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A Chilean official loads the fresh highly enriched uranium into the special transport container. Photo and caption from National Nuclear Security Administration via Creative Commons license.
In a remarkable story in Sunday’s Washington Post, we learn that the US National Nuclear Security Administration had just packed up a bit less than 40 pounds of highly enriched uranium, which is enough to make a bomb, in Chile when the magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck that country on February 27. As expected, the shipping containers holding the material were not breached in the earthquake, and after a few minor adjustments to the shipping plan, the materials were safely shipped and arrived in the US in late March.
The Post article informs us that this action was taken under the Nunn-Lugar program, which was funded by Congress in 1991 to provide billions in funding to secure nuclear weapons and weapons-grade material from the former Soviet Union and other countries. The website for the Nunn-Lugar program informs us that it has been responsible for the deactivation of almost 6000 nuclear warheads. The Post article tells of the most recent successes:
In the early 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union gave rise to worries about hundreds of tons of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium left spread across 11 time zones, as well as questions about the security and storage of nuclear materials from weapons being withdrawn and disassembled.
Today, the focus is on smaller but still dangerous quantities of nuclear material, often nestled in research reactors well beyond the former Soviet Union. In the past year, the United States has cleaned out highly enriched uranium from Romania, Taiwan, Libya, Turkey and Chile. Bieniawski said 18 countries have been swept free of highly enriched uranium.
The upcoming summit in Washington is aimed at further progress:
At a summit in Washington on Monday and Tuesday, President Obama will press leaders or other representatives of 46 countries to accelerate such efforts and fulfill his pledge to lock up all the vulnerable material within four years.
It’s so refreshing to see actual progress in making the world a safer place. With the increased rhetoric aimed at sanctions on Iran, which is still far short of weapons-grade enrichment (they have boasted 20% enrichment, although it is likely more like 5-10%, and over 90% is required for weapons), this report of actual success in removing already existing weapons-grade material to safe storage is documentation of tangible progress.
When this information is coupled with the signing of the new strategic arms limitation treaty with Russia (pdf) and the nuclear posture review, we see that the Obama administration seems to be moving in the right direction on the issue of arms reduction.
Lest we get too happy about this situation, though, we should keep in mind that the general effort toward seeking out and removing weapons of mass destruction was dealt a huge blow when Vice President Cheney outed Valerie Plame’s CIA identity, since she led a covert group working in WMD anti-proliferation. Also, I note on the Nunn-Lugar website this discouraging bit:
For a private citizen, the best way to support NUNN-LUGAR is to make sure that the money, authorized by the United States Congress for such an important task, is being spent efficiently. Unfortunately, Defense Enterprise Fund ("DEF"), a Program funded with NUNN-LUGAR money, fell victim to gross mismanagement, and the US government’s investigation of DEF has been, at best, half-hearted.
The documents related to the continuing DEF investigation are found on this website. It is our belief that those who mismanage the funds that were supposed to be used to enhance the security of the world should be held accountable.
Blatantly stealing a tactic from Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel, I’d like to invite readers to consider this to be a working thread in which we can read the posted documents together and work toward further exposure of the mismanagement. Sadly, even though there may well be documentation of "gross mismanagement", I don’t expect much cooperation from the Obama administration in looking back on these crimes, just as they won’t look back on torture or illegal wiretapping.
57 Comments
good post.
Thanks.
Some say our stance with regard to Iranian nukes is hypocritical. I’ll go farther. Now that the Supreme Court says that we all have an unqualified right to personally bear arms, isn’t our stance downright un-American? Don’t we want to spread Americanism to the world, especially when the long-preferred method–invasion–just isn’t in the cards?
In today’s world, when no one really knows what the neighbors might be loading up with, can we really expect people to feel secure behind a puny 9-mm, AR-15, or AK-47? What would Charlton Heston say? We both know the answer.
So shouldn’t we be distributing fissionable materials as widely as possible, so that every person with the God-given cash or credit to purchase same can counter foreign, terrorist, and/or guvamint WMDs with his or her own PND (Personal Nuclear Deterrent)? Shouldn’t every punk that feels lucky be answered: “Go ahead! Make EVERYBODY’s day!”
I think the logic of our proliferation policies over the last 50 years solidly supports my position. Think about it–not too hard, but just about as hard as anyone EVER thinks about nuclear policies.
As for me, you can take my plutonium when you pry it from my hot, glowing hand.
Yeah, but those weapons have to be in the appropriate hands, don’t you know?
Don’t you trust the American People to do the right thing? And the American Way of Life to convert the world? I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
Besides, as I like to hold forth whenever I’m in the presence of my NRA friends, the logic is truly irrefutable. If you have a right to bear arms, why take half measures and invite one-upsmanship? If you resist “Them” with your AK, militia style, They just napalm your house and drive a tank over the rubble (assault rifles worked out great at Waco and Ruby Ridge, right?). Rely on a concealed .38 and you never know whether Someone Else won’t draw a .45 first. But with the nuke in your basement connected to a heart monitor on your chest, nobody gets the drop on you and nobody outguns you. Personal protection at its most reliable. Like the cold war, only individual, distributed and networked.
On a slightly (only slightly) more serious note, I remember attending a lecture by a democratic socialist politician of some sort speaking on the Prospects for Socialism in the Seventies. I was attending mainly as part of my courtship of the then Bright-Red, future Madame R., so the lecture itself would have been pretty forgettable except for one incident. A wild-looking weirdo stood up in the middle of the speech and started screaming that the Suffering Masses in the Third World would bring Socialism to the West in a Fire-Storm of Total Revolution. It was hot stuff even by the standards of the day, and I laughed out loud. An older friend–a math grad student–quietly whispered that I obviously did not know who “that” was. I didn’t. “That” was supposedly one of the brightest stars in our internationally known physics program–specializing, of course, in theoretical problems related to nuclear explosions.
I’ve often wondered where the guy ended up–whether he is now a devout Muslim convert working in Pakistan or a Born-Again boffin in some fearmongering, Cheyneyesque thinktank. Either way, his logic was very much like the cartoon version that I have laid out above. He held, essentially, that the only way to insure justice in the world was to give all of the weakest and poorest the ability to destroy said world–sort of a geopolitical variant on the NRA-ism that an armed society is a polite society.
Something similar seems to motivate North Korea, Iran, and their friends in China. Something like it–Mutual Assured Destruction and the consequent balance of terror–is also still widely credited with giving us 50 years of peace, victory in the Cold War, and a world safe for plutocracy. So, much as I support the effort, I don’t see much future in non-proliferation at this point. The metaphorical genie is out of the bottle.
Technology is not the issue. The issue is the near universal perception that, in security terms, terror works, and nuclear terror works absolutely. Balance-of-terror thinking is becoming the norm outside of the First World, just as the latter seems to be forgetting that MAD ever seemed like a rational policy that legitimate, non-terrorist, non-cultish governments might adopt. I fear that nuclear proliferation is now driven by generalized, Cold-War-style fears over national survival rather than by a desire for prestige or conquest.
If I’m right, then our wrong-headed domestic politics is driving even more wrong-headed foreign policy decisions whose future consequences are potentially huge (and unintended).
First, we had Bushista neo-con imperialism. To a Third World government like Iran, the history might read as follows: Iraq tried to get the Bomb, but wasn’t fast enough and/or made too many concessions to non-proliferation agencies. It got invaded. North Korea worked faster and got something to at least go bang. It did not get invaded. Conclusion? Countries with the Bomb are safe from Western aggression, while those without might, as my mother would say, wake up dead at any time.
Clearly, Bushism set up a dangerously counterproductive proliferation situation. So what does Obama do? He does the worst thing that he could do. He promises no first use–but only against countries that already HAVE the Bomb. He implicitly threatens countries that do not–countries that have obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and are thus non-nuclear by definition. By tying his implied threat to the treaty, Obama carefully excluded nuclear-armed countries like North Korea (withdraw per treaty provisions) and countries like Israel, Pakistan, and India (never signed and thus have no obligations).
So, if you are Iran (or South Waziristan, for that matter) and feel threatened, what does Mr. Obama’s policy suggest that you do? It suggests that you’d better break out of the treaty and get your own Bomb as soon as you can or at least look like you might have it. I’m no Iran expert, but I suspect that the latter is what Iran is up to. Such defensive bluffs aren’t uncommon historically. Stalin did something very similar when he created the illusion of a non-existent long-range bomber force in the 1950s as a counter to the very real US force.
Nice post, robspierre, I bow in your virtual direction, that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking.
Israel’s own undeclared, uninspected, unsafeguarded weapons, and the obvious conclusions to be drawn from whom we invade and whom we don’t, all provide the best reasons for her neighbors to want nukes for themselves: it’s the deterrence!
The single action I’d like to see the US take (our government, not Obama’s or either party’s or that of our NSA-type warmongers), is to make an honest nation out of Israel, and ourselves along with her, by bringing her nukes out into the open. We’re creating the conditions we most fear, by parading around the world with our vast hypocrisy on full display.
BTW, I just did a little homework on this, using the search phrase “US threatens Iran,” on Ask,com. First, no quotes: 435,000 hits. But if you go through them, the vast majority reverse the search phrase. The articles quickly turn into “Iran threatens US.”
Next, with quotes: 210. That’s two-hundred ten. Nope, just did it again: now it’s 209. And if you click through, you only get 118 of them.
My favorite result showed a “Iran threatens US with nukes” headline just above a “US to retain 90 nukes on Iran’s border” story.
We got jacked to war in Iraq by myths about non-existent WMDs, and we’re still getting jacked, this time by myths obscuring existing nukes. How’s that for the power of myth! More powerful than all the world’s bombs, nuclear and otherwise.
Now this is interesting. Neurotic that I am, I triple-checked the results.
I still only get 118 of the 209, and check out the results summary:
WTF?!
Damn, should’ve made a screen capture, the order I mentioned earlier has changed.
How do you like those last two? Obama was threatening Iran even before he was president. And of course, Israel has been using nuclear terror on Iran for the last few decades, but it’s a given, according to the misnamed “common wisdom,” better known as myths, that it’s Israel that fears Iran’s non-existent nukes. What a wacky world!
Are people dumb or crazy for getting jacked by the products of think-tanks? No, not IMO. Such are the intended products of domestic disinformation campaigns. It’s like dissing vets for their psychic wounds.
We may be nucking futs, but there’s good news.
“Evil” spells eventually wear off. The mind-numbing power of the shock doctrine, namely infantilization, has to be charged up once in a while. Propaganda has to be “catapulted,” as GWB notoriously said.
In the meantime, we can learn not to get jacked by our own dreams, hopes, and fears.
One of the most potent curatives for what ails us, is the simple awareness of the malicious myth-jackers own efforts. My hope is, with sufficient common knowledge of mythology and its use in politics, we can define their wacky world right out from around them.
IOW, seeing the emperor as naked renders him impotent. Has there ever been an emperor so naked, as an American president preaching non-proliferation, yet hyping Iran’s non-existent nukes while hiding Israel’s hundreds?
I wonder if Dimona will be ‘cleansed’ next…! I guess one can always dream, eh…?
I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.
I suppose not…
A bit after 9/11, I came to the realization that there’s only one M in WMD, and that is nuclear. Why all the loose nuclear material in the world wasn’t vacuumed up & put in a safe place, easily accomplishable in a year, and much less expensive than war, in the year following 9/11 has been an ongoing mystery to me. I even emailed thusly to Allinson at Harvard, and he emailed back to the effect that ‘war was sucking all the oxygen out of the admin.’ Dumb.
I’d have to add biological into that mix. Consider the anthrax attacks of 2001 to be a demo run. That event proved that deadly biological agents could be dispersed with lethal consequences. The missing element in that attack is that anthrax does not spread from person to person. If an agent that is transmissible from person to person had been used, the outcome would have been much worse. We might not be so lucky on the choice of agents in the next attack.
Terrorists getting hands on a real biohazard is remote, and I think, given they are not experts in handling them, they wouldn’t want to come anywhere near them. Less dangerous bio weapons can be handled by the isolate & inoculate model. Sure it would kill thousands, but not millions.
I agree. No country has ever successfully weaponized biologicals. Not Japan in World War 2 (they tried). Not the US in the Korean War (we tried infected bats). The problem is that you can’t get biologicals to strike where you want them and not where you don’t. Their characteristics make them anything but “mass destructive” and, in fact, barely make them weapons at all.
The problem is the same for chemical, biological, and radiological (“dirty-bomb”) weapons: dust and fog settle quickly, blow away readily, and generally act unpredictably. To get anything like the degree of reliability that makes a weapon practical, much less “mass destructive”, you’d have to be able to create stable, repeatable, large-scale aerosols so that people could get the agent on their skin, preferably within their lungs. You have to do it in the open, regardless of the weather. Nobody has ever managed that. Trying alternatives like infected bats was an act of desperation–and bats weren’t any more predictable. That’s why these weapons have been signed away so readily in treaties: they don’t work.
For terrorist use, military aerosols are even less practical. The “weaponized” (finely divided, purified, and fully dried) anthrax spores used in the US scare killed a vanishingly small number of people compared to the effort involved because, in effect, only people opening mail in confined spaces (and only a few of them) actually ingested enough to become infected. Once it was known what was happening, basic health measures could defeat the attack. The Sarin attacks on the Tokyo subways a few years back are another example. Enough agent was present for a massacre, apparently. But delivery depended on puncturing a plastic bag of liquid with an umbrella. Only a few deaths resulted. Biologicals like ricin and botulin toxin face similar limitations. The plastic surgeons of a town might have enough Botox to kill an army–but how do you get each soldier to take just a little from a rather tiny vial?
Biologicals, deadly chemicals, and radiological materials are also very hard for amateurs to handle. Accidents happen with these materials even in super-secure labs with expert technicians. Trying the same operatioins in a hotel room puts the terrorist at more risk than anyone else. I seem to remember that they found a guy 98% dead from ricin poisoning in a Las Vegas hotel room a year or two back. The Russian agents that fed the deadly radioisotope to the Russian defector in London ended up deathly ill themselves. In fact, an ex-military acquaintance who ought to know argues that radiological and toxicological hazards all but rule out any rogue, terrorist use of nuclear bomb materials. Trying to transport and process the material would likely result in dead terrorists and some badly contaminated cars and rooms.
Compare the results possible after all of this hassle with what could be achieved with a few grams of TATP explosive or by taking a leagally purchased assault rifle into a crowded shopping mall–or with what actually was “achieved” by exploiting 30 years of aviation industry resistance to spending money on locable cockpit doors. Chemical, biological, and radiological weapons offer too few payoffs and too many problems. If they are popular with terrorists, I have to wonder whether our spies put them up to it.
Thank you thank you thank you. Yours is a thoughtful, articulate response to the semiarticulable hypotheses I had drawn from my post-9/11 readings. As a midtown Manhattan resident, this thought experiment had more resonance than for people living elsewhere, but in the end I decided that crossing the street was far more dangerous than a terrorist attack.
A terrorist that is willing to die to complete an attack is a possible biological weapons vector – infect themself and ride subway all day sneezing. Then take train to another city and repeat.
Influenza could be used in this fashion, and there are likely other more lethal diseases (eg Pneumonic plague)
First, very few lethal ailments are spread by sneezing or coughing. Those that are not fast acting. Finally, coughing still faces the aerosol problem. You can’t get any kind of major, mass effect this way.
The result of your hypothetical attack? Jihadi best case? Six dead (assuming something like pneumonic plague). Eleven sick and recovering in ICU. Not spectacular. Worse, if homeland security suspects you will attempt this, they just put Curell dispensers on the all the platforms and hand out painter’s paper masks. Then nobody even gets sick.
Set off a few ounces of TATP in the same car, and you have lots of dead, a blocked tunnel, and a fire.
A Pneumonic plague carrier can infect a lot more than 6-17 people before anyone twigs that an attack is underway. Sneezing is a very effective way of aerosol-izing an infectious agent. 200-500 infections in one subway trip is possible. There’s a real problem with network effects until the problem is identified, then prophylaxis like filter masks can start making a difference. Pneumonic plague can kill within 24 hours.
Getting the infected carrier in position is the hard part. Once that happens casualties in the 10,000+ per city visited are very possible.
That’s what always scared the Director of Emergency Services in the NYC hospital in which I was working in 2001. The first victims coming in might end up infecting the care staffs in the city’s hospitals even if the attack didn’t much spread beyond a few hundreds (low-end estimate), it would be rather effectively terrorizing.
The whole concept of WMDs is pretty obviously political scare mongering. Nuclear weapons are WMDs, but, practically speaking, only nation states can build, transport, and deploy them. Biologicals, radiologicals, and chemicals are bogeymen. Many of the people who talk up these threats no doubt know better. THAT is what worries me.
Moreover, on 9/11, ordinary Americans, when informed by cell phone of what was happening, attacked barehanded, crashed their plane, and saved the Capitol–all dowenplayed in the official statements and in the MSM. Since then, with cockpit doors locked, every single terror attempt on a plane has been immediately snuffed by massive passenger resistance. Why isn’t THAT what politician’s and security people trumpet to the skies? Isn’t the likely prospect of an ignominious battering by businessmen and enraged grandmothers the best possible deterrent for these jihadis? No doubt. But such a message does not build you a security state or give the executive dictatorial powers.
Dayam…! Some Italians teamed up with the Taliban…???
Pashtun Pasta. Sounds yummy.
That is a truly strange story. It’s hard to imagine that charity medical workers would get caught up in a murder plot.
Some of the folks in my Twitter feed have been joking about Afghan week using the hashtag #ThatDariDank; I think this story should be referenced under that tag…
*heh* Keith Olberman almost inspired me to sign up for Twitter the other day… Almost…! ;-)
Big stories break anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes earlier there than anywhere else.
I can wait.
From the Op-Ed by Vice President Biden at the link for the nuclear posture review:
Gosh, I guess we can’t say nukes are still on the table in our saber rattling aimed at Iran. These moves by Obama are very encouraging.
My short version: U.S. will only use nukes on non-nuclear states, now explicit. All the more reason for everyone to get nukes. Now that’s a great policy!
BTW, Iran is in compliance with NPT, ya know, how & cold running inspectors. The U.S. is NOT in compliance. U.S. responsibility is to decrease nukes under NPT.
Put that in your pipe & smoke it. I expect MSM WH reporters to pummel O with that observation next presser. Not.
But, but, that would mean Obama’s policy is the opposite of what he has stated. You’ll need to cite a precedent if you want to claim that this is likely. /snark
LOL. Well, precedent would be DPRK, n’est pas?
What a crock of sh*t, tho…! We still can’t hit the broad side of a barn and we’re still tossing Billion$ into the SDI rathole…! 8-(
Aegis ballistic missile defense actually has a pretty good record at terminal phase defense. Boost phase missile defense isn’t so good, and once you’ve got MIRVs some will get through.
Aegis is good for defending against Korean/Iranian missiles. And possibly Isreali, I believe they only have single warheads on their missiles.
The game plan for the Iranians to defeat the Aegis is to launch barrages of junk to expend the ammo… With a 20 min. reload rate, follow on barrages would be lethal…! 8-(
That assumes Iranians have a lot of missiles.
They have ample shirt to throw at the 5th Fleet…! 8-(
I hope we don’t test these hypotheses – can Iran launch enough MRBMs to overwhelm AEGIS cruisers and fleet close-in (phalanx) systems.
I seem to remember that none of the US missle-defense systems have ever managed a hit against a target that didn’t have a transponder aboard to assist the interception–at least not until very recently. Moreover, for most if not all of the tests, real missile targets aren’t used and decoys are not included. Failures far outnumber successes. It is a hard problem, akin to trying to shoot down a .30-06 after you can see it but before it hits you.
Also, ballistic missile decoys (“junk”) do not require a lot of missiles. The decoys don’t have to be anything like as heavy or large as a warhead. They just have to reflect radar and/or emit infrared radiation in a manner that confuses the intercept seeker during the infinitessimal moment when an intercept is physical possible. I’ve read that Mylar balloons can be used as decoys.
I seem to remember that 4th of July sparklers make great decoys to distract missiles, but perhaps I jest.
You’re thinking of 1980s tests. AEGIS guided SM3 do hit terminal phase missile. As for counter measures yes chaff deployment does help defeat missile defense, but that isn’t easy to engineer into a re-entry vehicle, pretty much is only MIRV capable missiles that can do it. Which means Russia, China, US and countries that buy missile technology from these countries.
That’s wha they say (I do read my Aviation Week). But I don’t trust what the Complex tells me. I read the same periodical back in the ’80s. They claimed what they claim about Aegis now. Maybe it is true. But they are still claiming to hit a sniper bullet in midair in real life. And there is a lot of money riding on that claim. I’m skeptical.
You also fail to realize that the Arabian Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz also lies well within conventional Iranian Field Artillery range…! 155mm Mortar rounds are able to reach close enough for the Aegis systems…!
Aegis isn’t meant to defend against artillery – Phalanx defends against it as well as anti ship missiles.
Let’s just not go to war against Iran so we don’t test any of these toys out. I also hope we never test them defending Taiwan.
I did a little open source research when a Lockheed employed welfare queen found out his project (Multiple Kill Vehicle) had been canceled. MKV is/was destablizing because it invites improvements in MIRVs to assure some warheads get through. Canceling it is a good thing as neither the US nor Russia can afford a new arms race.
BTW, the welfare queen engineer is now working on IR instrumentation for the Webb telescope. I call him a welfare queen because he’s a wingnut about tax money.
Another BTW, Jim, is the curious case of poison gas. I read somewhere, reliable in my memory but lost to history so no link, that the reason why poison gas is classified as a WMD is because it’s cheap & effective. U.S. lobbied for its inclusion on the list because the powerful U.S. cannot allow poor countries effective means of defense.
In a terrorist context, poison gas could also potentially kill thousands (I’m thinking about amounts in excess of what seems likely they could get, released in NYC subways, but even then the dilution factor works against terrorists) but not millions.
The Kurds didn’t think that gas is always a defensive weapon. Iran and Iraq didn’t use it entirely defensively in their war, either.
But mostly the impetus for banning gas started during the first World War.
I didn’t mean to imply that it was only a defensive weapon. The problem of knowing what is in one’s own brain but not anticipating how communicating it will be received. Anyhow, only meant to put into the thread the curious case of how it got to be classified in WMD. Of course it is an offensive weapon, and your cases illustrate the point that it is cheap & effective.
GAs was only effective because the Kurds weren’t prepared for it. They weren’t even combatants–no gas masks, not notion of what was happening, no medics or decontamination people.
The main agent used–mustard gas–isn’t even lethal for healthy adults. This is, historically, part of the reason for its success. It is an irritant–kind of super tear gas in some repsects like CS. In WW1, they found that it killed very few people, at least in the tactically significant near term. But, in the near term, the dead were left where they fell. One bullet was very lethal and took out one man. Mustard, on the other hand, blinded one man, wrecked his breathing, and made urgent medical care imperative. So, for every man gassed, you needed at least one and more often two combatants to leave the lines and attend to him. It was also realatively safe to handle and transport.
Then and later, mustard was militarilly effective because it disrupted orderly military operations on a scale out of all proportion to the effort demanded. But it was not a weapon of mass destruction. On the contrary.
Exactly, right after it was first used…! ;-)
Gas warfare was reviled so much after WWI, that during WWII the Nazis, despite having Sarin-filled artillery shells didn’t lob them at Allied troops.
I never appreciated lugging around my mask 24/7, nor running out of the CS Chamber with snot dangling and my arms a’flapping like a headless chicken…! ;-)
BTW, the aforementioned lockheed engineer – I call him a welfare queen because he likes to go off on wing nut rants about people living off taxpayers… and he admits Lockheed can’t survive in the open market (eg L1011 airplane couldn’t compete with Boeing or Airbus).
He got re-assigned to IR instrumentation for the Webb space telescope. Welfare I support wholeheartedly.
This morning on NPR they announced that President Obama had met with leaders of Pakistan, India. Npr did not mention Israel. No mention of the nation that most other nations in that part of the world consider the most threatening
Ah, isn’t it special, to see our president jack the planet with war-mongering myths preached from The Bully Pulpit? Is that how it got its name?
I see the dim party has assembled and run off into the non sequitur zone. The conference is just a pretense and cover for more sabre rattling directed at Iran — and other members of the Evil Empire and sundry Evil Doers. Obama has tacitly embraced the legacy Bushlerite pronouncement and still holds on to Bushlerites in key foreign policy positions. Meanwhile, DC denizens have to suffer the insult to injury in this great confabrication.
And now, the Google results, page 1. Note that this is a search for US threatens Iran, no quotes, yet the top result has it backwards:
Is that some crazy shit, or what? Now with quotes:
And if you click through to page 20, you get this:
How much slack is there in a three-word search phrase? And if you go clicking through that, you get to page 40. No nice redirect link, no explanation for the missing results. Just this (got a screen shot this time; first result is an ad):
As I said before, WTF is up with these results? They sure look strange to me.
For example, What common words are there to omit in a freakin’ three-word search phrase? If you can only get to 398, where’s the rest? Most striking, the search phrase is inverted on the very first Google result (from the phrase including quotes).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I’ve gone through and made screen shots of every tenth page. The very last page, for the no-quotes results, is 100, where the search results look like this. Again, no explanation, just a dead-end (I’m including only the top two results):
It’s Google’s new motto: All the results we see fit to show you. Or maybe it’s, We filter your news, so you don’t have to. Or maybe it’s, Do you feel lucky, punk?
Correction/Clarification:
Also: about those “evil” spells with which malicious myth-jackers charm us to hell.
Sometimes, maybe even most often, waiting for them to wear off isn’t an option at all, let alone our best one.. MLK Jr. said, there is such a thing as too late.
As we’re doing with this thread here (I say expansively; hey, brother and sister poets, where TF are you? Isn’t this supposed to be our redeeming virtue: busting the myths that jack us ever further into the Waste Land, setting them straight and clarifying our way forward? this is the time to shine for all true artists), “evil” spells must be broken.
(Damn, I sure know how to kill a conversation. Sorry, JW, didn’t mean to. I thought I was being provocative. Oh well, call it a vocational hazard of mytho-poetic prosaic writing: speechlessness is the highest honor. So, dear dubious readers, cross-examine me, or, as under the law, I’m taking silence for consent.)