09.28.10
Posted in Stumble and Fail, War On Terror at 1:37 pm by George Smith
Tom Friedman, high button upper-class boob and two-time Pulitzer winner, with another unintentionally laughable quote from his Sunday column on the miraculous $45,000 electric car from China:
I was recently at a Washington Nationals baseball game. While waiting for a hot dog, I overheard the conversation behind me. A management consultant for a big national firm was telling his colleagues that his job was to “market products to the Department of Homeland Security.??? I thought to myself: “Oh, my! Inventing studies about terrorist threats and selling them to the U.S. government, is that an industry now????
We’re out of balance — the balance between security and prosperity. We need to be in a race with China, not just Al Qaeda. Let’s start with electric cars.
Anyway, Friedman needs a pat on the back. He was one of the pundits who contributed to the private sector security industry boom after 9/11.
Specifically, in touting the Iraq War and letting us all know that every once in a while the US had to smash a country in the Middle East for the sake of sending the message: Suck on this!”
And ever since the country has had a booming business infrastructure for finding various new and old menaces, even if they either don’t or barely exist.
If this is actually news to Friedman, and not a failed joke, it’s because he’s spent his time marveling at the above-ground plastic mine business in China. Among other wonderful things.
In today’s Los Angeles Times, semi-related news came from a business story on Northrop firing 500 by the end of the year.
One of the few sectors of the economy where jobs have been very durable during the Great Recession has been national security. A 500 person lay-off at Northrop does not so much show that it has had an equal effect on defense. But rather that the scale of the collapse of the economy for the middle class and the subsequent debt the government has taken on are finally causing relatively minor cutbacks — with respect to the rest of the country — in that sector.
The Los Angeles Times writes:
The cutbacks are the latest to hit the aerospace industry amid concerns about the ballooning deficit.
After growing by double digits every year since the 2001 terrorist attacks, defense spending is expected to rise only about 1 percent annually over the next five years …
Lockheed Martin Corp., the nation’s largest defense contractor said earlier this month that about 25 percent of its executives opted for a voluntary retirement program to cut costs as defense spending slows. More than 600 vice presidents and directors applied …
Six hundred vice presidents and directors. That’s nice.
In blog related news, even the Marines get bedbugs. They are so without pity.
See here.
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09.15.10
Posted in Stumble and Fail, War On Terror at 2:54 pm by George Smith
Particularly at the grass roots level, it needs a drastic haircut.
From my old homestate of Pennsyltucky, this bit of found humor, courtesy of the Associated Press:
Information about an anti-BP candlelight vigil, a gay and lesbian festival and other peaceful gatherings became the subject of anti-terrorism bulletins being distributed by Pennsylvania’s homeland security office, an apologetic Gov. Ed Rendell admitted.
Rendell, who claimed he’d just learned about the practice, said Tuesday
that the information was useless to law enforcement agencies and that
distributing it was tantamount to trampling on constitutional rights.
In recent weeks, several acts of vandalism at drilling sites spurred the
inclusion of events likely to be attended by environmentalists and the
bulletins began going to representatives of Pennsylvania’s booming natural gas industry.
A Philadelphia rally organized by a nonprofit group to support Rendell’s push for higher spending on public schools even made a bulletin, as did drilling protests at a couple of Rendell’s news conferences this month as he toured the state to boost support for a tax on the natural gas industry.
And who was getting the funding for this valuable intelligence on the state of homegrown terrorism?
Something called the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, in Philadelphia, to the tune of $125,000.
It’s website is here, listing a POB in Philadelphia as well as a branch in Jerusalem.
It emits a bit of an unpleasant odor.
For example, to collect intelligence for its clients is relies, it says, on something called its Ground Truth Network.
And apparently the company’s Ground Truth Network, or analysts, have been eying the protest movement against gas drilling (and even a public showing of the documentary “Gasland,” a scathing look at the industry nationwide), now commonly called “fracking” in Pennsylvania.
In “Gasland,” the rural Pennsylvania community of Dimock is profiled. In great detail, it shows how the place was ruined and its water contaminated by drilling.
The intelligence document came to light when it was posted on a pro-drilling forum on the web, whereupon it was also seized by anti-drilling groups.
The company distributes its intelligence product to the Pennsylvania director of homeland security, law enforcement and gas drilling companies.
James Powers, the Pennsy director of homeland security was quizzed by the Harrisburg Patriot-News and that article is here.
PA governor Ed Rendell indicated to the Associated Press that James Powers would not be fired even though he was “appalled” by the news.
“I think I would have said `no’ to this contract before we ever spent a dime and before we sent out any information that was wrong and violative of, in my judgment, the constitution,” the governor said.
“Which public meetings the anti-drilling folks were planning to attend was supplied by the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, a Philadelphia firm contracted with the state Office of Homeland Security to provide information for the intelligence briefings,” reported the Patriot News.
“When asked if ITRR was tracking groups — specifically, people opposed to drilling in the Marcellus Shale or attending showings of ‘Gasland’ — [James Powers, PA director of homeland security] replied, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t asked them.’
“Powers did indicate that someone — either ITRR or state employees, he wouldn’t specify which — was monitoring the ‘Web traffic’ of anti-drilling groups.”
Rendell said the firm’s contract would come to an end.
“Gasland” has also recently been showing on HBO and it has gained many favorable reviews.
Erik Miller, “the Director of Security Studies at the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR), where he serves as project-manager, case officer, researcher, and intelligence writer,” has an article in the recent issue of Counter Terrorism magazine.
On Sweden and alleged radicalism in that country, it begins:
To many, Sweden is a leading model for what a modern, liberal democracy should be; an exemplar of tolerance, humanitarianism, and diplomacy. To those who monitor global jihadism, however, Sweden has shown a severe lack of leadership in confronting the growing problem of Islamic radicalization within its own borders.
Even as newly-emerging evidence continues to expose this process of radicalization; the Swedish establishment fails to face the problem directly. In the name of multiculturalism and religious equality, leading Swedish figures have chosen not only to deny the issue but to seemingly embrace their homegrown Islamists.
This phenomenon is a new form of nationwide “Stockholm Syndrome” that is self-deceptive, self-defeating, and ultimately, suicidal.
That article is here.
And here is what looks like one of the company’s reports — originated perhaps from its Jerusalem office, posted on another website.
A sample ITRR intel briefing booklet from 2009 is posted here, on the company website.
It is not particularly insightful, seemingly only a .pdf collection of bits anyone interested in terrorism could assemble from sifting public news.
But it is probably the type of briefing book discussed by the AP and Harrisburg Patriot News.
The AP, on the material included in the ITRR intel report distributed by Pennsylvania’s homeland security office says:
It listed demonstrations by anti-war groups, deportation protesters in Philadelphia, mountaintop removal mining protesters in West Virginia and an animal rights protest at a Montgomery County rodeo. It also included “Burn the Confederate Flag Day,” the Jewish high holidays and the Muslim holy month of Ramadan as potential sources of risk.
On page 11 of the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response’s sample May 2009 briefing book, the organization lumps a number of equally surprising activities under the topic “Domestic/Eco-Terror Alerts.”
Among these, “the Rainforest Action Network is holding training at campuses across the [continental United States]. The training is designed to inspire ecological activity — from legitimate canvassing to illegal direct actions.”
The very legit Rainforest Action Network is here. It looks like a happy place.
In another posting, the ITRR bulletin reads: “Ecological activists in [San Francisco, Phoenix, Tuscon and Sonora} will be protesting the intent of Mexico to build a toxic waste dump on land belonging to the O’odham Indians.”
Other “domestic/eco-terror alert” entries include notes on protests of the Bank of America bailout scheduled for Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office, “a protest march … held by people opposed to the closing of some schools in New York City, “eco-activists” from Earth First! holding a summer training camp, institute analysts monitoring “anarchists” who might protest an appearance by Karl Rove, as well as a variety of anti-war and anti-cruelty-to-animals protest events.
The intelligence booklet makes a practice of classifying people, groups and non-profits who protest corporate activities as “anarchists.”
“Working with organizations that refuse to surrender their domestic or international operations to terrorism,” reads the pamphlet.
Terrorism, in this case, seeming to broadly rope in constitutionally protected activities contrary to the interests of corporate and government clients.
Another article by ITRR experts, this time on al Qaeda’s use of the Internet is here.
It is, many will agree, a trifle underwhelming as an example of this type of counter-terrorism literature.
Pennsylvania’s director of homeland security, James Powers, characterized the leaked ITRR briefing .pdf in one embarrassing e-mail as “sensitive information” only for “those ‘having a valid need to know.’ ”
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09.14.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Stumble and Fail, War On Terror at 9:32 am by George Smith
“I bought a new toilet! It was made in China. That’s where all the jobs went. Nothin’ could be finer!” — live verse from ‘China Toilet Blooz‘ and I do play the harmonica.
Ahem, the New York Times has run a bit asking the question: Are there any jobs that can’t be outsourced?
Well, yeah, menial cleaning, restaurant work, anything that requires a face-to-face connection. I’m willing to bet that overuse of robots and telepresence will cause the same resistance and disgust the phenomenon does on help and corporate telephone lines.
But to the quote for repeating, first from a professor at UC-Irvine:
The best jobs program is trade reform with China. Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, it has used a potent set of mercantilist and protectionist policies to shift millions of American manufacturing jobs offshore.
America can compete in the international environment if “free trade” is also fair.
America’s unemployed skilled manufacturing workers – both white-and blue-collar – can only trade down …
Regrettably, the current generation of unemployed workers is lost until the White House and Congress find backbones to stand up to Chinese trade policies.
In an aside, if you’re wondering why I’ve shifted increasingly away from security discussions that are purely on weird weapons lobbies and fear-mongering, it’s because the security of the country ultimately lies within. If rot and economic unfairness cleans out the middle class, there is no security.
As it stands, the US is unstable. And it can easily become moreso. An unstable US is not good for the rest of the world.
Irrational leadership leads to war and hardship inflicted on others, not just on ourselves. And if there is anyone who thinks that putting the Republican Party in control in Congress won’t lead to greater national instability, they need to get away from this blog. Nothing for you here.
Another professor called upon by the the Times has something to say about science and engineering prowess in the US. It’s not from the little Tommy Friedman class of punditry:
Moreover, there is neither a shortage of U.S. students who are world-class in their educational performance nor of college graduates with science and engineering degrees. The U.S. can claim the lion’s share of the world’s highest performing (domestic) science students and continues to graduate more than two times the number of scientists and engineers than are hired each year. Meanwhile, we produce an astounding number of very low performing students. Improving education is important but focusing on top tier skills is not a panacea for unemployment or poor economic performance …
Job growth requires a coordinated policy response that includes some protection for U.S. workers as well as stimulating demand for domestic products and services.
I would add to these assessments that there can’t be any changes until American business is harshly penalized for deindustrializing to slave labor work nations. Others have called for a democracy tariff, a price put on imports at the border for those things coming from such ‘beggar-they-neighbor’ living spaces.
It’s not like we need a place, ours, where even more snobs can have iPods whose parts are made by workers driven to suicide.
Thanks, Steve Jobs. The iPad commercial with someone playing the virtual piano on their slave-labor gadget is so great! I could never make a video that good!
I’ve said that the Obama administration’s tax incentives are essentially bribes to American business. Instead of hiring the unemployed directly, the president resorts to trickle-down efforts, hoping that some manner of payoff will juice American business into hiring.
The frontpage of yesterday’s hardcopy (no link) Los Angeles Times had, as its headline: R&D effort may yield scant jobs.
The part worth excerpting, which is pretty obvious:
Over the last two decades, US scientists and engineers have discovered or pioneered the science behind one blockbuster product after another — from flat-panel screens and robotics to the lithium batteries that run next generation power tools and electric cars.
Yet, in almost every case, production, jobs and most of the economic benefits that sprang from those breakthroughs have ended up overseas.
===
And new reports show that during the recession American companies ramped up investment overseas for plants and new hires, as well research and development — even as they cut back domestically.
So what didn’t get outsourced in the Great Recession?
Census jobs. It required face to face work and an enterprising, ad hoc, self-motivating mass workforce. I kinow. I was part of it.
The US government could change things by choosing to hire people directly for national reclamation. There would be the usual business outcry that by putting itself in competition with the private sector for such work, it was being bad in all the usual ways. Anti-competitive, socialist, communist, etc.
But when you have an American business culture that’s already accustomed to just taking the bribe money and using it to hurt the US labor force even more, there would seem to be little downside to actually putting people to work without private sector help.
Paradoxically, the Sunday LA Times’s hardcopy headline was on the growth of the Predator drone manufacturing business in southern California.
It did not paint this part of the weapons industry as a boon. Building flying robot assassins employs only 10,000. It’s a relative drop in the bucket for a southern California economy that’s bigger than most world nations.
And while 10,000 do have jobs in it, it’s an industry that generates little worth to the middle class. Other than stimulating the local economy where workers presumably spend much of their pay.
Robot assassins don’t build roads, they don’t improve the infrastructure, they don’t do anything for universal healthcare, they don’t fight disease, they don’t coach high-school wrestling teams, they don’t spread goodwill overseas. And it’s not an industry that is theoretically open to everyone for a good living regionally, like Detroit in its heyday.
The Times article also addressed all the downside associated with the industry. Its political lobbying, the legalized political bribery, the association with scumbags like Randy “Duke” Cunningham.
It wrote about the fact that as technology, the drones pretty much suck. They are not miraculous things.
They’re expensive and not useful against any country that has an air defense. They were a joke over lowly Bosnia, it was said, and no one wanted them prior to 9/11.
Which again only shows the war on terror as a growth opportunity for those parts of the American economy which very little to do with a healthy middle class.
There was a Mexican sci-fi movie which a few of the same points, if rather depressingly. It was called Sleep Dealer and is probably not worth the money Amazon is asking for the DVD.
In it, drones are used to bump off poor people — “terrorists” after drinking water — in Mexico, their video footage used as entertainment in reality show American programming.
Just prior to 9/11, the Times writes of a Predator sales pitch:
The Predator could be used to spot wildfires, [the General Atomics salesman] told his latest prospects. It could monitor global warming.
The audience listened politely — then scattered quickly when the demonstration ended. There were no takers.
Despite the constant braying about it, “[The drone business is] still not big enough to single-handedly restore the Southland aerospace industry to its former glory,” concluded the Times.
These are the jobs that are not outsourced. Wow.
Thanks heavens they’re as nasty as everyone thinks
From CNBC, billionaires bum out at esatz Davos over US and Obama administration:
“They saw the United States in a long-term slow growth environment with the near-term risk of recession quite real,??? said Wien, in a commentary to Blackstone clients. “The Obama administration was viewed as hostile to business and that discouraged both hiring and investment. Companies and entrepreneurs were reluctant to add workers because they didn’t know what their healthcare costs or taxes were going to be.???
A massive reduction in the consumer debt load, a workforce without the right skills for the jobs of tomorrow, and too high labor costs relative to other countries “are not problems that are likely to be solved any time soon,??? wrote Wien of the attitude of the people at the lunches, which took place in two groups on successive Fridays last month. “Only a few investors thought the Standard & Poor’s could reach 1200 next year.???
So what are the billionaires buying if this environment continues? Wien said “vacant office building,??? “farmland??? and “Africa??? were some of the ideas thrown out.
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08.30.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, War On Terror at 7:54 am by George Smith
In from Armchair Generalist, Jason Sigger notes a Taliban ‘gas’ attack on a school for girls, by way of the Guardian.
He writes:
This hasn’t been the first gas attack on a school, and it’s unclear what kind of non-persistent industrial chemical was pumped into the schools. But it’s a far cry from the feared terrorist use of chemical warfare agents that most DHS scenarios warn about.
In another way of looking at it, one could draw a good conclusion that the Taliban have absolutely zero capability with poison gas. And this kind of attack is a benchmark in pathetic lows.
Anyway, DD’s educated guess is this is fumigant use, of which there is plenty in Afghanistan, for purposes of pest control.
Here’s a link to a UN job posting for a pest controller in Kandahar.
While it’s a small item, US forces could benefit from a press campaign in area making the point that it’s the cruelest and lamest of things to spray insecticides at girls. However, treatment of women is abominable there, under any circumstance.
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08.27.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, War On Terror, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 6:51 am by George Smith
Predictably, Raytheon’s pain ray has generated quite a bit of bad publicity along with the usual brief corporate news pieces in which a local TV station or paper sends a reporter to be a trial gimp.
The reporter invariably giggles and jumps out of the way as Raytheon technicians or jailers look impishly on. See the wonder that’s taken a decade for the US military, in conjunction with an arms developer, to come up with! It’s a revolution.
From Associated Press:
A device designed to control unruly inmates by blasting them with a beam of intense energy that causes a burning sensation is drawing heat from civil rights groups who fear it could cause serious injury and is “tantamount to torture.”
The mechanism, known as an “Assault Intervention Device,” (or AID) is a stripped-down version of a military gadget that sends highly focused beams of energy at people and makes them feel as though they are burning. The Los Angeles County sheriff’s department plans to install the device by Labor Day, making it the first time in the world the technology has been deployed in such a capacity.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California criticized Sheriff Lee Baca’s decision in a letter sent Thursday, saying that the technology amounts to a ray gun at a county jail. The 4-feet-tall weapon, which looks like a cross between a robot and a satellite radar, will be mounted on the ceiling and can swivel.
It is remotely controlled by an operator in a separate room who lines up targets with a joystick.
The ACLU said the weapon was “tantamount to torture,” noting that early military versions resulted in five airmen suffering lasting burns. It requested a meeting with Baca, who declined the invitation.
What much of the news has missed is that Raytheon has been trying to peddle the pain ray into prisons for years. And it has long had a big influence in the LA Sheriff’s Department, where Sid Heal presided over a long career as the local point man for bringing stupid applications in cutting edge technology, rays and various gadgets, into the force.
Mostly unsuccessfully.
For instance:
The folks who keep planes from crashing into one another over at the FAA were none too pleased to read about that little UAV demo conducted by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department this weekend, with the agency telling Sheriff Lee Baca and company to keep their drone grounded pending the result of an investigation. What’s more, the department could actually face disciplinary action for the SkySeer’s inaugural flight — FAA spokesperson Laura Brown commented that although the agency wasn’t “peeved,” they were “definitely surprised” that authorization had not been requested for the trial. Commander Sid Heal, point man for this program tasked with spying on Angelinos locating criminal suspects …
In 2008, Heal retired but not before indicating to New Yorker magazine that he was interested in a Raytheon consulting offer, based on peddling the pain ray. Here, from earlier this week.
Those who’ve followed the ADS story know that Heal and, by extension — the Sheriff’s Department, have longed for the pain ray for some time.
If you read the AP piece to its conclusion, you see the now standard assertions — built up over the years — that the pain ray can’t possibly hurt anybody. Plus it will only be used by people who are trained to exquisite fineness in its use, never afflicted with the cloudy or bad judgment which is usually part of the human condition.
Sure they’re intelligence-insulting, but it’s the way of the p.r. campaign for the thing.
Many authoritarian Americans are always keen to believe whatever rubbish is presented to them, as long as its couched in magical terms which assure that breakthroughs in technology have made a burning weapon something that doesn’t physically burn. It’s all in your mind. Or your nerve endings. Or the top layer of your skin.
Whatever, who cares, its prisoners we’re talking about and if you’re in jail in the US, you deserve everything bad that comes your way. And this is a good flavor of bad, its chief scientists/engineers at Raytheon — all of them — say so.
The pain ray is a weapon for using in cases where people can’t shoot back or launch any kind of counterattack. It’s critical the target be helpless. Like many reporters sent by news agencies for testing.
The ADS — or AID — is not a survivable piece of gear and it’s why it was peddled to the US military for use against unarmed crowds. The US military brought it back from Afghanistan without firing a shot, for logical reasons.
Winning hearts and minds is not the pain ray’s strong suit.
Paradoxically, when the Active Denial System was first marketed it was called the Sheriff and part of the idea was that it was great because it wouldn’t actually kill people, thus pissing off victims and civilians less.
“Sell the Sheriff to the sheriffs!” was probably on a Raytheon sales memo somewhere.
All you need to know about the delirious history of the pain ray — at Globalsecurity.
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08.24.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Stumble and Fail, War On Terror at 10:57 am by George Smith
In watching Fox News this morning, DD caught a Megyn Kelly segment on the latest whereabouts of the Active Denial System, or pain ray.
I last wrote of it in July when the US military withdrew the thing from Afghanistan without ever having used it.
Summing up:
One imagines very few sane US military leaders would want to see their careers incinerated upon publicized or leaked news on use of the wonderful pain ray on civilians in Afghanistan.
However, the ADS redeployment to a Los Angeles jail, where it can be used on prisoners who can’t launch a counterattack against it, is an industry thing.
Specifically, Ratheon’s, which has long wanted to peddle a commercial version of the ADS into US prisons and police forces. Where, presumably, it can argue behind closed doors that the American public won’t care if prisoners are burned with it. And so they won’t step up suicide attacks and miscellaneous bombings in retaliation for employing it.
Although the Fox News segments on the thing — renamed the AID (you just have to laugh at the cartoonish evil of it) for Assault Intervention Device — participated in the usual stunt, sending a reporter out to be burned, the bloom is well off the weed.
Even Megyn Kelly had to admit the pain ray was a publicity disaster for the US military. And now only a moron, or someone paid to stand still and get burned, thinks getting shot by the pain ray while Raytheon’s technicians perform the test, is great stuff.
So what’s the connection with the Los Angeles jail?
Probably Sid Heal, although the stories didn’t mention him.
For longer than DD can remember, Sid Heal — who retired from the LA County’s Sheriff Department in 2008, has been trying to pitch the pain ray in Los Angeles.
An article from the New Yorker that year reads:
In January, Heal gave notice that he would retire from the Sheriff’s Dept. on March 31st. At that point, he had received at least sixteen job offers. The offer he finds most interesting involves consulting with Raytheon on the Active Denial System — the pain ray.
Raytheon desperately wants to peddle the pain ray into the US correctional system, a task they’ve been at for at least half a decade.
And while the US can’t use the blighted thing overseas for obvious reasons — the reputation for torturing the unarmed being one, the corporation presumably feels there is no such squeamishness in prisons. Where shooting penned up out-of-sight undesirables means out-of-mind undesirables.
Just picture it: Prison guards — big guys, often obese and/or hyper-muscular from a mixed regimen of weight-lifting and steroids, working in a jail — Pitchess — notorious for its bad conditions, and the pain ray.
I just can’t think of a more humane and reasonable combination, can you?
Well, hold that, maybe you can in 2010 America.
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07.27.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 4:39 pm by George Smith
Americans are used to helplessness when a corporation goes rogue. But what if you were actually helpless — inert flesh tied to a table in a business plan run amok? Toay’s post takes us to a small firm, one from the heart of the bioterror defense research industry.
Its name: List Biological Laboratories in Campbell, CA.
To set the stage it is necessary to take readers back to a small newspaper article from November 2004.
From the Palm Beach Post:
Two weeks after four Floridians were paralyzed with knockoff Botox, the laboratory that manufactured the botulinum toxin unhesitatingly sold its poisonous product to a federal undercover agent over the phone.
Campbell, Calif.-based List Biological Laboratories didn’t verify the buyer’s identity or his made-up statements that the botulinum would be resold to research institutions, according to a federal search warrant affidavit obtained Thursday.
The FBI raided List, effectively halting the company’s sale of botulinum toxin, apparently to anyone with a good story.
“Agents … seized ‘growing procedures,’ computer records, customer lists and all List documents relating to Toxin Research International,” reported the Post. Toxin Research International — or TRI — would turn out to be two scammers with a plan to resell botulinum toxin produced by List Biological Laboratories. Reused illegally as the popular Botox, it would poach into Allergan’s effective monopoly on the drug in the United States and net a hefty profit.
The plan exploded when another Florida man named Bach McComb bought botulinum toxin from List. He then put himself and three patients in the hospital with botulism, a condition which would have killed all four had they not been sustained on ventilators.
Botulinum toxin, nature’s deadliest poison, eats part of a key protein in human nerve endings. When this happens in very small doses, it removes frown lines.
When it happens in full blown botulism, the victim loses the ability to move, to smile, to even speak. Eyelids droop, become flaccid. Speech is slurred as the toxin eats at the synapses.
The body, turned to unresponsive meat, must be sustained by artificial means until the damaged nerve endings are slowly healed.
The four suffering from botulism were slabbed, kept alive in hospital by machines. The made-in-America product took them right to the edge of the abyss and gave them a good look down.
McComb, a doctor in Florida whose medical license had been suspended for overprescription of painkillers, had bought a 100 microgram vial of highly purified botulinum toxin — a dangerous amount if incompetently used — from List Biological Laboratories.
He injected himself and three others with aliquots taken from it in treatment for wrinkles. Three to four days later, he and his patients were on hospital ventilators for survival. McComb’s girlfriend took the worst of it, needing six months on life support, saying in a videotaped statement for a criminal trial that her body wasted away until it was unrecognizable.
A scholarly paper subsequently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association described the poisonings as equivalent to “21 to 43 times the estimated human lethal dose by injection.” The vial from which McComb took his injections was thought to contain enough material for 14,286 fatal doses.
But how did this get started?
The simplest of all motivations. Greed.
In 2003, two con-artists in Arizona in pursuit of profit in the anti-aging industry began ordering the most poisonous substance known fresh from List Biological, then a dedicated purifier of biochemicals and toxins used in counter-terror research.
Chad Livdahl and Zahra Karim had set up a series of shell companies in Tucson with the aim of acquiring botulinum toxin cheaply and repackaging it as “Mimic Botox.”
The “Mimic Botox” would be shilled to cosmetic surgeons, fraudulently misrepresented as Botox, competing with Allergan’s property, the only company that could sell Botox in the US as a trademarked and licensed drug. With more profit in the equation than purchase of Allergan’s product allowed.
The scam worked.
Using the front company Toxin Research International, Livdahl and Karim ordered thousands of 5 nanogram vials of botulinum toxin from List Biological Laboratories sight unseen and promptly diverted it for resale to a collection of websites, as well as through anti-aging seminars.
Through this effective bit salesmanship, TRI established demand in the US’s first botulinum toxin black market.
According to the US government’s indictment (full text here), Livdahl and Karim paid List about $30,000 for the botulinum toxin shipment, subsequently making about one and a half million dollars in profit through the operation.
The plan came apart when McComb and his patients landed in the hospital. The FBI raided List. Livdahl and Kahrim were arrested, tried and convicted, getting nine and six years respectively, for fraud and misbranding a drug.
McComb pled guilty in 2005 to charges of administering unapproved drugs. He entered a Florida court using a walker, seemingly crippled from the side effects of botulism, according to a newspaper report. He was given three years in prison.
But although the government was looking to file charges against List Biological Laboratories, the company escaped the formal grasp of justice.
“Toxin Research International obtained the botulinum toxin from Campbell-based List Biological Laboratories, but investigators from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration could not establish that List had done anything illegal,” reads a San Jose Mercury News article from 2006.
“List sells products designed to be used in scientific and medical research, and no charges were filed against the company.”
The article outlined the US government’s continued roll-up of clients and associates in the Toxin Research International network, revealing the hot demand for American black market Botox.
“In June, a New Mexico doctor was indicted on federal charges of fraud after giving the fake Botox to 120 patients,” informed the newspaper. “Earlier this month, an Oregon doctor was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for using two kinds of fake Botox, from Toxin Research International and a Chinese company, on more than 800 patients. An Idaho doctor also was sentenced to six months in prison in mid-December for using botulinum toxin from Toxin Research International.”
Technically, List Biological Laboratories was part of the US government’s select agent control regime. It is a program designed to prevent select agents — like botulinum toxin or anthrax — from getting into the hands of bad people.
However, there are no obvious laws preventing professional malfeasance
and escape from oversight with regards to the select agent program.
In all the news on the black market Botox incident, no employees from List Biological Laboratories appeared in the press. The person (or persons) at List who sold botulinum toxin to Livdahl, Karim and McComb were never identified. The corporate culture when the company turned rogue and its product escaped from prudence, propriety, good sense and oversight have never been elucidated or described. No firings were announced.
What happened to the people who made the botox that put four people in hospital, severe enough poisonings to have killed the victims without intervention? Where did these parties go, if anywhere? Are they still scientists and lab assistants in good standing?
Mum’s always been the word. List ran for cover.
If the four poisoned by List Biological’s botulinum toxin had died, that would have made one less fatality than the number killed in the anthrax mailings.
Both incidents had to do with select agent misuse. The anthrax mailings led to a spectacular explosion in US bioterror defense spending.
List Biological Laboratories, like many other small firms in the bioterror defense industry, benefited and grew during this go-go period, a time when the US government was spending money like there was no tomorrow on bioterror defense research.
It was apparently a giddy time for List Biological Laboratories, a history to be discussed in a moment.
For two of those poisoned by List’s misused research botulinum toxin, there was only the civil court.
In June of 2007, the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reported:
A South Florida couple that suffered debilitating injuries from deadly anti-wrinkle shots has settled a civil lawsuit against the supplier of the lethal toxin.
Eric and Bonnie Kaplan, of Palm Beach Gardens, were among four people who almost died of botulism poisoning in 2004 after they were injected with a toxin more than 2,850 times the lethal dose at an Oakland Park clinic …
The terms of the settlement, finalized on the eve of a trial that was scheduled to begin Monday in Broward Circuit Court, include a confidentiality clause, said attorneys for both sides. The settlement is between the Kaplans and List Biological Laboratories of California, which supplied the raw botulinum toxin …
While neither side would discuss the amount of the settlement, the Kaplans revealed last year that they had previously rejected a $1 million settlement offer from List.
It’s the by now typical corporate remedy.You can have the blood money under the condition you never speak of this again.
List had been badly damaged by the FBI raid and botox case publicity. The extent of the damage would not become visible until the company filed for bankruptcy late last year.
“Campbell, Calif.-based List Biological, a biotechnology company which produces and researches bacterial toxins, files for Chapter 11 with $1 million to $10 million in both total assets and liabilities,” read a small item on December 11, published in the Daily Deal.
Throughout the year, List’s bankruptcy case has been proceeding through a San Jose court.
Paradoxically, List’s bankruptcy filing put an end to another civil suit brought against it, one by one of its infamous clients, Bach McComb. That legal stay — in pdf form — is here.
The List bankruptcy case is an argument by the company that it should be allowed to continue business as it reorganizes.
Part of it, for example, is a stay to keep its utilities — gas, electric, garbage and Internet — plugged in. That request is here.
List Biological’s creditors list, which has been furnished to the court a couple times, includes not only the many businesses it is in debt to but also the names of those convicted in the botox case.
These include Toxin Research International and Bach McComb, as well as Gayle Rothenberg and Saul Gower.
Rothenberg and Gower were a wife and husband team operating a big cosmetic surgery operation in Houston, tried and convicted in yet another complicated chapter in this case.
List lays out an initial argument for its survival in a request for a cash collateral loan so that it may continue operation during the bankruptcy proceedings.
That request is here.
Part of the justification for it is stated in a part entitled “History and Events Leading to the Debtor’s Bankruptcy Case.”
“In 1988, botulinum toxin became of great interest to List Bio Labs and the Company developed the technology to produce commercial sale botulinum toxin for the research reagent business,” it explains.
“As a result of its acknowledged expertise in this area, List Bio Labs was engaged by Allergan, Inc., in the early 1990’s to provide assistance … and to produce clinical grade botulinum toxin. The relationship ensued that led, ultimately to the licensure of the manufacturing facility as well as to the active ingredient in Botox being produced at the facility.”
By 2004, greatly increased government spending on bioterror defense research had led to ballooning demand for select agents.
List moved to a new location and expanded its laboratory production facility.
“With this new expanded facility, List Bio Labs is prepared to exploit its biological product expertise and expand the contract manufacturing part of the business,” attests the company.
“List Bio Labs is known for providing resources to biological and medical scientists and to the biodefense community. The Company success has been based on the List Bio Labs name recognition and our focus on quality products.”
If the reader grimaces while noticing weasel-wording, it only means that you’re still sane.
List’s arguments get much better. They imply the company’s value lies in things like its production of Botox and its strict adherence to safety and the select control regime.
Without mentioning that the reason List is in bankruptcy is because it turned bad with regards to these matters.
The above snapshot has List arguing there was an upgrade in the protocols of the select agent program in 2003. And the company’s infrastructure for agent handling was or is in national compliance. This at the time when List was either selling or about to sell botulinum toxin, a select agent, to Toxin Research International. By 2004, it had sold to Bach McComb and the resulting botulism cases brought the FBI down upon it.
While some bankruptcy court readers may be impressed by List’s various claims about its employees being approved by the select agent program there’s nary a mention the company is in this mess precisely because it sold select agent to bad people.
Who is behind List Biological Laboratories? Their names and faces have never been shown in newspaper stories.
For the purposes of this article, the company president is Karen R. Crawford, one of the five equity holders in List. One of the other holders is List scientist Linda Eaton. Along with List’s director of research and development, Nancy Shine, the three appear to be the principals in the company’s sales push for its botulinum toxin research preparations and related products over the past few years and during the period when the company’s troubles started.
Their accumulated poster sessions on select agent materials, on-line here at List, go from 2003 to 2009 — just before the company filed for bankruptcy.
And here is a patent filing by all three from 2003 for a substrate used in testing for the activity of botulinum toxin.
The value of this to the company becomes clear when one realizes the counter-bioterror research boom is partly aimed at finding quick detection for materials which the US thinks could be used by terrorists.
In fact, this List special product — called Snaptide — was cited as a possible answer for rapid detection of botulinum toxin in foods, milk specifically, in a theoretical bioterror attack scenario published in the prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
In this paper, published in November 2004, the author posited 100,000 poisoned individuals through the purposeful contamination of milk with botox — a near Biblical catastrophe, of sorts. It was an overcooked thought experiment in terror theatre and received great publicity.
Nevertheless, the timing of the paper’s reception at PNAS — in one of those very strange twists of fate — dovetailed with List’s sale of botox to Bach McComb and the four near fatal botulism cases the same month.
In financial statements about List delivered regularly to the court, Crawford, Shine and Eaton are List’s highest earners.
For example, during the weekly pay period beginning March 22 and ending April 2, they earned $4348.08, $3957.12, 3840.71 — respectively. List has a little under thirty employees with salaries ranging from Crawford’s high down to somewhat less than a quarter of that for an office assistant.
With address listed in court documents, Crawford lives in a relatively posh abode worth about $2.2 million, according to Zillow. It would seem to feature a nice-looking swimming pool and attached Jacuzzi.
These things, as limited as they are, limn aspects of List and its brain trust.
And while legitimized botox production is a proven money maker, in the final analysis, there is no compelling argument to be made for List’s survival. If it were broken up and its physical and intellectual assets sold off in a firesale with the remains going to creditors, it would be no big loss to science or the biodefense research effort in the US.
There will always be others to take such a company’s place, to develop purified or custom biochemical preparations for research purposes. List is only unique with regards to the trouble it has been embroiled in.
On the other hand, there would be a symbolic balancing if the firm was brought to an end.
Perhaps they apologized in private.
Perhaps it has been sworn, cross the hearts and hope to die, that this will never happen again. Never! Our bad. But now the company is good again. Really!
But just because there wasn’t something with which to charge people isn’t much of a reason for List not going down with the rest of those in this illness-inducing and disgraceful case, anyway.
Post note: The US government — specifically the Defense Threat Reduction Agency — paid to find out the level of threat that might be posed by overseas black market botox production being suborned by terrorists. And it was all over the news recently.
It’s worth noting the inspiration for analyzing such a problem — the diversion of botox to bad people — was minted here in the US, courtesy of the biodefense research industry. First.
In fact, mundane reality may reproduce the American model — the incidental poisoning of a few people here or there, lining up for black market de-wrinklings, overdosed by the careless and incompetent greedy wanting their piece of the beauty industry action.
List fights to save its laboratory equipment from Wells Fargo bank.
List’s Vice President and another one of the firm’s five equity holders, Debra Dye, writes the bankruptcy court, in attempt to defend the company against the Wells Fargo move on its equipment here.
Much of the argument on the firm’s value and history is exactly the same as the information first logged in the company’s petition for a cash collateral operating loan. A cut-and-paste job.
A section once again implies the firm is an important part of the US bioterror defense effort:
Many of the List Bio Labs products support the national bio-defense effort and for that purpose the Company has provided reagents to an NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — ed] funded reagent repository as a subcontractor.
The arguments are to minimize the market value of List’s lab equipment, bought on a business loan from Wells Fargo. So as to apparently lessen the debt load upon reorganization.
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07.26.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, War On Terror at 7:49 am by George Smith
Over at Armchair Generalist, J notes the US military has withdrawn the Active Denial System, formerly known as the Sheriff, aka the Hummer mounted millimeter wave pain ray — from Afghanistan.
He writes:
[The] US military is pulling its “less-than-lethal” Active Denial System out of Afghanistan after just deploying it there a short while ago. This is due more to policy and perception issues than technical issues.
He’s not entirely pleased with the decision for reasons made perfectly clear if you go to AG. It’s supposed to be a non-lethal weapon, after all.
Be that as it may, I’ve written about the pain ray off and on for a long time, starting at the Village Voice in the old Weapon of the Week column. And the tale of the ADS escaped DoD’s very stage-managed publicity. In observing how this story unfolded, the reasons for the weapon’s withdrawal become clear.
This from 2002, when DoD was just beginning to tout it as a wonder weapon:
The Department of Defense’s bland name for this electronic heat ray is the Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial (VMAD) system, a mouthful of jargon that yields few clues about the weapon’s nature. Allegedly designed for an Orwellian task—”humanitarian missions”—the VMAD is a giant version of your microwave oven, without the safety box surrounding it. The generals want to move it around on a humvee.
Official propaganda on the device is that it makes one’s skin only lightbulb hot, enough to force a person to run but not enough to cook him. Of course, there is no proof this can be achieved, because the results of tests on people are classified. It’s safe, insist the inventors, the air force’s Directed Energy Directorate in Albuquerque.
But anyone with first-hand experience broiling hot dogs and other non-robust meats in their tabletop microwave might be chary of such an assertion. Struck by the heat ray, “Sssss,” went the eyeball.
What is the microwaver’s target? It must be unarmed civilians, because as described, the VMAD wouldn’t seem to offer much against terrorists or regular soldiers ready to fire back with conventional weapons. What is certain is that the Pentagon’s microwave projects lack oversight and common sense. In one manic, grandiose claim, the Defense Department calls VMAD “the biggest breakthrough in weapons technology since the atomic bomb.”
The lust for military microwaving has also been a sinkhole for tax dollars. While much of the work remains deep in the shadows, the Directed Energy Directorate (DED) does allow that $40 million went out the door for the VMAD over the last decade. An additional $15 million was awarded to ITT Industries for research on high-power microwaving applications in bombs and other types of ray guns.
Microwaving facilities pictured as part of the Directorate also look to have cost a small fortune. One 27,000-square-foot concrete monolith is worth $9 million, resulting in a “cost-effective and timely capability.”
Vendors capitalizing on the VMAD include Raytheon, CPI (Communications and Power Industries), and Veridian Engineering—a tech firm menacingly cited for its part in researching “biological effects.”
The hype on the Sheriff, as it was called then, was so thick a German television crew asked me just before the outbreak of war in Iraq if the Pentagon would use the “death ray.” This was the perception overseas. Back in 2002.
Over the years, DoD’s publicity campaign for the ADS was always the same.
Noxious and intelligence-insulting, it boiled down to:
Recruit some journalist to be the gimp in a strapped down chicken test, the piece of meat to be left out standing in the field as a target.
In return the reporter got to visit wherever the pain ray was stationed — in the past couple years, Moody AFB in Georgia — to write a story about how great the thing was.
The pain ray was always said to be a revolution in military less-than-lethal technology. It was something needed by our boys, pronto!
Richard Machowicz of Futureweapons was one strapped down chicken a couple years ago. Even 60 Minutes was recruited.
In 2008, on the 60 Minutes advertisement for the ADS, from el Reg:
The omega in our story is another weapon that’s never done anything but win the hearts and minds of its handlers and the journalists commissioned to write about it after it had shot them. Just prior to the war, the Vehicle Mounted Active Denial System, since shortened to just Active Denial System, was ridiculously hailed by people in the Department of Defense as the biggest breakthrough in weapons technology since the atomic bomb. From there, it’s been almost all downhill for the Hummer-mounted pain gun that heats the top layer of skin with millimeter waves.
It had been hoped that the ADS, nicknamed The Sheriff, would arrive in Iraq in time to aid pacification and occupation operations. But a peculiar thing happened.
In their quest for publicity, the weapon’s minders worked out a system whereby reporters would be given the opportunity to be burned and awed by it in return for cheerleading notices. The practice worked but not in the way ADS pushers had hoped. Many stories, all glowing, were generated. But at the same time, the US gained a world reputation as a nation that tortures prisoners. This cognitive dissonance erased the value of the ADS publicity scheme. A Hummer-mounted ray gun that agonizes people, even if only non-lethally, is seen as a potential instrument of America-style torture, one aimed at unarmed foreigners.
Since the beginning of the Iraq war, the ADS has been regularly promised and every year it has failed to show, left to languish by Pentagon men who probably don’t want to see their careers go down in flames over it. Moved from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, the ADS has had progressively less money devoted to it, a sign that at least a part of the DoD wishes it would go away. Its liabilities include factors ranging from possible foreign public relations nightmare to its being recently described on “60 Minutes” as against the ingrained culture of a military that wants weapons which kill people as fast as possible.
The Air Force resorted to something of a Hail Mary pass for it earlier this month, farming the ADS out to “60 Minutes” where, as usual, it was described as a wonder weapon, one that could have solved a multitude of big woes that are now water under the bridge, like the blasting of Fallujah. “Pentagon officials call it a major breakthrough which could change the rules of war and save huge numbers of lives in Iraq,” claimed CBS News’ David Martin. Like many who had so bravely gone before him, Martin allowed himself to be shot by the ADS in return for a puff piece explaining that the reason it wasn’t already in Iraq saving lives was because of lack of proper backbone among Pentagon leaders.
In five years of war, the ADS became politically untenable. “You don’t ever, ever, ever want a system like this to be thought of as a torture weapon,” Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Sue Payton told “60 Minutes.” Payton also told the news operation she “loved” the ADS and “started giggling” after being shot by it, adding another negative – a whiff of craziness – to the stigma of the pain ray.
Since the war began, few ADS stories have been complete without indication that it was going to Iraq soon. This time it’s for summer fun. The bright side is that if it continues true to form, it’s just another in a five year-long list of assorted threats and promises never quite delivered as billed.
The ADS program was also contaminated by the Pentagon’s reliance on kooks. And its inability to control them once they’ve been released from active duty.
From 2008, also at el Reg:
The US military’s pain ray, aka the Active Denial System, is a certified excrement magnet. In March Reg readers learned that the US Air Force wonder weapon is still being pitched as a game changer in Iraq, a prediction that’s never even been close to being tested.
ADS defenders claim the Pentagon, afraid that using it would be a public relations disaster, won’t give the non-lethal pain ray, a gun that shoots millimeter waves, the green light. It’s something the US would use to torture foreigners, preferably smaller and not as well-armed as our boys.
Ah, but maybe it’s not just a pain ray – maybe it’s a death ray, too! And it’s been hiding in plain sight under cover of a non-lethal weapons program.
The deliverer of the death ray claim was Dave Gaubatz, a former Air Force man who had done security for the ADS. Unfortunately for the military, Gaubatz also became a public relations liability as a civilian.
Seeing undercover Muslim subversion everywhere in the US, Gaubatz via TPM:
[Said] in September 2008 on a now scrubbed blog post at www.jihadishere.blogspot.com that: “We are now on the verge of allowing a self admitted ‘crack-head’ to have his finger on every nuclear weapon in America.”
But back to the ADS and what was written at el Reg:
[The] interesting [death ray] allegation comes by way of a man named Dave Gaubatz, and FrontPage magazine.
Gaubatz, described as a former veteran of the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, informed FrontPage that 60 Minutes, as well as everyone else, had been fed a crock on the pain ray. It was originally designed, he said, as a straight lethal ray gun and it’s been operational for years. It was ready for use in Iraq where it could have slain the enemy and saved American lives. And 60 Minutes made a big mistake by not getting the truth of this and “putting our soldier’s lives in danger everyday.”
“Each day that goes by and another soldier dies should weigh heavily on every member of 60 Minutes,” said Gaubatz.
Well into the weird, Gaubatz explained that journalists have all been fed a story about the non-lethal weapon. This is true, but only to a point – one not yet in crazy world. Then the narrative jumps the cliff. The journalists are culpable because they’re “liberals who know less about the Ray Gun [yep, that’s in caps] than they do basic fundamentals of war.”
And readers now see what happened to the Active Denial System.
Although the Pentagon’s careful publicity campaign for it spanned many years and many journalists, it backfired badly.
While various big name reporters were consenting to be shot by the ADS, in order to transmit stories on the great new non-lethal wonder weapon, the rest of the world — not being stupid — perceived it much differently.
That message: The US had invented a nefarious device to be sent to the Muslim world for the agonizing of civilians. Just another instrument of torture.
One imagines very few sane US military leaders would want to see their careers incinerated upon publicized or leaked news on use of the wonderful pain ray on civilians in Afghanistan.
So the ADS — while sent there for a brief period — never fired a shot, according to reports. And has now been shipped home for obvious reasons.
There’s a book in this story. One on how really stupid ideas, packaged in futurism, whizz-bang technology, the hype of sycophants and the belief in American exceptionalism in all things, blow up when the rest of the world doesn’t agree to drink the Kool-Aid.
Or, more simply: Just because you can make such a thing doesn’t mean you should.
The Department of Defense also commissioned the programming of a war game to model use of the pain ray. I had a copy of the game, played it and reported on the technical aspects of it here.
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07.15.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 2:36 pm by George Smith
One of the best examples of terror defense research as the equivalent of welfare for scientists is the ricin vaccine.
To be sure, the slow development of a vaccine for ricin is built upon the foundation of good science. However, once you get past the rigor involved, its practical value dissolves into the equivalent of science welfare.
The history of ricin and intended use in poisoning has been well-described many times by this author, here and elsewhere.
It’s a “weapon” of choice for kooks and incompetents. White neo-Nazis in the US, England and Canada are regularly banged up and sent over for a long time for the crime of turning castor seeds into a mush.
The recipe for turning castor seeds into mush containing a bit of ricin is widespread. And occasionally it is even found in the hands of Islamic terrorists, as in one very famous case here.
But there is no way to make ricin into an effective weapon of mass destruction. Despite its toxicity, it’s not quite poisonous enough and not found in quite high enough quantity in the castor seed. And turning castor seeds into powder is not an effective way of purifying it.
And there is no public record anywhere of ricin being made into a WMD, ever — despite the existence of a questionable patent on using ricin as a toxic weapon, one developed by the US government too long ago to be interesting anymore.
As with so many things imagined to be of easy use to terrorists, it is actually easier and more reliable to shoot people, or blow them up, or even strangle them — than to poison with ricin.
Before 9/11 there was no interest in a vaccine for ricin. Man has worked with castor seeds as a renewable agricultural resource for centuries and been no worse the wear for it.
After 9/11 that changed.
And a small number of people have been working on a ricin vaccine ever since. Despite the fact that the only people who might every actually need a ricin vaccine are those who do research with ricin and the occasional nuisance who sickens himself with castor powder.
So, as fruit of the war on terror, one reads — today — of a research paper on a vaccine for ricin:
“Since it is likely that a ricin vaccine would be used in an emergency setting or by the military, the ease of [intradermal] vaccination with jet injectors or similar devices with lower doses of vaccine is rather important,” stated Robert N. Brey, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer of Soligenix. “It should also be noted that ID vaccination was highly effective at protecting the lungs of the mice from ricin aerosols, a likely route of delivery in the setting of bioterrorism.”
It is not a likely setting. The people making the ricin vaccine know it. The only things killed with ricin aerosols are in the labs working toward a finished ricin vaccine.
However, Soligenix is another small biotech company with virtually no product line, one attached to the teat of funding for bioterror defense. It used to be called DOR Biopharma, changing its name a year or so ago, perhaps in a clumsy attempt to snooker potential investors. Like many of the companies mentioned on this blog it is a member of the Alliance for Biosecurity.
Concludes the article on the ricin vaccine:
“There have been many attempts to develop a prophylactic ricin vaccine, using different preparations of the ricin holotoxin with and without various adjuvants,” stated Dr. Ellen Vitetta, Director of the Cancer Immunobiology Center at UT Southwestern and senior author of the study. “But none of these have been as extensively studied as RiVax™ and none have looked at the ID vaccination route.”
Whoopie! A vaccine of benefit only to the company making it. It’s science welfare, kids!
Another small form of science welfare, one also supported since 9/11, is the attempt to make castor plants ricin free through molecular genetics. Like this charity case waste of time at Mississippi State.
The rest of the world — particularly the big producers of castor products, India and China, couldn’t care less about ricin-free castor beans.
It’s just not an issue. The world doesn’t need a ricin-free castor plant. The castor plant is not a menace.
And it wasn’t even an issue in US castor production, although a couple scientist involved in this work now will try to insinuate it was, when castor seed cultivation was stopped in this country because it simply wasn’t profitable enough.
Previously, excerpted from here:
Over the course of a decade, from 1959 until 1970, Plainview was considered the hub of domestic castor bean production with the local office of Baker Castor Oil ultimately contracting for 70,000 acres of production annually.
However, the crop’s success ultimately worked against it with practically no significant domestic production recorded after 1972. Since that time, the United States has been forced to turn to producers in India and Brazil to supply the majority of its needs.
Plainview Mayor John C. Anderson has a unique perspective on the local castor industry, having served as general manager of Baker Castor Oil’s local operations from August 1959 until December 1970.
“During most of that time Baker was the dominant player in the United States with about 75 percent of the castor oil production,??? Anderson recalled last week, “and the Plainview facilities accounted for virtually all of that.???
The oil derived from castor beans is used in a vast array of products, ranging from paints, varnishes and lacquers to lipstick, hair tonic and shampoo. Since it does not become stiff with cold nor unduly thin with heat, castor oil is an important component in plastics, soaps, waxes, hydraulic fluids and ink. It also is used to make special lubricants for jet engines and racing cars, and during World War I, World War II and the Korean War it was stockpiled by the federal government as a strategic material.
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07.02.10
Posted in Extremism, War On Terror at 9:34 am by George Smith
The alleged ‘publication’ of al Qaeda’s English-language Inspire .pdf brought on a media convulsion notable for its collective amnesia.
The publication itself was, outside from the first three pages, a negligible download.
The contents page continues an established tradition of clumsy and/or unintentionally funny bits re the much repeated article (which does not exist in the publication): “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
I’ve spent years looking at various al Qaeda and attributed-to-al Qaeda documents devoted to terror, specifically recipes for making chemical and biological weapons in the home, as well as explosives.
Sophistication and slickness are not in their character. In this, “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” as a usage, is typical.
Rachel Maddow devoted a few minutes of clowning to Inspire yesterday, drawing out the “bomb” bit out for comic effect.
In this she and her staffers missed the point that for the greater duration of the war on terror, such documents, whether they are silly-looking or not, have been portrayed in the western press as very serious business.
And even when they don’t confer any capability — the bomb-making formulations and poisoning advisories being much less than adequate, they have been written of as if they convey great ability to anyone who downloads them around the world.
And in the United Kingdom, no matter how absurd they appear, they have been used as evidence — materials deemed likely to be useful to terrorists — to send over people who downloaded them onto their hard drives for very long prison terms.
See here in “Art Shown Here Can Get You Jailed.”
Snapshots of various .pdfs from the war on terror show the new al Qaeda publication is not especially out of the ordinary. But it does, in fact, look a bit better than the usual fare.
Here is one bit from an old terror document, actually published by the Washington Post a few years ago, of an infamous poisoner’s handbook, one purporting to give you the ability to make botulism toxin from a few handfuls of garbage and dung. It’s no more or less absurd than a title like “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
And another, the work of a now long-jailed al Qaeda man.
However, al Qaeda men and jihadists have never had much trouble compiling and distributing .pdf files. Which makes the less-than-compelling quality of Inspire — which has apparently purposely been obfuscated past the first three pages, a bit of an embarrassment.
If the purpose is to get the maximum number of readers, the insertion of digital gobble into the .pdf as padding — as this commenter details here — is astonishingly counterproductive.
It essentially creates impressions that the publication is either unfinished, a fake or that its creator greatly overestimated his own cleverness.
“[I] have no idea why it would occur to anyone to try it in the first place,” commented one of DD’s colleagues in e-mail. [Hat tip to SA.]
And the publication’s relatively small number of downloads, in proportion to the news of it, would seem to be proof of fail.
“The language of the magazine, such as ‘Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom,’ reflects either a poor command of English or a light-hearted sense of self-parody,” writes someone — not very perceptively — at the Atlantic.
“Since I am not completely certain that the clean PDF doesn’t contain a hidden virus, I’ve elected not to post it just yet,” adds Marc Ambinder.
Armbinder’s presumption is silly. The file is harmless.
And it is here.
Nevertheless, even if one makes a joke of Inspire, terrorists have been inspired by similarly feeble work. It often doesn’t take much to motivate a few in the rather small global fan club for these things.
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