02.24.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Ricin Kooks, WhiteManistan at 5:22 pm by George Smith
From last week:
Well over a quarter of a century ago I was always able to find Hutckinson’s recipe for abrin [and ricin] at the end of a telephone line. With the squeal of a US Robotics modem you would find it archived, along with lots of other alleged means to easy mayhem and malice, on bulletin board systems run off PCs in the bedrooms of young men.
With regards to the poison and other informations from the computer underground, what it was called back then, not much has changed.
Keep it in mind, it will have some relevance later.
In the last few years anti-terror training has moved from drills centered around Muslims to those involving domestic terrorists.
One such drill was briefly mentioned in the news last year, from Ohio:
A dead science teacher, weapons of mass destruction, first responders in hazmat suits and the Ohio Army National Guard all near the Municipal Stadium in Portsmouth, Thursday. There’s no cause for alarm — this is just a drill!
The mock disaster training exercise is being done with Scioto County first responders and the Ohio Army National Guard 52nd Civil Support Unit.
“It’s the reality of the world we live in,” says Portsmouth Police Chief Bill Raisin. “Don’t forget there is such a thing as domestic terrorism. This helps us all be prepared.”
The make-believe scenario is timely. Two school employees who are disgruntled over the government’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, plot to use chemical, biological and radiological agents against members of the local community.
On hair-trigger over being potentially painted as domestic terrorists, gun rights supporters used the Freedom of Information Act to pry loose training documents on the incident.
They are here.
The papers show a theoretical plot in which a disgruntled janitor in the Portsmouth School District cooks up some sulfur mustard and ricin, dispersing the former in a plot which caused minor burns. Ricin was put into the school lunches of children, sending many to the hospital with “flu-like” symptoms.
The scenario shows the janitor inspired by William Pierce, a famous American neo-Nazi known as the author of “The Turner Diaries,” America’s foremost example of race hate and government overthrow fiction. Pierce died a number of years ago but his book was a bestseller within the neo-Nazi violent right underground. Timothy McVeigh was one infamous domestic terrorist influenced by it.
The ricin recipe was also reproduced in the documents. It is illustrated as originating from the “Second” Temple of the Screaming Electron 2 website.
I could not find it on TOTSE2, so it is possible that for the drill, something was put together that looked like the chat board.
The original Temple of the Screaming Electron, although it no longer seems to exist, is archived in more than one place on the web and the mirror includes its old ricin recipe. The ricin recipe was a procedure bowdler-ized from far right kook Kurt Saxon’s Weaponeer and The Poor Man’s James Bond where it was attributed to someone named Punk Rock Girl.
Or maybe it is there at TOTSE2 and my search-fu was not strong enough. Or perhaps it was taken down.
On the Temple of the Screaming Electron, by me at the Register, in 2007:
During the [anti-terror] sweep which netted the alleged ricin cell, one young man was arrested with a copy of the ricin recipe downloaded from the Temple of the Screaming Electron, which is where Google will take you if you punch in “how to make ricin” and then click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” tab. He was subsequently released.
The person apprehended turned out to be a researcher with the wrong kind of name.
Over a quarter of a century ago, The Temple of the Screaming Electron was a bulletin board system hosted on a PC at the end of a telephone line. It archived computer virus source code, hacking files and, of course, things like the ricin recipe from self-published pamphlets authored by the violent right, then called anarchy files.
It was later migrated to the world wide web where it lasted, I’m guessing, for about a decade.
In the anti-terror exercise in Portsmouth, Ohio, the perpetrator was
drawn as someone striking back in retaliation against perceived effort to change or eliminate the 2nd Amendment.
However, in terms of motivation, how poisoning young children with ricin at lunchtime would symbolically be seen as having something logical to do with 2nd Amendment rights escapes me. If recent history is a guide, domestic terrorists have planned to attack government workers and installations.
Continuing, domestic right-wingers were recently been convicted in a ricin plot.
One such group was puckishly referred to as the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang in 2011.
Two members of that group were recently convicted by a jury in 90 minutes for conspiring to attack the government with ricin. Two others had previously taken guilty pleas on weapons offenses.
And a few days ago the FBI arrested three more men who were allegedly conspiring to attack the government with pipe bombs.
They were observed and engaged by the FBI and two confidential informants while on Facebook:
Three Georgia men tried to buy pipe bombs and other explosives and discussed attacking power grids, water treatment plants and other infrastructure in a plot to incite other militias to fight the federal government, authorities said.
Brian Edward Cannon, 36, and Cory Robert Williamson, 28, appeared in federal court Friday in Rome and were denied bond. Terry Eugene Peace, 45, is due for his first court appearance Monday. A criminal complaint charges them with conspiring to receive and possess firearms, specifically pipe bombs and thermite grenades. Thermite grenades are military-grade weapons typically used to destroy vehicles, weapons systems and other equipment …
Between Jan. 23 and Feb. 15, the three men participated in online chat discussions about carrying out an operation against the government in February, according to a written statement from an FBI agent. The online chats were monitored by the FBI.
‘‘Peace encouraged members of the militia to review guerrilla warfare tactics, small unit tactics, accumulate supplies and prepare family,’’ the agent’s statement says.
In a recorded phone call on Feb. 8, an FBI source told Peace he had a contact who could provide the materials the men sought. Peace said during the conversation, ‘‘… if he can hook us up with say 12 pipe bombs that will be sweet,’’ according to the agent’s statement.
A second FBI source told agents he had a conversation with Cannon on Feb. 8 during which Cannon said the group planned to ‘‘start the fight’’ with the government by sabotaging power grids, transfer stations and water treatment facilities to create mass hysteria, the agent’s statement says. That would push the government to declare martial law, which would push other militias to join the fight.
The FBI arranged for one of the informants to supply the men with a dozen dummy thermite bombs, at which point they were arrested.
As mentioned last week, it’s quite clear Homeland Security and the FBI monitor networks for this kind of thing.
And the right is a bit perturbed about the Oho anti-terrorism drill.
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02.18.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Fiat money fear and loathers, Ricin Kooks at 12:06 pm by George Smith
A 19-year-old boy in south Florida is set to be imprisoned, possibly for life, as the result of a federal investigation of the Black Market Reloaded website, a replacement for the infamous Silk Road, where there were “numerous offerings for the sale of illegal and harmful goods, including but not limited to biological agents, toxins, firearms, ammunition, explosives, controlled substances, counterfeit goods and fraudulent documents,” according to an FBI document here.
Jesse Korff of Labelle, Florida, was arrested by agents of the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations when he delivered two vials of liquid containing a small but detectable amount of the poison abrin to them. It was the final part of a transaction started on the Black Market Reloaded site when one of the undercover men contacted Korff, inquired about buying the poison and advanced him 1.608 Bitcoin for it.
Like the Silk Road, Black Market Reloaded was hosted on the encrypted Tor network where many people seem to still believe federal agents cannot get at them. Black Market Reloaded was subsequently taken down and the sting shows that Homeland Security and the FBI are well into operations aimed at keeping similar websites and Bitcoin markets for crime under heavy surveillance.
From the Department of Justice website:
“HSI has worked tirelessly with the FBI and other law enforcement partners to combat underground websites such as BMR,??? said Andrew McLees, Special Agent in Charge of HSI Newark. “Anyone who can sell abrin, a potential agent for chemical terrorism, must be stopped. The arrest of Korff shows HSI’s commitment to protecting the public from individuals who show a callous disregard for their safety in the interest of making a buck.???
Beginning in April 2013, HSI special agents conducted an investigation of illicit sales activity on BMR. The website provides a platform for vendors and buyers to conduct anonymous online transactions involving the sale of a variety of illegal goods, including biological agents, toxins, firearms, ammunition, explosives, narcotics and counterfeit items. Unlike mainstream e-commerce websites, BMR is only accessible via the Tor network – a special computer network designed to enable users to conceal their identities and locations. Transactions on BMR are conducted using Bitcoin, a decentralized form of electronic currency that only exists online.
Korff maintained a seller’s profile on BMR, through which he negotiated the sale of two liquid doses of abrin to the undercover agent. During their online conversations, Korff told the buyer about his delivery methods – concealing vials in a carved-out and re-melted candle – and discussed how much abrin was needed to kill a person of a particular weight and how best to administer the toxin.
Korff and the buyer agreed on a total purchase price of $2,500 for two doses of the poison. The undercover transferred a deposit – the equivalent of $1,500 in Bitcoin – from a bank account in New Jersey to Korff on Jan. 6, 2014.
A federal task force then raided the house where Jesse Korff was living. A local news report reads:
Investigators tell WINK News they found a pipe bomb, firearms, ricin and meth labs at Jesse Korff’s home in Muse. After hearing of the evidence, the judge said Korff should stay behind bars.
The photo of the task force raid is from this blog.
Abrin, a poison extracted from the fairly common Precatorius, or rosary pea plant, has, to my knowledge, never killed anyone in the US during my time. It doesn’t happen. It’s not a hazard, even accidentally.
Seeds and the plant can be easily purchased on-line. It is even common in the woods of south Florida.
Nevertheless, abrin is a poison, related to and more toxic than ricin.
And well over 20 years ago, before Jesse Korff was born, young men began copying the poison and bomb-making self-published pamphlets by America’s survivalist right into cyberspace. From there, they traveled around the world.
So one reads in the FBI document:
Abrin can be extracted from the seed. The extraction of the abrin from the seeds is relatively easy and does not require technical expertise. Procedures and methods for extracting abrin are available from open sources on the Internet.
With regards to abrin recipes and the poison’s lure as an efficient and untraceable way to put someone to death, Maxwell Hutchkinson’s pamphlet, The Poisoner’s Handbook, published by Loompanics in 1988, is the main source.
Many readers are familiar with my comment on it, which can be reviewed here.
Terrorists have never used abrin as a weapon of mass destruction although the FBI and Homeland Security special agents mention their expertise in WMDs in the Korff document.
Nevertheless, eight years ago at the height of the war on terror Homeland Security conducted exercises imagining they could.
This was part of the national security megaplex belief that everything deadly that could be dreamed up or theorized was “easy for terrorists” to do.
From Steve Aftergood’s Secrecy Bulletin in 2005:
The notion of a hyper-competent terrorist who can easily overcome the physical and technical obstacles that perplex and detain ordinary mortals has become a common rhetorical trope in public discussions of terrorism.
George Smith of GlobalSecurity.org conducted a Nexis search for the phrase “easy for a terrorist” (and similar formulations) and found about one hundred mainstream media citations over the past two years.
Judging from press reports, nearly everything comes “easy” to terrorists:
“From food terror, to manipulating the flu virus, to blowing up chemical plants, to getting driver’s licenses, to coming across the Mexican border, to buying large caliber guns, to shooting down planes with ground-to-air missiles, to spreading hoof-and-mouth disease and destroying the cattle industry, to paralyzing Los Angeles by attacking power stations, to causing major blackouts, to putting anthrax in bagged rice,” Smith found. “There really is no end to it. It’s stupefying in its universality.”
Such glib assessments of terrorist capabilities are worse than simply wrong. They spread fear and a sense of helplessness, doing the work of the terrorists, and they threaten to dissipate limited security and financial resources in a hundred different directions.
I wrote about the Homeland Security exercise positing abrin as a terrorist weapon on the blog around the same time.
It was also published at The Register and here are parts, excerpted:
Did you know you can buy a WMD on eBay? It’s true …
[It’s] rosary peas, seeds of the Crab’s Eye weed, which is commonplace in Florida and known as ratti in India. It also contains the protein abrin, which is more toxic than ricin, another similar enzyme.
Somehow mankind has muddled through, managing not to exterminate itself with rosary peas, which have been used in ornamental jewelry and ripped out of lawns by annoyed gardeners.
That is, until the US-led war on terror, a war in which the incompetent concoct terror scenarios about weapons of mass destruction, scenarios which toss common sense and critical-thinking out the window. With GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow T-shirt on, it has been determined that this is done so that “readiness” may be practiced and the public convinced the tax dollars going to the Dept. of Homeland Security are well spent.
By-lined FORT INDIANTOWN GAP (a dilapidated Pennsy US army post where Cuban refugees were once held and DD rode in an armored personnel carrier as a Boy Scout), the Lebanon Daily News reported a week or so ago:
“With the early morning frost still coating the grass, the men raised their guns and slowly moved in.
“Clad in white-and-blue HazMat suits, bulletproof vests and gas masks, the men split into three groups and waited for the signal. Then, with the sudden crash of battering rams smashing into doors, they sped into action.
“The raid at the Gap was part of ‘Exercise Wide Vigilance,’ a bigger training simulation held yesterday by the South Central Pennsylvania Regional Counter-Terrorism Task . . . ”
And what was the terror plot that was being broken up? A lab said to be using rosary peas to make a weapon of mass destruction.
Terrorists planned to explode bombs at the two sites, sending the [abrin] into the air. [One man who designed the exercise] said that, according to his calculations and the size of the lab, enough of the chemical was made to kill 2,500 people.”
But abrin has never been used as a WMD.
Without getting into the technical details, it’s not possible to make rosary peas into a WMD. Technically speaking, it is possible to envision people being individually poisoned by abrin, if they were a target of a single assassination, or somehow mistakenly chewed and ate a couple rosary peas. Because of the latter, the FDA has been doing a small bit of work aimed at examining how to look for abrin in food.
But the US government has gone well beyond this, constructing a public belief system in which demonic menace is said to lurk everywhere and where death by exotic means is easy to achieve. It’s a system in which terror advisors and consultants simply make things up on a frequent basis. And they make such useless exercises up because it is a way in which to get paid by the government for aiding in alleged terror preparedness.
“Yesterday’s exercise, the biggest of its kind in the region, was funded through the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security” wrote the Lebanon newspaper.
Readers of this blog may suspect that the addled concept of rosary peas as a WMD has filtered down from sources it has read of previously. Like the benighted chemical warfare recipes in the Afghan Manual of Jihad or Maxwell Hutchkinson’s Poisoner’s Handbook.
And they’re right!
The Hutchkinson book, which has been responsible for so much trash belief re the capabilities of terrorists and their chemical dreams of mass death, does not disappoint. It furnishes the usual “wisdom” – wisdom in this case meaning the lack of it – on the subject.
On abrin, from page 8, in a section entitled “precatory beans:”
“Precatory bean plants may be purchased at nurseries nationwide.
“Some years ago, a few very stupid people came up with the idea of using the attractive scarlet and sable beans for rosary beads… If your target is strongly religious, then these beads can easily be modified to kill.”
Hutchkinson continues with the advice to scarify the rosary peas so that the abrin might leak out and poison anyone who handles them. Since abrin is a protein, it can’t be much of a contact poison, any more than you can eat a piece of meat by putting it on your skin, but Hutchkinson, of course, does not know this. He is more interested in poisoning the Pope.
“As the abrin slowly kills your target, an interesting cycle will begin,” he writes. “The worse your target gets, the more he will pray with his rosary beads, which will only make him worse… ”
“These items make wonderful presents for the religious target. We’d send one to the Pope, but he already has nineteen hundred years of Christian spoils to adorn himself with.”
So what is to be thought when a local government carries out a terror exercise in which the threat is based upon such wretched mythology? To paraphrase Hutchkinson, “Some days ago, a few very stupid people came up with the idea . . .”
“[When] you handle the abrin you should were [sic] gloves,” Jesse Korff writes to an undercover agent at one point, indicating the lore of Hutchkinson, that you can poison someone with it through their fingers, has passed down through the terror age.
Well over a quarter of a century ago I was always able to find Hutckinson’s recipe for abrin at the end of a telephone line. With the squeal of a US Robotics modem you’d find it archived, along with lots of other alleged means to easy mayhem and malice, on bulletin board systems run off PCs in the bedrooms of young men.
With regards to the poison and other informations from the computer underground, what it was called back then, not much has changed.
You can do it cheaper and faster, and find a black market for it on the Tor network. You can even pay in Bitcoin!
But selling vials of a solution containing the grinding of rosary peas is a terribly awful way to earn money.
Why, yes! This blog now accepts BitCoin!
Donate Bitcoins
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11.23.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 11:12 am by George Smith
Shannon Richardson, the Texas woman and sometime television extra who tried to frame her husband on a ricin beef by sending castor powder letters to the president and others, has entered a plea agreement with the government.
No terms have been announced. While in jail, Richardson gave birth to a child. She was originally charged with two counts of threats by mail.
Elsewhere, the two defendants at the center of the case of the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang have been in jail since the end of 2011. They still have not come to trial.
And Jeffery Levenderis, a destitute Ohio man, arrested when a jar with some castor mush was found in the refrigerator of a house he’d rented but no longer lived in, has been in jail, awaiting trial, since January 2011.
In trivial news earlier this month, an official from the Department of Homeland Security told Congress that one of the three ricin suspects arrested during the summer fad of letter-mailing, had also set up to sell something — that something undisclosed — on the closed Silkroute drug trading site. The name of the person was not given.
This was done as part of testimony that terrorists were availing themselves of the black drug site.
Using the three individuals (or at least one of them) arrested for castor-powder mailing this summer to demonstrate terrorist use on the Silkroute drug site is a really big stretch. But that’s how we roll.
Want an MP3 of “Ricin Mama” for your device? Click here. Be the first on your block to have the only blues rock tune about ricin mailing, ever!
Also featuring the only satirical use of video of Lee Atwater playing guitar with Steve Cropper (of Booker T. and the MG’s) and others.
With backstory, a real multi-media bonanza!
Tip jar.
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11.22.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 3:37 pm by George Smith
J. Everett Dutschke, still industriously refining the concept of weird obsessions:
A Mississippi man charged with sending poison-laced letters to President Obama and other officials has been charged with trying for a second time to frame the man first arrested in the case. The suspect, J. Everett Dutschke, has been jailed since April on charges of sending ricin-tainted letters to Mr. Obama, Senator Roger Wicker and Judge Sadie Holland of Lee County Justice Court. The new indictment says Mr. Dutschke, while in jail, tried to recruit someone to make more ricin and send it to Mr. Wicker, a Republican of Mississippi. The indictment filed in Federal District Court in Oxford says he was again trying to frame Paul Kevin Curtis, an Elvis impersonator.
The annals of Dutschke — from the archives.
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08.26.13
Posted in Bioterrorism at 12:10 pm by George Smith
On Friday, Charlotte Sexauer, a reporter from the Santiago Times contacted GlobalSecurity.Org over news of an old stash of botulinum toxin, discovered as part of a Pinochet government clandestine program.
An initial story, in the Santiago Times, explains the circumstances:
Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship possessed biological weapons capable of killing “thousands,??? it was revealed by a former government official Thursday.
Former Public Health Institute (ISP) director Ingrid Heitmann told the German Press Agency (DPA) that “two boxes of syringes full of Botulinum toxin??? — dating back to the 1980s — were found underneath the ISP in 2008. Initially, Heitman claimed the amount could wipe out “half of Santiago,??? though later revised this estimate to the thousands without giving a precise number.
Heitmann said the toxins were destroyed without then-President Michelle Bachelet’s office or the Justice Ministry being informed, and added she “panicked??? when her colleagues made the discovery …
Legal evidence and reports had previously demonstrated that botulinum toxin was tested on in labs, and sarin gas and thallium were manufactured during Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Secret police (DINA) agent Eugenio Berríos was charged with carrying out the production and use of sarin gas under Pinochet’s orders.
The toxins found underground in 2008 were believed to have been sent from the Butantan Institute of Sao Paulo, Brazil, in the 1980s. Heitmann added Chile did not have the capacity to produce botulinum toxin.
The reporter asked me, “If Botox is legal, why is Botulinum Toxin considered a chemical weapon? What makes it prohibited by the Geneva Protocol?”
Botulinum toxin is the single most deadliest poison known. It is prohibited because of this and because of its history as a weapon manufactured in historical bioweapons programs. The Japanese used Clostridium botulinum in WWII and the US military developed it as a weapon at the same time because of fears Germany was pursuing it. It was also a tested part of the Soviet bioweapons program.
Botulinum toxin weaponization is within the capability of national programs and there is no antidote for poisoning by it except sustaining measures. People must be maintained on ventilators until the body repairs the part of the synaptic junction eaten away by the toxin. This can be a relatively long period and it is easy to see that a large number of botulinum poisoning cases, as might result in use of a weapon, would stand a good chance of overwhelming medical facilities.
Botox, on the other hand, as used in the cosmetics industry, is the same poison but is not shipped in dosages that can prove problematic or lethal to human beings. It would be a lot of work, impractical really, to actually collect enough botox vials from the cosmetic industry, recombine them, and then concentrate the contents without loss into a usable weapon.
One American company produced botulinum toxin for research purposes and was lax in its procedures and oversight during the years of the war on terror. It sold reagent grade botulinum toxin in concentrated pure form to quacks masquerading as researchers in the time period ca. 2003-2004 without oversight.
The cosmetic industry quacks who bought botulinum toxin from the American private sector laboratory were interested in diverting it for resale in their cosmetic surgery businesses. The operation was discovered when one of them administered the concentrate to himself and patients/acquaintances without realizing it was so dangerous. They all suffered acute botulism and had to be maintained on ventilators for months. This drew the attention of the FBI which rolled up the ring and raided the American lab.
The lab, named List in the San Francisco Bay area, was forced into bankruptcy by the incident.
It has apparently emerged from that bankruptcy and continues to sell and research botulinum toxin along with other biochemical agents of interest.
“Since 1978 List has advanced research through quality products,” reads a description on its “about” page.
I published a detailed write-up on the rogue botulinum toxin operation and the involvement of List Laboratories here at GlobalSecurity.Org in 2010.
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08.15.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 3:11 pm by George Smith
After more than 20 years of writing on specialized matters in national security, I’ve come up with a theorem that works on all things American.
The megastructure that now makes the national security a commodity has completely warped the thinking of Americans, from the top to the bottom.
So much so that it’s evident and can be described in a fairly simple rule, one that describes much of the war on terror and the American business of threat-seeking.
And here it is:
The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is inversely proportional to its appearance in entertainments, movies, television dramas and series, novels, non-fiction books, magazines and news.
Or, put another way, the probability that something bad will happen, as described or predicted by experts or any government, intelligence or quasi-corporate/government assessment agency, asymptotically approaches zero as it attains widespread use in popular entertainments. (And that’s usually very early in the development cycle.)
Therefore, you can bet your sweet bippy there’s never going to be an electronic Pearl Harbor, or an electromagnetic pulse attack, or a national blackout caused by Chinese hackers, or people dieing from a ricin mailing even though it’s so easy to make. And al Qaeda does not come back from being hided for more than a decade. No one gets a second chance.
Summed up: Too many bad movies, too much bad television, too much fear-making as edutainment, passed off as serious news, advised by bad people slumming from the national security industry, their purpose primarily maximization of employment. Everything touched by it, tainted by an intrinsic badness. And it is definitely not supported by the real world but must be maintained by a uniquely American machinery of manipulations, lies and purposeful technology-mediated confusion.
And thanks to Frank’s Pine View Farm where I’ve been working it out in commentary.
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07.31.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 11:40 am by George Smith
Ask me how I know.
The sequester, the big process now imposing austerity measures across the federal government, is also having an impact on ricin trials in the US, a few of which are waiting to go forward.
Sequester has hit federal public defender offices, closing some of them one day a week, across the country, to keep the books balanced.
This includes public defenders tasked with defending the few number of Americans arrested and accused of making ricin.
Ricin cases have never moved quickly. Austerity makes the wheels of justice turn even more slowly.
And this slightly related news from AP:
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned Wednesday that the Pentagon may have to mothball up to three Navy aircraft carriers and order additional sharp reductions in the size of the Army and Marine Corps if Congress doesn’t act to avoid massive budget cuts beginning in 2014.
Speaking to Pentagon reporters, and indirectly to Congress, Hagel said that the full result of the sweeping budget cuts over the next 10 years could leave the nation with an ill-prepared, under-equipped military doomed to face more technologically advanced enemies.
More technologically advanced enemies. How do you even say or write this kind of horseshit with a straight face.
Who are these enemies and where might they be? Alpha Centauri?
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07.22.13
Posted in Bioterrorism at 4:27 pm by George Smith
Every mid-Summer, flesh-eating bacteria found along the coast kills and maims a very small number of Americans. Called Vibrio vulnificus, my contribution to science was discovering what it produced that made it lethal. It makes an enzyme, collagenase, that digests collagen, the protein that makes up connective tissue and filler throughout your body. Said another way, this makes it efficient at eating holes in the flesh walls of you. And that’s a catastrophe.
Have you ever spent time working with a pathogen that could kill you?
From the Epoch Times newspaper:
At least one person is dead and three others were sickened in Louisiana after coming down with Vibrio vulnificus, a type of “flesh-eating bacteria.???
They contracted the illness after swimming in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana, health officials told the Houston Chronicle.
Four swimmers were infected with the “flesh-eating??? Vibrio vulnificus bacteria, which is naturally occurring and found in warm water. They were swimming near New Orleans and Thibodaux.
The person who died was an 83-year-old Terrebonne Parish man who had an open wound that was splashed with water containing the bacteria.
“You get bacteria into certain wounds, and they can cause a lot of tissue destruction by virtue of the fact that these bacteria produce enzymes that break down the tissue [I did this],??? Dr. Peter Hotez, an expert at Baylor College of Medicine, told ABC-13 in Houston.
He said that people can also contract it via eating raw shellfish.
Early diagnosis and aggressive treatment with antibiotics are needed to successfully cure V. vulnificus infections. Sadly, this is often not the case and fatality or infection requiring amputation to save life is the result.
When I graduated with a Ph.D. based on the microbiology, no one was interested in continuing or funding the study of it. The small number of people it killed were of no general concern.
It took decades to make it a requirement that people be informed of the risk when eating raw shellfish taken from brackish Gulf Stream coastal waters where good growth of V. vulnificus occurs in the summertime. And many many people still do not know of the hazard which can occur if minor fishing or sea shore cuts are infected with it. Some people, due to underlying conditions, tend to be far more vulnerable to V. vulnificus.
It is a wicked disease.
What I did was innovative. I thought about Vibrio vulnificus and what it might be doing before almost everyone else believed it to be important. I decided to take a risk (and you undertake a thorough think about such things for obvious reasons) and made a hypothesis as to what might be a contributing factor to a fatal disease, did the laboratory work to find an element and define the nature of the product of the bacterium. That’s real science.
Here.
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07.16.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks at 12:12 pm by George Smith
By reason of insanity or something.
From the wire:
A Texas woman has been charged with federal violations for allegedly sending ricin-laced letters to the president.
Shannon Guess Richardson, a 35-year-old New Boston, Texas, resident, was named in a three-count indictment by a federal grand jury in the Tyler Division of the Eastern District of Texas …
Richardson contacted federal investigators claiming she had found a suspicious substance in the refrigerator and ricin-related internet searches on the couple’s computer, the article says. Investigators say they found evidence that she sent the letters herself.
Richardson’s lawyer, Tonda Curry, told the Associated Press that her client will plead not guilty and that the government must show that the woman had “the requisite mental state??? to prove her actions were a crime.
I’ve not commented on the US government’s spying on the mail program, inadvertantly revealed in one of the indictments hadn’t down in the ricin cluster.
Two reasons: There was no need of it in either the Dutscke or Richardson cases. Dutschke allegedly wanted the FBI to come to Tupelo, MI. And Richardson summoned the agency, allegedly putting a return address on the letters that placed them near her home.
Reason number two: Bruce Ivins, the anthrax mailer, would not have been caught by the program although it was put in place because of him. Ivins drove from Frederick, MD, to a mailbox drop in Princeton, NJ., to send anthrax.
So what is the net effect of the massive spying effort? Virtually nil.
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07.12.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 9:19 am by George Smith
Plate 4, Irhabi007. Seven years ago, now jailed aspiring al Qaeda chemical and biological terrorist Younis Tsouli, aka Irhabi007, password-protected this .pdf jihadist translation of Maxwell Hutchkinson’s The Poisoner’s Handbook by combining the initials of the Islamic Media Center and part of his handle to make “IMC007.” Tsouli believed himself to be a secret agent.
Full size.
Plate 5, Chemical Terrorism — Easy to Do!The same summer, a U.S. Army expert on chemical attack, James A. Genovese, was using this as a slide in a presentation on the alleged capabilities of terrorists.
Al Qaeda never launched a chemical or biological attack in the United States.
A word about the series, Fine Art from the War on Terror. In pictures taken from the archives of DD blog, it attempts to show the attitudes, beliefs and thinking from a time when the bad news on what terrorists could allegedly do came daily.
There are probably no similar examples on the web. Share with your friends.
Real life: Careless overuse of pesticide chemical bug bombs in NYC cause catastrophic fire at beauty salon.
OFAWOT
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