Author: Jason Ditz

Tiny Maury County, Tennessee seems like a strange place to go looking for terrorism, but that’s where we find ourselves focusing today.

There’s just something in the water in Maury County – or not depending on who you ask. Residents have been complaining about it for awhile though, insisting that children are getting sick drinking the tap water. The tap water is officially clean, according to Tennessee officials, and that’s where the terrorism comes in.

When environmental officials say that the water is clean, you better believe them, it turns out. One of the top state officials in charge of water quality warned residents that complaining about the quality of the water after he’d already got done telling them it was fine amounted to “an act of terrorism” and that they could find the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) coming after them for questioning it.

Locals in Mt. Pleasant, TN have been complaining the water is “cloudy” and “odd-tasting” for years. From now on they may have to do it quietly.

Death penalty hearings against five Guantanamo Bay detainees were quickly shelved today, and the courtroom ordered “cleared” during the defense lawyer’s questioning of a former Gitmo prison commander Rear Admiral David Woods sparked an angry exchange with the prosecution.

Defense lawyer Commander Walter Ruiz was discussing the details of CIA input in controlling the detention center, as well as CIA restrictions on attorneys’ access to their clients. Woods plead ignorance on the matter, and Ruiz asked what intelligence organizations he knew of that were operating at Gitmo during his 10-month term as commander.

At that the Justice Department prosecutors ordered the hearings stopped, and warned Ruiz, in open court, that he was “playing with fire” in even asking those questions.

Ruiz, enraged, shot back that he “will not be threatened by the prosecution,” and went on to point out that there is a court security officer sitting right next to the judge who is supposed to be the one who decides if certain questions are verbotten. The officer didn’t say anything about it, and the prosecutors took Ruiz aside to threaten him some more, sparking him to reiterate his complaints.

The judge, Col. James Pohl, responded by ordering the courtroom cleared, and announced that a secret, closed-door session would be held to discuss the matter. What came of the session will, of course, remain a secret, and the death penalty cases will continue, with the detainees never to know what was said.

Physics lesson time guys.

So we’ve heard in the past 24 hours that:

a) Some guys totally built an X-ray death beam to kill Obama and/or “enemies of Israel”

b) Those guys were KKK but somehow pro-Israel too

c) The whole thing was a “portable Hiroshima” that ran entirely off the van’s cigarette lighter

d) They didn’t have the “radioactive” material yet

I’m going to just toss “b” out the window for the time being, because it’s just too damned stupid. There’s a lot of other stupid stuff here too, but I thought a little basic physics could clear up some misunderstandings about X-rays, death beams, and X-ray death beams.

Fact 1: “d” is just nonsense. You don’t generate X-rays from radioactive material – that’s just inefficient and dumb. If you have something so radioactive its giving off enough photons to be fatal, it’s going to kill you long before you install it in anything.

You generate x-rays from running a charge through a cathode (usually through thermionic emission, i.e. heating the crap out of a filament) to shoot electrons at a target in a vacuum tube. Neither the target or the filament is generally radioactive, nor would that be any advantage.

Now, if you think about it, cigarette lighters just heat up a piece of metal anyhow, so it’s not a huge leap to go from that to heating a filament. You can see where they thought it might be possible.

Fact 2: Let’s dispense with “c” real quick here as either bad science or crazy branding. The US attack on Hiroshima yielded 67 TJ (Tera-Joules). A good alternator operating at 100% efficiency (again, they just don’t) might kick out 2-3 MJ per hour, meaning that it’ll take that van 3,000+ years to produce the same amount of energy as Hiroshima, and that’s with the motor running.

As for “a,” I’m not going to go so far as to say it’s physically impossible to make an x-ray generator small enough that it would run off a cigarette lighter, but even the small non-killy ones that already exist need a healthy power source, and a car battery ain’t it.

There are huge sources of inefficiency throughout this system, and even when you’ve minimized them, electromagnetic radiation gets precipitously weaker the farther away the emitter is, so the idea that these guys can park this thing across the street and “zap” a crowd of Muslims or Democrats or whatever is just silly. Radiation doesn’t work that way.

That said, X-rays can be harmful with prolonged exposure, so if they got their “victim” to stand perfectly still right next to their generator-van, they might do him some harm eventually. But they’d probably have better luck throwing the thing at him.

There’s a reason energy-based weapons never really caught on, and it’s because they’re really energy inefficient. You might remember the Pentagon inventing that “anti-protester” ray gun awhile back. It requires a 100,000 Watt generator. So, not a car battery.

Oh, and it won’t kill you either. Not because the military wouldn’t like death rays, but because energy weapons don’t work very well.

Just a reminder for those who haven’t done so already, the White House petition calling on President Obama to preemptively pardon leaker Edward Snowden is still a little short of its goal. There’s plenty of time left and no reason we shouldn’t be able to get another 14,000 signatures in fairly short order.

The petition would oblige President Obama to comment on the Snowden situation directly, and would hopefully embarrass him into not simply shrugging the issue off, as he has done so far. Though the Justice Department hasn’t officially decided to charge Snowden with anything yet, all the information from administration insiders suggest this is inevitable. Lets make it clear to the president that we oppose this process, and don’t want to punish people for simply telling the American public the truth.

Rep. Betty McCollum (D – MN) has suffered another setback in her efforts to end military waste, as her bill to ban military subsidies for NASCAR and professional wrestling was defeated in a vote of 134-290.

Last year, McCollum noted that $26.5 million in funding from the National Guard to Dale Earnhardt Jr. resulted in 20 “qualified” candidates for the guard, and none of them actually joined. At the time McCollum managed to get the funding pulled, but after NASCAR expressed outrage at the decision it was reinstated. This year the overall expense was $53 million, according to McCollum, who noted that they got no recruits once again.

Rep. Richard Hudson (R – NC) represents a district with a major NASCAR track and spearheaded opposition to the bill, saying that pulling military subsidies from the sport amounted to “stealing from our nation’s military” somehow. He insisted that the increase in the size of the military proved the funding must be working somehow.

Hudson went on to claim that you “can’t put a price on” having Dale Jr. wearing a jacket that says “National Guard” on it, though clearly Dale Jr. has been able to do so, and that price is tens of millions of dollars annually.

The NSA’s PRISM scheme is already surveilling the entire American public to an enormous level, culling massive amounts of data from the PRISM Nine companies that have been complicit in that policy.

So it’s no surprise that the International Cyber Security Conference in Tel Aviv this week turned its focus on PRISM. Here’s the scary part: they don’t think it goes far enough.

RSA’s chairman, ironically the head of a company that used to be about protecting data from prying eyes, argued for “full visibility into all data” as the only real path to cybersecurity.

“All data” is exactly what it sounds like, literally everything, everywhere, in the world. Which would’ve been unthinkable just a couple of weeks ago, but now that we know that the NSA is already spying on a solid majority of our most important and most private data, it isn’t that surprising that they’d like to have everything else too. I mean, why not go for broke?

See it’s not longer just enough to have access to all your emails, they also need access to the preferences file of your email client, because maybe the way you configured it is significant. Knowing everyone you called is nice, but how about what custom ringtones you used?

The “relevant data” question has already been dispensed with by officials arguing that literally anything could be “relevant,” so there is no practical limit to this scheme. Some day, the NSA may need your saved game file from Sim City, because maybe the way you designed that city will be the final piece of the puzzle to figuring you out.

It’s not only terrifying how broad their reach is, but how many perfectly innocent little coincidences they are bound to uncover this way, which through the eyes of suspicious bureaucrats will be immediately transitioned into certainty of a horrible, imminent catastrophe.