If there is indeed one born every minute, the French have used up about five months of the global quota of suckers.

Per my calculations, that's about how many Frenchman have forked over seventeen bucks for a bestselling book advancing the ridiculous notion that the 9/11 attacks were the fruit of an internal right-wing conspiracy in the US government. I'm not going to mention the title or the author, as I don't wish to give this crackpot any more publicity than he's already been handed for this load of balderdash, or even to dignify his arguments by rebutting them.

If anyone ever wonders why I hold the belief that universal suffrage is not an altogether undiluted Good Thing, this example of human gullibility, along with other classic examples - the popularity of sleazy tabloid papers, the Art Bell radio show, astrology, creationism, and lotteries, should prove my point beyond all reasonable refutation.

Some people are simply too stupid to have a vote.

This book will serve a useful purpose, however. It is soon to be published in more languages and in other countries. This will furnish pyschologists a very accurate tool for estimating the average national IQ's, or at least allow us to locate the largest concentrations of morons.

Perhaps we can offer cash bonuses to them for voluntary sterilization. We'd be doing the human race a favor.

... Link (0 comments) ... Comment

So I'm out at my parent's place yesterday, tending to my wolfhounds. I'm walking with the hose to refill the little swimming pool where they like to splash around and cool off, when I hear this alarmed squawk at my feet.

I look down to see that I've nearly stepped on this little baby bird. He's staring at me defiantly, all 2.5 ounces of him.

I bend over to look more closely.

"Squawk!"

"Lil dude, what the hell are you doin' outta the nest?" "Squawk!"

I stand up and look around, and realize that I've been subconsciously hearing louder and more adult versions of the little guy's call as I was walking around the yard. As I look for his nest, I see Mom and Dad sitting on branches at opposite ends of the yard, talking to each other and him. I'm no birdwatcher, so I don't know what they were. I can see the beginnings of the adult coloration on the little guy. They are handsome grey birds with black and white bands on their wings, long straight tail feathers, graceful fliers, larks maybe?

Try as I might though, I do not see the nest, though I know it can't be far. I realize that I've probably got no way of getting him back up there anyway, but it doesn't hurt to look.

I bend back down to look at him. He doesn't move, but he doesn't seem to be hurt, either.

"Look you, do you realize what your life expectancy down here is? About 30 secs after Opa's barn cat hears your squawkin'. Plus, I'm fixin' to let my hounds out, they're gonna tear around this yard about Warp 9, and you'll be lucky if they don't step on you in the process."

He just stares at me.

I happened to have the AGFA in the car, as I had earlier that day been out shooting some real estate. (Commercial photography is one of the various ways I support myself - nothing fancy or artistic, just mundane stuff) So, I walk to go get it as I ponder what to do.

I've had enough experience with lost birds as a kid to know that the odds of me hand-raising this fella are pretty slim. Still, I'm thinking about it - some meal worms from the pet shop, crickets and nightcrawlers from the bait store, maybe it'll work. But I've got about two hours of work, at least, here before I can leave, putting the finishing touches on C&C's new domus.

I snap a few pics of him, then notice an empty hanging basket on the back porch. It's about four feet off the ground. A perfect place to stow him.

I bend over to grab him. He squawks louder that ever before and opens his mouth. It's huge, like his head splits in back at the base of his skull.

"Oh, be quiet, I'm not gonna eat you." I'm surprised that Mom and Dad, chattering up a storm, are not dive-bombing me. I set him in the bottom of the hanging basket, then go finish with the dogs.

To my surprise, the little guy has hopped up from the bottom of the basket, and is sitting on the rim, about a, umm eight inch leap. He's friskier than I thought. I wonder if Mom and Dad will tend to him from there.

But a few moments later, he's back on the ground, in the monkee grass underneath the basket.

"Dude, what in the hell are you doin'? You're an idiot. You can't fly yet."

I put him back in the basket, and wander off again to let the hounds out. They tear around the yard, as advertised, running out to the front to jump in the drainage ditch, where the water is chest deep on them, play fight, and chase each other, flinging contrails of water droplets and roostertails of turf and topsoil behind them at every turn.

Caesar, trying to get away from Cleo, hangs a sharp right around the corner of the house. The bird had jumped onto the ground again, and Caesar sees him, skidding to a stop. He lowers his long snoot...

"Caesar, NO!"

At the same time the little guy jumps up, opens his mouth, spread his wings to their mighty four inch full extension and squawks louder than ever before. I don't know if it was me or the bird, but Caesar jumps about two feet backwards. I hurry over and put the guy back in the basket one more time.

This is one of those times when I'm tempted to not let the facts get in the way of a good story, and put a Happy Hollywood ending on this, but I've decided not to.

I call the dogs to come with me for a walk in the pasture. It turns into a long one, as they decide that they can't resist running out the back side of the ten acres chasing something, and then have to cool off in this small lake on the neighbor's property.

When we got back, a good thirty to forty-five minutes later, the little guy was gone. I don't think the cat got him, as it's half, make that 98%, wild, and doesn't come out in the day, especially when the dogs are out.

So, we not only don't get the Happy Ending, we don't even get the cathartic tale of sorrow. Not even the satisfaction of knowing the ending. Story interrruptus.

Maybe we get a moral from the story, though. Sometimes, we leave home a little bit too soon, and turn away, or spoil, all attempts to help us out of the situation we're in. Sometimes, even our parents are unable to help us, even though they'd like to.

In the early 80's, I worked as an instructor at one of the very first "boot camp" style programs in the nation. This one was for violent juvenile offenders, kids so mean and bad that they had been sentenced as adults, and were headed for the state prison in Florida, even though they were only fourteen to sixteen years old. The camp was located in Central Florida, just south of Sebring, in the swampy land around Fisheating Creek.

All of them had spent most of their lives in the custody of the state. Some of those kids were destined to spend the rest of their life incarcerated no matter what we did, but a few, maybe one in five, actually had a chance.

Sometimes I remember Slim, (sentenced for stealing a Miami PD squad car and driving it around the 'hood for four days during the '81 riots there) and Ernie (who I spent 24 straight hours running down through those swamps one time when he tried to run - I told those little fuckers that if they ran I'd be on their ass, so it was a matter of pride) and Romeo (charged with killing his dad with a shovel, as he didn't like seeing him beat his mother) and wonder what happened to them all.

Life isn't like the movies - sometimes the endings are unkown, and we don't get the clarity we seek.

Hell, we don't even know for sure what happens when our own movie is over.

No wonder why we like the movies so much.

... Link (2 comments) ... Comment

Just so you know where I'm coming from on this - I attended The Marine Corps Reserve School for Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Warfare Defense. I graduated first in a class of sixty-three students.

I spent the next few years regurgitating that stuff, training other Marines.

So, you wanna ask me hard questions about the difference between blood agents and nerve agents, or expected persistence of liquid nerve agents under varying weather conditions, or the difference between alpha and beta particles and gamma rays, fire away. It's been a few years, but I still recall most of that stuff, and my old class notes are in this folder right over here.

I've added to this knowledge over the years by continuing to research the subject, and through several informal contacts I've maintained with people that are in a position to know. I'm not going to footnote and annotate this entry six ways from Sunday, but I assure you, I've got references for all this stuff. 90% of them you can find yourself by googling around with well-chosen search terms.

Here's what I predict.

Within five years, the will be a serious attack using some sort of WMD somewhere in the United States. This attack will kill hundreds, if not thousands. It will prove impossible to prevent, without resorting to measures so draconian as to prove impossible to get the American citizenry to accept.

There are too many targets. Guard the government building and they'll hit the mall. Guard those and they'll hit the schools, or the water supply, or the bank, or the hospital. You get the idea.

There are too many Bad Guys. Even if they are able to abandon this insane concern with hurting innocent feelings, and start cracking down on likely-looking terrorists, the Bad Guys will simply change their spots. Instead of using Middle Eastern operatives, they'll recruit from other demographic groups, to include blue-eyed blonde guys from here in the States. In a diverse culture such as ours, this is an enforcement nightmare.

While they may have a difficult time finding suicide bombers over here, as we lack the requisite religious training, if you think for a cool million or two they couldn't find some gangbanger or skinhead to drop some toxins in the nearest public water supply, you've got a much higher opinion of human nature than I do. Hell, they got John Walker. a Cali rich kid, for nothing.

The materials are too easy to get. Despite our loudly trumpeted assurances that there are no missing nukes, for example, questions remain about some belonging to the former Soviet Union, as mentioned in this article by the BBC.

But let us leave those nightmare scenarios where they get some plutonium or enriched uranium aside, give ourselves the benfit of a doubt, assume all those operatives running all over that half of the world with Big Bags O' Money keeping supply down on the Black Market do the trick, and consider more mundane threats.

I might as well start with the Dirty Bomb.

After the recent arrest of Jose Padilla, or whatever name he's using these days, the authorites were quick to point out that nothing had really gone on yet, that Padilla had done not much more than begin to research it on the internet.

Yeahright.

As if the world had run dry of cybercafes, and he needed to return to Chicago to find a dialup connection.

Seventeen seconds later the broadcast airwaves and newspaper columns were filled with articles downplaying the effects of a dirty bomb. As the reports told it, the effects would be limited to a few deaths, and a slightly higher cancer risk down the road for folks in the surrounding blocks. The main effect, they said. would be panic.

Let's look at that.

Most of the scenarios mentioned involved the two most widely available isotopes. Cesium137 is used in the building industries to do things like check the integrity of welds, and measure the thickness of asphalt. The amounts used in these devices are quite small. However, they are openly available. They are supposed to be kept track of, and reported if they are lost, which they often are. When reported lost, they are only recovered half of the time.

Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that if we use these things here in the States, then they're probably a few in other countries, too, and not much harder to get, or less likely to wander off, either. Now how long do you think a wealthy, patient, foe, using some front companies, would take to get his hands on enough to make a few sizable dirty bombs? You do recall, do you not, that Osama and his happy little gang of cutthroats measure their operational planning time in years, correct? Does it make you feel better to learn that his family business that made them all those millions was the construction business?

The other mentioned isotope is Cobalt 60, found in rods about a foot and a half long, and most commonly used to irradiate food. There are thousands of these in use globally. Most of them are outside the US.

It is a much more intense source. The main operational problem with it is twofold - first, in it's bar form it's not too dispersable. It would need to be ground into a fine dust for maximum effect, or at least metal filings the texture of a coarse sand. It's a soft metal, so that's not the hard part.

The hard part is the fact that the stuff is so deadly that after one minute unshielded exposure you're a dead man walking with just a few weeks to live. After twenty minutes, you're so ill as to be incapacitated.

This is a technical challenge, but again, not one that a man with money and time enough can not overcome, especially if he has some martyrs that are willing to be used up in the process.

"Here, Abdul, go into that lead room, pick up that bar and start grinding until you die. Tell Allah hello, I love him, and fuck some virgins for me when you get there, OK? Saddam said he will give your family $10,000 for every minute you manage to stand up in there and work. Habib made it 17 minutes. Go for the record!"

Of course, the official SpokesExperts have denied the plausibility of such a scenario. As a typical Put The People Back To Sleep article, some hired gun for CBS pooh-poohed it here:

...as Milhollin said, "The Pentagon has decided that radiation bombs are not militarily effective because no one's been able to figure out a way to take radioactivity intense enough to hurt people and transport it somewhere and make a bomb out of it. It's that simple."

BZZZT! Wrong answer, on a few levels. The military doesn't use radiation weapons for entirely unrelated reasons.

First, they don't have to. They get the Good Stuff.

Second, The Sheepul won't allow it. Remember the furor over the neutron bomb, how immoral such a weapon was?

Third, lingering contamination makes for all sorts of complications for subsequent military operations. It's nearly impossible to effectively conduct a battle in protective gear. That's why the military wanted the neutron bomb - you could run troops through the blast area a day later with no ill effect, and they wouldn't have to jack with decontaminating the area.

Use of any WMD was, according to plan, to be behind the battle lines in enemy support areas, to disrupt such things such as counterattacks and logistical operations.

How many of those three considerations that make a dirty bomb a poor choice for military operations apply to a terror organization? You guessed it, none.

As a final point on this, Milhollin is either flat fucking lying, or dumb as a box of rocks. If the military cannot design effective radiation shields for things like their suitcase nukes, the "Dial-A-Nuke" variable yield artillery shell that fits inside an eight-inch howiter tube, and several other tactical weapons, then how in the hell can we have those weapons? I assure you the weapons grade fissile materials in those weapons is highly radioactive, and US servicemen assigned to maintain them are not dropping like flies.

More troubling is the prospect of the Bad Guys getting Strontium90, some undetermined amount of which is sitting around the former Soviet republics. At least we hope it's still there. They've mounted an expedition to go round up these free-range mother lodes. An excerpt from the full article:

The IAEA has been working with Georgia since 1997 to upgrade levels of radiation safety and security in the country, where over 280 radioactive sources have been recovered since the mid-90's. Some of these sources were discovered on abandoned Soviet military bases and all have been placed in safe storage.

Sounds pretty good unless you're one of the those persistent types that reads to the very end of the article: "The second phase - an aerial and road survey covering different territory - is scheduled to begin in early September. The objective is to locate and recover other known or suspected orphaned radioactive sources in the country."

Whoa! Back the truck up.

What happened to the journalistic principle of putting the most important info in the first few sentences? Why wasn't the headline "More Deadly Radioactive Material Missing - Search to Begin This Fall"?

The final hurdle the Bad Guys must leap is the delivery method. I can think of several, but the simplest is via ship. The amount of tonnage pouring daily into the US is huge, and very little of it is given more than a cursory glance.

Kim Petersen is the executive director of the advisory body the Maritime Security Council. He states, as reported here, that just 2% of containers entering the US were inspected.

The mayor of Boston is so freaked about the possibility of a LNG tanker going up that he asked to have them banned from the port there. A gas tanker goin up would be one hell of an explosion, garan-dam-teed to disperse the hell out of whatever you had. But a simple shipping container would be just about perfect for housing a nice size Dirty Bomb.

If it was me, though, I'd fill it full of "Dirty Rockets." Modify some small surface-to-air missiles by removing most of the explosive payload and replacing it with your DirtyDust, set the launchers up to point the missiles a bunch of different directions, with altimeter fuses set to go off a few thousand feet in the air, and you're done.

Pull it off on the Fourth of July, and odds are nobody would even know what happened until people started keeling over. Get the idea? You don't need to have a Dirty Bomb - just a Dirty Dispersal.

There you have it - one dead city.

You won't have killed everyone, or even a sizable majority of the inhabitants, but the city would no longer be livable, and would effectively cease to be a viable economic entity. An isotope with a long half-life could cause the city to be abandoned for decades. Strontium90's is 28 years, Cobalt 60's is about five - you don't even wanna know about the really bad stuff.

Cleanup is virtually impossible. The only thing to do is try to wash the particles away with water. The Soviets used jet engines mounted on the beds of trucks. Fire up the engine, and feed water into the exhaust stream to powerwash the affected vehicles. In a civilian decontamination procedure, if you wanted to reclaim the city, you'd have to wash the whole city down, and somehow collect the water in the process, which would itself become toxic, and tranport that off somewhere. That's real workable. Now you know why they've just cordoned off Chernobyl.

Nightmare scenario follows...

Next July 4th, in the port cities of New York, New Orleans/South Louisiana, Houston, Corpus Christi, and just to let the West Coast into the fun, Long Beach, such an attack occurs. This would immediately wipe out roughly 30% of all tonnage, with the fractions of foreign cargo (can you spell oil?) even higher. The economic aspects would be beyond my abilty to describe, with ripple effects that would last for at least a decade. Toss in some supporting attacks on, say, the downtown areas of Chicago and Frisco, and the financial world is paralyzed, too.

Tomorrow, assuming I can get to it, we look at bioweapons.

Stay tuned...

... Link (2 comments) ... Comment