Good news, lads! Good news! Brand USA — The National Anthem. Still big with all those on the end of military broadband connections in Afghanistan. Must be the ‘whores and beer’ sing along part.
‘Pennsyltuckyvoter’ man at 2:31. Thanks Mr. Fussell.
Law enforcement and homeland security personnel face an average of 55 daily encounters with “known or suspected terrorists” named on government watchlists, officials told Reuters.
The figure – which equals more than 20,000 contacts per year – underscores the growing sweep of the watchlists, which have expanded significantly since a failed Christmas Day 2009 bombing attempt of a U.S. airliner. But officials note that very few of those daily contacts lead to arrests …
The ‘Evil Genius’ behind Al Qaeda’s underwear bombs
“With the death of Osama bin Laden, Asiri is a key reason that US officials consider Yemen’s Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, to be one of the most significant threats to the American homeland,” reads the piece. “He is highly determined and fully committed to attack America,” it continues.
“They have a team of engineers, scientists and doctors. It’s a little spooky,” said Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, a member of the Homeland Security Committee who was briefed this week on the intelligence operation that U.S. officials say thwarted an AQAP plot to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner. “In my view, it’s very likely they have produced more of these.”
One hint at the expansion of AQAP’s bomb-making capabilities can be found in passages in an article entitled “Wining on the Ground,” found on the 57th page of the latest 59-page edition of Inspire, released by AQAP last weekend.
In 2009, AQAP had only a “very modest and small laboratory in a rural area” to make bombs, the author of the article –identified as Yahya Ibrahim — wrote.
But now, after obtaining “a large deal of chemicals from military laboratories” in a key city in southern Yemen — “the modest lab has transformed into a modern one,” the Inspire article stated.
It’s almost beautiful how the story is twisted from one of failure into pieces which try to cast the impression al Qaeda men are cranking out underwear bombs at some modern facility in Yemen.
From two failed attempts, a failed printer cartridge bomb plot, and infiltration by a spy who turns over the latest goods to the US, to an “Evil Genius,” a bomb factory of perhaps great capacity, and a most dire threat to the US “homeland.” The refashioning of the story is eye-watering in audacity.
By this time next week it will be in the rear view mirror as an al Qaeda victory.
In fact, at the time, I felt the Newsweek journalists knew they were twisting the story. They did so because the truth didn’t fit the official narrative of the war on terror as published in this country.
Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan, blamed “errors, sloppiness and bad judgment” for the loss, which stemmed from a hedging strategy that backfired.
The trading in that hedge roiled markets a month ago, when rumors started circulating of a JPMorgan trader in London whose bets were so big that he was nicknamed “the London Whale” and “Voldemort,” after the Harry Potter villain.
“Voldemort” or the “Evil Genius” of underwear bombs — who’s the threat?
Al Qaeda’s barrel-scrapers continue to be portrayed as capable of posing a huge threat to this country. Now virtually destroyed by US operations, a handful of al Qaeda piss ants in a couple countries continue to putter with things that don’t work for shit.
The CIA foiled a plot by al-Qaida’s affiliate in Yemen to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner around the one-year anniversary of the killing of its former leader Osama bin Laden, The Associated Press reported.
American officials said the plot involved a bomb with a design that upgraded the underwear bomb taken aboard a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas 2009. That explosive device failed to detonate …
The AP reports the improved bomb had a more refined detonation mechanism, but was still intended to be hidden in a passenger’s underwear …
In an exclusive meeting, a senior U.S. intelligence official told NBC News that Hassan al-Asiri — the so-called “master bomb-maker??? for al-Qaida in Yemen — posed the single most dangerous threat to the United States …
Asiri designed the first underwear bomb that failed over Detroit and he was also the maker of the printer ink cartridge bombs that were discovered before they were shipped to the United States.
Refining the detonator on the underwear bomb. Imagine the painstaking and brilliant work that such a project must involve. Where does al Qaeda find such innovative men of action?
The US military, through a West Point terrorism training school, released documents seized during the Osama bin Laden raid, a year ago this week. Readers know that despite the formidable achievement, for which the President deserves a great deal of credit, there has been no bin Laden dividend. The 99 percent has seen no benefit from his killing. The war, if anything, has accelerated with more drone assassinations and special operations work.
The original No-Prize was invented by Stan Lee of Marvel Comics. It was a way to say ‘atta-boy,’ a symbolic air prize totally without worth. And that’s the bin Laden doc release by the US government.
At the time of the raid the media, fed by government minders, dutifully reported that a “trove” of materials had been seized in the bin Laden compound.
Physically, perhaps it was true. However, the released of 17 declassified documents today, constituting over 170 pages of translated-into-English letters is a dud.
They are not particularly interesting. For example, in document “SOCOM-2012-0000004T” there is much trivial discussion on which media outlets in the US should get al Qaeda’s propaganda messages for the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Fox News is written off.
“[CNN] seems to be in cooperation with the government more than the others (with the exception of Fox News),” the letter reads, penned by American-turned al Qaeda man Adam Gadahn to bin Laden. The Arabic version of CNN, he writes, is somewhat better.
In the end Gadahn makes the recommendation that every news channel receive a copy of Ayman Zawahiri’s 9/11 anniversary speech.
“Except for Fox News, let her die in her anger.” It is inadvertently funny.
Gadahn also recommends a few journalists by name — all them of seemingly cocked up in some interesting way.
There is “Brian Russ” — he means ABC’s Brian Ross. And “Simon Hirsh,” presumably Pulitzer winner Seymour Hersh.
I leave only a picture for readers to determine why this is hilarious.
Were bin Laden and Adam Gadahn fans of re-runs of My Mother the Car? It is hard to know.
The other observation to be made is that being the preferred journalists of al Qaeda is like getting a recommendation from a colony of flesh-eating bacteria.
The remote possibility exists that some of the material has been doctored by the US government for the express purpose of humiliation.
Readers can zip out to Cryptome here, to see for themselves. But it’s mostly rancid old mutton, passed off as veal for a day or two in the mainstream media.
It shows again how short al Qaeda was on talent. It just adds to the picture that over a decade of war history had passed bin Laden and his terror men by.
Last year the picture was of bin Laden, alone in his compound, writing letters to his minions, missives ignored. Much like Hitler in the Fuhrer bunker near the end, moving formations that no longer existed on a room’s map table, no one daring to point out the obvious.
There are big differences, of course. In the grand scheme of history, Hitler still makes bin Laden look like a piker.
In sharp contrast, many Americans still know some of the famous names of US generals from WWII. Movies were made about them.
Nobody down ladder knows the names of the men who killed bin Laden. They may know the name of the dog on the mission — Cairo — because it was convenient publicity.
Americans can’t name the commanding generals in any of the theaters of war where there is action against al Qaeda or the Taliban. And they will never be able to do so because no one cares.
Glorious memorable movies will not be made. The war will go on, somewhere, always.
This is the way the military machine has made things. If there are any men or women of stature among them aghast at the length of the conflict and how millions upon millions of their countrymen have been economically disenfranchised and cast into ruin on the home front while they have continued to meaninglessly fight on, we will never hear it.
The nation’s top military officer told Harvard’s Kennedy School Thursday that despite the death of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the exit of longtime dictators from the world stage, and no mortal enemy in the form of a nation-state the United States is more vulnerable.
Army General Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told students at a forum on the Cambridge campus that even though the world appears to enjoy greater stability and interdependence, threats looming beneath the surface — from cyber warfare to the proliferation of long-range missiles — actually place American security at greater risk.
“The truth is, I believe I am chairman at a time that seems less dangerous but is actually more dangerous,??? Dempsey said, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. “That’s the essence of what I like to call the security paradox.???
Dempsey, who took on the role as top military adviser to President Obama last fall, has been criticized for asserting that the international scene poses greater harm than at any time in his lifetime – even the Cold War when the destruction of much of humanity loomed as a possible consequence of the nuclear standoff between superpowers.
A week from now no readers will remember this man’s name, only that yet another bit of exaggerated insane trash was passed off as wisdom from an expert.
We do not need or train good military leaders. They are only needed to ensure the machine continues to grind.
Why this blog exists
A scholarly report issued by the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State entitled Carnage Interrupted: An Analysis of Fifteen Terrorist Plots Against Public Surface Transportation cites yours truly in the footnotes.
This is because I did primary research on the infamous London ricin plot.
The report, written by Brian Michaal Jenkins, a counter-terror expert and former Green Beret covers it, although under the label — Heathrow Express Ricin Plot.
“The trial of the defendants did not establish any link to al Qaeda or Zarqawi,” writes Jenkins. “Since all but one of the nine held for trial were acquitted, we can only speculate that at least some of them may have thought as part of the global jihadist enterprise.”
Or maybe not. For the text Jenkins eschews the political dimension of the case — which was its primary reason for being in the news in the first place.
The castor beans seized in no way could have been made into a WMD, or even a weapon that would have killed many. Jenkins grasps this.
In a reaction to a Scotland Yard officer’s claim that it “was going to be our 9/11,” Jenkins writes:
“This was a gross exaggeration of what was a terrorist fantasy, or at most, an amateurish scheme. The Heathrow Express plotters possessed no ricin and their planned method of disbursal was dubious.”
Jenkins still comes up a bit short on what ricin actually is, however. He writes that it might pose some hazard if smeared on handrails or doorhandles.
He knows ricin is not a contact poison and cannot be absorbed through the skin. But if there were open cuts on the hand?
No. If such were the case it would have been impossible to work in castor mills, work in castor plant fields, or handle castor mash — which was often packaged as fertilizer and used in mostly futile attempts to kill insect pests. Fatalities would have resulted.
In castor powder, which is all anyone has ever produced from castor seeds outside of fully-equipped biochemistry labs where people know what they’re doing, there is simply not enough ricin to make that a realistic hazard.
Eating it, however, is another matter. And there are times when people have tried to poison one another in domestic criminal cases with it.
The Heathrow Express/London ricin plot was a huge deal, politically. The Bush administration conspicuously used it to push for war in Iraq, making the claim that the UK poison ring — actually, Kamel Bourgass — was connected to al Qaeda in Iraq. It was in a slide used to present evidence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was in league with al Qaeda.
Indeed, the UK prosecution’s initial strategy was try and tie the poison recipes of Kamel Bourgass to materials seized from al Qaeda hideouts in Kandahar and Kabul. They failed in this because that’s not where the poison recipes seized in the London ricin trial were from.
Nevertheless, the Carnage Averted monograph is a worthy read on a collection of failed terrorist plots.
Inspire magazine, while not meant to be an al Qaeda joke, has always been easy to brush off. It’s been an example of how al Qaeda has had a serious problem with recruitment filled as it is with wishful thinkers and fantasies on terror that will never come true. Al Qaeda, for practical purposes, is operationally dead. As far as the 99 percent and middle class America is concerned, it poses no serious threat.
Al Qaeda has been whittled down by American might over a decade of war. The US employs more money and manpower hunting it than it needs to destroy a handful of medium-sized nations.
Al Qaeda, while not gone, just does not matter. Jihadists may got lucky now and then in the future. But there won’t be any game changers with regards to the progeny of Osama bin Laden. The history book has closed on this chapter although the US war machine will continue to prosecute it.
Today then, news of the latest issues of Inspire — inspiring only laughter if you have any sense.
The men who launched al Qaeda’s English-language magazine may have died in a U.S. missile strike last fall, but “Inspire” magazine lives on without them — and continues to promote jihadi attacks on Western targets, offering detailed advice on how to start huge forest fires in America with timed explosives and how to build remote-controlled bombs …
But issue nine carries equally lethal advice, with “It Is of Your Freedom to Ignite a Firebomb,” which gives detailed instructions on how to ignite an “ember bomb” in a U.S. forest, recommending Montana because of the rapid population growth in wooded areas.
“In America, there are more houses built in the [countryside] than in the cities,” says the writer, who uses the pseudonym The AQ Chef. “It is difficult to choose a better place [than] in the valleys of Montana.”
Readers know US terror beat reporters are panderers. And stupid.
They choose not to point out the total cluelessness of the al Qaeda man.
More houses are built in the urban environment than in the woods. That’s a fact.
I live in southern California. In Pasadena. Where I can look outside and see the mountains, and the houses built right up to them and on their lower slopes. Every year southern California has fires, some of them set by arsonists. These fires burn down homes, frequently lots and lots of them.
Population of Montana: 998,199
Population of LA County: 9,830,420
Doh!
The al Qaeda men writing for Inspire have obviously never actually been to the United States.
They just wishfully think it would be good, and really terrorizing, if someone could like, uh, start a couple fires in … wait for it … Montana!
Where they’d be put out right away. Al Qaeda apparently cannot even scan net news archives for stories where fires do get out of control in states where lots of people live — like here, or … well. Do it yourself.
Inspire only shows two things — that al Qaeda is virtually destroyed and that US war-on-terror reporters are crap. The latter has been known for a long time.
The ABC news story, and others, note the new issues of Inspire are “riddled” with spelling errors.
One of al Qaeda’s most prominent radical clerics may have been killed in a drone strike last year, but his words appear to have lived on in a new issue of al Qaeda’s English-language magazine in which he calls for biological attacks against the U.S.
“The use of chemical and biological weapons against population centers is allowed and is strongly recommended,” U.S.-born Anwar al-Awlaki is quoted as saying in one of two new issues of the Inspire magazine.
Al Qaeda has never had any bioweapons capability. It is a fiction although the terror agency’s desire to have them is not.
What’s left of it, a small number of kooks and feebs worldwide, apparently continues to call for the wishful manufacture of biological weapons because its people, who are not very discerning, read everything about it in western news. And they have come to believe that because so many stories assert that it its elementary to produce biological weapons, someday it will be easy for them. Or it will fall into someone’s hands, magically, or something like that.
Reality, on the other hand, has not been kind to the group in this matter.
Everything wished for in Inspire has never happened. The only interesting issue was the one which covered, after the fact, the al Qaeda plan to bomb UPS and FedEx jets with bombs hidden in toner cartridges.
US history is filled with powerful companies and agencies breaking the law to discredit and destroy popular movements that threaten their interests. And so today comes news of powder hoax mail sent throughout NYC, timed to coincide with legitimate May 1 protest.
Three new envelopes containing suspicious white powder were sent to New York City banks and news organizations on Tuesday, along with notes suggesting the sender sympathizes with the Occupy Wall Street’s Day of May 1 protests, police said.
A total of ten letter-sized envelopes were sent over the last two days, and at least some contained an identical note saying “This is a reminder that you are not in control” and “Happy May Day,” police spokesman Paul Browne said …
Five envelopes were sent to Wells Fargo, while one was sent to J.P. Morgan, and another to Citicorp. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp was also targeted, with one envelope addressed to the Wall Street Journal and a second “possibly” addressed to Fox News, police said.
Another letter, addressed to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was processed at city offices at 100 Gold Street, and not at City Hall, police said.
For the last decade powder hoaxing has evolved into a niche national sport. Those who are caught at it do serious jail time. There is a constant dribble of powder-laced letters going to local and federal government offices, officials, celebrities and media outlets. Notoriously, when caught, powder hoaxers are never — that’s never — on the side of the left or from any cause deemed even remotely progressive.
They are invariably garden variety right-wing extremists, crazies, gun nuts, or ex-jail birds.
This on the same day morning news was clogged with announcements over the arrests of five “anarchists” planning to bomb a bridge over the Cuyahoga in Ohio.
Early news stories indicated the “anarchists” were not capable — one talked of making bombs from bleach. And the FBI delivered unto them the usual packs of fake implements, whereupon they were arrested.
“The suspects had bought fake explosives and placed them near the bridge Monday.” reads one report. “The suspects were arrested after 9 p.m. Monday …”
“The local Occupy crowd said they were a part of their operation, but have now distanced themselves,” the piece added.
Just in time for May 1, the day of nationwide protests by Occupy.
Coincidence? Sending a message? Or news conveniently aimed at discrediting a nationwide group engaged in legitimate protest?
It is not a secret the FBI’s counter-terror intelligence operation includes infiltration and communications intercepts.
It’s early history, as depicted in Tim Weiner’s history of the agency, Enemies, shows its principal operation was counter-intelligence against domestic groups, prominently American labor during a time of great inequality, protests in the streets, and a subsequent growth of Communist Party membership. J. Edgar Hoover made it his business to smash the Communist Party in the US, as well as anyone even remotely associated with it. And so the FBI did.
Jumping forward decades, prior to 9/11 the FBI had allowed its counter-terror intelligence operation to evaporate. Al Qaeda brought it back out of necessity, the agency rebuilding its domestic spying to root out terror plots in the United States. In pursuit of that end it now has many assets to bring to bear on all manner of domestic groups suspected of harboring terrorists or simply causing what is viewed as unacceptable and troublesome unrest.
This does not mean the FBI is setting up Occupy Wall Street. But it would be naive to think it has not heavily infiltrated the group.
And the diffusion of counter-intelligence operations into the private sector has resulted in an infrastructure of various corporate security services vended back to local and government entities, all done under the banner of protecting the homeland during the war on terror.
The world’s biggest banks are working with one another and police to gather intelligence as protesters try to rejuvenate the Occupy Wall Street movement with May demonstrations, industry security consultants said …
After evictions and arrests from Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park to London that began last year, the movement against income inequality and corporate abuse will regain strength, said Brian McNary, director of global risk at Pinkerton Consulting & Investigations.
He works with international financial firms to “identify, map and track” protesters across social media and at their assemblies, he said. The companies gather data “carefully and methodically” to prevent business disruptions …
Banks cooperating on surveillance are like elk fending off wolves in Yellowstone National Park, he said. While other animals try in vain to sprint away alone, elk survive attacks by forming a ring together, he said.
Banks are like beautiful and nice forest elk protecting themselves from the nasty wolves, the Occupy movement.
Consider the warped sentiment in that.
Prior to the creation of the FBI, the Pinkertons were America’s foremost para-military counter-domestic terror corporate police force.
From Tim Weiner’s Enemies:
“Four nineteenth century presidents had turned to the nation’s most powerful private police force, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, as an instrument of law enforcement, a source of secret intelligence and a tool for political combat … The agency’s founder, Allen Pinkerton, had run espionage operations during the Civil War and helped create the Secret Service for President Abraham Lincoln. Its detectives served steel and railroad barons by spying, breaking strikes and cracking skulls to defeat labor organizers … They did not shrink from breaking the law to uphold the law …”
In my old neck of the woods, Pennsylvania, Pinkerton, at at the behest of the Reading and Lehigh Valley Railroads, was famous for infiltrating the Molly Maguires, an armed group of Irish-American coal miners who rebelled and struck back against employers during a time when labor vigorously fought business. The Maguires were subsequently destroyed.
A piece from a small Georgia newspaper shows the plight of one of the old white cranks swept up in the FBI’s domestic terror case.
For the past ten years the FBI has had an extensive network of criminal informants. In Tim Weiner’s history of the FBI, Enemies, it is revealed the agency’s counter-terror operation employed a communications program, an illegal one, called Stellar Wind.
Stellar Wind essentially monitored all communications in the US and it is reasonable to assume the FBI continues to do so. And when such a program detects the chat of some cranky old white guy going on about the desecration of the Constitution by the US government, and the need for it to be violently stopped, on some crap website for the like-minded, it enlists a local informant to massage the targets.
“Because of this “Tink??? (a confidential informant used by the federal government in building the case against Roberts and the three other defendants), I don’t know his name, but he’s the one that should be in jail. He made threats all along – he made actual threats against Dan at Shoney’s in Lavonia.???
Calling the charges against her husband a “set up??? by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Margaret Roberts said the two confidential informants initiated and orchestrated the actions that led to the foursome’s arrest, and were financed and enabled by the FBI.
“As far as Dan, he did not pay any money for any sort of silencer or anything, the money came from the FBI,??? Margaret said.
“Joe Sims, the informant, had the money. Every bit of this was set up and paid for by the FBI. It’s just been unbelievable to me,??? she said.
Saying that the only time her husband has been in trouble with the law was when he borrowed his brother’s car without insurance, Margaret Roberts added that she had supported Roberts’ decision to plead guilty instead of sitting and waiting two or more years for a trial date.
“I insisted that Dan do it (accept the plea agreement); he may be dead in two years sitting there waiting on a trial for something he never even should have been in jail for,??? she said.
“If you’re guilty of this stuff it’s bad enough, but when you’re set up, and set up by the government, this has all just been a nightmare, an absolute nightmare,??? she said.
Motivated by the need to save face and not look bad in the public eye, the FBI and federal government pursued charges against four old men who posed no threat, Margaret added.
“I think they (the FBI) got started on this stuff, believing in Joe Sims and his lies, and then they don’t want to look bad,??? she said. “If the FBI had not furnished the money and all of this, none of this would have ever happened.???
Roberts’ involvement in militia activities was limited to first aid, and other survivalist training, Margaret said …”
“About the ricin, that’s the most outlandish thing I’ve ever heard in my life,??? she added. “Dan knew nothing about that,??? Margaret said, insisting that it was Sims who approached defendant Crump regarding ricin production, not Roberts.
The government is beginning to ‘waive a white flag,’ according to Margaret, who said she and Roberts’ attorney are now expecting the terrorism enhancement charges to be dropped.
“Who in the world would have thought the FBI would do us up like this,??? she said.
Weiner’s Enemies concedes the dragnet constructed for the war on terror netted a lot of patsies and fit-ups, in the book’s case — Muslims.
However, it has often been a similar case for many busted on domestic terror charges. The charges exceed the actual nature of the threat.
The last post on ‘Old pink meat product‘ produced a comments section identifying the electrocuting hot dog cooker as the Presto Hot Dogger. YouTube had a few home videos devoted to the Presto as retro cooking equipment. Unbreakable and manufactured, originally, as early as the Fifties in Eau Claire, WI, here’s one amusing video.
With a touch of extra amusement provided by the Carolina Chocolate Drops singing “Short Life of Trouble.”
I used the Hot Dogger in the late Eighties and early Nineties. It was a thing that, fundamentally, always worked. Unlike the current service-centered economy, as you know if you have standard Internet connectivity through AT&T, or have recently dumped cable because having no tv other than DVD replay is actually better.
Presto made home appliances. And you know what happened. It was all moved to China.
Here’s a piece from the BBC on US manufacturing, from 2002:
Maryjo Cohen is shutting two factories.
Cheap, high quality goods from China have eaten away profit margins at National Presto industries, a Wisconsin-based firm which makes pressure cookers and electric frying pans.
“That’s going on all over the US, our entire industry has moved to China,” says Ms Cohen, National Presto’s president.
She is reluctant to say how many jobs will go at National Presto’s plants in New Mexico and Mississippi but it will be a “substantial number for a company our size” – at least half the workforce.
National Presto has an agent in Hong Kong who subcontracts work to plants in China’s neighbouring Guangdong province.
How did National Presto diversify and expand after outsourcing its small cooking appliance manufacturing? You read this blog, you already have a hunch.
Once again, a perfect example of national decline.
National Presto went into arms manufacturing, the only protected business and preserved-at-all-costs labor in the United States.
The company makes over 600 million a year in ammo and ordnance production through a subsidiary.
National Presto Industries Inc. said Monday its ammunition products unit has received an $81 million defense contract option from the U.S. Army.
The Eau Claire-based company said AMTEC Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary, received the option award under AMTEC’s five-year contract to produce 40 mm systems for the Army. It is the first award AMTEC has received during the government’s 2012 fiscal year, which ends in September, and additional awards are anticipated, the company said.
The option award brings the cumulative amount awarded under an ongoing 40 mm contract to $364.7 million, the company said.
A business profile at Seeking Alpha comments, “National Presto Industries (NPK) is an oddly diversified producer of military arms, adult diapers, and small cooking appliances with a market capitalization of well under $1 billion.”
Up until a few years ago the received wisdom, also delivered by economists, was that it was fine to deindustrialize and ship most domestic non-military manufacturing to China and other periperal nations with cheap labor markets.
You didn’t have to make things in America anymore. You could be good at other stuff — like financial products and software programming.
Add arms manufacturing.
Life ain’t fair. But even the bromide, the preservation of arms manufacturing and the consequent decade of continuous war has been profoundly unfair to the 99 percent in this country.
If arms manufacturing had been exposed to the same pressure as all other forms of domestic manufacturing, we wouldn’t have war.
A black comedy could be written around a script in which a national leader decides to enact policies that would mandate absolute lowest bid contracts on arms manufacturing to a global marketplace. Yes, I know it could never happen.
But a story revolving around the fear, loathing and comeuppance in the military defense industry complex upon dislocation into the Chinese manufacturing sector is enjoyable to consider. I’d buy that novel. I’d anticipate it being optioned to Hollywood. I’d be first in line for the the movie adaptation, too.
I’d love the parts where the dispirited newly fired workers of Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin were taught how to apply for food stamps at severance meetings. And, how, with a lot of extra free time on their hands they fruitlessly strived to make a go of things by fashioning their own personal brands, uploading homemade white rap and comedy videos to YouTube. Or making small business website pages advertising new artisan coffee or dog walking businesses. Logging on to Zaarly everyday to find new opportunities as personal assistants or gofers for the more fortunate, locally.
Going back to school to learn how to be a chef at the Cordon Bleu school; taking two or three janitorial positions, any job that couldn’t be sent to hired hands overseas. Wait staff, not so favorable an outlook, because of something else, made by another in the army of pitiless trivial douchebags from the creative economic destruction industry, coincidentally called the Presto.
There would be growth in the cyberdefense subsidiary businesses of the big arms companies because, paradoxically, while all the manufacturing had been shipped to China, Chinese state-supported hackers were still penetrating US networks. However, growth would slow as even the Chinese began to realize there was little left to steal in the way of so-called intellectual property. And getting into the power grid just wasn’t important when you had that country’s
production completely by the balls.
Yes, there should be equalization and fair dinkum payback! And no, it won’t happen but that doesn’t mean you can’t savor the idea. China is getting into the aircraft carrier business, I hear. And certainly it has a military space program.
Think of all the money that could be saved on ammo and bombs.
If the Chinese can make electric guitars for Fender and Gibson, and all the digital underpinnings that go into the modern consumer electronics music industry, surely it can produce Joint Direct Attack Munitions and Predator drones through licensing agreements.
Shock! Horror!
It’s nice to dream about it all being gone. Like the Presto Hot Dogger.
Once again the Internet recipe for ricin takes down some fools.
Today wire news informed two members of the George Ricin Beans Gang copped guilty pleas to the lesser charges of “conspiring to get explosives and silencers.”
Two Georgia men pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiring to get an unregistered explosive and an illegal gun silencer in what prosecutors describe as a plot to attack government targets.
The suspected ringleader of the group, Frederick Thomas, and Dan Roberts entered their pleas at a hearing in federal court in Gainesville, about 55 miles northeast of Atlanta.
Thomas, 73, and Roberts, 67, could face up to five years in prison …
Readers may recall the ricin beans gang comprised four old men, mostly talkers, who were angry with the government’s alleged desecration of the Constitution. To make things right, they mused at a Cracker Barrel restaurant and other places, people would have to be killed.
One of the ways this was to be done was an absurd plan to grind up castor seeds and dispense the powder from a car speeding along the highway. It would never have worked and the men had no capability. I and others were quoted as saying so in newspapers.
“There’s no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly illegal: murder,??? Thomas said during a meeting in March, according to the affidavit. “When it comes to saving the constitution, that means some people gotta die,” he was quoted as saying.
Roberts’ attorney, Michael Trost, said after the hearing that the plea was the best “rough justice” he and his client could hope for. The plea is “close to what represents the facts,” he said, since it is not an admission of terrorism.
“We will resolutely deny that it is terrorism” during the sentencing hearing, he said …
“Prosecutors said those two men brought [two other defendants who have not issued pleas, Sam Crump and Ray Adams] into the mix after Roberts talked of obtaining a ‘silent killer’ — the toxin ricin, which can be lethal in small doses,” added AP. “Crump had memorized the recipe for making the poison from castor beans, prosecutors said, and Adams had the know-how to make it as a former government lab technician.”
Adams did not have the know-how, as a “lab technician,” to make ricin.
He was a pesticide mixer, at best. However, this is unlikely to matter in the final reckoning.
There is no defense lawyer who can mitigate charges when ricin is part of the courtroom discussion. Juries, judges and prosecutors simply won’t have it.
“This is about an old man talking big,” said one of the defendant’s lawyers. It was an accurate statement. But the justice system during the war on terror makes no allowance for such things.
