Several weeks ago, two bloggers who had been hired by the
John Edwards for President campaign became the
target of criticism by Bill Donohue, the leader of a religious organization called the Catholic League. One of those two bloggers is Melissa McEwan, who uses the pen name
Shakespeare's Sister on her blog of the same name. Ms. McEwan is a friend of mine. We became acquainted because we were both commenters at
AMERICAblog, and we ultimately began our own work as Weblog publishers and writers at about the same time. Ms. McEwan, in fact, reached out to find me after we had stopped commenting at
AMERICAblog: she wanted me to know about her new blog, and she wanted to know what I was doing. It was through her generous effort, then, that we became reunited in our separate but mutual efforts to speak out against the Bush Administration, the religious zealots, the neo-conservatives, and all the others who have made this century open in such a grim and awful way.
In Mr. Donohue's inflammatory press release condemning the two women Mr. Edwards had hired, he declared that the Edwards campaign "has no choice but to fire them immediately." His press release and subsequent comments deriding Ms. McEwan gave members of his organization (and perhaps others sympathetic to his concerns) what they perceived as license to flood her with e-mail, some of which was violently threatening, hateful, menacing, and altogether unworthy of anyone who would pose to speak on behalf of an organization affiliated with any Christian church committed to the New Covenant. Whether or not Mr. Donohue accepts responsibility for the cyber-violence his condemnation of her brought about, he was not merely the catalyst; he was the
instigator.
The much-touted constitutional protection of citizen speech is a right to the extent that the Constitution does not recognize the government's role in restricting it. This leaves to the federal legislature, the several states, the civil society, and the courts such responsibility as necessarily exists for defining the distinction between speech and conduct and the setting forth the boundaries where speech becomes actionable under civil and/or criminal law. Speech that is an incitement to riot is not without sanction because it interferes with the compelling interest of the government in maintaining civil order; speech that endangers others in demonstrable ways is subject to scrutiny because of the compelling interest of the government in protecting its citizens. Where the line is drawn is always a matter of controversy, and that line shifts over time as new dimensions of speech and innovative experiments in existing modes of communication arise.
Mr. Donohue cannot simply declare that his was protected speech: demonstrably, it led at a minimum to civil assault upon Ms. McEwan, this being the case because "assault" involves a reasonable belief on the part of the victim that she is in imminent, personal danger. Mr. Donohue had created a sense in his followers that theirs was a threatened—indeed,
persecuted—lot and, because of the perilous condition of their right to worship as they wished, they would consequentially have not merely the option of reactive violence to perceived threats, but
compelling religious duty to react as necessary to protect their religion.
I shall not leave to the likes of men like Mr. Donohue their sentiment that they may continue to terrorize those whose voices are strongly contrary to their own. As a matter of fact and evidence, he was the proximate initiator of events that led to cyber-violence. Whether or not he believes that his god will reward him for what he loosed upon Ms. McEwan and the other blogger by describing them as "trash-talking bigots," responsible agents of the civil society must take notice and respond within the bounds of law and efficacy; and ultimately, that civil society, through its responsible, concerned agents, must compel both statutory and common law to address those who would use the Internet to incite individuals to become a menacing mob.
As an important note with regard to the above, I have found no instance of an official statement by the Catholic League condemning the threatening e-mail messages received by Ms. McEwan. Neither have I found an official statement by that organization ordering its member to cease such activities. Indeed, I have found no spoken or written evidence that any official of the League took advantage of what was happening to counsel the membership on rightful action in accordance with Christian teachings. Should such firm, resolute, and forceful efforts to stop the mob violence have been widely promulgated, I shall amend this article to include praise of that work.
Cyber-attacks come in many forms. Some, like distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and spambot slams, are highly technical and seemingly impersonal, although some of them are not nearly as random as might first appear. My servers have labored occasionally under these types of assaults. The cyber-attack on Ms. McEwan was far more obviously personal and infinitely more frightening; but it was, at its essence, the very same type of strategy with a very similar objective: swarm and silence the target.
Mr. Donohue's followers who went after Ms. McEwan were extraordinary in their numbers. In that way, they were just like the multiple sources in a distributed denial of service attack; and similarly, their objective was to drive Ms. McEwan from a position of visibility and influence.
In the end, they succeeded, but only nominally: Ms. McEwan's voice lives on as Shakespeare's Sister; and, if anything, Mr. Donohue has made her influence greater if unofficial. She need no longer concern herself with parsing her language to meet the needs of John Edwards as he fashions himself a respectable candidate who is "
personally offended" by what he otherwise
should have tolerated were he to really want strong, feminist thinking within his inner circle of advisers and assistants.
For my own part, I am relieved that I no longer have to consider mincing words about John Edwards, who thinks he is centering himself politically even as he panders to interests in ways that I find altogether troubling. While I most likely would not have held my criticism of Mr. Edwards even if Ms. McEwan had continued to serve as a technical adviser to his campaign, I now no longer have to worry about whether or not she would take flak for continuing to associate with me as I escalated my own critical rhetoric.
Distributed denial of service cyber-attackers and the vitriolic e-mail attackers are of the same breed: They are locusts. Stopping one of them does no good; stopping a dozen or a hundred of them is useless; stopping a thousand of them is trivial. They just keep coming and coming. It is not in their individual actions that they do their damage, but rather in their collective menace, their smothering erosion, that they cause their great harm.
They swarm, and in the time of their swarming, the victim believes that the onslaught will never end absent his or her full-scale retreat.
Long before I came to be a writer here in this venue, I wrote on message boards. My words were far harsher than they are in this time of my life. When finally the time came that I had offended several who could call the locusts down upon me, I backed down and completely disappeared from the Internet. There was nothing else I could do. More importantly from a personal perspective, I had the ungodly, awful, penetrating sense that the attacks upon me would never end and that, sooner or later, one or more of those violent people writing to me and about me were going to find me and kill me. At one point, I wished that it would happen just so the dread of waiting would be at its end. Every light shining in my window at night was the end coming; every time the phone rang, it might be one of the maniacs; every car that followed me for too long on a darkened road was the end about to happen.
Was all of this my own, personal, delusional paranoia? In fact, I
was followed late at night on several nights; property of mine
was destroyed; and other, much worse things that I shall not share were visited upon me. I literally, honestly wanted to be at the end of myself as a living person. I had been humiliated, I had been wrecked. Most tellingly, all the moral support, all the kind and generous words I received, meant
nothing.
And, of course, I was silenced.
The locusts swarmed; and thereby, those who had summoned them won.
Never again, though.
Let me make it entirely clear that, while I can take care of myself—I have made it one of my principal life endeavors—to ensure my ability to strike back destructively against cyber-attackers, this is not what other potential victims should have to do. Progressive bloggers, both individually and collectively, should not have to live with an intimidating sense that they might be targeted, attacked, and wrecked by Right-wing secular and religious zealots. Extremists are an expanding ball of fire that just keeps right on billowing with every drop of blood they draw. Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Bill Donohue, and dozens of other significant and minor invokers of the swarm thrive on their minions who pay them to spew hate and who would gleefully leap into the air to join a swarm against some defenseless victim.
Countervailance against the swarm is not within the scope of most individual bloggers. It must be more than a group effort; it must, in fact, be an
official effort of a scope, funding, and gravity commensurate with the threat the Right-wing zealots pose to civil society.
That means those who would benefit from our progressive voices, Democrats and moderate Republicans alike, must take responsibility for ensuring that the netroots, which will become more and more important to them as time goes by, can function without fear of cyber-attacks.
Chet Scoville of
Vanity Press recently published a post,
cross-posted at
Big Brass Blog, in which he cited an
article by Jeffrey Feldman advocating the formation by the Democratic National Committee of a full-fledged task group dedicated to "...protecting Democratic candidates... from the cancer of organized Republican smear." Specific responsibilities of the task group are laid out, including "Republican smear campaign forecasts; Status of ongoing (smear) campaigns; Framing and Keyword analysis; Background research (presumably on known and suspected smear instigators); Strategy and tactic suggestions; Internet activist reports..."
Mr. Scoville adds to Mr. Feldman's fine list the importance of every Democratic campaign having its own version of this task group. This is important because the work of the national group would have to be articulated and augmented by any particular candidate to operationalize meaningful action and response to smear campaigns. Invoking the model and terminology of Robert Altemeyer (recently
discussed by Minstrel Boy of
Harp and Sword), who has
extensively researched what he calls "Right-wing Authoritarians" and "Social-Dominance Oriented" individuals, I commented on Mr. Scoville's article in part as follows:
The Southern Poverty Law Center offers the model for cataloguing, monitoring, and tracking hate groups. What is being proposed in your article seems at first blush far more ambitious, if only because the source of these hate attacks appears more ubiquitous. Actually, it is not: the so-called "Right-Wing Authoritarian Followers" comprise maybe about a quarter of the population of this country, but the overwhelming majority of them are dormant unless harangued into action.
We have seen this before: huge numbers of RWA-F lie dormant until a Social Dominance-Oriented/Right-Wing Authoritarian (SDO/RWA) "double high" (as such a person is called in the literature) draws them to action. In historical terms, we saw this with a certain group of evangelicals who were brought to bear by Jerry Falwell; we saw it with Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum (with the Equal Rights Amendment); and we saw it again several times in the '90s, and one last time quite starkly with the thugs who laid siege to the facilities where Florida election officials were trying to commence a recount of the 2000 Presidential Election votes.
The RWA Followers are not dangerous unless and until they are bid to action by a small core of leader types, generally either financially well-off, themselves (as with Melton Scaif), or capable of generating large amounts of money (as with Pat Robertson, Sun Myung Moon, and Paul Weyrich).
As far as mitigating their influence is concerned, to some extent, it is a matter of open exposure. The RWA Followers are actually rather immune to public humiliation, but some (not all, but some) of the SDOs that set them in motion are fairly sensitive to the limelight, especially when it turns against them and they cannot cloister themselves against awareness of it.
To the extent that wide-ranging exposure of their action is not enough to slow them down, though, the next step is to move against them in the courts. This includes suits alleging torts, particularly torts of interference with business relationships. It also includes suits alleging defamation. Finally, it also includes an all-out effort to bring civil RICO charges to bear on them and their lieutenants.
To this last point, there will come a time when we must clarify in our own minds that this isn't "just politics"; this is, instead, an organized criminal enterprise that has spanned well more than a decade and used hundreds of millions of dollars to the purpose not of benefiting the democratic experience of these United States, but instead of interfering with and degrading it.
However, that comment having been made, this work, as important as it is, cannot be the extent of dealing with those who would cause the violence Ms. McEwan suffered. It really doesn't even
address what can happen to progressive bloggers
unless the umbrella of protection extends past the candidates, themselves, and reaches deep into the progressive Blogosphere.
In fact, an official task group at the national level cannot succeed unless that task group uses as one of its primary resources the bloggers who could very well be at the shock front of any smear campaign. We are the ones who see the ebbs and flows of trolls; we are the ones who get the e-mails that we actually open and read; we are the ones who look at our hit counters for nuances of increased traffic; we are the ones who read the details of our incoming visitor traffic reports, meaning we can often see the source that has referenced trolls to our sites.
And, as time goes on, it is we the progressive bloggers who will know far better than candidates and their suit-and-tie type of technical advisers the terrain here in cyberspace. It is we who will know the lay of the land and the threat level presented by trolls and other harsh commenters. It is we who will take the messages of presidential candidates and echo them across the electronic world. Unlike the mainstream media, which for the most part uses the Internet as an after-market publication platform, we bloggers are often the wells from which arise into the electronic information stream the character and quality of candidates through what they are saying that the mainstream media might very well be trivializing or even ignoring.
But it goes beyond merely "tracking" Right-wing smear campaign organizers. Unless and until the necessary resources are brought to bear in law enforcement actions by those who know how to use such instrumentalities, the Right will just keep on calling the swarms.
That means the DNC or whoever would form a full-blown task group has to deal with men like Mr. Donohue by filing complaints with the IRS for the violation by the Catholic League of prohibitions on issue advocacy by 501(c)(3) groups. That means aggregating threatening e-mail messages on behalf of targeted bloggers and moving that menacing literature to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That means having attorneys who can issue letters to the smear campaign organizers laying the blame at their feet and demanding that they issue public statements ordering their followers to stop. That means, when those smear campaign initiators smirk and say there's nothing they can do about it, hauling them into civil court and hammering away at them until they get tired of the litigation pain and learn how to control themselves when they write and speak. That means fighting back
as a concerted, sustained, unrelenting, opposing force.
That's how you stop the locusts.
If the Democratic National Committee and the candidates haven't the interest to provide for our protection under some national task force dedicated to dealing with smear campaigns, then the DNC and the Democratic candidates have done themselves every bit as much harm as they have allowed to happen to us. And if the Democratic Party and those candidates believe they can come to us thinking we'll hand them free air time, they simply must understand that we will accommodate them only to the extent that they grasp our significance to the world of tomorrow. If they cannot bring themselves to stand up for us, they should not be surprised when we deploy our own net of defenses and then ask them, "Where exactly were you when the locusts came to pick us off one by one?"
Likely, the Democratic National Committee will protect itself, and each of the major Democratic candidates will protect himself or herself. Those candidates will still come to us, hat in hand, expecting us to speak favorably of them and use our valuable resources to their own political gain. In that event, they will find this: learning how to survive in a world of hate—be it on the violent streets of urban America or in the streams of cyber-violence in the online world—means learning how to grow up strong, mean, and unforgiving, especially of cowards who could have helped but would rather stand in the bright sunlight waving to the adoring crowds of sheep.
Whatever choices are made by others, though, one thing is certain for us, the progressive bloggers out here in the field.
The locusts shall not prevail.The Dark Wraith has spoken.
Published 3/16/2007 01:27:00 AM
<< 31 Comments Total
From this morning's CNN.com top stories, we have the article, "Plame to testify on Capitol Hill," in which we find this absolute jewel as the opening sentence:
"Democratic lawmakers are eager to hear from outed CIA operative Valerie Plame as they try to make political fodder out of the 2003 leak scandal."
Dear God, good readers, hasn't CNN heard by now that it's okay to stop this?
Well, at the very least, I've learned from past experiences with CNN.com that I have to do a screen capture of an article of theirs when they're being naughty because of the possibility that the article will vanish once they've done their damage.
The Dark Wraith is grateful to CNN.com for legitimizing the art of propaganda.
Good morning Mr. Wraith,
Given what is going on with flogger I'm assuming you're more than aware of this trend: mogger balware. If nothing else it may give some of your readers a better understanding of why it is time to leave hogger behind.
Well hey, at least it's Friday right?
"...people who try to impersonate a neo-con on the run from a noose..."
These neo-cons of which you speak; are they the ones walking around and saying,
"No noose is good noose"?
(Gotta quit askin' questions like this; almost hurt myself fallin' outta my chair.)
The Dark Wraith remains unamused.
Thanks DW, for another amazing rant (as usual) which hit on so many great points. In fact, you hit on so many great points that while reading you, I often think to myself: "hell yeah, that's right, Amen brother!, how bout that, F yeah, me too, uh huh, woah-didn't know that..", etcetera, etcetera. Damn DW, I want to comment on so many things that what happens is you overwhelm me and I often wind up commenting on little to nothing. (How, I wish I could tell it like that.)
Anyhoo, thanks for not inviting me into the nude breakdancing group. I mean it. LOL Though I might watch if you get some hot progressive chics like somewaterytart and Litbrit; and perhaps even mediagirl, Pissed off Patricia or BlondeSense - though I don't know what they look like.
And (everyone) please download Volume 2 of my video series which is now available.
RCG Volume 2. Title: Banned and Censored Video Clips and more. Runtime: 00:53min. 32 sec.
Available here: http://www.demonoid.com/files/details/1056181/1840667/
Here is a tinyurl, just in case the previous doesn't show correctly. http://tinyurl.com/3azzgn
As long as the average American finally figures out who is to blame, all is good. If that average American finally figures out who is to hang, all is even better than good.
~The Dark Wraith
I can't say I'm convinced that it will pan out that way, seeing how most average Americans supported the lynching and rape of Iraq. The on-going rape must still enjoy significant support among same said average Americans, else we would be pulling troops out of Iraq rather than planning to send more in.
If average Americans were to hang those truly responsible, more than a few average Americans would themselves be hung. For this reason, I expect them to falsely assign blame elsewhere rather than place responsibility where it properly belongs.
Hello again - one and all. Since this is an open thread, I'd like to quote something that I just read on Mike Ruppert's site, fromthewilderness.com. It's shocking and it made me think of the "locusts" post and so... it's below.
"I want to repeat something I have been saying in private emails over the last month. Personally, I am through forever with investigative journalism and public lecturing. I am leaving public life. It is my hope that by continuing to repeat this sincere position that many of the inexplicable difficulties which have dominated my life over the past months will ease." Mike Ruppert.
Mike is currently hospitalized in Toronto and "his adrenal system is severely damaged and there may be toxicity of the liver". Hmmm...Sounds to me like Mike is asking those who may have poisoned him to lay off and he will go away.
anyhoo, I'm nodding off. Here's a link if you want to read the rest of the story. http://tinyurl.com/2og4fr
G'night DW and everyone...
Good morning Dark Wraith,
Damn I've missed you. Work has been consuming me for the past two week, so DWF was my first stop this morning! (Well, after checking out whatever damage I inflicted on the Virtual Bar at Shakes' last night.)
Good morning, konagod.
You had me a little worried there with that post you published a few days back. It looked like a classic case of "life whip-saw": first, firm plans to make a major life change; then an unexpected twist that makes the firm plans go away. The good news is that it sounds like you've secured a great job, and as a bonus, txrad gets hired at the same place.
And now you're still publishing posts regularly, so at least one part of the universe is in good order.
Now, if only we could get the remainder of the universe to see it our way...
The Dark Wraith is working on the problem.
Good morning, rcg.
In the days when I was getting beaten into the ground in an earlier cyberspace persona, I was thoroughly convinced that I would never again even so much as go near any kind of interactive environment on the Internet.
One of the worst parts of the experience was that I kept trying to do "reality checks": you know, where you tell yourself that, rationally speaking, no one's really out to get you, and it's all in your mind, and you don't want to be some obsessed 'conspiracy theory' kook, and everything's really okay. Those reality checks finally stopped working, and my loss of confidence in a broadly "rational," "objective" kind of look at how things can be took a severe diminishment. I even had to dredge up several events from when I was quite young and let go of my own dismissal of what I had seen and what I had known. The journey got bad because I had to look at both the here and now as it was really unfolding at the same time I had to look at a few things from the past that had tried to define my way of thinking but that I had set aside.
The year-and-a-half to two years I spent writing about the ancient versions of the English language was wonderful therapy. I was able to use a relatively objective base of knowledge to write extensively and even creatively, and the participants in the forum were not, for at least a very long time, particularly nasty in the sense that no one would actually hunt down and harm someone with whom there was disagreement. That finally began to change somewhat, and the ugliness--particularly that of the moderator of the forum as she dealt with some people--ultimately prompted me to leave.
Something else was a factor in my departure, too. A writer doing research for a historical fiction novel came to the message board and asked me if I had any idea what a certain Old Norse word--a proper noun--meant. The possible translation was so odd that I, myself, began to look into the story about which the lady was planning to write. Although only shards of historical documentation exist--and all of those are official writings of Church officials after the time--what emerged was a story that was truly frightful in an eerily subtle kind of way. There I was again: getting myself all wound up into "official" versus "unofficial" and "rational" versus "gut-level" understandings and perceptions of events.
So here I am, and here we are: we see what this Administration has done to the country, we know what are the likely consequences of their venality and incompetence, we know what the legions of the secular and religious Right want to do to our world, and we know very well that we're pretty much, each in his or her own way, screaming our bloody heads off in vain because the overwhelming majority of Americans would prefer to keep their heads in the sand and stick them out only when they, in their own personal lives, feel a little kick in the butt from the jackboot that's been kicking everybody's butt.
In other words, here we are; and here I am, back in a place with which I am all too familiar.
But at least we have our own blogs, rcg. That's a good thing.
Until they take those away from us.
That would be a bad thing.
The Dark Wraith has prattled long enough for now.
DW,
"The GOP is the party of fiscal distain."
I won't yet abandon hope.
Who knows? "Tripping the light fantastic" did wonders for Belushi and Aykroyd.
All hail Terpsichore!
Anybody have a good cheap studio out there?
BTW, I've been to a number of levels of Hell and usually did my drinking and had good times AFTER coming back. But it sounds like an offer I couldn't refuse.
A one and a two...
Off to the hospital again, be back later this PM. Things seem to be going OK.
A minor note is in order this evening.
I have been working on the new version of The Dark Wraith Forums. I think I can give a fair estimate that sometime on Wednesday evening, if you come to this blog, you'll see it on its new platform. It will look a little different, but not all that much.
I am now in the part of the project where I am making it look the same as what you see here except for the parts I intentionally mean to look different (or simply cannot make the same).
If you happen to visit at the wrong time on Wednesday, you might see some really odd things going on, but those will be temporary. For example, I'll have to deploy the alternate color themes (there will be two alternatives, I hope) in the main page here to perfect them, so you might for a while see a color scheme that looks decidedly non-black.
A few minor alteration efforts will survive the official change-over. I can do those (or more accurately, try to do those) at leisure over the next week or two. The main goal is to get the Website completely functional in the new platform so I can completely, fully, and permanently cut off Blogger's access to my domain. That will, unfortunately, mean that comments will be closed in articles that were published under the Blogger platform. The articles, themselves, will survive, as will the comments posted prior to the switch-over; but because comments publish to those articles using Blogger's commenting system, there will no longer be any facility for adding new comments once the Blogger connection is finally (and with prejudice aforethought) terminated.
So, anyway, if this site looks strange on Wednesday, the problem is only temporary. Just how temporary any strangeness will be depends entirely upon how quickly I can repair mistakes I find once I go live on the new platform.
The Dark Wraith bawls, "Hang on, Nellie, we're goin' down the mountain road, an' th' brakes ain't workin'!"
Good Afternoon Dark Wraith,
The Dark Wraith bawls, "Hang on, Nellie, we're goin' down the mountain road, an' th' brakes ain't workin'!"
I've been feeling like that since the republic party stole the 2000 election!
Good luck, best wishes and you know I sympathize.
Happy coding!
I finally switched, but then I do not have the awesome computer abilities you obviously have.
But I don't like the way they forced the issue.
Damn it. I see I need to make a beer run for the Wraith; it gets awful quiet around here when there's no suds for Peter and Blackdog.
Best of luck with the transition Dark Wraith. I feel your pain.
Well, good friends, I am sitting here with a mystery on my hands. Building a template that looks nearly identical to the one you're seeing right now was one thing, and making it a three-column affair was quite trying, which I always expect.
But now, I've got the stupid thing almost perfect except for one thing: it looks right on my computer and on a whole bunch of others I've used to view it, but when I look at it from several of the computers at school—nice, fast Dells with 17" flat-screen monitors at the very standard 1024x768 resolution—the confounded center column is pushed down to the bottom, but I'm not seeing this on ANY OTHER COMPUTERS ANYWHERE, EVEN ON THE ONES ELSEWHERE CONFIGURED IDENTICALLY!!!
It's supposed to be working looking nice at any resolution of 1024x768 or higher, and it does, except for when I look at it on those several Dell machines.
DumbDells.
I cannot for the life of me figure out what in the Dell is going on.
I'm thinking to myself, "Well, Hell's Dells, maybe I need to start again from scratch and build the three-column thing again from scratch using an alternate architecture." Then again, I keep thinking to myself, "I know I've done the mathematics correctly, and I need to stand firm with what I know is right, come Dell or high water."
But I'll tell you all one thing right now: there's got to be a special place in Dell for computer designers that send incompetent hacks like me into fits of bad pun-making.
The Dark Wraith is on the verge of Dell-irium.
Kinda had me worried there with your ranting and raving about Dell, for I thought that perhaps they might seek some sort of vengeance. But then I sorta remembered an old saying. Something about,
"Dell hath no fury..."
Good Morning Dark Wraith,
If it was a laptop and you sent it back for service, it could go to Dell in a handbasket.
The Dark Wraith fears that he has started one Delluva punfest.
"Do not ask for whom the Dell foils,
it foils for thee."
*Groans at the puns and clicks quickly away.
Alright, so maybe there were some chuckles on reading so many, but I'm not going to admit it.
Wow, that was one Dell-of-a post!
Alright, so maybe there were some chuckles on reading so many, but I'm not going to admit it.
Not even if Dell freezes over?
Here's one network the Dark Wraith won't use come dell or high water:
8 Signs Giigle is Planning to Build a National Wireless Network
grr.
"Dark Wraith said...
grr."
Ye Shall Reap As Ye Have Sown.
And, from :
(bold emph.-PoLT
State officials in New York have detected a substance used both as a rat poison and anti-cancer drug, Aminopterin, in samples of suspect pet food.
No explanation was given as to how the poison entered the food or when in the process the dog and cat foods became contaminated. Neither State nor Federal law enforcement agencies have indicated any criminal investigations are planned.
According to Wikipedia, Aminopterin (4-aminopteroic acid) is a 4-amino analog of folic acid. It is a substance with properties that suppress the immune system (lower anti infection system strength in the body) and is commonly used in chemotherapy.
From Merriam-Webster Online:
One entry found for pterin.
Main Entry: pter·in
Pronunciation: 'ter-&n
Function: noun
Etymology: International Scientific Vocabulary pter- (from Greek pteron wing) + 1-in; from its being a factor in the pigments of butterfly wings
: any of various compounds that contain the bicyclic ring system characteristic of pteridine
I have Ph.D in Conspiracy Theory but I'm kinda scant when it comes to biology. Biology majors are welcome to reassure me that the Custodians weren't just testing the "food" on animals before they tried it out on humans.
PoLT,
Achtung! Herr Doktor! I think the Chinese are exporting their future.
If they slowly poison all of us, not necessarily with just "poison", starting with the animals, there's gonna be some kinda fear and panic in the streets; just what W wants while he and his friends sip guava juice in Paraguay.
Next it'll be something from Wally-World imported from the land of the panda.
I'm looking at a major rash-causing irritant in knock-off toilet paper!
I think they'll do it just to show us they can be a real pain in the ass.
Back to leaves and stones and twigs!