08.31.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, Predator State, Stumble and Fail at 2:43 pm by George Smith
The daily newspaper is now always loaded with Dickensian characters.
The country has a class of people, a club that hated the last two thirds of A Christmas Carol.
Often they have truly negative security implications for the general welfare.
Take Austin “Jack” DeCoster, the man behind the biggest egg recall in US history, profiled in the Los Angeles Times last week.
As the head of Wright County Egg Farms in Iowa, the paper couldn’t have painted him more poorly. If there was something evil Decoster hadn’t done in food production in the last few years, one can’t imagine what it might have been.
Decoster caused child labor laws to be rewritten in Maine, was sued by neighbors for “beetle infestation,” had eggs his company produced banned in New York, and was declared a “habitual violator” of environmental regulations in Iowa for “mishandling of hog waste.”
And in 1997 he was fined by the feds for “numerous egregious safety and health violations” in Maine.
But the US system just can’t get a guy like this off the street, even after he’s directly responsible for sickening 1,500 with Salmonella enteritidis.
DD has covered this before.
During the Bush administration it was like this:
In the predator state, the bad company led by bad men will literally poison the public. And they won’t stop until people are killed. In the predator state system, still that’s not even enough to get them [dragged off].
A year ago Baxter International and another US company it did business with killed people by selling tainted heparin. Heparin is a necessary drug in US medicine and it used to be made here. But in the rush for profits, like many other US businesses, both companies subcontracted their formerly in-house work to China, where there were people willing and malicious enough to deliver a cheaper counterfeit substance, a derivative of chondroitin sulfate, used to mimic heparin. The counterfeit material sickened hundreds and killed a number of people outright. There were news stories and vows of reform. And then nothing happened; it was back to business as usual in the predator state. It was no time to get in the way of commerce!
Today readers have the spectacle of the house hearings in which Peanut Corporation of America’s CEO, Stewart Parnell, is seen as willfully urging his employees to get his salmonella-laced peanuts out the door.
“[Parnell] gave instructions to nonetheless ‘turn them loose’ … ” reports the Atlanta Journal & Constitution. At the time, Parnell was engaged in finding a laboratory that wouldn’t return a positive salmonella test, kind of like fishing through a high school bundle of failed exams, looking for the lone good one, the coincidental exception, that could be waved around to show what a diligent student you were.
However, despite making hundreds ill and killing a handful, Parnell’s still on the street and the bulldozers haven’t been called. Literally, months go by — sometimes years — and the US government just will not remove such people.
In the predator state, this is the way things work, or — don’t work.
In the predator state, it is important to look the other way, to pretend to be concerned, but to actually remain indifferent to such things as long as humanly possible. Because to take action would be to interfere with the business of predators, the making of profit at everyone else’s expense.
Two years later, and despite lots of noise from the Obama administration about making regulation stronger and revamping the FDA with someone named Margaret Hamburg — someone at the time of appointment alleged to be great — it’s the same old story.
Not enough regulations, or regulations put in place too late, or ignored, or any other miscellaneous excuse from a bottomless grab-bag to explain why we have the trouble we do.
At least the Chinese government has the stones to actually execute a couple businessmen every once in awhile for poisoning or sickening a mass of people.
The Los Angeles Times profile of DeCoster had someone attesting he was at least good for local tax revenues. This because in desperate times people will accept anything really bad as long as there’s a bit of money that comes with it.
And one of his old attorney’s added: “I know Jack pushes the envelope because he’s growth oriented.”
Growth-oriented and envelope-pushing to the extent that today newspapers read:
Federal investigators found piles of manure up to eight feet tall, live mice, pigeons and other birds inside the hen houses at two egg farms suspected of causing a nationwide outbreak of salmonella illness, officials said Monday.
Investigators made public their observations of Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms, two massive egg producers who have recalled nearly 500 million eggs since Aug. 13.
===
FDA officials said Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms appeared to violate federal regulations for egg safety that took effect July 9, as well as voluntary industry standards for sanitation. Company officials have said they were in compliance. — the WaPost
On its blog, the LA Times explained salmonella had been virtually eliminated from state egg production by institution of a rigorous program of sanitation.
But it gets in the way of profit.
The program, which includes vaccinating hens and testing barns regularly for bacteria, has essentially wiped out salmonella on California farms, industry officials say. Yet only nine other states have enacted similar government-sponsored efforts.
In other words, protecting the public has impacted business and that we cannot abide:
One reason, the Armstrongs and other California farmers contend, is cost. Injecting chickens and swabbing cages takes money — not a fortune, but enough to send egg distributors searching for lower-cost sources.
“We have lost contracts over pennies a dozen,” Ryan Armstrong said. “They want cheap eggs.”
One obvious answer to this is for the US government to regularly destroy a business and ban its bosses for causing mass illness through negligence and cost-cutting. And to do it swiftly.
Not to just talk about putting a bootheel on some company’s throat but actually crush its windpipe. And then throw the leftover garbage in a hole.
Sadly, I doubt this will ever happen in what’s left of our lifetimes. You’re going to regularly see more and more of this type of thing.
Hand in hand with it — almost unnoticed, however — will go regular increases in expenditure to increasing food security against attack from terrorists.
The article from old DD blog continued:
In the predator state, it is critical that attention be diverted from real liabilities to the external menace, potential threats which can even be trumped up in the absence of proof that such things exist in a practical sense. In the case of tainted food and drugs, it has been the radical Islamists under Osama bin Laden who have been passed around as those who would easily poison and contaminate American food and drugs.
Terrorists might put botulism in milk, killing hundreds of thousands.
Terrorists might put anthrax in beef, rice or orange juice. (It was an American, an insider, working from a biodefense lab, who put anthrax in the mail, killing five. But only recently has research on dangerous agents been suspended at the lab where the insider, Bruce Ivins, worked so that the military-run disease house can be internally put in order.)
Osama bin Laden might even poison meals at school!
In fact, one famous example always used to squeal about what terrorists can do to food was also an American example, the work of the Rajneeshee cult in The Dalles, Oregon. And while it was intentional, it still was not as effective at creating illness, monetary loss and disruption as the recent egg recall.
From a paper posted at the Centers for Disease Control:
Bioterrorist attacks could be covert or announced and could be caused by virtually any pathogenic microorganism. The case of the Rajneeshee religious cult in The Dalles, Oregon, is an example (1). The cult planned to infect residents with Salmonella on election day to influence the results of county elections. To practice for the attack, they contaminated salad bars at 10 restaurants with S. Typhimurium on several occasions before the election. A communitywide outbreak of salmonellosis resulted; at least 751 cases were documented in a county that typically reports fewer than five cases per year. Although bioterrorism was considered a possibility when the outbreak was being investigated by public health officials, it was considered unlikely. The source of the outbreak became known only when FBI investigated the cult for other criminal violations. A vial of S. Typhimurium identical to the outbreak strain was found in a clinical laboratory on the cult’s compound, and members of the cult subsequently admitted to contaminating the salad bars and putting Salmonella into a city water supply tank. This incident, among other recent events, underscores the importance of improving preparedness at all levels.
There’s a way of logically looking at these problems. But the US government doesn’t do it and corporate interests work to discourage it.
History shows that bioterrorism as a mechanism for causing illness and disruption is not nearly as frequent, effective, or motivating as the combination of greed, lack of regulation, and an utter disregard for the public welfare.
That’s just a fact.
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08.30.10
Posted in Extremism, Stumble and Fail at 12:05 pm by George Smith
Krugman:
If I were President Obama, I’d be doing all I could to head off [the prospect of GOP control in Congress], offering some major new initiatives on the economic front in particular, if only to shake up the political dynamic. But my guess is that the president will continue to play it safe, all the way into catastrophe.
Imagine! It takes s summer of columns in the New York Times, written by a Nobel laureate, to get the guy to do something, anything — almost nothing.
Here.
And over the weekend, the smartest response he can come up with over the Fox News Network’s building him up as an illegitimate president until a quarter of the electorate believes he’s Muslim is that it doesn’t worry him?
What?
It’ll work him over good when all the junior league Ted Nugents get put in charge of Congress.
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Posted in Crazy Weapons, War On Terror at 7:54 am by George Smith
In from Armchair Generalist, Jason Sigger notes a Taliban ‘gas’ attack on a school for girls, by way of the Guardian.
He writes:
This hasn’t been the first gas attack on a school, and it’s unclear what kind of non-persistent industrial chemical was pumped into the schools. But it’s a far cry from the feared terrorist use of chemical warfare agents that most DHS scenarios warn about.
In another way of looking at it, one could draw a good conclusion that the Taliban have absolutely zero capability with poison gas. And this kind of attack is a benchmark in pathetic lows.
Anyway, DD’s educated guess is this is fumigant use, of which there is plenty in Afghanistan, for purposes of pest control.
Here’s a link to a UN job posting for a pest controller in Kandahar.
While it’s a small item, US forces could benefit from a press campaign in area making the point that it’s the cruelest and lamest of things to spray insecticides at girls. However, treatment of women is abominable there, under any circumstance.
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08.28.10
Posted in Rock 'n' Roll, Stumble and Fail at 9:46 am by George Smith
Pennsyltucky hillbilly rock from US of Fail.
The Patriotic Class War Song
I was a little bitty baby
I was rocked in the cradle
In an old Middle Class-style home
Now that I’m old and broke
I wanna give the rich a poke
In those big places they call home
We’re gonna invite ourselves to dinner
And shoot ’em in the kisser
And raze their ritzy mansions to the ground
It won’t be very hard
To piss in the front yards
Of all the shiny houses they called homes
We’re gonna pull ’em out of cars
And dip ’em in some tar
Then throw ’em in a hole and have a laugh
We’re gonna find a big ol’ oak
Hang ’em all ’til they croak
In America, the place that we call home
In America, the place that we call home
In America, the place that we call …
Here.
In .wav format.
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Posted in Extremism, Ted Nugent at 8:49 am by George Smith
So noted, from the Kennewick, WA, fairgrounds:
Ted Nugent did more than rock the Benton Franklin Fair on Thursday night.
He rankled family fairgoers who could hear him dropping repeated F-bombs and other coarse words over the loudspeaker throughout the fairgrounds.
Known for his hard rocking and big mouth, the Motor City Madman didn’t disappoint his fans. But dozens of others have been calling and e-mailing fair organizers and commenting on the Herald’s website, upset about his rowdy language.
The first letter to the editor complaining about the show came in at 9:12 p.m. Thursday — while Nugent still was on stage.
“Nugent needs his mouth washed out with soap — that green pine stuff my mother used — and the fair board needs to tune up its entertainment practices,” said another letter writer, Kirk Williamson of Kennewick.
Jennifer L. Mangum commented Friday on the Herald’s Facebook page: “What rock did they find Ted Nugent under. I am very angry at (the) choice of words used during his concert. … Were they so desperate to have Ted that they couldn’t put a few rules in place and remember their own Mission Statement.”
Fair Manager Lori Lancaster said Friday, “He went way beyond what was appropriate. … We are not happy about it.”
She said fair officials checked on his performances at other fairs and were told there were no problems.
Yeah, right. F-bomb intermezzos from Ted’s casino and fairs tour have been on YouTube all summer.
Also, about half the profanity, sometimes more, is used in conjunction with hates on various politicians, including the president.
“On Friday, [an official] said the fair board will be talking about the issue at its next meeting,” reported the newspaper.
Many small-city reporters have ‘interviewed’ Ted this summer. Since they do no research, they are easily gulled into allowing the rocker to do an e-mailer with them. Ted is now notorious for using the same stock answers, cut-and-pasted into his editing software, then sent off for the local rube.
The result has been that observers see the same Nugent phrases and sentences over and over, like this one:
Hunting, fishing and trapping are the last perfect natural environmental positives available to mankind, and my ultra-intense soulful American music is the soundtrack of defiance against the brain-dead denial of political correctness against my hunting lifestyle.
“So how do his love of music and hunting get along?” asked the Spokane Spokesman’s reporter. Naturally, no mention of his latest misadventure.
That would be impolite, impertinent and harder work, too. It’s always better to mainstream the extremist, to make him seem like a reasonable fellow, albeit with slightly colorful and entertaining quirks. And then Ted surprises folks at places like the Benton Fair, or in Dubuque, where they’re startled by what he’s really like.
“How could this have happened?” ask the local burgomeisters.
And finally, the Detroit News runs Ted’s bomb Iran column from the Washington Times, but with the really good part about bombing Iran left out.
Which was this:
In the event that Hitler No. 2 launches a military strike against Israel because of the economic sanctions or for any other reason, let’s hope our military has plans to destroy every critical power-generation station, its communication and electronics grids, key bridges and other critical infrastructure. Iran will need to be reduced to the pre-Stone Age. Let’s make it so AA batteries don’t even work in Iran.
How’d they do that? How do you have a bomb Iran column, complete with Hitler and Poland metaphors, without having the nitty-gritty in it about actually bombing Iran?
It’s too much for my simple mind.
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08.27.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, War On Terror, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 6:51 am by George Smith
Predictably, Raytheon’s pain ray has generated quite a bit of bad publicity along with the usual brief corporate news pieces in which a local TV station or paper sends a reporter to be a trial gimp.
The reporter invariably giggles and jumps out of the way as Raytheon technicians or jailers look impishly on. See the wonder that’s taken a decade for the US military, in conjunction with an arms developer, to come up with! It’s a revolution.
From Associated Press:
A device designed to control unruly inmates by blasting them with a beam of intense energy that causes a burning sensation is drawing heat from civil rights groups who fear it could cause serious injury and is “tantamount to torture.”
The mechanism, known as an “Assault Intervention Device,” (or AID) is a stripped-down version of a military gadget that sends highly focused beams of energy at people and makes them feel as though they are burning. The Los Angeles County sheriff’s department plans to install the device by Labor Day, making it the first time in the world the technology has been deployed in such a capacity.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California criticized Sheriff Lee Baca’s decision in a letter sent Thursday, saying that the technology amounts to a ray gun at a county jail. The 4-feet-tall weapon, which looks like a cross between a robot and a satellite radar, will be mounted on the ceiling and can swivel.
It is remotely controlled by an operator in a separate room who lines up targets with a joystick.
The ACLU said the weapon was “tantamount to torture,” noting that early military versions resulted in five airmen suffering lasting burns. It requested a meeting with Baca, who declined the invitation.
What much of the news has missed is that Raytheon has been trying to peddle the pain ray into prisons for years. And it has long had a big influence in the LA Sheriff’s Department, where Sid Heal presided over a long career as the local point man for bringing stupid applications in cutting edge technology, rays and various gadgets, into the force.
Mostly unsuccessfully.
For instance:
The folks who keep planes from crashing into one another over at the FAA were none too pleased to read about that little UAV demo conducted by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department this weekend, with the agency telling Sheriff Lee Baca and company to keep their drone grounded pending the result of an investigation. What’s more, the department could actually face disciplinary action for the SkySeer’s inaugural flight — FAA spokesperson Laura Brown commented that although the agency wasn’t “peeved,” they were “definitely surprised” that authorization had not been requested for the trial. Commander Sid Heal, point man for this program tasked with spying on Angelinos locating criminal suspects …
In 2008, Heal retired but not before indicating to New Yorker magazine that he was interested in a Raytheon consulting offer, based on peddling the pain ray. Here, from earlier this week.
Those who’ve followed the ADS story know that Heal and, by extension — the Sheriff’s Department, have longed for the pain ray for some time.
If you read the AP piece to its conclusion, you see the now standard assertions — built up over the years — that the pain ray can’t possibly hurt anybody. Plus it will only be used by people who are trained to exquisite fineness in its use, never afflicted with the cloudy or bad judgment which is usually part of the human condition.
Sure they’re intelligence-insulting, but it’s the way of the p.r. campaign for the thing.
Many authoritarian Americans are always keen to believe whatever rubbish is presented to them, as long as its couched in magical terms which assure that breakthroughs in technology have made a burning weapon something that doesn’t physically burn. It’s all in your mind. Or your nerve endings. Or the top layer of your skin.
Whatever, who cares, its prisoners we’re talking about and if you’re in jail in the US, you deserve everything bad that comes your way. And this is a good flavor of bad, its chief scientists/engineers at Raytheon — all of them — say so.
The pain ray is a weapon for using in cases where people can’t shoot back or launch any kind of counterattack. It’s critical the target be helpless. Like many reporters sent by news agencies for testing.
The ADS — or AID — is not a survivable piece of gear and it’s why it was peddled to the US military for use against unarmed crowds. The US military brought it back from Afghanistan without firing a shot, for logical reasons.
Winning hearts and minds is not the pain ray’s strong suit.
Paradoxically, when the Active Denial System was first marketed it was called the Sheriff and part of the idea was that it was great because it wouldn’t actually kill people, thus pissing off victims and civilians less.
“Sell the Sheriff to the sheriffs!” was probably on a Raytheon sales memo somewhere.
All you need to know about the delirious history of the pain ray — at Globalsecurity.
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08.26.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Imminent Catastrophe at 8:37 am by George Smith
What makes individuals like Newt Gingrich and other GOP cronies so repellent is their use of fear to enrich themselves. According to them, the future is always filled with many all-powerful external threats. The collapse of the US economy, mass unemployment and the destruction of the Middle Class is of no concern.
In John Dean’s Broken Government book from a few years back (yes, John Dean, of all people), he names one of the central aims of GOP power: “Line your own pockets.”
Gingrich and others are featured prominently.
And today’s post, on a discussion of Gingrich’s new book, To Save America, you get the official DD laundry list of GOP predictions about external threats. And all of the industries involved in protecting from such potential threats are those discussed on this blog.
The piece, at American Thinker, reads:
In Newt Gingrich’s latest book, To Save America, he reflects on the five potentially catastrophic threats to the United States. Gingrich lists the threats as “Terrorists with nuclear weapons, Electromagnetic pulse attack, Cyber warfare, Biological warfare, and the potential gap between Chinese and American capabilities.”
Any discussion of the sacrifice of the manufacturing base to slave labor jobs in China is presumably missing.
Or any noting of the unpleasant fact that the corporate interests in America seem not to have yet realized when you beggar your US shoppers by firing as many as possible, relentlessly compressing wages and removing all benefits, there is not even enough leftover anymore for anything but essentials. Chinese crap notwithstanding.
Nevertheless, it’s time to drop everything and worry about China’s military, or electromagnetic pulse doom, or the usual ant-like countries allegedly developing magical ways with biological weapons:
Frances Townsend, former Bush and Fox News flunky Homeland Security Advisor, felt that electromagnetic pulse weapons are “a big deal and we are solely unprepared for it. I think Gingrich is right.”
===
Currently we can try to prevent this threat, but there is no way to defend against it because society is so interconnected, particularly in the delivery of food, water, and medicine. It appears that this is a threat that falls under the radar, with little time or energy spent on solutions. The death toll would climb in unexpected ways. Clare Lopez, a former CIA official who is currently a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, told of a scary scenario where people would “no longer be able to buy groceries or gasoline.
Yes, stealth electromagnetic pulse attack certainly explains the spectacular growth in people applying for food stamps. They can’t buy groceries anymore after they were thrown out of work because Iran launched a surprise EMP attack and we didn’t notice.
And there’s also this:
There is also concern — not that al-Qaeda terrorists will become biologists, but that the biologists of Iran, Syria, and Pakistan will become terrorists. These countries, as well as North Korea, are working on synthetic biological weapons.
Naturally, the only way to counter these threats is the standard mantra: A cooperative alliance between the national security industry and big government is always needed.
This almost sounds acceptable, until you’ve been around long enough to know what it really means. I’ll rely on another quote from Dean’s book, by way of a fellow named Alan Wolfe at the University of Pennsylvania:
[If] government cannot be made to disappear, at least it can be prevented from doing any good. [So one purpose] is to build a political machine in which business and the Republican Party can exchange mutual favors; business will lavish cash on politicians … while politicians will throw the cash back at business (called public policy).
The people who regularly tout this rubbish, and often noted here, are genuinely despicable. But in 2010, despicable is virtue.
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08.25.10
Posted in Extremism, Ted Nugent at 8:39 am by George Smith
I’ve often stated that music journalists are largely creampuffs.
They can’t be counted upon to do anything difficult, to lance even the easiest boils. It’s not all their fault. When your job security and opportunities demand you be a creampuff, you do what you gotta do.
Take today’s Billboard. Years ago, Billboard had no trouble reporting that Ted Nugent had been tossed off a radio show for remarks that were thought to be bigoted.
That evidence is here. DD posted it recently.
Today, however, Billboard published a brief interview with Nugent. It was remarkable for actually asking Ted about his recent run-in with the law over his hunting faux pas. No other journalist on his summer tour, or any sports section wildlife journalist has chosen, so far, to pin him on it.
However, Billboard allows Nugent his usual deceptions. On his website last week, Nugent copped to his crime. And in news from California, it’s perfectly clear that Nugent’s legal team negotiated the charges against him downward:
Nugent, to use his love of hunting as a framing piece, presents a target rich environment.
From a couple weeks ago:
Nugent was originally facing a charge of killing a “spike??? — an immature buck — on the program but the charge was dropped during negotiations between his attorney and the Yuba County District Attorney’s Office, said Foy.
A spike is a deer with two antlers that have not yet “forked,??? Foy said.
A Department of Fish and Game warden saw the show in March and “just about fell out of his chair??? when he saw Nugent with the buck, according to Foy.
A subsequent investigation led to the baiting charge.
Furthermore:
Nugent originally faced 11 charges, including killing a deer too young to be hunted. In a deal with Yuba County prosecutors, attorney Jack Kopp entered no contest pleas Friday to the two misdemeanors on behalf of Nugent, who did not appear in court.
A Nugent spokeswoman did not immediately return messages left late Tuesday.
All of this is easy to find if you have access to Lex-Nex, or even more easily, Google.
But this is what you get from Gary Graff, writing for Billboard:
With his tour wrapping up on Sept. 5 in his home town of Detroit, Nugent plans to spend the late summer and early fall hunting bear and moose in Canada and deer in Wisconsin before hitting the studio in December with his band — bassist Greg Smith and drummer Mick Brown — at producer David Zaijcek’s studio in the same Texas village where Nugent now resides. “I love the convenience,” he explains. “I love being able to hunt in the morning, then go rock my balls off the rest of the day. It’s called balance. My spirit has never been more positive or energized.”
Nugent’s hunting did get him in a bit of trouble recently when he plead no contest to misdemeanor charges of killing an immature and baited buck during a taping of his Outdoor Channel show “Spirit of the Wild” in February. Nugent, who did not bait the deer but rather killed it in too close proximity to a baited area, paid a $1,750 fine for violating California hunting laws.
“I did not use bait, I didn’t see any bait and nobody in our group used any bait,” says Nugent, who was hunting with others during the trip. “We were only 100 yards from an apple orchard. Is that bait? I don’t know … I thought about fighting it and we probably could have won, but they were putting a lot of pressure on me and I pled no contest pretty much to save my buddies, who did nothing wrong, either.”
A good reporter might have asked Nugent for the original indictment before publishing the self-serving quote. Someone responsible might have even gone to PACER and spent an entire fifteen minutes looking for Nugent’s case file.
A proper journalist might have brought up the issue that Nugent’s own cable show, Spirit of the Wild, was the original evidence which inspired the charges levied against him. And that it had been discussed in hunting circles in February. With Nugent generally coming out as the loser.
A real journalist, as opposed to a creampuff, might have even tarried to ask Nugent about the race-baiting columns he’s had published all summer long in the Washington Times or the incident in Dubuque which caused the town newspaper’s editorial page to condemn him.
Someone with guts might have chosen to make Nugent actually look at himself in a mirror, for a change.
Good job, Billboard and Gary Graff! Get that news on Nugent’s next album, supposedly featuring “‘ stone cold motherf***king songs’ ready to go when he takes his band into the studio later this year … ”
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08.24.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Stumble and Fail, War On Terror at 10:57 am by George Smith
In watching Fox News this morning, DD caught a Megyn Kelly segment on the latest whereabouts of the Active Denial System, or pain ray.
I last wrote of it in July when the US military withdrew the thing from Afghanistan without ever having used it.
Summing up:
One imagines very few sane US military leaders would want to see their careers incinerated upon publicized or leaked news on use of the wonderful pain ray on civilians in Afghanistan.
However, the ADS redeployment to a Los Angeles jail, where it can be used on prisoners who can’t launch a counterattack against it, is an industry thing.
Specifically, Ratheon’s, which has long wanted to peddle a commercial version of the ADS into US prisons and police forces. Where, presumably, it can argue behind closed doors that the American public won’t care if prisoners are burned with it. And so they won’t step up suicide attacks and miscellaneous bombings in retaliation for employing it.
Although the Fox News segments on the thing — renamed the AID (you just have to laugh at the cartoonish evil of it) for Assault Intervention Device — participated in the usual stunt, sending a reporter out to be burned, the bloom is well off the weed.
Even Megyn Kelly had to admit the pain ray was a publicity disaster for the US military. And now only a moron, or someone paid to stand still and get burned, thinks getting shot by the pain ray while Raytheon’s technicians perform the test, is great stuff.
So what’s the connection with the Los Angeles jail?
Probably Sid Heal, although the stories didn’t mention him.
For longer than DD can remember, Sid Heal — who retired from the LA County’s Sheriff Department in 2008, has been trying to pitch the pain ray in Los Angeles.
An article from the New Yorker that year reads:
In January, Heal gave notice that he would retire from the Sheriff’s Dept. on March 31st. At that point, he had received at least sixteen job offers. The offer he finds most interesting involves consulting with Raytheon on the Active Denial System — the pain ray.
Raytheon desperately wants to peddle the pain ray into the US correctional system, a task they’ve been at for at least half a decade.
And while the US can’t use the blighted thing overseas for obvious reasons — the reputation for torturing the unarmed being one, the corporation presumably feels there is no such squeamishness in prisons. Where shooting penned up out-of-sight undesirables means out-of-mind undesirables.
Just picture it: Prison guards — big guys, often obese and/or hyper-muscular from a mixed regimen of weight-lifting and steroids, working in a jail — Pitchess — notorious for its bad conditions, and the pain ray.
I just can’t think of a more humane and reasonable combination, can you?
Well, hold that, maybe you can in 2010 America.
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Posted in Ted Nugent at 6:37 am by George Smith
Ted Nugent must have had a day off on the casino tour.
Second WaTimes column in two days, on Iran and the bomb. All one needs to know but could have guessed:
In the event that Hitler No. 2 launches a military strike against Israel because of the economic sanctions or for any other reason, let’s hope our military has plans to destroy every critical power-generation station, its communication and electronics grids, key bridges and other critical infrastructure. Iran will need to be reduced to the pre-Stone Age. Let’s make it so AA batteries don’t even work in Iran.
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