heru-ur:

I don't even know what a semantic demurral is.

All I meant was that the otherwise-iffy McBride raised several valid points about the infrastructure here, and your repeated reply was that these are "comments" as opposed to a "forum". To me, this ignores the salient part of the criticism, in favor of an argument based on a prescriptive definition of those two words - thus, a semantic argument. Not particularly powerful or incisive - but also not a big deal, and I didn't mean it as any sort of insult. (BTW: don't even get me started on Symantec bloatware.)

L.W.M.:

And the snark is what you missed.

I appreciate the apology (and enjoyed the Model T reference). That said, you couldn't resist another dig, however subtle. I'm quite aware what "snark" is, thankyouverymuch, and would have formidable experience interpreting it even if my couple years' worth of lurking at UT was the entirety of my net experience - hardly the case, since I was logging onto BBSes in the halcyon days of my youth, before Tim Berners-Lee so much as spun his worldwide web.

I must say, in response, that your continual employ of colloquialisms like "I'm out" and "whack" (-a-mole?) is entertainment in its own right. I presume you verb nouns, as well! Checking in on myspace and facebook, too, no doubt - hip as can be!

Now, what would you call that - the tone of the above paragraph? Hmm. Tip of the tongue, and all that.....

Still, I genuinely respect your contributions here, and stand behind the encouraging comment I made in reply to your 'threat' to leave the UT comments. (For whatever pittance that's worth.)

It seems as if I've forsaken the lurker's life here at last - woe unto you all!

meh

I presume you verb nouns, as well! Checking in on myspace and facebook, too, no doubt - hip as can be!

Trust me. I've never been there and never would. I'm not that easily pinned down. Just like our resident poet, Art James (aka Good Celery!) who is in the VA hospital and should know this hardcore bastard is sending him good vibes, I am just not that easy to pin down. But nice try! Stick around. We need some new blood her and I like your style.

I'm not the one who thinks all religion is an abomination. Mona and AI should revisit that debate. So when I say: As God is my witness...

meh

meh

We need more of this kind of commentary, Edward 1. I hope you stick around as well. I mean that, as God is my...

:-)

We need more of this kind of commentary, Edward 1. I hope you stick around as well. I mean that, as God is my...

No problem, fuck off already.

Furthermore, AFAIK the actual evidence concerning drug-induced harm to the common good within drug-decriminalized society indicates that, if anything, decriminalization seems to have a slightly ameliorative affect on drug-related crimes. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please do pass it along.

Just saw this. On the contrary, Sir or Ma'am, I agree but urge a massive public health and medical insurance program, (voluntary, of course, unless criminality of another nature is involved) to coincide with the decrim of drug usage. My ideas are miles ahead of anyone else in America. Common in Europe. No big mystery to it. All been tried (successfully) before.

No problem, fuck off already.

-- edward

I might not be able to give you up - for less than you are worth.

Thanks to the person linking this site.

http://www.ph.ucla.edu/EPI/bioter/asolutionanthraxmys.html

"That would explain how spores could escape into mail-processing facilities, cross-contaminating other letters and affecting workers, even though the Daschle letter, and a recently discovered one addressed to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), reportedly were sealed with tape.

Experts earlier had said it would be possible for spores to puff out of the unglued openings at the ends of an envelope flap. But several had questioned how readily spores could escape from a well-sealed envelope.

E.J. Rice, vice president for development at the Institute of Paper Science and Technology in Atlanta, said this week that tests sponsored by the institute suggest there may be thousands of microscopic tunnels infiltrating the paper of a typical envelope.

"We are of the opinion now that it [anthrax powder] is able to come through" the paper, Rice said.

David Rothbard, an associate scientist at the institute, said, "It is not unusual to find pore connections on the order of five microns or larger" in envelope paper.

Such connections, under the right conditions, would provide passageways for the escape of the 1.5- to 3-micron particles found in samples of the anthrax powder mailed to Daschle.

Particles in the 1- to 5-micron range can be inhaled readily and can cause the potentially lethal inhalation form of anthrax. Such particles, much smaller than a dust mote, can float in the air like a gas once released, experts say. (A human hair is about 100 microns in diameter.)

The Leahy letter, discovered Nov. 16 in a barrel of unopened congressional mail, has been described by an Army scientist as leaking anthrax spores "like a sieve." After careful preparations, investigators at the Army's Fort Detrick biodefense facility in Maryland were planning to open the letter by today and begin a physical and chemical examination of its contents......."

The letter loading place, transport to car, car transport, and mail box insertion point all present good places for evidence collection. Was his car clean? Was his laundry basket?

Ivins posted a message to legacy.com about Caitlin Hammaren, a victim of the VA Tech shooter and member of Kappa Kappa Gamma.

Our hearts reach out to you. Caitlin's spirit will live on in the lives of all those whom she touched so beautifully.

Bruce Ivins (Frederick, MD)

http://www.legacy.com/GB/GuestbookView.aspx?PersonId=87314283&EntryId=15655563

I read Dr. Mary Nass's article with interest, and there are a lot of good points. There are a couple of things to add, however:

1) the anthrax vaccine has been around for decades, and isn't substandard - it just requires repeated injections on regular schedule to be effective, followed by six-month boosters. The hope was that a recombinant vaccine might need only one or two shots, not the nine or so that the traditional vaccine did.

The vaccine (Biothrax) was originally manufactured by the government as needed in Michigan. The facility was quietly privatized and handed over to a consortium headed by a retired Navy Admiral and a Lebanese businesman in 1997. They were unable to get approval for vaccine manufacture by the FDA for three years, so Battelle manufactured all vaccine during this period as their sole subcontractor. The main customer is the U.S. military, but the private firm has also recently sold the anthrax vaccine to Saudi Arabia, apparently.

2) There was an attempt to create an anthrax vaccine-resistent engineered strain of anthrax by Army Defense Intelligence Agency in partnership with Battelle at their West Jefferson Ohio biowarfare research center. (Project Jefferson). The result was kept secret.

3) FBI efforts to recreate the anthrax letter powder using off-the-shelf equipment and publicly available recipes all failed - it was clearly the product of a state laboratory with access to top secret recipes. It could have been stolen, but how many people would have had access to the purified powder produced at Dugway Proving Ground? That's not a subject of discussion.

The amateur anthrax scenario appears to have lost some credibility with the failure of the FBI's attempt to reverse engineer a high-quality powder using basic equipment. If the Army couldn't do it in a top-notch laboratory staffed by scientists trained to make anthrax powders, skeptics ask, who could do it in a garage or basement?

That's from Gary Matsumoto, writing in Science magazine. Nothing in the 2003 article he wrote has been refuted, and so I do find this rather demeaning quote from Dr. Nass odd:

Ivins cursed about giving journalist Gary Matsumoto information requested in a Freedom of Information Act request. Matsumoto is a most peculiar journalist. We had a number of conversations. He would not get off the phone, sometimes staying on for an hour or more. He would harass me, in an attempt to shape the story. He worked very hard, trying to force me to say that the only problem with anthrax vaccine was its squalene adjuvant, although there were many reasons to question that assertion. I hung up on him more than once, exasperated, and no doubt I used some foul language describing our conversations to others.

That has little bearing on the story of Bruce Ivins and where the spores came from, or the quality of the spore preparation. What purpose does this serve? There are many reasons a biowarfare researcher might think that telling journalists any details about bioweapons is a bad idea. On the phone for an hour? Harass? Sorry, but isn't that what journalists usually do?

We already do know quite a bit about the spores, thanks to the initial reporting of Richard Preston. Gary Matsumoto's 2003 article in Science is also worth reading. Science tends to publish reliable articles, after all:

http://cryptome.org/anthrax-powder.htm

I've never seen any of the factual details in that article contested on a point by point basis. The bottom line then is that the spores were indeed the product of a high-tech production system - there is no way that Bruce Ivins could have whipped up the spore prep in his basement, regardless of what strain he might (or might not) have had access to.

4) There's another thing required for good forensics: a documented chain-of-custody of the samples in question, since it is very easy to cross-contaminate samples, whether accidentally or deliberately. Furthermore, the FBI also claimed in 2005 that Ames was "common" - but not any more?

5) It is worthwhile to take a look back to 2002 and to the persecution of Steven Hatfill, which had many of the very same elements - he was mentally unstable, he held a grudge, it's almost the same exact story:

http://www.albionmonitor.com/0208a/0208a-404.html

* Hatfill is a "germ warfare specialist" who had recently worked with deadly material at the U.S. Army research center where he "might have had access to anthrax" (quotes from NY Times)

* Hatfill is not officially a suspect, and just one of about 30 "persons of interest" to the FBI -- although no other individuals have been named

* The FBI has searched the apartment of Hatfill's girlfriend, his storage locker, his car, and twice searched his apartment, the last time with live TV helicopter coverage

* The FBI found on Hatfill's computer the draft of a novel about a bioterror attack

* Hatfill commissioned a 1999 report on the risk of anthrax being sent via the mail

* Bloodhounds with scents from the anthrax letters "went crazy" during the search of Hatfill's apartment (Newsweek)

* Hatfill lives in the same state as the mailbox where several of the anthrax letters were mailed -- and only Hatfill's photo was shown to people who work in the vicinity of the mailboxes that were used

* The return address on an anthrax envelope was the name of a school in Zimbabwe, where Hatfill once lived

Deja Vu?