From the Daily Heil, covering “Patrick Calvar, head of the General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI) – France’s equivalent of MI5:”
[Calvar] said he feared a move towards car bombs and more conventional explosive devices, allowing terrorists to attack without risking their own lives, and that he believed Islamist extremists will look to use booby-trapped cars in the future.
He said: ‘I’m convinced they’ll go to booby-trapped vehicles and bombs, thus upping their power.
‘We know very well they’re going to use this mode of operating.
‘They’re going to end up sending commandos whose mission is to organise terrorist campaigns without necessarily going to the assault with death awaiting them.’
He also raised the possibility of extremists using ‘dirty bombs’ and the natural poison ricin, saying several radical groups had studied the toxin in the past.
The Armed Islamic Group, which caused terror in Algeria in the early 1990s, was looking to put the substance on car door handles to create a panic effect, Mr Calvar said, and this tactic was also studied in northern Iraq and in the remote Pankisi Valley in Georgia, once a stronghold of Chechen militants.
Ricin on door handles. No. Too big a molecule, a protein made of two subunits, to pass through skin. Can’t happen.
On the other hand, you can cause a panic if enough people actually believe it does. Which this article is not helping with, particularly.
In any case, if terrorists actually are still entertaining the idea that ricin can be used as a contact poison, it shows they haven’t progressed on the subject in the last fifteen years.
The Wood Green poison plot was also said to have toyed with the idea of mass contact poisoning. A Nivea skin creme pot was found with a liquid extract of tobacco mixed in with it. The idea, one presumes, similar to a nicotine skin patch.
As to ricin, only 20some castor seeds were found, all but one in a jewelry tin.
The United States is producing more research scientists than academia can handle.
We have been told time and again that the United States needs more scientists, but when it comes to some of the most desirable science jobs — tenure-track professorships at universities, where much of the exciting work is done — there is such a surplus of Ph.D.s that in the most popular fields, like biomedicine, fewer than one in six has a chance of joining the club in the foreseeable future.
While they try to get a foot in the door, many spend years after getting their Ph.D. as poorly paid foot soldiers in a system that can afford to exploit them.
Over the years I’ve infrequently posted on the matter. The picture is far more complex than the usual piece that delivers the observation that the US doesn’t interest enough people in science.
To the contrary, it does.
“Many spend years in a holding pattern as postdocs, which are temporary positions, working for a professor and being paid from the professor’s research grant,” Kolate writes.
It’s from The UpShot blog and, by definition, is short for the subject. Still there’s a lot to unpack and I am certain there are many research scientists and postdocs nodding their heads, newly minted and from decades back.
The symbol of the Strat electric guitar & big “Freedom,” at the — ahem — Quicken Loans complex in Cleveland, setting the standard:
“In Cleveland, officials are estimated to have spent at least $20 million in federal funds on equipment ranging from bicycles and steel barriers to 2,000 sets of riot gear, 2,000 retractable steel batons, body armor, surveillance equipment, 10,000 sets of plastic flex cuffs, and 16 laser aiming systems, which a technology retailer describes as being used for night direct-fire aiming and illumination.???
Because freedom is not free, particularly the crowd suppression and riot control parts.
The Race For The Presidency: Two New Yorkers (more or less) fight for the Presidency and the country loses. I tend to agree with the four more years chorus but that ain’t happening. Really, what we have is two septuagenarians fighting over which privileged white asshole will run the country.
“What is it that American police officers lack? Racial tolerance, common sense, empathy? Well, all of those things, plus something else: A sacrificial sense of duty that can override self-preservation. Their first thought on encountering a person with a gun, toy gun or cellphone should not be ‘how am I going to protect myself?’ but ‘how am I going to handle/defuse this situation with minimal harm to everyone?’ We do not send firefighters into burning buildings to see whether they can get out alive.” — Barbara Ehrenreich, 07/11/16, FB
Do you need fashionable doorstops? These Tom Clancy books are the perfect answer for your home, heavy at 600 pages and with shiny and colorful quality jackets. Better still, Clancy’s audience and publisher don’t even seem to have noticed he died in 2012. $1.99 each. Now that’s a bargain.
“Until you see what we do, it’s hard to really understand the mission impact music can have,??? Senior Master Sgt. Ryan Carson said in a phone interview from Doha, Qatar, where his Air Force rock band, Max Impact, is deployed. (They can’t even think of a band name that isn’t a grim joke to everybody else on the receiving end.)
“In recent months, he and his five band mates have played in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and a number of what he called “undisclosed locations,??? performing popular songs in Arabic for foreign dignitaries, troops and children, as well as globally recognized American rock anthems by groups like Journey and Bon Jovi.
“We are allowing people to relax, connect, have meaningful interactions. For a lot of these people, it leaves a really lasting, positive impression of our country and our military,??? he said.
And these are not tunes played by the public relations brigade of the American Wehrmacht. Listen, guys, you don’t rock, you never will, no way. It was never about dressing up and doing glee club in the Vichy cities of the Middle East.
Once there may have been a good and noble purpose for military bands. Heck, I saw them when I was a kid. A US Army rock band came and played my high school in Pine Grove. They did James Brown to Jimi Hendrix. But, jeezus, they’ve obliterated all that. What a disgrace, an affront to music. Hang your heads in shame.
Achtung Musikband soldiers. (Note old dude who thinks it’s bullshit and has to be ordered to sing.)
