Human friendly Dolphin

Whoa.

Someone needs to do a straw poll as to when exactly our universe bifurcated, we left reality behind and entered that parallel realm where the bizarre and the irreal are now the dominant forces. I don't know. I put it down to the moment when President Clinton got caught getting a blow job in the Oval Office. There was something so strange and National Lampoon's President's Day about it that it ceased to be a solid discernable event in my mind. something that could be judged with any weight. When the President of the free world acts like a hypersexed corndog Chevy Chase there is no rational, actionable response. No moral high or low ground. It is simply ludicrous and cannot be processed as a real event. Then, when the minutiae of his oral infidelity was printed in multitudinous volume and released on the internet (we forget the malice with which that was enacted. The desperate desire for final, ultimate personal desecration. A psycho-sadistic desire that is utterly psychotic) it became something even more bizarre, still unreal but now repulsive.

Anyway. much water under the bridge since then. We've had publicly stolen elections about which no one seemed to mind, Hollywood mini-apocalypses, terror masterminds hiding in cave complexes deep beneath the earth, anthrax in envelopes, suicide bombings, Paris-fucking-Hilton and a million metric tonnes more of the dross and sediment of a half-imagined plasticated irreality accumulating at an exponential rate till they threaten to overwhelm us completely.

A bit like the rising floodwaters pulsing against the weakened levees of New Orleans. They too broke, swamping the city like their cousin floodwaters that swamped the entire Gulf Coast. Destroying all in their path. Releasing toxic substances, primitive human urges... and packs of trained killer dolphins with high powered dart guns.

Oh yes.

Armed and dangerous - Flipper the firing dolphin let loose by Katrina

by Mark Townsend Houston
Sunday September 25, 2005

It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Experts who have studied the US navy's cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying 'toxic dart' guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet's smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.

Dolphins have been trained in attack-and-kill missions since the Cold War. The US Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have apparently been taught to shoot terrorists attacking military vessels. Their coastal compound was breached during the storm, sweeping them out to sea. But those who have studied the controversial use of dolphins in the US defence programme claim it is vital they are caught quickly.

Leo Sheridan, 72, a respected accident investigator who has worked for government and industry, said he had received intelligence from sources close to the US government's marine fisheries service confirming dolphins had escaped.

'My concern is that they have learnt to shoot at divers in wetsuits who have simulated terrorists in exercises. If divers or windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber and if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they could fire,' he said. 'The darts are designed to put the target to sleep so they can be interrogated later, but what happens if the victim is not found for hours?'

Usually dolphins were controlled via signals transmitted through a neck harness. 'The question is, were these dolphins made secure before Katrina struck?' said Sheridan.

The mystery surfaced when a separate group of dolphins was washed from a commercial oceanarium on the Mississippi coast during Katrina. Eight were found with the navy's help, but the dolphins were not returned until US navy scientists had examined them.

Sheridan is convinced the scientists were keen to ensure the dolphins were not the navy's, understood to be kept in training ponds in a sound in Louisiana, close to Lake Pontchartrain, whose waters devastated New Orleans.

The navy launched the classified Cetacean Intelligence Mission in San Diego in 1989, where dolphins, fitted with harnesses and small electrodes planted under their skin, were taught to patrol and protect Trident submarines in harbour and stationary warships at sea.

Criticism from animal rights groups ensured the use of dolphins became more secretive. But the project gained impetus after the Yemen terror attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Dolphins have also been used to detect mines near an Iraqi port.

See, reality used to be a friend of mine. Then he started smoking some of that heavy shit and now he's gone all weird.