The US was not always anti-science. At least not when I was growing up and being trained as a protein chemist.
Now it’s profoundly different. The party of extremists, backed by big corporate money in the fossil fuels industry, has spent years cultivating contempt for science and facts because it is necessary to protect business interests.
There have always been lots of really stupid people. However, we did not formerly put them in positions where they could paralyze thought and progress in the nation.
So we have a big pack of the most contemptible and self-serving of all fools in the guise of the Republican Party. (As well as a much smaller number of craven and contemptible Democratic politicians in red areas.)
But largely, this is a problem foisted on us by a party in lockstep, one for which the entire purpose is to destroy government, leadership and rational thought because it gets in the way of predatory business “freedom.”
It is a problem that can only be solved by their removal from power. And even then it will take decades to undo all the harm.
OXFORD, Miss. — Marshals Service: Suspect in ricin letters case has been released from jail in Miss.
A kook, but not the ricin kook, apparently.
In one stroke, the FBI has replayed on a smaller scale the anthrax catastrophe with Steven Hatfill, the infamous “person of interest” before the suicide of Bruce Ivins.
It unfolded slowly, with Monday’s news revealing that the FBI had failed to find any castor seeds, “ricin-making materials” or internet recipes at the home of Paul Kevin Curtis.
It is a serious blow to the agency, a public relations and image nightmare, throwing into question everything it has done.
What’s with the ricin determinations on the letters? Are they actually reliable? Why was ricin reported in the letters? Why? Why? Why? Who has f—– up so royally?
In the past twelve years, the American government has always recovered castor seeds, castor powder or ricin recipes from those accused of “making ricin.”
The FBI would have had to know, very quickly after arresting Paul Kevin Curtis, that it had a serious problem developing when it found none of these, not even traces, in his possession.
What pressure was on the agency to make a quick arrest because of the national terrorism hysteria over the Boston marathon bombing?
“[Paul Kevin Curtis’] lawyer said in court that someone may have framed Curtis, suggesting that a former co-worker with whom Curtis had an extended exchange of angry emails may have set him up,” reads one emerging report from the newswire.
Updated: Transcribed court proceeding from Kevin Paul Curtis hearing.
Material included — mental history, former brushes with law, restraining order, assessment of material in letter (crude, made by throwing castor seeds in a blender), names of others, one of whom became another FBI target today.
Readers know I have no taste for the nation’s received wisdoms on ricin and terrorism.
This is because t he country has been so poorly served by expert advice during the war on terror, the most ridiculous things create a panic. The result has been that the absurd has become accepted and normal
The FBI is certain ricin was in the letters send to Roger Wicker and the President.
Yet today, its special agent admitted the FBI cannot find castor beans or ricin recipes in the materials seized at the home of Paul Kevin Curtis.
Agent Brandon Grant said that a search of Paul Kevin Curtis’ house in Corinth, Miss., on Friday did not turn up ricin or ingredients for the poison. A search of Curtis’ computers has found no evidence so far that he researched making ricin …
Still, Grant testified that authorities believe that they have the right suspect.
“Given the right mind-set and the Internet and the acquisition of material, other people could be involved. However, given information right now, we believe we have the right individual,” he said.
Grant testified Friday that authorities tried to track down the sender of the letters by using a list of Wicker’s constituents with the initials KC, the same initials in the letters. Grant said the list was whittled from thousands to about 100 when investigators isolated the ones who lived in an area that would have a Memphis postmark, as do some places in north Mississippi. He said Wicker’s staff recognized Curtis’ name as someone who had written the senator before.
The letters also contained lines that were on Curtis’ Facebook page, including the phrase, “I am KC and I approve this message,” Grant said.
Grant testified that there were indentations on the letters from where someone had written on another envelope that had been on top of them in a stack.
The indentations were analyzed under a light source and turned out to be for Curtis’ former addresses in Booneville and Tupelo, though one of the addresses was spelled wrong, Grant said.
Is there a different ricin kook on the lam? And how would castor powder from someone else’s letter wind up in the letters of Paul Kevin Curtis?
Paul Kevin Curtis’ lawyer suggested “in court that an enemy may have framed” him.
More and more reasons to be tired of the whoopie cushion scares that have become normal as a result of 9/11. (The immense headache of the anthrax case, only on a much smaller scale, comes vaguely to mind.)
Whatever reality is finally determined in the matter, it will not have been worth the media space. And it still won’t justify spending more money on ricin countermeasures.
From a New Jersey business publication, more industry of fear p.r. on Soligenix, a company that has existed on bioterror defense spending for more than a decade, trying to exploit opportunity created by the crazy man:
Soligenix is actively working to develop vaccines for bioterrorism agents such as ricin, but funding the research remains a challenge, according to company president and CEO, Christopher J. Schaber.
“Every biodefense program needs to be sponsored by the government,??? said Schaber. “We don’t spend our own money on biodefense. The company could not take off with biodefense unless we secure a large procurement contract from the government, which are typically in the hundreds of millions of dollars …
Soligenix’s share price rose 20 percent this week after the ricin-laced letters to government officials were publicized.
Soligenix would make money if the government stockpiles the vaccine, but the research has to be funded and it has to get FDA approval before the company can procure a government contract.
“We’ve taken this very far with the support of the NIH (National Institutes of Health), but we really need to get a larger contract with more funding to allow us to move forward,??? Schaber said. “The government many times doesn’t move that quickly on these things, especially because a lot of people haven’t died.
In over ten years Soligenix has brought nothing to the US market.
Worth 100 mil to the biodefense rent-seeker?
Fun fact: Number of people made even mildly ill in government offices from handling ricin-tainted letters in the last twelve years: Zero.
From a Minneapolis newspaper, on the REO/Styx/Nugent oldies tour:
Nugent, 64, was the most polarizing figure on the bill, thanks to his outspoken views on politics, hunting and guns. But it seems like it’s been at least 30 years since Nugent cared what anyone else thought about him, and he carried that cocksure attitude over to his performance. Basically, it was one long guitar solo, punctuated by an obscene amount of swearing and some “USA! USA!” patriotism tossed in for good measure.
From the Toledo Blade, an article on the same tour explaining the Midwestern love of “classic rock” — or, as readers of this blog might call it now — WhiteManistan rock:
[Toledo venue manager] Miller refers to classic rock and country music as the arena’s “bread and butter,??? attracting “a traditional and loyal audience??? who identify with the songs about the Midwest experience — see Styx’s “Blue Collar Man,??? for example.
Cronin also noted similarities in the two fan bases, and said that REO Speedwagon keyboardist and co-founder Neal Doughty has a theory that classic rock is really the new country.
“Not musically, but just in as much as it’s long lasting,??? he said. “It’s the music of heartland, and it’s another alternative??? …
The music of heartland for some, of stomach-turning for others. Modern country became the refuge of classic rock in the last twenty years. Neal Doughty of REO has it a little bit sideways.
The musicians in modern country play light classic rock with banjo and fiddles glued on for seasoning.
See the most recent comment on Brad Paisley, here. After bombing with “Accidental Racist,” his record company launched another weird dud, “Beat This Summer.”
Now I ask you, who thought conjuring the spirit of a slightly older Jon Benet Ramsey by putting the song to a video in which a very little boy and little girl have a puppy summer affair on the Santa Monica pier was a great idea? Wistful, I don’t think so. It made my skin crawl.
God save us from the clueless in WhiteManistan and heartland music.
OXFORD, Miss. — Marshals Service: Suspect in ricin letters case has been released from jail in Miss.
Rent-seeking behavior is the abandonment of providing a good product or service to customers (or one of even slightly minor social benefit) for the sole pursuit of wealth through private sector/government collusion.
It is practiced by corporations as well as individuals. And it is rife in the national security megaplex.
An article on the science journal Nature’s website on the 18th is the very illustration of it.
Entitled, “US ricin attacks are more scary than harmful,” the added slug line informed “But researchers hope that the incidents will renew development of stalled vaccines.”
Paul Kevin Curtis, the ricin-tainted letter mailer, appears to be profoundly mentally ill. There was never any chance that his letters would reach their targets. Bruce Ivins, the anthraxer who worked within the heart of the US’s bioterror defense establishment saw to that.
And there was no way the crude castor powder with ricin in it ever posed a threat to the general public.
It was country’s very bad luck to have the mental illness of Paul Kevin Curtis fly right into the middle of the week of the Boston terror bombing hysteria.
The US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland, has developed a vaccine called RVEc, which protected mice that were exposed to inhaled ricin.2 The vaccine has also been tested in human volunteers, who subsequently developed antibodies to the toxin. But further human testing is needed, and it is not clear whether the Department of Defense will continue to fund the vaccine’s development.
The other leading vaccine candidate, RiVax, is made by a company called Soligenix, based in Princeton, New Jersey. The vaccine was initially developed by Ellen Vitetta, an immunologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and batches made by her group have been tested in animals. Those batches have also been found to be safe in healthy human volunteers, in whom they stimulated the production of antibodies.
But Soligenix has not yet tested the safety and effectiveness of its own batches of RiVax. The company’s development efforts have slowed as a result of budget constraints at its funding agency, the NIAID, says Vitetta.
“It basically is not going anywhere,??? she says. “It’s disappointing and upsetting.??? After an event such as the latest ricin mailings, “everyone wants to know where the vaccines are. Somebody has to think this work is important enough to fund us and let us finish it.???
Soligenix’s work on the vaccine is currently funded by a US$9.4-million NIAID grant, but further testing in animals to prove the treatment’s effectiveness would cost between $20 million and $40 million, says Chris Schaber, the company’s president.
It is cynical behavior to use the work of an individual like Paul Kevin Curtis as an argument for the refinancing of bioterror defense business.
The conditions concerning ricin poison are not going to change. It will never be a weapon of mass destruction and therefore has little to no utility unless one can think of a rationalization to require all ongress, or the president, to be immunized with it.
Ricin-tainted letters are rare and one cannot generally predict who they will go to. Should the entire US postal service by immunized?
Rhetorical question, obviously.
Soligenix is a company that has been mentioned here from time to time. It is a bioterror defense nostrum firm that exists only because of Bruce Ivins and the war on terror. For over a decade it has been kept afloat by taxpayer money and never brought anything to the American people in return.
More recently its stock collapsed, the company eventually turning to an accounting maneuver to re-inflate it.
Practically speaking one might look at the anthrax mailer from Fort Detrick (USAMRIID) as the ultimate bioterror defense rent-seeker.
The FBI surmised that one of Ivins’ motivations in mailing anthrax was to create an incident that would save and stimulate his anthrax vaccine work. In this he certainly was successful. Fort Detrick, for example, where Bruce Ivins was employed was a hot place to work. Bruce Ivins, a very capable scientist, was no Paul Kevin Curtis.
So after the anthrax mailings the national bioterror defense industry boomed. It continued to expand through the entire presidency of George W. Bush. Indeed, those were its salad years.
However, today, spending on bioterror defense asks reasonable people to consider it in terms of morality and good citizenship.
For five years the country has been limping along with an economy that does not serve the majority of its citizens very well. Food stamp subsidies are at an all time high. Millions and millions of people are long-term unemployed or underemployed. The nation faces very serious problems it is not really attempting to solve.
However, crude powder containing ricin in the mail is not a serious national problem affecting the lives of hundreds of millions.
The vast majority of Americans have seen very little real benefit from the large sums in bioterror defense spending. This is probably not going to change.
In view of this, the use of Paul Kevin Curtis, an obviously nuts person, as a rationalization to spend money on a vaccine that no one will likely ever need takes on a taint of immorality. It is simply an attempted collusion between government and a small bit of the corporate national security business to get more of the taxpayer loot.
It is rent-seeking through use of the industry of fear.
You think this man is a reason to fund a ricin vaccine? Seriously?
Law enforcement agents should be able to test the toxin found in the letters to determine its potency and purity, as well as learn what chemicals may have been used to extract it from widely available castor beans, said Murray Cohen, the founder of the Atlanta-based Frontline Foundation, which trains workers on preparedness and response to bioterrorism and epidemics. Those chemicals might then be able to be linked to purchases made by Curtis or materials found in his home.
Curtis’ ex-wife has said he likely didn’t have the know-how to make ricin, and she did not know where he would buy it because he was on disability. But Cohen said ricin was once known as “the poor man’s bioterrorism” because the seeds are easy to obtain and the extraction process is relatively simple.
“Any kid that made it through high school science lab is more than equipped to successfully make a poison out of this stuff. Any fool can get recipes off the Internet and figure out how to do it,” Cohen said.
Those seeds, which look a bit like coffee beans, are easy to buy online and are grown around the world; they are often used to make medicinal castor oil, among other things. However, using the seeds to make a highly concentrated form of ricin would require laboratory equipment and expertise to extract, said Raymond Zilinskas, a chemical and biological weapons expert.
“It’s an elaborate process,” he said.
The industry of fear, at work. In the first “expert” claim, you have the case of someone from one of the many small advisory and training firms that moved into national security work in the wake of 9/11.
The Frontline Foundation was originally a business for healthcare worker safety training.
The second expert is someone who knows and has a long career studying bio and chemical weapons and their relationship to terrorism.
The claims are contradictory. The story’s title: Experts: Ricin like that in letters easy to make.
There is one right answer and it’s the second. Again, no one has made purified ricin during the war on terror years for reasons explained over and over here.
But it’s not something one has ever been able to get across to the press.
It does not fit the script, all the received wisdoms. Worse, it does not aid businesses offering their services in training for defense against all those things we are to be afraid of. Because they are easy to make.
There’s no profit in telling the truth because it’s complicated. It does not make as sensational a story nor does it earn money.
Consider too, there is now an obvious social cost to this, at the general public’s expense. Paul Kevin Curtis probably read the news. Although clearly out of his mind and with no sense of self-consciousness or restraint (you can get it from his pictures and videos), like others before him he’s immersed in an environment that tells everyone how easy things are to make.
Any kid that made it through high school can do it, you see.
And logic and careful thought can never win against such one-line claims delivered by people in performance for the media.
The FBI and national security agencies would, of course, be quite interested in combing over it, and translating various videos linked to by Tsarnaev, in efforts to understand his background. It’s a process that could take days although the broad strokes are apparent almost immediately.
Presumably they have already made a mirror of it.
One of his “favorites” was a disturbed Russian video of someone badgering a pet chameleon set to religious chanting.
A Washington Post blog entry shows a snapshot here.
I am willing to bet Tsarnaev had zero subscribers prior to that screenshot.
The channel now has a steadily increasing trickle of fans. See for yourself. The number ticks up as you refresh the page.
It is of generally good quality although the authors have a slight case of the disease of national hedging on how easy ricin is to make.
Yesterday, I put unequivocal evidence, from a domestic ricin case, of what a castor powder mixture contains on the web and stated flatly that ricin recipes on the internet fail to change it in any significant matter.
It has been reposted at GlobalSecurity.Org here along with a host of other very legitimate resources on the topic.
The quality of [instructions for making ricin] varies. Some directions would produce only crude preparations while others would produce nearly pure ricin. Even the crude preparations have been considered deadly.
They all produce crude preparations, a mix of proteins and polypetides, including ricin, that comprise the 5 percent component of proteinaceous material in the castor seed.
Crude castor powder can be deadly, if eaten. Eating a castor seed, specifically — chewing it, can cause death or a bad incident.
But not always, as discussed here in January of last year:
The National Institute of Health furnishes a report on a single case of poisoning by castor bean in Oman, where a patient used one to mistakenly treat a cough.
Apparently, some old methods of “traditional??? medicine employ castor seeds. And the castor seed does not usually poison unless it is chewed, a factor pointed out by the journal article.
“In various countries castor beans are the base of many traditional remedies. Our patient believed that they could treat his cough. Ingested castor beans are generally toxic only if ricin is released through mastication or maceration …”
And from the abstract, the outcome is summarized:
“Increasing the awareness of the population to the dangers of ricin would be a way to avoid the utilisation of castor seeds in traditional therapies. Here we are reporting a case of mild poisoning after ingestion of a single castor bean. The patient, who presented at Nizwa Hospital, Oman, fortunately recovered completely as the ingested dose was quite small.”
And many years ago it was not uncommon to find castor powder, of course containing ricin, used by gardeners in attempts to control pests.
Castor seed powder was frequently used as fertilizer in this country. In the periodical called Timely Turf Topics, the publication of United States Golf Association Green Section, an issue from November 1942 reported that the country was using over 80,000 tons of castor seed mash as fertilizer annually. The Golf Association Green Section periodical was devoted to providing information to golf green managers on the maintenance of beautiful grass turf. During World War II, nitrates were diverted for the war effort, necessitating use of alternative fertilizers, of which castor seed mash was one.
In the November 1941 issue of Timely Turf Topics, the association grapples with the problem of controlling mole crickets in southern golf courses.
“It is reported that turf in some sections of Georgia and Florida has just experienced the worst infestation of mole crickets in a number of years,??? reads the issue. “Attempts to eradicate them from turf by the use of well-known poison bait as well as by treatments with arsenate of lead, ground tobacco stems and castor meal have not been successful in several localities this fall.???
The point to be made is that people once worked with large quantities of the grind of castor seeds in this country without dropping like flies.
Pure or nearly pure ricin can only be produced using the methods of protein chemistry. Of course, such procedures exist in the scientific literature. They have been beyond the capability of that demographic that messes with castor seeds.
Continuing with the CRS technical report on ricin:
“Many experts believe that ricin would be difficult to use as a weapon of mass destruction. Ricin needs to be injected, ingested, or inhaled by the victim to injure. Biological weapons experts estimate that 8 metric tons would be required to cover a 100 km2 area with enough toxin to kill 50% of the people. Thus, using ricin to cause mass casualties becomes logistically impractical even for a well-funded terrorist organization.
“Furthermore, some experts have stated that the required preparatory steps to use ricin as a mass casualty weapon also pose significant technical barriers that may preclude such use by non-state actors.”
This is certainly right. Eight metric tons of pure ricin, or even close to pure — like, say 50 percent, is not doable. Never has been. Eight tons of such a material is an absurd and incomprehensible amount.
Active proteins, which is what ricin is, are perishable, even more so when you do things to them that take them out of their natural circumstances.
The US military fiddled with ricin many decades ago. There is no compelling evidence it was successful.
The idea was to make a ricin bomb, a foolish undertaking on its face.
Proteins — bluntly, meat — react the same way to shearing, tearing, explosions, heat and fire just like the good stuff on the grill as raw hamburger. They are cooked.
The authors of the patent only vaguely grasp that during purifications, proteins are degraded by rough-handling and heat. They admit that their preparations were damaged by exposure to steam (“…considerable detoxification results”) in the text of the patent, which would be natural to expect in the practice of protein chemistry. And they mill and grind their rough preparation, noting “… dry ball and hammer milling … produced considerable detoxification perhaps due to the generation of excess heat.”
Such results would, for example, provide evidence to a good scientist that making a ricin bomb or artillery shell might be counterintuitive, shearing forces from blast and vigorous heating generally being unavoidable in such things.
Again, Ricin: Technical Background and Potential Role in Terrorism is here.
In a somewhat related matter, the German news magazine Spiegel Online published an article entitled, Poisonous Instructions: FBI Has Recipe for Ricin on Website, a now typical case of trying to throw a scare into readers.
Star, arrow, rune, figure eight — at first glance, it looks like nothing more than a series of hieroglyphics strung together on the website of the FBI, the federal investigating authority of the United States. But it’s an easy-to-follow recipe for the deadly poison ricin, handwritten in a code that even laymen can decipher.
The text was published in March 2011 on the pages of the Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU). There it served as an example of the work of the bureau’s decoding experts. Curiously enough, no secret is made of the document’s contents
For the rest of it the reader gets what everyone does on ricin. The combination of journalists wishing for eyeballs, a scary story of behavior that superficially looks incomprehensible, and the usual performing experts who state that the recipe is effective.
It’s an industry of fear, mutually beneficial to both parties.
Indeed, the FBI’s puzzle was solved on the web by an interested crypt-analyst blogger here on tax day.
The enciphered recipe is very crude, producing only a mash form that is not further purified for dangerous potential. Similar recipes in terrorist “cookbooks??? are “deemed incapable of achieving a good product for causing a large number of casualties by any exposure route, mainly because of the low content of toxin of the final extracts.???
Having originally posted the plain text of it, the blogger later redacted the material.
Nevertheless, DD blog saw a copy and it is one of the old ricin recipes. Specifically, it’s origin lies in Kurt Saxon’s The Poor Man’s James Bond, Vol III.
“It is bad to poison your fellow man, blow him up or even shoot him or otherwise disturb his tranquility. It is also uncouth to counterfeit your nation’s currency and it is tacky to destroy property as instructed in [the chapter] Arson and Electronics …
“But some people are just naturally crude … It is your responsibility, then, to be aware of the many ways bad people can be harmful …
“Also, in the event that our nation is invaded by Foreign Devils, it is up to you to destroy them with speed and vigor. Or — and perish the thought — if our Capitol should fall to the enemy within, I expect you to do your duty.
“It is right to share with your enemies, the knowledge in this wonderful book …???
Like this blog, as well as Congressional Research Reports, it contains much thoughtful and expertly derived and delivered information, the product of years of careful study. And I have a Ph.D., even if you don’t like the nickname and are afraid it will bring ridicule if mentioned in polite company.
Twitter “The Ricin Kook” in tweets, spread it in e-mail to your friends, share and “like” it on Facebook, post it to Reddit or your blog. Help make is a useful addition to public information on the subject.
What can be the harm? Perhaps someone important will see it and I will be empowered to write a fine book on the subject.
