05.23.13
No polishing the national security turd
Heckled twice. This is only of the heckles. He makes a joke and the boot-licks applaud.
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05.22.13
Bean Pounding (a new one)
Not another. Infatuated with his smartphone, too.
Matthew Ryan Buquet has been arrested by the FBI in connection with the recent mailing of two more ricin letters in Spokane, WA. Over the weekend, his apartment was raided and today he was arrested.
Buquet is on Facebook. He likes “Hannibal,” the tv show, PSY’s new single, Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” Cody Wilson’s 3D printed plastic gun and the right wing crank newsite, Newsmax.
A man accused of mailing ricin to the post office in Spokane pleaded not guilty Wednesday in federal court.
Matthew Ryan Buquet was charged with one count of mailing a threatening communication …
The FBI said the 37-year-old man was arrested following last week’s discovery of a pair of letters containing the deadly poison ricin. Buquet was arrested Wednesday afternoon …
Spokane police confirmed that Buquet was also a registered level two sex offender. Buquet was convicted of indecent liberties involving a 10-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty in November of 1998 and served 18 months. He was released November 14th, 1999.
From the Spokane Spokesman Review:
A suspect was indicted Wednesday by a federal grand jury in connection with the two ricin-laced letters sent by mail, one of which contained threats against U.S. District Judge Fred Van Sickle.
“The indictment did not mention ricin,” added the AP.
This is another odd one, leading to the potential that the ricin-detection was a false positive in the field in a test applied to all letters threatening officials. Or that ricin-testing of mail has been ramped up in the wake of the Dutschke case.
In which case, Buquet will not join the ranks of bean pounders and they will release him on bail for trial over sending a nasty letter to a judge.
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The dogshit of American tech
More belief that computers and digitization handles all problems, a feature story in the Washington Post on a grant for a 3D food printer, billed for Mars missions and as something that might combat world hunger.
So when do the 48 million on food stamps get it?
Anyway, nobody’s going to Mars in my lifetime. Never gonna happen.
Texas-based Systems and Materials Research Corp. has been selected for a $125,000 grant from NASA to develop a 3-D printer that will create “nutritious and flavorful??? food suitable for astronauts, according to the company’s proposal. Using a “digital recipe,??? the printers will combine powders to produce food that has the structure and texture of, well, actual food. Including smell.
The project — the details of which NASA plans to finalize this week — was presented at the Humans 2 Mars Summit in Washington earlier this month. At the presentation, Anjan Contractor, an engineer at SMRC and the project manager, explained how the idea originated: he had used a 3-D printer to print chocolate for his wife.
SMRC said part of its motivation for seeking the NASA grant is to pursue the even loftier goal of fighting world hunger.
“There isn’t some silver-bullet technology that’s going to solve hunger problems,??? said Gawain Kripke, policy director for food security and hunger at Oxfam America.
My, my, Anjan Contractor made chocolate for his wife. Isn’t that nice. Since this is just the kind of tech pabulum the upper class and its shoe-shiners like, he’ll be in every newspaper by Friday. But at least someone had the sense to rain a little on the premature victory parade.
Now, without using Google, name one American astronaut.
And not the guy who sang the sissified version of “Space Oddity,” he was Canadian.
There are, obviously, good things done with 3-D printing.
But the American culture of lickspittle guarantees that 3-D plastic total crap gets all the attention. Which must be really irritating to 3-D printing manufacturers.
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05.21.13
Two and a half minutes of grace
Was planning on posting a continuation on natsec rent-seeking but just couldn’t today.
Didn’t have it in me (as spied on Twitter) to live up to the recommendation directed at someone else: “Become DickDestiny and go all out pls. [Give him the] Beat down … ”
This song, a lot more polished that the vinyl recording by virtue of the Letterman band, was from a release just before The Breeders went platinum in the mid-90’s with The Last Splash. And it is 150 plus seconds of why rock and roll exists.
There’s this too.
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05.20.13
Bean Pounding (More Dutschke)
If you’ve kept up with the story of J. Everett Dutschke, his music and ricin letters here, you’ve had a full measure of the twisted idiosyncrasy and unusual crime he delivered to his neighborhood in Tupelo.
However, these three grafs leap of a Washington Post feature on him:
In the summer of 2012, as Dutschke prepared to enter his band RoboDrum in the annual Bud Lite Battle of the Bands contest, he started coming to the attention of law enforcement.
In June, he was charged with indecent exposure by the city attorney’s office after several neighborhood children came forward.
“He would get the attention of the girls with a green laser. He would hit the laser and click it around until they started to look into his house. Then he would expose himself,??? said Dennis Carlock, whose 13-year-old granddaughter was one of the victims and testified to the incidents.
He was convicted on exposure and later charged with three counts of fondling minors.
As mentioned earlier, there has to be a book in it: Bean Pounding, with only slight apologies to Faulkner.
J. Everett Dutschke — from the archives.
Do enjoy.
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Bean Pounding (continued)
The FBI is remaining mum on the recent case involving ricin mail in Spokane, WA. This is not surprising. The agency wants to avoid another case of mistaken identity and misdirection.
Agency spokeswoman Ayn Sandalo Dietrich added legal documents in the case also might be sealed. Their comments come after law enforcement officers raided a Spokane apartment Saturday and witnesses said they escorted a man from the building.
The letters were postmarked last Tuesday in Spokane and addressed to the downtown post office and the adjacent federal building. They were intercepted by the Postal Service, and no one was injured.
Investigators in hazardous materials suits spent most of Saturday executing a search warrant at the three-story apartment building …
There was no answer after a knock on the door of the apartment that was raided.
I think there might be a sitcom or comedy movie in castor bean pounding, don’t you?
It just writes itself. Weird freaky guys with unusual hobbies, framing enemies, scaring neighbors and making themselves famous through a new kind of performance art.
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The bioterror expert rent-seeker
The American bioterror defense effort is riddled with rent-seekers, individuals and businesses who spent the better part of the war on terror years inflating threats to increase spending in the field.
Most recently DD blog covered the company Soligenix which promptly used the recent ricin case to go looking for funding in the mainstream press.
Indeed, anthrax mailer Bruce Ivins can be thought of as the most successful bioterrorism research rent-seeker. Part of his motivation in mailing anthrax, according to FBI reasoning, was to save interest in research and development on the anthrax vaccine, of which he was a major part.
Ivins was spectacularly successful. The national panic over the anthrax mailings virtually created the modern bioterror defense industry in the United States.
Over the weekend, Los Angeles Times reporter David Willman, who was the first to publish news on Ivins and his suicide in 2008, went public with a story that fingered another big name from bioterrorism defense, former secretary of the navy and pre-presidential Obama security advisor, Richard Danzig. (His biography at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity is here.)
“Anthrax drug brings $334 million to Pentagon advisor’s biotech firm,” reads the headline in the newspaper.
Danzig, a lawyer, made himself into an expert on bioterrorism — the kind of expert who always insists a catastrophic attack was perhaps imminent and certainly probable, that such attacks were easy to mount.
From the LAT:
Over the last decade, former Navy Secretary Richard J. Danzig, a prominent lawyer, presidential advisor and biowarfare consultant to the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, has urged the government to counter what he called a major threat to national security.
Terrorists, he warned, could easily engineer a devastating killer germ: a form of anthrax resistant to common antibiotics.
U.S. intelligence agencies have never established that any nation or terrorist group has made such a weapon, and biodefense scientists say doing so would be very difficult. Nevertheless, Danzig has energetically promoted the threat — and prodded the government to stockpile a new type of drug to defend against it …
Danzig did this while serving as a director of a biotech startup that won $334 million in federal contracts to supply just such a drug, a Los Angeles Times investigation found.
By his own account, Danzig encouraged Human Genome Sciences Inc. to develop the compound, and from 2001 through 2012 he collected more than $1 million in director’s fees and other compensation from the company, records show.
The LATimes account is damning. By all accounts, Richard Danzig’s career as a bioterror defense advisor should be over. But nothing will happen. A quick read of Danzig’s biography would convince most that he is too important in the national security megaplex. Of course, he has already made his pile.
“Dr. Philip K. Russell, a biodefense official in the George W. Bush administration who attended invitation-only seminars on bioterrorism led by Danzig, said he did not know about Danzig’s tie to the biotech company until The Times asked him about it,” continued Willlman.
“Holy smoke—that was a horrible conflict of interest,” the scientist told the newspaper.
During the salad years of the war on terror Danzig peddled a talk and paper entitled “Catastrophic Bioterrorism — What is to be done?”
In the paper Danzig recommended a counter-measure drug to anti-biotic resistant anthrax be developed as soon as possible. He added that making antibiotic resistant anthrax was an elementary process, one that could be performed by a high school student.
In all this time, Danzig did not inform many, if any people, that he was on the board of directors of Human Genome.
“A Times search found seven papers Danzig had written on bioterrorism since 2001, reported Willman for the Times. “In only one of those did he disclose his tie to Human Genome.”
Danzig told the Times he had noted his position with the firm in confidential forms required annually by the government.
During the war on terror years Danzig made the rounds in the press and consultations to the government and industry, inflating the threat with claims that anthrax posed a greater potential threat than 9/11 and that bioterrorists could attack again and again with it, a process called “reloading.”
Bioterrorism “reloading” was also a potential scenario fast peddled by Tara O’Toole, a research scientist who made the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity famous during the Bush administration. O’Toole is now a director at the Department of Homeland Security, a position that has required she keep her opinions on catastrophic bioterrorism out of the press.
Wrote Willman for the Times:
The anthrax letter attacks, Danzig wrote in his “Catastrophic Bioterrorism” paper, exposed national security vulnerabilities “greater than those associated with 9/11.” He argued that the country’s defenses were inadequate.
Doses of anthrax vaccine would have to be given weeks or months in advance of an attack. As for antibiotics, Danzig suggested that even a novice terrorist could “readily” make a resistant strain.
“Development of an antibiotic-resistant strain … is quite easy,” Danzig wrote. “Even at the high school level, biology students understand that an antibiotic-resistant strain can be developed.”
This is something beyond the capability of a high school student or even someone with graduate training.”
“It’s not a trivial endeavor,” Paul Keim, a Northern Arizona University geneticist and anthrax expert, told Willman.
“This is something beyond the capability of a high school student or even someone with graduate training.”
The entire piece on Richard Danzig is here at the Los Angeles Times.
Unfortunately, readers know from experience what always happens in cases such as this.
Nothing. Conflicts of interest are like bread on the table — the staff of life in the national security megaplex.
It doesn’t matter if important people in unique positions to make policy are involved in businesses that profit directly from their policy advice and lobbying. That is just the way things work in the United States.
Recently — on bioterror rent-seeking, penny-ante stuff at Soligenix, which is not worth even a tenth in market cap value of the government contract awarded to Human Genome.
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Civil War 2: Ted Nugent’s problem
The Washington Post did everyone a favor in publishing Jeff Nugent’s break with his famous brother on guns and the culture of the National Rifle Association over the weekend.
By dint of the Post’s publication it has been republished in many smaller newspapers around the country this morning.
Ted Nugent’s comeback was published by one of WhiteManistan’s many crank news sites, Newsmax.
At Newsmax, only the converts read Ted. But small newspaper publications guarantee many more Americans, from all sides, will see the opinion of his brother.
And that has to sting. Because Jeffrey Nugent’s opinion was gentlemanly and well-reasoned. Ted Nugent, on the other hand, rests his entire career on extremism and incivility. He’s very well known for regularly metaphorically recommending violent ends for enemies.
From a Beaumont, TX, newspaper’s blog:
Jeffrey Nugent asks,
Why would responsible gun owners want to protect people who threaten not only our safety but our gun rights?
People that leave guns unsecured in their house with their children.
Or buy a dangerous weapon dangerous weapon as a gift for a five year old.
Another problem associated with Nugent’s incivility is his inability in getting anyone interested in bankrolling a record for his art.
Ted Nugent built his old rockstar career on writing tunes about what he knew. That was mostly about screwing young women when he was still attractive enough to do it, and somewhat less about hunting and the call of the wild.
He can’t do that anymore. Hard rock music about lusting for women and having one’s way with them, when you look like this, is merely ludicrous. (Go ahead, click that link!)
And an album, with songs all about hunting, shooting and eating venison, has no chance, even in the oldies circuit.
To be a songwriter, it’s good to go with what you know.
What does Ted Nugent know well now? Hating on African Americans, Hispanics, gays, “hippies,” the president, liberals, moochers, the list goes on and on.
Overflowing with piss and venom, it would be a compelling collection. But no one would touch it with a ten foot pole.
I figured it all out for Ted a year or two ago. I saw where he was going if he played his pundit career to the maximum.
And this is the album I had him making:
A nod to his old song, “Stormtroopin,'” I described it here:
His great gift of expression is through guitar. But you will never see Ted compose an album of songs based on what he really thinks.
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Bean Pounding
Moving a bit more slowly in the latest ricin case:
FBI spokeswoman Ayn Sandalo Dietrich would not say whether agents were questioning anyone in connection with the case.
“We are not actively looking for a subject,??? Sandalo Dietrich said. “We are not asking the public’s help in bringing someone in.???
Despite the hazmat suits, officials said apartment residents were not at risk, and people were seen coming in and out of the brick building in the city’s historic Browne’s Addition neighborhood.
“There’s no public risk,??? Sandalo Dietrich said.
Scott Ward has lived in the building for three years, and lives on the second floor near the apartment that was being searched. He said he does not know the neighbor who lives in that apartment.
“He’s a guy with a big beard,??? Ward said. “He sticks to himself.”
The US government, at least parts of it, has finally modified its comments on ricin in letters, in the last two cases stating the castor powder did not pose a threat.
News stories report it. However, they still add that a small pure amount, something which has never existed in ricin cases, is still deadly if eaten or “inhaled.”
Analytically, what a castor powder mixture containing ricin looks like.
With only slight apologies to Faulkner.
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Khan used fists, not a smartphone
Saw Star Trek: Into Darkness last night at the Pasadena Arclight.
It was not a sellout.
People in the Star Trek future are really nothing like the coming generations of Americans.
In Star Trek the communicators still look a lot like the old ones, not like smartphones.
If the medium-sized evening audience at the Arclight had been Star Fleet, Khan would have been victorious. While everyone was fidgeting, playing games and surfing the internet on their smartphones, he would have killed them all.
In Into Darkness, Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan primarily uses his flying fists, elbows and ruthlessness to beat virtually everyone senseless. He had no visible use for apps.
I liked his take on Khan, an interpretation that turned the character into a glowering action villain motivated almost entirely by revenge.
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