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Last week’s best comment — hands down, from the Galileo post:
I am no fan of Rick Perry.Its Ron Paul or no one.The fact of the matter is gobal warming caused by human activity is a fraud. Do the research.Deliberate falseifing of weather data was exposed in 2009. Scientific knowledge is great but it should not be used to take away our freedooms.
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Terror news/speculation as a commodity vended by the mainstream media.
Today’s example, underlining the point made in “The bad guys won,” from the Daily Beats, by John Solomon:
America’s Next 12 Terror Threats
1. Biochemical Attacks
An intelligence report this summer warned that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was seeking castor beans, the simple but deadly ingredient needed to make a quick and lethal dose of the poison ricin. One concern was that ricin might be used in a subway attack, combined with an explosion to disperse the deadly toxin through the closed tunnels of a subway system. This is a scenario the U.S. military has long feared, going back to the 1960s and 1970s, and the sarin gas attack in Japan’s subways in the 1990s showed its lethality.
[Incompetent. Ricin is not quick. Initial symptoms of ricin poisoning take a few hours to show up. Death from a lethal dose, depending on the amount, can take from one to three days.]
2. Radiological Bombs
The so-called dirty bomb has been an obsession of U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials for years, dating to 2002, when the FBI suspected an Illinois man named Jose Padilla of plotting such an attack. Padilla was ultimately convicted of other crimes. Still, officials recognize it would be fairly easy for a terror group to collect radiological waste from hospital machines overseas and package it with an explosive.
[Incompetent citation, again. Jose Padilla thought he could enrich uranium by swinging it in a bucket tied to a rope.]
5. Cyberterrorism
…With the help of a state sponsor well versed in cyberwarfare, a terror group could shut down parts of the U.S. electric grid, cause havoc with financial trades …
[The electrical grid and Wall Street memes, repeated in almost every story on cyberterror/cyberwar.]
“John Solomon is the editor of news and investigations for Newsweek and The Daily Beast,” reads the tagline.
Not that the bad guys have given up. Tens of thousands of our protectors were on full alert yesterday against a small number of Al Qaeda operatives who were said to be plotting an attack here or in Washington.
The possible weapons included a car bomb and a poison such as ricin. One informed law enforcement source said the terrorists had been trained to strike an easy “soft” target first with the hope of diverting protection away from a better defended “hard” target.
From me, mirrored at Globalsecurity:
The number of people hired to search for and analyze threats exploded.
Today it’s a fact there there are a lot more people working in this capacity alone, paid for by the taxpayer, than there are actual members of al Qaeda worldwide …
Another result is that at the local level, nationwide, the belief has been embedded nationwide in many people, including those ostensibly involved in counter-terrorism, that al Qaeda men are everywhere, ready to spring from behind any bush to spray Americans with germs or poisons.
Some on the right have tried to link the US government’s raids on Gibson Guitars to a sinister Democratic/Obama administration plan to destroy jobs.
Gibson’s CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, has hitched his horse to the hare-brained conspiracy thinking for the sake of publicity.
They are among the most sought-after musical instruments in the world. Everyone from Chet Atkins to Les Paul to Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin to Slash of Guns n’ Roses played them. A vintage 1959 Les Paul guitar can go for as much as $400,000. Almost every kid who has dreams of music stardom wants a Gibson guitars.
Gibson is also a company that is proud to put the “Made in the USA??? label on its instruments. While the company has lower-end lines that are made overseas, every guitar that bears the “Gibson??? label is made in the U.S. by American workers …
Outside observers see a more sinister possibility in all of this. Henry Juszkiewicz, Gibson’s CEO, is a Republican, who has contributed to Republican candidates (as well as some Democratic candidates). Other guitar companies, which have not been targeted, are led by Democrats. Is there a political motivation to all of this? Neither Mitchell, nor Juszkiewicz will offer an opinion, but consider what Juszkiewicz told Neil Cavuto on “Your World.”
“You know we’ve been pretty low key. We’re a guitar company. We’ve been manufacturing guitars. We’ve been involved in the environmental movement. We’ve been trying to do the right thing in terms of sourcing. We really don’t know why they are picking on us.???
The government is picking on Gibson because it appears to have been importing banned wood, something other guitar makers in the US refrained from. And that is explained here.
And Gibson, like many other musical instrument manufacturers, employs more people in China than it does domestically. It’s American-made business is for the wealthy as any day trip to a local Guitar Center will quickly demonstrate.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn gets it wrong again (“Gibson Guitar CEO joins jobs talk fray,??? Sept. 8). The investigation into Gibson Guitars illegally importing protected wood was started before November 2009.
The Lacey Act of 1900 was amended in May 2008 to add more protection to many commodities. The amendments were included in the Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008 passed by the House and Senate and vetoed by President Bush. A month later, Congress overrode the veto by a bipartisan vote of 317-109 in the House and 80-14 in the Senate.
The recent raid probably was to determine if Gibson had kept its word from the raids of November 2009 to stop using illegally harvested wood. This adds to a troubled past including IRS tax liens and charges of price fixing.
Everyone hopes that Gibson will survive this latest problem.
Laughably, Juszkiewicz has said the US government is engaged in “class warfare” in pursuing its investigation.
Please save my Gibson guitar from the tyrannical hands of the US guv’mint!
Here’s my ten year anniversary reminisce on the war on terror, one drawn from expert perspective. And it’s simple.
The bad guys won.
I don’t mean bin Laden or al Qaeda.
My view deals with the US mechanism, the security and threat assessment machine that was part of the post 9/11 Bush boom in the tools of war.
Today there’s no visible mechanism in the nation looking at things from the perspective of a devil’s advocate. There is nothing acting to put the breaks on a function where the only purpose is to find new enemies.
It hardened into this all things terror all the time half a decade ago.
Arms control agencies, any public information source that didn’t directly serve the war on terror by finding new threats, any threats, went silent, were marginalized or ceased to exist.
It’s a matter of economics and capitalism. There is no money in not feeding the fear.
We did this to ourselves. The worst parts in the paranoid reptile brain, convenient for a national business model based on a constant state of fear, were allowed to take over.
Over the years I’ve known a number of good people who did practice reason and criticism, individuals who fought against the making of terror stories and information into commodities, planted p.r. for political recognition and increased funding. If they went into the apparatus, and some did, they were silenced.
Purchase for service and work in the government destroyed all the value of formerly public critical thinking.
Of course, we still have it. It just has no place now.
From my experience, it’s useful to look back at how I got into looking at terrorism. The idea was to be rational. And that doesn’t seem too unreasonable even when printed today.
This occurred when I was contacted by British defense counsel in the infamous London ricin trial. I had been researching “recipes” for ricin and how and where they had circulation worldwide. I published on the web through GlobalSecurity.
And these recipes were going to be part of the trial. The prosecution’s case was initially aimed at linking a recipe found in England with other recipes found when the US overturned the Taliban and routed al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The reasoning was that it would prove a linkage and an operation that had been interrupted.
And I was familiar with all the original ricin recipes and where and when they had been published.
Kamel Bourgass’s jewelry tin of castor seeds, used to help grease the Iraq invasion. “The prosecuting authorities effectively [stood] accused of suborning justice to shore up support for an unjustifiable war,” wrote a columnist for The Telegraph in April of 2005.
Take a close look at that photo of a jewelry tin of castor seeds.
In September of 2002 until January of 2004, British anti-terrorist branch men were engaged in a dragnet for suspected terrorists in the north and east of London. In one operation on January 5, the plant poison ricin was claimed to have been found in an apartment above a pharmacy in a place called Wood Green. The news flashed around the world.
Tension was high and TIME International wrote in a story entitled “Poisonous Plot:” “Watching the police officers come and go, some of them in protective white suits and masks, and seeing the long hours they spent in the top-floor apartment above a local pharmacy, neighbors in North London’s multiracial Wood Green section knew that something big was up.”
Several suspected terrorists were arrested. One at Wood Green, others connected to a raid at the Finsbury Park mosque and one, Kamel Bourgass, a week later, in Manchester. Bourgass stabbed and killed a police officer in the Manchester raid. At the apartment in Wood Green — a “residue of ricin” was said to have been found. “A presumed al-Qaeda terror lab had been shut down.”
The residue of ricin eventually turned out to be a false positive, news suppressed until the trial of accused suspects in 2004. As for anything deadly — 22 castor seeds, most of them in the tin shown above, were the best that could be produced.
When I was first contacted by a representative of the defense counsel, document specialist/expert Duncan Campbell, the opinion was that a crew of terrorists bagged in the London raids were going to be sent over.
Most still believed there was some substance to Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council, a now totally discredited piece of theatre that ended his career. It was a show in which one of the government slides focused on a nefarious network allegedly linking al Qaeda in Iraq to plots in Europe.
Now — replace that ominous-looking and shadowy “UK Poison Cell” with the silly photo of a jewelry tin of castor seeds.
It’s impossible to take even half seriously as any basis for even one plank of an argument for taking the US into a disastrous war in Iraq. That it was used in such a way is criminal.
Nevertheless, that’s what our leaders did.
In England and before a jury, the prosecution’s terror case collapsed. There was no way to link a scrap of a ricin recipe found in England with material taken off al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The British recipe had been actually been copied from a server in California.
The British jury would convict only Kamel Bourgass. And he was already in prison for life. The ricin trial charges were only icing on the nasty cake.
The jury did not buy that the people in the dock with Bourgass were part of an al Qaeda poison ring. They were exonerated although the British government would continue to make things miserable for them in subsequent years. A trial of more men swept up in the original counter-terror operation was canceled. It had been predicated on the idea that a jury would find evidence of a poison ring and convict all men in the first trial.
I realized early that this would be of some news in the US.
The British government had embargoed the trial in the UK, but not here. So, under the rubric of Globalsecurity, American news agencies were approached.
No one would have it. So we published on site.
Then they started to call.
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post was perturbed. The information, he growled over the phone, put the paper in a difficult position. This meant having to scramble for confirming anonymous sources in England.
Harrumph! Such things disturb the digestion.
Somebody from 60 Minutes called. What did my sources in the government, the intelligence agencies, tell me? What did Colin Powell have to say?
That’s what I was asked. I didn’t have any sources in the government and intelligence agencies. Colin Powell? Surely, 60 Minutes had to be joking! I never heard from them again.
At Newsweek, reporters Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball found a wind-up toy terror expert to help craft the impression a British jury had gone rogue and set free a detachment of al Qaeda men:
The mixed outcome dismayed U.S. counterterror specialists who were convinced that Bourgass and his four codefendants were in fact acting as part of a broader international terror plot …
“This is very disturbing …” [said a] a government consultant on international terror cases about the acquittals in the ricin-plot case. “These are dangerous people …
It was tripe. Newsweek wouldn’t have the truth.
At the end of one of my write-ups at GlobalSecurity I tried to sound an optimistic note:
The [al Qaeda poison ring] news was too terrible and repeated too often to easily replace as common wisdom. Indeed, there will be many convinced that justice was not served, that a poison plot was foiled and that convictions would have been certain if only the right evidence had been presented and taken seriously. They will think that the case of Bourgass and others was a defeat in the global war on terror.
Others, however, will view it as a victory, an affirmation that specious intelligence, fear, stupidity and suspicions cannot forever trample on reality.
That hesitant optimism was unwarranted. Things were only going to get worse.
The number of people hired to search for and analyze threats exploded.
Today it’s a fact there there are a lot more people working in this capacity alone, paid for by the taxpayer, than there are actual members of al Qaeda worldwide.
And you can define the number of times in the last decade even one of them has come forward to offer public reason and perspective contrary to the usual mantra of everything being at threat at any time, simply by using the index finger and thumb to make a big zero.
That’s none in the ten years since 9/11.
This has resulted in very many bad things.
For example, at a micro level millions of dollars a year have been thrown away on not one, but two, experimental ricin vaccines for a decade. It’s been enough to support one pharmaceutical business and one government operation, the former of which has not brought one product to market in the time since 9/11.
Just multiply that kind of thing tens of thousands of times throughout the country.
Another result is that at the local level, nationwide, the belief has been embedded nationwide in many people, including those ostensibly involved in counter-terrorism, that al Qaeda men are everywhere, ready to spring from behind any bush to spray Americans with germs or poisons.
And yet another, the worst: The cynical monetization of all information and news on terrorism.
It’s always good business to have it for your new book’s publicity or your big news scoop. Or to manipulate it, leak it, massage and exaggerate it for political purpose, for improving the career or expansion of manpower and funding to search for always more threats.
Indeed, much of it has been written about here, at GlobalSecurity, and at other venues. Almost a decade’s worth of work on what now looks like historical documentation for the inexorable downward slope.
After bin Laden was killed there was a week of celebration. However,
what was the benefit? Seven days later it was back to more business as usual.
All the people who died ten years ago are not honored by this machine, this gigantic thought-destroying mechanism erected because of one very bad day. One wonders what some of them might say to us if they could have just one look at the way things are now.
Krugman notes the long outpour of reminisce and analysis over the ten year anniversay has been “subdued.” I have another word, lame.
And his blog post serves an introductory to a longer thing I’ll post later this morning PST.
From “Conscience of a Liberal” blog:
What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. [The] atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.
A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?
The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.
“Predator loans, iPhones and drones … plus we got lotsa crazy people! Exactly the right song for today. Whether we like it or not. The ten years following 9/11 did not honor the people who died. I wonder what some would say if saw what the country became.
Update:
Frank at Pine View Farm comes up with a pic from a local ATM machine.
It’s worth a thousand words, all describing the condition of “being contemptible.”
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Rick Perry’s college grades have been released.
At Texas A&M he was awarded what amounted to a semi-science degree for pantywaists. Perhaps his parents thought he would run a cattle farm some day.
His grades are here.
[Pass your mouse over the link — “do we need another dumb texan“] Not entirely rhetorical. A lot of Americans would say yes.
The degree was in “Animal Science” which sounds legitimate until you view the transcript. Note all the watering down from a standard undergrad degree in biology or chemistry.
If the grades are any indication Perry needed the dilution.
As a young man he got a D and an F in two semesters of organic chemistry, a D in trigonometry, a C in physics, a C in freshman chemistry, a D in “feeds & feeding,” a D in basic accounting, a D in economics, a D in an animal anatomy class.
It’s a hopeless transcript, the record of someone who eked one out.
So where did he come up with Galileo? A staffer pre-debate?
In any case, for Perry’s demographic the transcript couldn’t be any better. Now it’s an asset, showing you don’t need no steenkin’ learnin’ to be president of the United States.
From a historical and practical viewpoint this is true. You don’t need any education to run the United States. One can lead it so even the most learned elite snobs have no effect.
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Passing article on the web on the best countries for vices.
Moldova is first in the world for power drinking, closely followed by old eastern Euro nations and other places formerly in the Soviet Union:
According to [a] WHO report, the country topping the list for annual alcohol consumption per person is Moldova. The average Moldavian consumes 18.22 liters of alcohol annually, almost three times more than the global average of 6.1 liters. Moldova is one of the poorest countries in Europe and a major wine producer. Many of its people drink cheap homemade wine, vodka and other spirits.
The English and the Germans have some work to do if they wish to burnish their reps as paralytics drinkers. It may also help to have a smaller population so that any percentage of the folks that don’t get into the spirit of the thing don’t dilute the rankings.
And DD has a tune for this.
Walkin’ for Bumwine in Pasadena
Sadly, the US is no competition. I’d assume because there’s too much fundamentalist Christian religion embedded in half the country. Teetotal is the way to be when damning everyone else while you’re in service to Jesus and Mammon.
Now — gluttony — that’s where we’ve got it going. Second only to Mexico, according to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development:
The U.S. (68%) is ranked second behind Mexico (70%) in the proportion of adults who are overweight …
As for highest rate of fatness in the completely developed western world? We own that.
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Nothing so illustrated the deep failure plaguing the country and the collapse of intellect than Rick Perry invoking Galileo in defense of GOP disbelief in science and global warming.
You see, when DD was a kid I was assigned to read Bertolt Brecht’s play, “Life of Galileo,” in its original German in an advanced language class. This was in high school in backward Schuylkill County, PA, in the early Seventies. (The above illustration is obviously not the original Deutsch edition. It was the closest-looking thing to it I could find on the web.)
The play tells the story of Galileo’s clash with the Catholic church, one brought upon him by his use of a telescope and his subsequent belief in Copernicus’s view of the solar system. The church threatens Galileo and, fearfully, he recants these beliefs. They put him under house arrest.
It’s all very depressing.
Last night, Perry trotted out a short incoherent dodge implying his “scientists” — scientists the referees of the debate couldn’t get him to identify — had the truth — global warming was “unsettled” science.
Then he unexpectedly blurted out that even Galileo “got outvoted.”
It illustrated, too, why it’s impossible to debate the GOP. Even semi-intellectual arguments are of no use when the “refs” — Brian Williams and someone from the Politico — can’t enforce any rules to penalize or discourage the emission of outrageous balderdash. The Republican Party employs tactics which nullify reasoned argument. This gives them a significant and very real advantage.
And this is what Rich Perry also apparently specializes in.
The very idea that he would liken Galileo’s suppression by the Church to the GOP dogma/disbelief in science is flabbergasting. In the eyes of anyone with intelligence throughout the world, the conclusion would be that the United States could easily become an unstable pariah nation because of the nature of its potential political leadership.
Rick Perry insults anyone with a scientific education, even anyone with just a vague memory of old Galileo from grade school many years ago.
When the US has evolved to a position where someone like this can be the governor of Texas, or even aspire to the Presidency, it only provides ample proof the country’s system has so changed it richly rewards and promotes only the incompetent but forceful.
Perry could easily be President. The rage vote against a powerless to do anything President can work.
Relatively speaking it’s difficult to muster any confidence that people will be able to distinguish a serious qualitative difference in 2012 between a man who made speeches that never delivered on jobs and the economy and a different man who firmly projects the image of a strong, assertive guy from Texas who professes absurdly that, like Galileo, his opinion is suppressed.
One oh-five degrees Fahrenheit in central Pasadena. I’m off to the swimming pool for a bit.
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