Re: More military might-have-beens . . . and nightmare scenarios
On Friday 04 March 2005 17:07, Jed Rothwell wrote: oth sides had had them, it would have been a bloody trench war stalemate like World War I -- as indeed it became by the time Gatling guns were deployed in 1864 at Petersburg.) It is not out of the question that someone might develop cold fusion enough to produce something like the dreadful remote control mini weapons and crows I described in the book, in Chapter 11. You would not have to perfect a megawatt-scale cold fusion reactors to produce them; they would require only 10 or 20 Watts mechanical. Something with the power of a remote-control model airplane or helicopter would do the job. They would be very cheap to manufacture. I did not go into detail, but consider an organization such as Al Qaeda decided to make some. Al Qaeda has tons of money. (The CIA says that 95% of men under 40 in Saudi Arabia approve of Al Qaeda and consider Bin Laden a national hero, so I am sure they have unlimited funds at their disposal.) If the technology were available, it could easily afford 50,000 remote-control robot crows. They would be similar to model airplanes and would cost perhaps $300 each in quantity, or $15 million total. In the book I described how such devices might be used to attack a military base and go around assassinating people wearing uniforms. It does not take much imagination to think of what else they might do, in the hands of people who have no qualms about committing cold-blooded mass murder. Suppose, for example, you had 50,000 crows available, and a few hundred people hiding in the U.S. to control them. On day one you randomly select and kill a 16 people in cities and towns across the country. The next day you kill 32. Then 64, 128 . . . then you go on the radio and announced that the United States must immediately withdraw all troops from the Middle East and the price of oil will be $100 starting now, or the killing will escalate. Of course the US government would defiantly refuse at first. But imagine how things would be when the numbers reached 2,048 in a single day? This would be after 4,080 deaths, and you would still have a stock of 46,000 robots remaining. The country would be in an absolute uproar, with chaos everywhere. Europe and Japan would also be in hysterics. People everywhere would stay indoors all day long; food would rot in the stores; patients would die in hospitals, women in labor would be stranded, and people would soon starve. There would be riots, and the police and the military would be overwhelmed. Think of what happened in Washington, DC a few years ago when a pair of snipers began shooting people at random. Multiply that by 1024, then 2048 . . . I think a few days later the U.S. would -- in effect -- negotiate a surrender. How quickly we forget the past! There have been times when we had such casualties and lived through it. In Britain in WWII, the Londoners had similar casualties and pressed on with their lives. We would as well. Were we to be weak, like Cambodians, we well might live like rabbits. If so, we would die like rats, just like the Cambodians meekly went to the slaughter under the AngKha Loeu in the 1970's That slaughter was so bad that a thoroughly sickened and disgusted Viet-Namese government, albiet Communist, put an end to it in the name of humanity. This selfless act was unappreciated and soon forgotten by forces in the rest of the a world that wanted to follow Chinese lead and 'rehabilitate' Saloth Sar (AKA Pol Pot). It cost many Viet-Namese lives to end the reign of terror of Pot's murderous regime. I believe that we would not go the way of the devided and apathetic Cambodians. Were we to be apathetic, however, where would be the rioters that would 'overwhelm the military'? There are courageous people everywhere in this country. Look at the ones in the hi-jacked airplane headed for the White House on 11Sep01 that attacked the hijackers with the yell of 'lets roll', and stopped yet another catastrophe at the brutal cost of their own lives. As long as we have people like that living here, there will be no panic like ruled Cambodia in 1975! Standing Bear
Re: More military might-have-beens . . . and nightmare scenarios
... There are courageous people everywhere in this country. Look at the ones in the hi-jacked airplane headed for the White House on 11Sep01 that attacked the hijackers with the yell of 'lets roll', and stopped yet another catastrophe at the brutal cost of their own lives... -- maiorem hac dilectionem nemo habet ut animam suam quis ponat pro amicis suis --
Re: More military might-have-beens . . .
At 05:48 pm 04-03-05 -0500, Jed wrote: I wrote: (The CIA says that 95% of men under 40 in Saudi Arabia approve of Al Qaeda and consider Bin Laden a national hero, so I am sure they have unlimited funds at their disposal.) Correction: the government of Saudi Arabia says that, based on public opinion polls. Source: Imperial Hubris (Brassey's, Inc., 2004). The point is, not only does Al Qaeda have money, they have a huge reservoir of technical skill. There are probably hundreds of thousands of qualified but unemployed engineers and other university trained people, such as the 9/11 hijackers. It is a myth that modern terrorists are disenfranchised poor people, or that they are technically ignorant. The Japanese Aum sect attracted some of the most talented biochemists and engineers in Japan. They built a state-of-the-art sarin production facility. This was built right out in the open in Japan -- a country where government surveillance is intense, and the authorities have enormous leeway and detailed information on everyone. (In Japan, you have to register all members of your household and all domestic pets with the local police. If you forget to vaccinate your pooch a friendly policeman will come around to remind you. You also have to register all television sets and radios, and pay a tax on them. Students used to be adept at hiding television antennas.) It takes no great stretch of imagination to envision a 5-year secret project involving thousands of highly qualified people in Saudi Arabia (or some other state), in which experts make important advances in cold fusion and then fabricate 50,000 crude small motors for handheld devices. It would be *far* easier than hiding a conventional nuclear weapons program. Grimer, my man! Is that scary enough? ABSOLUTELY! That's fantastic stuff Jed. Not only blood curdling but very interesting with it. If you can write like that and get it syndicated you can forget about the CoFu Bomb game. If I were from the bible belt and I read that in my morning paper under the headline, WAKE UP AMERICA I would be reaching for my M16 with one hand and with the other I'd be writing a letter to my congressman demanding that he did something about the COLD FUSION GAP if he wanted to get re-elected. And if I were from Montana (my son, Greg, once stayed there with a family. He said they were armed to the back teeth) I would send down a detachment of my militia to make sure you had sufficient protection from any Skull and Bones backlash. What you have to remember is, it doesn't really matter a damn what the atoms say. It's all about bits - all about perceptual bits. To quote from the book I was reading when I checked my mail just now. -- And they were not just cold. Hedgies struck me as incredibly detached as well. Apart from the real world. On another planet, almost. Actually, a lot of people on Wall Street are this way. They reside in a different layer from the rest of the world. I suppose it is how the financial system is set up; they can buy and sell companies all day without really caring what they actually do. -- Of course they can. They aren't buying companies qua atoms. The are buying companies qua bits, i.e. perceptions. It is not for nothing that often the most valuable asset of a company is not its physical assets such as buildings, machines, etc., but intangibles, like trade marks, good will, etc. That's what my intellectually challenged directors at Building Research failed to recognise. Their value was the reputation, the honesty, the competence of the work. That was what they should have been selling. Selling, that is until the last honest researcher had drifted away at last, and turned out the lights. That's why when CoCo Cola sold home counties tap water without having watched all episodes of *Only Fools and Horses*... - http://www.trotters-independent-traders.co.uk/episodes/mother_natures_son.htm Del Boy's latest scheme is to bottle tap water and sell it as 'Peckham Spring' water. It's a great success thanks to Rodney's mate Myles. -- it was a complete public relations disaster. The US firm very sensibly strangled the whole thing at birth before it impacted on their other lucrative sales of sugar water. There's of lot of our countrymen who moan about the loss of manufacturing industry. With your extensive historical knowledge I'm sure you recognise that exactly the same moaning went on in England in relation to agriculture as the industrial revolution took hold. The west's future is in 'bits' and the sooner modern Luddites wake up to that reality the better. And if you're not a lawyer, and your skill is in atoms, not
