August 1914  

Jamais at Open the Future has a good list of resources interpreting the news about the UK Terror Plot - most of which I already follow, but there are a few new sources in there..

The panic among the authorities in the UK and US is indicative of just how unprepared we really are for these kinds of possibilities. The likelihood of dying from terrorism is no lower than being struck by lightning, but unlike lightning strikes -- or auto accidents, or slips in the bathtub, or the other commonplace sources of mortality against which terrorism can be compared -- death from terror events hits large numbers of people at the same time. The statistics of terrorism may be reassuring, but statistics rarely trump emotion.

Here are the web resources I'm following for this subject:

# W. David Stephenson -- lots of coverage of homeland security, with a strong smart mobs perspective.
# Global Guerillas -- the single best site for understanding the nature of "4th Generation Warfare."
# Schneier on Security -- Bruce Schneier is the world's leading security guru.
# Defense Tech -- looking at military issues through a tech lens. Surprisingly progressive.
# Homeland Security Watch -- from the folks who run Defense Tech.
# Counterterrorism Blog -- a new one for me, so I don't know yet how good it is, but it's interesting so far.

I think it would be fair to say that I don't take the news entirely seriously any more - so I didn't really know what to make of all the fuss when I woke up to this morning's news - and after a minute I simply began ignoring it. I was therefore somewhat gratified to see Billmon had much the same reaction - obviously too much examination of the entrails of the propaganda state has a fairly numbing effect on the brain.

It's hard to know what to make of today's airplane bomb hysteria, which is one reason I haven't written about it so far. There's so much disinformation and misinformation flying around -- which is inevitable whenever the cable guys have one of these panic attacks -- that I finally succumbed to the temptation to tune it all out.

Juan Cole has his typical informed comments -- in this case pointing out the implications of the growing polarization (and the radicalization of a substantial minority) in the British Asian Muslim community. The presence inside Britain of such a large terrorist cell, capable of at least preparing for major attacks, despite the crackdown after last year's London bombings, has some fairly chilling implications. Londonstan indeed.

Or it would have such implications, if the official story were essentially true. One can choose one's degree of paranoia here, since the only information sources about the plot are the police and intelligence agencies involved, plus the political spinmeisters.

Many of us have grown accustomed enough to the pointless politicization of color-coded alerts to be instantly skeptical. But the idea that Al Qaeda had a "big one" in the works -- and would have loved to have pulled the trigger in the middle of Israel's war on Lebanon -- certainly isn't inherently implausible. I've mentioned the possibility myself.

On the other hand, none of the previous known plots hatched by the British wing of the movement have come anywhere close to the alleged scope and sophistication of this one. To expect a bunch of idiots who literally couldn't figure out how to set their own shoes on fire to pull off the simultaneous destruction of up to 20 planes using liquid explosives is a bit of a stretch.

I'm also dubious about the claim that the plotters were following -- almost to the letter -- an 11-year old plan developed by Al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to blow up a dozen or so U.S. airliners over the Pacific. Following the script for a previously exposed and foiled operation doesn't exactly seem like a global terrorism best practice. Are we dealing with professionals or amateurs here? Or is it a little bit of both, plus a healthy dose of hype from a couple of guys (Bush and Blair) who right now can use all the hype -- and raw, adrenalized fear -- they can get?

Like I said, it's a BYOP (bring your own paranoia) party. The truth behind the latest episode of the "Osama bin Laden Hour" is one of those unknown unknowns Rumsfeld talks about. Would the security apparatuses of two leading capitalist powers (including the commercial heavyweight champion of the world) really turn the global transportation system on its ear just for the sake of a temporary political advantage? And if that's really what's really going on, why isn't it October right now?

Maybe what matters most isn't the credibility of the plot -- using whichever meaning of the word you think most appropriate -- but the fact that five years after 9/11 British society apparently contains a large (and growing?) number of young Muslim men who would like to kill as many Americans as they can whenever and wherever they can.

It's a pretty ironic coda to the wingnut flypaper theory -- under which we were supposed to "take the fight" to the terrorists in Iraq (and Afghanistan and Lebanon and, in time, Iran) so that we wouldn't have to fight them in the streets of New York and London. ...

What can I say? We're stuck to our own flypaper. Which means that phony or not, today's hysteria probably is an authentic glimpse at the shape of things to come. We're going to have to get used to the idea of standing in two-hour lines at airport security and toting our carry-on items in a clear plastic bags. But these inconveniences are absurdly insignificant compared to other risks we'll face if we remain on the road we're on -- the one that leads to that clash of civilizations the uberhawks are clamoring for.

All I can say is I'm glad I'm not living in London or New York these days - and I'm equally glad I'm not flying all over the place like I used too - and that's more because I think air travel will be incredibly painful in the coming months than out of any fear of planes getting blown up.

The Oil Drum had an interesting post today on oil projects coming online in the next year or two - Is a Wall of Oil Heading for the Market ? - this tends to support the idea that we might be on a production plateau for the next 3-5 years, though the wildcards are, as always, uncertainly over how fast existing giant oilfields are being depleted and how many small projects are being developed (no one seems to have an accurate summary of all the relatively tiny developments going on around the world - if anyone has seen one please send me a reference - even the megaprojects numbers and dates seem a bit rubbery).



The comments thread veered off to discuss the new terror alert after a while (along witha round of new nicknames for BP - I liked "Begin Pedalling" best), with one commenter combining the latest bout of official paranoia with the doomer meme that Prudhoe Bay has run dry, and coming up with the theory that this latest scare is a way to frighten people out of the skies and thereby achieve some targetted demand destruction (this is the most effective time of the year to try it I guess, with the summer holiday season in full swing up north).

Another commenter was moved to quote the great sage, George Orwell, while also theorising that this is another step towards the invasion of Iran (following the first step of trying to neutralise the threat on Israel's north flank, which doesn't seem to be going all that well, unless you think we'll be able to fill these failed states we're creating with death squads to keep all those 4GW groups that are springing up under "control").

It looks much like [an] hysteria-pumping excercise aimed exactly at demand destruction. However, Prudhoe may not be the primary reason - there must be something bigger. If this theory is right, the UK and US governments will use this "failed terrorist plot" as an excuse for some vile atrocities (a war against "Duka-Dukastan"?)

To me yesterday's madness in the UK reminds of George Orwell's 1984 (see last sentence of the quote):

Winston found that the one area of his interest in which Julia could not share was the idea of organized rebellion against the Party. She was not affected by the story of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford. She did not mind as he did about the fact that history was being falsified daily. As for Goldstein and the Brotherhood, she went to sleep when Winston tried to discuss them. It did not matter to her whether they were fighting Eurasia or Eastasia, in fact she doubted whether there was a war at all, the Party probably dropped the bombs itself to control the people.

And lastly, "Microhydro" gets in on the theorising as well:

Even giving the UK government the benefit of the doubt - assume actual terrorists with a credible threat - the government admits this situation has been under observation for months, so the public disclosure date was elective and the degree of hysteria entirely by choice and inappropriate for a well neutralized threat. I suspect this incident served several agendas:

1. "Leverage the xenophobia" as the Pentagon said in its internal documents re: Zarqawi. As the dictator screamed in the movie V, "REMIND THE PEOPLE WHY THEY NEED US!!!
2. Get Lamont defeats Lieberman out of the news cycle
3. Get dead Lebanese children out of the news cycle
4. build momentum towards UK ID cards
5. Get people accustomed to martial law

While I'm in "Friday Night Fear Mongering" mode, I might as well throw RI's post on the topic into the mix as well, which also quoted the dictator from "V".

Some brief thoughts on the latest mass-induced near-death experience.

The crawl on MSNBC Thursday night read Terror in the Sky: Mass Murder on an Unimaginable Scale! Well, no; and I mean no to everything.

There is no terror in the sky, unless you're Iraqi or Lebanese, or reside in northern Israel or any of the world's other free-fire zones and might expect to see death fall from it. Or unless we can include the sky itself, churning with strange weather and unwholesome artifacts, and a sun that now seems to burn an alien white. Because if we look up, we may just catch our breath.

The mass murder never was, and the unimaginable scale! was imagined more than ten years ago, and given the name Project Bojinka. Substitute the Pacific for the Atlantic, and toss in the assassination of the Pope and the crashing of a plane into CIA headquarters for good measure, and you have a thwarted operation that's earned its exclamation point. But 2006 isn't 1995, and today citizens of the great crusader nations must be reminded, repeatedly and at the pleasure of their minders, just how vulnerable they are, and therefore dependent upon the same dark mills of empire that intentionally exacerbate those vulnerabilities.

"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big," boasts a naturally unnamed White House official in the AFP story "Bush Seeks Political Gains from Foiled Plot." Bush and Blair conferred last weekend on the "imminent attack" (though neither man was sufficiently moved to break off their vacations), and the White House tooled its response to Joe Lieberman's defeat at the hands of a "far left" cut 'n runner accordingly. The thwarting of the plot (with a man inside, as is the custom in plots both thwarted and unthwarted) became itself a time bomb, rigged to detonate in the faces of populist leaders who even modestly reflect the now conventional wisdom that the war is an abject failure (at least according to how failure is conventionally understood). This would be a reminder and an example that the threat is real, though the threat was no less real - and possibly more real - when Bojinka was foiled in 1995.

Last night on the RI forum, "sunny" wondered "So, if the plot was foiled, why was the terror alert raised? That in itself tells me everything I need to know."

Returning to a less paranoid plane, Financial Sense has an interesting graph of Saudi production marked up with some dates of supply interruptions elsewhere.

We have lost over 1.7 million barrels per day (bpd) of supply since the hurricanes, the Nigerian conflict and the BP debacle. That would mean we had over 3.3 million bpd of spare capacity in July 2005. Alternatively we had all this new capacity come online recently. Really? Where? Which country? Well for one thing if these guys get fired then they surely can make a career writing fiction.

For a moment though let us assume they are right. Surely then we would have seen some form of spare capacity coming online after the disruptions, right? Let’s look at the production profile of Saudi Arabia who most analysts believe holds this elixir of camel dung which cannot be used by any refinery. We had the hurricanes (a) and the Saudi’s said “ We will respond”. We had the Nigerian conflict (b) and they said “ We will respond”. Now we have the BP debacle (c) and they said , you guessed it “ We will respond”. See for yourself.

As King George was constantly getting quoted in all forms of media today about the peril of "Islamic fascism" (which I've never seen a definition of - probably unsurprisingly, as while Islamic fundamentalism and traditional Christian fascism are both thriving in the world at the moment, I really don't see how any historical definition of fascism could be successfully applied to Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and co), this post by The Agonist seems appropriate to ponder - Can't you see.

...in the sphere of public political knowledge the same principle applies. I will lay you odds that not one person in one hundred could give me a coherent definition of terrorist that didn't turn their own government into terrorists. Not one in ten could tell me what the differences are between Hezbollah and al-Qa'eda, and tell me how they matter in dealing with the organizations. (You wouldn't try to land a jumbo jet on a VTOL pad, would you?)

False categorization, and superficial categorization then are two sins of sloppy thinking and they come from thinking that once you name something, you don't have to think about it much any more.

Then there are false analogies. Let's take Islamo-fascism. Think about if for a few minutes. In what way is it productive or revealing of the motives of al-Qa'eda, the Muslim brotherhood, Hamas or Hezbollah to compare them to fascism (which to most people means the German Nazi party.) Are they say, movements that exalt the State and patriotism above all else? Are they movements that blur the boundaries between corporations and the state? You can go down the list of what it means to be fascist like this and find that the matches aren't all that strong. Some exist, but it's clear that these organizations don't have much to do with fascism. (It also becomes clear that those movements are each different from the other in significant ways.)

There's nothing wrong with using analogies in your thinking - it'd be hard to think about anything abstract without them. But sloppy use of analogies, of cramming things into the analogy is potentially deadly. (For example, pre Iraq war people used to use Japan and Germany as analogies for what the reconstruction and occupation of Iraq would be like. At the time a number of us argued those were bad analogies. Closing in on 3,000 deaths have told us that we were right. Bad analogy, deadly results.)

The kissing cousin of analogies is the storyline. Humans almost automatically sort events into storylines and people involved into the events into various archetypes, starting with heroes and villains but moving on to ingénue roles, best friends, wise men, treacherous advisors and so on. Storylines are easiest to watch in the press and deciding what their proffered storylines are on any issue is something a lot of people spend a lot of time doing (the most famous in the blogosphere perhaps being Peter Daou).

Bush is an iron jawed man of resolve fighting evil terrorists led by the mastermind bin Laden. The Iraq war was about taking out Saddam’s WMD and was a glorious march of freedom. The Hezbollah/Israel conflict was about destroying a terrorist organization that had kidnapped brave Israeli soldiers. Israel is a small and beleaguered bastion of democracy surrounded by evil people who want to destroy it and cause a second Holocaust. Lamont was a one issue candidate supported by far left bloggers and the anti-war wing of the party.

Note that prominence of characters there. Character = story. Period. If you are the hero, you will be shown as the hero, no matter what you do. If you are the wise advisor, you will be shown as the wise advisory – the storyline will be changed to fit the character role you are expected play. John Kerry was a wishy-washy flip-flopper, therefore he couldn’t have been the man who won and deserved all those medals – the man who turned his boat into gunfire. Dean was angry, therefore the scream was manufactured.

Sometimes this heads into truly surreal territory. The 9/11 hijackers, for example, despite being willing to die for their cause were somehow cowards. More people voted in the Afghani election than the entire population, but the election was clean according to international monitors. Lowering taxes will increase tax revenues.

All of which is enough to make one want to roll on the ground and scream: ‘Can’t you see? Can’t you see!’

WorldChanging recently had an interesting post on "Our Nuclear Summer". How does the saying go - everything is connected...

For all the arguments made by the opponents of nuclear power -- that it is uneconomical, unsafe, a potential boon to terrorists, poses waste-disposal issues, and all the rest -- nuclear's biggest threat may come from the one problem it is purported to address: climate change.

If, as many climatologists suggest, the heat waves in Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere are an indication of shifts in global climate patterns, it could spell doom for nuclear power, whose viability is directly linked to the availability of adequate water supplies.

Consider what's happened lately on both sides of the Atlantic.

"The extended heat wave in July aggravated drought conditions across much of Europe, lowering water levels in the lakes and rivers that many nuclear plants depend on to cool their reactors," reports the Christian Science Monitor, adding

"As a result, utility companies in France, Spain, and Germany were forced to take some plants offline and reduce operations at others. Across Western Europe, nuclear plants also had to secure exemptions from regulations in order to discharge overheated water into the environment. Even with an exemption to environmental rules this summer, the French electric company, Electricité de France (EDF), normally an energy exporter, had to buy electricity on European spot market, a way to meet electricity demand."

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the utility giant Exelon last week cut the power at its nuclear power plant in Quad Cities, Ill., after a heat wave warming the Mississippi River valley reduced the supply of cooling water, according to a Reuters report cited by the blog energy.buzz. The story cites similar drought-related cuts in nuclear plants in Minnesota and elsewhere in Illinois.

Such problems may be short-lived -- these plants' output have likely since been restored -- but the question remains: What happens to nuclear power's future if climate change reduces the availability of the water on which they depend?

Lack of water isn't the only problem associated with heat-stricken nuclear plants. The French government announced last month that nuclear power plants situated along rivers will be allowed to drain hot water into the rivers at higher temperatures than normal, according to IPS News. The heat wave since mid-June has led authorities in France, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere in Europe to override their own environmental norms on the maximum temperature of water drained from the plants' cooling systems.

Of course, it's not just nuclear. Hydroelectric power plants are similarly affected by droughts, especially crucial for an economy in a country like Norway that is dependent on hydropower. In northern Italy this summer, low water levels in the River Po affected hydroelectric supplies, prompting power shortages in Rome that knocked out air-conditioning and left people trapped in elevators, reports the International Herald Tribune.

...

As for nuclear in particular, the water issue needs to float to the top of concerns addressed by both advocates and opponents when make their respective cases. For now, the burden of proof seems to be on the nuclear industry. As Stéphane Lhomme, a spokesman for a French group Sortir du Nucléaire (Abandon Nuclear), told the Christian Science Monitor: "Global warming undermines the arguments we've always heard about nuclear power, that it doesn't damage the environment. Nuclear is not saving us from climate change. It's in trouble because of climate change."

Todays Sydney Morning Herald had a look at cost blowouts on one of the new rail links being built in town - it was interesting to see just how many urban rail projects are currently underway worldwide.

The jump in costs comes after the price of the Liverpool-to-Parramatta bus transitway blew out from $98 million to almost $350 million. It does not bode well for major rail infrastructure projects in the pipeline, such as the north-west and south-west rail links and another city line, complete with a tunnel under the harbour.

A worldwide building boom has driven up construction costs but especially in rail, with 1600 urban rail projects under way in 327 cities.

Even though I started off on a fairly tinfoil track, sometimes I think you can never have too much esoterica - so here's the tale of the red heifer (for some mysterious reason the Red Angus association seems to be interested in peak oil - and I won't even try to speculate if they are merely worried about rising agricultural input costs or if they see a tie in to the whole biblical armageddon thing).

And to close, here's John Stewart talking about the great opportunity that we've presented to the middle east (via Past Peak). Hopefully I'll get a more energy focussed post out next...