Terrorism and a failure of imagination: Poisoning Milk

FuturePundit: Bioterrorism Attack On Food Supply Modelled By Stanford Researchers

We put SWAT teams on the subway. I guess it helps calm people. On the other hand, there's this article, which could be illegal in the UK fairly soon.

A mere 4 grams of botulinum toxin dropped into a milk production facility could cause serious illness and even death for 400,000 people in the United States. Investments that would cost the public only 1 cent more per half-gallon of milk could prevent this nightmare scenario, according to Lawrence M. Wein of the Stanford Graduate School of Business...

...In the case of milk, says Wein, all it would take is for someone to obtain a suitable strain of botulinum toxin—the most poisonous substance known to humans—from an overseas black market lab, grow it in culture, and pour it into an unlocked milk tank or milk truck. From there, the contaminated milk would make its way into large processing silos, where it would poison at least 100,000 additional gallons. Only a fraction of the toxin would remain active after pasteurization, but according to Wein's mathematical model, that could be enough to infect the approximately 400,000 people who would drink the milk. "Only 1 millionth of a gram is enough to poison an adult," says Wein, "and there would be more than that per person remaining in the distributed milk to do the job.

Ok, from now on the kids drink rainwater. No wonder Homeland Security has had trouble retaining staff. Anyone who's any good gets fed up with George "Flame Plame" Bush and heads for the hills.

Peak Oil: not in the near future, and then a controlled transition

Econbrowser: How to talk to an economist about peak oil

An economist talks about Peak Oil. He is persuasive. His thesis is that there are vast profits related to anticipating the proximity of Peak Oil; profits so enormous that greed will ensure we have good warning of true Peak Oil, and a gradual price increase beforehand.

He does not say whether the current $60 price is a sign that we are in fact on the glide path towards Peak Oil. If I interpet his reasoning correctly, a price of $75 next year would be a reasonable sign that we are entering the end game of the Oil Era -- but we will have much time to respond to the price increases.

Of course manias and madness are yet possible ...

Cringely jumps the shark? iTunes HD, retinal scans and video iPods?

PBS | I, Cringely . July 14, 2005 - More Shoes

Well, Cringely isn't playing it safe with this one. He claims the Intel/Apple deal is all about Apple delivering an Intel 'home entertainment system' very soon. Not to mention retinal scan iPod VR headsets.

If he's right, he deserves some kind of prize. Certainly a bold set of predictions.

SARS and pulmonary angiotensin receptors: Nobel prize work?

With New Clue to How SARS Kills, Scientists Work on Treatment - New York Times

Incredible. SARS causes ARDS by binding to pulmonary angiotensin receptors; in mice administration of angiontensin converting enzyme 2 reverses this toxicity. Until last year this receptor had not been identified in lung tissue.

This has so many implications. Nobel prize work?

I still don't feel I know why the epidemic waned. My guess has been that there was a simultaneously circulating mild strain of the SARS virus that caused a conventional cold, and acted like a natural immunization program. Clinicians got sick in some SARS centers because they were so scrupulous at infection control they missed out on the benign virus.

A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War

This is why we liberals ought to reconsider our opposition to a fully inclusive military draft. We would not be in the mess we are today if the children of the ruling class were on the ground in Iraq. Those with power would not then remain silent at the incompetence of our government and military leadership.

Here a certified neo-conservative goes public with his observations, an event not unrelated to his son's pending service. Would he have spoken so clearly against his putative allies if he were not placing his son into their care? (via Shrillblog and others)

A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War
washingtonpost.com, Sunday, July 10, 2005; B01
Eliot Cohen is Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.

War forces us, or should force us, to ask hard questions of ourselves. As a military historian, a commentator on current events and the father of a young Army officer, these are mine.

You supported the Iraq war when it was launched in 2003. If you had known then what you know now, would you still have been in favor of it?

As I watched President Bush give his speech at Fort Bragg to rally support for the war the other week, I contemplated this question from a different vantage than my usual professorial perch. Our oldest son now dresses like the impassive soldiers who served as stage props for that event; he too wears crossed rifles, jump wings and a Ranger tab. Before long he will fight in the war that I advocated, and that the president was defending.

So it is not an academic matter when I say that what I took to be the basic rationale for the war still strikes me as sound. Iraq was a policy problem that we could evade in words but not escape in reality. But what I did not know then that I do know now is just how incompetent we would be at carrying out that task. And that's what prevents me from answering this question with an unhesitating yes.

The Bush administration did itself a disservice by resting much of its case for war on Iraq's actual possession of weapons of mass destruction. The true arguments for war reached deeper than that. Long before 2003, weapons inspections in Iraq had broken down, and sanctions, thanks to countries like Russia, China and France, were failing. The regime's character and ambitions, including its desire to resume suspended weapons programs, had not changed. In the meanwhile, the policy of isolation had brought suffering to the Iraqi people and had not stabilized the Gulf. Read Osama bin Laden's fatwas in the late 1990s and see how the massive American presence in Saudi Arabia -- a presence born of the need to keep Saddam Hussein in his cage -- fed the outrage of the jihadis with whom we are in a war that will last a generation or more.

More than this: Decades of American policy had hoped to achieve stability in the Middle East by relying on accommodating thugs and kleptocrats to maintain order. That policy, too, had failed; it was the well-educated children of our client regimes who leveled the Twin Towers, after all...

... But a pundit should not recommend a policy without adequate regard for the ability of those in charge to execute it, and here I stumbled. I could not imagine, for example, that the civilian and military high command would treat "Phase IV" -- the post-combat period that has killed far more Americans than the "real" war -- as of secondary importance to the planning of Gen. Tommy Franks's blitzkrieg. I never dreamed that Ambassador Paul Bremer and Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the two top civilian and military leaders early in the occupation of Iraq -- brave, honorable and committed though they were -- would be so unsuited for their tasks, and that they would serve their full length of duty nonetheless. I did not expect that we would begin the occupation with cockamamie schemes of creating an immobile Iraqi army to defend the country's borders rather than maintain internal order, or that the under-planned, under-prepared and in some respects mis-manned Coalition Provisional Authority would seek to rebuild Iraq with big construction contracts awarded under federal acquisition regulations, rather than with small grants aimed at getting angry, bewildered young Iraqi men off the streets and into jobs.

... Conceivably, the Iraqi insurgency could collapse in a year or so, but that would be highly unusual. More likely Iraq will suffer from chronic violence, which need not prevent the country as a whole from progressing. If the insurgencies in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka and Kashmir continue, what reason do we have to expect this one to end so soon? Most insurgencies do, however, fail. Moreover, most insurgencies consist of a collection of guerrilla microclimates in which local conditions -- charismatic leaders (or their absence), ethnographic peculiarities, concrete grievances -- determine how much violence will occur and with what effect...

Your son is an infantry officer, shipping out soon for Iraq. How do you feel about that?

Pride, of course -- great pride. And fear. And an occasional burning in the gut, a flare of anger at empty pieties and lame excuses, at flip answers and a lack of urgency, at a failure to hold those at the top to the standards of accountability that the military system rightly imposes on subalterns...

Iraq and Vietnam: a comparison

Iraq Is Not Vietnam by Jim Cox

Fifteen ways in which Iraq is rather like Vietnam. It's amusing in a dark fashion. Obviously Vietnam and Iraq do have quite a few things in common, it's possible however that Iraq is much more internally divided and combative than Vietnam ever was. That is a significant difference.

IQ is up, IQ/EnvIQ is way, way down

I was thinking a bit about complexity in the modern world, and a post I'm working on about the increasing "invisibility" of innovation. It reminded me of the perfectly silly thesis that video games and complex TV dramas account for the apparent rise in measured IQ: Gordon's Notes: Bogus science: television and video games improve IQ.

Any cognitive burden imposed by watching TV dramas is dwarfed by the mental strain of juggling cell phone, BlackBerry, TV remote, iPod, laptop, PC, wireless phone, pager, etc. Not to mention trying to remember the current postal rate. That's what's forcing us to "up" our IQ game -- not TV.

But is our "IQ" really keeping up? I think not. Maybe our IQ has risen 10%, but our environment is not 10% more complex than it was 40 years ago. I'd guess it's 200 to 300% more complex -- as measured by the variables we track and balance.

There's a denominator in the "IQ" equation. The denominator is the "Environmental IQ" or EnvIQ -- the IQ required to stay "on top" of our rockworld/cyberworld environment. Perhaps the numerator (average IQ) is rising, but the ratio of IQ to EnvIQ is plummeting like a rock.

We are working very hard simply to tread water in this new, immensely complex, world. (see also: "Fast Times at Fairmont High").

And so it goes -- entering the world of low cost chaos

BBC NEWS | UK | Hunted chemistry expert arrested

With each attack, there is a new lessening of freedom.

The government plans new criminal offences of providing or receiving training in the use of hazardous substances; of acts preparatory to terrorism; and of inciting terrorism indirectly, Home Office minister Hazel Blears said.

Incitement. Prepatory acts. Such a wide scope ...

Human freedom may not again equal the heights of mid-1990s America for decades, perhaps much longer.

iTunes Radio: the quiet revolution - better than podcasting?

Apple - iTunes

I have yet to figure out a use for iTunes "podcasting". My commute just isn't long enough, and there's no other time I could listen to something that requires processing. I also don't usually want to listen to such things more than once, so the permanence of a podcast file is a bit odd. Not to mention I prefer things like lectures from The Teaching Company or audio books for that sort of setting.

iTunes radio is another story. One no-one talks about. When iTunes first came out they offered very few low bit-rate stations with poor reliability. Now there are hundreds of 128 kb stations, and they actually work. You can drag and drop to playlists (need to display the comment field in the playlist view or you only see the station ID) and add your own metadata (rating, type, etc - I unchecked most of the default iTunes columns as they're not relevant to radio). I suspect you can create smart Playlists from this data.

I'm listening now to KCRW. Very good.

I wonder when anyone will notice iTunes Radio now spanks the competition?

Advances in Alzheimer research

Hope for reversing memory loss

Mice bred to produce defective tau protein develop memory loss. Turning off defective protein production aids memory recovery -- but the brain continues to form neurofibrillary plaques and tangles.

Ashe said the new findings suggest that abnormal forms of the proteins work like poisons. They might be disrupting the function of brain cells early in the disease process, and long before the plaques and tangles appear. The plaques and tangles might, instead, be a defensive mechanism to neutralize the bad proteins, she said.

This has been a recurring idea for some years -- that the "pathologic structures" seen in brains afflicted by the Alzheimer's process are actually attempts to protect the neuron. Dr. Ashe's research has greatly strengthened that hypothesis. Now others will have to validate these results.

Update: Thinking this over, it occurs to me that the plaques and/or tangles would still play a pathologic role if they somehow acted with the tau protein to cause memory loss. Oh well, Dr. Ashe probably has other reasons to suspect they're protective.

The London attack: let's hope it needed an outside expert

Cracking the London Case - Agatha Christie vs. the terrorists. By Tim Naftali

Tim Naftali is the author of Blind Spot: the Secret History of American Counterterrorism. He's not a formal counter-terrorism export, but given the way he writes I wonder if he's had another past life he doesn't talk about. This Salon article, despite the stupid title, is an exceptional summary of how counter-terrorism operations proceed, including how the Lockerbie bombing was solved.

The most interesting part for me, however, was his conclusion:

The challenge now for the British is to determine whether they are hunting a large organization, with direct ties abroad, or a local jihadist gang. There is much debate now about the extent to which al-Qaida has metastasized in reaction to U.S. and allied attacks on Bin Laden's sanctuary in Afghanistan. There is no question that the group has devolved into a looser worldwide confederation. The question is whether it has also become more lethal. The solution to the London case may provide some answers. Counterintuitive as this may seem, it would be comforting to learn that these four suspected bombers relied on outside help. That would indicate that they are part of an army of terrorists, and armies have leadership structures that can be destroyed. If, on the other hand, the London bombings were done by four angry young men with the barest amount of local support, the challenge for Western counterterrorism becomes much greater.

Years ago, when I wrote a mini-book web page post 9/11, the falling cost of havoc was the single most important concept I wanted to communicate. This is the real bottom line. We've always had suicidal religous fanatics (remember Shinto pilots in WW II?). We've always had terrorists. We've always had religious and cultural strife. What's new is that havoc has become affordable. As technology reduces the costs and increases the diversity of weaponry, as communication allows ideas and techniques to be widely disseminated, as the pool of the educated disenfranchised grows, the risks and costs of terrorism rise.

This has implications. I think, for example, that we should be desperately funding research into the nature of paranoid schizophrenia and the sociology of antisocial action. We also need to think about how we'll survive a world in which engineering bio-pathogens becomes a schoolboy's exercise.

Let's hope this event required an outside expert. Let's hope the currently missing Islamic chemistry student wasn't all they needed. Let's hope the day of reckoning is still a few years away.

At last -- the study on how well studies hold up

CNN.com - Research: Third of study results don't hold up - Jul 13, 2005

When I started my practice in rural Michigan 16 years ago Family Physicians were (even then!) being "beat up" for not adopting new research quickly enough. After a few years of practice I experienced quite a few reversals in "best practice" (such as the U turn on Magnesium post-MI).

Back then I proposed doing a study that would take a number of journals from the 1980s and see how well the recommendations held up. I started doing some preliminary work, but my life took other directions. Once it became apparent I wasn't going to do the research myself I talked it up with friends and colleagues. They weren't too impressed.

Which is why I'm so pleased someone has done the work, and confirmed what I'd guessed back then:

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- New research highlights a frustrating fact about science: What was good for you yesterday frequently will turn out to be not so great tomorrow.

The sobering conclusion came in a review of major studies published in three influential medical journals between 1990 and 2003, including 45 highly publicized studies that initially claimed a drug or other treatment worked.

Subsequent research contradicted results of seven studies -- 16 percent -- and reported weaker results for seven others, an additional 16 percent.

That means nearly one-third of the original results did not hold up, according to the report in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Now there's some empiric support for the practice of gnarly old docs who like to wait a few years before implementing the very latest research -- especially when the benefits of a new approach seem relatively modest.

Progress on "supplements" in Europe -- the slow dawn of rationality

BBC NEWS | Health | Vitamin controls backed by Europe

It was always a ridiculous superstition that because something is "natural" it is somehow fundamentally safer, and thus should be treated differently from "synthetic" substances. Tobacco is natural. So is Coca, tetrodotoxin and rabies. Europe fell to this superstition early, and it infected the US in the 1980s thanks to a dim witted senator from Utah.

Maybe this is a sign that superstition has its limits, at least in Europe.

Terrorists have families too: suicide bomber reported missing

BBC NEWS | UK | London bomb arrests: At a glance:

It was obvious that the lists of persons reported missing might include the terrorists, but wisely I didn't see this mentioned anywhere. Now it can be said:

1712 The home addresses of three of the four suspects were searched. Material found at one of the six addresses raided has caused police concern. One man has been arrested in West Yorkshire and will be brought to London to be questioned.

1709 All four of the men arrived in London by train on the morning of Thursday 7 July. Personal documents link them to the scenes of some of the explosions, Mr Clark says. One suspect had been reported missing by his family.

1708 Peter Clark, head of the Met's anti-terrorist branch says they were alerted quite early to the activities of four men, three from the West Yorkshire area.

1707 Asst Comm Andy Hayman says police have followed up more than 2,000 calls to an anti-terrorist helpline. They have also studied 2,500 CCTV tapes.

1650 Security sources confirm they believe all four bombers are dead. They suspect the three on the Tube were suicide bombers but are keeping an open mind on whether the bomber who died in the bus bomb meant to kill himself, the BBC's Margaret Gilmore says.

1638 Counter-terrorist officers tell the BBC they believe all four of the bomb suspects are British born. They suspect more than one died in the blasts.

A double tragedy, perhaps, for that family.

Responding to terrorism -- the limits of human nature

BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | UK urges terrorist asset seizure

Humans are bad at prevention; natural selection has not given us the full cognitive architecture needed for anticipatory actions. We do better at this than other animals, but ultimately we run into our fundamental limitations.

There are many actions the EU was to have taken post 9/11 that they did not take, particularly with money laundering. These were requested by every post 9/11 commission and report. The reluctance to act is probably related to the use of those services by powerful individuals in the EU (and US) who are not directly connected to terrorism, but may wish to avoid taxes, leverage campaign donations, benefit from corruption, hide money from divorce lawyers, recycle drug money, etc.

Now that the long anticipated and highly probably London bombings have occurred, we humans may do post-tragedy the things that were needed pre-tragedy:

Among the measures in the EU action plan he wants pushed through are:

* Ensuring all member states can take action nationally to freeze terrorist assets - EU-wide mechanisms cannot currently be used to freeze accounts of EU citizens

* Making it compulsory for wire transfers of money to be accompanied by information about the identity of the sender

* Updating the EU money laundering rules to meet international standards

* Completing the European Commission-sponsored review of EU structures on tackling terrorists' finance

* Introducing a code of conduct to prevent abuse of charities by terrorists.

Sadly, being human, we may also do some things of uncertain risk/benefit ratio as well:

...On Wednesday, Home Secretary Charles Clarke will chair an emergency meeting with his European counterparts on co-operation on counter-terrorism operations.

Mr Clarke wants to force telephone and internet service firms across Europe to keep records of all private telephone calls, text messages and e-mails so they can be passed on to the police if necessary.