ARMY OF FEARMONGERS: The biggest and best in the world, for many reasons

On Tuesday, DD blog regaled you with tales of Doctors Strangebug and Acid-Thrower, testimony from some of the leading lights of the biochemical terror-is-coming lobby. Dating from 1995, al Qaeda hadn't yet demolished the WTC, but already the mechanisms and experts were in place to pin the capability of easy bio and chemwar to Islamic radicals. Osama bin Laden and company just needed to appear on the stage of history.

Consider the following slide, presented twice during the Strangebug and Acid-Thrower seminar held by the biochem terror lobby in Bethesda, MD, by James A. Genovese, a U.S. Army "expert" on chemical attack.


Wow!

And it pointedly illustrates the US has a ready corps of experts on methods of terrorism, an army that would tell and does tell anyone who listens -- from politicians to journalists to small children -- that everything is easy to do. And that it is all inevitable.

It is, of course, logical that they do so. Their job security and career development depends upon it. Their paycheck depends on you, and the people in power, understanding that the most macabre types of attack are easy to do.

Dick Destiny blog has documented its regular appearance this summer.

Take, for example, Mubtakkar of Death, peddled by a famous journalist, The Botox Shoe of Death, frightening exaggerations and lies peddled by many, and most recently in what appeared to be the overstated capabilities of the liquid bombers -- here and here and here.

In all these pieces, no shortage at all of experts, sources in-the-know and terror-beat journalists delivering claims on how easy it is for the jihadists to deliver varieties of explosive, chemical and biological ruin.

As this blog moved through the summer, it fashioned search strings for Google so readers could see for themselves the army of fearmongering experts and their professional cant on the inevitable nature of bioterror.

Every week, the same declarations.

"The nation's farms and food supply are highly vulnerable to terrorism and the Department of Homeland Security isn't prepared to deal with the 'catastrophic' consequences of an agro-terror attack, Georgia agricultural experts warned a U.S. House subcommittee [last] Thursday, cried a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

"Compared to bioterror, agro-terror is appallingly easy," said Corrie Brown, professor at the University of Georgia's College of Veterinary Medicine, invoking the specter of terrorists introducing foot-and-mouth disease, avian influenza, swine flu or some other animal-borne disease that could disrupt the U.S. economy . . . "

Not just easy, appallingly so!

And why might this be? Because the University of Georgia, and Corrie Brown, want to be the recipients of funding for a new government lab to fight and research terror, and they're competing with other states for it. And the other states have their army of experts who want the funds and the lab and they're just as capable of saying agro-terror is easy, as many times as necessary.

One way of looking at the practice is to divert for a moment to the story of the Cardiff Giant.

In the late 1860's, a con man induced a farmer near Syracuse, New York, to bury a cheap gypsum statue that had been crudely altered to resemble a giant, fossilized man. The statue was then "discovered" and proclaimed "the Cardiff giant," the scary remains of a specimen of a lost race said to have wandered the hills prior to the coming of man.

Although immediately dubbed a fake by a few who smelled a rat, there was a great deal of popular acceptance of "the Cardiff giant," which spilled over into the news media of the time.

Andrew D. White, the first president of Cornell University and one of the "giant's" earliest skeptics, remarked in his memoirs of the affair: "There was evidently a 'joy in believing' in the marvel, and this was increased by the peculiarly American superstition that the correctness of a belief is decided by the number of the people who can be induced to adopt it."

And it's possible to look at the "correctness of a belief . . . decided by the number who can be induced to adopt it" in this unscientific aggregation, here!

Holy smoke! One is almost tempted to say there are more Google hits for experts saying agroterrorism is easy than there are actually terrorists to carry out easy agroterror.

"Our agricultural system is so vast and so integrated, if something gets in, it's going to be all over and the terrorists know this," the expert added for good measure.

"Georgia is one of 11 states in the running for the Department of Homeland Security's proposed National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, which would address such threats . . . The state has offered two locations, both in Athens, as sites for the $500 million center . . . "

Job security, career development and scientific academic/corporate welfare -- the war on terror is great for it.

Naturally, there are terrorists. Dick Destiny blog's essay isn't saying they're Cardiff giants, or that bioterrorism is. What is being said is that the picture is never so cut-and-dried, so easy -- to use one of the fearmongers' faves, or so simplistic and obvious.

But often even experienced journalists, people who should know better, get dizzy from all the hot air.

As example, Dick Destiny blog cites one newspaper war-on-terror beat writer (name withheld to protect the underserving) who had requested an interview last year to talk about "what was easy" for terrorists.

So swept up in the repetition was he, the reporter was amazingly convinced it would even be easy for him to bring about agroterror. Why, all that he had to do was cut the feet off an infected animal and toss them in a cattle pen. The U.S. beef industry, destroyed!

Over a year ago, I wrote this on the phenomenon of professional fear-mongering masquerading as threat analysis:

After I read a stack of these articles, I thought for a moment I was in the wrong business and should devote a couple months and publications to predicting the ways in which terrorists could attack. Terrorists could imitate the methodology of the Washington sniper and his accomplice. Why haven't they? Terrorists could go into the forests and high chaparrals of southern California during fire season and ignite calamitous blazes, making national news and sewing panic. Local arsonists do it. It would be easy for terrorists. Gang members from central Los Angeles shoot into cars on the freeways. Surely that would be easy for terrorists... [Anti-terror celebrity Richard Clarke did do this in a long piece for the Atlantic Monthly.]

It's a good game. It needs to take no account of what terrorists are actually doing, no knowledge of what tough to get human intelligence sources and materials may show, or historically -- what preferences, capabilities, experiences and limitations terrorists carry with them. It can assume that there are more terrorists expertly trained in many degrees and methods of mayhem and working themselves into place than there are actual terrorists. For the anti-terrorism effort, it is only necessary to assign a simple universality to fragility and vulnerability and degrees of omniscience and unlimited resources to the adversary. It is easy, so to speak, to think of things that are easy for terrorists to do.

It's part of a larger original here. [Helpful hint: You might enjoy the article "Over invested in anti-terror widgets and nostrums," too.] And it was revisited a few weeks ago in "One year later on the Doom line."

It comes as a slight surprise then to see the same idea starting to be entertained in a place which is usually seen as the intellectual home of the professional cadre of threat assessors, Foreign Affairs, the policy journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

"But if it is so easy to pull off an attack and if terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it?" asks the author of the article.

"Why have they not been sniping at people in shopping centers, collapsing tunnels, poisoning the food supply, cutting electrical lines, derailing trains, blowing up oil pipelines, causing massive traffic jams, or exploiting the countless other vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could so easily be exploited?"

Incredible!

It's a bit like seeing the town whore begin suddenly applying for correspondence courses with the Church Universal and Triumphant. You can't help but be astounded and then begin to wonder how long the seizure will last.

"A fully credible explanation for the fact that the United States has suffered no terrorist attacks since 9/11 is that the threat posed by homegrown or imported terrorists . . . has been massively exaggerated," the article continues at one point.

"The massive and expensive homeland security apparatus erected since 9/11 may be . . . taxing all to defend the United States against an enemy that scarcely exists."

Coming from a learned organ of the CFR, it's virtually heresy. And someone may have to be imprisoned in a tower until a recant is delivered.

But don't fear for the professional fear-mongers. Because next week they'll be right back with something else, for after all:

JOE STEFANO: Passes at 84

Joe Stefano, one of Dick Destiny's inspirations, has died at the age of 84.

Stefano, creator of the screenplay for Psycho, was -- in this scribe's opinion -- far more influential for the Gothic sci-fi tv series, The Outer Limits.

As a kid, Dick Destiny was genuinely frightened by many episodes of The Outer Limits, a series that captured an early cold and clammy doom in black and white Cold War television.

Stefano was heavily involved in the creation of Please Stand By, the pitched series which became The Outer Limits.

"Stefano's education in the tasks of producership was furious and rapid," relates the book, "The Outer Limits: The Official Companion." "From the day 'Outer Limits' commenced, it absorbed all his time. When he wasn't writing or rewriting, he was meeting with writers, screening actors or holed up in editing rooms . . . "

Tremendous Stefano-pennded episodes included "A Feasibility Study," in which inhabitants from the ruined planet, Luminos, kidnap an American neighborhood as breeding stock, and "Nightmare," in which a future American world federation enlists the help of an alien race to perpetrate the sham of an interplanetary war. "Feasibility Study" was so effective, it was recreated for the much less successful resurrection of the series in the 90's.

Other Stefano episodes included "The Zanti Misfits," a story in which palm-sized ants, criminals from the planet of the same name, land in the southwestern desert and are exterminated by a regiment of the army, "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork," a dark study of an energy being made from a mote of dust and the corporate weapons lab trying to control it, and "The Invisibles," a claustrophobic and paranoid tale of trilobite-like aliens, the size of pumpkins, parasitizing leaders in US government. All were variable allegories on the modern American belief, and the costs associated with it, that evil forces from outside are always on the attack.

A special Dick Destiny favorite was the sombre and rainy, "The Forms of Thing Unknown," starring David McCallum, "Ilya Kuryakin" from "The Man from U.N.C.L.E," as the inventor of a time machine beset by unscrupulous women.

"[T]he scheming Kassios and the meek Lennora," who have just killed their vile boyfriend, Andre Pavan, are befriended by the lonely and naive McCallum, a scientist called "Mr. Tone." Tone is the creator of a "time-tilter" -- and uses it to bring Pavan back to life during a thunderstorm. It ends very badly.

The dramatic atmosphere and morality of the Outer Limits has never been duplicated in modern television science-fiction. (Although the new Battlestar Galactica comes close.)

At its best, it was black and unrelenting, but always with a strong moral thread, exotically capturing the Zeitgeist of the American military industrial complex and the Cold War. Joseph Stefano was the show's beating heart.

DRANO BOMBS 2.0: Expert anti-terror education and our law & order society

Last week, DD blog set aside for special ridicule one example of "security training" in the war against terror. Produced in a master's thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, the work was judged utterly out-of-touch.

DD blog excerpted a paragraph discussing the teenage boy-fueled phenomenon of "drano bombs," the mixing of the popular pipe cleaner with balls of aluminum foil in capped plastic soda bottles. The thesis from the Naval Postgraduate School framed the same thing in the context of domestic terrorism.

Dick Destiny found this so absurd and intelligence-insulting, it decided to take another whack at the thing, entitled Common Chemicals as Precursors of Improvised Explosive Devices: The Challenges of Defeating Domestic Terrorism.

Once again, consider the excerpt:



DD blog, with GlobalSecurity.Org senior fellow T-shirt on, then produced a link to a video showing some nerds making drano bombs in a basement. It was so popular, now it's unavailable.

"Try again later," Google Video brightly recommends.

(Almost everything comical or stupid Dick Destiny blog links to goes poof in a couple weeks. Drano bomb demos, photo albums of Lafayette athletes and their women in drunken stupors, etc. Sheesh.)

However, an adequate substitute is found in the work of the River Road Rednecks, here. The River Road Rednecks set their drano bomb instruction and demonstration to country music, with the firing rangesetting in a white-trash country backlot.

Dick Destiny blog might have chosen Big & Rich's "Comin' To Your City" or something off the new Montgomery Gentry LP as background music rather than rustic "Deliverance"-style theme. That would have made it more attractive for coverage in altie weeklies, preferably located in the south, where the writers can take 250 words to marvel over the miracle of being able to mash popular music together with inane home-movie slices taken from American life.

But the River Road Rednecks appear to have done a bang-up job on drano bombs, one more momentarily entertaining than those available from YouTube in the same genre. The rules of journalism now require this article to tell you, or imply, that YouTube is the fountain from which all wisdom and culture flows.

In any case, what is to be thought when a graduate school is teaching courses in national security in which students are benightedly allowed to believe drano bombs are something connected with terrorism?

That's rhetorical.

In any case, careful with those drano bomb vids, fellows.

DOCTORS STRANGEBUG & ACID-THROWER: Official testimony from 1995

Bill Patrick, the United States' dark guru of biowarfare, was in the news recently.

"Although liquid bombs are in the news these days, a possibly more harmful weapon could become a reality within the next few years," wrote a Louisiana newspaper.

"William Patrick III, who has more than 50-years experience in biological warfare, said dissemination is the main hurdle left to perfecting biological warfare. The biological agents are out there, Patrick said Wednesday at the Fourth Annual Instructor Professional Development Conference sponsored by the National Center for Biomedical Research and Training at LSU. The only thing lacking is getting those agents to a target. But some governments and terrorists are working on that process, said Patrick . . . "

One can question the utility of Bill Patrick, other than as a teller of scarey stories, at any professional development conference on biomedical research and training.

After all, what does Bill Patrick offer? Think a moment. How good for the nation is professional development and training in the making of germ weapons?

If one wants to violate the Biological Weapons Convention, an arms control treaty the US is signatory to, then Bill Patrick would be the perfect choice to drag out of retirement.

But Patrick was known prior to the Amerithrax mailings as one of the primary voices from the bioterror-is-coming lobby. Journalists, particularly those at the New York Times, loved his tales of how easy it was to cause microbial mayhem. Always bragging about making wonderful infectious powders for the US military, one would have thought Patrick was a scientist on a par with those who worked in the Manhattan Project.

Not quite.

Quoting from the blog a few months back:

No longer did [Bill Patrick] tell tales of how good his microbial preparations had been. Newspaper articles on him flying about the country to deliver seminars on bioterror, one -- for example, in Hollywood, for an audience of the well-to-do and reported in the Los Angeles Times, stopped. His rambles to reporters on how easy it was to dispense powders of . . . death over Maryland and the capitol were silenced . . .

In a review of Judith Miller's book, Germs, for which Patrick was a primary source, I wrote:

On Sunday, October 14, Judith Miller of The New York Times wrote of her personal anthrax scare, "As I washed my hands and tried to dust off the powder that clung to my pants and shoes, I thought about what Bill Patrick, my friend and bioweapons mentor had told me . . . "

We should all be so lucky to have as friend and "bioweapons mentor" someone who, according to Miller's book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, infected "volunteers" with Q fever microbes to see what dosages were effective in producing illness, a man who was "overjoyed" when a field test on animals went south and people who weren't supposed to get sick did, because it proved his team of sorcerer's apprentices were producing "a product that was very, very good." The reader is informed that everyone survived. That made it all right?

In a better world, a Bill Patrick would have been given the bum's rush a long time ago . . .

For the most part, Bill Patrick has been given the bum's rush since 9/11. This is a good thing. No cornucopia of lurid quotes about his splendidly made powders of death crept into the Lousiana newsmedia.

To get the flavor of Bill Patrick, it's useful to see what he actually had to say when speaking to a crowd on bioterror.

The following quotes come from a conference on biological and chemical terror preparedness, held back in 1995, in Maryland. (Thanks to RMS for pointing it out.)

Patrick's comments start on his scenarios to attack the World Trade Center with germs. Keep in mind, this is well before Osama bin Laden and the hijackers made a monkey out of his claims about the utility of biological weapons, as compared to jetliners.

"The size of the building is also very important," said Patrick. "The World Trade Center, a heck of a big building, contains 10 billion liters of air, huge building. We are going to grow bacillum toxin in garbage cans and we are going to assume that we get good growth of the toxin.

". . .Already you can see that this is getting out of hand. We are going to disseminate this amount of material in a 2-gallon garden sprayer. Can you imagine spraying 264 gallons by means of a garden sprayer in a building intake?

"It does not make any sense.

"Anyway, using the number of human doses we have available, it did not work. You got 0.00002 human doses per liter of air so you would have to be in that building for several years before you could accumulate that level of dose.

"Why did botulinum toxin fail? We all know that botulinum toxin is the most toxic substance known to mankind. It is highly effective when you go around shooting into the gut or giving it by the oral route, but it is significantly less effective by the aerosol route. Let me give you an example. It takes 1,500 mouse gut doses to give you one mouse aerosol dose, over three logs difference. You see that limits the effectiveness of botulinum toxin on an open-air target.

"We are going to attack the World Trade Center with the old U.S. spray-dried botulinum toxin. Notice that our concentration is much higher, that we have a very small particle size; the dose per man is the same. This time we are going to use a disseminator, the ADC fire extinguisher using C02. It makes a beautiful disseminator. You get about 40 percent of your material up as an aerosol, and it only takes one kilogram. That is what we are going to disseminate, one kilogram, and I can hide one kilogram on my person and not be obvious. If people are in the building for one minute, they do not, of course, get sufficient material, but if they are in the building for 20 minutes, we reach our first LD 50. Of course, most people are in the building where they work for more than 20 minutes."

Don't be flustered by the jargon and figures. It's just standard Patrick boasting.

You should be scratching your head right now, asking the question: "What the heck does this have to do with defense or preparation against bioterrorism?"

Almost nothing.

It's simply Bill Patrick going on about how he could fatally sicken people in the WTC with his products from the US's old Cold War bioweapons arsenal.

It's entirely about Bill Patrick and his bioweaponeering talent back in the days when he was employed by the military.

"In this next situation, we are going to attack the World Trade Center with crude tularemia; francisella tularensis," continues Patrick.

"I want to use 1,000 blood auger plates that you can buy practically anywhere: hospital supply houses, for instance. I can scrape 1,000 of these plates in 2 hours without a problem. I am going to scrape with a cotton swap so that I get confluent growth. In about 36 hours I am going to wash off the material that has grown there. I am going to wash it off with saline. If the terrorist is wise he is going to add a little sugar to maintain isotensity of the cell wall, cell membrane. I am going to Waring-blend this mixture and then I am going to filter it through cheese cloth.

"I am going to use a garden sprayer to disseminate the material. The critical point here, in addition to the agent, is that the garden sprayer has got to develop 90 psi; if it is less than that, you can forget it.

"One thousand plates with this little scheme will yield 5 liters of product or 1.32 gallons of material. Trust me on this. The agent concentration is not like a sophisticated production facility, but we have five times 108 of these cells per milliliter. The dose for man is a very conservative 50 cells; I could as easily have used 10 cells if it is fresh material. The garden sprayer has a 2-gallon capacity, 90 psi, one split orifice. I am going to disseminate at the rate of 1 gallon per 10 minutes, and I am going to use a very low disseminating efficiency because
garden sprayers are not very efficient. I am going to get 0.001 percent of the material that I have. Attacking the World Trade Center with your good friend tularemia!"

". . . Finally, I believe that a dedicated terrorist group can produce crude BW agents with simple procedures, with readily available equipment. I think they can jerry rig disseminating devices from equipment that can be purchased from a local hardware store. They can infect and kill large numbers of people in confined areas like buildings. The Pennsylvania Turnpike tunnel was a very interesting study, classified, of course. The subway systems in New York, Chicago, and Washington. They will certainly produce panic and hysteria."

If you read Patrick's entire presentation in the original, along with the rest of those from the old bioterror-is-coming lobby, the audience doesn't quite get Bill Patrick. A couple venture to say, logically, that if everything is possible just as he says it is, there's nothing anyone can do. The terrorists will strike, lots of people will get sick and die, and emergency services will be crushed.

Just get lots of body bags and quicklime.

Of course, Bill Patrick doesn't have an answer to any of it. At least, not any good ones. It was only ever his job to convince people that bioweapons capabilities as developed by clandestine national programs, like his, could now be assumed to be within reach of small terrorist groups.

The testimony included in this long .pdf (link at the foot of this article) include words from members of the it's-easy-to-mount-a-chemical attack lobby, too.

Consider Army expert Fred Sidell. Chemical attack -- mass acid-throwing -- is easy for Fred. All the information is on the Internet. You can make poison gas in your home. All you need is one book, Silent Death, by an author called "Uncle Fester."

"It is great reading if you enjoy this kind of thing," says Sidell. "I read it in one sitting; it was great. There are a lot of different types of processes here for how to make chemical agent materials. There is also some basic toxin materials in here as well, on how to make ricin and other things. Other books out there are The Anarchist's Cookbook, the Poisoners Handbook and the Poor Man's Atomic Bomb. As someone just mentioned, there is a lot on the Internet. So it is not even difficult for the bad guy to figure out . . ."

Dick Destiny blog has written quite a bit about these books. See here on The Poisoners Handbook. And I deal with the infamous Silent Death here and here.

What these books are and were good for is mention by the chemical and bioterrorism lobby as evidence that anyone can make weapons of mass destruction in their kitchen. It's not important that anyone know what is actually in such books. It is only important that the myths being spun about them are believed.

Knowing that, the one way to view such testimony as Sidell's, is with contempt.

Those in attendance or transcribing are being told stories of substantial distortion and exaggeration to scare them into a frame of mind that accepts the idea that exotic terror weapons can be assembled from materials in your house, simply by following scribbles found on the Internet or in thin, error-filled tomes, put together by dodgy small publishers.

Make a chlorine weapon in your bathroom, says Sidell.

"If you want to check out chlorine, take some household ammonia and some household bleach, lock yourself in the bathroom, turn off the ventilator fan, and put it in a bucket. Shake it up and let it sit a little. What you will produce is chlorine gas. You will see green gas come off the mixture and it will burn out your larynx."

Such clowning and showing off! Yes, yes, sir, mothers told us never to mix ammonia and bleach or you might see spots and stars before your eyes, but it's not a weapon of terror.

Sidell also goes onto mention how terrorists could spray people with malathion or some other insecticide. He mentions teaching FBI agents about the terror danger. No recognition that illegals and immigrant farm workers in California get sprayed with insecticide when they're in the fields and that the state compiles statistics on it.

Remember, all this was delivered in 1995 in a seminar called "Responding to the Consequences of Biological and Chemical Terrorism" at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, MD. It's not so much about responding or training responders as it is about the lecturers telling people how easy it is to create a variety of terror weapons and plans.

Shameful, don't you think? Here's the ugly thing.

NO MORE BOOZE FOR YOU, HUCK FISH: Says judge

Dynamite-packing Huck Fish was granted bail yesterday in Houston, according to wire services.

From the Associated Press: "No future court appearances were yet scheduled after U.S. Magistrate Judge Calvin Botley lectured Howard MacFarland Fish, a junior majoring in biology at the Easton, Pa., college about the importance of attending all court dates and meeting all other bail requirements, including a ban on drinking."

Perhaps after seeing the young Fish with two overserved girls among a batch of Lafayette drinking party photos posted to the web, AP reported the judge commanded the student go dry.
"I'm requiring that you don't go to beer halls, nightclubs, day clubs or any kinds of clubs," said the judge, according to AP. Fish was described as "subdued and nervous."

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Late coming in: The Lafayette student who had posted the photo album of power drinking at a spring wing-ding e-mailed DD blog. The message was that the article on Huck Fish was uncalled for. And it seemed DD had never been to college.

DD understands the dismay. Fun photos of Lafeyette students in drunken stupors -- now since expunged from a web college photo album -- aren't so fun anymore, for obvious reasons. So I struck the repeat image of young Fish in this piece.

But it stays in the original because Huck Fish was and is security news. Fish was in just about every newspaper in the country, often in articles on front pages. And the interesting aspect of the entire foul-up is the blackly comical exposure of news that dynamite can be packed in some baggage and roll through a foreign airport and onto an airplane bound for the US.

And, yes, I did go to college, even visiting Lafayette a few times. Imagine that.

CONFISCATE ALL CAMPFIRE TABLETS

Not TATP peroxide bombs, but HMTD peroxide bombs, claim the usual anonymous sources. This from today's New York Times in: Suspects Not Ready for Immediate Strike.

The newspaper story backed off the stock hype that's been the rule on the plot. It's not easy to tell why.

In any case: "Despite the charges, officials said they were still unsure of a critical question: whether any of the suspects was technically capable of assembling and detonating liquid explosives," wrote the Times. Bravo!

"A chemist involved in that part of the inquiry said HMTD, which can be prepared by combining hydrogen peroxide with other chemicals, 'in theory is dangerous,' but whether the suspects "had the brights to pull it off remains to be seen.'

And that is a quote worth preserving! It sets into play a somewhat different set of technical requirements for the making of a so-called instant bomb. It inspires new questions about the origination of blanket rules for dispensing all types of liquids prior to flight. It also asks why the original feeding frenzy was so joyfully indulged in.

Below, see formulation for HMTD, also derived from the Journal of the American Chemical Society paper, "Decomposition of Triacetone Peroxide is An Entropic Explosion," discussed here.
In essence, this one involves synthesis of a compound similar in nature to TATP, from only slightly different "household" chemicals, again with all the caveats and baggage previously described. In this case, substitute hexamine (or hexamethylenetetramine) for acetone.

Hexamine, in this case, being equivalent to campfire tablets. Numerous pages on the commercial products are littered around the web.

"They say the estimate of 10 planes [to be attacked]' was speculative and exaggerated," wrote the Times. "In his first public statement after the arrests, Peter Clarke, chief of counterterrorism for the Metropolitan Police, acknowledged police were still investigating 'the number, destination and timing of the flights that might be attacked.'"

As has been said, being circumspect with regards to the statements of Peter Clarke is good policy and practice.

"In retrospect . . . there may have been too much hyperventilating going on," said one of NYC's former anti-terror officials, the standard reasonable quote by the chocolate jimmy on top of the cupcake in terror plot reporting.

Below, see diagram of HMTD reaction, excerpted from JACS paper cited upstream. Don't be floored by the formulas. Think of it like, perhaps, an amateur terrorist -- someone with perhaps little or no know-how would, working from some scribble on a piece of paper:

Campfire tablets plus peroxide plus lemon juice ----> Pow!




Late breaking, sort of: The New York Times embargoed its complete story -- In Tapes, Receipts and a Diary, Details of the British Terror Case -- Martyrdom Motive and 'Bomb Factory' Cited -- in deference to British laws which prohibit publishing of materials which might be prejudicial to criminal cases.

Cryptome put it on-line here.

During the case of the alleged London ricin ring, similar although not precisely identical conditions led me to hold back publishing on the case until April 11, two days before the gag order was lifted in Britain.

The Times article mentioned law firms for the defendants in the peroxide bomb case declined to comment. Dick Destiny blog bets one of the firms in question is that of famous Brit human rights lawyer, Gareth Pierce. Her firm was also one tapped during the trial of the London ricin ring.

THE DAILY FALLOUT: Part IV or V in a series


The good news about nuclear destruction, seriously.

Tragically, though, most Americans today won't give much credence to this good news, much less seek out such vital life-saving instruction, as they have been jaded by our culture's pervasive myths of nuclear un-survivability.

Most people think that if nukes go off, then everybody is going to die, or will wish they had. That's why you hear such absurd comments as: "If it happens, I hope I'm at ground zero and go quickly."

This defeatist attitude was born as the disarmament movement ridiculed any alternatives to their agenda. The sound Civil Defense strategies of the '60s have been derided as being largely ineffective, or at worst a cruel joke . . . In fact, though, the biggest surprise for most Americans, if nukes are really unleashed, is that they will still be here!

Most will survive the initial blasts because they won't be close enough to any "ground zero," and that is very good news . . .

-- from WorldNetDaily, in an editorial by the CEO of a company developing "Civil Defense solutions to government, military, private organizations and individual families."

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Your insurer won't cover you or your property in case of nuclear attack.

Another major provider . . . states: "We will cover customers if they are injured as a result of 'conventional' terrorist activity, ie caused by explosives, guns, knives, etc."

So, while it is always advisable to check with one's insurer, most customers need not worry unduly about nullifying cover in a war zone. It is vital, however, that they do not participate in violence . . . Acting in a foolhardy manner likely to result in injury could also leave you unprotected. In addition, policies exclude cover for treatment arising from chemical or nuclear attack.

-- from The Daily Telegraph

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Don't be a pessimist.

The pessimists assume that the dangers of a nuclear confrontation will increase exponentially as the number of nuclear powers grows and that a future catastrophe is all but certain. Since little can be done to avert such a terrible outcome or mitigate its consequences, the argument goes, efforts to stop proliferation in the first place must be redoubled. The optimists, by contrast, assume that the stability that nuclear weapons seem to have brought to the superpowers' Cold War confrontation will be replicated. Far from being a sure disaster, they argue, the spread of nuclear weapons could be a relatively cheap and easy (albeit nerve-racking) solution to the age-old problem of war.

-- from Foreign Affairs

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Youtube video, the font from which all wisdom flows.

"Iraq - The Truth?" features very little graphic violence. The narrator speaks English as somber orchestral music plays in the background. He argues that the war in Iraq is unjust. There is also a veiled threat that the U.S. will face nuclear attack. He finishes by complimenting Americans on their ability to produce great leaders with a subtle suggestion that they violently overthrow the current administration.

Another antagonizing news story on the miracle of Youtube

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Feeling anxious?

If you are the anxious type, you're in trouble if you've read even this far, and no doubt there is more . . . Now, we can either shrug it off, reasoning that we can't possibly protect everybody against everything, or we can get more serious about security at the ports.

Let's get more serious. Port security is much improved, compared to a few years ago. But that's comparing it to relatively little at all.

A Seattle Times reporter as an experiment recently infiltrated the Port of Long Beach and discovered that sneaking himself in doesn't take the imagination of a RAND researcher. You just hop a truck and roll right on in, showing no more credentials than a driver's license, which nobody really looks at anyway . . . If you were scared by our second paragraph, how does the handling of truck security strike you? A nuke doesn't have to arrive only by ship, does it?

An editorial in a soCal newspaper.

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God favors nuclear war waged by the righteous.

Since God is partial on righteous wars, this “… self-sacrificing love that is willing, if necessary, to lay its life down for another…” – the very essence of God’s war versus evil that the likes of Cindy Sheehan mock with disdain -- “… includes the legitimate and deadly use of force…”

Which means that if the evildoer of Iran launches the first nuclear attack to wipe Israel off the map and at the same time strikes and harms us because of our strategic alliance with Israel, we apply the law of Moses… lex talionis [“the law of like for like”].

In other words, simply drop the nukes on the aggressor with divine justification that we are no longer engaged in carnal warfare but we are launching a Godly War to end all evil wars, which proves my premise that under Christ’s Gospel, this ultimate war is not necessarily evil. Judgment day is perhaps a prelude to another biblical genesis – mankind’s new beginning.

-- from The American Chronicle

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With enough shovels, we're all going to make it, but not the Democrats. The draft is coming back, too. All out war with the Middle East.

. . . the fallout shelter is coming back, too . . . when dealing with a possible strike from a single weapon, or at most a mere handful of weapons, the logic of the fallout shelter is compelling. We’re going to need to be able to evacuate our cities in the event of a direct attack, or to avoid radiation plumes from cities that have already been struck. Tens or hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved by such measures.

For starters, the dovish Democrats are doomed. In “Hawkish Gloom,” I pointed in broad terms to the imminent hawkification of the United States . . . the revitalized George McGovern-Howard Dean wing of the Democratic party cannot survive much past the moment when Iran gets the bomb. . . .

Funny how the very thing the doves don’t want — a preemptive strike on Iran, is the only thing that can save them.

. . . the only middle way between helpless acceptance of nuclear terror and massive nuclear retaliation against countries that may not even have attacked us, is going to be through conventional invasions.

From Walter Groteschele, at The National Review.

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Histortical backgrounder: T.K. Jones, patron saint of the coming great bomb sling!

From Robert Scheer's "With Enough Shovels:"

"Thomas K. Jones, the man Ronald Reagan had appointed Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, told me that the United States could fully recover from an all-out nuclear war . . . in just two to four years . . .

"T.K., as he prefers to be known, added that nuclear war was not nearly as devastating as we had been led to believe. He said, 'If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it.' The shovels were for digging holes in the ground, which would be covered somehow or other with a couple of doors and with three feet of dirt thrown on top, thereby providing adequate fallout shelters for the millions who had been evacuated from America's cities to the countryside. 'It's the dirt that does it,' he said."

Excerpt here.

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EVIDENCE OF THE PURE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS

The articles on Dick Destiny blog are flypaper for the best and brightest. As evidence, consider the following search strings before journeying to favorite pages:

"TATP" and "peroxide nail polish bomb" -- self-explanatory

"hydrochloric acid bomb" -- Improvised cyanide munition

"how to kill a person by poisoning" -- Botox Shoe of Death

"how to make botulism" -- Horse dropping or cow dropping?

"where can I buy cyanide" -- Mediocre terror/nuisance all-purpose flypaper.

"bible codes explosion bomb new york" -- The Daily Fallout

"destroy western civilization + iran's' plan" -- The Daily Fallout, Pt. III

"bioterrorism inevitable" -- Bioterror inevitable: For second or third time this week Ha-ha!

"comet and draino bomb" -- Drano bombs & duds What, not Mentos & soda?

Now that I'm done with today's minor record-keeping, the best headline and picture combination of all time: The New York Times doesn't know Dick (Destiny)

Although now I look like this . . .

HUCK FISH: Makin' life just a little harder for his fellow air travellers than it ought to be

Hey, if you were a college student about to take a plane home to Newark from Argentina, you'd toss part of a stick of dynamite as a memento into your suitcase, right? Well, maybe after a few six-packs.


And so here's a photo of Lafayette lacrosse player Howard "Huck" Fish, helping two ladies who've had more than a few too many at the proverbial college part-ay! Where is the Girls Gone Wild team?!

These come from a photo page, mounted by one of Howard's (or Huck, as he is know to pals) teammates. It tooks about twenty seconds to find this on the Net. So, Huck, I'm sure the FBI so believed you when you told 'em you worked with explosives! You should have said, "Hey, I was drunk!" That might have worked.

Dick Destiny blog also likes this one, of a friend at the same spring wing-ding, called Bart takin' a knee!

Writes the Associated Press of Huck and his big dynamite air adventure:

Howard Fish said he felt as if he had been punched in the stomach when he received a call at work from the FBI Friday telling him his son was in custody after authorities found a stick of dynamite in his airline luggage.

"When the FBI calls and says, 'Do you have a son named Howard Fish?' you don't have a great feeling," Fish, of Old Lyme, said Friday night . . .

[Fish's father said his son] was traveling alone in South America for more than three weeks and bought the dynamite while on a trip to a silver mine in Chile or Bolivia.

Operators of the mine that he visited directed Fish, a student at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., to buy presents for the miners. He bought a stick of dynamite and ended up keeping it.

"He threw it in his suitcase," his father said . . .

"I am absolutely confident of what happened," he said. "It's a 21-year-old kid not paying careful attention to the press and thinking it would be cool to have a piece of dynamite."

This version of the story different slightly from that turned in at the Allentown Morning Call:

Fish's father said the dynamite was a souvenir his son, nicknamed Huck, got during a tour of a silver mine while on a three-week vacation in South America.

''They gave them all a little package that is part of the silver mining process, which included a piece of dynamite,'' Howard MacFarland Fish 3rd said in a telephone interview from his home in Old Lyme, Conn. ''He dumped it into his suitcase. It was not tremendous judgment, given what goes on in the air today.''

Fish said his son made a ''terrible mistake'' and was ''entirely innocent.'' He said his son thought the souvenir was ''neat'' and sent his parents an e-mail about it during his trip.

The U.S. attorney's office in Houston said Huck Fish would appear before a federal magistrate Monday . . .

The second version sounds about right.

In any case, Huck, Dick Destiny blog is sure your fellow travellers wanted to hang you on the spot. And people in the government won't be too thrilled either, because this well-placed story shows one can walk through a foreign airport with dynamite in your bags and get it on an airplane. And bomb-sniffing dogs will detect it in the US, but by then it's too late!

To heck with this mix your liquid bomb in the jet-liner bathroom nonsense!

Atta-boy!

KEEP THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR HANDY

Now that you've had a chance to let the Monday news of the charges against the alleged British liquid bomber terrorists sink in, let's review some of it.

Dick Destiny addressed deputy assistant police commissioner Peter Clarke's reputation here.

Generously, you have to take whatever Clarke says about evidence that's been gathered with a shaker of salt for reasons not apparent to most of the American newsmedia but obvious to many in Britain.

Although the journalists in the States don't get it, when Dick Destiny was talking with a journalists from the BBC over the weekend, there's ready admission from that end that a substantial portion of the English polity -- especially in the law-abiding Muslim population -- views terror announcements from the authorities with anywhere from a fair to a credibility-roasting amount of suspicion.

This is characterized in quotes taken from the British newsmedia a week ago here.

Restated, in brief:

". . . Many Britons believe that ministers not only exaggerated but lied about intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to provide a basis for the 2003 invasion, an affair which has done untold damage to public trust in the government . . . The Iraq intelligence debacle was followed by a string of security and intelligence blunders, the most tragic being the police shooting of an innocent man mistaken for a suicide bomber . . . It later emerged that police had been acting on only the flimsiest of intelligence . . .

"Most recently, a dramatic raid on the home of a Muslim family in Forest Gate, east London, has again highlighted the fallibility of intelligence . . . [the June raid] . . . resulted in the police shooting of one of the suspects, later found to be innocent. [A] suspected chemical weapons factory was never found . . . "

The chap from the Beeb also mentioned the Forest Gate incident as an extreme sore point.

In addition, British prosecutors have been seen as ludicrous in the case of a framejob instigated by a newspaper and handed over to authorities, known as the trial of the Red Mercury Gang.

Red mercury is a long-standing hoax and prosecutors asked that the jury not take that into account.

"The Crown's position is that whether red mercury does or does not exist is irrelevant," said the prosecutor in the case. The jury subsequently cleared the men in the dock.

In today's Los Angeles Times, reporter Kim Murphy recounted the appearance of the eleven accused liquid bomb plotters in court where eight were charged with conspiracy to commit murder and terrorism.

One American diplomat, granted anonymity, furnished quote on terror capability of the kind one has come to expect and despise from those usually granted anonymity.

"The diplomat said U.S. officials have taken the evidence seriously despite the public skepticisim in Britain . . . ," wrote Murphy.

Although only hydrogen peroxide has been attested to as part of the evidence, with no specificity as to its amount or grade, "With some scientific background, some guidance from someone knowledgeable of the chemicals and processes, no it would not be very difficult [to presumably make a bomb]."

It's a quote anyone could have furnished. So why not either leave it out or find someone willing to have their name printed? As for, "it would not be very difficult to do" -- readers can review what Dick Destiny blog thinks of such claims.

This doesn't rule out that someone could sneak bombs onto an airplane. But it doesn't get the press off the hook in scrutinizing arguments from authority.

So far, the best that has been produced is some talk of hydrogen peroxide and a "17-year old boy, who was not identified because of his age, was charged with possessing a book on bombs, suicide notes, and the wills of people who were prepared to commit acts of terrorism. He also had in his possession a map of Afghanistan containing information 'likely to be useful' to a person preparing an act of terrorism . . . " This, from the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday.

While the evidence has been described as immense by British authorities, the substance of it devoted to accurately describing materials and methods -- which would allow one to get a handle on actual capabilities rather than just murderous desire -- is still thin tea.

The New York Times put Alan Cowell on the story and his reporting was not substantially different from that published in the LA Times.

Cowell, however, merits special attention because he did a patently awful job while attempting to do catch-up coverage on the foul-up that was the London ricin trial in April 2005.

Dick Destiny blog recounts Cowell's wretched performance, written of on GlobalSecurity.Org here.

On April 13 [2005], the New York Times covered the Bourgass trial. The Times has had a documented rough time of it reporting on the intersection between alleged exotic al Qaida weapons and the war in Iraq/war on terror. Its article on the alleged poison ring in London did not depart from tradition.

Reporter Alan Cowell furnished a piece that was largely a mixture of UK anti-terror forces jive and frankly weird mistakes brooking no intrusion of reality. In the story's fourth paragraph, Cowell writes, "Details of the trial emerged only today after a judge lifted strict reporting restrictions on two secret jury trials of Mr. Bourgass, arrested in the aftermath of the reported discovery of traces of ricin in an apartment in north London in January 2003."

In the very next sentence, Cowell writes: During [Bourgass's] arrest, in Manchester in the north of England nine days after the ricin was found ..."

It is not until well down into the Times story that the reporter gets around to printing quote from a defense lawyer that "no traces of manufactured ricin had been found," perhaps confusing himself, editors and readers . . .

[Cowell] further wrote, "[The terrorists] were said to have used household ingredients like tobacco, cherry stones and castor oil to make poisons." Ricin does not come from castor oil and "poisons," those discussed in the Bourgass trial, cannot be made from it. Attention, New York Times! Castor seeds were recovered, castor seeds!

This was journalistic clowning of the worst kind. Dick Destiny blog had access to evidence presented in the London ricin trial and Cowell's say-so bore absolutely no resemblance to what those with direct experience had in hand.

Why would this be of importance?

For that, it is necessary to again recall the London ricin trial, one which the US newsmedia largely declined to cover.

The verdicts -- not guilty for everyone but murderer Kamel Bourgass, whose knifing of a British constable during his apprehension was not a direct terror action, were awkward. Bourgass was also convicted of the unusual crime of conspiracy to create a public nuisance with poisons and explosives.

Bourgass and the other Muslims roped in with him had taken part of the central stage in the run up to the war in Iraq. In Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council, the London ricin ring was connected through an intermediary -- who it later turned out had been tortured -- to al Zarqawi in Iraq. This was evidence, it was said, that al Qaeda was directing chemical attacks aimed at England.

During the trial, none of this was proven. Indeed, the original hearsay presented to the newsmedia, wasn't even brought. The prosecution could not connect any of the defendants to al Qaeda even though it tried to do so through the use of a variety of documents on chemical weapons and poisons obtained in Afghanistan after the route of the Taliban.

The story is long and complicated, recounted here, in the articles dated from April 2005.

Additional evidence, provided by the British metropolitan police in a videotape of Operation Springbourne, or the breaking up of the alleged Bourgass ricin ring is here.

Watch closely.

The first envelope contains a handful of ground spice. Quite the weapon of mass destruction, capable of poisoning many! The round things in the dish are cherry pits. England was going to be attacked with the fiendish cherrystones of jihad! Plus, a coffee grinder.

It was these things, along with some foolish recipes scribbled off an American web server, and a jewelry tin containing a handful of castor seeds, which were presented as the basis for mention of the London ricin ring in Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council. And, therefore, part of the evidence for war with Iraq.


It looks absurd and it is. A reasonable person would be enraged by it. But it was not taken so at the time because no one had any idea, outside of authorities, what the evidence looked like. And they weren't furnishing the details.

The U.S. press covered the ricin ring story but asked no serious questions. And then it promptly forgot about the matter. The Brit press went into hyserical overdrive, one tabloid proclaiming of the al Qaeda chemical threat: It's Here.

Had the U.S newsmedia made any attempt to seriously cover the London ricin trial, it would now be obvious to its reporters why extra effort is called for in scrutiny of the airplane liquid bombers.

Perhaps the liquid bomb plot is just as British authorities have said. Or maybe it is something different, threatening, but not of the degree of menace described in early days of reporting. And perhaps it is -- and let us hope not -- London ricin ring, the sequel, or something similar.

We'll be the worse for it, if so. Becuase the U.S. press won't be able to keep its attention on the ball for the couple of years it's going to take to get this into and through the Old Bailey.

OH, YOU'RE SO RUDE!

The Left furnished truth in packaging. The stark visual cues let it be known that this was garage punk for suffocating the annoying--presumably those in Hagerstown, where the band was formed. The blasting noise of the band--Jim Swope’s guitar through a Fender Twin set to crushing treble and singer Brian Sefsic chanting as charmlessly as Iggy on The Stooges--combined in a mix to scratch diamonds. You imagined them to be churls who meant exactly what they sang on "Fuck It," a tune about barflies. Read the rest in the Baltimore City Paper here.

Next on today's menu, Killola's Louder, LOUDER! Astonishingly, used copies are already going for about 40 bucks on Amazon!

Defending the good rep of ’70s lippy girl new wave, Killola commit to all the pop tricks of Holly & The Italians, Sue Saad & The Next, Pearl Harbor & The Explosions and a couple other ampersand bands you can't remember for [the kickoff tune] "Barrel of Donkeys." "I guess you could call me talkative" chatters vocal chameleon Lisa Rieffel straight off, then proving it by mixing annihilating putdowns—"Your manners are poor and your nails are dirty!” with ... And the rest is on PaperThinWalls.com, here.

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In other rude matters, The Washington Post reported Tower Records filing for bankruptcy and up for sale.

With a Tower in Pasadena, for over a decade it's been where Dick Destiny has bought most of his records. The prices were the highest in town but the selection catered to my tastes. Where else would I have bought the uncouth work of Point Blank or the cheesy rock of the Angels and Teazes, written of yesterday? Plus there's a Stampeders collection I've been dawdling on. "Hit the Road Jack," Tower! No!

BestBuy moved into town with much lower pricing. And while I do shop there a few times a year, it's obvious their selection is worse. BestBuy offends. From the pics on the front wall of the neatly uniformed seven dollars-or-so-an-hour employees, it's a store, like many patronized by Americans, built primarily on slave labor goods and modelled on the Walmart way of doing business.

And you know that process where someone has to run up to you in greeting, asking if you need assistance within 30 seconds of entering? That's not because they like you or BestBuy is particularly interested in a good service reputation. It's because businesses like these glommed onto the idea years ago, an unprovable one, that if patrons were met in such a way, it deterred shoplifting.

This model thrills everyone with cheap stuff made by people who earn a handful of pebbles living in deplorable conditions Americans who buy the same stuff would rather not think about, until, that is, that model of business has destroyed every local competitor that paid better but made things priced just a bit too high. And if Americans should somehow be thrown out of work by this process, eventually the truth of it hits home. By then it's too late.

Recorded music, on the other hand, can't be made the US imported-good slave labor way. People can make it on their own dime, but it will have cost them money. They can choose to give it away. Or, if they're lucky, they can get a record company to underwrite them, at which point a considerable amount of money will be spent. And then people, if they so wish, can choose to steal it digitally.

But for the physical good, it can't be priced as a slave labor item, like a CD player or a 175 dollar electric guitar in a cardboard box.

The labels overprice and overpriced their artists. Small changes have been made but not significant ones. And digital distribution is cheaper when it caters to the single downloader, or the mix-and-match listener.

But while Dick Destiny has been on-line longer than digital music, it doesn't fit that demographic. I like to buy something I can hold. I don't enjoy listening to music sitting in front of a flat-panel screen and when I go mobile, it's with a Walkman-like CD player, not an iPod.

So while I'm an old and in the way piece of meat, I'm still here to whip people and whip them I shall. Tower had a purpose and provided goods I enjoyed until the end of its existence.

"They're going to force you to going online now; it's like forcing you to ride the subway," said one man to the Post. "It's the last of an icon around here . . . At Circuit City and Best Buy, they're just throwing whatever up on the shelves. [At Tower] the selection is wide."

One curious graf stood out in the Post article, the contributed quote of the "expert" deserving of a horselaugh:

Tower's popularity extends beyond its customer base, said Geoff Mayfield, an analyst with Billboard.

"The industry wants it to survive," he said. It got a standing ovation from the crowd when it recently won retailer of the year from the major recording merchandisers' trade group, he said.

Perhaps, like some other stores, it could diversify by selling shoes, posters, games and other goods that would appeal to its audience, Mayfield said. "It needs to become a destination," he said. "Otherwise, people will just pass it by."

One wonders where Mayfield has been. Tower did move toward selling both outside and inside-the-mission goods in the past few years. Porn DVDs, racks of trashy pop culture books, a wall of magazines equivalent to a newsstand, dolls, candy, beverages, guitar strings, comic books, and other things I never paid attention to. One thing, however, they did not sell was shoes. Yes, Geoff Mayfield, Tower did not sell shoes. How could they have been so stupid?

The guy's worse than the usual government and anti-terror experts Dick Destiny ridicules.

The rest of the article includes the usual about fickle consumers moving on to other tastes and the merciless ubiquity of the digital realm.

BIG HARD ROCK END-O-SUMMER RUNDOWN

The photo to the left is from Angel's The Singles Collection, Vol. 2," a Russo-American import, it's libretto written half in Cyrillic, half in English. Notice -- this is not Vol. 1.

Angel were a Baltimore band swept away to Hollywood and signed on the say-so of Kiss' Gene Simmons around '76 or so. Their first two albums on Casablanca were a mix of heavy metal and trudging prog set to embarrassing Dungeons & Dragons lyrics . (You want that stuff, go for Vol. 1.)

The purist hard rock fans usually prefer them over the later material, when the band was pressured to write singles or appeal to girls by looking like dolls.

Despite white satin garments and too shiny hair, I had all of the records and have come to like the dregs of their catalog best. The Singles -- Vol. 2 collects all of this bubblegum metal including a song about Christmas, delivered twice, one with non-denominational winter lyrics. Best of the lot is a warm and sincere cover of The Rascals' "Ain't Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore," sounding a lot like Alvin & the Chipmunks doing rock 'n' roll. Or was it the Evolution Revolution?

"Stick, stick, stick like glue," sings Angel's Frank Dimino on "Stick Like Glue." Indeed, couldn't get it out of my head for two whole days. The CD one also includes "20th Century Foxes," disco rock title tune for "Foxes," the movie, about white-trash & high-life San Fernando Valley girls and Scott Baio with a bad case of blueballs.

Does not contain "Wild & Hot" which may have had the lyrics "'Cuz I'm wild and I'm hot/And I'm ready to trot!"

Imagine having to sing that when you're in your thirties. That'd really suck the air out of you night after night. And that's just what happened to Angel.

Canada's Teaze were wild & hot, too. And the lyrics on their first album, reissued this summer, aren't quite as humiliating as Angel's but of similar flavor.

This was another group who sang they were "hot to trot."One guitarist played sans shirt in spandex pants, suspenders and bow-tie, taking on a Chippendales look in venues where women into the real Chippendales would not dare to venture.

It wasn't the lyrics that were important, though, because Teaze-type bands, of which there were many, always write the melodies and riffs first, then glue on words. And so you get basic themes on being cool, like "Boys Night Out," vigorous muscle car rock with lyrics about how the dudes are really going to tear up the town smoking cigarettes, cursing and drinking until daylight.

Wow, guys, get in a chain fight with a biker gang, why dontcha?!

With that as example, you know there's nothing about doing krank until your teeth are gone or being busted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for running a meth lab. It's all dirty clean fun, not like Texans Point Blank, who were singing songs about shooting people and the true purpose of wife-beating around the same time. (You don't have to be an ogre to do hard rock, although, for some people, it really helps.)

"Rockin' With the Music" & "Hot to Trot" -- are titles that furnish you with the Teaze philosophy and while it's fashionable to dismiss such efforts as cliches beneath notice there's gritty pleasure to be had hearing the band work it's way through forty minutes of gutsy, tuneful, and very joyfully played hard rock. Teaze's music sounds as firecracker as the cover looks.

Black Stone Cherry include a show-and-tell DVD on their new one. So you find they're white trash from Kentucky, just like the kids thirty years ago where I grew up. It's reassuring to know that, contrary to the popular conception in the media, the genome of young people hasn't changed one molecule in the intervening decades.

What you get, however, is hard rock by guys who spent hours hanging out on the local auto mechanic's property, spitting chaw on the asphalt, talking about dirt bikes or girls, and urinating on the side of the building after the proprietor went home. Until, inspired by parents who were or are in rock bands and who -- perhaps, told them they looked vaguely like Lynyrd Skynyrd, they decided to take a whack at it themselves. Black Stone Cherry are harmless and friendly enough but should have stuck with chewing tobacco for their satisfaction. (Gooze, you're gonna pay for recommending this one.)

The first eight tunes on the CD are slow, downtuned, serious-man's straining hard rock. It grinds and hollers and you can't remember a blessed riff as soon as it's finished. At tune number eight, Black Stone Cherry mystifyingly decide to do classic rock, "Hell or High Water" having a melody that can be sung along to in the arena. The Yardbirds' "Shapes of Things" follows but while both are fine, neither are strong enough pegs to hang an album on. The first half of the record should have been tossed out before delivery with nary a look back.

The Flairs are a current Canadian band, the beneficiaries of a first round of publicity for Shut Up and Drive, one which netted them almost nothing. I saw the band in one of the guitar mags, and to frame this right, you have to know that the practice in such pubs is to essentially give out freebies to new product in the front of the book. And that more than half the article will be dumbass discussion about what it's like to be a girl doing rock and roll in a man's world. And the specs on the guitars and amplifiers used. It's not always that predictable, some would say so comfortingly so, but the practice is dependably formulaic.

What this also means is that The Flairs are one of those prole hard rock bands deemed completely uninteresting by the vast majority of music editors running reviews and profiles of altie product.

They're not quirkyor literary and they're obviously influenced by 80's-Sunset Strip pop metal and meat-and-potatoes punk rock. (They do a version of Skid Row's MTV hit, "18 & Life." It's not the best song on the CD.) So if you're a music writer you can pitch them around for review and have it met with a shrug or a gratuitous insult on how boring they allegedly sound. And if they get covered, it will be by an intern at a weekly writing for free or almost free, way in the back, limited to a sentence or two connected to an appearance at a local firetrap where they're on the bottom of the bill, or at best, the middle.

The Flairs, in other words, make just the kind of charging hard rock I like. You can play them alongside Teaze and the major difference is only that the songs are sung and written by girls and Flairs lyrics are better. They perform with vigor, tackle their material with enthusiasm, sound like they'd be a heckuva treat for thirty minutes in person, and have written one excellent end-of-summer tune in "Falling Into Pieces."

Suplecs' Powtin' On the Outside, Pawty On the Inside is just right for today, too. Watching Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke strikes the mood for their history. Suplecs were a poor man's stoner rock band who, like everybody, lost everything. They also saw this record, scheduled for release just as Katrina hit, get washed out to sea. CD-Rs went out but no one seemed up for them except the usual fanzine perps.

As a year old relaunch, it deserved another listen. Repeat spins reveal it easy on the ears. The art is standard Man's Ruin slum stoner rock in bib overalls but the delivery is more subtle. Suplecs, for instance, has a singer who tries. There is dynamic to the record and the guitar backs off on the big, fat and heavy knobs here and there, adding colors lighter than electric mud. Suplecs' ship won't come in with this one because they're not elegant, just like all the rest of the CDs reviewed today. If they'd been around in the mid-70's they would have had a fair chance of making four or five records, none of which they would have had to spend their own money on. They might have even made a little on a couple of them.

So make no mistake, they are part of the definition of why people listen to hard rock bands with no chance of even faint commercial success. Not easily expressed in words, it's a vibe from lives that share some sort of community with the listener.

BUSH ADMINISTRATION MYSTIFYINGLY CLASSIFYING ANTIQUE NUCLEAR ARSENAL INFORMATION: The cost of having dangerous ninnies in control

The new fad of making secrets of old and basic information in the public domain on America's Cold War nuclear arsenal is startling but perhaps not surprising. The Bush administration and the Pentagon -- in penchants for secrecy -- have withdrawn, or attempted to withdraw, much legitimate information from the public record. This is an impossible task, particularly with respect to old numbers from the nuclear arsenal, and the foolish and annoying nature of this work doesn't seem to have occurred to our leaders.

One can view it as the cost of gross ignorance in positions of power and leadership.

" . . . The Pentagon is now trying to keep secret numbers of strategic weapons that have never been classified before," said one person to the Washington Post, the paper that first reported the story.

"It's yet another example of silly secrecy," said Thomas Blanton, the archive's director, to the Post.

A government fugleman, Bryan Wilkes, "spokesman for the National Nuclear Security," said just the opposite. White was black.

"There's no question that current classified nuclear weapons data was out there that we had to take back . . . And in today's environment, where there is a great deal of concern about rogue nations or terrorist groups getting access to nuclear weapons, this makes a lot of sense."

"The report comes at a time when the Bush administration's penchant for government secrecy has troubled researchers and bred controversy over agency efforts to withhold even seemingly innocuous information," wrote the Post.

As example of material being classified, or redacted, came from an old chart presented by Melvin Laird to the House Armed Services Committtee in 1971. The chart showed "that the United States had 30 strategic bomber squadrons, 54 Titan intercontinental ballistic missiles and 1,000 Minuteman missiles." These numbers have been blacked out in a copy of the chart viewed in January, according to the newspaper.


Dick Destiny blog, with GlobalSecurity.Org senior fellow official T-shirt in place, went to its bookshelf to consult "The History of the U.S. Nuclear Arsenal," by James Norris Gibson, published by Brompton in 1989.

On page 14, under "Number of [Titan] missiles deployed: 54 . . . " With 163 constructed and 67 flown as of 1989.

On page 16, in the book's entry on the Minuteman missile program: Minuteman 1A -- 150 deployed, "none in service after 1969"; Minuteman 1B -- 650 total deployed, "none in service after 1974"; Minuteman II -- 500 deployed, "450 in service as of 1986." By reading the text, one can determine about 1,000 Minutemen 1B and II missiles were deployed in 1971.

The book, full of color pictures and figures, is for sale on Amazon. Using the upside down logic quoted in the Post piece, the information in it should set the hair on fire of the dangerous ninniesnational security mandarins, working under the Bush administration.

Before the normalization of this flavor of cracked thinking, it was accepted that publishing the numbers of weapons in the U.S. arsenal was useful in demonstrating the maintenance of deterrence. And productive, ahem, in instilling confidence in adherence to strategic arms limitations treaties.

One also assumes the game of nuclear confrontation, Ultimatum, made by Yaquinto in 1975 and much admired by this blog, also contains material that ought to be classified.

One would also not be surprised to see a withdrawal of common information on warhead yields, missile ranges and the number and types of platforms nuclear bombs are delivered by.

SILL LOOKING GOOD IN LEATHER: More Vic Tanny, one presumes


The iconography On "Denial of Death," The latest CD by NYC's The Brain Surgeons (or Brain Surgeons NYC), resembles that of a motorcycle gang. Call it a revision of the "Transmaniacon MC" Boozefighters-from-the-Algonquin-Hotel mythos off the first Blue Oyster Cult album. Although said by others, it's worth repeating -- the Surgeons are Blue Oyster Cult 2006, while BOC is a cover band doing old hits and other stuff no one listens to. The former never come close to that flavor of kitsch, instead making records still draped in fogs of creepy and creaking-house heavy metal. If they could dig up the guy who did the Me 262-in-Paraguay album art for "Secret Treaties," I'd be even happier.

Upgunned by the addition of Ross the Boss from the Dictators on lead guitar, Denial of Death is a lot louder than any previous Brain Surgeons LP. With no a cappella songs like previous favorites "Biloxi" or dusty blooz ala "Stones in My Passway," the album rips a fair to tremendous trench from "Constantine's Sword" through to the closer, "Change the World Henry," reaching climaxes of Texas shout on "Lonestar" and Motorhead stampede on "1864."

Surgeons singer/guitarist and former rock critic Deborah Frost looks good in leather at the mike and the band insists Ross is a star to Russkis greatly impressed with his old classic Manowar-style guitar-playing. For that you'll want to check "Death Tone" from Battle Hymns, the best, and probably only, heavy metal concept album devoted to the Vietnam vet. I think.

TERROR CHARGES ANNOUNCED IN LONDON: Uh-oh, though, it's Peter Clarke

Terror charges against the liquid bomb airplane plotters were just announced. The news is still thin on the ground.

From the Guardian:

At a joint press conference, the head of the Metropolitan police's anti-terrorist branch, revealed that investigations had uncovered bomb making equipment, the chemical hydrogen peroxide and a number of "martyrdom" videos. In addition to these materials, there were more than 400 computers, 200 mobile telephones and 8,000 computer media items such as memory sticks, CDs and DVDs

Deputy assistant commissioner Peter Clarke said police also had "highly significant" surveillance that would be used in evidence against the suspects.

From Peter Clarke's statement, on the website of the Metropolitan Police:

This is the first time we have been able to release information about the progress of the investigation, since the morning of the arrests on 10th August.

"This is not because we have wanted to withhold information from the public on the contrary, we want to tell the public as much as we can about the terrorist threat. But we have now reached the stage where I can give you more details. I cannot give you a running commentary on the enquiry. Neither can I give details of the specific evidence against individuals. What I can give is an indication of the type of evidence that will be presented in support of the prosecution.

"First, there is evidence from surveillance carried out before 10 August. This includes important, indeed, highly significant video and audio recordings.

"I can also tell you that since 10 August we have found bomb making equipment. There are chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide, electrical components, documents and other items.

"We have also found a number of video recordings - these are sometimes referred to as martyrdom videos. This has all given us a clearer picture of the alleged plot.

Even less from Associated Press:

The investigation discovered bomb-making equipment, including chemicals and electrical components, along with the existence of martyrdom videos on the computers belonging to those in custody, said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke. He didn't say if those in custody had made the videos.

Hydrogen peroxide? Of what grade? And no acetone or acid?

Looks like we'll have to wait for more and hope the press is diligent in their digging. That's because Peter Clarke doesn't have such a hot reputation in speaking the bald truth to the public.
During the trial of the alleged London ricin ring, the trial that found no ricin and only laughable materials and plans in the hands of one convicted man, Kamel Bourgass, Clarke was known to exaggerate.

"In fashioning the news [on the London ricin ring], Peter Clarke, the Metropolitan police deputy assistant commissioner in charge of anti-terrorism, delivered a particularly inflammatory statement to the media. 'The impact on the public, if he [Kamel Bourgass] had succeeded in what he wanted to do, is incalculable,' [he said].

Read the rest from that mess, and it ain't pretty, here.

DRANO BOMBS & 'ASK PARNEY': Pranks & duds

It's often disappointing to read the 'work' of America's experts on security and terror. Errors are astounding in nature. What's more surprising is that few seem to care. If you don't know what's going on, just pretend you do! It's even better when you have a title!

For example, a 2005 master's thesis from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, entitled "Common Chemicals as Precursors of Improvised Explosive Devices: The Challenges of Defeating Domestic Terrorism," contains the following howler, among others.



The author, a director of homeland security at some unfortunate county in Minnesota, contributed the thesis in fulfillment of requirements for a master's degree in "Security Studies (Homeland Security & Defense)." And while the paper is about chemicals, it's not obvious its creator knows any chemistry.

In any case, the quote on the "draino bomb" is one found ad nauseum on the Internet, usually among the collections of hoarders of anarchy files. You know, the ones made by teenagers, now grown men seemingly bereft of any of the benefits of a solid education, but still devoted to the idea that everyone needs access to poorly conceived homemade formulae for incendiaries and bombs.

In any case, the "draino bomb" file is witless, obviously composed by a kid, who at some time in the past, got a kick out of the idea of riling elders by writing some menacing-looking graffiti on the walls of cyberspace.

"Information wants to be free!" used to be their favorite saying.

What the Naval Postgraduate School author of the thesis doesn't get, however, and this is the disappointing part, is that the recipe for the "draino bomb" is trash.

And since it is trash, there should be no interest in controlling it or even wondering what point its "information" serves. The correct answer is: It doesn't matter!

The violent chemical reactions it purports to tell you how to instigate are more well-illustrated on the Internet in legitimate science courses which few would think of censoring.

But if you cast around on Google looking for references to drano bombs (spelled either the S.C. Johnston way, or the dumbass teenage way), YOU WON'T FIND THEM. And because your comprehension of the science is poor, you'll fail in understanding the risk, or lack of it, and appear a ninny!

Drano bomb files address a couple of different chemical reactions, none of which the various authors of the files seem knowledgeable of.

One is the reaction of aluminum with water and sodium hydroxide, a strong base. It's well described here, at a university chemistry department in Germany.

"This reaction is used in drain cleaners," writes a professor genially. "They are mostly made out of strong alkalis, to which [aluminum] or zinc has been added. The alkalis break down organic residues chemically. In addition, the formation of hydrogen leads to a bubbling effect which adds an additional mechanical cleaning mechanism. "

A slightly pooched nerdy white-trash spin on this chemical reaction, or the making of a drano bomb in the basement before a small but annoyingly admiring audience, is illustrated in this brief video.

Watch it or you'll put your eye out, kid!

Other formulations for prankster "bombs" of this variety include the reaction of bleach, or sodium hypochlorite, and hydrogen peroxide. Note that the scientific exercise for students, here is much less exciting than the unsupervised teenage interpretation here, from a New Jersey newspaper:

The two plastic bottles, filled with chlorine, bleach and peroxide exploded about 2 a.m. and 9:15 a.m. Sunday on a Market Street baseball field, bringing a response from the Bergen County Police Department Bomb Squad and the county's hazardous materials team.

Police said they have reason to believe teenagers were responsible for the devices and that they may have gotten the idea after seeing an episode of the Discovery Channel science show "MythBusters," called "Mentos and Soda," which aired Saturday night.

That episode featured the show's hosts mixing Men- tos candy with diet soda to simulate geysers and explosions, but a description of the show on the TV network's Web site did not mention any experiments with [bleach] and peroxide.

Other variations on this riff include "science camp for small children and idiots" stuff like vinegar and baking soda or adding acid to bleach and capping the bottle. The former reaction generates carbon dioxide, the latter -- chlorine, which is more interesting to the teenage anarchy hobbyists.

The astute reader may have noticed that none of these reactions fit the bill of making a "car explode like in the movies." Indeed, the "draino bomb" file cited by the Naval Postgraduate School student, is idioticcounterintuitive in a number of interesting ways.

Formulations of scouring powder, or Comet, for instance, contains only minor amounts of bleaching powder, or sodium hypochlorite.

Now while all this is very entertaining, it's not so entertaining when one reads it as part of something that's supposed to be part of a serious postgraduate schooling in national security matters.

"Approved by Dr. Douglas Porch, Chairman, Department of National Security Affairs," reads the thesis ominously.

Next up, we return to another Dick Destiny favored terror expert, Civitas Group director and ex-Department of Homeland Security bigwig, Penrose Parney Albright.

Parney Albright, while assistant secretary for Homeland Security, was involved in allegedly improving the nation's defenses against bioterror, among other things.

If you pump his name into Google, like this, your first choice is Parney Albright hosts Ask the Whitehouse at whitehouse.gov.

Outstanding!

"Hi, I'm Parney Albright, and I'm the Assistant Secretary for Science and Technology at the Department of Homeland Security. It is a real pleasure to be here and I'm looking forward to answering your questions," he writes to attendees at an interactive question-and-answer session on terrorism, one that focused on the biological side of the threat.

Some of the questions were posed by imbeciles, like this one:

"Should we develop the ability to quarantine sections of the country with an electromagnetic wall, to prevent bio spread in case of attack?"

One doesn't really know how to respond when confronted by such a ninny except, maybe, "Silencio!" or "Next!" or the Willy Wonka-inspired fallback, "I don't know what you're saying because you're mumbling."

"I’m unaware of any technology though that would cause an electromagnetic wall to prevent the escape of biological pathogens," answered Albright.

"As much as we’d all like to have these types of things, we are a long, long way from having the shields that Captain Kirk, for example, can call upon to protect his people."

That's game.

But better stuff was on display in another session of "Ask Parney," archived here.

Question -- I keep wondering why, if no biological weapons or chemical weapons have ever been used against us with the exception of anthrax, do we spend so much money on this? Or was the money for this type of funding nonexistant before the previous terrorist attacks? thanks you.

Parney Albright -- That's a very good question . . . Let me try and answer it in a couple of ways.

The first is that the anthrax attacks were not the first time we had had an incident of bioterrorism in this country. You might remember many years ago a cult in Oregon tried to poison a whole bunch of local salad bars with botulism in order to disrupt a local election. So these sorts of things--bioterrorism--has a very long history to it, going back to millennia, when people used to catapult diseased animals over city walls to infect the population of the city under siege.

Parney, arghhh! The Rajneesh cult used Salmonella typhimurium to cause salmonellosis. Botulism is caused by toxins produced by the microbe, Clostridium botulinum.

So, readers, do you think it's (or was) important for someone who was in charge of allocating dollars in the Department of Homeland Security's science and research operations on bioterrorism to know the details?

Further down:

Question -- What type of bio-drugs are the most needed and why?

Parney Albright -- . . . Let me make an important point here—this BioShield legislation not only deals with bio threat, it also deals with developing medical countermeasures for all of the threats. It includes medical countermeasures for chemical attacks. It includes medial countermeasures for radiological attacks as well. The kinds of drugs we are interested are of course vaccines. Ideally you would like to develop a vaccine that would in effect take a particular pathogen off the table entirely. But we also understand that is hard to do and that in many cases what makes more sense to do is to develop a therapeutic to help people who have been exposed. You might recall when we had the anthrax attacks over here on the East Coast, the treatment of choice was something called Cipro. We need to develop more block spectrum anti-virals such as Cipro so that we can deal with a wide variety of threats and we can also deal with threats after the attack has occurred.

Agghhh, Parney! Such clowning! BioShields are failing, Captain!

Cipro is not an anti-viral drug, it is an antibiotic. And anthrax is a bacterial disease, not a viral one.

DEPT. OF HOMELAND SECURITY REPORT ON MANPADS DEFENSE KERFUFFLE

A few weeks ago the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy Project, run by Steven Aftergood, posted a DHS reported entitled "Counter MANPADS Progam Summary" on its website. And so the report was downloaded by quite a few people, until this week.

"A July 31 Department of Homeland Security report to Congress on the status of defenses against shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles was removed from the Federation of American Scientists web site after DHS objected (pdf) to its publication," wrote Aftergood.

"DHS urged that the unclassified report, marked For Official Use Only, be taken offline and, upon consideration, we agreed to do so.

"The Report has never been released by DHS to the public because it contains sensitive information such as the transition of military technology for potential civil use, systems performance of the prototype systems being developed by DHS and its partners, and the reliability of such prototype systems," wrote DHS deputy associate general counsel William H. Anderson."

Then Anderson threatened the Secrecy Project.

"Due to the sensitive nature of the Report, I request that your organization immediately remove the Report from its website."

"If the Report is not removed from your website within 2 business days, we will consider further appropriate actions necessary to protect the information contained in the Report."

Aftergood's Secrecy Blog added further comment from a Congressional staffer who had downloaded his copy of the report from FAS.

"[The staffer] said that executive branch rest