Letters to the Editor
-
The sea wave counter was Coroebus.
It's found in Plutarch's 'piece' about a conversation 'Odysseus had with 'Gryllus.'
The two were talking about the 'dunce,' Coroebus, about mankind in matters of judgement and reasoning and memory.
Gads, it wasn't onFox teevee. They started 'rambling' about comparisons between an ass, a sheep, a fox, a wolf, and a bee. They were considering what is best to think about the inherent knowledge of a God? Judgement.
Corebus was proverbially so stupid that he tried to count the waves of the sea (It's in 'the Odyssey' X1X.394ff.) throughout eternity. Sad.
Coroebus was the one who wished to surpass all men "in thefts and perjury." It's a story about the rich man's decline.
A Precarious communion. No Coroebus's here?
-
Would it make a difference at this point?
Leaving aside all the technical issues concerning the original anthrax strains used, I have to ask:
Would it really make any real, positive difference for ABC News to issue a mea culpa retraction of its Saddam-anthrax stories at this point in time?
The media's creditability is pretty much gone now on this and most other issues. ABC News admitting it was flogging a discredited story all this time is unlikely to help it any in that regard and indeed may make further alienate the public from them.
Over 150,000 US troops are still in Iraq and the White House shows no sign of changing its current non-strategy in that regard. The whole "Saddam had WMD" meme has been accepted as an outright lie that, again, ABC News admitting one of the hydra-heads of that particular angle was outright false isn't likely to do more than confirm the already accepted fact the Bush Administration lied its way into this disaster.
Am I suggesting there should be no retraction? Emphatically, NO! ABC News, like CBS and MSNBC and CNN and all the rest, should come as clean as possible and admit they were sounding a drumbeat for war where one wasn't justified. But they (and we ourselves) should know that in itself won't be enough to undo the damage done.
It in fact would only be a start, and a small one at that.
Would a retraction by ABC News on this make any practical difference to current opinions or circumstances? I don't believe so.
Should they do it anyway? Absolutely, if only to demonstrate they are indeed serious about rebuilding their creditability as a news agency. Whether they can actually do so remains to be seen.
-
Bentonite
In addition to your materials about Bentonite, weren't there indications that the strain of anthrax found was from American labs?
-
ABC's apology
Would it really make any real, positive difference for ABC News to issue a mea culpa retraction of its Saddam-anthrax stories at this point in time?
It would make a small difference, in that it would reflect the fact that they finally realized that their reporting does have an impact on people's lives. Not that that has made any difference with the NYTimes, as they have carried water for the administration on recent claims of Iran's horrible intent.
It would be nice if they learned from their mistakes and acted like real journalists, not propaganda tools.
BUT, what would really make a difference is for them to investigate WHO gave them the bogus info and WHY. Like the song says, I wanna know who the men in the shadows are.
-
What we can find out about Anthrax
Back in 2003 there was some information out there that gave some clues to how and who manufactered the anthrax. Some of the techniques can be read in Technical and Policy Issues of Counterterrorism--A Primer for Physicists in Physics Today magazine (see http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_56/iss_4/39_1.shtml). The part of the article to concentrate on is box 4. The experiments carried out in box 4 indicated that the anthrax was manfuactered between 1999-2001, which would most likely rule out some weapons states who haven't manfactuered anthrax for quite some time. The strain of anthrax used as well (from a well known 1988 batch) tends to point to a dosmestic manfacture. Of course, there's probably a lot more information out there now about this case, but you might be interested in some of the science used to try and track the killers down, techniques that only recently were developed.
-
chemical:
The link you gave was for BSL 3 and stated:
It is recognized, however, that some existing facilities may not have all the facility features recommended for Biosafety Level 3 (i.e., double-door access zone and sealed penetrations). In this circumstance, an acceptable level of safety for the conduct of routine procedures, (e.g., diagnostic procedures involving the propagation of an agent for identification, typing, susceptibility testing, etc.), may be achieved in a Biosafety Level 2 facility, providing 1) the exhaust air from the laboratory room is discharged to the outdoors, 2) the ventilation to the laboratory is balanced to provide directional airflow into the room, 3) access to the laboratory is restricted when work is in progress, and 4) the recommended Standard Microbiological Practices, Special Practices, and Safety Equipment for Biosafety Level 3 are rigorously followed. The decision to implement this modification of Biosafety Level 3 recommendations should be made only by the laboratory director.
Obviously BSL 3 could not be set up in a garage because that would imply a double airlock containment system for the whole facility, and they could not vent anthrax out into the environment because, duh, they would get caught.
G-protein coupled receptors (GPCR) are very common subjects of study, thus you could easily purchase antibody to them from any of multiple biotech supply sources to do affinity purification. That is much simpler than the purification the anthrax producers had to do. Essentially, all your grad students have to do is pour homogenate over a column. That simple process still produces ONLY 30 mg of final product which demonstrates my point, the tremendous ratio of raw homogenate to final product when doing biological purifications. This is why I am using the word “campus” do describe the facility that produced grams and grams of purified milled spores.
In the case of the anthrax, it is not clear that one could purchase any purification aids, and since the purity was so high, it implied multiple rounds of centerfuge processing before milling. In order to get grams of final product, they had to use large special purpose centerfuges, possibly produced for the vaccine or biotech industry.