Why are they so rare?
I’ve been wondering that for years. Decades in fact, long before 911. My theory has always been that the intersection of the sets of people competent to do such things, and people willing to do such things, is very small. Fortunately. Unfortunately, with advancing technology, it’s going to get easier, expanding the former set.
Idiots lack focus. The people that do these things are not just evil. They are idiots. As such, they spend their time being idiots. Evil has to grab them by the nose to actually accomplish anything heinous. While they may occasionally come up with an evil plan, it generally doesn’t stay in their brains long enough but is pushed out by any stupid distraction.
These things will become less rare in the future when somebody does the focusing for them. But the guys that would do that are even more rare.
A lot of people believe its hard to make a bomb. Based on my military experience, it really isn’t. Fortunately, there aren’t that many people motivated to plant bombs.
America is wide open for this type of bombing attack. I’ve been very surprised that we haven’t had much more of it since 9/11.
Apparently at least some of the security theater implemented after 9/11 had some beneficial effect.
And the appeasement theater implemented since 20 January 2009 has had the opposite effect. Who could have guessed?
It turns out that a housefly, after being exhausted by trapped in the house for 48 hours, can in fact be swatted with a sledgehammer…
Heh. Wouldn’t know, myself. My wife’s three cats apprehend flying bugs in an average of 12 hours, tops.
…furniture and fragile objects hardest hit.
Amazing how many folks who supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (at least in the beginning) said that part of the issue was fighting them on THEIR soil. Result – no attacks on US during Bush era.
Bring in Obama, you know, the great appeaser who was going to make everyone love us. Now, we have had at least 3 major attacks in just over 4 years.
Great idea – fighting the terrorists on OUR soil just bury head in my hands.
You get the same thing from Paulians as from Democrats: “Let’s wait until we’re stuffing corpses into body bags in Downtown America before we do something about it… otherwise people in foreign countries might say bad things about us.”
I have a pet theory that the self-same rigidity of thought that enables ‘fanaticism’ cripples ‘outside-of-the-box thinking’.
Give a -good- engineer the task “Cause mayhem”, $100,000 and ‘minions’, and … we’d have a hell of a lot of mayhem. And … catching people would be -quite- tough. The list of areas of trouble that are (IMNSHO) completely unexplored is … large.
And yet – a significant slice of the upper echelon -are- engineers. And they manage the methodical aspects (timing, placement, functional explosives etc.) But they don’t appear to back off to strategic thinking or applying any sort of scale. “Hello, Mouser? Hey, I’d like 10000 of ….”
There aren’t nearly as many people who want to go out and kill strangers as you imagine, most people just want to get on with their own lives.
You might be surprised. Not all cultures are like yours.
It’s not been really hard for a long time. Prior to the OK City bombing, the worst bombing in the US took place in 1927.
The bigger threat today from the internet may be in bringing like minded people together to amplify grievances, and give nut cases the external validation needed to push them into doing something.
I got it. Only two of how many bombs went off? Three if we count the library. So perhaps it’s only rare because the potential bombers blow off a few fingers testing and decide it’s not worth doing?
Bombs are simple, they just don’t think of the pressure cooker. So, will they now need background checks to buy a pressure cooker?
“Only two of how many bombs went off?”
Two out of two.
“UPDATE: Officials later said the incident at the JFK Library was not related to the explosions at the Marathon.”
The report of 2 bombs found and disarmed was later reported to be in error. But the potential exists for a less than competent bomber to lose fingers, or more, trying to figure it out. Many “easy” explosives have very bad tempers.
The rat bastard Tim McVeigh used fuel oil and fertilizer to kill over 160 people. The US government used to publish simple directions for using this combination to do things like blowing stumps. While making high explosives has a learning curve and can be a Darwinean process, there are a lot of things that are readily available just about anywhere. There is some speculation that the white smoke from these bombs could’ve been black powder which can be bought at countless gun stores. You can buy pressure cookers, BBs and nails at Wal Mart, among countless other places.
I still have a few of my old Army field manuals. One of them, “Special Forces Incentary Techniques” gives the directions for building many different types of nasty devices, many from common materials you’d likely find around the house.
A: The frequency of low-intensity attacks is fairly high. In fact, it seems to follow an N^-2.5 power law , which is not coincidentally the same law that governs the size of e.g. asteroids. Or corporations, or any of numerous other variables in both physical and social sciences. The little ones are much more common than the bigger onces, across all scales, in a manner that comes out of random agglomeration of resources and does not reflect systematic bias.
B: The issue isn’t whether people are good or bad, or whether terrorism is easy or hard, or whether terrorists like big attacks or small ones. The issue is, terrorists are people, and people are social. Even in the rare case of the man who can do great and terrible things by his own unaided hand, he is far more likely to actually do so when he’s got friends cheering him on. And mostly, terrorists need material assistance as well. So we get terrorists randomly bumping into each other like rocks in the asteroid belt, and occasionally they stick, and occasionally they break apart. Which gives that N^-2.5 power law in size of terrorist groups, translating into an N^-2.5 power law in capability and will to commit terror.
C: It only seems like Boston-style attacks are rare because, as Jane put it, “That’s why we don’t get high-frequency, low-intensity attacks on crowded spaces near some Texas town that no one in Abottabad has ever heard of”. And nobody in the New York Times newsroom has heard of those towns either, so they don’t count. Not if it’s just three murder victims with no suspect and no motive. Without a larger body count or a uniquely newsworthy angle, that’s just a drug deal gone bad, or gang-related, or hey, Texas, must have been rednecks playing with dynamite. The Boston Marathon, by comparison, would have been newsworthy without any casualties.
Part C needs a name, because it also quite pervasive. That is: where the statistics just flat-out don’t mesh with the worldview of the reporter to the point of incomprehension. Examples include defensive gun use, violent weather damage, child safety, etc.
How about the Pauline Kael effect?
As to part A, it has become something of a fad to fit power distributions to everything. Asteroids have a good reason (that is, a model) to fit a power law (impacts are crudely proportional to cross-section area so anything overrepresented with respect to the power law in question has a greater relative probability to get smacked), but the rest of the stuff mentioned is less so justified.
Data trumps theory, and several independent datasets all show a very good fit to a power law for terrorist attacks of up to ~100 fatalities. Same or similar exponent, roughly -2.5, as well. And there is at least speculative but plausible justification as to why this should be so. As you mention, large rocks have a greater relative probabilty of getting “smacked”; you really think the same isn’t true of terrorist groups?
OK, maybe you don’t. But where there’s data and a proposed theory, you’re going to need more than “Oh, the authors are just being trendy”.
What’s frightened me for years now is Mumbai Part Two.
Because they achieve nothing.
This, of course, prompts the question: why did it take the Irish so long to figure this out?
Well, because they’re Irish?
I wonder if federal investigators consult Bill Ayers on these cases, like Clarice Starling’s sessions with Hannibal Lecter.
Has Kiefer Sutherland ever played opposite Hopkins? That would be nutty.
Well it’s been the Wild West here. They nailed one guy and are looking for the other.
I have to say I’m impressed that the cops reacted quickly to acquire and chase the two down the street. The local news is doing their usual “We have nothing new to say so we’ll say loads of nothing”.
The authorities have surrounded a few spots. Cities are complex – it will be tough to get this guy.
P.S. I begin to wonder what, if anything, the other cells that are assuredly in place in the Boston area will do in the next few hours….
Lie low until the furor dies down?
Or use the confusion to overstress the authorities?
My guess is that they’ll lay low and hope the second guy isn’t taken alive. While there is a lot of confusion right now, there are also a LOT of heavily armed and pissed off cops who’d quickly take out anyone looking to commit terrorism.
Certainly they’ll lie low, they’d have to exist to do anything else.