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Whilst I am far from a reflexive fan of Victor Davis Hanson, who seems to me to alternate between astute commentary and tedious conservative cranio-rectal insertions, it must be said that when he is on target, he is very on target. In his latest article on NRO The End of An Era: The bankruptcy of the anti-Americanists, Hanson is spot on this time.
Face it: Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Yasser Arafat, and Saddam Hussein — not the ghosts of the thousands of their innocent dead — all prefer Ramsey Clark to George Bush. We are seeing nothing less than quite literally the end of an era — witnessed by the intellectual suicide of an entire generation, who in their last gasps are proving they have been not very moral people all along.
Absolutely!
Every time I see or hear the media talking about “dirty bombs” my teeth grate. Dirty bombs are nuclear weapons that are either too inefficient to “burn” most of their fissionables in the explosion or else are built intentionally to spread fallout. The media almost always means what is now being called a radiological weapon, something like a terrorist’s standard anti-personnel bomb, but packed with bits of radioactives lifted from medical equipment, old watches or what have you, instead of rusty nuts, bolts and nails.
Any idiot can build one, but they will probably fail to get more than local dispersal. Bad enough in fact; but by the time the SafetyNuts are done you’d have an entire city evacuated for years over the risk of a handful of extra cancers per year. So this is more mass disruption than mass destruction unless the enemy acquire some really nasty radionucleotides and manage a good dispersal within the desired target footprint.
The first type of real “dirty bomb” is what we will almost certainly get from the enemy. It is dirty because they don’t know how to make their fissionables fission before the plasma blows itself apart. When the fission process occurs there is a chain reaction in which a neutron splits one nuclei, which releases at least one more neutron and on average “a bit” that in turn cause another one or two atoms to do the same. This exponential growth happens so quickly it has no meaning on a human scale.
But on the bomb level it does. Each atom releases a great deal of energy; that radiated energy turns the fissionables and the bomb casing into a plasma racing outwards at an enormous speed… which is still slow relative to the neutron cascade.
If the cascade happens fast enough, virtually all of the Uranium 235 or Plutonium fissions and releases energy before the wisp of plasma blows the ghost of the bomb matter outwards. If the cascade is a bit slow the “flame” is extinquished and the cascade stopped because the remaining fissionables are too far apart to have much chance of a neutron hit.
Those unfissioned materials become a nasty bit of the fallout. It is highly unlikely that an “amateur” bomb will get things right the first time, so one expects 5% or less of the material will “burn”. The other 95% gets dispersed in the mushroom cloud. This is the scenario all of us “in the know” fear: a couple kiloton fizzle with a lot of very hot debris and a deadly cloud drifting down wind.
The second type of dirty bomb is even uglier. If you re-read your ’50’s literature, you’ll run across the “Cobalt Bomb”. This is a thermonuclear weapon packed with Cobalt or other materials that will generate nasty and long lived fallout. The Doomsday bombs of yore.
To my knowledge, no one ever built one. It’s not a terrorist likelihood as H-Bombs are out of range of the technology of anyone but a major state at present… without help that is.
A third type, which falls between the cracks of the definition, is the Neutron Bomb. This is an extraordinarily “clean” bomb with very low yield. It causes limited blast damage but it gives off an extremely intense pulse of neutrons. These kill everything (except roaches and Radiodurans bacteria) in a wide radius. The buildings are untouched and the people are dead.
These were tested but not deployed1. It is doubtful anyone could build one without extensive experience or testing.
Let’s pray none of us ever learn about these things first hand.
1= A clarification for those who want precision: a large number were built, but after a big political battle over deployment in the Reagan years, they were put into storage. They were perhaps disassembled during Bush Sr’s Presidency. I do not know if any of these tactical “Enhanced Radiation Weapons” remain in the US inventory.
Dream on. British TV Is The Best In The World is on a par with the statement about how British Justice Is The Envy Of The World (“Hey, Miguel, how come we can’t convict innocent people so quickly and expensively?”)
-Terry Pratchett
There is more information here. It leaves you with a certain level of… uncertainty. Like “why was he writing a draft statement that said this in the first place?”
Time passes….
I’ve now read the original statement by Blunkett and am left wondering who hyped this whole thing into silliness. There does not seem to be any warning of imminent attack, only a general warning of what we all know already: we’re a target and the enemy is utterly ruthless.
Following Home Secretary David Blunkett‘s confused apocalyptic warning yesterday about the threat of an Al Qaeda attack on the UK, which was then quickly retracted, earlier today on News Direct 97.3 FM radio, I caught a fragment of some UK government warning about a “credible threat of an attack against London” and “poison gas” was mentioned. However I have not heard a blessed thing since then. Is this something new? Is it a retraction of yesterday’s retraction? Did any one else hear more of this and get any details?
Is it just a coincidence that there has been an astonishing number of military helicopters (mostly Pumas and a couple Chinooks) flying over my house throughout the day?
Hmmmm.
Proposition 1, to end the Massachussetts income tax did not pass. Few of us expected it would this first try. But despite massive counter efforts by the entrenched interests, it came damn close:
With 2155 out of 2157 precincts reporting,
881,738 people voted Yes on 1 — 45.4%
1,060,525 people voted No on 1 — 54.6%
Despite a total news black out from the major Boston news outlets, Michael Cloud managed a respectable showing against the very senior “safe seat” incumbent John Kerry:
With 2155 of 2157 precincts reporting,
John F. Kerry (Dem): 1,596,350 – 81%
Michael Cloud (Lib): 368,304 – 19%
Richard Winger, Third Party authority and Editor of Ballot Access News, said the following: “This was the best U.S. Senate result for a Libertarian in Party history, and the best by any nationally organized Third Party candidate in a U.S. Senate race since 1932.”
Carla Howell only managed 1% on the hotly contested governor race between two indistinguishable candidates. Insiders feel she sacrificed her own campaign to push Proposition 1 ahead at every opportunity.
All of this was done in campaign efforts outspent by factors of 100 to 1 and higher by candidates whose campaigns were partially State funded.
“You done good”, guys. Or as Ms O’Hare said, “Tomorrow is another day.”
The BBC Protection Ministry (sometimes knowns as the ‘Independent’ Television Commission), has banned the US news program “The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board With Stuart Varney” and threatened CNBC with fines. As the Opinion Journal puts it:
“Let us see if we get this straight. The ITC thinks it is protecting viewers by refusing to let them hear the viewpoints of a roundtable of American newspaper editors? These same editors may state their views in a newspaper that bears the name of The Wall Street Journal, but if they utter them on a TV program that bears that newspaper’s name, their views are somehow tainted? That sure sounds like a free-speech issue to us.
Which leads to the question of what the case is really about. The answer–and we wish we could say this with the requisite plummy accent–is the BBC. The ITC’s actions against CNBC Europe and CNN amount to little more than the British government harassing private competitors of the publicly funded British Broadcasting Corp.”
I’ll be a bit less compromising than our friends across the water. What the bureaucracy really doesn’t like is the non-Tranzi slant of the WSJ. They don’t want the BBC to have to compete with ideas.
I hope our Russian ex-pat friend succeeds in taking the Beeb down a peg or two!
An investor of a company well known to us is being sued: the classic tactics of a certain over the edge group. Read this. Make sure you save a personal copy of the page.
Need I say more?
This from Friedrich Blowhard is right on the money. It’s a piece about the financing of “high” art in America, and identifies one of the the key facts: the tax laws.
It was not clear that there would be an endless succession of extremely wealthy art-fanatics who would be willing to spend their money behind the scenes to prop up these institutions. The solution, oddly, was the 1894 income tax law, which included a provision that charitable donations to nonprofit corporations organized for “educational” purposes would be tax-deductible. This presented the wealthy with a choice of paying the government taxes or donating to nonprofit enterprises, which was a choice many less-than-religious supporters of the arts were willing to make – especially if they got to be a certifiable member of the social-cultural elite in return. In short, the income tax provided the incentive, and the nonprofit corporation the vehicle, to broaden the group “supporting” the uneconomic arts.
The biggest givers, while no longer required to assume a heroic burden like that of Mssrs. Morgan or Higginson, got another perk as well: they got control of the enterprise because they sat on the board. These wealthy, prestige-seeking board members, often determined to use their art institution to civilize the masses, had an intensely conservative effect on the material that was actually presented and how it was presented – no more of the wild and wooly hybrids of “low” and “high” art which we saw were financially successful for decades in New Orleans-style opera and on the vaudeville stage. No, by jingo, we were all going to take our “high” culture straight. So much for giving the customer (the American public) what they wanted.
→ Continue reading: High art – low art – art
The Gibraltar government called a referendum and Gibraltarians have turned out in force to vote in a referendum that is expected to overwhelmingly reject attempts by Britain and Spain to negotiate joint sovereignty over the British colony. Here are just a few things that caught my attention:
- Both London and Madrid say the referendum carries no legal weight. I know, I know, legal is far from democratic, let alone commonsensical but are they not even going to pay lip service to the wishes of the governed population?
- A party atmosphere prevailed in Gibraltar, where streets were decorated with red and white pennants and many houses flew Britain’s Union Jack or the Gibraltar flag. One man walked down the street wearing a “Proud to be British” tee-shirt. Yeah, that’s how you can tell it wasn’t in Britain…
- There is no official “yes” campaign. The overwhelming sentiment of campaign posters and of people ready to give their opinion was a rejection of joint sovereignty. What are the chances of replicating this in the UK with a rejection of abrogating our sovereignty to the EU?
Gibraltarians say they have been British since the 18th century and culturally are not Spanish nor do they want to be. They also believe they are better off economically as a British colony than they would be if they joined Spain. (Spain ceded Gibraltar to Britain under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, but has been attempting to recover it ever since.)
At least the Gibraltarians seem to know what is at stake in their referendum…
By which I mean blogs which have ‘link buttons’ such as those below. In addition to the plain brown wrapper blog links in the sidebar of Samizdata.net/blog, I am collecting complimentary graphic links to other blog for our External Links page sidebar.
If you have one and we are linked to you (or even if we are not), e-mail us with your nifty graphic and we will probably add it.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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