after the NRA participated in spreading the false rumor that there was a government plot to buy up the civilian supply of ammunition after a media-induced run on bullets created a shortage.
Unable to see through Fox News and hate-radio propaganda that closing gun-show loopholes will lead to Black Hawk helicopters over Shreveport, these angry citizens live in fear of their own government and walk around with violent fantasies floating through their fevered minds. If you are told all day by right-wing media that you are at war with your government over your basic freedoms, then sending a toxin-laden letter to the chief executive doesn’t make you a terrorist. In your own mind, it makes you a patriot …
So, when a person who watches Fox News bile all day finally goes insane with paranoia, why should it be surprising when that person decides to take action against their government and its officials.
The entirety of the US mainstream media has also not touched the most obvious but most unpleasant fact in the ricin mailing fad.
President Barack Obama is the first president in US history to get not just one, but three ricin letters. In fact, he’s probably the only person in American history to have ever been mailed three poison letters within less than 60 days.
And he just happens to be the first African American president.
Just a coincidence. Yup.
And now you’ve read the first person to point it out.
First music video with ricin mail in it, ever. That’s worth something. Factual and timely, too.
Tommorrow: Bean-Pounding Blues, the song.
Meanwhile, the only ricin and domestic trouble soap opera, ever, that involved sending a poison letter to the president, continues:
There are still no arrests in the ricin investigation in East Texas, but an attorney for a man whose home has been searched by the FBI is speaking out.
FBI agents first searched the home of Nathan and Shannon Richardson in connection with the mailing of ricin-tainted letters to President Obama, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the Mayor’s gun control group in Washington D.C.
Attorney John Delk says his client Nathan Richardson approached him about getting a divorce a year before the FBI searched the couple’s house.
Richardson’s wife reportedly alerted authorities to suspected ricin in the couple’s New Boston home.
“We have very good reason to believe it was a setup,” said Delk.
One feels a bit sorry for the FBI men who have to sort it. They know the investigation of such trivial pests is a huge waste of time and money, but necessary procedure because of the bed we’ve made for ourselves over the last decade.
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06.03.13
Bean Pounding: Dutschke indicted, faces life term
Left, Tupelo’s alleged ricin guru, J. Everett Dutschke
J. Everett Dutschke is officially indicted by a grand jury.
The indictment charges Dutschke, 41, with one count of knowingly developing, producing, stockpiling, transferring, acquiring, retaining and possessing a biological agent, toxin and delivery system, for use as a weapon, to wit: ricin, and with attempting to do the same, in violation of Title 18, United States Code,
Section 175(a) (if convicted on this charge, Dutschke faces maximum possible penalties of life imprisonment, a $250,000 fine and 5 years of supervised release); one count of threatening the President of the United States by mail, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 871 (maximum penalties of 5 years imprisonment, $250,000 fine and 3 years supervised release); two counts of
threatening others by mail, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 876(c) (maximum penalties of 20 years imprisonment, $250,000 fine and 3 years supervised release); and one count of falsifying, concealing and covering up by trick, scheme and fraudulent device, material facts, to impede the investigation of threatening letters containing ricin, in an effort to make it appear that someone else had sent the threatening letters, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001 (maximum penalties of 5 years imprisonment, $250,000 fine and 3 years supervised release).
The indictment, outlining the ricin mailer’s scheme to frame Paul Kevin Curtis, is here.
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06.02.13
Bean Pounding: Thoughtless and cruel
The smallest victim in the national micro-fad of bean-pounding.
Our unique and grotesque micro-culture of castor bean pounders is both thoughtless and cruel. They know when ricin mail hits the news the FBI will descend in force (with assault rifles) on a quiet neighborhood, yellow hazmat suits deploy, and a house or apartment will be ransacked.
But they do it anyway. We are left to believe they cannot make the mental connection between what they have seen happen and what is most probably going to happen to them! It’s sociopathic.
And so, buried in the news, there is the forlorn photograph of the Richardson family’s cat, being mercifully taken away by a city worker after the FBI blew the house apart at 111 Maple and there was no one left to care for it.
Our bean-pounders know the neighborhood will be turned upside down for days. They know they’ve stressed out the little people who’ve had to open their poison powder mail, not the targets. But it doesn’t make any difference. They have their schemes.
This hasn’t occurred in a national vacuum. American ricin bean pounders haven’t generated spontaneously, like the old myth that if you throw garbage and fish heads in a jar, seal it up and wait a week, flies and maggots will result.
“And you can go on the Internet and find out any one of a gazillion recipes on how to make ricin [said a homeland security expert] adding that it takes only a beginner’s knowledge of science to “weaponize??? it. — the Associated Press, yesterday.
Thanks for the received “wisdom.” What a wonderful thing to put in a news story. Bet the editors loved it!
To strenuously reiterate, the paradox is that the spending of over a decade screaming about how easy ricin is to make has some bearing on why we’re seeing what we are.
Some government officials now seem to realize this. But the media, largely, still doesn’t. For the most part it simply can’t write pieces that don’t include how deadly ricin is and that recipes are on the internet.
And this is shameful because, of course, they now must realize that Americans are suggestible and that there will be a certain number among them, even if small, who act out on this.
Is the person responsible a menace to their neighbors in New Boston, Texas? No, they weren’t. Although the presence of an FBI force changed it for the weekend.
Mostly, those into bean pounding are hazards to themselves.
And they certainly don’t merit the money that must subsequently be wasted upon them in the quick reaction force investigations that come down.
Our press and national security ways had a hand in this, even if unintentional, having steeped the country in a paranoid almost valueless lore on terrorism for years.
So, unimaginable and ridiculous stories, virtually custom fit for sitcom drama or movie scripting, replete with bizarre social media pictures that beg for republication, become a new norm.
Back and forth, two pieces of work, from the NY Post:
[Shannon Guess Richardson’s] son, Brenden Guess, 19, told The Post that his mother was paranoid that her husband was trying to poison her with ricin.
“She thought he was injecting it into her food and drinks,??? he said, adding that she became suspicious after discovering on his computer an order for castor beans, from which ricin is derived.
“She told me she was trying to be as careful as possible. She didn’t eat unless it was straight from the store to her hand, basically.???
A family friend said Nathaniel previously posted dozens of pictures of his guns — which have since been taken down …
Local authorities have since condemned the bean-pounding house.
Thanks to Frank at Pine View Farm who permits me to use the comments section of his blog as a preliminary scratch pad.
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06.01.13
Bean Pounding: Why to read this blog
Shannon Richardson of New Boston, TX, ricin babe?
As I mentioned earlier today, in an abrupt change from the war on terror years, [some] officials have apparently realized that more than a decade of telling everyone that ricin is easy to make and that castor bean mash is deadly has been counterproductive.
One can add that this particular received wisdom has some bearing on why America seems to have more bean pounders than anyone else.
Throughout the decade of the war on terror government (or other counter-terror) people called on to comment on ricin always recited a gospel that it was easy to make with particular emphasis on how little necessary to kill someone.
However, there have been no domestic cases, or foreign incidences, where anyone has produced pure ricin. (Except for the presumed Markov assassination decades ago.)
The recipes available on the Internet don’t do it, as analytic
work on castor powders always shows. Purifying ricin isn’t within reach of the people who are always caught with castor seeds or castor mash containing ricin and net recipes.
But the many years spent yelling about how ricin is easy to make, just by getting castor seeds and browsing the net for instructions, has some relation to what we now see.
People believed all of the cant on ricin passed on by the media. Why not? Read or heard or seen innumerable times, the sheer weight of it convinces anyone not an expert that it must be true. It became received wisdom. And being steeped in this received wisdom has contributed to our very unusual micro-demographic of castor bean pounders.
More simply, people are suggestible.
So it was a bit different to see this published at Fox today:
Officials cautioned that there is “a significant difference??? between a trained scientist weaponizing the ricin extracted from castor beans and an individual “taking some castor beans, running them through a coffee grinder, and soaking them in acetone??? – a crude and ineffective homemade process that officials said would only be liable to induce, in a recipient foolish enough to go so far as to swallow the contents, symptoms as mild as diarrhea.
However, for every piece like it there is always another stock piece of incompetence, news that collects the usual standard counter-terrorism men, people with little or no experience in the biochemistry of terrorism, to act out the standard scripts for the press.
From the Associated Press, in a story entitled “The perfect poison:”
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The key ingredient — castor beans — is easy to find. Crude instructions for extracting the lethal poison in them can be found on the Internet. And it doesn’t require a chemistry degree or sophisticated lab equipment.
Security and counterterrorism expert Michael Fagel, who teaches at Northwestern University and is a veteran of ricin investigations, said ricin may be employed because castor beans are so easy to come by.
The plants grow wild along highways and in other spots in the U.S. They are also considered ornamental by some gardeners and are cultivated for medicinal castor oil and other products.
“And you can go on the Internet and find out any one of a gazillion recipes on how to make ricin,” Fagel said, adding that it takes only a beginner’s knowledge of science to “weaponize” it.
It is shameful to say and publish that “it takes only a beginner’s knowledge of science to weaponize.”
Any one of a gazillion recipes on the Internet! Pathetic.
Our so-called terrorism experts and advisors to Homeland Security, hard at work, illuminating the public.
This is why one reads DD blog. And why it remains important to spread the word. It’s always an uphill battle.
Earlier today, on recent developments, at GlobalSecurity.Org, a reliable source.
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Bean Pounding: Welcome to the new weird
Welcome to the new weird. The fresh batch of ricin letters has uncovered a bean-pounder, or bean-pounders, even stranger than Tupelo, Mississippi’s accused ricin guru, guitarist and karate instructor J. Everett Dutschke. If you thought ricin mail was already bizarre, it just got a whole lot more so.
I consider it a given you’re either wholly or somewhat insane to pound castor beans and mail the powder to the president and other officials. And inside the house at 111 Maple in New Boston, Texas, something is very insane.
Shannon Guess Richardson of New Boston, TX, a ricin babe?
The FBI detained Nathaniel D. Richardson of New Boston after his wife , Shannon Guess Richardson, tipped authorities that she had found a suspicious material in Tupperware in her refrigerator as well as searches for ricin on the home computer.
The FBI picked up Richardson for questioned and dispatched its mobile evidence and WMD units to the Richardson household, which was flipped.
While castor seeds were found in Nathaniel D. Richardson’s car, under questioned he astonishingly claimed they were not his and that his wife had sent the poison letters to the President and Mayor Bloomberg. The FBI released Richardson yesterday, although he remains a suspect.
Richardson’s wife has now come under suspicion.
Shannon Guess Richardson had been married three times prior to Mr. Richardson. And with five children from the priors, plus another on the way, the marriage is headed for divorce. (Coincidentally, accused ricin mailer J. Everett Dutschke has been married three times.)
Of course, the upshot is that as in the case of J. Everett Dutschke, this is more dual use ricin mail, poison letters to frame someone you wish to be rid of, and for officials. But who is the framer and who the framed? Or is it a husband-and-wife ricin-mailing team that has now fallen into scapegoating?
This is what the FBI is attempting to determine.
Did Shannon Guess Richardson not like the President, too?
Domestically, castor seeds have occasionally been used in plots in which one spouse tries to poison the other. Most famously, a woman named Debora Green tried to poison her husband with ricin in the early Nineties. Green was only successful in making the man deathly ill although she did later burn down the family home, killing two of her children.
However, copy cat use of ricin mail to the President and others in framing an acquaintance or your spouse would appear to be totally unique at this point in American history. Is the primary motivation for the ricin mail a frame job, or getting crazy words out to the President and others? Or do they share equal weight?
In less than sixty days, at least three different individuals, in three different states (Mississippi, Washington and Texas) have sent ricin mail to the President and others. One is most certainly a frame job. The third may also turn out to be so.
Everyone knows that the President, and important people in general, never open their mail. (A reader puckishly remarked that nobody earning over $30,000/year in America opens their own mail.)
Everyone also knows, that thanks to the war on terror and anthrax mailer Bruce Ivins, mail to important people is rigorously checked for nasty things. This guarantees that ricin mail is quickly discovered, although the occasional letter may go awry from the collection, as one aimed at the CIA in the Matthew Buquet case seems to.
The discovery of ricin mail immediately triggers an FBI dragnet, with results as have been seen.
This makes the “why” of ricin-mailing unfathomable. Castor powder is obviously not good for framing others. And sending it to the President will inevitably result in embarkation on a long custodial trip.
Ricin mail is crazy and now, virtually always suicidal. Yet ricin mailers persist! They seem without mercy. Does it not occur to them that the only people who will handle their nasty-grams are those in exactly the same economic circumstances?
They are just cruel and irrational. In addition, it seems the detection and apprehension of them, while necessary, is one helluva a waste of taxpayer money.
Welcome to the empire in 2013, from land of the free to land of debris. There’s certainly a book in it.
Can haz castor seeds?
In an abrupt change from the war on terror years, officials have apparently realized that more than a decade of telling everyone that ricin is easy to make and that castor bean mash is deadly has been counterproductive.
In fact, one can add that this particular received wisdom has some bearing on why America seems to have more bean pounders than anyone else.
From Fox:
Officials cautioned that there is “a significant difference??? between a trained scientist weaponizing the ricin extracted from castor beans and an individual “taking some castor beans, running them through a coffee grinder, and soaking them in acetone??? – a crude and ineffective homemade process that officials said would only be liable to induce, in a recipient foolish enough to go so far as to swallow the contents, symptoms as mild as diarrhea.
Pure ricin has never been produced in a US case.
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