08.13.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 12:42 pm by George Smith
Today’s most odious news comes from the New York Times and concerns an alleged plot by al Qaeda in Yemen. And the plot involves — ricin bombs.
Reported by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, the story also appears to be a bit of tease for their book, “Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda.” set for publication next week by Times Books.
The tome is mentioned in the story. However, Schmitt and Shanker do not really mention they’re the authors, too. One supposes editors thought it obvious.
In any case, readers already are sniffing a self-serving business here.
But on the bit about ricin bombs, news of which must have been communicated to the authors a decent interval ago, news-wise.
Here’s the lede from the newspaper:
American counterterrorism officials are increasingly concerned that the most dangerous regional arm of Al Qaeda is trying to produce the lethal poison ricin, to be packed around small explosives for attacks against the United States.
For more than a year, according to classified intelligence reports, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen has been making efforts to acquire large quantities of castor beans …
Long time readers know that no one — that’s NO ONE — has ever developed a “ricin bomb.”
A long long time ago the US military tried. And the only result was an infamous patent for the purfication of ricin. Since the work was done long before scientists understood protein chemistry (full disclosure: DD’s Ph.D. is in protein chemistry) reading it leads a current scientist fluent in the field to realize it actually destroyed ricin.
Ricin is a protein. And proteins don’t like lots of things — like heat, harsh handling, many solvents, being taken out of their natural environment, and … well I won’t go into the rest right here.
And the old US ricin patent used all the things that are hard on proteins. Which perhaps has something to do with why ricin bombs have never been made.
Readers will note the first sentence of the Times piece states that al Qaeda is trying to pack ricin around explosives. Therefore, from this it can be inferred that al Qaeda has no competent scientists working on this project in Yemen.
But onward.
These officials also note that ricin’s utility as a weapon is limited because the substance loses its potency in dry, sunny conditions, and unlike many nerve agents, it is not easily absorbed through the skin. Yemen is a hot, dry country, posing an additional challenge to militants trying to produce ricin there.
In the first sentence, the journalists show that someone in government has told them a little bit of what I’ve just put up here on the nature of ricin and proteins.
But in the same sentence they make this BIG mistake: “[Ricin] is not easily absorbed through the skin.”
Ricin is not absorbed through the skin. Period. Proteins are not absorbed through the skin. If they could be absorbed through the skin you could eat your sandwich by putting the slice of salami on your forearm or pouring your cup of beef bouillon on your stomach.
Proteins are large macro-molecules. And they are not absorbed through the skin — which is made up of keratin — the structural protein that makes up the outer layer of our hide.
Nerve agents are not large molecules at all. In fact, they are quite other things.
In the scheme of things during the war on terror, the US has funded the development of two ricin vaccines. They are not ready yet. However, during development ricin toxicity is tested on rodents. And it is used in an aerosol, not as a contact poison.
It is also purified ricin.
The New York Times story does not make any indication that al Qaeda has purified ricin. In fact, if they are planning on using it with explosives, the likelihood is that they do not have anyone savvy enough to purify it to the state in which it is used for research in the United States.
The Times continues:
Michael E. Leiter, who retired recently as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said at a security conference last month. “It’s not hard to develop ricin.???
And here is the problem of relying on an expert who may know everything about fighting terrorism but who knows nothing about advanced chemistry or biology.
Ricin is not easy to “develop” unless, in using that word, you mean “grinding castor seeds into powder.”
And that is what people fiddling with castor seeds, in large quantities or small, always do. They transform seeds into castor mash. And the mash may be subsequently washed with an organic solvent, like acetone, to remove castor oil.
None of this is a purification. It is merely a change from seed to powder, and a bit of oil removal.
Back to the Times:
In 2003, British and French operatives broke up suspected al Qaeda cells that possessed components and manuals for ricin bombs …
This is also wrong.
The London ricin plot was not connected to al Qaeda. It was one man — Kamel Bourgass — who was sent over for it. No manuals or components for ricin bombs were recovered.
I have translations of the papers seized in the British “ricin ring” raids.
They are clearly posted on the web here at GlobalSecurity.Org.
These are not manuals. They are elementary scraps of paper. Rubbish, really.
In London, the plot was to smear ricin (castor powder, really) mixed with skin creme on door handles. No bomb. In any case, an expert testified that ricin wasn’t a contact poison, anyway.
No ricin was discovered in England.
From my old writings on the matter, at GlobalSecurity:
Martin Pearce, the Porton Down scientist who accompanied the anti-terrorism team on the Wood Green raid noted items of potential interest to include, toiletries, a common funnel, two scales, bottles of acetone and some rubber gloves.
Twenty-two intact castor seeds were recovered. Twenty-one were found in a jewelry case along with one other in an unspecified location within the Wood Green apartment.
Furthermore:
Months earlier and behind the scenes, the British government had seen its claims, that the group [of men eventually found innocent in a jury trial] had the capability to produce ricin and that materials on a ricin recipe found in their belongings could be linked to al Qaida, rupture. And equally startling, it was confirmed that a preliminary positive finding of the poison in a residue tested in a raid on their apartment in Wood Green in January of 2003 was false but that through bureaucratic bungling, just the opposite news was presented to British authorities.
Near the end the Times reporters write:
Months after the initial ricin intelligence reports surfaced last year, Saudi intelligence officials revealed a twist to the ricin plot: Qaeda operatives were trying to place the toxin in bottles of perfume, especially a popular local fragrance made of the resin of agarwood, and send those bottles as gifts to assassinate government officials and law enforcement and military officers. There is no indication that Al Qaeda ever succeeded with this approach, intelligence officials said.
Even this idea is old news.
My crude drawing, from years ago, is a copy of how American survivalist Kurt Saxon proposed that ricin might be used from one of his old pamphlets published in the Eighties.
On the old blog, I wrote:
The illustration to the left, for example, is Dick Destiny blog’s rendition of a drawing of what to do with your bowl of ricin poison, published in Kurt Saxon’s “The Weaponeer” in 1984.
It is no surprise that al Qaeda has an abiding interest in ricin. The “recipe” for turning to castor seeds into dry powder is easy to come by. And there has never been any shortage of US government men and mountebank counter-terror “experts” saying that it’s easy to make.
But history has shown quite the opposite. Ricin is far from easy to make into a weapon, much less any notional bomb. It can be used and has been used as a poison aimed at one person, sometimes in a household, or more famously from a Cold War example I won’t bother to mention.
And every year the FBI arrests a share of white American kooks who are puttering around with castor seeds.
So it is quite logical that al Qaeda might wish to try and do something using it. And, through the war on terror, some of them have always believed, too, that ricin is easy to make into a weapon.
Why?
Because they have frequently read that this is so in the American press.
The New York Times article has one takeaway which is not a mistake. The US counter-terror man asserts that any “ricin bomb” would most certainly “scare” people and be very big news.
That’s very accurate, unfortunately. It makes it possible for them to make a “ricin bomb” that doesn’t actually work, although the immediate explosion would, by itself, kill people close by.
Once news got going that a “ricin bomb” had been deployed anyone even remotely near the thing would probably be terrified they’d been poisoned. The American media would be the vector for this whether anyone had actually been poisoned or not.
Related materials: My inimitable Ricin Kooks tab.
My articles on the London ricin case at GlobalSecurity.Org.
This post has been updated slightly for clarity.
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08.11.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall at 9:05 am by George Smith
From the wire, just now:
LOS ANGELES — The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency says contact with its experimental hypersonic glider was lost after launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the central California coast.
The glider was launched from this Minotaur IV rocket at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The agency says in Twitter postings that its unmanned Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2 was launched Thursday atop a rocket, successfully separated from the booster and entered the mission’s glide phase.
The agency says telemetry was subsequently lost, but released no details.
A similar vehicle was launched last year and returned nine minutes of data before contact was prematurely lost …
The U.S. military is trying to develop technology to respond to threats around the globe at speeds of Mach 20 or greater.
“Respond to threats around the globe at speeds of Mach 20 or greater.”
Bomb the paupers in Somalia, Yemen or AfPak at Mach 20. That’s just what Americans clamor for.
This particular example of the empire’s dog crap was started in 2003, born of the pressing notion that the US needs to be able to bomb anyplace on the planet within a few minutes to an hour or two, max.
Cue “The National Anthem:”
If you have gold and your ass don’t smell, we won’t bomb you straight to Hell.
Think of it as a Keynesian jobs program for our men in the arms manufacturing industry who get erections over building things that are painted black and don’t work. Thank heaven for these chaps.
Number of Americans currently on food stamps: about 46 million. Or about 1 in every 6 or 7 Americans require food assistance.
If you need a daily example from the empire on where the real parasitism is, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better example than the “Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2.”
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08.09.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle at 9:39 am by George Smith
“Good boy” alert, but a different flavor, the national security expert in training.
Today, the idea is floated that the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy has been treated maybe a little too shabbily by whatever constitutes the analytic community.
The idea is that it’s sort of bad to laugh at the Cult if you’re unwilling to take the time to write a scholarly piece that soberly dissects the issue.
Yeah, right.
Here’s the key line, republished from the Atlantic (where I dumped on the guy who wrote it, Patrick Disney, a couple weeks ago) at a blog you’d never normally read:
To be honest, not a lot of folks have taken the EMP threat seriously enough to give it a thorough rebuttal … I myself have tried to dive into the issue as part of my graduate research, imagining various scenarios in which an electromagnetic pulse attack could seriously threaten the United States, its allies or its military. And although I still maintain that EMP is, in general, a laughably overhyped “threat,??? the issue deserves better treatment from the analytical community than it has gotten.
For shame.
Weeks ago, from the Atlantic, grad student Patrick Disney had this to say:
According to [Newt Gingrich], EMP may be the greatest single threat facing America today.
Fresh stuff.
Today, there’s more because — apparently — no one paid enough attention the first time:
Under what circumstances would a terrorist be unsatisfied with an old-fashioned, direct nuclear strike against a city? If the goal is to crash the US economy, the terrorist could hit Wall Street …
The national security man-in-training thinking about what would create the most fear.
Hitting Wall Street. First time I’ve heard that. Today.
Ahem. Hitting Wall Street with electromagnetic pulses, be it through bombs, rays or “direct nuclear strike,” is always one of the first things that occurs to people conducting these exercises. Scramble the finances!
Here’s a discussion on non-nuclear electromagnetic pulsing, before the House Joint Economic committee back in 1997.
Years ago I put this on the web as part of the old Crypt Newsletter page and in it, a retired general with six Purple Hearts, Robert Schweizer, goes on about the threat to everything, singling out the “banking” systems:
You can use [electromagnetic pulse weapons] against the banking system so that currency transactions and financial transactions cannot be made … This can be done with going to RadioShack and buying the components. I have in my briefcase a catalog from one of the companies that is putting out these devices that says, “We will show you how to do it. Everything is included. If it isn’t, we will help you get it with diagrams or other assistance.” And, the prices are from $35 to $200 to buy components to go and do a number on Wall Street.
The kind of scenario that one could envision would be the van with a radio frequency weapon in it and no exterior signs or indicators or signatures on it, just driving in circles or up and down the canyons of Wall Street pulsing with this almost limitless capacity to generate high power pulses through the walls of the financial and banking institutions on let’s say, a Sunday morning at 2:30 a.m. And, you can make as many passes as you need.
Again, it’s non-nuclear, but even way back then, the argument touched on the servant’s obsession with protecting the territory of the plutocracy. Schweizer died a number of years ago never having seen a single example of what he was warning about.
But back to Disney, who argues:
But this year has witnessed a shift. The message about the impending blackout has softened. The jihadi boogeyman, who until recently was perched in a rowboat off the East coast ready to launch a scud, has vanished. The new EMP monster under the bed is: solar weather?
Well, no, not precisely. Bad solar weather was a convenience, one that was simply added to the pie. He knows this.
Here’s the Heritage Foundation today, again going full throttle on the same old-same old nuclear burst angle, complete with the videos they love to produce.
All this to draw extra attention to something the Foundation tried last year: getting a national Electromagnetic Pulse Awareness Day on the calendar.
If you’re a normal human being, it’s almost impossible not to laugh at the conceit. Naturally, when it showed up the first time everyone ignored the request.
I tried to helpful, suggesting Roscoe Bartlett be put under a shroud on the floor of Congress to symbolically all the Americans who would be dead a year after the electricity vanished.
“March 23 should be designated as EMP Recognition Day,” wrote someone at the Heritage Foundation, at the time.
Yesterday, James Jay Carafano repeated the call for a special day, writing that the entire Earth “would most likely recede into [a] ‘new’ Dark Ages,” after an electromagnetic pulse attack on the US.
“An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) produced by the detonation of a nuclear weapon at high altitude or as the result of unusually powerful solar activity (often called severe space weather) could produce catastrophic destruction in the United States,” is the lede sentence.
As I’ve said, the bad solar weather hook is a convenience. And that’s because what the Cult of EMP Crazy chieftains want are only two quite specific things: more missile defense and to bomb Iran.
Heck, they even released a movie earlier this year, expressly to pimp for a strategic attack on that country.
And bad solar weather really doesn’t help them in these matters.
However, it does provide a convenient extra hook on which to hang opinion pieces on electromagnetic pulse attack.
Anyway, there’s still no shortage of the usual scenario-making.
From the obscure Investor’s Business Daily:
Tehran’s navy deploys ships to the Atlantic capable of launching long-range missiles. This is not a joke. This is a dress rehearsal for the day an EMP attack ends our way of life … A simple Scud missile, with a nuclear warhead, could be fired from an inconspicuous freighter in international waters off our coast and detonated high over the U.S.
It would wreak devastation on America’s technological, electrical and transportation infrastructure. Masked as a terrorist attack, Iran would have plausible deniability of any responsibility.
From the favorite newspaper of Ted Nugent, the Washington Times:
The Revolutionary Guards have successfully test-launched long-range ballistic missiles from a ship before, so the statement that they are arming some of the vessels with such missiles should worry the United States. An Iranian navy ship or any commercial vessel operated by the Iranians could easily launch a missile from outside the Gulf of Mexico and essentially cover most of the United States. Much more alarming is the fact that once in possession of a nuclear bomb, Iran could successfully carry out its promise to bring America to its knees by a successful electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on America.
“One nightmare scenario posed by the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States From Electromagnetic Pulse [Attack] was a ship-launched EMP attack against the United States by Iran, as this would eliminate the need for Iran to develop an ICBM to deliver a nuclear warhead against the U.S. and could be executed clandestinely, taking the U.S. by surprise …
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07.28.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons at 8:09 am by George Smith
I dumped on the mania of electromagnetic pulse weapons recently.
And the comments section wound up with a link to a southern California business, one that’s been around for years, always claiming wonderful inventions.
Except the inventions never do anything. They’re not really supposed to. It’s just corporate welfare for a nest of electrical engineers.
But the junk sure looks great.
Here’s the company:
SARA, Inc., creates custom solutions to complex problems for the defense and homeland security industry. We specialize in directed or detected wave energy from EMP and ELF to laser light, HPM and sound.
Our technologists harness electromagnetism, plasmas, acoustics, electronics, and processing to build practical applications for force protection, renewable energy …
You’ll have to visit the site to see the pretty pictures.
Here’s what looks like the world’s biggest high power microwave weapon. Actually, it’s only the antenna. The rest of it is — if they actually made it — would be as big as a double-tractor-trailer, which would do nothing interesting, anyway. Those guys do look proud, though.
Here’s more do-nothing devices, fruit of the fad belief about a decade ago that projecting high volume or ear-piercing sound would be a game-changing non-lethal weapon rather than something that just annoys the neighbors.
“Since 1992 SARA has developed and tested high power acoustic devices of all shapes and sizes ranging from sources the size of a pencil to the size of a compact car,” it reads. “The acoustic devices have been powered by bottled air …”
Yeah, well, there was that bit in the second Hulk movie, too. YouTube is also full of examples of this old “science” application, which was never much of a hot sale except in Pittsburgh, where one of them is used to irritate small crowds. (Commonly, these are LRADs, not produced by SARA, but with the same idiotic ideas firmly in place. They’re sold to foreign country and a small number of police departments in the US for use against people who aren’t expected to fight back.)
American innovation at work winning the future.
Where was I?
Back at SARA, there’s the abundant pollution free electricity program.
It sounds good but it’s only a molten hydroxide fuel cell. Not a unique idea, it’s never really caught on. For reasons which are fairly obvious if you think about the chemistry and energetics for a bit.
“Almost 3/4 of our technical staff has advanced degrees in engineering or physics from places like MIT, University of California, University of Illinois, SUNY, Georgia Tech and Stanford, yielding an attractive balance of PhD’s, old codgers and young chargers,” reads SARA’s “about” page. “The company is led by persons with extensive experience and training at upper levels of major defense contractors, including Northrop, Raytheon, TRW and Boeing …”
Proudly doing nothing but wasting taxpayer money in Cypress, CA, since 1989.
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07.26.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons at 7:22 am by George Smith
There’s an app for that.
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07.24.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons at 3:53 pm by George Smith
Late last week news spiked on alleged mainland Chinese interest in electromagnetic pulse bombs.
A Washington Post blog entry on the matters introduces the issue:
[A] newly disclosed U.S. intelligence assessment describes American concerns that China might be developing sophisticated weapons to zap the self-governing island’s electronics, or perhaps to use against an American aircraft carrier in the Taiwan Strait.
The 2005 assessment by the National Ground Intelligence Center, part of the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, details China’s experimentation with electromagnetic pulse and high-power microwave weapons, either of which could theoretically be used to shut down the communications systems and other electronics in Taiwan.
The mania over non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons is now close to two decades old. And none that are even remotely interesting have every been produced.
On the other hand, this has not seriously impeded widespread belief in them, demonstrated by the fact that now not a week goes by without a TV drama or movie using them as a plot devices.
The electromagnetic pulse weapon is a perfect magic wand, something which can be produced when it’s necessary for all electronics to fail in an exciting way.
For the Post blog article and the alleged news, the electromagnetic pulse bomb or ray has been rebranded as a high power microwave weapon. This is a semantic trick introduced by developers and the US military a few years ago to sidestep scorn heaped on the old claims about “electromagnetic pulse” bombs and rays.
It spawned this bit at the Post, including the capper sentence, which is just patently ludicrous:
The United States and other governments have long worked to perfect high-power microwave technology.
The problem, experts say, is that it’s been difficult to make the weapons both safe and effective. An HPM device would have a range of only a few hundred yards; weaponry that was designed to have a greater range could effectively set the atmosphere on fire.
Set the atmosphere on fire. A good editor might have immediately spiked that as an unprovoked attack on common sense.
However, the EMP/HPM crowd has played fast and loose with facts for close on twenty years. And they have been very good at getting the ludicrous into the news. The result has been that journalists and passers-by, people who do not know better, fall prey to the classic American trait of belief in utter bullshit because said bullshit is published in so many places.
This dates from the time of the Cardiff giant, at least.
The Cardiff giant was one of the most famous hoaxes from old America.
Andrew D. White, the first president of Cornell University and one of the “giant’s” earliest skeptics, remarked in his memoirs of the affair: “There was evidently a ‘joy in believing’ in the marvel, and this was increased by the peculiarly American superstition that the correctness of a belief is decided by the number of the people who can be induced to adopt it.”
Ukman runs down John Pike at Globalsecurity.Org, an agency for which I’ve been known to take on the role of “expert” on this or that having to do with national security affairs. And Pike is very well aware of the extreme scorn I’ve heaped on electromagnetic pulse weapons over the years.
For the Post, Pike delivered this:
“People have been talking about these things for many decades and they just haven’t gone anywhere??? …
All the same, given U.S. research efforts, Pike said it wasn’t surprising that the Chinese were pursuing the technology.
“One would be amazed if they were not doing this sort of thing,??? he said.
And this is a classic case of mirroring — a foreign power believes it should be in the business of trying to make electromagnetic pulse weapons because it’s military men have read about our efforts to make the same things for years. That no one actually ever makes them, or anything that actually works, is beside the point.
The problem with these types of weapons can be explained. But it’s never mentioned in news stories. Never.
Two years ago I put it this way on the old blog:
The fundamental problem associated with non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons is simple to describe.
And it’s never addressed, except through elliptical statements about limits of their “portability” and the ability to predictably “couple” the weapon’s electromagnetic effect to a target. The problem is this: dispersion cripples such notional weapons, or as a scientist might say, any effect is constrained by the law of inverse squares. Nature’s laws, fortunately for us, aren’t subject to whimsical change.
“The intensity of the influence at any given radius r is the source strength divided by the area of the sphere,” explains a page at a university physics department. “Being strictly geometric in its origin, the inverse square law applies to diverse phenomena. Point sources of gravitational force, electric field, light, sound or radiation obey the inverse square law. It is a subject of continuing debate with a source such as a skunk on top of a flag pole; will it’s smell drop off according to the inverse square law?”
A bit of scientific humor, the latter bit about the skunk.
But there is never any humor associated with stories of electromagnetic pulse bombs [and rays]. It is always deadly serious stuff.
Electromagnetic and/or high power microwave weapons are also plagued by classic bad science. That is, trivial or insignificant results are reinterpreted as spectacular.
The perfect example is cast by the infamous pain ray, made by Raytheon. For years the pain ray was advertised as something to revolutionize warfare.
When it finally arrived in some working fashion it was used only to shoot tech geek fan boys journalists who could be dependably relied upon to gush over the experience. However, the real world refused to go along with the rubbish. The pain ray was viewed as a short-range torture machine. It was shipped to Afghanistan and quickly withdrawn without firing a shot. At which point Raytheon began a marketing campaign to sell a smaller version for use on unruly convicts confined at state penitentiaries.
It’s also a given that electromagnetic pulse weapon projects always attract a fair number of kooks. Invariably, the kooks score publicity victories.
For years, the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department had a man who was always pushing them. He retired without ever actually seeing a practical version and the Los Angeles police force and sheriffs have not been poorly affected by the lack of access to electromagnetic pulse guns.
In the mid-Nineties a man named Winn Schwartau sponsored yearly “information warfare” conferences that were either alleged proving grounds for electromagnetic pulse rays and bombs or simple vehicles for salesmanship on the subject.
Infamously, Schwartau published a paper by someone named Carlo Kopp — (this common Google search trend on him is revealing) — describing the imminent arrival of electromagnetic pulse bombs and rays.
That “paper” was from 1996. And the future still hasn’t arrived for it.
However, Kopp’s paper was copied all through the US military where it successfully contaminated uncritical thinkers for a good long time.
Where is Kopp now?
Damned if I know.
Over the years, various kooks associated with electromagnetic weaponry have come and gone. Some have retired. One even died before he found the holy grail.
But the ranks of electromagnetic pulse nuts are never really thinned. There are always more kooks on the way.
The National Ground Intelligence Center assessment on China’s interest in the electromagnetic pulse weapon crap is here.
On page four of the eight page scan, it reads:
It is widely acknowledged that (conventional) explosively powered [radio frequency] sources with military application are a difficult technological hurdle (despite some overly hyped Internet articles on e-bombs to the contrary), and it is very unlikely that China could have overcome these hurdles.
Over the years, I’ve been responsible for damaging many of these articles. What the assessment does not mention is that defense contractors in the pay of the US military were those who were very guilty of the hype thing.
A listing of various kooks going on about electromagnetic pulse weapons in the mainstream news — from 1997 — by me.
Notoriously, just before we charged into Iraq an editor from one of the big news agencies called to ask how journalists could protect their laptops and phones from the electromagnetic pulse weapons we were allegedly about to use on Saddam Hussein.
The man wanted to know if they could store their stuff in a microwave oven, the reasoning being that if a microwave kept radiation in during cooking, it might keep it out, too.
True story. No joke, sadly. Electromagnetic pulse weapons over Iraq in 2003. Now you know why we won that so easily.
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07.18.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Imminent Catastrophe at 1:18 pm by George Smith
You think they’d make graduate students a little smarter, particularly if they’re going to contribute something to the home of all good boys, The Atlantic.
Some dweeb featherbedding a future resume from Yale discovers the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy and Newt Gingrich’s role as one of its old chieftains.
“According to Gingrich, EMP may be the greatest single threat facing America today,” writes Patrick Disney.
That’s fresh.
Cult of EMP Crazy — from the archives.
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07.11.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Decline and Fall at 12:49 pm by George Smith
A classic on the Empire’s Dog Feces beat today, courtesy of one of the many cheerleaders for arms-manufacturing disguised as journalists, W. J. Hennigan.
Hennigan’s e-mail must now be jammed with junket offers from the domestic arms industry. And that’s because he regularly acts as a stenographer for Raytheon project developers.
Today it’s e-warfare, specifically the EA-18 Growler fighter jet. It’s used now over Libya, part of the standard US military policy of bombing the paupers and pantywaists of the world, enemies with militaries so ineffective, outnumbered and outgunned we could beat them with stuff that’s fifteen years old.
A few excerpts:
The Pentagon is seeking to increase its technology research budget, which includes electronic warfare, to $12.2 billion in fiscal 2012 from $11.8 billion — and that doesn’t include spending in the classified portion of the budget.
[And Hennigan is doing his part.]
With a price tag of about $74 million each, Boeing Co.’s Growler is a showpiece of American electronic know-how with high-powered radar systems made by Raytheon Co., and tactical radar jammers made by ITT Electronic Systems and Northrop Grumman Corp.
But as the Growler enters wartime service, work has already begun on a new jamming device for the jet to give it an even greater ability to befuddle the enemy.
Four aerospace giants are competing for a jamming device contract estimated at $2 billion: Northrop, BAE Systems, and Raytheon Co and a team of ITT and Boeing. A total of $168 million has been handed out by the Navy to the companies for research and development on the program.
The story does not mention the US destroyed Moe’s air force and air defense system with cruise missiles and strategic bombing months ago.
And as anyone who has watched video of smart bombs targeting Moe’s feeble navy knows, the threat environment looks nil.
Jets that can fly faster and jam more powerfully are about as necessary as you needing a new pair of motorcycle boots to stomp ants on the sidewalk. Your old shoes work fine, thank you.
And no Empire’s Dog Feces story is complete without Brookings Institution fugleman, Peter Singer, for an obvious and somewhat awkward comment, delivered to seem gnomic:
“War fighters have gone from using physical weapons like spears and knives, to chemical weapons such as gunpowder and explosives, to electronics with radio waves and computer codes,” said Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It’s a natural evolution in warfare.”
“This is the new generation of electronic warfare,” said a saleman for Raytheon, “[a] former Marine Corps pilot,” to the newspaper. “The enemy should never know what’s coming their way.”
And they won’t as long as Uncle Sam keeps spending more than the top ten other militaries in the world combined on this stuff. However, at home, everyone else is left to rot, making it increasingly obvious that there will be less and less to defend. From the depredations and the calumnies of those many pantywaists.
These types of stories aren’t even hard to do. As a frontpage thing in the actual paper edition of the newspaper, even more indefensible. The reporter gets a trip, with a photographer, to go see the military hardware, escorted around by US military and arms manufacturer types. Who all spout some great-sounding bullshit about American military technology.
In terms of journalism, it’s right up there with writing laudatory pieces about pop stars, sprinkled with pictures from recent concerts and comments from record label flacks and fans.
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07.10.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism, Fiat money fear and loathers, Imminent Catastrophe at 9:32 am by George Smith
Perhaps it’s the heat.
In any case, the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy has been getting caught in the DD blog spam filter this week, first for its Internet radio show.
And now for a techno-thriller posted on-line, written by someone who cleaves to the “Ludwig Van Mises Institute,” an eye-rolling place dedicated to promoting goldbuggism and persuading assorted nuts plutocrats to hide their money in tax-dodge banking nations like Switzerland and Lichtenstein.
Here’s the spam synopsis:
“A short story showing how powerful elite Washington & London interests and central bankers could manipulate American foreign policy using a black flag event in order to guarantee the American dollar remains the world’s reserve currency. Follow what could be the next Middle East conflict in the Persian Gulf region involving the US, UK & Iran over the dollar and oil reserves and the resulting [electromagnetic pulse attack] attack and world financial crisis starting in the Middle East.”
Yeah, I know, I can’t follow the logic, either.
Be that as it may, there are threads connecting the Cult of EMP Crazy and the fiat money kooks. They mostly have to do with extreme right philosophies about imminent catastrophe linked to conspiracy from the Middle East and the collapse of American civilization. And, of course, the dollar.
DD spent a couple minutes reading the story, or what there is of it.
A poor man’s piece of Tom Clancy fan fiction, it’s a tale of a provoked war with Iran. Iran retaliates by launching an electromagnetic pulse attack on the oil fields, rather than the usual target — the United States.
The price of gold soars, the dollar “dies” and that’s the end of the installment.
There’s a stalwart old general, set up to be the hero, who doesn’t do anything in the first chapter but worry about US currency and sovereign debt.
A sample. so you get the drift (no link — Google it if you must):
Later following the 2008 financial crash [the general] delved even into finance and politics with Wood’s Meltdown book and then Ron Paul’s End the Fed. Although he didn’t vote for Ron Paul in 2008 because he thought it improper to mix politics with military service, he had begun to get a thorough education in what had happened to the Constitution and his country he had sworn an allegiance to defend.
He privately attended several Mises Institute events and when at home logged on to read The Mises Blog, LewRockwell.com and The Daily Bell almost every day. He read Hayek and Ludwig von Mises including even Human Action.
That’s draw-you-in stuff.
I also leaned William Forstchen’s One Second After is Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s favorite English-language book. Presumably because it’s about the end of American civilization after an electromagnetic pulse attack.
If you dig around enough in this type of material, eventually you find the Ludwig Van Mises fiat money kooks are, like the Cult of EMP Crazy, very fond of videos with high production values.
For example, here’s one (do go see it for a titter) that illustrates the world view of the paranoid follower of Van Mises nicely, while also advertising other spell-binding video tales with titles like Dollar Death Blow, Freedom Assassins, and Internet Kill Switch.
I was hoping for some stuff on achieving and preserving wealth through Bitcoins. But alas, not obviously among the titles.
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07.08.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons at 8:34 am by George Smith
From the Dept. of Very Small Laughs, EMPAct America, the umbrella organization also referred to as the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy has hired a spammer to advertise their latest venture, I guess because it is under-appreciated at this time of national travail.
It’s an Internet radio iPod broadcast called, obviously enough, EMPAct Radio.
This week one of the spam filters on my domain picked up a couple of attempt to upload a canned advertisement for it into comments.
No link, it’s easy enough to Google. The lead-in, to urgent blip-blipping music:
“You’re listening to EMPAct Radio, the only radio network dedicated to addressing electromagnetic pulse and other threats that could end American civilization as we know it … For you nation, for your family, and for your way of life … it’s EMPAct Radio!”
“This should be a great show!” adds the host before I move on. Sales pitches for Electronic Armageddon and America in the Dark DVDs included.
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