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How long has this been going on? The thought struck me after reading Adriana’s post that this plot may be quite wide. Last year a fellow here in Belfast was arrested, tried and convicted for studying ways of blowing up airliners using capacitors from tape recorders and such.
I was working in the US at the time that particular story broke… and was quite surprised to see pictures of the very complex in which I lived.
Perhaps it was a good thing my drapes were pulled while I was away so he never noticed the American flag in the corner. I can almost imagine his thoughts had he seen it: “An American! Allah be praised! And me, the only Arab terrorist in Belfast!”
Only those who have lived in Belfast will fully understand the joke.
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newsflash via Reuters (help!) that hijack of Qatar Airways plane has been foiled, citing Al-Jazeera TV.
Not a great day for the flight industry.
I’ve been trying to figure out what liquids they were going to use. In high school my fav was making NI3, but that requires filter paper, time to dry out and it would take quite a bit to do any real damage.
Nitroglycerine? I don’t remember the precursors. In my neighborhood it was something you bought for blowing up stumps. It is also very squirrely to deal with.
Perhaps some fuel air explosive to turn the entire fuselage into the bomb? The possibilities are gruesome and endless.
what about if you just poured a litre of petrol on the floor and set it on fire. Would that bring down a plane?
The very thought causes a full retraction… I do not know. It is not explosive per-se but would certainly be terrible to those inside. The Oxygen supply is limited and if at high altitude it might be possible to depress. If it really got going there would be structural failure, blowouts due to expandin gases, etc.
Might or might not take the airplane down, but it would kill and maim a lot of folk. Just horrendous to imagine…
I was once at a pig roast where an idiot biker started the fire with gasoline and a match. I still remember the flame front racing outwards 20 feet or more. Happened in seconds, singed his hair and I was far enough away that it stopped short of where I was. Not something one forgets.
The joke’s an old one and was first told to me (a native of Belfast) by a South African so I think the joke is known outside of Norn Iron. Finding a Jew in NI really would be like winning the lottery but you yanks would be easy for any terrorist to find. They could start at the Crown.
It’s handy enough for the reporters hanging out in the Europa, but my local of near 20 years and my other regular watering holes are a bit more interesting. I would, on rare occasions drop in the back bar at Robinsons and I have played the basement bar there.
Yes, Matra, the joke is well known in South Africa. I would say that I heard it at least 30 years ago (since I know I was at school when I first heard it), and it was published in a joke collection or two at that time.
I’m thinking that we may be going at this too literally. I don’t think that gasoline would take down the plane; the cabins are (with the exception of the passengers) designed to be fire retardant.
I’m thinking that based on the restrictions being placed on baggage in the UK and America, that the liquids were being used to disguise traditional terrorist explosives, like Semtex. Shampoo, for example, is notorious for being practically impossible to xray using airport style equipment. The dirty secret since 9/11 has been that you can sneak anything you want into an airport if you simply put it in a bottle of Prell.
Actually, the news I have read is they were expecting at least binary explosives with different enemy agents carrying each component on board as something innocent and then combining them during flight.
The enemy has a lot of cannon fodder they are willing to expend on this.
That’s much the same problem as binary gases, isn’t it Dale? There’s no reason to expect an “enemy” composed of amateurs to be able to do stuff that is too difficult in practice for major powers to be bothered with. The premium is on simplicity, cheapness and idiot-proofness, I suggest. But I am offering no suggestions in a public place.
Not really. The difficulty with binary chemical warfare weapons is not the chemicals or the mixing of them… it is getting it to work reliably and autmoattically in an explosive shell. Same thing with a binary explosive. There are lots of possibilities of which I know only a handful, none of which are really suitable to what the enemy was up to here. I could mix up something to blow up a tree stump from a binary using things I could probably buy within walking distance. But the stuff is flakey and not really that powerful.
I suspect a great deal of research went into their efforts, and I my suspicion is they farmed that research out to a large number of expendables like the guy arrested here in Belfast. Get lots of young fanatic engineers looking for you and pick the best option.
I will even posit they did not start out with the binary idea, but put out a results based research RFP via their assorted popup websites. That is true net-centric warfare.
You want terror? Real bowel voiding terror?
You want simplicty and a 100% kill rate?
You want a slow, painful uncurable death for any and all who you “infect”?
Go google dimethyl mercury.
And then think about the cooling water spray misters you see in some places during the heat waves.
Was that actually “water” some chav just nailed you with from his car via a “supersoaker”?
When you grab the bar or strap on the Underground, that IS just the residue from someone’s sweaty hand, right?
Yes, there are far worse things in this world than anthrax and smallpox and plague and New Labour.
I remember an air accident some 20 or so years ago. It was one of the Arabian countries’ airlines, a 747 that took off, had a fire in the cabin, and returned to land. It managed to land but the fire consumed all aboard before anyone could be evacuated. The investigation suggested that some foolish passenger had actually started a gas stove on board and started cooking something on the cabin floor in flight. This caused a cabin fire that spread throughout the entire fuselage.
With this event in mind it is clear that just about any flammable liquid will suffice for total destruction of an aircraft. Now think about all the duty free liquor on board?.
In 1987 there was a South African Airways Boeing 747 that was consumed by fire over the indian ocean near Mauritius. No one could determine what caused the fire but it was likely that it was something flammable in the cargo that ignited.
There are loads of really nasty obscure things in the world, Chris Tucker. But the reason every street-corner psycho isn’t usung them is because they are often much more tricky than they seem, and much, much more tricky than the ordinary tools of the violent, which are plentiful and cheap.
Something that’s badly behaved has much more chance of killing those attempting to weaponise it – even if they can get it in the first place – than they do of getting a victim subsequently. Think of not plague but Ebola fever. Highly contagious, and deadly. But it kills and disables its vectors too fast to be a really successful disease.
Just how would you go about getting enough dimethyl mercury into a super-soaker – and considering it is denser than aluminium what sort of pressures are you going to need to spray it on anyone but yourself?
I hope the uncovered plot is, indeed, far bigger than we know about now. For simple police reasons.
First,. The more terrorists you catch today the more can’t harm you tomorrow. And you get much information about what is still undetected.
The more people in a plot the more chance one will slip up and blow the secrecy.
Second, big plots and attacks wake people up. Evil may or may not exist in the abstract. But in life you may have to act as if it does and choose a side.
I remember an air accident some 20 or so years ago. It was one of the Arabian countries’ airlines, a 747 that took off, had a fire in the cabin
That was a Saudia flight out of Riyadh; I lived in Jeddah at the time. A colleague (and friend, a father of two) was killed on that flight. Frightening stuff, but unlikely to get past even the most cursory pre-flight security nowadays.
A vest full of Semtext and ball bearings will kill the wearer dead just as surely as getting Dimethyl Mercury on their hands.
Do they care they are going to die? At last reports, no.
If you don’t care about your own life, all kinds of nasty becomes QUITE feasable.
Dimethyl Mercury is just one not all that hard to obtain substance that can do all sorts of horrible things to people.
I’m not a terrorist. I know about them. What makes you think they don’t know about them, too?
If you don’t care about your own life, all kinds of nasty becomes QUITE feasable.
Except, as ever, things are more complicated than that.
The reason suicide bombing is a popular means of unconventional warfare is that it is quick, irrevocable once initiated, and open to the unskilled, the bomber is theoretically alert and capable.
The reason the 9/11 attackers were so remarkable was that their self-imolation was an act of deliberate careful overcoming of instincts of self-preservation. Much harder. Even though at the front of the plane they could guarantee themselves a quick death, it was still shockingly courageous. Which made it so much more effective, in itself, and as propaganda.
Not caring about your own life, is probably too simple a way of putting it anyway. I have no doubt there are different types of motivation and different types of people involved in terrorism. Richard Reid was nothing like Mohammed Atta, in capacity or personality, though they both aimed to destroy an aircraft, putatively in a similar cause.
But not caring about your own life is definitely not the same as having no human reactions to pain, uncertainty, loss of control and so forth, all of which are consequences of self-poisoning methods. It is a comon feature of fanatics that they are willing to ignore or discount the suffering of others, but being inhumane and being willing to make some specific dramatic sacrifices imbued with certain sorts of meaning does not mean they cease to care for themselves at all.
I suspect also, though I cannot prove, that the role of agent is important part of the psychology here. Suicide bombing in this sort of circumstance (and I think we need to distinguish method and motive: Tamil and Palestinian suicide bombers, say, are doing different things from these non-nationalist fanatics) is an existential act giving meaning to the person. Being a passive carrier, rather than a daring attacker, doesn’t fit the pattern.