12.03.10
Posted in Census, Stumble and Fail at 8:06 am by George Smith
The absentee president, given the treatment by Krugman:
The truth is that America’s long-run deficit problem has nothing at all to do with overpaid federal workers. For one thing, those workers aren’t overpaid. Federal salaries are, on average, somewhat less than those of private-sector workers with equivalent qualifications …
Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies. He did not, as far as anyone knows, wear a sign on his back saying “Kick me,??? although he might as well have.
It wasn’t too long ago — late spring, actually — that the president looked hopefully at the unemployment numbers, which had dipped. Due to mass hiring of census workers, of which I was one.
He learned nothing from that. The jobs were temporary. But they did pay and pump money into local economies. Census hiring showed how the government could immediately put people to work doing a very productive task. And that it had good effects.
In the meaningless whacking of middle class job pay under his command, he’s signaled he believes those with the generosity of spirit of Ted Nugent are just and virtuous. In the process, he’s destroyed any belief his supporters might have still had in him.
That you could actually lose an argument over giving tax cuts to the wealthiest, who have benefited the most after the economic collapse, while unemployment benefits to those who lost the most are stifled, is stupefying.
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12.02.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, War On Terror at 10:53 am by George Smith
Writes ph2dot1:
[al Qaeda’s mubtakar of death] is resurrected/recycled from time to time (google for numerous links), requiring additional debunking …
And now, November 2010, the DHS in collaboration with ITACG has issued a Unclassified/For Official Use Only Roll Call Release warning about [it again] …
ph2dot1 includes a pic of the same old Dept. of Homeland Security prototype cyanide bomb made back in 2006, now recirculated with more pix, probably from the same sessions.
The DHS ‘mubtakar’ was an improvised weapon made up from a widely distributed al Qaeda drawing.
Despite much press and celebrity journalist blandishments that the mubtakar had been poised to deliver catastrophe into the New York subway, it never amounted to much. However, I bet it has shown up in a couple TV dramas based on the war on terror.
A DD source attested one had been attempted years ago in Afghanistan without effect.
Strapped-down chicken testing of ‘perfectly made’ improvised chemical weaponry never counts — except in bulletins of this nature.
An older picture of the DHS-made mubtakar duplicate is posted here at old DD blog.
Write-ups of the pushback on received wisdoms from the media and analysis of the original documents are here and here.
Again, hat tip to ph2dot1.
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Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism at 9:30 am by George Smith
UPDATED
If there is an alternative illustrative definition to the word persistent in the dictionary, it is the Cult of EMP Crazy.
It is a fringe group of GOP politicians and staffers who are the most extreme among the extremists. They encapsulate the worst aspects of our political culture (the new normal, in other words) — stubborn ignorance and the relentless pursuit of personal agendas and idee fixe at the expense of their constituents.
The Federation of American Scientists informs that GOP House members Roscoe Bartlett (Maryland) and Trent Franks (Arizona) have introduced legislation “[to] require the Director of National Intelligence to submit a report on the foreign development of electromagnetic pulse weapons.”
This at a time when the GOP has vowed to block all legislation in the Senate for the duration of the lame-duck Congress, or until it gets what it wants.
And so, while the majority of the government tries to focus (or at least create an illusion of focus) on the pressing issues of restoring the economy, reducing mass unemployment, and keeping the jobless spending a little over the holiday season, two GOP congressmen have written H.R. 6471, a piece of nuisance legislation aimed at squeezing a report out of the intelligence community on the threat of very frequently notional electromagnetic pulse weapons.
Why? Because such a report would afford more opportunity to warn of electromagnetic pulse doom — the US-civilization-ending catastrophe Roscoe Bartlett has regularly announced is coming upon us … for at least the last ten years.
Bartlett and Franks are kooks … as is everyone in the Cult of EMP Crazy. Bartlett is also an anthrax-denier, a member of another fringe group which strongly believes Bruce Ivins was not the perpetrator of the bioterror attacks which killed five.
He has previously introduced legislation in an attempt to compel the intelligence community to divulge whether the anthrax mail attacks had foreign involvement.
His colleague, Trent Franks, is a notorious birther — one of those who does not believe the president is an American citizen.
Franks has also implied that African-Americans had it better under slavery.
More recently, in Congress he was chosen to be one of the recipients of the Team B report issued by Frank Gaffney — another member of the Cult of EMP Crazy, and notorious Islamophobe/retired military man, William “Gerry” Boykin.
The Team B report purported to show how, domestically, sharia law was being used to subvert the nation — possibly at White House Iftar dinners.
In short, there is nothing to recommend the legislation of Bartlett and Franks.
It is reprehensible work from hardened political nuisances, designed only to keep the issue alive in Congress. Or to perhaps give Bartlett a report which he can use in future attempts to create more legislation promoting defense against electromagnetic pulse attack and ballistic missiles.
Bartlett has never been successful. Most recently, Alaska GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski wiped out pet legislation from him aimed at promoting hardening of the nation’s infrastructure against EMP attack. This blog mentioned it last week here.
Despite the lack of success, the Cult of EMP Crazy is never idle. It has produced videos for YouTube, a yearly conference at Niagara Falls, a movie on electromagnetic pulse doom, innumerable opinion pieces for the nation’s newspapers, a relentlessly flogged science-fiction book and — recently and most stupifyingly — a cable TV special starring — Roscoe Bartlett.
A video of Roscoe Bartlett’s latest attempt, in June, to get defenses against electromagnetic pulse doom instituted is here on YouTube.
He stands before an apparently almost empty room.
Like previous legislation, Bartlett’s HR 6471 will probably not get very far. However, the Congressman will inevitably return next year, at the earliest opportunity, with more pestering potential legislation on the menace of electromagnetic pulse attack.
Since Roscoe Bartlett has been at his cause for so long, one might legitimately ask what is the man’s legacy?
Striking fear into people who are not particularly perceptive is one of his signal achievements. Over the past few years it’s not difficult to find such who write things like what I’m about to excerpt. Bartlett’s unstinting work aimed at describing the total end of US civilization in an instant is particularly resonant within the Christian right.
Here’s a symptomatic piece, from around the web and inspired by the Heritage Foundation which works in lockstep with Bartlett on the matter, picked up in the Google news tab this week:
The time to [mount a defense against EMP] was actually yesterday, but since yesterday is gone, the time to prepare and prevent an EMP attack is now!
My point in reporting this information to you is not to cause you fear or distress. I want us not to despair, but to prepare. Be armed with knowledge, and make your own disaster plan. You may consider stockpiling food, water, guns, ammunition and other supplies as best as you’re able. This is not always easy, since many of us don’t have the space or money to be able to stockpile very much. Plus, we have no way of knowing how much we would need and for how long.
Regardless, we know that this world is a dangerous and deadly place and always will be. The only source of true, eternal “safety??? is in God through Jesus Christ. In the event of something like an EMP attack, the Lord is more than able to give us what we need and even to keep us alive against all odds, but even if we do perish, those of us who cling to Him know we’ll be A-OK in the very end.
The puckishly named website, youngerthanroscoe.com, states that — among many other things — Bartlett, who won re-election at 84 in November, has been around longer than PEZ candy, parking meters and penicillin.
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12.01.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons at 10:00 am by George Smith
No better way to say it, from Secrecy blog:
Nuclear physicist Sam Cohen died Sunday at age 89, the Washington Post reported in an obituary today. Cohen, a veteran of the Manhattan Project, conceived, designed and advocated development of the neutron bomb, a high-radiation anti-personnel weapon.
He cordially despised the Federation of American Scientists, which didn’t stop him from writing and calling us regularly to discuss his bodily ailments, the history of nuclear weapons, classification policy, and whether or not former Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary was the devil’s spawn.
Steve Aftergood references Cohen’s self-published autobiography entitled “Shame,” an utterly frank and self-lacerating recollection of his life travels.
Among the material already mentioned, the first edition contained Cohen’s fascination with the fictional substance, red mercury, which he — and many others — thought was real in the Nineties, going so far as to warn of it on television and in various news stories.
“We Should Be Terrifed!” was the title of one chapter in Cohen’s “Shame.”
“Specifically, at issue here is an extremely small pure-fusion mini-neutron bomb, roughly the size of a baseball, which in all probability the Soviets designed years ago with the knowledge of Boris Yeltsin and the Russian Mafia and what used to be called the KGB have been smuggling the technology and even the bombs themselves to known terrorist states and others who feel the need for them — at a price, a big one,” he added.
“The triggering material, known as red mercury, is a remarkable non-exploding high explosive which technically is one of a very special class of so-called ‘ballotechnic’ explosives which apparently Los Alamos has been investigating (at the classified level) in nuclear weapons research … Red mercury produces vastly more energy per pound than conventional explosives but does not explode in the conventional sense …Instead, upon being detonated, it becomes very hot, extremely hot, which allows pressures and temperatures to be built up that are capable of igniting the heavy hydrogen [also in the mechanism] and a pure-fusion mini-neutron bomb.”
Red mercury was not real. Although things said to be it have been used as bait to sucker people in the clandestine arms trade.
And the fascination with ‘ballotechnic’ explosives like red mercury was consequentially so great DARPA once funded now utterly discredited research into the possibility of making a golf-ball sized superweapon composed of a related material.
In later years, Cohen published an updated and re-edited version of “Shame.” Although the story of red mercury did not make it to the second copy, the book remains a captivating read.
The FAS notice on Sam Cohen is here.
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Posted in Crazy Weapons, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 8:48 am by George Smith
The American habit of brainlessly bragging about all things always produces something like this:
It looks and acts like something best left in the hands of Sylvester Stallone’s “Rambo,” but this latest dream weapon is real — and the US Army sees it becoming the Taliban’s worst nightmare …
After years of development, the XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System, about the size of a regular rifle, has now been deployed to US units on the battlefields of Afghanistan, where the Army expects it to be a “game-changer” in its counterinsurgency operations.
And for those who get erections watching clips from Futureweapons on YouTube:
The gun’s stats are formidable: it fires 25mm air-bursting shells up to 2,300 feet (700 meters), well past the range of most rifles used by today’s soldiers, and programs them to explode at a precise distance, allowing troops to neutralize insurgents hiding behind walls, rocks or trenches or inside buildings.
“This is the first time we’re putting smart technology into the hands of the individual soldier …”
Use of the XM25 can slash civilian deaths and damage …
The next weapon, always promised to be game-changing and nice to civilians. And then the war grinds on, and civilians keep getting killed, the Taliban doesn’t give up, the bodies stack up, the government remains corrupt, its soldiers turncoats, etc …
But the promos sure look great.
Just can’t curb the bragging and delusional thinking over weapons technology.
Bugsplat was going to change everything, too. Not to mention the sensor-fused cluster bomb, the … and the …
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