The rivalry between America's space program and the Strategic Defense Initiative dates back to the time NASA's Tang Dynasty ignited the Cold War struggle to spin the spin-offs that make men free, and motivate Members Of Congress to vote for next fiscal year's cost overruns
For decades, the Tang Label was NASA's battle flag,but now the Star Wars empire has struck back with a cool new icon that testifies that the era of optical underkill is at its end. Solid state lightbulbs cannot be far behind.
August 26, 2008
June 05, 2008
LIBERAL VAMPIRISM
Is National Review's Jonah Goldberg putting out feelers for the theme of his next book ?
“Do Vampires have rights ?” , he asks in NRO.:” it seems to me that the founding fathers would unequivocally say that vampires do not have rights because rights come from God (or our creator). Vampires are undead and exist solely thanks to satanic or other demonic forces. They shy from God and God's love and therefore do not deserve the protections all of God's creatures are entitled to. ... I think I'm safe assuming that most atheists ground their understanding of rights and citizenship as stemming from sentience, consciousness, etc.
Well, vampires have all of those things in their favor. Presumably, an atheist would reject the premise of the question. They would argue that vampires either do not exist... or that vampirism is a biological state, a disease of some kind.... In which case, I assume they would argue that vampires do have rights because having a disease does not amount to a surrender of your humanity or rights.
Interestingly, if you could prove that vampires are real and that their vampiric status derives from supernatural forces, you would have done yeoman work in proving the existence of God. After all, if there are demons, there are probably devils and if there are devils, it seems awfully silly to reject the idea that there might be angels and, ultimately God. If I were more up to speed on my Chesterton, I'm sure there's an appropriate quote here...”.
The Bosnian Islamovampists are not going to like this at all.
May 18, 2008
Dangerous Things
The cultural contrast between intriguing guests and apparently brain dead yack TV hosts has John Derbyshire lamenting :
" It's not the dumbing-down that bothers a lot of us fogeys so much, it's the loss of interest in things and stuff."
I’ll say- gone are the days when Massachusetts and California overflowed with he not so wretched refuse of the electronics industry, and government surplus property offices dished out a high tech cornucopia for pennies on the dollar of taxpayer money invested. The high water mark was the sale of bona fide Titan II ICBM engines fourteen feet tall to any wannabe rocket scientist with a thousand bucks and a truck,
Hence the attraction of the second career of John Ratzenberger, AKA "Cliff Clalvin”. The former Cheers] actor is founder of the Nuts, Bolts, and Thingamajigs Foundation, "dedicated to raising awareness of skilled trades and engineering disciplines among young people." . On the O'Reily Show he expressed “ unhappiness at the fact that young Americans don't tinker any more."
This bothers Derb much more than kids not reading or going to art galleries." But rejoice- technophilia has gone wild at a California fair sponsored by Make Magazine, where ,in a counterblast to nodyne OSHA regulations that felonize sharp objects and mandate chemical-free chemistry set , fire engines belch celebratory fire, robots strut the midway, and home-brew lightning flashes from ten-foot Tesla coils.
The sight of Muffin Cars with roaring turbines out-segueing Segways may make Congressman Waxman cringe, and greens flee in terror, yet a merry old time was had by young and old, including a fellow:
" holding forth in a vintage British military uniform and pith helmet, and is gesturing with a hand that holds a sloshing tankard of ale. “We’ve been told by corporate America that we cannot fix the things we own,” John O’Hare told a somewhat shell shocked reporter from The New York Times: “All we can do is buy their stuff and like it.Cars have become too complex to work on under a shade tree, and people have no idea what is inside their cellphones and cameras. “All this technology, and it’s not ours. It’s somebody else’s, Make is about taking that back off and making it yours.”
said the Steampunk enthusiast universally known as Major Catastrophe, who stood out from the 65.000 who attended by virtue of having arrived in this three story Victorian mansion on wheels.
This gearhead extravaganza sounds like serious Red State Stuff, and though such events began in the San Francisco Bay fever swamps that spawned the Home Brew Computer Club and gave us the PC, the sponsoring magazine, www.make.com , is starting another Make Faire in Austin Texas, with plans to expand the franchise. Boring as media culture has become, the heartland continues to cherish and fire the intellectual independence that took fire in the Goldwater movement and led to the Reagan revolution. It is one thing for libertarians to remove to the Nevada desert for an annual anarchist potlatch , quite another when Middle California breaks out of its smoke-free suburbs, and starts waving pitchforks and propeller beanies at the culture of regulation. MacGyver gave way to Mythbusters, What will the sequel be to The Boys [and now The Girl's ] Book Of Dangerous Things ?
May 13, 2008
What In Creation?
Many in government still experience difficulty in politicizing Earth science, witness the failure of the The Congressional Record to memorialize the 6,000th
anniversary of the Earth's creation-- 4004 BC-- AD 1997.
To bring America's National intelligent Design Curriculum up to date,
The Seitz System Of Condensed Concordia
...Integrates noted Revelation scholar & alchemist
.Sir Isaac Newton's Calculus, Archbishop Ussher's
..peer-reviewed addition of Begats & the Geognostic
.Magisterium of late Commonwealth Latin Secretary
.John Milton Esquire & Doctor John Winthrop
........of Harvard College , into America's first
.........BIBLICALLY CORRECT .............GEOCHRONOLOGY
This postmodern miracle reduces the Tedium of Plate Tectonics by cutting the span of geological time God-fearing students need to memorize by a factor of a million !
Copyright MMVIII Russell Seitz
..4004 B.C. Hadean Era commences with Lucifer's fall to Earth
* 4003 B.C.: From Eden, Adam & Eve request
asbestos waders to cover their shame.
* 3984 B.C.: The first biotechnologist, Cain, patents heat resistant bacteria.
* 3804 B.C. Lava rains on Mesopotamia for 40 days and 40 nights; Noah's Ark incinerated.
* 3504 B.C.: Archaean copper deposits form , kick-starting Bronze Age.
* 3104 B.C.: Tubal Cain inaugurates banded Iron Age. Sphinx starts to fossilize.
* 3004 B.C.: Y1K crisis averted : Gilgamesh unable to count as high as 1000.
* 2804 B.C.: Methuselah begins to notice passage of geological time.
* 2604 B.C.: Tired of reading graphic granite, Imhotep devises hieroglyphs.
* 2584 B.C.: Earliest sedimentation; discovery of slate leads to stone tablets.
* 2384 B.C.: Breathable atmosphere develops; first sermon preached.
April 21, 2008
April 14, 2008
Sticks Nix Hick Pix
"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,"
a flimsy attempt to discredit Darwinist theory as the cornerstone of
modern biology, reps such a missed opportunity. While roving
interviewer Ben Stein extracts some choice soundbites from scientists
on both sides of the creation-vs.-evolution debate, the film's flippant
approach undermines the seriousness of its discourse, trading less in
facts than in emotional appeals. A probable punching bag for film
critics and evolution proponents alike,"
To add to the film's slapstick tribulations, besides two plagiarism cases, there has been a slip up involving Intelligent design stalwart Maciej Giertych, comedian Ben Stein's Polish s
econd banana in the effort to blame Hitler on Darwin. Ben is presumably just kidding in this Expelled website PR image, but the German Press Agency reports the party run by Giertych's son organized a real live neo-nazi swastika torch parade in 2004. Videoed boogeying at the event, which Poland's Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski condemned as
"scandalous", was Giertych's PA. Now that's show business !
Maybe they should skip the release and go directly to the prequel--
March 29, 2008
Idiocy Of Biblical Proportions
Of course, nowadays even prequels have prequels
Until at last, you get back to the future. Which like the past is often so filled with random acts of intellectual vandalism as to be beyond ironic repair-- I didn't perpetrate this one- it's part of the original artwork proudly displayed on the Expelled website.
Of course, they could try erasing "Darwin" , and substituting "Einstein", but then, it might strain even a funny guy like Ben Stein to write a prequel to Mel Brook's The Producers based on the premise that Hitler got The Bomb.
Maybe Ben should settle for spraypainting " Maciej Giertych" the Discovery Institute Declaration signer who appears in the film.
Will the exposure of Giertych's peculiar racial views get him Expelled from the final cut? Stay tuned--
it seems his right hand gal was caught on video in a neo-nazi swastika torch parade.
Now that's show business!
March 14, 2008
Two Opposable Thumbs Down
IDIOCY ILLUMINATED
With apologies to the Bayeux Travesty and the Tres Riche Heures of Chuck Berry 
Expelled Executive Producer Logan Craft is deeply, deeply shocked that a movie critic has seen his Darwin For Zombies opus without signing a non-disclosure agreement , and that the cad has had the temerity to actually review it.
Craft denies involvement in the online “media alert” from Media Marketing, shown below, but his film's official movie site displays the Motive Marketing logo and the a firm was founded by Craft's colleague, Promise Media executive Lauer , who writes :
We already had our first security breech [sic] and are asking YOU now for your support to stand up for EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed. Hosted by Ben Stein, EXPELLED contains a critical message at a critical time. As an underdog in Hollywood right now, we need your support.
Recently Robert Moore, a film critic from The Orlando Sentinel pretending to be a minister, snuck into a private screening, did not sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and criticized the film the next day in his article.
Yesterday, the vigilant Producers expelled P.Z. Myers, a scientists who appears in the film from a preview !
Myers was yanked out of line even before he got to the Non-Disclosure sign-in--little wonder the invitation Moore received from Promise Media bears the film's splendidly candid subtitle: No Intelligence Allowed-- many of the scientists Stein is depicted interviewing are simply not there- he is talking to an empty chair. The other half of several "interviews" are Orwellian cut and paste jobs assembled from footage of people he's never met, "answering " questions he's never put them.
More to the point , producer Mark Mathis failed to notice who else was in line- and got in un-accosted:
Richard Dawkins
March 13, 2008
March 08, 2008
Grin And Bear It
Medvedaev, the name of the new Soviet Russian President Hillary Clinton couldn't quite recollect in last month's debate, means 'Bear', and a bear is indeed his political party's ballot symbol.
So, reports Sans Everything, Russian animal rights activists bent on performance art as political mockery, or:
"inspired by the pagan Slavic connection between human sexuality and the health of Mother Earth...staged an orgy ...at a Russian Biology Museum.
While making love on the floor, the activists chanted slogans about the need for Russia to save its bear population...The signs that the activists are holding up read something to effect that “Screw to save our bears.”
February 28, 2008
Juggernaut Bites Metaphysician
Sick and tired of peer reviewed journals that say things Anne Coulter disagrees with, and Human Events knows are not so? Strike a blow against the fact-based-- try:
Answers Research Journal
Cutting-edge creation research. Free.
"Answers Research Journal (ARJ) is a professional, peer-reviewed technical journal for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific and other relevant research from the perspective of the recent Creation and the global Flood within a biblical framework."
Wherein you can savor the wonders of
-
by Desmond P. Allen February 22, 2008
Because one is tangible and the other intangible, the physical and metaphysical are generally treated separately. But this dichotomy is illogical.
-
Catastrophic Granite Formation
by Andrew A. Snelling February 6, 2008
The timescale for the generation of granitic magmas and their subsequent intrusion, crystallization, and cooling as plutons is no longer incompatible with the biblical time frames.
I wouldn't try the instant granite recipe at home, but the first paper may have been engendered in this blog's archive, bu last years modest proposal for the automated Sokalization of formulaic Crank Climate screeds of the sort currently ground out by human toil in Steve Milloy's SUNKJunkScience boiler works.
Las February, I featured UNDER DECONSTRUCTION, which began with the observation that
Of all the Weapons of Mass Derision deployed in the Culture Wars, few have proven more lethal than the PoMo Jargon Generator,
It seems entirely possible that the fearsome engine has been embodied in the metal software of the author of the Unification Apology at the top of the list .I would not be at all surprised to see him at next week's Heartland conference.
"Soon As Buckley Arrived
.......................... ,,,He told the left wing to go to Hell."
With apologies to cartoonist Henry Payne
February 23, 2008
Potemkin Firewalls ?
Headed to Beijing ?
The " Golden Shield Project" is being routed around visitors to the Olympics, according to James Fallows disturbing expose' in The Atlantic
" In reality, what the Olympic-era visitors will be discovering is not the absence of China’s electronic control but its new refinement—and a special Potemkin-style unfettered access that will be set up just for them, and just for the length of their stay.
According to engineers I have spoken with... the government bodies in charge of censoring the Internet have told them to get ready to unblock access from ...certain Internet cafés, access jacks in hotel rooms and conference centers where foreigners are expected to work or stay during the Olympic Games... the very existence of Internet controls is almost never discussed in public here...
When American technologists write about the control system, they tend to emphasize its limits. When Chinese citizens discuss it—at least with me—they tend to emphasize its strength. All of them are right, which makes the government’s approach to the Internet a nice proxy for its larger attempt to control people’s daily lives.
In America, the Internet was originally designed to be free of choke points... In China, the Internet came with choke points built in...virtually all Internet contact between China and the rest of the world is routed through a very small number of fiber-optic cables that enter the country at one of three points..."
February 22, 2008
X-Rated Astrophysics
Last year,the Rossi X-ray Timing
Explorer (RXTE) spacecraft was aimed at a pulsar named PSR J1846-0258 some 20,000
light-years away in the constellation Aquila when the star suddenly erupted in a blast of
x-rays.
The display, which propagated as stripes across the stellar disc,is reported online in Science, by Fotis Gavriil of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He suggests PSR J1846-0258 may be a magnetar in the making---a neutron star with an enormously powerful magnetic field. Only a dozen or so have been discovered, routinely emitting energetic x and gamma rays.
"The bursts were completely unexpected," Fotis told Science, Because the young-- roughly millennium old-- pulsar's magnetic field strength is low his colleagues suspect it is still evolving. He says the discovery raises important questions-- Do pulsars behave like magnetars only periodically and then revert? Did all magnetars originate as pulsars?
January 30, 2008
January 25, 2008
But Is It Art ?
Craig Venter has moved along the artificial life curve another step reports Ron Bailey of Reason, somewhat belatedly
But thanks to Ron Bailey for reminding me of an earlier avatar of Frankenstein Lite
In the year 2000, Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac inaugurated a conceptual art installation based on molecular genetics called , naturally, " Genesis", which translates messages in Morse code into the ACGTs of the genetic code.
You can write any plain text message by assigning word spaces to adenine, dots to cytosine, letter spaces to guanine, and dashes to thymine, and a sequencing engine can then string these DNA bases together for insertion into the genome of any handy lab organism, like E. coli or other simple bacteria .
The arty bit is that Kac , by activating an ultraviolet light over a petri dish of the genetically encoded messenger bacteria, can mutate them, and the message.
For a suitably large grant from the National Endowment For The Arts, I am prepared to encode select passages from The Federalist Papers , and commence their random mutation to see how long it takes them to transform into quotations from The Discovery Institute or recognizable excerpts from Bill Kristol's New York Times Column .
January 17, 2008
January 15, 2008
January 14, 2008
January 11, 2008
Torpedoed In Bangalore
I
n the pre-dawn hours of
August 31, eight policemen raided Lakshmana Kailash's residence in Bangalore and waved the Information
Technology Act, 2000, in his sleepy face.
Get dressed, he was told, we
are taking you to Pune jail for having defamed Shivaji. When Lakshmana protested that he
didn't know anyone called Shivaji, he was told they
were talking about Chhatrapati Shivaji, an insulting picture of whom appeared on the networking site,
Orkut, with a trail leading to the 26 year old technician's computer. En route, he learned the image had triggered riots in which political parties forcibly
closed cybercafes. Kailash was released after 50 days behind bars when police located the uploader of the cartoon of the redoubtable Hindu warlord, who died in 1680.
.
January 08, 2008
Science Journalism : The Imagination Of Disaster
An Exchange With Andrew Revkin
The New York Times
January 8, 2008
Melting Ice = Rising Seas? Easy. How Fast? Hard.
By Andrew C. Revkin
Most forecasting is easier and more reliable in the short run than over the long haul. Think of weather prediction. (And history is full of failed long-term forecasts of everything from oil prices to human population trends.)
But for scientists studying the fate of the vast ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica, the situation seems reversed. Their views of sea trends through this century still vary widely, while they agree, almost to a person, that centuries of eroding ice and rising seas are nearly a sure thing in a warming world... I wrote about some of that work for Science Times this week. This post offers a bit more depth than could fit on the printed page.
• FULL TEXT OF ARTICLE
• Comments
• 9. [ Seitz to Revkin] January 8th,2008 6:47 am
Don’t they teach isostasy in journalism school?
It seems a considerable failure of candor to discuss Greenland’s ice at such length without noting that the base of most of it lies far below sea level, the weight of it having pressed the underlying crust of the Earth into the mantle by roughly the ratio of the ice’s thickness to the density of the underlying rock- Though the glaciated surface flows down to the sea, much of the miles thick ice fills a vast central basin, the land beneath sloping downhill towards Greenland’s center, much of which is over a kilometer below the elevation of the coast.
The icebergs calving at the fringe are like dandruff compared to the massive skull of ice stuck in the central basin. Ignoring the consequences- and the time scale– of isostasy and isostatic rebound does more that condone cartoon visions of meltwater sending the icecap tobogganing uphill. It obscures the role of post-glacial isostatic rebound elsewhere, as in Hudson’s Bay and the Baltic, both in forcing more water into the ocean and in some locales raising land faster than the measured rate of sea level rise
[ANDY REVKIN notes: Hi Russell. Isostasy is fine, but the overall calculations for Greenland’s sea level potential are — of course — only for the ice that’s above sea level. When you fly there and land on the summit, 10,500 feet above sea level, all that ice below you is what has the potential to add to sea heights. The whole point of today’s print story and post was to clarify how much ice is at stake, how soon. The IPCC was clear that total loss of the Greenland ice sheet (above sea level) could only happen on a time scale of millennia. Not sure where you come off thinking I’ve shirked my journalistic responsibilities here.]
— Posted by Russell Seitz
• 43.
January 8th,
2008
3:38 pm
Hi Andy:..You ask where I come off thinking you’ve shirked your journalistic responsibilities here ?
Silence gives consent. Oz Elliot was of the opinion that journalists have a constructive duty to correct popular misconceptions, and the Climate Wars have seen politicians amplify some a thousandfold by juggling real pictures and stills taken from computer animated sci fi flicks.
So it’s up to you to take the point–especially if it makes David Guggenheim unhappy– in explaining things like the isostatic difference between shore and shelf ice, and how post-glacial rebound is locally tipping the Bering seashore into the drink. If somebody doesn’t,the credibility of geophysics will disappear like meltwater down a moulin, and as surely as the number of polar bears on TV is rising, the arctic may go down as a locus classicus of bad science journalism driving the good out of circulation.
— Posted by Russell Seitz
December 29, 2007
The Party Of The Night
Think a Mitt & Mike have troubles? Hang on to your Gore-Lieberman button, and Try this
Oozing from its ageless crypt beneath City College Alcove 1.5, it spread up the East River like a black mist, arching over to the Miskatonic and into the headwaters of another stream, until, as the Hunter's Moon rose over New Haven, an eldrich chanting was heard in an oval henge of stone :
Boola , Boola , Cthulhu, Cthulhu,
Boola , Boola , Boola Cthu !
Iä! Yog! Iä! Yog! Iä! Yog! Yale!
December 19, 2007
L'Ecotrahison Deneuve !
A Coal Fashion Statement Has Pulled Into
Vanity Fair Station, Under Its Own Steam
November 28, 2007
It's About Time
There is a sad modern corollary to the fact that it took ages- dark ages to be precise, for classical Greek science texts, like Aristotle's Physics to find their way out of Arabic and into medieval Latin translations. Three centuries after its first printing, Principia Mathematica remained unpublished in Arabic.
Now that is about to change. Jascha Hoffman reports in Nature that : "Hundreds of science books, including classics by Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking, will be translated into Arabic for the first time." An ambitious plan that has the backing of Abu Dhabi's Crown prince and funding from its Authority for Culture and Heritage.
The project, called Kalima (“word” in Arabic), aims to change the fact that the world's quarter of a billion Arabic speakers get to read only a few hundred freshly translated books each year
The group intends to publish about 25 science classics annually:
" one already translated is A Briefer History of Time , Stephen Hawking's revision of his best-seller . Next year, Kalima will translate books by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck and Richard Feynman into Arabic, and prepare Arabic versions of recent works by Roger Penrose, Steven Weinberg and Freeman Dyson. Other scientists to be translated include Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Wolfram and James Watson..."
October 22, 2007
October 14, 2007
October 01, 2007
Shriven Me Timbers
Confess Your Earthly Eco-Sins In A Recycled Confessional 
The Greenpeace festival in Glastonbury, famed resting place of Arthur, first biodegradable King of the Britons, hosted a major liturgical innovation as Dom Anthony Sutch ,Benedictine monk, offered those tired of buying Carbon Indulgences a place to confess their Eco-sins.
"The Eco-fessional , made from recycled materials, such as doors and other found objects" featured the Benedictine monk bedecked in vestments "made from recycled curtains...
The ecofessional is described as a "non-judgmental environmental advice
installation 'aimed at getting people to sign a pledge promising to
reduce energy consumption and engage in socially sustainable practices,
like ethical banking...The Earthly Sins website...
includes a Temple of Sustainability...whether you are a devout Catholic, a staunch atheist, or
something in between...there is a way for everyone to
find environmental salvation." Screaming Lord Sutch has not commented on his namesake's epiphany.
September 12, 2007
We Bring Good Things To Life
A quality product of the great corporation's innovation team proves its enduring worth
After a hiatus of 47 years, Tennessee's electric chair functioned flawlessly last night , but to the general relief of many of its manufacturer's employees, The Jackson Sun reports "those convicted of minor crimes such as larceny, forgery, perjury, arson and horse theft " can no longer be executed.
The lights reportedly did not dim in the Former Next Presidential Poolhouse in Nashville, but his office is expected to file a complaint, as Tennessee authorities neglected to connect it to windmill in Nantucket Sound, or file a carbon offset with the execution's environmental impact statement.
August 27, 2007
Heavier Than Air
Two words well known to engineers wind power advocates never use in advertising:
CRASH ,,,AND, , ,BURN
It's not pretty when 300 foot wind turbines turn into Pinwheels From Hell.
A whole gallery of these Alternative Chernobyl pics feature in Der Spiegel's critical review of the Green's Wuthering Heights remake.
July 30, 2007
July 28, 2007
The Descent Of Journalism
"The American press has the blues" laments Russell Baker's latest NYRB Essay. My beef is with the decimation of science editors and the devolution of fact checking as journalism slouches towards Talk Radio, but Baker says his colleagues :
table talk is about journalistic frauds and a Washington press too dim to stay out of a three-card-monte game...Murdoch of course has long spread melancholy in newsrooms around the world, but it was the disclosure in May that the Bancroft family, which controls The Wall Street Journal, might be ready to sell him their paper for five billion dollars that really struck at journalism's soul...no newspaper is so valuable to the republic that it cannot be knocked down at market for a nice price. Murdoch at the Journal is a dark omen for journalists everywhere. When the sign in the shop window says "Everything For Sale," it is often followed by "Going Out Of Business."
How did it come to pass that an "assemblage of self-servers, frauds, political double-dippers, gasbags, mountebanks, spoiled reporters, and unprincipled swine make up that vague organism called "media"?
Once the WSJ goes, Baker expects The New York Times may be
"auctioned off like a side of beef."
July 18, 2007
Underdog : The Prequel
'How Many Other Flying Dogs In Red Sweaters Do You Know?'
Asks Disney's latest popcorn movie ad,
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! More powerful than a speeding Prius, this strange visitor from another planet is:
Former Next,Underdog Gore !
Soon appearing
in theaters and presidential primaries near .........you
July 11, 2007
May 23, 2007
Getting A Leg Up On Terror
Augusta , Georgia , a metropolis of 200,000 famed for golf tournaments and the threat of amphibious attack rabbits at the throat of Jimmy Carter , has moved to tax a weak link in the defense of its citizens vital bodily fluids. A $1 water meter surcharge has been enacted to buy anti-backflow valves to deter non-infidel dogs and Aqua Teen Hunger terrorists from insinuating vile toxins into America's undefended first line of defense- Where was your fire hydrant last night ?
Those aiming to attach the $575 dollar valves to millions of fire hydrants do not dwell on why evildoers should prefer public plumbing to reversing private swimming pool pumps , but the perps should be easy to spot . Be on the lookout for caravans of trucks blazoned with the skull and crossbones. Turning a city the size of Augusta into a virtual Jonestown would entail mainlining 200 tons of cyanide into its water mains. More on the intellectual downsizing of anti-terror hardware by Heartland hucksters here.
May 17, 2007
May 15, 2007
_Balouch Nukes ?_
Governments, like people , seldom go to the trouble and expense of placing advertisements for the return of things they have not lost.
More rarely still do medical bureaucracies seek to recover objects missing for half a century. Yet the government of Pakistan says Urdu signs like this one , far from signifying something amiss with the inventory control practices of its nuclear weapons establishment , are merely public service ads , placed in case someone should stumble upon an abandoned relic of 1950's cancer radiotherapy , or a gamma ray source thoughtlessly mislaid in the 1960's.
Happens all the time. Many eventually turn up in scrap yards ,but the great fear is one outcropping in a State Of The Union address.
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