Yearly Archives: 2006

Fighting Terror with Anti-Terror

Bruce Schneier says what I’ve been saying since day one of the London Terror Plot, only more eloquently. Perhaps he wasn’t burdened with someone poking him with a sharp stick constantly.

Another thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn’t engage in pointless airline-security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn’t write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn’t use the event to remind us all how scared we should be. If we’d reacted that way, then the terrorists would have truly failed.
It’s time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation — and not focusing on specific plots.
But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show’s viewership.

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Poor Dan

My friend Dan is having a rough summer. Among other things, this Sunday, he was out riding his bike on the Monon, and he had to brake suddenly to avoid hitting some other bikers who had stopped in the middle of the path. He flipped over his handle bars, hit his head, and broke both his arms — his left elbow and wrist, and his right elbow. He’s having surgery on his wrist today.
On top of that, his birthday is August 28th, so he’ll be recuperating during his birthday. Here’s his Amazon wishlist.
If you want, comment well-wishes and I’ll pass them along to him. It occurred to me at lunch that I should go over and mow his lawn, since I imagine that will be kinda hard.

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Picking apart Gary Welsh’s coverage

Gary Welsh has a blog post about a recent Washington Post article on the London Terror Plot, in which he takes the opportunity to make some swipes at my blog posts about the event.

“While many bloggers opposed to President Bush’s policies for fighting the war on terror scoffed at initial reports that Islamic terrorists were planning to bring down U.S. airplanes headed from London to the U.S. this month…”

Wrong. I never scoffed at the plot itself, I scoffed at the government’s spin job on the terror plot, and the media’s hysterical reporting of the overly-hyped, politically-timed reports from the government. You quoted me yourself, Gary: “(Let me clarify that — I don’t think they’re constructing a terrorist plot out of whole cloth to scare us. I think they’re making a mountain out of a molehill, and that we’re not really in any danger.)”

The reality is that we were never in any danger. As you can see yourself in the Post article, the attack wasn’t anywhere near imminent, and the British government was monitoring the proceedings almost from the start. I was about as likely to be killed as I would be to suffer a farming accident. The government reports of “mass murder on an unimaginable scale” were completely out of line, if not criminally negligent.

The bloggers who were quick to doubt the original terrorist plot claim are saying little about today’s news.

Possibly because I didn’t read the Post article, Gary. I’m not a right-wing nut, so I don’t read that paper with the religious fervor that you apparently do, considering you equate that one article with all of “today’s news.”

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An Inconvenient Truth

We went to see “An Inconvenient Truth” over the weekend.

You really want to see this movie. You may not know that you want to, but you do. You may be on the fence about the issue, or afraid that it’s boring, or unconcerned. You may think you disagree with the movie. Trust me. You want to see it. You’ll be very glad you did. You’ll agree with me when you leave the theater, and say “She’s right, I did want to see that movie.” I promise. You won’t be bored. You’ll be entertained. You’ll be enlightened. You’ll be inspired. You’ll thank me. Please just indulge me. Give it a shot.

If it isn’t in theaters after this weekend in Indianapolis (we saw it at Landmark, where it’s playing at least until Thursday) then please throw the DVD on your Amazon Wishlist, or into your Netflix queue. Or let me know, and when I get the DVD, I’ll have everyone over to watch.

We knew the basics of the movie before we went, but seeing the information spelled out in charts and graphs is really compelling. And seeing the photographs (2, 3) of the way the earth has changed in the last thirty years is astonishing. We went and bought the book after we saw the movie, because I wanted the charts…

One of the things I didn’t expect was a list of realistic changes that we can make to solve the problem. I’d shifted directly into despair mode that this is an unfixable problem, or that the changes we need to make are so radical that only hemp-wearing hippie nuts would tackle them. That’s really not the case at all.

Here’s one of my favorite parts of the movie… Regarding the argument that combatting global warming will destroy the economy, Gore displays the image below, which comes from a Bush Administration presentation on “global stewardship” and is a call to balance economic concerns with concerns about the environment. The image displays the absurdity of the argument.

Gore says in response to the image, “OK, on one side we have gold bars,” he says. “Mmm, mmm, don’t they look good!”

“And on the other side, THE ENTIRE PLANET!”

The point of course, being that without the planet, where would we keep our delicious gold bars?

An Inconvenient Scale
Mmm. Gold Bars
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