Question Everything

[andrewducker]

Should you be the kind of person who ever feels sceptical about what the news/government feeds you, I highly recommend you read:
1) This piece about the difficulty of actually making the "liquid explosives" that were supposedly going to be used in the recent plot.

2) This piece, which rightly points out that None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports., as well as the fact that a _year_ of survelliance hadn't turned up this plot, which instead came to light under Pakistani interrogation. The Pakistani police being known for the use of torture.

And then watch this video, which is a news piece by MSNBC about what they call "The Nexus of Politics and Terror", when terrorist alerts are announced at politically useful times, in the handy top 10 format.

It's all scary, scary stuff.

Comments

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I think that if anyone is actually shocked or surprised by that last link, they should actually be mocked openly in the street for being so stupid and possibly locked up for being so naive.

It's like I said - terrorism is great for governments. Every few months, you can just announce that you foiled six terrorist attacks, but you can't tell anyone anything about them. Even though you foiled them with no fuss at all or media coverage, and then when you get something like this, it brings the country and the media to a panicked halt, even though nothing actually happened or, arguably, was going to happen.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Also, look at what you can't take onto a plane....

So some terrorist is going to use tweezers, a cigarette lighter and a sandwich to take control of a plane?

Even MacGuyver would have trouble doing that....

[rparvaaz.livejournal.com]

But Jack Bauer can do it. I'm sure...

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

My first suspicion, on hearing that you cannot take items like the above onto a plane, was that Macguyver had somehow gone rogue.....

[rparvaaz.livejournal.com]

Should I know who Macguyver is?

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGyver

[rparvaaz.livejournal.com]

Thanks. :)

So he is the original, bleedin'-heart-liberal version of Jack Bauer. Wonder why they never showed the series here...

[loveandgarbage.livejournal.com]

Thanks for gathering these together. Fascinating. The comment at the start of the MNBC broadcast is something that passed me by - the arrests were at the request of the US government.

Perhaps it's time for a repeat of The Power of NIghtmares.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

You also haven't actually read 1984, as I recall ;-)

[andrewducker]

I have read the first third. And I've seen the play.

And I lived through it! (Ok, I was 12, but it still counts)

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

Blimey! Read the rest. I've read it many many times and highly recommend it.

[andrewducker]

I wasn't really enjoying it, to be honest. Thought Brave New World was much better.

I'll give it a go again at some point.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

They're fairly different kettles of aquatic creatures.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I'm curious.

At the start, police said it was an "al qaeda style plan". The tabloids of course, immediately blamed evil Osama and his cronies, no surprise.

Then it went a bit quiet and no one linked them directly to Sinister International Terrorist Organisations.... but on the BBC today I noticed that it is being referred to as an Al Qaeda plot.

When did that come out?

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

That video page demands I install IE6, which is most rude of it, and funnily enough is unavailable for Linux.

[terminalmalaise.livejournal.com]

Try the youtube version:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=30ligvuLKCs

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Excellent, thanks!

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

While we're busy questioning everything - an admirable activity - I for one would question The Register's expertise on the difficulty or otherwise of making liquid explosives. I know I have had cause to question their expertise on IT in the past, which was their previous home turf.

I am quite agreed, though, that you'd need a lot of air freshener to mask the distinctive odour of a very large rat in all this.

[andrewducker]

Oh, I don't trust the sources above. But they raise good points, and indicate that it's worth reading further.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Having now seen the video, I'm tempted to ask whether it isn't just coincidence. Some of the 'reponses' in terms of publishing alerts were three or four days later. Given an alert published on just about *any* day, could one not find something either embarrassing, distracting, or whatever in the previous few days that one could say it was a response to? (forgive my twisted grammar). Sorry if this makes me seem like too much of a stats geek, but I'd want to know the prior probability of one of these prompting events happening in any given three-day window before jumping to conclusions. I can quite believe it of the people involved that they might stoop to this, but I'm scared of turning into a conspiracy theorist.

[andrewducker]

http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/1117099.html?thread=5985195#t5985195

[robhu.livejournal.com]

We need to lock up all the chemists and only allow them to work while under surveillance in prisons.

Knowledge is dangerous. No knowledge = no terrorism.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Luckily that at least means there's no danger of terrorism at the White House.