Yup. The smart approach is also to be prepared to handle and react to calamities in general, rather than putting vast effort in making exacting preparations against a single, highly specific calamity so detailed that your preparations are worthless if your hypothetical attacker diverges even slightly from "the script". And this doesn't even get into the effort we waste pointlessly preventing people from boarding aircraft because, for a real-world example, they have an Agatha Christie murder-mystery novel in their possession that has a gun and a knife on the front cover. (I can imagine the fun the Goons would have had with this -- using a photograph of a gun to hijack a photograph of an airliner to a photograph of Cuba, probably.)
Sadly, coming up with measures that are actually sensible, useful and effective is all too often neglected in favor of Being Publicly Seen To Do Something About It, Right Now, even if it's completely the wrong thing -- and then, of course, once the wrong solution is in place, it stays there forever and is never replaced because A Solution Is Already In Place. (Until, of course, it gets augmented the next time someone needs to Be Publicly Seen To Do Something About It, Right Now.) In practical reality, it's almost always better to do nothing at all until you figure out the right thing to do than it is to blindly rush in and do the wrong thing as fast as possible.
Right now, I'm quite sure the real terrorists have figured out that they don't even need to actually implement, or be able to implement, a plot -- all they need to do is come up with about 80% to 90% of the pieces of something half-way plausible, leak it, and watch the US and UK governments scurry around in a panic with their pants on fire terrorizing their own citizens. Someone commented yesterday that the "terror alert level" system isn't so much a terrorist threat indicator as it is a terrorist success indicator.
People always think I'm some sort of nut when I say things like, "you're going to die, no matter what you do, so enjoy life," or point out that we live on each other's whim.
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cadhla.
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Sadly, coming up with measures that are actually sensible, useful and effective is all too often neglected in favor of Being Publicly Seen To Do Something About It, Right Now, even if it's completely the wrong thing -- and then, of course, once the wrong solution is in place, it stays there forever and is never replaced because A Solution Is Already In Place. (Until, of course, it gets augmented the next time someone needs to Be Publicly Seen To Do Something About It, Right Now.) In practical reality, it's almost always better to do nothing at all until you figure out the right thing to do than it is to blindly rush in and do the wrong thing as fast as possible.
Right now, I'm quite sure the real terrorists have figured out that they don't even need to actually implement, or be able to implement, a plot -- all they need to do is come up with about 80% to 90% of the pieces of something half-way plausible, leak it, and watch the US and UK governments scurry around in a panic with their pants on fire terrorizing their own citizens. Someone commented yesterday that the "terror alert level" system isn't so much a terrorist threat indicator as it is a terrorist success indicator.
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I'm Not Going To Let The Bas#$&* Win!
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