Yesterday, I hung around late at work for a bit, then made a detour out of my way to attend the Saint Paul Police Department’s “open house” at the Eastern District station.

This is one of a handful of open-to-the-public events the SPPD do every year, in the guise of community outreach. The goal is a noble one, of course - develop a rapport with the local community, earn the trust and respect of people in the neighborhood, and be “good neighbors”. Like a lot of community outreach efforts, I have my doubts about how well they actually work.

The Eastern District station is an old brick building that was once part of the Hamm’s brewery, a major employer on Saint Paul’s east side for about a century, until it closed in the 1990s. The “open house” was held in their garage, a large and very spartan concrete space with not a lot of light and not a lot of ventilation. Arrayed for public viewing were examples of most of the vehicles the SPPD owns - from a mobile command post to an EOD disposal trailer to a motorcycle with sidecar to… one of four EOD robots. (If you’re a military history buff, you might also be interested in the department’s oldest actively serving vehicle - an ex-USAF armored car.) The SWAT team was there to show off their body armor and weapons (AR-15/MP-5/40mm grenade launchers/.40cal Glocks). A K9 officer was there with his partner.

I hung around for a few minutes, talked to a couple of people - the officers were all very friendly, and extremely happy to answer questions - took a few really blurry photos with my cellphone, and left.

Here’s what I observed in the thirty minutes or so I was there:
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Spammers are evil. Spam is evil.

Over the weekend, some enterprising spammer managed to ramp this up to new heights hitherto unheard of by me.

Sadly, it was probably completely unintentional on his part.

It all started Saturday afternoon, when i received an e-mail in one of my inboxes informing me that I’d been added to a Google Group with a completely meaningless name - asfdsafdasdf, or somesuch. I didn’t pay a whole lof ot attention, because it looked like spam.

Fifteen minutes later, well…
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I recently wanted to purchase something online from a company in a far foreign land. This is not atypical; I regularly receive packages in the mail bearing strange and exotic postmarks from faraway lands, and do regular business with companies on four continents.

Normally I use Paypal. Or Google Checkout.

This particular merchant - in a country infamous for it’s credit card fraud, I might add - only accepted bank transfers, Western Union transfers, and credit cards.

On a $25 transaction - what I wanted to pay - my bank charges $49.95 for an overseas transfer, and Western Union fees aren’t a whole lot better. So, if I wanted what these folks were offering, I’d need to use a credit card.

I only have one credit card, however - a credit/debit card tied to my checking account. Having that compromised by thieves would be… extremely inconvenient.

So, what’d I do? Got another credit card, that’s what. And in the process discovered a very, very interesting opportunity to engage in, if not anonymous, at least pseudonymous banking.
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Last month, an immensely forgettable group of boffins released a hopefully-doomed-to-obscurity 92-page report (7.9MB PDF). The Report of the Joint Defense Science Board / Threat Reduction Advisory Committee Task Force on The Nuclear Weapons Effects National Enterprise - and how’s that for a ponderously long name? - argues not-very-convincingly that America’s ability to engage in military operations in a nuclear environment has atrophied - that’s a word they seem really infatuated with, by the way - since the glory years of the Cold War. This may or may not actually be true; keep in mind that the U.S. military has never actually operated in a nuclear environment, so all the nostalgic bluster about Cold War-era readiness and capabilities is at least partially wishful thinking.

The Task Force further alleges that this is a ginormous problem that poses an imminent danger to capitalism, democracy, and the American Way of Life(TM) in part because our conventional military forces are just so gosh-darned awesome that the only way a deranged third-world tyrant could ever hope to defeat us is through the use of nuclear weapons.

This is the point, dear reader, where I sincerely hope you just did the whole facepalm thing.

But wait. It gets worse.
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I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend lately in intelligence products, particularly law enforcement intelligence products. The trend is a distinct tendency to try and tie just about any criminal activity, in however tenuous a fashion, to the manufacturing of homemade bombs.

I really don’t know why this is, but it’s the sort of immediately-post-9/11 idiocy that I thought we’d all moved on from. I guess I was wrong.

Here’s a real example - this May 2010 briefing on synthetic marijuana analogues. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, let me hit the highlights of this intelligence product, which was produced by the Ohio Strategic Analysis and Information Center:

1. Various types of herbs, soaked in or sprayed with synthetic THC, are evidently gaining in popularity as a legal alternative to marijuana.
2. Despite the apparently unregulated nature of these materials, CBP has made several seizures of shipments entering the country from overseas.
3. The report provides no information about the domestic availability of the main precurson - the synthesized THC - and does not indicate that there is any evidence of domestic production.

Nonetheless…
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