terrorism
revere | December 24, 2007There are computers on a chip and labs on a chip and now explosives on a chip. Explosives on a chip? WTF?
This wonderful tech breakthrough is brought to us by Georgia Tech Research Institute and reported, straight-faced, by the Press Release service, Science Daily:
Developed by a team of scientists from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the Indian Head Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, the highly-uniform copper structures will be incorporated into integrated circuits -- then chemically converted to millimeter-diameter explosives. Because they can be integrated into…
mikethemadbiologist | December 18, 2007Since torture seems to be under discussion by the A-list bloggers, I want to follow up on a point Helmut made in his Congressional testimony about torture. Simply, it is this: if torture is truly used as an interrogation technique, and not to fulfill a psychological need or as terrorism, it can not be an isolated event--it must be systemic and routine.
Take the case the pro-torture advocates constantly raise, the Jack Bauer scenario, where if torture were not used then TEH EVIL TERRORIST will level Los Angeles in five minutes and twenty three seconds*. Oh, I forgot: BEEP, BEEP, BEEP!
Are…
mikethemadbiologist | December 16, 2007...not 9/11. The Bush Administration spied on American citizens without court orders before Sept. 11, 2001. And it didn't stop the attacks (italics mine):
In a separate program, N.S.A. officials met with the Qwest executives in February 2001 and asked for more access to their phone system for surveillance operations, according to people familiar with the episode. The company declined, expressing concerns that the request was illegal without a court order.
While Qwest's refusal was disclosed two months ago in court papers, the details of the N.S.A.'s request were not. The agency, those…
mikethemadbiologist | December 16, 2007Jonathan Schell has recently written a superb book about the history of the nuclear age, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger. What Schell does is expose a lot of the hidden assumption underlying the discussion surrounding nuclear disarmament and nuclear proliferation (which as he notes are intertwined). Here's a small taste:
In short, even in a world without nuclear weapons, deterrence would, precisely because the bomb in the mind would still be present, remain in effect. In that respect, the persisting know-how would be as much a source of reassurance as it would be of…
mikethemadbiologist | December 13, 2007If you visit ScienceBlogs regularly, you've probably read about ScienceBloglings Sheril Kirshenbaum's and Chris Mooney's proposal for a presidential debate about science. There's a lot I like about this proposal, but the reality of what could happen bothers me. First, what I like about the idea.
For much of the last two and half years, I worked at a non-profit organization that focused on infectious disease policy and programs. Science policy--and politics--are important. The idea that every political candidate would actually have to devise a science policy, and perhaps even be judged by…
revere | December 3, 2007Carnegie-Mellon is a great university and when it comes to robotics and computer science is always on the cutting edge. But does that cutting edge have to be so sharply lethal?
Unmanned aircraft are showing up in the skies more often and today the US Army awarded $14.4 million to Carnegie Mellon to build a remote-controlled unmanned tank.
A certain amount of the award will go toward significantly improving the Crusher, a 6.5-ton unmanned support vehicle Carnegie engineers developed in 2006 in conjunction with DARPA. Since its introduction, the Crusher has demonstrated unparalleled toughness…
revere | November 26, 2007What's the big deal about putting a few bad guys into "stressful" positions (assuming you know for sure they really are bad guys)? You call that torture? Waterboarding maybe is torture (we aren't sure about that yet; requires some study***), but stressful positions and a love tap or two? Give me a break:
Source: Waiting for the Guards, Amnesty International
So what's the big deal? This was straight out of the CIA interrogation manual. No pretense we don't do it.
This video is also not play acting:
In order to make the film, the directors put the actor into a stress position for six hours…
revere | November 7, 2007I know there are readers here who will say this is the "price of freedom" or some such nonsense. But give me a break. The father-in-law of a Swede didn't want him to travel, so he dropped a dime on him to the FBI, saying he had links to al Qaeda:
When the husband refused to stay home, his father-in-law wrote an email to the FBI saying the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda in Sweden and that he was travelling to the US to meet his contacts.
He provided information on the flight number and date of arrival in the US.
The son-in-law was arrested upon landing in Florida. He was placed in handcuffs…
purepedantry | October 15, 2007I was struck by an NPR story this morning where they talked to a pathologist in Afghanistan. He conducts the autopsies on the remains of suicide bombers there.
The doctor argues that a great many of them had mental or physical disabilities:
Dr. Yusuf Yadgari, a forensics instructor at Kabul Medical University, says 60% of the bombers they've examined had a physical ailment or disability. When you factor in mental problems, Yadgari says the number grows to include more than 80% of all suicide attackers in Afghanistan.
He says these "outcasts" may become suicide bombers because it's a way to…
mikethemadbiologist | October 10, 2007As if outing Valerie Plame, whose primary task was to monitor and contain WMD proliferation in the Middle East--including Iran, wasn't bad enough, the Bush Administration destroyed another intelligence gathering operation for political gain (italics mine):
A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had…
mikethemadbiologist | October 9, 2007What's one more criminal in the mix, anyway? So what if a government contractor supplied weapons to Liberia's Charles Taylor and the Taliban (italics mine):
Viktor Bout, was paid tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars while illegally flying transport missions for the United States in Iraq. Bout is the notorious Russian weapons merchant whose fleet of aging Soviet aircraft rivals that of some NATO countries in its size and capacity. By marrying his access to Soviet bloc weapons with his airlift capacity, Bout established himself as the world's premiere purveyor of illicit weapons to the…
mikethemadbiologist | September 11, 2007For me, the most visceral images of that day weren't from NYC, but from DC. I remember seeing the footage of ambulances lined up, waiting to get into Arlington Hospital--a hospital I not only drove by regularly, but have been in multiple times.
When I returned to DC three days later (by train, there were no flights available), I remember going to the Smithsonian (what was I supposed to do? Cower in fear in my family's house?)*, I remember seeing surface-to-air missile batteries at the foot of the Washington Monument. The whole city had turned into an armed camp, and everything was…
grrlscientist | September 11, 2007tags: terrorism, religion, streaming videoAll religion has a very bloody history and the fact that people still subject themselves to this brainwashing shows that most people are mindless idiots. Don't believe me? Watch this video that will remind you about what happened on September 11th, six years ago. [5:27]
revere | August 16, 2007Either there are more lab accidents in biodefense laboratories or we are hearing about them more (see here, here, here, here, here.). Since there are always lab accident but there is a lot more "biodfense" laboratory work, it is probably both. I think we can look forward to the Bush administration solving this problem by declaring lab accidents in biodefense labs a state secret. That way we won't have to worry about hearing about them any more. But until that happens, we can look forward to more of stuff like this:
A graduate student at Jackson's University Medical Center had to be treated…
revere | July 10, 2007When terrorists attacked the symbolic center of American economic power on September 11 it wasn't the first time:
On 16 September 1920, throngs of brokers, clerks, and office workers poured from the buildings lining New York City's Wall Street as a nearby church bell struck twelve o'clock. The narrow cobblestone street became a river of sputtering automobiles and scurrying pedestrians as the financial district employees set out to make the most of their mid-day break.
Traveling opposite the egressing crowds, an elderly bay horse plodded along Wall Street pulling a nondescript wagon and a…
mikethemadbiologist | June 21, 2007...help them win the election. Over at Thoughts from Kansas, ScienceBlogling Josh has a post about who and what are responsible for the current civil war in the West Bank and Gaza. In any discussion of the Middle East, all sorts of things will be claimed, but there is one awful historical fact: American and Israeli pressure on the Palestinian Authority to change their electoral system helped Hamas win the 2006 elections.
The original electoral system that Palestinians had was completely proportional. If a party won forty percent of the votes, it received forty percent of the seats in…
mikethemadbiologist | June 11, 2007I used to think that Democratic politicians were trying to be too clever by half, and consequently screwed things up. Then I started to think that many are actually quite conservative, so they're just reverting to form--most of them don't have a tiny liberal inside of them, struggling to be free. After reading this exchange with a Democratic canvasser (something I used to do), I think the party has been taken over (or at least seriously infiltrated) by fucking morons (italics mine):
When I explained my stance and rationale [for not donating to the national party] to the woman on the phone,…
mikethemadbiologist | May 16, 2007Last night, the Republican presidential candidates were asked what they would do in a "24" situation. Intelligent Designer help us, but McCain (and Paul) were the only sane ones.
McCain noted that the "24" scenario is ridiculous. He also pointed out that torture causes us to lose our moral credibility. Doesn't McCain realize that morality is to be applied only to fetuses and prayer in schools? Giuliani and Romney went Full Metal Bauer, as digby notes:
I think it's clear that this group has come to fully understand that winning the GOP nomination is all about the codpiece. These guys have…
mikethemadbiologist | April 12, 2007According to CNN, a bomb blast has killed at least two people in the Iraqi Parliament. This building is located in the Green Zone.
I hope Bush, McCain, and the other members of the Coalition of the Sane have the decency to wait until the bodies cool a few hours before they claim that this proves that the surge is 'working.' This might even challenge the Unified Theory of The Surge, which states that no matter what happens, any and every event proves that the surge is working.
If terrorists attack, it's because the surge has frustrated them. If terrorists don't attack, it's because the…
mikethemadbiologist | April 12, 2007I've never really considered myself an anonymous blogger, even though I blog under the pseudonym "Mike the Mad Biologist." I think about fifteen minutes of serious investigation would reveal my identity (nefarious as it is). It's more of a minor affectation than anything else. But two incidents in the past week illustrate why not having your name directly linked with criticism of Little Lord Pontchartrain might be a good thing.
First, via cookie jill, is this story about an anti-war activist trying to get a passport:
A local activist thinks the federal government is trying to prevent him…