The Glade 4.0

It's been the last couple of days that it's been reported that the current heads (two) of Al Qaeda in Yemen were released from Gitmo and went through "de-extremism" training in Saudi Arabia; I don't personally know the veracity of the statements, but I have no reason to doubt it.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

You want to kill lots of people, take a popular non nut food product and add nuts to it. A little peanut oil in some coke or diet coke syrup. Oh yeah.

Rush hour NY, haul some truck with CO tanks in it and let it out.

Hell find a crowded hotel with an indoor pool, at night break in and dump bags of common chemicals into it and gas the entire hotel.

**** ain't hard.

The things about explosions that are man carriable (without going nuclear) is that bodies and external walls tend to be pretty good at absorbing or redirecting damage. Stand behind a fat guy.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I think the chemistry of that would be rather more difficult than you're making it sound.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Not all chemical reactions are extrmely concerned with the ratios of the chemicals present. It would work best in an empty pool but there isn't any reason not to use the massive amounts of chlorine that happen to be on hand (not that chlorine the best gas to use unless the pool is rooftop).

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

There's other problems as well, namely the fact that there's a huge amount of water present and that the pool area won't necessarily vent to the rest of the hotel. Most people don't want "pool smell" in their accomadations. I doubt very much you'd manage to kill more than 2 or 3 people that way before someone detected and neutralized it. There's also the problem of how concentrated the gas would be in any given area. Terrorists have attempted to use Chlorine gas in Iraq as in improvised chemical weapon. It really wasn't what you'd call wildly successful.

Really, if we can think of some "easy-peasy" way to do a terrorist attack here on this board, some terrorist has already thought of it. If it hasn't been done it's because it was infeasiable for some reason or other.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Guns + Malls + Christmas = stampede and terror, maybe not the body count you want, but the psychological damage. A vest bomb in the line to go see Santa.

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

Chlorine gas is heavy and detectable. Thats why I wouldn't use it, but its not the only way. Also the water can serve to retard certain reacitons because it does dilute, making the chemical reactions necessary occur slowly over time.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I still think the "best" attacks are the most simple, and hell probably not even the highest body count. It depends what your goal is, carnage or psychological damage, or financial damage. Sure you can go for all three but it gets complicated. Ever been to an amtrack station around Thanksgiving? Packed to the gills and no security in site.

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

I think the amount of psychological damage you can cause with any "terror" attack is substantial. Millions of people die every year from heart disease, cancer, auto accidents and even the flu.

If you take out a few people with a gun and make it seem politically and terror motivated, you generally get the effect you seek. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

I'm convinced stuff like this will keep happening. DHS will continue doing stupid things like issuing orders to beware of people with Ron Paul bumper stickers and returning combat veterans who may have trouble reintegrating. Yet the real threats shoot people on army bases and try to blow up planes. DHS still doesn't put us on guard against those types of enemies, lest we piss off a certain demographic for profiling.

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The Dude abides.

The point is the customer wants security but he doesn't want to pay for it. So we give them an illusion of security instead, it's much cheaper. All a private company would do is tell a better lie for less money.

Hah, yeah, but we're definitely paying for it one way or another.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Back to the actual CD incident, this is the flight I have taken 3-4x this year back from AMS to Detroit. Not that the CD event is going to stop me from flying or anything, but I'm just very familiar with that particular flight.

So is airport security getting itself back in shape? (not as in "providing good security", but as in "not seriously delaying/cancelling half the flights in the USA anymore"?)

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

And?

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Except for the fact that security does not have to be perfect for it to be effective. No fixed defense is ever completely effective against a determined enemy because the attacker is the one in control of the circumstances of the attack. It does, however, prevent casual and even fairly determined but poorly-planned or resourced attacks from occuring; in most of those cases simply by making them appear infeasiable before they're even conducted.

Obviously security cannot be perfect. For one thing people make mistakes (from which we learn), and like I said, the attacker has the initiative.

The main flaw in the thinking that I'm seeing here though, si that terrorists generally get what they want from terror campaigns. Terror attacks tend to create outrage as much or more than fear. They don't usually cause people to cower in their homes afraid of their own shadows. If they did, Iraq would have starved to death by now. People demand action. That action may or may not be favorable to the terrorists.

Really, if terrorism were so easy and effective the entire world would have collapsed in the face of relentless terror attacks by now. Terrorism is not that effective because terrorists are not any more clever, brave, or efficient than anyone else, and because they make the mistake of pretty much any idealogue over the last century or so: They think ideological purity and resolve are what's needed to succeed. Those may give you motivation, but they can't replace resources or planning, nor does it account for the fact that one's opponents may not be all that impressed with your ideological purity.

However, just because security is not perfect does not make the existing security an illusion. It's not. It makes it much more difficult to carry out terror attacks than it otherwise would be, and every time one does succeed, lessons are learned.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Israeli air seem to do well. Can we copy them?

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

When were they released? If they are who they think they are, I'm fairly certain it was in 2007.


edit - we don't want security. We want it's illusion, and we don't want that illusion to get in our way. And thank god we don't want security, because that would mean the end of civil liberties as we understand them. Here is the horrible, awful truth - we cannot stop them from killing our people in every instance. Given enough time, any hacker will break into an accessible system. Unless we want to strip search every single solitary passenger, including children and grandma, terrorist attacks will happen on planes. Unless we want to make sure any religious group that believes in modesty never takes another air plane, we will never have security. Handing airport security to a private company is *not* going to change that. It is, however, going to put people's well being in the hands of an entity that has no interest in that well being, and only in their bottom line.

This attack illustrates something key - people on planes are not sheep anymore. Which means if you make an attempt, they will act.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

I agree with this.

We don't have to change that fact (people will try to terrorize planes) either. But were we to privatize the airline industry (and I don't mean just security, I mean stop bailing out failing airlines, reduce and phase out FAA oversight to make it more of a voluntary, collabrative industry resource, like INPO, only with out de-fact sanctioning power, and the same with the airports) then people can choose a security package commensurate with their own travel needs. Maybe there wouldn't be a tailor-made package for every single person, but there might be some more choice. And that's fine, no one has the right to fly, anyway.

Let me ask you this. Why do you think the "bottom" line is such a bad pursuit? If a company provides airport security, then in pursuing their bottom line (in order to pursue it best), they must provide great security.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

That's quaint, Montegue. You still think that government cares about your well being.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Well, they were, but this dumbass blew only two things to smithereens: efficiency and pleasantness in flying. Oh, sorry, three: his crotch.

Terrorism is easy DE, the reason the world hasn't collapsed is because most people have too much to risk. Family, future, options.

It usually takes a stranger who knows of a different life to make you hate your current one.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

In support of Elmo's last comment, the Soviet POW's returned at the end of WWII were sent to Gulag's not home. They served long sentences, or were executed outright, for having surrendered instead of dying in place for the Motherland. That was the official line. The real reason, according to several sources, was because they knew too much of the West, knew how much better it was there, and the Soviet leaders were afraid of their worker's paradise being overthrown by former soldiers who knew the government was lying to them. Keep the repatriates from telling their stories and you keep the masses ignorant.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

No, Elmo, it really is not that easy. It's just easy to make it sound easy when you're sitting at home typing about it on the internet and glossing over all the little complications that add up to make it very complicated in real life.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Raf - the bottom line isn't *necessarily* a "bad" pursuit in and of itself. In order to be in business, you must work towards that goal. However, I firmly believe that life and human well being is significantly more important that corporate profit, so when it comes to issues like security, police, fire, health care, and military protection, I believe the profit motive fails to achieve the desired goal. In my opinion, not everything is a commodity, not everything belongs in the arena of private enterprise, and not everything can be made better by capitalism. Some things can be made much, much worse.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show