It must be forty years since I first saw on a news segment that one could then build an A-Bomb to fit in a suitcase. The reporter put on a Russian uniform, and left a suitcase that size in the middle of New York. It stayed there. It was probably the only one that year that was left out in public in New York City and wasn’t stolen.
About anything that was possible forty years ago is easy now.
I hear the suitcase bomb mentioned in passing many times on TV.
Contrary to what I thought, I have been informed that many of the Islamic extremists are technicians. The terrorists I saw down the years blew themselves to Kingdom Come and many of them wandered around with bombs and didn’t know where, in the African bush, to put the damned things.
I keep reading about suicide bombers who blow themselves up. Naturally, since I can’t help being one of those smartasses who “has experience in the field,” so like them I just chuckled to myself and made a generalization.
I have said it before: I have made about every mistake I denounce, including thinking of myself as the Intellectual and the Idealist, at least twice. Many, many times, since I was the Spokesman and the writer of press releases, I thought I was smarter than the people who really knew what was going on.
But when I found out how many real techs they have, I immediately started wondering about that suitcase bomb again.
A lot of you knew all along that there were these real techs on the other side. It is not really my special knowledge, but my way of thinking, what I call Mantra Thinking and BBG calls street smarts, that I have to offer you. You had the knowledge before me, but you don’t THINK like I do.
That worries me, because knowledge can be passed on fairly easily, but a way of thinking dies with the man who does it.
This suitcase bomb maybe a very good case of this.
You must have the ability to create that forty-year-old device, but you, the few who can, must USE it. Our picture of the Islamic extremists is carefully cultivated to see them as mindless nuts. Any serious THINKING about it undermines this image.
More than one book has illustrated that the Islamic extremists only use terror when we go into THEIR territory. This is a message no one wants to hear, least of all respectable conservatives and Christian fundamentalists who demand total war in the Middle East.
When discussing 9/11, I have been astonished to find some people have MEMORY of it, and not just the stuff the media keeps repeating. A few people actually REMEMBER the It’s Not Israel Campaign right after 9/11.
When the towers went up, support for Israel in America dropped like a rock. Every discussion, and there were a LOT of them, had everybody agreeing that the Towers weren’t bombed, as those who did it claimed, because of US support for Israel.
They did it, and they SAID that was WHY they did it. So every single professional talker in the media began a It Has Nothing To Do With Israel campaign. They convinced a lot of people, according to their polls.
You have to be a bit stupid to think Arabs would attack the United States because our women don’t cover their faces when they see themselves as victims of a country that holds their territory in their own back yards.
So if you THINK about the suitcase bomb, it may be that the Arabs don’t want to just kill. There are devices that could do that a lot more intensely than the 2001 incident.
I think the suitcase bomb or its equivalent will be developed and used. But that can only happen when a critical mass of money and expertise decides to use it. So far, the total basket cases are blowing themselves up, and technology is beyond them.
So we are left with the conclusion that so far at least the Arabs who have the money and the technical expertise have not decided to USE it the way the They Just Hate America crowd say they naturally would, the way our image of them says they would.
The media doesn’t do any THINKING, but I think they avoid the whole question of suitcase bombs and bacteriological warfare by instinct. It requires a consideration of what the other side is THINKING, and the whole media image is based on insisting that they DON’T think.
#1 by BGLass on 04/17/2010 - 11:16 am
It was years ago, but it seems like yesterday that the book came out, Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, who would later do Silence of the Lambs. Then in 1995, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, then the Deaver books, beginning with Bone Collector, in 1997, about tracking all those wily white serial killers. For about ten years, nobody could find a fiction crime book about something else and all the books lifted the same pertinent page from Mind Hunter, that explained THEE serial killer: who has to be the angry white male hetero loner-gun-nut genius. They all followed a distinct pattern that could be summed in a paragraph, and all the heroes had to have graduated from something called “Quantico.” Easily, there were 200 books/movies on this.
The real news had stupid serial killers and non-white serial killers and gay serial killers, but those were not REAL serial killers (like in fiction books which were true).
Here’s what I think is weird: so much time and money goes into just one of these ideas, like the ‘serial nut’ idea–so why on earth would propagandists turn around and ‘muddy it up.’ Like, here: “lone gun nut,” is supposed to be for white men, but then it gets used for Islam.
In other word, applying a highly cultivated image of white-lone-gun-nut to Islam (freedom fighters to left), has only served to make them (the “left”) question their views of whites.
So, these ideas they spend a fortune developing just collapse and actually backfire, (on the metaphorical level). While in school, I always wondered about this; it must be why Old Education taught all the stupid redneck kids not to mix metaphors. In our school: one teacher actually said mixing metaphors was ‘HOW KNOWLEDGE was produced.” I wish I was making that up.
#2 by Dave on 04/17/2010 - 11:27 am
Everybody has a unique point of view because everyone?s personal experiences are unique.
I learned a long time ago to not make assumptions about anyone’s point of view. I expect to be blindsided by strangers.
I do not assume they think like I do.
What upsets me time and again is that because of events and shifting circumstances the worldview of masses of people shift without their being conscious of it. Their standards change for the worse, their “ontological” perspective changes, meaning their view of what the world is and what is in it and what it does changes, and what was once considered inferior and condemned becomes acceptable.
America has shifted enormously in this way. It is an unconscious shift, very ominous. People adapt to tyranny very readily. They adapt to death camps very readily. And they adapt to death squad politics very readily.
Just think about how easily the American public has adapted to the preposterous proposition that the Supreme Court is the source of rights. Just think how easily the American public has adapted to the idea that suicide attacks are normative methods of warfare. At an earlier time people would have been shocked into incomprehension at such ideas.
And it is there, right there, where the Establishment massively screws up. It engages in far too much that can’t be taken back while tumbling into the delusion that it can provide for its own security.
The Establishment has acquired for itself a splendid lifestyle that it cannot imagine losing. If you do not understand this central fact, you do not understand the Establishment. So despite its endless travails and carrying on about its own security, it is there, right there, where the Establishment is most deluded.
That is because it imagines all these heavy duty plays it has made can be taken back. That is just another way of saying that despite everything, the Establishment assumes it is secure. And of course, it could not be more wrong.
#3 by backbaygrouch4 on 04/17/2010 - 1:50 pm
Suitcase nukes are unique weapons. They require a high level of technology, huge sums of money and they have a relatively short shelf life. Either you build it for immediate use or you fund an ongoing replacement program. This takes a government willing to spend the money or a government with a large income from another government. There is only one such entity in the Middle East and it ain’t Arab.
Seymour Hirsch claimed that Nixon rearmed Israel after it had its ass whipped in 1973 because Israel threatened to nuke Odessa and provoke a US/USSR catastrophe. Since then Israel has pursued a blackmail weapon to control American policy. Suitcase bombs could be one such. Additionally the US has forced Germany to build for Israel,, gratis of course, nuclear submarines, which were not to be armed with WMDs [wink, nod]. Now Israel can aim and deliver the Bomb to the American homeland.
Four years ago a Jew who had enlisted in the US navy and pushed for and was trained in the launching mechanisms of nuclear armed submarines was caught spying. The Navy had flat out refused to assign him to the more advanced submarines. He became very discontent. He deserted and was charged with trying to sell the technical information he had purloined to an unnamed foreign power. He has been convicted, and is in prison.
The government handling of this case is interesting. At first, it attempted to claim he was not a Jew, that he was German. Then, it blacked out the name of the the country involved, but leaked that it was Russia. But Moscow does not need missile launching technology. They have it. Israel does not and wants it. No other nation wants it. But this young Zionist attempted to sell his expertise and stolen documents to the allegedly anti-Semitic regime of the defunct USSR. For further information, google Ariel J. Weinmann.
Any grade school teacher with street smarts. or as Bob would put it, Mantra Thinking, asks why one kid is pointing to another when a misdeed is to be punished. She knows which one to whack, or at least did back when the Hickory Stick was in vogue. Ask yourself who those who tout the Suitcase Bomb threat support, and you will see who might have them.
The extent of the rot in Washington endangering this nation was vividly illustrated this week in an article by Philip Giraldi. The rot’s tentacles have crept into the highest levels of the government, even in the military.
http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2010/04/14/dr-strangelove-made-in-israel/
There is a clear and present danger in addition to distant concerns posed by the Arabs. But it takes a mind that asks why is this Suitcase Bomb threat being trotted out by the media for public consumption. Who is doing it? Why? Who is it deflecting attention from? It takes Mantra thinking. And you won’t get that on your evening news.
#4 by Simmons on 04/17/2010 - 3:30 pm
9/11 was one of those shifting points for Jews at least some of them, June, 1941 all over again.
Conspiracy as it is also remember that the conference in SA where the Arabs bushwacked our favorite Jewish Nation preceeded 9/11 by a few months, and the world’s only nation that counts was down in the polls.
Now thanks to the passive-aggressive wing puller offers of the left Israel is dropping blood in the water from their blow up raft awash in the shark filled ocean of wronged people.
As for the media they do not think they read a script.
#5 by Alan B on 04/19/2010 - 10:25 pm
For years we hear that Iran is working on the A-Bomb and they may develope one at any moment. Funny how Iran with their oil riches need to invest millions to accure the A-Bomb yet, we are also led to believe that rag tag terrorist will some how purchase a suitcase A-Bomb and blow it up. Logic would dictate that all Iran would need to do is invest a fraction of what they have spent on developing their own a-Bomb and just buy the damn thing out right.