Today I want to expand on the discussion I began about America’s counter terrorism approach. I want to spend some time thinking about the effectiveness of our policies, & land on what I consider (despite the billions of dollars we’re hemorrhaging monthly) to be the true cost of our approach.

We are currently engaged in a strategy that is most strongly underpinned by something we might call a “security theater” story. Measures are taken to make people FEEL safer, regardless of the real effectiveness of the approach. Here’s a question. A though experiment if you will. Pretend you have $10,000. Pretend you’re cracked in some fundamental way. Do you honestly believe that the Department of Homeland Security, or the FBI, or the NSA, or who-fucking-ever could actually prevent you from killing twenty or a hundred people if you’re willing to sacrifice your own life?

Here in Seattle we’ve just had a vivid reminder of how stone cold simple it is to assemble assault rifles, semi-automatic pistols, shotguns, & other tools of terrorist mayhem. Play the game in your head for a few minutes. My personal favorite involves the I90 floating bridge.

Shopping List
Semi-automatic rifle – $800 – $2,000
(I’d likely spring for one of the AK-47 knock offs. They’re not as accurate as some rifles, but they’re legendary for reliability. Plus the large capacity banana clips are easy to find).
Assault pistol – $800 – $1,500
(I’d go with a semi-automatic version of the classic 9mm Uzi & then buy all the 32 round magazines I could lay hands on. I’m thinking I could carry at least ten.)
Personal body armor – $500 – $1,000
(There are some excellent performance reviews as a result of troop fatalities in Iraq. The point isn’t to survive…just make it harder, hence longer, before they can take me out.)
Caltrops – $0 – $250
(You can buy car caltrops on ebay, or make them yourself. They’ve been in use for a very long time.)
Binoculars – $50 – $500
(I’d spend extra on flare resistant coated optics.)
Optional DIY napalm

If you’re wondering how easy it would be to dig up the goodies on my list, take a look at http://www.gunsamerica.com/ (I’m thinking mail order is the way to go if you’re brown & ESL).

Now that we have all the tools needed, you’ll need to cauterize your sense of right & wrong (or amp yourself up on a religious zealot trip). Pick an end of the bridge during rush hour (I’d go with the one closer to the city). If you check out the satellite pictures on Google you can see that there are some nice shrubs etc. for you to nestle into. Watch with the binocs until you see two relatively full buses are on the bridge at one time. Throw handfuls of caltrops onto the lanes entering the tunnel. Go to work with the AK-47. Given that the cars are only likely to be doing about 3 miles per hour it’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel. Once the tunnel has been fully blocked by immobilized vehicles throw as many one-gallon glass bottles of homemade napalm as you can onto the cars below (this doesn’t really serve a significant function other than to make it more dramatic for the news. Which is really what terror is all about). You could do something flashy like rappelling down (or you could do something simple like following the little ramp down to the side walk that runs along the side of the bridge). Unlimber the Uzi & start firing into the vehicles that are trapped in the traffic jam you’ve created on the bridge (well, I guess you didn’t create it. You just made it really, really bad). The individual cars aren’t really your targets. You just want to create chaos & make sure everyone keeps their head down. The buses are where you’re going to get the numbers you need to make it a significant attack. Keep trying to kill people until they kill you.

What’s the point of this exercise, other than demonstrating the fact I’ve spend too much time stuck in traffic, on buses, on I90 & I’m more than a little twisted? My point is that America is filled to the brim with soft targets. There isn’t a damn thing we can do about it if we intend to maintain our character as a nation. “Security Theater.” We’re spending great heaping buckets of money on things that make people FEEL more secure when they’re just as (marginally) exposed as they were before. The implications of this approach spin out in a couple of ways. First, it’s a really dumb way to spend limited funds (it’s not like we’re so flush with cash that we couldn’t come up with something constructive to do with a hundred billion dollars). Second, it props up the illusion that we can be secure. Which means that when the (inevitable) attack comes, it has the same risk of mass-stupidity-perhaps-we-should-go-to-war-&-can-I-vote-for-a-right-wing-freak-show response that we witnessed after 9/11.

The real threat to our security is bound up with something I call creeping totalitarianism. Or maybe the insidious sneaky expansion of the security state. We’ve all heard the stories. Homeland security officers trying to monitor internet use at a public library, investigating a Texas man because he paid off his credit card bill, locking down the funds for the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild for months, arresting a vegan protester at a HoneyBaked Ham store who had the audacity to write down his license plant number after the officer had been taking video surveillance of the protest (you gotta be careful with those terrorist vegans), photographers all over the country (myself included) are harassed persistently by security personnel (some of them are even arrested) for taking pictures of public buildings, department stores, etc….

If you’re feeling even a little bit conspiracy minded…you should remember that Halliburton just received a very large contract to build “temporary detention centers” inside the US, they’re running “war games” with names like “Cyber Storm” to “test how it would respond” to devastating attacks over the Internet from “anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers.” How does it feel to be an enemy of the state?

My biggest concern is a mental process that was well documented by Phil Zimbardo in 1971. The Stanford Prison Experiment (http://www.prisonexp.org/) was a classic demonstration of the power of social situations to distort personal identities and long cherished values and morality as the student volunteers internalized situated identities in their roles as prisoners and guards. The planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of the results were so nasty. In only a few days, the “guards” became sadistic and the “prisoners” became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress. These are the results when you’re talking about a bunch of Stanford college students. Tell someone they have the authority to do whatever they want to protect national security, & they’ll do whatever they want. Tell a citizen they have to give up their rights to be safe from terrorists, & they give up their rights. Spend too much time in those roles & you become inured to the loss of your liberty.

Take all of this in the context of the fact that the government is already making plans & running simulations for how they can shut down the people who’re independent minded enough to disagree with them & I don’t think you have to be a “black helicopter nut” to be very afraid.

a creationist’s head just exploded. think it might be time to beat up another professor.

then again, as people have pointed out it doesn’t really matter to the ID crowd. you keep finding these transitional species and then they’ll surely point out that you didn’t find it’s immediate predessor or successor so now you have 2 missing links instead of just the one.http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

http://www.pandasthumb.org/

First look, gets a thumbs up.

Oh, I’m posting a direct link to this because I read it earlier and thought that it was pretty damn funny.

Red Queen Says: video dog has the actual Sopranos clip that the article talks about.

To the first person who makes me a better blog template.
This one is ugly. I know what it should look like. I have the bits (background, jpeg for the top, etc, but not enough techy know-how to post it as anything that doesn’t look like hieroglyphics.

Pretty please with sugar on top and a kidney?

1. I fought the law (and the law won)
2. I shot the sheriff- Bob Marley
3. I predict a Riot- Kaiser Chiefs
4. Pledge of resistance-Saul Williams
5. Combat Rock- Sleater Kinney
6. Mediocrity Rules- LeTigre
7. 16 Military Wives- The Decemberists
8. Fight the Power- Public Enemy
9. War on War- Wilco
10. Kick in the ass or Big Fish – Moxy Fruvos

What’s on your gitmo playlist?

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And I can’t forget New Kicks by LeTigre. It’s got Amy Goodman, Susan Sarandon and Saul Williams speaking it. I get chills everytime I hear it.

then again, this little bit of insanity comes from the other side of the pond.

LONDON (Reuters) – British anti-terrorism detectives escorted a man from a plane after a taxi driver had earlier become suspicious when he started singing along to a track by punk band The Clash, police said Wednesday.

….

I don’t know what is more stupid, the cab driver for dialing this one up or the anti-terrorism detectives for actually taking this seriously. Although it does make me wonder how many cells in Gitmo are occupied by people who happen to like political punk music (as opposed to say one of the most successful duo acts since the dawn of time).

And yes, I still like this song . I dare you not to be earwormed.

Hmm.. I hear cuba is nice this time of year.

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Thinking about this some more, I wonder what it would be like to be sent to Gitmo for listening to the clash…

[prisoner 1]: hey everyone, what are you in here for?
[prisoner 2]: me? my brother thought it’d be a fun prank to call Sistani an asshole. what bout you #2?
[prisoner 3]: oh me? a rival clan sold me to the americans because they had to make it look like they were actually doing something about the security situation in iraq and elsewhere. how about you #4?
[prisoner 4]: i had the audacity to sing rock the casbah and actually know most of the lyrics.
[prisoner 3]: by allah’s beard! may they torture you twice as much next time.

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I think I may have my first assignment overseas. When I get into london perhaps I will do a little rendition of “know your rights”.

o/~ you have the right to free speech as long as you’re not dumb enough to try it o/~

Borderline conspiracy theorist that I am- I don’t trust anything out of the mouths of politicians. But it used to be that the everyday civil servants doing the job of running federal agencies like the FDA used science instead of religion as the basis for rule-making.
Not so anymore. You think all the stuff about the FDA approving Viox despite the possibility of death was bad, then the (dis)information they are putting out about birth-control and condoms should really freak you out.
This is one of the best, most comprehensive articles on the topic I’ve read in a while. None of it’s new to me, but it is very well put together. I may have to start reading girly mags again if this is the kind of articles I’ve been missing.

Wait, what’s that you’re saying? Oh you have a penis, this doesn’t apply to you. Bullshit. You need to know what kind of crap your girlfriend or wife is being fed because it directly impacts your sex life. Oh, I’m sorry, you’re a boy who sleeps with other boys- yeah check out what they say about condom use. You wonder why condom use is declining among young gay men- maybe because they are being told that condoms don’t work to prevent the spread of disease. If condoms don’t work against disease, and gay boys can’t knock up other boys then why would they need to use condoms at all?

I’m starting to think we live in some freakish hybrid of Orwell’s 1984 and Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.

The deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security was arrested last night on charges that he used the Internet to seduce an undercover Florida sheriff’s detective who he thought was a 14-year-old girl, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office said.

Brian J. Doyle, 55, was arrested at his Silver Spring home at 7:45 p.m. and charged with seven counts of using a computer to seduce a child and 16 counts of transmitting harmful materials to a minor, according to a sheriff’s office statement.

Agents with the department’s Inspector General’s Office, the U.S. Secret Service, the Montgomery County police and the Polk County Sheriff’s Office served a search warrant and seized his home computer and other materials, the statement said.

Doyle was online at the time awaiting what he thought was a nude image of a girl who had lymphoma, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said in an interview with Fox News’ “On the Record With Greta Van Susteren.” “We wanted to make sure he was using that computer and talking to detectives at the time of the arrest,” Judd said.

In his initial communication last month, Doyle told an undercover computer-crimes detective who he was and that he worked for the Department of Homeland Security, later disclosing numbers for his office phone and government-issued cellphone and using those lines, the sheriff’s office said.

“If he would provide that kind of information to include a photograph of himself with his identification tags, who else may he be talking to around the world who he thinks to be a 14-year-old girl?” Judd said on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.”

Attempts to reach Doyle, who was booked into the Montgomery County jail on the Polk County charges, on his office and cellphone numbers and by his official e-mail were unsuccessful.

He was a TSA spokesman before becoming deputy press secretary last year to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Chertoff press secretary Russ Knocke declined to comment on the case beyond releasing a written statement, saying, “We take these allegations very seriously and we will cooperate fully with this ongoing investigation.”

Judd said Doyle confessed and waived extradition to Polk County.

According to the sheriff’s office, Doyle initiated a sexually explicit conversation with the detective on March 12 in response to an Internet profile of a 14-year-old girl.

Doyle allegedly sent pornographic movie clips, non-pornographic photos of himself and instant messages from his AOL account, the police statement said. The sheriff’s office alleged that Doyle “on many occasions” instructed the undercover detective to perform a sexual act while thinking of him and described explicit acts he wished to perform.

Another Homeland Security official — Frank Figueroa, special agent in charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tampa — faces trial this week on charges of exposing himself to a teenage girl last year at a mall. Figueroa, who has been suspended, pleaded not guilty.

I heard once that the real difference between the French and the Americans is that the French refuse to acknowledge race as an issue, while Americans refuse to acknowledge class as an issue.

Think about it. When was the last time someone you know admitted to being anything other than middle class? Even if you knew they were either poor or wealthy, most people would say they were middle class. A few might say they were financially “comfortable” or they were “in between jobs” but very few will admit to being rich or below the poverty line. Yet the number of people living under poverty level is increasing (35 million plus and counting).

From the little debate DeeK and I are having over immigration I am reminded that we have groups of poor people, separated only by race, that are kept fighting amongst each other for small change while the fat cats run off with the bags of cash. Poor whites are afraid of poor blacks getting an equal shot at jobs and education through affirmative action, poor blacks and whites are afraid of immigrants taking their jobs and using up precious resources for their children, and looming large over all of it is the threat of TERRORISTS coming across the border to blow us all up with dirty bombs. But in the end we all want the same thing, to be able to provide for our families and what is keeping us from doing that is not each other.

We can try to force businesses to provide a living wage for everyone, immigrant or citizen, though that has had no success so far. Or, we could go with an idea I first heard attributed to Nixon(I know – what the fuck?) called the mandatory minimum income. The idea is that you make bushiness as competitive as possible by eliminating the minimum wage and you offer everyone a monthly subsidy until their income reaches a certain point. After that point you progressively tax income received form employment or investments. Through this you eliminate social security, welfare, and unemployment (they would get the subsidy instead). Taxes would be substantially higher, but costs of goods and services would go down. And while wages would go extremely low at first, employers would have to increase them enough to entice employees out of the safety net.

It’s an idea that needs a lot of work, but it gives business what it wants (competition without minimum wages) and employees get a stable ground to negotiate from.