Starbucks
And He and I, perplex us,
If positive, 'twere we
Or bore the garden in the
Brain This Curiosity
--Hummingbird, Emily Dickenson
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his Heaven -
All's right with the world
--Pippa Passes, Robert Browning
Is the head dead, yet?
--Dirty Laundry, Don Henley
If positive, 'twere we
Or bore the garden in the
Brain This Curiosity
--Hummingbird, Emily Dickenson
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his Heaven -
All's right with the world
--Pippa Passes, Robert Browning
Is the head dead, yet?
--Dirty Laundry, Don Henley
_________
The St. Pete Times ran a piece today on the Air Force Research Laboratory Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air Force Base:
"Today, the focus is 'nano' and 'bio,' among other "os," says John H. Pletcher, associate director for weapons."Someday, the directorate might demonstrate a nanoenergetic, robo-plane based on a hummingbird's physiology that flies itself into the head of a terrorist drinking thick coffee on a balcony in Beirut, Lebanon, and then explodes.
"'Nano' refers to scale. It's one-billionth of a unit. A nanometer. A nanoliter. A nanogram (Think Nano, Bio, or Robo for Weapons of the Future.)"
I read this while drinking morning tea. Somehow, I could not share in the directorate's glee over this posited scenario. Does this scientist working for the Air Force not understand jurisdiction, and the fact that murdering a "suspected terrorist" is, in fact, murder?
Perhaps if the blast is kept intercranial, and there is not too much splatter, they can reuse the same thick coffee to bait the next suspected terrorist.
"Nano" might also refer to the breadth of one's morality who thinks a hummingbird bomb flying into someone's head while they're drinking "thick" (Turkish?) coffee in Beirut and exploding sounds like a good idea.
This wouldn't be "racial profiling," would it? What with our non-targeted airport searches, surely we've become too p.c. for that business.
--Lisa
Labels: bioweapons, DARPA, munitions directorate eglin, nanotechnology bombs
posted by Lisa at 12:11 AM
2 Comments:
deep into the cold war, when the h-bomb was still brand new bill mauldin had a great cartoon. it showed a visibly distressed pilot reading a newpaper with the headline ballistic missle development will make piloted aircraft obsolete.
right next to the torch jockey were his iconic dogfaces, willie and joe, in their dishevled fatigues. joe is busying himself cleaning a rifle and willie is saying to the pilot:
don't let it worry you none mac, i been obsolete since the crossbow.
they will never come up with a replacement for the plain old grunts. the finest technology in the world is nothing without young men willing to lace up their boots, shoulder their rucks, and go about the business of soldiering. to listen to the long distance killers who think they can phone in a war from a command center in colorado is to find oneself almost believing that the stalemate in the trenches of wwI was broken by biplanes, not tanks and infantry. that every single battle and skirmish of wwII was nothing but a prelude to the dropping of two bombs. we never really did need those grunts to fight their way through the hedgerows of normandy or grapple hand to hand on the coral atolls of the pacific. two bombs, game over.
i once totally dismayed a torch jockey in a saigon bar by saying pilots make headlines. grunts make history.
ooo-rah.
boonie rats, boonie rats
scared, but not alone. . .
MB,
When someone told Norm Thagard at a party that I was a VN vet, he approached me. I quipped that we were winning when I left. He said we really won that war. I said, "Norm, you were a jet jockey, and from where you were it may have looked that way; but it was touch and go where I was." He left the party 5 mins. later. I have never been accused of politesse.
I reckon it's all perspective, but those bombs sure killed a lot of VC lizards, snakes and other vermin, with few casualties to the VC.
I sure wish that I had gotten to go see those bars in Saigon.
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