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Well, it's a bit late but with Fliss being very busy with Stevenage and then the rugby at the weekend,
where England just happened to stuff the Welsh good and proper, we finally got round to
having out Valentines
day meal and we decided to visit TGI Fridays.
I have always associated TGI's with an expensive night out and I was again proved correct as we worked
our way to a bill of £65 for 2 people and that's after deciding not to have cocktails, which
I'm sure would
have pushed it towards to £80 mark, still it was a very nice meal and I was completely stuffed...and for those
that are just plain nosey and want to know what we had, well, we had and sharing chicken platter style thing
for starters, then I had a wicked chicken dish with southern comfort glaze while Fliss had a
normal chicken
dish with pineapple slices mixed in plus we both had two lots of ciabata garlic bread with
cheese and a portion
of onion rings and then for desert we had a sharing chocolate brownie....very nice, washed down with a few
pints of Stella
Can't remember where I found this link now but the following text can be found somewhere at
www.blarf.com
It relates to the threat of biological and nuclear attacks and plays down the hype that surrounds the use of
these weapons and their effects..
It is long but it is a good read if you have the time.
The "Real" Deal about Nuclear, Bio,
and Chem Attacks
by [name removed by toby] (Ret)
Armor Master
Gunner
Mesa, AZ
Since the media has decided to report (and
scare everyone with predictions of) all the chemical, biological, or nuclear
warfare on our turf, I decided to write a paper and keep things in their proper
perspective. I am a retired military weapons, munitions, and training expert.
Lesson number one: In the mid 1990's there were a series of nerve gas
attacks on crowded Japanese subway stations. Given perfect conditions for an
attack less than 10% of the people there were injured (the injured were better
in a few hours) and only one percent of the injured died. 60 Minutes once had a
fellow telling us that one drop of nerve gas could kill a thousand people, well
he didn't tell you the thousand dead people per drop was theoretical. Drill
Sergeants exaggerate how terrible this stuff was to keep the recruits awake in
class (I know this because I was a Drill Sergeant too). Forget everything you've
ever seen on TV, in the movies, or read in a novel about this stuff, it was all
a lie (read this sentence again out loud!)! These weapons are about terror, if
you remain calm, you will probably not die. This is far less scary than the
media and their "Experts," make it sound.
Chemical weapons are
categorized as Nerve, Blood, Blister, and Incapacitating agents Contrary to the
hype of reporters and politicians they are not weapons of mass destruction they
are "Area denial," and terror weapons that don't destroy anything. When you
leave the area you almost always leave the risk. That's the difference; you can
leave the area and the risk; soldiers may have to stay put and sit through it
and that's why they need all that spiffy gear.
These are not gasses,
they are vapours and/or air borne particles. The agent must be delivered in
sufficient quantity to kill/injure, and that defines when/how it's used. Every
day we have a morning and evening inversion where "stuff" suspended in the air
gets pushed down. This inversion is why allergies (pollen) and air pollution are
worst at these times of the day.
So, a chemical attack will have it's
best effect an hour of so either side of sunrise/ sunset. Also, being vapours and
airborne particles they are heavier than air so they will seek low places like
ditches, basements and underground garages. This stuff won't work when it's
freezing, it doesn't last when it's hot, and wind spreads it too thin too fast.
They've got to get this stuff on you, or, get you to inhale it for it to work.
They also have to get the concentration of chemicals high enough to kill or
wound you. Too little and it's nothing, too much and it's wasted.
What I
hope you've gathered by this point is that a chemical weapons attack that kills
a lot of people is incredibly hard to do with military grade agents and
equipment so you can imagine how hard it will be for terrorists.
The
more you know about this stuff the more you realize how hard it is to use.
We'll start by talking about nerve agents. You have these in your house,
plain old bug killer (like Raid) is nerve agent. All nerve agents work the same
way; they are cholinesterase inhibitors that mess up the signals your nervous
system uses to make your body function. It can harm you if you get it on your
skin but it works best if they can get you to inhale it. If you don't die in the
first minute and you can leave the area you're probably gonna live. The
military's antidote for all nerve agents is atropine and pralidoxime chloride.
Neither one of these does anything to cure the nerve agent, they send your body
into overdrive to keep you alive for five minutes, after that the agent is used
up. Your best protection is fresh air and staying calm. Listed below are the
symptoms for nerve agent poisoning.
Sudden headache, Dimness of vision
(someone you're looking at will have pinpointed pupils), Runny nose, Excessive
saliva or drooling, Difficulty breathing, Tightness in chest, Nausea, Stomach
cramps, Twitching of exposed skin where a liquid just got on you.
If you
are in public and you start experiencing these symptoms, first ask yourself, did
anything out of the ordinary just happen, a loud pop, did someone spray
something on the crowd? Are other people getting sick too?
Is there an odours of new mown hay, green corn, something fruity, or camphor where it
shouldn't be?
If the answer is yes, then calmly (if you panic you
breathe faster and inhale more air/poison) leave the area and head up wind, or,
outside. Fresh air is the best "right now antidote". If you have a blob of
liquid that looks like molasses or Kayro syrup on you; blot it or scrape it off
and away from yourself with anything disposable. This stuff works based on your
body weight, what a crop duster uses to kill bugs won't hurt you unless you
stand there and breathe it in real deep, then lick the residue off the ground
for while. Remember they have to do all the work, they have to get the
concentration up and keep it up for several minutes while all you have to do is
quit getting it on you/quit breathing it by putting space between you and the
attack.
Blood agents are cyanide or arsine which effect your blood's
ability to provide oxygen to your tissue. The scenario for attack would be the
same as nerve agent. Look for a pop or someone splashing/spraying something and
folks around there getting woozy/falling down. The telltale smells are bitter
almonds or garlic where it shouldn't be. The symptoms are blue lips, blue under
the fingernails, rapid breathing. The military's antidote is amyl nitride and
just like nerve agent antidote it just keeps your body working for five minutes
till the toxins are used up. Fresh air is the your best individual chance.
Blister agents (distilled mustard) are so nasty that nobody wants to
even handle it let alone use it. It's almost impossible to handle safely and may
have delayed effect of up to 12 hours. The attack scenario is also limited to
the things you'd see from other chemicals. If you do get large, painful blisters
for no apparent reason, don't pop them, if you must, don't let the liquid from
the blister get on any other area, the stuff just keeps on spreading. It's just
as likely to harm the user as the target. Soap, water, sunshine, and fresh air
are this stuff's enemy.
Bottom line on chemical weapons
(it's the same if they use industrial chemical spills); they are intended to
make you panic, to terrorize you, to herd you like sheep to the wolves. If there
is an attack, leave the area and go upwind, or to the sides of the wind stream.
They have to get the stuff to you, and on you. You're more likely to be hurt by
a drunk driver on any given day than be hurt by one of these attacks. Your odds
get better if you leave the area. Soap, water, time, and fresh air really deal
this stuff a knock_out_punch. Don't let fear of an isolated attack rule your
life. The odds are really on your side.
Nuclear bombs. These are the
only weapons of mass destruction on earth. The effects of a nuclear bomb are
heat, blast, EMP, and radiation. If you see a bright flash of light like the
sun, where the sun isn't, fall to the ground!
The heat will be over a
second. Then there will be two blast waves, one out going, and one on it's way
back. Don't stand up to see what happened after the first wave; anything that's
going to happen will have happened in two full minutes.
These will be
low yield devices and will not level whole cities. If you live through the heat,
blast, and initial burst of radiation, you'll probably live for a very very long
time. Radiation will not create fifty-foot-tall women, or giant ants and grass
hoppers the size of tanks. These will be at the most 1 kiloton bombs; that's the
equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT.
Here's the real deal, flying debris and
radiation will kill a lot of exposed (not all!) people within a half mile of the
blast. Under perfect conditions this is about a half mile circle of death and
destruction, but, when it's done it's done. EMP stands for Electro Magnetic
Pulse and it will fry every electronic device for a good distance, it's
impossible to say what and how far but probably not over a couple of miles from
ground zero is a good guess. Cars, cell phones, computers, ATMs, you name it,
all will be out of order.
There are lots of kinds of radiation, you only
need to worry about three, the others you have lived with for years. You need to
worry about "Ionising radiation," these are little sub atomic particles that go
whizzing along at the speed of light. They hit individual cells in your body,
kill the nucleus and keep on going. That's how you get radiation poisoning, you
have so many dead cells in your body that the decaying cells poison you. It's
the same as people getting radiation treatments for cancer, only a bigger area
gets radiated. The good news is you don't have to just sit there and take it,
and there's lots you can do rather than panic. First; your skin will stop alpha
particles, a page of a news paper or your clothing will stop beta particles, you
just gotta try and avoid inhaling dust that's contaminated with atoms that are
emitting these things and you'll be generally safe from them.
Gamma rays
are particles that travel like rays (quantum physics makes my brain hurt) and
they create the same damage as alpha and beta particles only they keep going and
kill lots of cells as they go all the way through your body. It takes a lot to
stop these things, lots of dense material, on the other hand it takes a lot of
this to kill you.
Your defence is as always to not panic. Basic hygiene
and normal preparation are your friends. All canned or frozen food is safe to
eat. The radiation poisoning will not affect plants so fruits and vegetables are
OK if there's no dust on 'em (rinse em off if there is). If you don't have
running water and you need to collect rain water or use water from wherever,
just let it sit for thirty minutes and skim off the water gently from the top.
The dust with the bad stuff in it will settle and the remaining water can be
used for the toilet which will still work if you have a bucket of water to pour
in the tank.
Finally there's biological warfare. There's not much to
cover here. Basic personal hygiene and sanitation will take you further than a
million doctors. Wash your hands often, don't share drinks, food, sloppy kisses,
etc., ... with strangers. Keep your garbage can with a tight lid on it, don't
have standing water (like old buckets, ditches, or kiddie pools) laying around
to allow mosquitoes breeding room. This stuff is carried by vectors, that is
bugs, rodents, and contaminated material. If biological warfare is so easy as
the TV makes it sound, why has Saddam Hussein spent twenty years, millions, and
millions of dollars trying to get it right? If you're clean of person and home
you eat well and are active, you're gonna live.
Overall preparation for
any terrorist attack is the same as you'd take for a big storm. If you want a
gas mask, fine, go get one. I know this stuff and I'm not getting one and I told
my Mom not to bother with one either (how's that for confidence). We have a
week's worth of cash, several days worth of canned goods and plenty of soap and
water. We don't leave stuff out to attract bugs or rodents so we don't have
them.
These people can't conceive a nation this big with this much
resources. These weapons are made to cause panic, terror, and to demoralize. If
we don't run around like sheep they won't use this stuff after they find out
it's no fun. The government is going nuts over this stuff because they have to
protect every inch of America. You've only gotta protect yourself, and by doing
that, you help the country.
Finally, there are millions of caveats to
everything I wrote here and you can think up specific scenarios where my advice
isn't the best. This letter is supposed to help the greatest number of people
under the greatest number of situations. If you don't like my work, don't nit
pick, just sit down and explain chemical, nuclear, and biological warfare in a
document around three pages long yourself. This is how we the people of the
United States can rob these people of their most desired goal, your terror.
O.k., just a few things that have happened this week that I feel like sharing with you...
Well, Valentines Day has been and gone and I have decided that it's worse having
someone and not being
able to spend Valentine's Day with them than it is to just not have anyone, as most of my friends know,
Fliss is in London overseeing the opening of a new Flares club in Stevenage and will not be back till
Thursday, a total of 10 days in all, so I have had to spend all this time on my lonesome with just the
dog to keep me company.
I read with interest the other day in one of the daily rags (The Sun) about Rhubarb being the
elixir of life!!!
They reckon that the humble Rhubarb could in fact cure ailments like stomach problems, cancer and heart
disease and that it can lower blood cholesterol...so lookout for a new brand of tasty tablets on the market
like Rhubarb crumble flavour or rhubarb and Custard flavour..a sure fire way to get kids to start popping
pills that don't leave you foaming at the mouth..
And yet another drug on the market, that being Uprima, the rival to Viagra, has been found to work on women
just as effectively as men, stimulating the brain as opposed to the blood supply as many women suffer more
from lack of libido than sexual function, so I will of course be ordering a few for me and a couple hundred for the wife...
On a sadder note is that on Friday afternoon a young girl of 14 was knocked down and killed about 200 yards from my house, she had been dropped of from school by her school bus and ran across the road with a friend and was hit by a double decker bus...very sad.
I have no intention on finishing on a sad note though so I thought I would give you my limited opinion of
the film Daredevil, that I went to see on Thursday.
Generally a good film, reminded me allot of Batman when that first hit the screens, very dark and moody with
strong overtones of revenge fuelling our hero's motivation, but still with a lot of
light-hearted humour so
as not to become to depressing..all in all a good film but I think they went overboard with his ability to
jump from building to building, he seems to have acquired Spiderman's enhanced
strength when I thought all his abilities were in his head i.e. heightened
senses and a form of sonar that he uses to see...not the ability to
'jump building in a single bound'
Anyway, that's enough from me..................................END OF LINE..........
Bugger, just heard about the Space Shuttle Columbia breaking up over Texas after lift-off, NASA lost contact with the Shuttle at about 2:00pm U.K time, not that I actually care much but the last time this happened I think it put the skids on the space program for quite a while
Well I finally got round to seeing Nemesis at the cinema and I thought it was quite good,
I thought it was better than Insurrection anyway which was pretty pants but this one stands on it's own as
a watchable film
It's Flares Cardiff's official birthday
tonight and it's going to be a busy one so I guess I'll stay in bed
all day tomorrow
Wow, long time between updates but with a very good reason,
as you can see...the entire site has had an overhaul to bring
it up to date with the year 2003, don't worry, it's still a crap
site..just with a bit more polish.
What do you think to
the colours, i know they look a bit 'gay' but my sites have
always been in black or something like that so i thought i
would try some pastell colours instead...easy on the eye's.
My thanks go out to Matt who, unbeknowest to him, did help
with this site.
I did not steal any code but i did use his code
as a reference when i hit the preveberale wall which i'm happy to
say was not that often.
To the right you will see a chatbox,
feel free to use it as it won't cost you anything and it don't
cost me anything either.
If you spot any broken links then please let me know, either via the chatbox or e-mail...Thanks.
Happy new year to everyone out there, sorry it took so long but I've been soooooooooooooo busy and I'm working on updating this site for a 2003 look so I will be a bit preoccupied with that, my mates came over to Cardiff on New Years Eve and had a lot of fun (by the looks of it anyway) and I have a few photo's to put up..........Thanks to Jeff Adler for this link http://firsttimeevolution.com/ , he seems to think it worthy of inclusion in the links page so that's what I'll do.
The next two tracks of DB's album are up, so check them out.