When the US government closed the anthrax case recently, the committee to clear Bruce Ivins and all the conspiracy theorists again emerged from the closet. Because the case took so long and the bioterrorist was at the center of the US biodefense research community, careers and reputations were made and lost on it.
The Department of Justice and FBI released a 96-page executive summary of the case. It contains a good picture of the flask of anthrax death, the gold standard for bioterrorism. In recapping, the scientific work teased out the unique mixture of genetic fingerprint – morphological variance, it’s called – in the mailed anthrax, and matched it with the flask of spores in Ivins’s control.
Ivins was not the only person with access to the glass of horror. However, the bureau eventually cleared Steven Hatfill because he never had access to the area of Ft. Detrick where it was stored when he worked at the institution two years prior to the attacks.
As the FBI continued its investigation, closing in on Ivins’s lab, the scientist made a number of attempts to throw them off the case. At one time Ivins indicated in analysis that a freshly made culture plate of the mailed anthrax looked like that of a colleague’s when it actually looked like his own. In another, he furnished a purposely misleading sample to the FBI.
The rest of the piece by your host can be read at el Reg today here.
The story will never finish cleanly. There are too many who not only don’t trust the US government but who also cannot abide the fact that anthrax was made by one of their own.
Jason at Armchair Generalist dissected a NYT op-ed on the same issues yesterday here.
Over the weekend DD ‘discovered’ Kevin Coyne, an old British rocker/singer/songwriter/poet who passed away in 2002.
A colleague on the I Love Music chat board piqued my interest:
Anybody care about Kevin Coyne? Eccentric British guy, early ’80s. The one album I have, In Living Black And White from 1973, is a live one; his guitarist plays pretty loud rock, though his band doesn’t much — come closest in “Eastbourne Ladies” and “Mummy,” maybe. He has a Joe Cocker growl that occasionally sounds a little Ian Hunter, but he doesn’t seem to have much in the way of tunes. (Maybe the studio albums are more tuneful, I dunno.) Sings about insane asylums (used to work in one according the liner notes), suicidal fat girls, burning down the world with turpentine, America being a land of disease, and British class stuff I don’t understand much. Don’t know what to make of the guy.
It immediately sent me off in search of Coyne records from the late Sixties to the mid-Seventies.
Much of his material has been posted to the Internet, so it certainly wasn’t hard.
There are a couple old videos of Coyne at a festival and a Rainbow appearance broadcast on the Beeb, now available on YouTube.
“Strange Locomotion,” from a ’75 Rainbow show shows a young Andy Summers (later famous in the Police) on guitar.
It’s stomping Brit rhythm & boogie. And since embedding is disabled it is here.
“Eastbourne Ladies,” from the 1974 album, Marjory Razorblade, is similar.
Performed in front of a festival audience in the Seventies, it’s boogie with the guys and gals bopping in a polite hippies we’re-having-a-party-in-Blighty
way. The camera pans back to show it’s next to a pasture, the cows grazing unperturbed. Coyne has a pair of Walter Brennan ‘real McCoy’ farm pants on and humps a pole a little. He asks if even the big black cow would give him some money.
This was back when you could look real crappy and the crowd loved you for it.
Another great tune is “House On the Hill,” a compelling country folk whine about what a local insane asylum was like. Coyne was a social worker in the mental illness system and his songs about it capture this bleak part of English life.
“Eastbourne Ladies” is one his career hight points. His gruff voice, occasionally spitting out a Wolfman Jack howl, is backed by a “Highway 61 Revisited” rhythm thing, except the song is about snobby high class dames who look nice.
Coyne wonders if they go to bed wearing crowns.
“Holiday in Spain” — another tune from the same album, is a spoof on Brit package holidays to the title country set to a flamenco beat.
The Spaniard waiting on the table frightens and offends the British tourists, looking to make their white skin turn a little brown on vacation. The vacationers think the man looks like a gangster from an evil side of town. Yes, there’s certainly risk to the sensibilities when holidaying in places where everyone doesn’t look like you.
Marjory Razorblade is a very good album with a unique taste of its own. Coyne gets his country folk blues complaints and japes going but always follows after awhile with a thumping piece of R&B pub rock — like “Chicken Wing.”
Coyne is a master of of these tones and styles, using his idiosyncratic voice and lyrics so well within the spare arrangements that he always sounds natural bending them to to completely odd purposes.
Speaking of idiosyncracy, it would be a hard person who wouldn’t break out laughing at Coyne’s “Karate King” with lyrics like this:
His white and muscled flexing at all the passing girls, smashing his way through the window frame, ripping apart his mother’s pearls — they’re lieing on the dressing table … Chop! Chop!
If you see the Karate King: Help him! Help him! Comment on his pommaded hair, tell him he would have been an excellent kamikaze pilot in the Second World War! That’s what the Karate King wants to hear … in the gymnasium.
Priceless in the context of rock ‘protest’ music, really.
Which brings us, dear readers, to Coyne’s “Good Boy.”
If there’s a theme song that’s better for this blog, I can’t imagine it.
The song delivers sarcasm and class resentment in ways that are beyond 99 percent of American pop music artists. While Frank Zappa comes to mind, it was rare that he was so musically direct. Since it’s a cut off the original Marjory Razorblade record, it probably won’t last long on the video channel.
Closing out, here’s some Coyne fast boogie. Obviously, the older and uglier you are the better you get at it. I’m serious.
Americans are nothing if not the foremost braggarts in the world. It’s embedded in the national DNA.
There isn’t a day that goes by without someone being proclaimed a rockstar, a wizard, a true star. Usually in complete absence of any proof why this should be so except that lickspittling in corporate America.
Today’s headline at the always exciting read: Government Information Security.
Some blogger, writing with no discernible sense of humor:
Howard Schmidt doesn’t look like one, but he’s a rock star in the cybersecurity universe. As proof: the White House cybersecurity coordinator will headline the biggest IT security show of them all, the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week.
Schmidt will give not one, but two performances Tuesday: The keynote address at midday and an early evening town-hall-style meeting, where he’ll field questions from adoring fans and, no doubt, some critics of administration cybersecurity policy.
This in a column entitled “Howard Schmidt Achieves Rock-Star Status.”
I’d recommend reading the rest but it’s devoid of folksy jokes for the sake of boilerplate and name-checking.
Schmidt, since being named the Obama administration’s cyberczar, has been absent from the ongoing chronicles of the Cult of Cyberwar.
The top voices running the show are Alan Paller — of the vaunted Paller-Scope, Mike McConnell/Booz Allen, Jim “Wild West” Lewis and the McAfee business.
Not a trace of Howard Schmidt to be seen in these critical times.
But way back in 2002, DD wrote this about Schmidt and his aptitude for security conferencing, at Securityfocus:
This month’s dose of demented prediction comes to you courtesy of Howard Schmidt, chairman vice of the President’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board.
Alleged “zero-day viruses and affinity worms” will sunder business records, as reported in Network World Fusion and credited to a Schmidt speech at an Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) conference. Brokerage house trading records will be scrambled, corporate networks rendered molten, CEOs humiliated.
This is not the worst. Traffic lights, pacemakers, appliances — all subject to outages and interruptions because in the future they’re controlled via Internet, declares Schmidt. The power grid could fail catastrophically by 2005! [That was certainly prescient. — DD, 2010.] Cats and dogs fornicate in the street as the sky turns black as sackcloth.
If it’s the first time for you at one of these [security] cons, where your employer coughs up anywhere from $500 – $1900 for the price of admission, Schmidt’s virus alarums might seem quite remarkable, even prescient. The remora-like journalists who get in gratis will assuage any lingering doubts you have as to the value of his lecture by emphasizing the most fantastic elements of it in the trades. If your boss reads the published result, it’s all good. You were educated at the feet of the guru.
In simplest terms, Schmidt is a computer security celebrity junketeer, a highly specialized occupation somewhat obscured by an official biography bulging with professional-strength acronyms. Much of his time is spent as a featured speaker jetting around corporate America. Search engines return Schmidt lectures everywhere in 2002: Atlantic City/HTCIA 2002 con, Cybercrime 2002, IT Business Forum, RIMS.ORG, New York State’s “Cyberstrategies,” the Chicago National Cybercrime Conference, South Sound (Washington), the National State Association of Chief Information Officer’s midyear confab, High-End Computing in an Insecure World, WSATA 2002 (the Western States Association of Tax Administrators), Trust & Security in Cyberspace at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Defending Against Information Warfare, the Secure e-Business Executive Summit, Winning the War on Cyberterrorism at Washington University of St. Louis, Microsoft’s Government Leaders 2002…
Ouch, I feel an airline coach-class thrombosis coming on just browsing the list!
As a deliverer of keynote addresses, Schmidt has created a powerful image of furious action in the name of national security. Indeed, he has become an invaluable mover in the computer-trouble industry economy.
Not for everyday public idlers are these affairs, oh no!