02.01.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Imminent Catastrophe at 2:10 pm by George Smith
Next week, the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy/bomb Iran/missile defense lobby will roll out its new ‘blockbuster’ documentary, Iranium.
DD is so there.
The production values on the website, here, are top notch.
Starring the usual cast — Frank Gaffney, Clifford May and assorted perps from the GOP far right — DD readers might also want to reserve their seats now.
Some dude, Robert Dreyfuss, at the Nation blogs about a screening of it at the Heritage Foundation — here.
Dreyfuss has apparently just discovered the favorite meme the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, the one it has peddled since 2008 or so:
Perhaps the high point of the film was when Frank Gaffney, the extreme right militarist who leads an outfit called the Center for Security Policy in Washington—waxed poetic about how Iran could soon be able to detonate a nuclear “electromagnetic pulse??? (EMP) weapon in the American heartland that would, he warned, “take down the entire power grid??? across the United States. Not only that, said Gaffney and others, but this “strategic EMP attack??? would destroy everything in the United States that relies on electronics, and with a few years “nine out of every ten Americans could be dead.??? This, Gaffney warned, with a serious face that made it clear that he wasn’t joking, was to carry out Iran’s “stated purpose of bringing about a world without America.???
What Dreyfuss and the Nation may have missed: The Cult has been making this movie over and over for the last couple of years, from shorter documentaries to commercials for YouTube.
Now the Nation’s audience of progressives who like their stories dressed up as new intellectual air-freshener get the scoop.
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01.31.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons at 11:30 am by George Smith
Via Cryptome, a USAF document, large in size, listing the definitions (and sources thereof) for everything mentioned about non-lethal weapons from the past twenty years. At least.
Although the war on terror has been hard on the efficacy of alleged non-lethal wonder weapons, the crackpot nature of most of them remains vital.
Outside of Tasers (which are demonstrably not non-lethal), tear gases, water cannon trucks, pepper sprays, flash bang grenades and beanbag ammo loads, non-lethal weapons ‘science research’ has been virtually a complete zero, from worthless gadgets to pure fictions except in the minds of developers and wishful thinkers.
One of the best examples is the never-ending story of the pain ray. In development for at least a decade, touted as a revolution in military affairs and on network tv, it was taken to Afghanistan and brought back — silently — without firing a shot.
Back at the work of shooting reporters for the sake of regular news stories, a variant of it is being peddled into prisons where targets can’t retaliate against it.
“Non-lethal Weapons: Terms & References” contains more non-lethal weapon arcana than you can shake a bundle of sticks at.
Produced by the US Air Force’s Institute for National Security Studies in Denver, Colorado, it indirectly affords a look at the large industry devoted to making shit that really doesn’t work. But which makes for delightful storytelling.
Some of the examples:
Barrier Foam, Sticky: A name given to a polymer-based superadhesive agent … It is extremely persistent and is virtually impossible to remove without a liquid solvent which has a pleasant citrus odor … Sticky foam came to public attention on February 28, 1995 when US marines used it in Mogadishu, Somalia …
Most Americans remember Somalia from Black Hawk Down.
The use of sticky foam in Somalia is a type of rewrite of history, one of very thin sourcing, in this case notably, Sid Heal, a commander in the LA County Sheriff’s Department who spent a career promoting non-lethal weapons. To little effect. For example, unless DD has missed something, sticky foam never made an appearance in southern California.
In fact, after fifteen years in southern California, evien with a cheerleader like Heal in law enforcement the entire time, use of prosaic non-lethals is just what you’d expect. Tasers, beanbag loads and beating people up through weight of numbers. And a few years ago a judge was reprimanded for famously shocking a defendant, bound in an electrocuting truss, for trying to speak up too much in court.
Sticky foam, however, is well-known for having been used on the Incredible Hulk in the first movie, directed by Ang Lee. Where it failed spectacularly.
Another fascinating reference from non-lethal cracked pottery:
Biotechnical, Pheromones: The chemical substances released by animals to influence physiology or behavior of other members of the same species. One use of pheromones, at the most elemental level, could be to mark target individuals, then to release bees to attack them. This would result in forcing them to exit an area or abandon resistance.
Apparently, bees were wished for in 1995. Earlier this decade, bomb-sniffing bees were thought to be something that might be useful in Iraq.
However, bees have proven stubbornly unsuitable for general use by police forces and the US military. Poor bees. It wasn’t their fault.
Also scintillating, this bit of fantasy, beloved for years:
Reactant, Liquid Metal Embrittlement: Agents operate by altering the molecular structure of base metals or alloys and could significantly interfere with the operation of aircraft, vehicles, metal treads and bridge supports to which they were applied …
Reactant, LME Graffiti: Graffiti used to mask an LME strike against a bridge or other target. Great potential for terrorist use. Example: Phone call to law enforcement stating than an LME strike has been used against one of a number of bridges in a city using red LME graffiti.
Good thing it doesn’t exist or LA would really be in trouble.
Full of the intriguing rubbish of non-lethal fact and mythology, “Non-Lethal Weapons: Terms and References” — is here.
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01.25.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons at 10:35 am by George Smith
It’s not uncommon to see stories on the US military filled with material that appears to not even have the slightest connection with reality.
So yesterday, when I was passed a journo query as part of the repping I do for GlobalSecurity.Org, it was quickly realized we’d run into one of those instances.
This concerns the Navy’s Next Generation Jammer.
The make-stuff-up part can be illustrated by simply republishing the lede grafs from a recent Aviation Week piece by David Fulghum:
A top U.S. Navy official acknowledges that the service’s Next Generation Jammer (NGJ) — designed for the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, EA-18G Growler and F-35 — will feature a network invasion capability.
Such a capability was demonstrated a few years ago by the U.S. Air Force, which created a focused datastream with its EC-130 Compass Call aircraft that could be filled with invasive algorithms and fired into the antenna of an integrated air defense system and its wirelessly connected missile launching vehicles. The effects on the enemy network were monitored by an RC-135 Rivet Joint. This network invasion effort was known as “Suter.???
The consensus view, as the mail went back and forth between Globalsec and your host was that the alleged capability, also reported briefly by others, was bullshit.
The Aviation Week story is four whole paragraphs.
Historically, the claims of the US using, or wishing to use, jammers on aircraft to do “network invasion” go back to close to the first Gulf War. Over the years they’ve also been closely associated with stories about electromagnetic pulsing and those wonderful EMP guns and bombs that never seem to arrive, except in computer games.
There’s never been a shortage of print on the subject.
At the time I edited the Crypt Newsletter and had developed a little joke glossary called the Joseph K Guide to deal with such things, usually centered on claims made by the military, or technology vendors and politicians on the primacy of soon-to-be-here awesome devices.
The old guide, coincidentally brought up by a reader last week, is here.
This old coinage jumped out:
The Daily Crapper: your local newspaper.
Usage: The Daily Crapper featured science and technology reporters who often turned in stories that claimed soon computers would be made of DNA and protein or that by the year 2006 the U.S. Army would defeat enemies through the clever use of telepathy and electric rays.
Another factor that’s worth consideration in such stories has to do with extraordinary claims. In real science, one needs extraordinary evidence to back such claims up. Not just, say, a couple paragraphs or a ten page .pdf file that uses argument from authority.
And this also ties in with Langmuir’s Laws of Pathological Science. Or bad cutting edge science — often practiced by the US military and its many vendors.
The basic tenets of this type of badness are here.
To which one might add the obvious addendum: In the US press, the rightness of a thing is determined by the number of others willing to adopt the same view. Particularly if accompanied by idiotic jargon like, for instance, ‘invasive algorithms.’
And so it’s all rather common for obvious professional reasons.
When reality is too dull, when you’re in hot competition with others who will print anything, or when cable television is full of miraculous shows on dubious cutting edge technology, the strong need to get going.
So go with the made-up stuff.
And if you’re an admiral or a vendor in hot competition for budget dollars, you need to be strong in this area, too.
You know in your heart that it just makes sense.
The Joseph K Guide shows it age — the mid-Nineties. But it’s still worth a couple titters.
To wit:
fictive environment: a new description for psychological operations against an enemy; or, the creation of a world of information fraud surrounding consumers, marks or targets.
Usage: In the mid-Nineties, the business of a significant number of Americans armed with computers became the spinning of fictive environments, the aim of which was to defraud others of cash money.
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01.18.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle at 11:26 pm by George Smith
Upholding the Huffington Post’s reputation for worthless flake news on anything remotely related to arms developer megacorporations, aerospace and technology, this article on prototype images Northrop Grumman, Lockheed and Boeing in collaboration with NASA are using to soak the taxpayer this year:
Get ready for the next generation of passenger airplanes.
NASA has taken the wraps off three concept designs for quiet, energy efficient aircraft that could potentially be ready to fly as soon as 2025, joining these planes of the future (and these). The designs come from Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and The Boeing Company. In the final months of 2010, each of these companies won a contract from NASA to research and test their concepts during 2011.
Click that link.
Yes, that s— looks just like what Nick Fury will be getting into to fly across the heartland in a few years. Perhaps with 100,000 pounds of JDAMs or a couple hundred troops in a military exercise on the way to Diego Garcia. While we go to work for nine dollars an hour at an athletic apparel and sneakers store selling stuff made in China.
And the third one, a sop to toss at commercial flight, will never happen.
Onward, forward and upward. More delusional garbage, please!
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01.17.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Cyberterrorism at 11:22 am by George Smith
By now you have heard of or read the exciting story of Stuxnet as a joint Israeli-US cyberweapon. The first of its kind, setting back Iran’s nuclear program for years. Ushering in a new age of cyberwar, it demonstrates the application of the neatest high-tech braininess in malware creation. And so on.
The new ages of cyberwar have been coming for awhile — well over a decade. But they never arrive. Or they have in various ways, just not quite as billed and conflict remains pretty much as always. That is, one needs to make a computer program physically damaging.
Which is where Stuxnet has fit the bill.
Briefly, the received wisdoms, collected by the Times for a cracking good read, describes Stuxnet as actually causing Iran’s uranium centrifuges to tear themselves apart. That is, by taking over the controlling software and forcing an unbalanced operation while reporting that all was OK at the front desk.
The fly in the ointment, and apparently one weak link in Iran’s nuclear program, is the centrifuge in question, called the P-1, sold to Iran by Pakistan.
It’s a crap piece of highly-engineered kit required to work reliably under a great deal of physical stress. However, one doesn’t read this in the NY Times piece until we’re almost at the end of the story.
Reports the Times:
But the United States and its allies ran into the same problem the Iranians have grappled with: the P-1 is a balky, badly designed machine. When the Tennessee laboratory shipped some of its P-1’s to England, in hopes of working with the British on a program of general P-1 testing, they stumbled, according to nuclear experts.
“They failed hopelessly,??? one recalled, saying that the machines proved too crude and temperamental to spin properly.
The New York Times article reports as elegantly and with the same inarguable finality one might see or read from Alex Jones and his many exposes on conspiracy and international doings.
Weaving together the lore on Stuxnet, which has been building for months, it employs anonymous intelligence from unnamed sources. It tells of a plan — a collaboration of Israel and the US, to install their own P-1 centrifuge cascades so as to study the shortcomings of the Iranian production facilities. And eventually glomming onto the idea, a little serendipitously, that controller software could be subverted in an attack on them.
At which point, work went forward to put Stuxnet together and test it on an Israeli P-1 centrifuge cascade secretly installed at Dimona.
Now, here’s the thing: A named expert on Israel’s nuclear program told the times that “Israel succeeded — with great difficulty — in mastering the [P-1] centrifuge technology.”
So, reiterating, the P-1 is a crap centrifuge which needs a lot of work to sustain. It has a good failure rate all by itself. The United States could not make them work. But the Israelis, after a great deal of effort, did.
According to the New York Times story, the Iranians have had a great deal of P-1 centrifuge failure. Which might be expected after reading the material on the nature of the machine.
Circumstantially, the New York Times story, in sources and tone, attributes virtually all of it to Stuxnet.
Maybe it’s absolutely true. Or maybe only partially so. And perhaps the P-1 centrifuges have bedeviled the Iranian bomb program all along because they are rubbish, with or without state-operated malware added.
If some Iranian nuclear scientists could be persuaded to send material to WikiLeaks …
For current purposes it’s good to look at the story from the perspective that, as time goes on, it will grow in stature and mythic proportion. It will be cited time after time in every news story and paper on cyberwar ever written. And because of this it will have a continuing effect on secret military policy on the development of more malware cyberweapons, which will always be green-lighted, no matter how bad the ideas are.
I’ve argued before that there’s no deterrent to nations like the US or Israel tossing a cyberweapon at the world network. In this case, all the justifications are about stopping the Iran bomb program. But the art of virus-writing, even from its crudest days when done by kids, has always been loaded with justifications.
Ours will just be better. Or if not better just more secret and impossible to influence. Trust us. We’re responsible. And never bad international neighbors. Bad ideas with consequences unforeseen down the road never go to our heads.
If one believes all of the New York Times story there is also some good news in it. And it’s not necessarily the part about knocking out 1,000 centrifuges.
It’s that the development of Stuxnet, as reported, is beyond the capabilities of those who routinely write worms for criminal purposes. That coterie doesn’t have the resources to build something like a mock centrifuge facility and then test things on it.
However, since the history of malware distribution shows that whatever gets put on the world network gets to contribute its various bits and pieces to everyone else writing bad stuff.
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01.05.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Made in China at 11:38 am by George Smith
The Chinese make many things. To our regret.
And they make things just good enough. Which really isn’t very good at all but when one has no choice in the matter, crap magically becomes the new excellence. Because it’s all you can afford and it’s all that’s in stores.
So socks that develop holes after a couple washings, wooden painted toilet seats that blister and crack a week after purchase or stub wrenches with no burrs become the new normal. Heck, you can still use a toilet seat that’s blistered or which immediately took up a yellow stain. It’s just unsightly but not quite useless.
Then there is the regular parade of stories about new Chinese weapons.
In these stories one hardly ever reads reasonable doubt about Chinese manufacturing skills or why one should think they can make alleged superweapons any better than the usual stuff.
Today’s Chinese whoopie cushion is the J-20 “stealth fighter.”
Here it is, the hot item at GlobalSecurity.Org. Ooh, pretty!
“Chinese combat aviation has made remarkable strides in recent years, moving from a collection of obsolete aircraft that would have provided a target-rich environment to potential adversaries,” it reads. “Today China flies hundreds of first rate aircraft, and even flies more Sukhoi Flankers than Russia …”
It adds that Chinese capabilities are still twenty years behind the US.
Reauters found an American military man to put it in perspective. In other words, to show the blistering toilet seat capability:
China is still years away from being able to field a stealth aircraft, despite the disclosure of images indicating that it appears to have a working prototype, a U.S. Navy official said on Wednesday …
“We’re anticipating China to have a fifth-generation fighter … operational right around 2018 …”
2018.
In 2018, the middle class will be mostly gone, the little still left having been shipped off to China. Except, of course, robot weapons manufacturing.
Now let’s divert.
Every Predator drone in action in the wars costs $4.5 million, according to the New York Times. They are not made in China.
“The Air Force’s fleet has grown to 195 Predators and 28 Reapers, a new and more heavily armed cousin of the Predator. Both models are made by General Atomics, a contractor based in San Diego,” reported the Times piece. “Including drones that the Army has used to counter roadside bombs and tiny hand-launched models that can help soldiers to peer past the next hill or building, the total number of military drones has soared to 5,500, from 167 in 2001.”
195 + 28 = 223.
223 x $4,500,000 = 1,003,500,000
From the San Diego Union Tribune, one day ago:
The Defense Department says it has awarded $85 million to General Atomics Aeronautical Systems of Poway to provide logistical support for its Warrior A/Warrior Block 0 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which is being developed for the Army. The work will be performed in Poway but represents support to four unnamed sites outside of the continental United States. The company still refers to the UAV as Warrior, although it is technically known as the MQ-1C Grey Eagle. The aircraft is a refined version of the company’s well known MQ-1 Predator drone, and is part of the Army’s Extended-Range Multi-Purpose UAV program.
According to Washington Technology, General Atomics 2010 revenue was $661,619,386.
For 2011, “[more] than $2 billion will be used to purchase unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, which the Obama administration has used increasingly over the past year to target suspected terrorist hideouts in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” stated a news report from TruthOut, published way back in February.
By contrast, the FDA — which handles food and drug consumer protections for the entire United States — is requesting $4.03 billion to “Transform Food Safety System, Invest in Medical Product Safety, [and provide] Regulatory Science.”
As a thought exercise consider that General Atomics and US manufacturing of killer drones sops up at least half, maybe more, than an important domestic US regulatory agency spends for the betterment, health and welfare of society.
General Atomics employs 5,000 people. The FDA, by contrast, employs a bit over twice that.
As another thought exercise, consider that a domestic arms manufacturer of flying killer robots and very little else is now half the size of the regulatory agency for food and drugs in allegedly the foremost of western nations.
Ah, so where were we? Lost. Talking about some rubbish having to do with a Chinese stealth fighter.
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01.03.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism at 2:46 pm by George Smith
A few alert readers may have already seen Tom Tomorrow’s two recent cartoons summing up the “Year In Crazy.”
A free No-Prize if you can guess who this is before looking at the rest of the post!
Got the answer yet?
It’s one of the junior leaders of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy — Frank Gaffney.
Gaffney shows up much more than we’d like in the Cult of EMP Crazy tab. In the past couple years he’s also distinguished himself as a birther and more recently as one of the co-authors of the “Team-B report” aimed at purportedly describing the threat of Sharia law to our precious bodily fluids American courts.
You can review a recent post here — containing some of Gaffney’s greatest hits, including a speech on electromagnetic pulse doom, from YouTube.
H/t to Jason at Armchair Generalist where the Tomorrow cartoons were syndicated.
Related: Today, now on Fox News, because there’s mountains of snow outside in the east, global warming is disproved!
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12.20.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Imminent Catastrophe at 10:41 am by George Smith
UPDATED
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy will use any right wing political handle to advance its agenda. Currently, it’s ratification of the START treaty.
Yes, a treaty which is aimed at controlling and curbing nuclear proliferation and reducing the weapons, in the hands of the Cult, does no such thing.
In fact, just the opposite. It threatens US civilization because it allegedly has a negative effect on the building of unlimited ballistic missile defenses which are, of course, needed to protect US civilization from a catastrophic end brought about by electromagnetic pulse attack, launched by terrorists who have obtained a nuclear weapon.
But new START is designed to get us back into Russia and the business of monitoring and securing nuclear weapons so that this is less likely.
If you think about this presentation too much, the rickety quality begins to make your head hurt.
But that’s not the point. The idea is to repeat the meretricious argument so many times it becomes an embedded truth.
And while electromagnetic pulse doom hasn’t developed a significant constituency clamoring for protection from it, the model used to to try and establish it is the same as has been used to embed other myths (often called “zombie lies”) — like massive growth by the US government while everyone else was taking the chop or that global warming is a hoax.
The issue of an electromagnetic pulse ending US civilization is much more fringe. It’s good for weekly television shows and movies but not cut from the same universally appealing cloth as other popular zombie myths. However, the lack of enthusiasm for it, as compared to others, among the right has definitely impeded the effort to make it a more shared story.
And it is also not as energizing as the dose of good old spite calling for blocking of START ratification because the Republican Party is furious over the repeal of DADT and any other legislation passed in the lame-duck session. And, of course, because it’s part of the strategy to destroy the president.
In any case, the head cheerleader for this obscure meme is, as usual, the Heritage Foundation.
In the past, I’ve described Heritage in this manner:
Heritage … mentioned last week, is a propaganda organ for the pushing of far right policy dressed up as scholarship.
It gathers various suspect ideas — that healthcare reform must be defeated, that the welfare class is getting too much in entitlements and undeserved stuff, that the rich are being taxed too much, that gays are assaulting the precious institution of marriage, that global warming, while no longer a cruel hoax, if dealt with will result in diminished US business, poorness for the wealthy and a much weakened military, that poor people who aren’t white are unjustly sopping up national treasure that could be spent on missile defense, a project which spreads freedom around the world, that the auto-industry bailout and cash-for-clunkers took money away from freedom-ensuring missile defense, etc — and employs its stable of bought-and-paid-for experts to craft pieces which exhort readers on the excellence of such beliefs.
A snapshot from Heritage’s website today:
Breaking wind: Vulnerable. End of the world. Armageddon.
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12.16.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons at 3:20 pm by George Smith
DD watched AMC’s The Walking Dead.
It was slightly better than average television, some episodes turned over to what seemed like interminable do-nothing-ism until zombies were thrown into a scene.
I’ll get to why I mentioned it up top in a minute.
Today’s bit on the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy takes you out to a newspaper article, one in a school of many devoted to the eternal flogging of William Forstchen’s One Second After.
All Cult of EMP Crazy stories must center on the end-of-US-civilization meme. Without it, you cannot proceed with the narrative/argument on why something must be done.
In this, they’re very much like zombie movies.
Apocalypse descends, intrepid bands of stragglers try to survive the vicious hordes from the cities.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see the corollary.
Since we’ve been warned about zombies so many times and seen what they can do, wouldn’t it be prudent to begin hardening our infrastructure and augmenting our emergency supplies to survive them now?
Alas, it never works out that way.
From a Macon newspaper:
As one would expect, the cities are the most dangerous areas. As food runs out, desperation forces many to turn to consuming the flesh of their fellow men. The most brutal, bloodthirsty lost souls of society don’t just do so to survive, but choose to wholeheartedly embrace cannibalism.
The zombies fat and lazy urban dwellers storm out of the cities, coming for the new survivalists’ stuff. And their flesh!
Congressional nuisance Roscoe Bartlett makes an appearance, described in 2005:
“[Preparing for zombies electromagnetic pulse attack] has no constituency. It has no support. Maybe if we can raise public awareness, the public will finally demand that some solutions be made before it happens.???
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12.02.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, War On Terror at 10:53 am by George Smith
Writes ph2dot1:
[al Qaeda’s mubtakar of death] is resurrected/recycled from time to time (google for numerous links), requiring additional debunking …
And now, November 2010, the DHS in collaboration with ITACG has issued a Unclassified/For Official Use Only Roll Call Release warning about [it again] …
ph2dot1 includes a pic of the same old Dept. of Homeland Security prototype cyanide bomb made back in 2006, now recirculated with more pix, probably from the same sessions.
The DHS ‘mubtakar’ was an improvised weapon made up from a widely distributed al Qaeda drawing.
Despite much press and celebrity journalist blandishments that the mubtakar had been poised to deliver catastrophe into the New York subway, it never amounted to much. However, I bet it has shown up in a couple TV dramas based on the war on terror.
A DD source attested one had been attempted years ago in Afghanistan without effect.
Strapped-down chicken testing of ‘perfectly made’ improvised chemical weaponry never counts — except in bulletins of this nature.
An older picture of the DHS-made mubtakar duplicate is posted here at old DD blog.
Write-ups of the pushback on received wisdoms from the media and analysis of the original documents are here and here.
Again, hat tip to ph2dot1.
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