Kaka stars in an advert featuring a chocolate called ‘Ringo. Sweet.
It’s a well known fact that ‘Muslim youth’ admire Kaka. Now if only someone could get him to play a charity game in Afghanistan..
Category Archives: US Elections 2008-9/11
U.S. military cuts critique of Dutch Islam film
An article by Shaun Waterman as part of a series on the U.S. military and its role in the “war of ideas.”
9/11 coincidence, or even premonition?
I earlier blogged on a 9/11 coincidence. Now I can add a coincidence to that coincidence, having met by chance last night a guy who since childhood has had premonitions of events. As a test I asked me whether he’d ever practically used the info, and he said once he’d had a premonition of a crash and not got on a plane, which had then crashed. Not proven, but interesting answer. He also said he’s ‘seen’ the Manchester United air crash.
So 2 the point..
The guy, who’s identity I have been sworn to keep secret, works for a multi-national company. Two days b4 9/11 he had a premonition and took down the plane numbers, which he says were the ones from the event. He says he was even was asked by some media company to go on TV with his experiences, but backed out after he saw another guy getting torn to shreds by the media for his ‘visions’.
Funny thing is at first his boss was impressed by his premonitions which he visualled in sketches, but then got ‘spooked’ and refused to see any more after they started coming true..
PS: The guy admitted not all premonitions actually took place in real life which is a nice. Personally speaking I’m more interested in the ‘coincidence of the coincidence’, anyhow.
Luck vs death
I just found the business card (stored in the loft up in Leciester) from HIV expert Dr Sam Friedman, which has the World Trade Centre address. Don’t worry, I asked him, and he was late for work that day in New York on 9/11.
I don’t recall if I reminded him about the value of luck vs death. By retrospective coincidence in 1999 I’d quoted for the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences conference at Berkeley research of his and his colleague’s, on ordinary people’s (or in this case drug injectors’) ability to see something coming before it ‘hit’ them:
“Drug injectors in New York (and indeed, throughout the world) have acted both to protect themselves and others against the AIDS epidemic. Thus, by 1984, before there were any programs other than the mass media to inform them about AIDS or to help to protect themselves, drug injectors in New York were engaged in widespread risk reduction…Furthermore, observations on the street confirmed this by showing that drug dealers were competing with others for business by offering free sterile syringes along with their drugs as AIDS-prevention techniques.” [1]
Nice to close the loop by finding the card. Only a few months to go as well to pay off the loan for all that research.
Reference
[1] Friedman SR, Curtis R, Neaigus A, Jose B, Des Jarlais DC, ‘Social Networks, Drug Injectors’ Lives, and HIV/AIDS,’ 1999. New York, Kluwer/Plenum. Also see ‘Big Events and Networks’.
NHS doctors turn out to be bombers
Regarding the anxiety that NHS doctors turned out to be bombers, I assume the authorities would be consulting with the General Medical Council’s list of PLAB entrants: “the main route by which International Medical Graduates (IMGs) demonstrate that they have the necessary skills and knowledge to practise medicine in the UK”.
Dirty bombs: More fear than substance? – UPI’s Shaun Waterman
And the intelligence-led view on terrorist A-bombs (unlikely; though that’s probably what they said about a twin towers scenario back in the 20th century;) based on a 19-strong bomb team.
Analysis: No real terror A-bomb threat
By SHAUN WATERMAN
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 (UPI) -- Two leading U.S. nuclear scientists say a team of terrorists with industrial equipment, physics and engineering skills and access to highly enriched uranium could build a crude atomic weapon in the United States for less than $10 million.
The claim, on the heels of revelations that U.S. agencies Web-posted
detailed technical documents from Saddam Hussein's Iraqi nuclear weapons program that might aid such an effort, is likely to fuel concerns about the possibility of a terrorist nuclear strike inside the United States.
Such a strike is already one of the "low probability-high consequence events" that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's new risk-based strategy is designed to direct more resources to combating.
But a careful review of the evidence suggests that there are technical obstacles to such an attack that are insuperable, for the time being at least, by the only terrorist organization seriously interested in staging one -- Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida.
And the two scientists themselves acknowledge there is no evidence that any terrorist group currently possesses the technical expertise
necessary for a nuclear effort.
Bin Laden "perhaps has yet to find his Robert Oppenheimer," write Peter Zimmerman and Jeffrey Lewis in "Foreign Policy," the journal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Oppenheimer was the scientist who led the Manhattan Project, the secret U.S. effort at Los Alamos, N.M., to build an atomic weapon.
Zimmerman and Lewis are widely respected, and Zimmerman, now an
academic, was formerly chief scientist both of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency --
before its merger into the State Department.
Their piece imagines a year-long effort, undertaken at an isolated ranch property, by a team of 19 terrorists -- the same number who carried out the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings.
The 19, all technically-trained specialists, would be divided into teams dealing with physics, engineering, metallurgy, machining, ballistics, electronics and procurement.
The weapon they would build is a "gun-assembled" uranium bomb, like the one code-named "Little Boy," built by Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project, and dropped on Japan in 1946.
The authors call such a bomb "conceptually simple," pointing out that the technology "is more than 60 years old," and adding that "It is perhaps easier to make a gun-assembled nuclear bomb than it is to
develop biological or chemical weapons."
They add that, at a cost of $10 million, the bomb, which could kill up to 100,000 people, would be an extremely cost-effective attack.
"In strictly commercial terms ... for a cost of ... about $100 a murder, it would be a bargain."
But some experts that United Press International spoke to -- whilst
stressing their respect for the authors -- expressed deep skepticism
about their argument.
Arms control expert Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland
called the scenario "super-optimistic," and said the authors had glossed over the difficulty of finding the kinds of highly qualified experts the project would need.
"Yes it's conceptually simple," he said, "And that's where the
simplicity ends."
The tiny size of the team -- the Manhattan Project had a staff of three thousand -- meant that in every one of a dozen or more expertise categories "you would have to find someone with the absolute optimal skills."
"How does that kind of organization find those kinds of people, in the real world?" he asked.
"Historically, al-Qaida has never had anyone at that level who was
prepared to help them in that way," he said, adding that al-Qaida's
unconventional weapons development efforts in Afghanistan had amounted to very little.
The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo -- who managed to make sarin nerve gas in the 1990s -- had a nuclear effort, too, said Leitenberg, adding "It was a shambles."
"These people don't pop up like jack-in-the-boxes," he said of the
experts in more than a dozen fields required for such a project.
George Smith, a veteran weapons analyst, pointed to a paper prepared for a more specialist audience in 1987 by the Nuclear Control Institute. He said the authors -- including J. Carson Mark, who led the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory for nearly three decades -- had addressed detailed technical issues not covered in the "Foreign Policy" article.
"I think in writing for a general audience, (Zimmerman and Lewis) elided some of those technical issues," he told UPI.
In particular, the institute paper addresses the difficulty of preparing the fissile material -- uranium in the case of the "gun-assembled" device -- and the large amount that would likely be required for a successful fission reaction to be initiated.
"They would have to acquire more material than is to go into the device, since ... considerably more material is required to work with than will appear in the finished pieces," says the paper.
Moreover the institute paper points out that with a relatively crude
gun-type device, there is a good chance of a problem known as
pre-detonation, where the nuclear chain reaction starts too soon,
resulting in what is called a "fizzle yield" -- an explosion equivalent to just a few thousands pounds of dynamite, as opposed to the hundred thousand pounds of a successful 10 kiloton nuke.
Overall, Leitenberg said their account "omits real consideration of at least a dozen points in the process where something could, and very likely would, go wrong that would bring the whole project to an end."
Zimmerman and Lewis do acknowledge, "Our scenario does not suggest that terrorists would find building a nuclear weapon either easy or
inexpensive."
"The most important obstacle remains the difficulty in acquiring enough nuclear explosive material to build a bomb," they add.
But they argue that "No one really knows how much highly enriched
uranium there is in the world, or how close the wrong groups are to
getting the right amount."
In reality, however, getting even the "right amount" is unlikely to be enough, given what we know about the capabilities of the "wrong groups."
Dirty bombs: More fear than substance?
Interesting to find an article on dirty bombs in Diagnostic Imaging on the day it was news in the UK. Also raises interesting issues about the cuts in Medicare, and the public perception of the imaging industry. Plus the psychological impact of ‘dirty bombs’ as opposed to their actual destructive effect as a weapon.
Dirty bombs: More fear than substance
Sunday passed without incident at any of the seven stadiums supposedly targeted as sites for dirty bombs. No big surprise there. Last week, in warning state and local officials, the government said that the threat posted on the Internet was not credible. The arrest this weekend of a grocery clerk in Wisconsin (of all places) capped it.
What did surprise me was that the threat of damage from a radioactive bomb was so readily accepted by news media. The claim that hundreds of thousands would die from the simultaneous blasts and that countless other fatalities would later occur as result of radioactive fallout were reported as if these were reasonable assertions.
Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of dirty bombs knows these assertions are more about fear than substance. Jonathan M. Links, Ph.D., made exactly this point in an article in the October issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine, “Understanding radiological and nuclear terrorism as public health threats: preparedness and response perspectives.”
On Oct. 9, three days before the grocery clerk posted the message that would gain international attention, DI SCAN quoted Links, director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health, who debunked the potential of dirty bombs to cause mass casualties. These bombs, he said, are designed to use conventional explosives to disperse radioactivity. Yet, while the physical risk involved in most dirty bomb scenarios is low, the psychosocial impact can be great, he noted.
You might think that with Links’ article appearing in a medical journal the very month that a dirty bomb threat captures international headlines, he would be widely quoted by news media. Yet Googling Links’ name under the “news” category brings two hits, one citing the Journal of Nuclear Medicine (Oct. 2) and the other DOTmed.com (Oct. 11). Do the same for “dirty bombs” and almost 300 links pop up, apparently none of which quoted the national expert on the subject. Some responsibly distinguished a fission or fusion weapon from dirty bombs, but the vast majority did not. What’s going on here and what can be done about it?
The answer to the first is that, like the late Rodney Dangerfield, the imaging community gets no respect. Despite being experts in radioactivity, radiologists are not perceived as such.
The answer to the second is found in the Oct. 9 DI SCAN article. In this article, Links suggested that the makers of nuclear medicine equipment and radiopharmaceuticals work in concert with professional societies to wage a social marketing campaign to educate the public about the benefits of nuclear medicine.
“Social marketing means to use marketing techniques to promote societal benefits,” Links said. “It uses classic advertising techniques to change behavior. Manufacturers are expert at all of them.”
This kind of marketing is needed now to combat terrorists, who use the threat of a dirty bomb to create a climate of fear, Links said.
The industry can further boost the public image of nuclear medicine by financing and promoting training programs for nuclear medicine professionals in issues surrounding nuclear terrorism so they can assist local police, fire, public safety, and health departments in developing community response plans. Vendors should also reach out to the Department of Homeland Security, volunteering executives to serve as members of expert groups, such as the Nuclear Sector Coordinating Council, Links said. The council was formed two years ago to strengthen security and emergency preparedness at the nation’s commercial nuclear facilities.
Breaking down perceptual barriers between medicine and the “war on terror” will grow more important as the government implements more antinuclear safeguards, Links said. Already, sensitive radiation detectors are being installed in major cities and public transportation facilities, detectors that may be triggered by patients who have recently undergone nuclear medicine procedures.
It’s time the imaging community stepped up to the plate and got its message across to the American public. Nuclear terrorism is a clear example of where the community, vendors and practitioners alike, can contribute. But it doesn’t stop there.
Medical imaging as a whole is underappreciated, which has led us to where we are today — two short months away from draconian cuts in Medicare due to a deficit reduction act passed by last year’s Congress.
The fallout from these cuts in reduced healthcare could be far worse than a dirty bomb, imagined or real.
There’s a lot to be told. If we don’t tell it, who will?
Anti-war poster in Barking
Took this shot recently in the centre of Barking. Follows on this week’s news of US attempts to scale down a prescence in Iraq, and President Bush’s reference to the Vietnam War.
In defence of Her Majesty
The Queen get’s flak from the Sunday Mirror today for daring to ask a NATO officer for his opinion on the war in Afghanistan. Reportedly Her Majesty asked Lithuanian Captain Arnold Raizys: “Is it a restoration or a war in Afghanistan?” Political editor Vincent Moss described this question as “confused”. Of course in its editorial a few pages in, its changed its opinion on to “a good question”. I never thought I’d side with the Queen against the Mirror but I respectfully suggest this is somewhat stupid and patronising of the Mirror. Er, hadn’t is occurred to them to take a clue from her use of the word “restoration” that she is not so stupid as they make out? Come on guys, think about it. But not too hard you have a dead-line to meet.
Modeling an Intelligence Analysis Profession on Medicine
Thought piece from Stephen Marrin and Johathan D. Clemente on using the American Medical Association as a model for embedding professionalism in the US intelligence service/s makes for interesting reading. Liked the phrase from the 9/11 Commission that the quality of people is more important than the quality of ‘wiring diagrams’ (reminded me of a similar point which came up from the Challenger Disaster investigation). Plus the importance of capturing knowledge within intelligence organisations.