Ask George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dick destiny
Why the Republican Party is dead to the majority but still needs to be buried a few times.
And then there are the feckless Democrats who stand around ignoring or passively enabling the goings on.
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Sorry, Kos, not nearly as catchy as WhiteManistan:
They can still carve out Dumbfuckistan out of the Texas pandhandle and western Oklahoma …
On the relentless demographic data, showing Texas is not going to be a red state in the future:
Two of every three public school children in Texas are minorities, according to the data.
In orange vests, they hang around big airport runways as alleged pro bono anti-terrorism squads, making sure the bad guys don’t show up with MANPADS.
It’s unlikely you’ll ever meet any of these para-police officers, wearing their bright orange vests and ID tags. But if you’re one of the millions of travelers who fly into Chicago every year, you might want to thank them — because they’re helping the FBI, Transportation Security Administration and other authorities protect you from terrorists.
Another in the occasional media favorite: exaggerating the hobbies/roles of middle-aged white guys in service to the nation. The silver-lining: They’re not home much to embarrass their kids.
Someone tell them the war on terror’s kinda over.
Modern day equivalent of the middle-aged white guys who always wanted to use their metal detectors on the grounds of the community swimming pool after hours.
Left, Tupelo’s alleged ricin guru, J. Everett Dutschke
J. Everett Dutschke is officially indicted by a grand jury.
The indictment charges Dutschke, 41, with one count of knowingly developing, producing, stockpiling, transferring, acquiring, retaining and possessing a biological agent, toxin and delivery system, for use as a weapon, to wit: ricin, and with attempting to do the same, in violation of Title 18, United States Code,
Section 175(a) (if convicted on this charge, Dutschke faces maximum possible penalties of life imprisonment, a $250,000 fine and 5 years of supervised release); one count of threatening the President of the United States by mail, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 871 (maximum penalties of 5 years imprisonment, $250,000 fine and 3 years supervised release); two counts of
threatening others by mail, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 876(c) (maximum penalties of 20 years imprisonment, $250,000 fine and 3 years supervised release); and one count of falsifying, concealing and covering up by trick, scheme and fraudulent device, material facts, to impede the investigation of threatening letters containing ricin, in an effort to make it appear that someone else had sent the threatening letters, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001 (maximum penalties of 5 years imprisonment, $250,000 fine and 3 years supervised release).
The indictment, outlining the ricin mailer’s scheme to frame Paul Kevin Curtis, is here.
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Because President Obama will be meeting China’s premier, Xi Jinping, will be meeting in southern California this week, count on the press to deluge everyone with pieces on the latter country’s cyberespionage, always said to be stealing our economic future, precious military designs, and everything.
Today the New York Times fulfills the role by finding two students at Yale Law School, both who were about four — or maybe younger — when talk of cyberwar and digital Pearl Harbor plundering the nation first started.
Because they have no history or background in cybersecurity or cyberwar, they are therefore the most senseless and fit for the job.
Write Jordan Chandler Hirsch and Sam Adelsberg of Yale, for the Times:
In confronting today’s cyberbattles, the United States should think less about the Soviets and more about pirates. Indeed, today’s cybercompetition is less like the cold war than the battle for the New World …
Among those who view these hostilities as the cold war redux, some are proposing a more strident response. Earlier this year, the United States military announced the formation of 13 units dedicated to offensive cyberstrikes and endorsed pre-emptive cyberattacks. And late last month, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former ambassador to China, and Dennis C. Blair, the former director of national intelligence, suggested allowing American companies to retaliate against Chinese hackers on their own.
This emergence of cyberhawks in both nations raises the odds of a hack’s [sic] becoming a cyberwar …
This is part of a slightly longer discussion in which the authors warn the country runs the risk of being like Spain sending the Armada against Elizabethan England.
“In these legally uncharted waters, only Elizabethan guile, not cold war brinkmanship, will steer Washington through the storm,” they conclude.
Elizabethan guile.
The only thing remarkable about the piece is that it’s at least the second time in about a week or so the Times has put the crackpot idea — from a lobbying firm for national security and corporate America called the Intellectual Property Commission — that American businesses ought to be empowered to conduct their own retaliatory cyberstrikes against China.
It’s an idea that’s truly excrement and has been treated primarily as such by experts and the tech press, or just about anyone not on the corporate/government cybersecurity payroll.
Nevertheless, the Times continues to push it on its opinion pages, today’s contribution by law students adding to it without actually having the nerve to express much of an opinion about it, one way or another.
What’s needed is Elizabethan guile, though.
Sam Adelsberg recommends Elizabethan strategy. Was about four when electronic Pearl Harbor was invented.
Jordan Chandler Hirsch. Here he recommends we give Israel fuel tankers so it can just go ahead and attack Iran without calling on us.
With future lawyers like this we’re in good hands.
The IP Commission — 1 Percenter stealth business and cyberwar lobby.
In a past life I wrote about music. At one publication I took up an interest in rock and roll from the Land of the Rising Sun. They love it there, the enthusiasm of the young for it at the beginning of the 21st century knew no bounds. In fact, enthusiasm was everything! We could use some of that here.
When the Japanese realized their geese were well and truly cooked in the war in the Pacific half a century ago, they came up with the highly popular idea of the kamikaze pilot. However, within that cadre of certifiable fliers was an even smaller group: the men who chose to ride the baka.
The baka was not a suicide airplane with bombs strapped under its wings. It wasa bomb: a big metal cylinder with a cap on one end, a feeble rocket engine on the other, and a ton or so of gelignite and the “pilot” on a wire seat in between. The baka and its rider would be slung under the wing of a bomber, flown out to the scene of the battle, and released in the general direction of a U.S. ship. Theoretically, the rider was supposed to “fly” the baka into an American ship, making a big, smoking hole in the ocean. In practice, the baka did not fly. Instead, it dropped like a stone. Baka riders hardly ever hit anything, unlike their more successful brethren who flew actual kamikaze airplanes. But the explosions could be mighty impressive. You might even think of the baka as an unsmart smart bomb.
I am told baka means “fool.” Anyway, long before Slim Pickens rode “Dear John” down to the Soviet countryside and into film history hollerin’ all the way in Dr. Strangelove, young Japanese men had been there, done that, for real. On Collection, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant strike me as the living heirs to the baka riders. They dress relentlessly in black, appear to be patent nutbags, and miss the target a substantial part of the time. But when they don’t, there’s one hell of an explosion.
Collection, a bit over half of which is near unlistenable bombastic r&b greasechain, cries out to be strapped, after the fashion of the baka, under the wing of a massive distribution company in search of competition to smite—or at least to irritate mightily. But “Boogie,” which is not a boogie, sports a fine melody, as does “World’s End (primitive version),” coupled to Wilko Johnson guitar. You see, I liked “Sukiyaki” as a tyke, and have been looking for replacements ever since. Don’t laugh!
The intrigued might also seek out “Hotel Bronco” from last year’s Gear Blues, which is reminiscent of Alfred E. Neuman’s sublime “It’s a Gas!”—published as an acetate-coated cardboard single in Madmag eons ago—except with guitar exchanged for Farfisa and “Sonova beetch!” as blurted lyric.
If TMGE had been alive in 1967, Mike Vernon would have worked overtime to sign them to Deram, they’d have had an instant residence at Klooks Kleek, and someone would be working on an omnibus CD complete with liner notes as we speak. Inspirational to children and many geezers too, Collection gives heart to all who have recorded or ever will record their Marshall dreams in an incomprehensible hybrid of fractured English and some other language.
John Toland’s The Rising Sun tells of the leader of a kamikaze force, presumably including some baka riders, who radioed a message to his superiors saying, “I will crash into and destroy the conceited enemy in the true spirit of Bushido . . . ” Then he went to his doom off Okinawa.
Thee Michelle Gun Elephant bring that spirit to rock and roll. “I want my motorcycle . . . ah ha . . . oh yeah . . . ah ha!” some crazy man sings jubilantly —as the Collection rocket bomb, now not totally unnoticed, goes plunging into the sea.
Americans believe constipation to be a fearful evil. The superstition is dressed up in evening TV ads for psyllium that treat it as religion. Purges make one wholesome, and there can be nothing better in life than to be a laxative addict.
It was a belief while growing up in Pennsylvania Dutch country, too, and what the stiff-necked Pennsy Germans feared they wished upon others. As a consequence, shit jokes—specifically, those in which inferiors suffered the revenge of laxatives or brown-stained toilet paper pasted to the shoe—were a source of glee. Indeed, one of the favored local artists was a “Professor Schnitzel,” who recorded 45s of comedy routines sprinkled with such tales.
The Japanese metal band Bathtub Shitter are a natural antidote to Pennsy Dutch, striking the world’s heevahavas in their intellectual center, the bowels. Lyrics from Lifetime Shitlist are not the crazy Jap-lish they seem, instead employing themes of elimination as metaphors for life. “Persist poor shit” and “Breeze from the hole, snore of the God,” rants the singer; is it Shakespearean or just cookie monster metal growling?
A memory that has pursued me into middle age is one of sadism disguised as care by my mother. The damned woman became possessed of the idea that my brother refused the call of nature while playing outdoors. This led to fever, she insisted, so the common cold became an excuse to administer enemas, which generated screams—half in discomfort, half in humiliation.
The Bathtub Shitters know something like it. While nutbag vocal muttering is all over the record, part of the time the BS mouth is in a studio duet with an exaggeratedly childlike shrieker who sounds like my brother did, cowering in the bathroom.
A strong scent of ’80s Brit-midlands metal emanates from the band; BS cover Witchfinder General’s “No Stayer,” although the listener will have to know the original to recognize it without the cue card. Hell, Bathtub Shitter’s best numbers aren’t even extreme. The title track is pretty guitar chamber music, pinched from some source I can’t precisely identify. It’s immediately trumped by a hot r&b riff, “Escapism to Refresh,” one of this year’s better metallized grooves.
Bathtub Shitter want you to regain “Control of Own Hole,” good advice for a citizenry more interested in minding everyone else’s. “Sober lifes will stop [the] bowels” is another shot at an American shibboleth—temperance, this time as a complement to regular cleansings. Perhaps BS describes your life. Would I shit you?
Japanese hard-rock acts are generally pitilessly annoying in some way. Instructive example: Church of Misery, a stoner metal band doing concept EPs on serial killers, in gibberish. To get the slightest enjoyment from them it’s necessary to grant a “get out of jail free” card to whatever feature sticks out as beyond wretched while understanding it’s the result of a great desire to be perceived as enthusiastic and earnest.
Guitar Wolf were basically awful at the American greaser lock ‘n’ loll they venerated. The band’s fringe audience, having never heard the real thing, was ill prepared to grasp their shortcomings. Dressing up like Link Wray and seemingly Vaseline-coated for dramatic rock-action poses, Guitar Wolf always looked like they delivered the goods. And while the trio had a genuine commitment to loud noise, the rhythm was ramshackle, the tone horrible. Eventually, on “UFO Romantics” and “Loverock,” honed reflexes and an animal cunning made some of the Wolves’ unintelligible blurts—like “Shinkansen High Tension” and “Jett Beer”—really invigorating. Accidental evolution or purposeful development? Who cares; on the anthology Golden Black, it finally works when you turn it up enough.
Electric Eel Shock’s Beat Me beats you over the head with ludicrous titles: “I Can Hear the Sex Noise,” “I Like Fish but Fish Hate Me.” The prizewinner in the fools’ hall of fame is “Don’t Say Fuck,” a self-defeating gem which spews the F-word ad nauseam. But the band aims squarely for early-’70s hard rock/metal tunefulness and achieves it, notably in the slash of “Scream for Me.” Last year’s Go USA featured “I Want to Be a Black Sabbath Guy but Should Be a Black Bass,” which was solidly in the Birmingham way even though the title screamed stay away. For this year, the Eel Shocks redo “Iron Man” and dare to affront consumers of dogma by switching between re-creation and a sliced funk delivery. It’s a winner because the Iommi/Butler/Ward tonal magic is preserved.
Loudness were described as furnishers of “brain-destroying” music in Tony Jasper’s sometimes accidentally amusing 1983 book The International Encyclopedia of Hard Rock & Heavy Metal. It was a compliment, the longstanding Japanese band’s high-water mark in print. Subsequently, they were never taken seriously in the West. Martin Popoff, accountant-certified compiler of thousands of metal reviews, dismissed them as “just foreign and weird,” adding, “…they still remind me of Bruce Lee and Godzilla movies.” Damning Loudness with faint praises, Popoff doled out failing scores for Thunder in the East and Lightning Strikes, albums mainstreamed at an American audience in the mid-’80s.
The gimmick was to sell Loudness as a cock-rock and party-metal act, a role for which they were patently unsuited. For this purpose they were eventually adorned with a stateside frontman, Mike Vescera, pilfered from a fourth- or fifth-string U.S. metal band called Obsession, Loudness’s native singer having been deemed too “foreign and weird.” It didn’t help much. Vescera lasted a few records before continuing on as a journeyman, trading marginally upward into Yngwie Malmsteen’s band.
Wounded Bird Records has been reissuing the Loudness catalog for a few years, the first releases being CD editions of American vinyl that revealed a band committing a variety of sins while kowtowing to ’80s ‘mersh metal lowest common denominators. But more recently, the label has introduced, for the first time, a few records made by Loudness after they had disappeared from stores domestically. Paradoxically, they are an artistic about-face and the best of the batch.
The material old fans know is Loudness with a wooden rhythm section; an original singer with, take your pick, impenetrable or nonsensical lyrics; or, a sleaze-rocking American vocalist picked for the hair-band audience. But after the band washed out of the U.S market, a second Japanese vocalist, with better elocution, was hired and the rhythm section replaced. Behind all of it was a wall of guitar from Akira Takasaki, the band’s one consistently “brain-destroying” component. Besides suggesting a micro-cult following that you probably didn’t know existed, four ’05 re-releases make a baffling collection that defies pigeonholing and rewards cherry picking.
Anyone trying to appreciate these reissues in one sitting is beaten senseless by the experience. Smaller slices are worthwhile, though, and the band roams so widely around metal subgenres that there’s something for purists of various stripes. Liken it to blind pigs finding occasional truffles or busted watches being right twice a day, but contrary to their meager reputation, Loudness made a few good records.
Shadows of War hits on the backside of Loudness’s American metal ride. It’s mostly awful old Loudness with accordingly cheesy album art, seemingly dreamed up by junior high boys who’ve just discovered a love for two things that don’t belong together — fire and dressing in women’s clothes. The image of the band in silks and bouffants was and is an embarrassment of the most excruciating nature. Singer Minoru Nihara wages a mighty but futile struggle with the ways of the Cinderella/Britny Fox song stylebook. On “Black Star Oblivion” it sounds like he’s shouting, “Drug store maniac!” over and over. Entertaining — but not in a head-banging way. On another tune, “One Thousand Eyes,” he makes shrieking reference to “one hundred voices,” thus creating history’s most subtle examination of people with ten eyes.
But in between the hapless choruses, the listener hears a band that’s supremely heavy when it’s not trying to succeed. Had Loudness dispensed with the sham of writing songs, always a burden, and been photographed in denim and leather, Shadows of War could’ve been great. Loudness, Heavy Metal Hippies, and Once and for All, however, are an entirely different story, the style metamorphosing from Silly MTV Hopefuls to Marauding Visigoths.
Dismissed from having to make it in the West, the band reorganized, drafting their new vocalist from another Japanese stateside non-starter, EZO. EZO was a doomed Gene Simmons “discovery” that relocated to L.A., where a Geffen Records A&R rep took a shine to them in a fit of delirium. Plodding, tortured-sounding, and unwisely dressed up kabuki style, they sold about as well as bottled horse piss.
But the trio of albums made featuring EZO’s Masaki Yamadi as frontman changed Loudness from party metallers to asphalt soldiers. Everything commercial went to a garage sale–the sissyman look, the old drummer and bass player, the Eddie van Halenism. Colors were out, the leather jacket discovered. On Heavy Metal Hippies the band is a bunch of greasy dolts coming out of the woods. Loudness and Once and for All look like black metal albums. Yamadi poses like he’s ready to chew nails. Where’d the kabuki go?
Loudness’s beats slowed down to a slinking and provocative pace. “Twisted” (from Loudness) is dark and funky hard rock; “Ride the Wind” is convincing cruising-&-chain-fights biker metal. On “Howling Rain” from Heavy Metal Hippies Yamadi makes the band sound like Guns N’ Roses for a moment.
Takasaki’s axe dispenses nothing but downtuned frying riffola. Known to be a shredder, he relies instead on knuckle-dragging rhythm and incinerating use of the wah-wah. Occasionally, the white-boy blooz float through the mix. His deathlike tone is infernally crunching, nasty enough to have influenced the underground Japanese grindcore band known for Satan-sitting-on-the-commode symbolism, Bathtub Shitter.
The syntax and general command of English improved, Yamadi and hired lyricists furnish standard street metal fare. There is, however, one peculiar slip-up that adds, maybe unintentionally, to Loudness’s unusual appeal. On the live album Once and for All, Yamadi repeatedly screams “Circumcized! Down and dirty!” Startling and absurd, it burrows into your head as effectively as a good pop hook. Is it a song about unsterile surgery? Is the singer a Touretter making creative use of a tic? Is it a joke? Yamadi laughs and goes “woo-hoo!” to the hometown crowd, so maybe it is.
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The smallest victim in the national micro-fad of bean-pounding.
Our unique and grotesque micro-culture of castor bean pounders is both thoughtless and cruel. They know when ricin mail hits the news the FBI will descend in force (with assault rifles) on a quiet neighborhood, yellow hazmat suits deploy, and a house or apartment will be ransacked.
But they do it anyway. We are left to believe they cannot make the mental connection between what they have seen happen and what is most probably going to happen to them! It’s sociopathic.
And so, buried in the news, there is the forlorn photograph of the Richardson family’s cat, being mercifully taken away by a city worker after the FBI blew the house apart at 111 Maple and there was no one left to care for it.
Our bean-pounders know the neighborhood will be turned upside down for days. They know they’ve stressed out the little people who’ve had to open their poison powder mail, not the targets. But it doesn’t make any difference. They have their schemes.
This hasn’t occurred in a national vacuum. American ricin bean pounders haven’t generated spontaneously, like the old myth that if you throw garbage and fish heads in a jar, seal it up and wait a week, flies and maggots will result.
“And you can go on the Internet and find out any one of a gazillion recipes on how to make ricin [said a homeland security expert] adding that it takes only a beginner’s knowledge of science to “weaponize??? it. — the Associated Press, yesterday.
Thanks for the received “wisdom.” What a wonderful thing to put in a news story. Bet the editors loved it!
To strenuously reiterate, the paradox is that the spending of over a decade screaming about how easy ricin is to make has some bearing on why we’re seeing what we are.
Some government officials now seem to realize this. But the media, largely, still doesn’t. For the most part it simply can’t write pieces that don’t include how deadly ricin is and that recipes are on the internet.
And this is shameful because, of course, they now must realize that Americans are suggestible and that there will be a certain number among them, even if small, who act out on this.
Is the person responsible a menace to their neighbors in New Boston, Texas? No, they weren’t. Although the presence of an FBI force changed it for the weekend.
Mostly, those into bean pounding are hazards to themselves.
And they certainly don’t merit the money that must subsequently be wasted upon them in the quick reaction force investigations that come down.
Our press and national security ways had a hand in this, even if unintentional, having steeped the country in a paranoid almost valueless lore on terrorism for years.
So, unimaginable and ridiculous stories, virtually custom fit for sitcom drama or movie scripting, replete with bizarre social media pictures that beg for republication, become a new norm.
Back and forth, two pieces of work, from the NY Post:
[Shannon Guess Richardson’s] son, Brenden Guess, 19, told The Post that his mother was paranoid that her husband was trying to poison her with ricin.
“She thought he was injecting it into her food and drinks,??? he said, adding that she became suspicious after discovering on his computer an order for castor beans, from which ricin is derived.
“She told me she was trying to be as careful as possible. She didn’t eat unless it was straight from the store to her hand, basically.???
A family friend said Nathaniel previously posted dozens of pictures of his guns — which have since been taken down …
Local authorities have since condemned the bean-pounding house.
Thanks to Frank at Pine View Farm who permits me to use the comments section of his blog as a preliminary scratch pad.
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Shannon Richardson of New Boston, TX, ricin babe?
As I mentioned earlier today, in an abrupt change from the war on terror years, [some] officials have apparently realized that more than a decade of telling everyone that ricin is easy to make and that castor bean mash is deadly has been counterproductive.
One can add that this particular received wisdom has some bearing on why America seems to have more bean pounders than anyone else.
Throughout the decade of the war on terror government (or other counter-terror) people called on to comment on ricin always recited a gospel that it was easy to make with particular emphasis on how little necessary to kill someone.
However, there have been no domestic cases, or foreign incidences, where anyone has produced pure ricin. (Except for the presumed Markov assassination decades ago.)
The recipes available on the Internet don’t do it, as analytic
work on castor powders always shows. Purifying ricin isn’t within reach of the people who are always caught with castor seeds or castor mash containing ricin and net recipes.
But the many years spent yelling about how ricin is easy to make, just by getting castor seeds and browsing the net for instructions, has some relation to what we now see.
People believed all of the cant on ricin passed on by the media. Why not? Read or heard or seen innumerable times, the sheer weight of it convinces anyone not an expert that it must be true. It became received wisdom. And being steeped in this received wisdom has contributed to our very unusual micro-demographic of castor bean pounders.
More simply, people are suggestible.
So it was a bit different to see this published at Fox today:
Officials cautioned that there is “a significant difference??? between a trained scientist weaponizing the ricin extracted from castor beans and an individual “taking some castor beans, running them through a coffee grinder, and soaking them in acetone??? – a crude and ineffective homemade process that officials said would only be liable to induce, in a recipient foolish enough to go so far as to swallow the contents, symptoms as mild as diarrhea.
However, for every piece like it there is always another stock piece of incompetence, news that collects the usual standard counter-terrorism men, people with little or no experience in the biochemistry of terrorism, to act out the standard scripts for the press.
From the Associated Press, in a story entitled “The perfect poison:”
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The key ingredient — castor beans — is easy to find. Crude instructions for extracting the lethal poison in them can be found on the Internet. And it doesn’t require a chemistry degree or sophisticated lab equipment.
Security and counterterrorism expert Michael Fagel, who teaches at Northwestern University and is a veteran of ricin investigations, said ricin may be employed because castor beans are so easy to come by.
The plants grow wild along highways and in other spots in the U.S. They are also considered ornamental by some gardeners and are cultivated for medicinal castor oil and other products.
“And you can go on the Internet and find out any one of a gazillion recipes on how to make ricin,” Fagel said, adding that it takes only a beginner’s knowledge of science to “weaponize” it.
It is shameful to say and publish that “it takes only a beginner’s knowledge of science to weaponize.”
Any one of a gazillion recipes on the Internet! Pathetic.
Our so-called terrorism experts and advisors to Homeland Security, hard at work, illuminating the public.
This is why one reads DD blog. And why it remains important to spread the word. It’s always an uphill battle.
Earlier today, on recent developments, at GlobalSecurity.Org, a reliable source.
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Welcome to the new weird. The fresh batch of ricin letters has uncovered a bean-pounder, or bean-pounders, even stranger than Tupelo, Mississippi’s accused ricin guru, guitarist and karate instructor J. Everett Dutschke. If you thought ricin mail was already bizarre, it just got a whole lot more so.
I consider it a given you’re either wholly or somewhat insane to pound castor beans and mail the powder to the president and other officials. And inside the house at 111 Maple in New Boston, Texas, something is very insane.
Shannon Guess Richardson of New Boston, TX, a ricin babe?
The FBI detained Nathaniel D. Richardson of New Boston after his wife , Shannon Guess Richardson, tipped authorities that she had found a suspicious material in Tupperware in her refrigerator as well as searches for ricin on the home computer.
The FBI picked up Richardson for questioned and dispatched its mobile evidence and WMD units to the Richardson household, which was flipped.
While castor seeds were found in Nathaniel D. Richardson’s car, under questioned he astonishingly claimed they were not his and that his wife had sent the poison letters to the President and Mayor Bloomberg. The FBI released Richardson yesterday, although he remains a suspect.
Richardson’s wife has now come under suspicion.
Shannon Guess Richardson had been married three times prior to Mr. Richardson. And with five children from the priors, plus another on the way, the marriage is headed for divorce. (Coincidentally, accused ricin mailer J. Everett Dutschke has been married three times.)
Of course, the upshot is that as in the case of J. Everett Dutschke, this is more dual use ricin mail, poison letters to frame someone you wish to be rid of, and for officials. But who is the framer and who the framed? Or is it a husband-and-wife ricin-mailing team that has now fallen into scapegoating?
This is what the FBI is attempting to determine.
Did Shannon Guess Richardson not like the President, too?
Domestically, castor seeds have occasionally been used in plots in which one spouse tries to poison the other. Most famously, a woman named Debora Green tried to poison her husband with ricin in the early Nineties. Green was only successful in making the man deathly ill although she did later burn down the family home, killing two of her children.
However, copy cat use of ricin mail to the President and others in framing an acquaintance or your spouse would appear to be totally unique at this point in American history. Is the primary motivation for the ricin mail a frame job, or getting crazy words out to the President and others? Or do they share equal weight?
In less than sixty days, at least three different individuals, in three different states (Mississippi, Washington and Texas) have sent ricin mail to the President and others. One is most certainly a frame job. The third may also turn out to be so.
Everyone knows that the President, and important people in general, never open their mail. (A reader puckishly remarked that nobody earning over $30,000/year in America opens their own mail.)
Everyone also knows, that thanks to the war on terror and anthrax mailer Bruce Ivins, mail to important people is rigorously checked for nasty things. This guarantees that ricin mail is quickly discovered, although the occasional letter may go awry from the collection, as one aimed at the CIA in the Matthew Buquet case seems to.
The discovery of ricin mail immediately triggers an FBI dragnet, with results as have been seen.
This makes the “why” of ricin-mailing unfathomable. Castor powder is obviously not good for framing others. And sending it to the President will inevitably result in embarkation on a long custodial trip.
Ricin mail is crazy and now, virtually always suicidal. Yet ricin mailers persist! They seem without mercy. Does it not occur to them that the only people who will handle their nasty-grams are those in exactly the same economic circumstances?
They are just cruel and irrational. In addition, it seems the detection and apprehension of them, while necessary, is one helluva a waste of taxpayer money.
Welcome to the empire in 2013, from land of the free to land of debris. There’s certainly a book in it.
Can haz castor seeds?
In an abrupt change from the war on terror years, officials have apparently realized that more than a decade of telling everyone that ricin is easy to make and that castor bean mash is deadly has been counterproductive.
In fact, one can add that this particular received wisdom has some bearing on why America seems to have more bean pounders than anyone else.
From Fox:
Officials cautioned that there is “a significant difference??? between a trained scientist weaponizing the ricin extracted from castor beans and an individual “taking some castor beans, running them through a coffee grinder, and soaking them in acetone??? – a crude and ineffective homemade process that officials said would only be liable to induce, in a recipient foolish enough to go so far as to swallow the contents, symptoms as mild as diarrhea.
Pure ricin has never been produced in a US case.
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