One imagined way of dispatching your enemies with ricin — dreamt of by Old Weird America extremists in the Eighties and passed down through the years.
DD is intimately familiar with Old Weird America.
I grew up in part of it, Schuylkill County, PA. There, fear of fluoridation and the existence of the occasional barn burner, invariably an unsettled young man who set fire to the obvious target, marked it in my youth.
That signature demographic has many subcultures. My first publisher, American Eagle, belonged to one of them.
American Eagle was a book maker run out of a house in Tucson, AZ. It was the creation of a fellow with advanced degrees from CalTech and MIT. He was also a theocrat.
Most of American Eagle’s books were devoted to publishing computer virus code. My book, a look into the old computer virus underground, Virus Creation Labs, was part of this collection.
But American Eagle, like other small US publishers devoted to the Old Weird America demographic, published one book, its last, that pitched directly to the most dangerous part of it.
It was called Civil War II and swiftly became one of the publisher’s best-sellers, catering as it did to the far right extremist’s view that Mexico and US Latinos would reconquer the American southwest and that the middle class was being destroyed by affirmative action and the US government.
Sound familiar?
It was a terrible read. Nevertheless, it was popular in the reactionary and violent far right underground.
If you liked Civil War II you probably had it on the shelf next to a worn copy of The Turner Dairies, America’s premier piece of raging bigot race war fiction, a novel in which “freedom fighters” bomb the FBI and Pentagon, eventual inspirations for Timothy McVeigh.
Around 2000, seemingly convinced the US government would collapse due to the Millenium Bug and other catastrophes, American Eagle’s creator left the country for Belize.
Between the start of American Eagle and it’s eventual end the publisher would occasionally write pieces on what life in a theocracy might be like, how one might start one’s own micro-nation on an island, or the greatness of Spetznaz knives. In one pamphlet or book he mused about a computer virus that would substitute the word “Sodomite” for every instance of “homosexual” or “gay” found in text.
Can you guess my book didn’t do well in this milieu? Wrong venue.
The point of this introductory is that this part of Old Weird America is always with us.
It had its own publishing arm with imprint names like Paladin Press and Loompanics, makers and distributors of generally always disgraceful and sometimes horrifyingly repugnant books. (I have one or two on my shelves, part of the research library on ricin and American samizdat lit on weaponry. These include the infamous Poisoner’s Handbook and Silent Death by “Uncle Fester,” aka the ex-con methamphetamine chemist, Steve Preisler.)
They all fed and feed to a dark undercurrent, present at gun shows in the hinterland, sometimes off in the corner, on the necessity of preparation for war and preemptively attacking your enemies — always the government, its various agencies, or your neighbors if they got in the way or weren’t the right color. And to be prepared for war meant having a library stocked with pamphlets and books on how to make improvised weapons — bombs, incendiaries, jellied gasoline, fire bottles, homebrew toxins, zip guns, fortifications, camouflaged pits lined with excrement impregnated stakes, booby traps, landmines, whatever you needed.
Old Weird America lives in its own world and is always paranoid.
People in it can’t be approached with reason. In fact, it’s often counter-productive and hazardous to do so. Nothing disturbs their cracked doomsday-is-coming world view.
They may be a crew of white guys who think no laws apply to them because they’re “free men,” far right Christians waiting for the second coming in which all unbelievers are to be sent to eternal damnation, gold bugs, neo-Nazis, survivalists, pro-lifers, census-resisters, people who think the income tax is unconstitutional and therefore illegal, or any combination of these.
They all share an apocalyptic dark vision of the future. And, invariably, they always think a civil war, or some manner of armed heavy combat between the government and the citizenry is imminent. And this is a battle for which they either plan to be well-prepared or intend to strike first. And they have written plenty of non-fiction and romantic man’s fiction about it.
The geriatric ricin beans gang nabbed in Georgia early this week come right from Old Weird America central casting.
It was June 9, and Frederick Thomas believed he was meeting with a dealer in black market weapons at a Lavonia restaurant, according to FBI affidavits.
“I ain’t worried about dying,??? said the 73-year-old Thomas, the accused ringleader of a North Georgia militia group now at the center of domestic terrorism charges.
A story grew clearer Wednesday through federal affidavits, interviews and court statements accusing Thomas, Roberts and two other men — Ray H. Adams, 65, and Samuel J. Crump, 68 — of planning to unleash the toxic agent ricin across Atlanta and other major U.S. cities, bomb federal buildings and take innocent lives. Documents say the men intended to launch their plot within a year.
At that meeting in June, Thomas talked about buying explosives, silencers and mines, and killing officials with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and Drug Enforcement Administration. It was a plan based on a novel by Mike Vanderboegh, a former militia leader and blogger, that detailed killing Justice Department attorneys, Thomas said, according to the FBI affidavits.
“Now, of course, that’s just fiction, but that’s a damn good idea,??? Thomas, a retired aerospace engineer, once told the others in the so-called “covert group …???
Documents allege that Crump planned to disperse the ricin in various U.S. cities including Atlanta, Newark, N.J., and Washington. In Atlanta, the documents said, the plan was to unleash the powdery substance on I-285, I-75 and U.S. 41.
A member of the Georgia ricin beans gang, pic from 2001.
The back of one of the most widely sold books of Old Weird America, one containing advice on ricin, The Poor Man’s James Bond by Kurt Saxon, reads:
“It is bad to poison your fellow man, blow him up or even shoot him or otherwise disturb his tranquility. It is also uncouth to counterfeit your nation’s currency and it is tacky to destroy property as instructed in [the chapter] Arson and Electronics …
“But some people are just naturally crude … It is your responsibility, then, to be aware of the many ways bad people can be harmful …
“Also, in the event that our nation is invaded by Foreign Devils, it is up to you to destroy them with speed and vigor. Or — and perish the thought — if our Capitol should fall to the enemy within, I expect you to do your duty.
“It is right to share with your enemies, the knowledge in this wonderful book …”
Succinctly, it sums up one of the many bleak philosophies of Old Weird America. And while I don’t know if anyone in the Georgia ricin beans gang ever read it, they certainly appear steeped in it.
Full disclosure: Your host was a source on quote on ricin for the AJC piece:
But could the group have made ricin?
“No, what they would have wound up with is dried castor powder,??? said George Smith, a senior fellow for GlobalSecurity.org, a public information organization on terrorism and homeland security. “They would not be able to make that into a weapon of mass destruction, and it’s not something even a lab technician can really do.???
As mentioned, self-published man’s romance fiction as tutelage for and on the destruction of your enemies and the tyrannical government has always been popular in Old Weird America.
It’s all uniformly dreadful and it’s no different with alleged inspiration for the Georgia ricin beans gang.
The authors and bloggers from Old Weird America are always pretty much the same — crippled stereotypes of Kurt Saxon and William Pierce, only dumber, but utterly convinced of their righteousness.
On his website, militia leader-turned-blogger Mike Vanderboegh writes about fed-up Americans responding to government violence with guns and grenades. It’s an attempt to warn the government that people are armed and angry, he says, just like last year when he urged those upset with President Barack Obama’s health care plan to toss bricks at Democratic Party offices …
In the introduction to ‘Absolved,’ first posted in 2008, Vanderboegh writes: “If this book is to operate as a ‘useful dire warning,’ then both real sides in my imaginary civil war … must be able to recognize the real threat to avoid it.
“In this, I am frankly writing as much a cautionary tale for the out-of-control gun cops of the ATF as anyone. For that warning to be credible, I must also present what amounts to a combination field manual, technical manual and call to arms for my beloved gunnies of the armed citizenry. They need to know how powerful they could truly be if they were pushed into a corner.”
Last year, Vanderboegh was denounced for calling on citizens to throw bricks through the windows of local Democratic headquarters.
Today’s top news item, a whoopie cushion expose in which the lousiest national leadership in national history, the GWB administration, believed it was exposed to botulinum toxin.
Why is it so bad? Well, our leaders — so benighted and fixated on the war on terror — were obviously too stupid to pick up the phone and get someone who would have told them right away that a detection was a false positive with absolute certainty.
Why with absolute certainty?
First — because bioterrorism detectors really don’t work very well. And they didn’t work at all reliably when this actually happened.
Second — there was no intelligence or evidence anywhere in the world that indicated al Qaeda or anyone, besides the United States biodefense industry, could make botulinum toxin into the potential weapon which the alleged attack would have represented. (In fact, there was only one company that leaked botulinum toxin during the height of the war on terror and it was here and on the inside of the homeland security industry. But the details aren’t important to get into for this post.)
The story reveals the absolute meretriciousness of so much American threat assessment. Identification of threats, not by way of any evidence, but by errant and lousy technology and potentials dreamed up by “advisors” and “experts” on what they think WE could do with all our resources.
It was just a few weeks after September 11, 2001 when Condoleezza Rice accompanied the president on a trip to China for the APEC summit. In Shanghai Vice President Cheney appeared on a secure video conference line and delivered President George W. Bush this message:
“The Vice President came on the screen and said that the White House detectors have detected botulinum toxin, and we were all– those of who exposed were going to die,??? Rice told me.
He said that?
“Yes, he said that. And I remember everybody just sort of freezing, and the President saying, ‘What was that? What was that, Dick?’??? Rice, who was the National Security Advisor at the time, said.
Botulinum toxin is, according to the Center for Biosecurity, the “most poisonous substance known??? and “extremely potent and lethal.???
The exposure time meant that she and those on the trip — Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Chief of Staff Andy Card — were all at risk, Rice told me.
The next day, the poisoning was confirmed as a false alarm by whatever great national lab had been employed to find out. No test mice breathing cups of White House air had died.
Folks, this is nothing but pure proof of epic fail in leadership, a tale of our self-absorbed leaders who believed in nothing but their own idiotic ghost stories and the machine that supported them in that.
These were the kind of people you’d laugh at on the SyFy Channel if they were the poorly dressed moron freak show reality actors on Ghost Hunters, stumbling through old houses with their Radio Shack cameras and night vision goggles, wondering if the cold draft just felt or creak heard from a dark corner was evidence of something from beyond.
What’s the big difference between the Ghost Hunters crew and our old national leaders? Not a trick question. Answer: The Ghost Hunters didn’t have the power to wreck the country.
This story, if you’re asking, is apparently courtesy of Condoleeza Rice’s new book, something called “No Higher Honor.” No higher joke.
If you had a class at Stanford with this person you’d be moved to throw things.
Another sad part is that most journalists simply don’t know enough about such details from the war on terror to get they’ve been fed still another worthless but demoralizing turd wrapped in the shiny paper of a new book announcement.
Captured on video, a young war vet hit with a tear gas round or flash bang grenade, and sent to the emergency room with a brain injury.
It’s worth saying none of the one percent have been punished like this fellow who was simply being part of an essentially peaceful national protest against inequality and mass unemployment. Not one of them has been dragged through the street or treated harshly and attacked by the peace-keeping forces.
It is unsurprising this has happened. The entire history of squashing dissent in the last ten years for the sake of plutocracy more or less guaranteed an inevitable overreaction by police somewhere.
The question once the protests started and refused to voluntarily move for anti-mess ordnances used against the poor was where it would happen first.
The primary threats to US security are all internal.
This is a a topic you have never seen taken up by the national threat apparatus and its culture of lickspittle shoeshine men in the think tanks. They’ll never touch it unless it’s to come down on the side of the “rule of law,” neatness and imagined potentials for cultivation of “homegrown” terror.
The internal security threats — corporate America’s business interests being incongruent with genuine democracy, justice and stability — have been significant. It’s just that it has taken massive economic failure and someone being wounded by a tear gas round for everyone to get the unpleasant message.
“Mexifornia??? is a case in point. California once was the symbol of the American dream. Today, it is sinking into a Third World abyss. Among large parts of Los Angeles, English can no longer be heard. Some neighborhoods are no-go areas. They are occupied by Mexican gangs and drug cartels. In the Golden State’s public schools, from kindergarten through the third grade, almost 2 out of 5 students have English as their second language. In the Central Valley, the state’s agricultural region, one can go for hundreds of miles and hear only one language: Spanish …
Yet Americans remain strangely silent. We are witnessing the emergence of a multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual Tower of Babel. Unless it is demolished, it will tear America apart. Today, Texas students are being told to pledge allegiance to Mexico and sing its anthem. Tomorrow, they may be told that the U.S. flag and the Constitution of our Founding Fathers represent a foreign regime occupying foreign soil.
Welcome to the United States of Mexico.
They really would like to see Hellfire missiles on the Predator drones at the border.
Rick Perry would use Predator drones to secure the border. Herman Cain would use alligators and electrical fences. The unemployed and poor could be booed. Before we hit them with guided missiles. (Even Joe Arpaio blanched a little at this today when questioned by Martin Bashir at lunchtime on MSNBC. We can’t give people a death sentence, or something to that effect, he stammered out. Oh, no?)
Anyway, Mr. Rick has missed that boat by at least two years although General Atomics must have certainly been thrilled to hear him say it.
And drones for everything had a hand in inspiring Sleep Dealer, a foreign film with a great premise: Use of drone camera live streaming of people being Hellfire’d in reality entertainment shows in the US, use of Mexican labor to operate robots in America, and US multi-nationals buying up all water in Mexico, gouging for it, and using remote-controlled machine gun posts to kill people trying to steal it.
Sadly, over the course of 90 minutes or so the movie just wasn’t very good.
The trailer makes it seem better which may indicate it could have used a good editing.
Predator drone used in border patrol at 1:45.
Now, The National Anthem would be a great tune to use as part of the soundtrack for a dystopian reality-based movie along the lines of Sleep Dealer. Reality-based because you can’t satirize this country anymore. Anything you think might work at that is already happening.
Anyway, you’d pay to see my idea executed as a movie. I just know it.
General Jack Ripper: “Your Commie has no regard for human life, not even of his own … For this reason men, I want to impress upon you the need for extreme watchfulness. The enemy may come individually, or in strength. He may even appear in the form of our own troops. But however we must stop him.”
Resolved that: The Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled Senate, in alliance with a global Progressive socialist movement, have participated in what appears to be a globalist socialist agenda of redistribution of wealth …
Resolved that: President Obama has seized what amount to dictatorial powers to bypass our Congress …
Resolved that: Our President, the Democrats-Socialists, most of the media, and most of those from Hollywood, have now encouraged and supported “Occupy” demonstrations in our streets, which are now being perpetrated across the globe, and which are being populated by various marxists, socialists and even communists, and are protesting against business, private property ownership and capitalism, something I thought I’d never see in my country, in my lifetime …
I, an American small business owner, part of the class that produces the vast majority of real, wealth producing jobs in this country, hereby resolve that I will not hire a single person until this war against business and my country is stopped.
Yes, people, especially young people, have a right to be angry, and the smart ones are focusing their anger on President Obama, Rep. Barney Frank, former Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, and other anti-free-market socialists … The president is losing the support of educated young people in droves.
Of course, the uninspired, uneducated, unskilled and stoned have been conditioned for generations to expect something for nothing …
Instead of busting their humps working two or three jobs, they have time to protest on Wall Street …
Smart people know that [Mr. Michael Moore[ and [Miss Roseanne Barr] represent a fringe movement of people who are poor because they have made a lifetime of poor choices … Stinky hippies, generational slaves to Fedzilla and the transparent entitled are the problem, not the solution.
Ted routinely ridicules people who went to college. He never got over not being particularly popular in Berkeley or Ann Arbor. However, he did use momentary enrollment in community college to avoid service in Vietnam through deferment.
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
The only reason the Lloyd Blankfeins and Jamie Dimons of the world survive is that they’re never forced, by the media or anyone else, to put all their cards on the table …
The so-called “Too Big to Fail” financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term “Systemically Dangerous Institutions” – are a direct threat to national security.
Will the pitchforks eventually come out, even symbolically? I have no idea. But a year ago there was no name recognition of anti-Wall Street populist anger anywhere but on Paul Krugman’s real estate.
Right now the plutocracy is wondering if it can just wait it all out. Still might be a safe bet.
At the beginning of the week Hank Williams, Jr. promised a “new” tune as payback for the Fox & Friends imbroglio in which he compared the president to Hitler. Two times.
This precipitated the loss of his big money gig as theme song provider to ESPN’s Monday Night Football. (To see the look on the man’s agent as it happened: Priceless.)
The entertainment press jumped all over the press release announcing Hank’s new song and now you can hear it in the YouTube stream above.
‘Cept it’s not a new song.
Hank unfurled his mediocre country-ish hard rock tune, Keep the Change ‘– an obvious play on the Obama administration, in 2009.
And it’s been flogged on YouTube ever since.
Rewritten only slightly to mention Fox & Friends — it was all about hating on the President (lyric: “we know who to blame”) and how we’re in the United Socialist States of America.
“I’ll keep my Christian name,” Hank sang in 2009. And that’s carried over.
Yep, we’ve all been in danger of losing our Christian names since the Muslim took over in the White House. Any day now I expect to get a card in the mail saying my new designation is Dick Muammar Destiny al Pasadena.
Here’s Hank, from 2009, singing the same song for the drumming up of love from the Tea Party:
The Tea Party generated (and generates) a lot of music.
The stuff for Ron Paul protesting fiat money and the Fed is enough to make you run screaming from the room.
And YouTube arrays much of the most popular material in the genre down the right side of the page for Hank Jr’s live performance of Keep the Change.
So it’s not really a coincidence (occasionally the computer algorithms are spot on) that the next video flashing up right next to Hank Jr’s is this:
As painfully stupid and bigoted as it is, Tea Party music is very successful. It is passed around, linked to, played repeatedly and serves as rallying cry/expression of defiance/social glue for its audience. It is brimming with conviction.
There’s no corollary on the other side of the line.
Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie would have perished due to neglect if they’d found themselves catapulted into 2009 and forced to compete for matching Democratic or progressive attention.
Hank Jr’s Keep the Change is not the only Tea Party tune with the same title and subject.
Country artist Darryl Worley tried for publicity using the same method last year.
It won’t come as a shock to anyone that lots of country music artists and their fans don’t like the president …
However, the country charts have largely shied away from this type of inflammation if we don’t include the short period after 9/11 when it granted a dispensation for those who liked the idea of getting our war on. (Chuck, you can correct me if I’m way off.)
These days there’s no political challenge in Country Music TV’s Top Twenty. And while any analysis of the country audience would come away with the idea that a profoundly anti-Obama song might move significant units, no one with a big reputation has tried to test it.
Until now.
Darryl Worley’s “Keep the Change??? is just such a song, one the singer obviously hopes will set his career on fire. For those unfamiliar with him, Worley’s highest-charting number, the jingo and manipulative “Have You Forgotten,??? benefited from the brief country music get-out-of-jail-free card given out after 9/11 to all redneck boors with hearts of gold …
[Worley] rather calculatingly seemed to believe, perhaps with justification, that if “Keep the Change??? … sells enough to white and worked up rural people who buy it because it massages their fear and loathing, country music [would] eventually be forced to play it …
For a Kalamazoo newspaper, Worley — it is told — “[is] concerned about the state of the nation and the overall emotional well-being of its people.??? And that the song “transcends political ties??? — which must surely be one of the biggest crocks you’ll read today.
“We (co-writers Jim ‘Moose’ Brown and Phil O’Donnell) pick song titles because we know they’ll stir up a stink,??? Worley told the newspaper.
It was a strategy that did not work.
Hank Jr’s repackaging of his Keep the Change is obviously a transparent attempt to monetize an epic career embarrassment on Fox.
But even Hank can’t be so stupid that he would think it could make even a few thin dimes against the pile the Monday Night Football song raked in.
New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg stated that he’s worried that American young people will begin to riot in our streets because of their unemployment.
While the mayor and I disagree on most things, he might be onto to something here.
The rest of the column indicates he’s largely unaware of the growing protest on Wall Street — by mostly young people in the Occupy Wall Street campaign.
Nugent believes the young should riot against Obama (unsurprising, he believes everyone must riot against the president):
Young people are starting to figure out that our president conned them in the last election, claiming that he could fix everything, make the world safer, create jobs, provide for everybody, redistribute earnings, coddle the unemployed, etc …
Many of the people in the Wall Street protest are unemployed. Per se, they are not protesting the President. They are protesting at the seat of capitalism before the wizards of finance who tore apart the US and world economy in 2008 and are busy going about it again. It is the biggest and most deserving target.
Since Ted cannot figure out young Americans — he semi-regularly insults them in his column for a variety of imagined sins from playing too many computer games to being lazy — he bags on them again.
For playing too many computer games and having a liberal education:
Where are the protests by today’s unemployed and underemployed young people? Why aren’t they demanding answers to fundamental questions about their future? Why aren’t they yelling that hope and change was a con job? Why aren’t they demanding answers to the reality that their generation will be the first in the history of America not to have a future at least as good as what their parents enjoyed?
Who knows? Maybe they can’t break away from playing computer and video games long enough to look around at their condition and the condition of America. Because of the toxic, liberal education they received, maybe they haven’t figured out how America is supposed to work instead of how our president wants to transform it into something that would inspire our Founding Fathers to call for a second American revolution.
Today they forced the closing of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Find the photos of crazy mean and stupid ol’ Ted playing his acoustic guitar, perfect for use in “Tough Crowd Boogie.” Sepia-toning him was the right touch.
