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Science Editors Urge Nondisclosure Of Bioterror Info
Jeraph Mason writes "According to this story on ABC news, science editors want to censor their publications because terrorists may use them. It's the same argument used to prevent security disclosures from being published." There's also coverage on the BBC and at The Washington Post.
About 70-80% of an "average" human poop consists of water. Water is
absorbed out of fecal material as it passes through the intestine, so
the longer a poop resides inside before emerging, the drier it will
be.
Much of the remaining portion of the poop, about 1/3 is composed of
dead bacteria.
These microcorpses come from the intestinal garden of microorganisms
that assist us in the digestion of our food.
Another 1/3 of the poop mass is made of stuff that we find
indigestible, like cellulose, for instance.
This indigestible material is called "fiber," and is useful in getting
the poop to move along through the intestine, perhaps because it
provides traction.
The remaining portion of poop is a mixture of fats such as
cholesterol, inorganic salts like phosphates, live bacteria, dead
cells and mucus from the lining of the intestine, and protein.
Poop has an odor ("stinks") as a result of the products of bacterial
action. Bacteria produce smelly, organic compounds such as indole,
skatole, and mercaptans, and the inorganic gas hydrogen sulfide. These
are the same compounds that give farts their odor.
The color comes mainly from bilirubin, a pigment that arises from the
breakdown of red blood cells in the liver and bone marrow. The actual
metabolic pathway of bilirubin and its byproducts in the body is very
complicated, so we will simply say that a lot of it ends up in the
intestine, where it is further modified by bacterial action. But the
color itself comes from iron. Iron in hemoglobin in red blood cells
gives blood its red color, and iron in the waste product bilirubin
gives rise to its brown color.
Poop is mostly shades of brown or yellow, but other colors can arise
under certain circumstances. For example, someone with a bleeding
ulcer might have tarry black poop from the presence of partially
digested blood. Bleeding in the intestine, from an anal fissure or
split, for example, can stain the poop red. Some illnesses in babies
gives them green or even blue-green poop. But another source of blue
poop in children is more innocent: it can come from eating a
concentrated source of blue food coloring such as ice cream. Intense
red food coloring can produce bright red poop. Sometimes brightly
colored foods pass through the gut almost unchanged, and the poop may
be speckled with bright red fragments such as pimentos, or bright
yellow kernels of corn.
Many animals eat poop on a regular basis. These include rabbits,
rodents, gorillas, many insects such as dung beetles and flies, and
yes, dogs. (Keep that in mind the next time a dog wants to lick you!)
Herbivores such as rabbits and rodents eat their own poop because
their diet of plants is hard to digest efficiently, and they have to
make two passes at it to get everything out of the meal. This is
equivalent to a cow chewing its cud, only cows are able to re-eat
their food without having to poop it out first. Another reason why
animals eat poop is that poop contains vitamins produced by their
intestinal bacteria. The animal is unable to absorb the vitamins
through the intestinal wall, but can get at them by eating the poop.
Another reason that animals such as dogs and flies eat poop is that
poop contains a certain amount of protein. Dogs are particularly fond
of cat poop because cat poop is high in protein.
People all have eaten poop at one point or another. One of the main
ways that diseases and parasites spread is through the consumption of
food and water contaminated with feces. This happens because people
don't wash their hands carefully after pooping or changing a diaper or
scratching their butt. It can also happen through careless disposal of
diapers.
You can definitely get sick from eating poop, even in minute
quantities! Although urine emerges sterile from the body (unless the
person has an infection), poop emerges loaded with bacteria and
sometimes other life forms. Many diseases, including food poisoning,
cholera and typhus, are spread by fecal contamination. Many parasites,
such as the notorious tapeworm, can be spread through deliberate or
accidental ingestion of poop.
There are some parasites, such as pinworms, who depend on people
eating their own poop to keep the population up. Pinworms are small
nematodes that live in the colon. The females emerge from the anus at
night to lay their eggs. Their activity makes the anal area itch. The
person scratches the itch (often doing so in his sleep), procuring a
small amount of fecal matter and eggs under his fingernails, and then
puts his fingers in his mouth. Once the eggs are consumed, the person
is infected with a new generation of pinworms.
Many people have pinworms. Luckily, pinworms don't do much harm. You
only notice them if you have a lot of pinworms! If you want to find
out if you do indeed have them, get someone to gently touch around
your anal area with Scotch tape while you are sleeping. The worms will
stick to the tape and you'll be able to see them.
Diarrhea is genrally caused by irritation in the intestines, resulting
in the bowel passing its contents too fast for the water to be
absorbed. There can be several causes, including infection by bacteria
or viruses, irritation caused by unfamiliar foods, food allergies,
chronic illnesses such as inflammatory bowel disease, lactose
intolerance, medications, and nervousness.
Corn poop is one of the mysteries in life. When we chew corn, the
outer coating slips off the inner kernal. This outer yellow coating is
almost entirely cellulose, and is indigestible. It passes through the
gut untouched, and emerges looking like a whole kernel, although it is
mostly just the outer skin. The inside of the kernel is starchy and
digestible, and that is the part that we succeed in chewing up.
In humans, soft poop is really one long, mostly continuous sausage
before it comes out. It gets its "link" look because we tend to pinch
off lengths of it with the anal sphincter as the poop emerges. If a
person pinches hard enough, the poop separates into several poop
units. If the person doesn't pinch that hard, the turds may stay
connected.
"Floaters" are turds that have an unusually high gas content.
Sometimes the gases produced by bacteria in our gut don't have a
chance to collect into a large fart bubble, but remain dispersed in
the feces. The poop then comes out foamy, and has a lower density than
water.
Turds can get very large and dry if a person is constipated, causing
painful stretching of the anal opening. Pooping can also hurt if the
person has hemorrhoids. Hemorrhoids are engorged veins in the anal
area. A doctor once described them to me as "varicose veins of the
anus," which suggests that the valves in the veins that are supposed
to keep the blood flowing in the right direction have gotten messed
up. Pooping can also be painful if the person suffers from an anal
fissure, a tear in the tissue of the rectum.
Meat protein is rich in sulfides, resulting in smellier farts and
poop. This is the reason that the poop of carnivores such as dogs,
cats and snakes smells worse than the poop of herbivores such as cows
and horses.
There are many thoughts on the matter of where the word "poop" came
from. According to Eric Partridge in his excellent book of word
origins (Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English),
"poop" comes from the Middle English word poupen or popen, and it
originally meant "fart." According to Robert Chapman, author of
American Slang, "poop" came into use with its current meaning around
1900.
In humans, soft poop is really one long, mostly continuous sausage
before it comes out. It gets its "link" look because we tend to pinch
off lengths of it with the anal sphincter as the poop emerges. If a
person pinches hard enough, the poop separates into several poop
units. If the person doesn't pinch that hard, the turds may stay
connected.
"Floaters" are turds that have an unusually high gas content.
Sometimes the gases produced by bacteria in our gut don't have a
chance to collect into a large fart bubble, but remain dispersed in
the feces. The poop then comes out foamy, and has a lower density than
water.
Turds can get very large and dry if a person is constipated, causing
painful stretching of the anal opening. Pooping can also hurt if the
person has hemorrhoids. Hemorrhoids are engorged veins in the anal
area. A doctor once described them to me as "varicose veins of the
anus," which suggests that the valves in the veins that are supposed
to keep the blood flowing in the right direction have gotten messed
up. Pooping can also be painful if the person suffers from an anal
fissure, a tear in the tissue of the rectum.
Terrorists aren't stupid, they can fuck shit up. Just many of them chose not to... You start killing their families to make your daddy happy, and they'll get pissed.
God spoke to me
The Soviet Troll is still alive !
Nuclear Bombs Make YOU dirty!
Maybe you should consider this "premier" slashdot account on eBay.
This gets always off the ground.
Terrorists and dictators don't need to read scientific journals to make bio-WMD.
Crass Act
by Peter Beinart (The New Republic)
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030224&s=trb0224
Why don't my fellow hawks ever discuss America's history with Saddam Hussein? I don't mean the 1990s, when Bill Clinton tried to ignore the Iraqi dictator--hawks (especially Republican ones) discuss that all the time. I mean the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush armed him. The history is appalling, and it involves key officials shaping Iraq policy today. Yet barely anyone to the right of Ramsey Clark seems to care.
Saddam first used chemical weapons, in particular mustard gas, in 1983, in his war against Iran. By October of that year, according to recently declassified documents, the United States knew he was using them "almost daily." But the Reagan administration wasn't bothered. To the contrary, that December it sent Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad. According to the book Spider's Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq, by Financial Times reporter Alan Friedman, Rumsfeld presented a letter from Reagan that proposed restoring diplomatic relations and offered U.S. military and economic assistance. When Iran launched a new offensive in February 1984, Saddam added tabun, a lethal nerve gas, to his chemical repertoire. In the spring of 1984, Rumsfeld returned for another visit. By November, the United States and Iraq had restored diplomatic relations.
It gets worse. Records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a 1994 Senate Banking Committee investigation show that during Reagan's presidency, the United States sold Iraq anthrax, bubonic plague, and botulinum toxin, all supposedly for medical research. In 1988, the Commerce Department approved Dow Chemical's sale of $1.5 million worth of pesticides to Baghdad, even though many in the administration suspected Saddam would use them for chemical warfare. Over congressional opposition, the Reagan administration sold Iraq twin-engine Bell "Huey" helicopters, which appear to have been used in Saddam's chemical attacks on the Kurds.
All this was justified at the time, of course, by the need to stop fundamentalist Iran. But, by August 1988, the war between Baghdad and Tehran was over. And yet Saddam continued his genocidal "Anfal" campaign against the Kurds, which by late 1988 had resulted in close to 100,000 deaths, most of them civilian. So, in September 1988, then-Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island introduced the Prevention of Genocide Act, which would have ended all U.S. aid to Baghdad. The bill passed the Senate, but the Reagan administration helped scuttle it in the House. And, when George H. W. Bush became president the following year, he doubled U.S. agricultural loans to Iraq--money that, it would later be revealed, Saddam was partly diverting to the military. As Samantha Power points out in A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, the Bush administration in 1989 refused to join twelve other democracies in calling for a special U.N. investigation of human rights in Iraq. In 1990, Bush's Commerce Department even considered selling Baghdad large numbers of "skull furnaces," valuable to Iraq's nuclear program. At the last minute, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait scuttled the deal.
Only left-wingers discuss this history. And for them the lesson is obvious: The Bush administration's current outrage at Saddam's crimes is bogus. If people like Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Richard Armitage (all of whom held prominent government positions in the '80s) really cared about the Iraqi people, they wouldn't have helped Saddam brutalize them in the '80s. And, since the United States doesn't care about the Iraqi people, our real motivation for war must lay elsewhere--either in a thirst for world domination, or oil, or both.
I think the left has it wrong. First of all, France and the Soviet Union sold Saddam even more military equipment in the '80s than Washington did. So, if America's history of ignoring human rights in Iraq makes leftists cynical about our motives for war today, they should be just as cynical about France's and Russia's motives for opposing war (i.e., they'd be perfectly happy to go back to doing business with Saddam). Second, it is precisely because the United States abetted Saddam's repression in the '80s that we should atone for our sins and depose him today. Certainly the left never argued that because for decades the United States coddled apartheid South Africa, it should not have switched course and imposed sanctions. The antiwar movement can't simultaneously decry the United States for appeasing Saddam in the '80s and demand that it continue that policy today. But, if the antiwar movement misuses America's shameful history with Saddam, hawks ignore it altogether. (A LexisNexis search turns up not a single reference to Rumsfeld's Baghdad trip in either National Review or The Weekly Standard or by any major conservative pundit on television.) Hawks seem to assume that because they support war now, people like Rumsfeld have learned from their past. But it's not that simple. Just because the United States is going to war with Saddam doesn't mean we're liberating the Iraqi people. It's far from clear whether the Bush administration will help build a democracy in post-Saddam Baghdad rather than simply install another strongman. Already, the United States is considering allowing Turkey to send its troops into northern Iraq, with potentially disastrous consequences for the long-suffering Kurds. And Afghanistan doesn't offer much reason for optimism: The Bush administration's reluctance to expand the peacekeeping force beyond Kabul has condemned much of the country to instability and violence.
It would be nice, then, if prominent Bush officials acknowledged their past moral culpability and vowed not to betray the Iraqi people again. Rumsfeld should have trouble sleeping at night given his role in abetting Saddam's crimes. Instead, last fall on CNN, he insisted that in 1983 he "cautioned" Saddam about chemical weapons. But State Department notes from the meeting show no such thing. (Rumsfeld did mention chemical weapons to then-Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, but only in passing--as one of various issues that concerned the United States.) In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last September, Rumsfeld said, "It would be a shame to leave this committee and the people listening with the impression that the United States assisted Iraq with chemical or biological weapons in the 1980s. I just do not believe that's the case." But, according to recently declassified State Department documents reviewed by Newsweek, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press, it is the case.
It is a testament to Rumsfeld's immense arrogance and lack of moral reflection that neither on CNN nor before the Armed Services Committee did he betray the slightest hint that he or the administration he served did anything wrong in the '80s regarding Saddam Hussein. That's not a reason to oppose this war. But it sure makes me wish a better man were running it.
"Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don't allow our enemies to have guns, why should we allow them to have ideas?"
- Joseph Stalin
Well, at least I didn't invoke Godwin's Law.