Smell the revolution
Reading Zodiac, by Neal Stephenson, courtesy of my co-conspirator DeAnander, and I run into a description of diaminobutane, aka putrecine. Protagonist and eco-sabateur Sangamon Taylor is a chemist who makes this stuff… which is the essence of decaying flesh — guaranteed to clear a city block with the right wind conditions, and a busy building in minutes.
Of course, the little wheels in my head went spinning and clicking at this. Problem is, I can’t find anything that says how to make this stuff… which, when you think about it, is the perfect poetic method to bring the essence of the war back home for the most clueless ciudadano.
Think of all the places…. theoretically.
If anyone knows, we’d like to help disseminate this information — strictly as a theoretical matter, of course — and we welcome other stink-bomb formulae as well… theoretically, of course.
One reason I bring this up is that Steve McClure recently sent me a piece from the American Sociological Review, authored by Dough McAdam and Yang Su, entitled “The War at Home: Antiwar Protests and Congressional Voting, 1965 to 1973,” correlating Congressional action on Vietnam with levels of violence associated with the social movements opposing the war.
Here’s the essence of it in a nutshell: Non-violence with non-violent reaction, even with mass actions, spurred more Congressional actions against the war, but they were largely symbolic actions. Actions that were violent, or that provoked violence from the establishment and war-supporters, corresponded to fewer Congressional actions, but they were Congressional actions that were far more substantive in actually putting the brakes on the war. Re-read that carefully. It matters.
Bad smells are not violent; but they are potentially disruptive as hell.
‘Nuff said.
Practical replies welcome.
Disclaimer: This is strictly a theoretical exchange, and the author does not plan to use these substances, nor does he suggest that others do.
Michael:
As long as were just talking theory here…
I read the same book and had the same reaction. While I don’t know about the substance Stephenson talks about I do recall hearing about somthing else; (artificial?) Cougar urine. I don’t remember if it was used by hunters to attract other cats or by ranchers to keep coyote away from their stock but it was reported to be very concentrated and smell very bad. Not quite the same thing but somthing that was supposedly available commercialy, unless that old hunter (rancher?) who told me was just blowing smoke.
I was provoked to day dream about how one might deliver such a substance and came up this idea; If one were to fill an ice cube tray 3/4 full and waited until it was partially frozen one could insert a hypo through the top, extract the water, replace it with this stinky stuff and top up the cubes. Once they were completly frozen they would form nice little packets that could be put into place but wouldn’t actually start to smell untill they melted. This was, of course, just a day dream so I have no idea if it is practical or not and the point is moot since it is all for entertainment purposes anyway. The were some very entertaining day dreams.
Best, Michael
21 July 2007, 1:49 pmStan:
Yeah, my best stink-bomb story comes from when I was a school kid. My dad, born in 1906, was old-school about things, and he taught me to trap for pin-money when I was very young. In the summer, before the trapping season started (cold weather, thick fur), he produced a special bait-scent.
He’d find a dead skunk in the road, not too damaged, and excise the “scent sack” from the unfortunate creature, placing it into a Kerr jar. Then he’d add chunks of fish offal (we were very earnest fisherpeople, as my 83-yo Mom is to this day) and place that in the jar with the skunk scent. This concoction was sealed tightly in this canning jar and placed on the roof. Over the warm weeks, the stuff inside cooked down into a viscous whitish substance.
Only open in the open, with a good breeze, because it can cause vomiting.
This was transferred into smaller, sealable containers, and a small twig was ever so slightly touched to the substance and placed near each trap (for raccoons, coyotes, and foxes).
Since the statue of limitations has likely expired at Saint Charles Junior High School, I can now take credit for a partial evacuation there in the 1963-4 school year.
21 July 2007, 2:10 pmskol:
There was an episode of Mythbusters trying to prove whether (iirc) a decomposing pig left in a car for a week would be smellable from a long distance away or whatever (Cadaverine is linked to in that other chemical up top in wiki). Not that I’m suggesting leaving decomposed pigs in cars; it just creates an incredibly unbearable stench. Wet greens left in bags in the sun will decompose anaerobically. And other natural anaerobic processes.
Or you could fill water sprayers with just an unbearable amount of pitchouli, which is like ferrets rolling in used hamster bedding at critical scents :p
Take a lot of hair and set it on fire? That’s not a bad idea, imho.
Also, lysol does not smell good in combination with these things. Ugh. Smell Good + Smell Bad = Smell Worse.
Rancid butter and putrefied cheese will make you butyric acid, which is the main scent in vomit (chain reaction, if you know what I mean).
All that and a fan? Aerosol cartridges, like for whipped cream? (most super-markets have make-your-own whipped cream cartridges)
Dunno how practical that is, per se.
I prefer the smell of frangipani, so don’t look to me like I didn’t do anything but check wikipedia.
otoh, if you take these smells I figure they work on the demonstrators as well as the police, but I’m wondering if a fight reaction (cops) has a different effect with these things as a flight reaction (people being beaten by cops, who I figure can bear a bad scent); I just the effect of adrenaline on things in general.
21 July 2007, 2:32 pmHere’s a short list:
Stench Warfare (article on military practices)
Stink Bombs (wiki)
Les:
Anti-choice activists use a substance called buteric acid to force evacuations of health clinics. This is why most women’s health clinics in the US do not have mail slots in the door. Well, this and bomb scares . . . and anthrax scares.
21 July 2007, 2:46 pmStan:
Using smells “against” people, like cops, might not be the most effective (or smart, from the self-preservation standpoint) way to go.
It’s more a monkey-wrenching technique, it seems. Think Federal Buildings and Courthouses and banks and porn houses and the like… clogging up the machinery. Or a vivid object lesson on the smell of war, as in Legislative offices and R/D party headquarters.
Establishing the plans to deploy these odor-devices, as well as secure ways to link public communications to them, might be an on-the-job-training program for Rebellion 101 (sorry to mix metaphors).
War stinks!!!
21 July 2007, 3:28 pmThe Buffalo In Da' Midst:
Butyric acid and Methyl Mercaptan (the smell of leaking natural gas due to mercaptan’s addition as a leak safety feature) are two substance of unknown availabilty…
The former was quite popular in NY during the 1960s campaign to force the power company, Con Edison, to retool their power plants in the NYC area to gas/oil fire instead of coal.
A small vial placed to be crushed or knocked over/leaked was sufficient to stench a whole floor of a skyscraper… smelled like ‘puke’.
21 July 2007, 3:28 pmStan:
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of all humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all human beings everywhere are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to supposedly secure these rights, Governments are instituted among humans, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, and not from elections administered to the population by the elite— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it
21 July 2007, 3:31 pmskol:
Here’s the simplest method I know of:
1) straight razor
2) box of matches
3) ammonia
4) jar with tight lid
and, of course,
5) safety goggles
take the match heads off the matches with a razor, put them in a jar, and cover with one cup of ammonia and screw tightly. Let stand for a week. This is ammonium sulfide, and certainly the easiest method I’ve seen. However, ammonium sulfide is toxic to the respiratory tract, and hydrogen sulfide is a byproduct which in sufficient quantities is Not Good (this only applies if your nose doesn’t work and you hang around). But I found this from a kids DIY site.
21 July 2007, 4:05 pmStan:
Audrey is not getting through to the moderation queue for some inexplicable reason, so she is forwarding this:
From my 8th grade Social Studies teacher, I know that if you have access to a building, the best way to deliver urine-filled ice cubes to the center of a closed room is under the door, with a pool cue. He randomly blurted that out in class one day, as a public service announcement of sorts. It’s the only thing I remember from that class.
I think in an email to you once, Stan, I made a reference to varnishing chickens. I haven’t personally tested this theory myself, but my sculpture professor mentioned that if you varnish a dead chicken (and I imagine this would hold true for any small animal), it forms a nice enclosed casing.
Eventually the chicken will decompose and the resulting gases will make it explode at some random point in the future. I’m not sure if it explodes with force or just kind of cracks open; I guess that would depend on how thick the varnish is, but my impression was that it doesn’t smell too good when that happens.
One thing I do know from personal experience is that if you find a dead smashed frog on the road that’s been dried in the sun til it’s all leathery and hard, and take it home with you, if you run that through an embossing press on wet paper, that makes a smell that will clear out an entire wing of a building in no time flat.
21 July 2007, 7:57 pmRequired:
Butyric acid seems like the way to go. It’s got to be effective if medical clinics have been successfully target and it seems like just about anyone can get hold of the butter necessary to make it.
How about at the R/D party conventions. Not being an american I’m not really sure what these are all about, buy those of you that are activists seem to like to disrupt them. I’ve seen some footage with thousands of R/D supporters packed into giant stadiums. A dozen infiltrators with Butyric acid could disrupt quite well. Though I imagine in this day and age you’d have a hard time getting passed security.
22 July 2007, 4:52 amanonymous:
@Stan,
If you want a lab method, this might help.
CXXVII. A SYNTHESIS OF N-METHYLPUTRESCINE AND OF PUTRESCINE.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1259269&blobtype=pdf
22 July 2007, 6:30 amskol:
I real adolescent part of me wants to go St. Paul this year. Only two hours away…(disclaimer: NO, I’M NOT GOING)
One of the advanced chem classes in high school was trying to make some sort of artificial flavoring (raspberry, iirc) and they spilled butyric acid all over the place. Good lord, that was one of the most awful smells… like really Very Portly Men drunk on tequila barfing in a jacuzzi in a well-insulated room. And it spills over.
Also, all anaerobic decomposition creates butyric acid.
I’m getting carried away. Why don’t we load up on cabbage and bratwurst and pay an “official” visit to these conventions?
(sorry, sorry)
22 July 2007, 7:34 amjack:
whatever it is to be theoretically delivered, central air conditioning units would be the ideal distribution system for enclosed buildings.
23 July 2007, 8:53 amStan:
Wal-Mart stinks, dontcha think?
On a TOOOOTALLY different note, there is a concept we used in Special Forces when training “irregulars” It’s called a “confidence target.” Never send newly trained irregulars on a first mission that does not have a very high probability of success. Failure the first time out is disastrous and demoralizes a freshly recruited and freshly trained force. Simple, straightforward targets are always best so there is a gain of experience, but a gain of confidence at the same time.
Sorry to have digressed so.
23 July 2007, 4:57 pmbadri:
any one in a lab can order these from Aldrich or other standard chemicals suppliers !
23 July 2007, 10:55 pmoff hand i know methyl mercaptan is pretty cheap as i used it 15 some years ago .
Trade Unionists Unite:
Will you be writing about the privatization and mass layoffs now in Haiti? See http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=38646
24 July 2007, 2:00 pmStan:
Working on a piece about Haiti right now; but not specifically about this.
24 July 2007, 4:56 pmDan:
Butyric acid is literally the smell of rancid butter. A technical description of it is on wikipedia.
Wikipedia also has a brief article on putrescine.
Not that either of these will help much unless one already has some background in college level organic chemistry - but they are interesting.
27 July 2007, 9:25 pmanon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanethiol
Ethanethiol has a strongly disagreeable odour that humans can detect in minute concentrations. The threshold for human detection is as low as one part in 2.8 billion parts of air. Its odour resembles that of leeks. Ethanethiol is intentionally added to butane and propane (see: LPG) to impart an easily noticed smell to these odourless fuels, that otherwise pose the threat of fire and explosion.
According to the 2000 edition of the Guinness Book Of World Records, ethanethiol is the “smelliest substance” in existence. Other more specialized chemicals were probably not examined, however. Most volatile thiols are comparably offensive. Thiols can be oxidized, and thus de-odourized, using bleach or related oxidants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butanethiol
Butanethiol, also known as butyl mercaptan, is a highly volatile, clear to yellowish liquid with a foetid (extremely foul-smelling) odor, commonly described as “skunk” odor. In fact, butanethiol is one of the major constituents of a skunk’s defensive spray. The scent of butanethiol is so strong that the human nose can easily detect it in the air at concentrations as low as 10 parts per billion. Butanethiol is chemically classified among the thiols, which are organic compounds with molecular formulas and structural formulas similar to alcohols, except that sulfur-containing sulfhydryl group (-SH) replaces the oxygen-containing hydroxyl group in the molecule. Butanethiol’s basic molecular formula is C4H9SH, and its structural formula is similar to that of the alcohol butanol. Butanethiol is a thiol of low molecular weight, and it is highly flammable. Butanethiol is used as an industrial solvent, as an odorant for natural gas (which is odorless), and as an intermediate for insecticides and herbicides. It is sometimes placed in the “stink bombs” and “stink perfumes” that pranksters love to use.
Butanethiol is a very noxious and caustic chemical compound, and at sufficiently high concentrations, it produces serious health effects in both humans and animals, especially as a result of prolonged exposure. Sufficiently high concentrations of the foetid, volatile substance causes eye irritation, headaches, nausea and vomiting, dizziness, and irritation of the respiratory tract. Even higher concentrations can lead to unconsciousness and coma after prolonged exposure. Contact with the skin and mucous membranes causes burns, and contact with the eyes can lead to blurred vision or complete blindness.
1 August 2007, 12:16 amanon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stink_bomb
A stink bomb or stinkbomb is a device designed to create an unpleasant smell. They range in effectiveness from simple pranks to military grade chemical agents.
At one end of the spectrum, relatively harmless stink bombs consist of ammonium sulfide, which smells strongly of rotten eggs. When exposed to air, the ammonium sulfide reacts with moisture, hydrolyzes, and a mixture of hydrogen sulphide and ammonia is released. Other popular substances on which to base stink bombs are thiols with lower molecular weight, e.g., methyl mercaptan and ethyl mercaptan — the chemicals that give odor to skunks and are added to natural gas. A variation on this idea is the scent bomb, or perfume bomb, filled with an overpowering “cheap perfume” smell. Prank stink bombs and perfume bombs are usually sold as a 1- or 2- ml sealed glass ampoule, which can be broken by throwing against a hard surface or by crushing under one’s shoe sole, thus releasing the odorous liquid contained therein. Another variety of prank stink bomb comprises two bags, one smaller and inside the other. The inner one contains a liquid and the outer one a powder. When the inner one is popped by squeezing it, the liquid reacts with the powder, producing hydrogen sulfide, which expands and pops the outer bag, releasing the putridity.
At the other end of the spectrum, the governments of Israel and the United States of America are developing stink bombs for use by their law enforcement agencies and militaries as riot control and area denial weapons. Using stink bombs for these purposes have advantages over traditional riot control agents: unlike pepper spray and tear gas, stink bombs are believed not to be dangerous, and they are effective at low concentrations.
The most effective stink bombs are those that contain a mixture of several stenches of biological origins. The biological odors used – vomit, human waste, body odors, burnt hair, and rotting garbage – are found universally revolting by people of all cultures. A mixture of various odors is more effective over time than a single odor, because it is much easier to acclimate to individual smells; a mixture therefore lasts longer and offers a greater impact.
The Guinness Book of Records [1] lists two smelliest substances. One is the “US Government Standard Bathroom Malodor”, a vile mixture of eight chemicals with stench resembling human feces, only much stronger, designed to test the efficacy of deodorizers and air fresheners. Another one, “Who me?”, is a mixture of five sulfur-containing chemicals and smells like rotting food and carcasses. “Who-me?” was designed during World War II, for use by the French Resistance to humiliate the German soldiers. Dalton of Monell has combined the worst of the two to make “Stench Soup”[2].
[edit] Chemicals used
Typically, lower molecular weight volatile organic compounds are used. Generally the higher molecular weight for a given class of compounds, the lower volatility and initial concentration but the longer persistence. It should be noted that some chemicals (typically thiols) have a certain concentration threshold over which the smell is not perceived significantly stronger; therefore a lower-volatility compound is capable of providing comparable stench intensity to a higher-volatility compound, but for longer time. Another issue is the operating temperature, on which the compound’s volatility strongly depends. Care should be taken as some compounds tend to be toxic in higher concentrations.
The most often encountered compounds are:
* Thiols
1 August 2007, 12:18 amo Methanethiol (used rarely, it is a gas and therefore more difficult to handle than liquids)
o Ethanethiol deer urine
o Propanethiol
o Butanethiol, Eau de skunk
o Pentanethiol
* Other sulfur compounds
o Hydrogen sulfide, smelling of rotten eggs
* Carboxylic acids
o Propanoic acid, smelling like sweat
o Butanoic acid, strong foul smell, effective and long-lasting
o Pentanoic acid
o Hexanoic acid, smelling of cheese
* Aldehydes
* Amines
o Ethylamine, fishy smell
o Putrescine, smelling of rotten meat
o Cadaverine, smelling of rotten meat
* Heterocyclic compounds
o Indole
o Skatole, smelling of faeces
anon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_me%3F
Who Me? was a top secret sulfurous stench weapon developed by the American Office of Strategic Services during World War II to be used by the French Resistance against German officers. Who Me? smelled strongly of fecal matter, and was issued in pocket atomizers intended to be unobtrusively sprayed on a German officer, humiliating him and, by extension, demoralizing the occupying German forces.
The experiment was very short-lived, however. Who Me? had a high concentration of extremely volatile sulfur compounds that were very difficult to control: more often than not the person who did the spraying ended up smelling as bad as the sprayee. After only two weeks it was concluded that Who Me? was a dismal failure. It remains unclear whether there was a successful Who Me? attack.
Who Me? was listed by the The Guinness Book of World Records as one of the two smelliest substances, the other being “US Government Standard Bathroom Malodor”, used to test deodorants and air fresheners[1]. Pam Dalton, a cognitive psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, describes the smell of Who Me? as resembling “the worst garbage dumpster left in the street for a long time in the middle of the hottest summer ever”.
A recipe for a kilogram of the same or equivalent substance in circulation on the Internet specifies 919 g of white mineral oil as an inert carrier, and 20 g of skatole, 20 g of n-butanoic acid, 20 g of n-pentanoic acid, 20 g of n-hexanoic acid and 1 g of pentanethiol as the active ingredients.
for good measure:
Alinsky’s Rules of Tactics:
1 ) Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2 ) Never go outside the experience of your people. It may result in confusion, fear and retreat.
3 ) Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear and retreat.
4 ) Make the enemy live up to his/her own book of rules.
5 ) Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
6 ) A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7 ) A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8 ) Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
9 ) The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10 ) The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11 ) If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
12 ) The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
1 August 2007, 12:27 am13 ) Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.