From technologically-enhanced eschatology to postmodern revisionist history — or free play of signs and signifiers? — here are two variations on a single theme.

I came across this brief passage in a new NEFA Foundation report on al-Qaeda in Pakistan:

In May 1999, Al-Qaida started a WMD program codenamed al-Zabadi or “curdled milk”, which Abu Khabab headed.

You can take a literal interpretation of the meaning of the program’s name, but perhaps it was an attempt at tweaking a famous obfuscation from Michel Foucault in the History of Sexuality, vol. 1:

One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then there, depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called ‘curdled milk.’ So he was pointed out by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published.

We finally know what Foucault was talking about. The French youths were part of a tech-primitive bioweapons manufacturing cell. al-Qaeda’s assaults on western civilization are multifaceted, and will attack the canon even as the canon attacks itself.