Terrorism around the world

Thre's been more terrorist news this week and weekend. I wasn't able to focus on it very closely as it happened.

Perhaps the place to begin is an observation I saw weeks ago (on a blog I've now forgotten). It is becoming apparent that every little terrorist group with an axe to grind has been attracted towards the Islamist terrorist creed.

At the very least, any terrorist or rebel group in any part of the world that has an Islamic population has attracted Islamist elements. Also, the members of those groups are apparently becoming attracted towards Islamist faith and practice themselves, because that's who all the noteworthy terrorists are.

The person who observed this pointed to events in the Phillippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. It is also underlined the bombing in India, and appears to be related to a series of beheadings in Indonesia.

India has known trouble between its Islamic population and its Hindu population ever since the end of the colonial era. Inter-religious violence was probably endemic to the region at some level before Westerners showed up.

Indonesia has long had friction between its Christian and Muslim populations, with a dash of other religions thrown in to mix things up even more.

Africa is a little less troublesome right now, but even Egypt has seen historic rivalries between Coptic Christians and Muslims produce new flashes of violence with Islamist overtones.

(As a historical footnoe: the Coptic church has been a distinct religious/cultural group in Egypt since Roman times. The Copts, the Orthodox, and the Catholic branches of Christianity diverged during later centuries of the Roman Empire, and the early centuries after the fall of Rome. The Coptic church doesn't have the same worldwide currency as the Catholic and Ortodox churches, probably because its center in Egypt fell under the influence of Islam during the 7th Century.)

These events in the far corners of the world appear to be part of a growing trend. The current battles in Iraq, the elections in Iraq and Afghanistan, bombings in Spain, Indonesia, England, India--even the long-simmering struggle between Palestinian Arabs and the state of Israel are all part of the worldwide war against Islamist terror. This is something that America has talked about for some time, ever since our President coined the phrase "the global war on terror." But it is something that has probably not been fully realized: Islamists are trying to force their vision of the future into being through terror. They have been trying to harry big nations like the United States, take the upper hand in the politics of Muslim nations, and use force to eradicate or subdue non-Muslims in countries with mixed populations of belief.

One of the big successes of the American venture into Iraq is that the Islamists have been forced to attack fellow Muslims in a Muslim-dominant country. Those attacks have been in an attempt to keep the fellow Muslims from following any other interpretation of Islam, or be friendly with any non-Muslim nations.

The Islamist enemy in Iraq--usually called Al-Qaeda in Iraq--still has some power in Iraq. However, their fortunes have been waning for months. They were unable to seriously disrupt the last round of elections. Their in-house brainpower keeps shrinking due to the death or capture of high-level planners and operatives.

Most importantly, they have become enemies even of the minority ethnic groups they used to make common cause with--the Sunnis.

That still doesn't mean that the global war is over. But it's a good start.

Palestine Hotel: sign of desperation?

The violent irregular soldiers who fight for Al-Qaeda in Iraq staged an impressive assault on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad.

Regardless of the final outcome of the blast, this operation had more elaborate planning and preparation than most of the attacks in Iraq in the past month or so. It was coordinated enough to make me suspect it was planned for maximum effect. I noted earlier that a significant organizational loss had happened over election weekend. Not only did their senior IT man get caught by American Soldiers, but so did a handful of other high-level aides.

Does this give me reason to claim that the recent assault had already gone through the planning stages before that big sweep? Or did this assault come from a section of AQI which was not affected by these detentions?

Their choice of target is telling: they don't go for an Allied command center, communication node, or air base. Not even a mess hall or barracks. Also telling are the resources used: a large number of irregular infantry were in the area after the bomb-blasts. They were driven off by Iraqi and American soldiers.

The target is almost entirely non-military. It seems designed to have created a press sensation. The resources used indicate a desire to invade, hold ground, and probably kill specific targets before exfiltration.

On the one hand, a large amount of media coverage is a bonus in the eyes of AQI. On the other hand, the operation looks to have been planned to maximize media casualties. There's also a security firm whose employees have been rumored to be part of American or Israeli intelligence. They play into the puzzle somehow, and in ways we can't unravel at the moment.

The terrorist plane does appear to have involved something similar to "use international news as Al-Qaeda in Iraq's PR firm". They got a show of strength and good video of a well-planned assault. Both became part of the nightly news around the world.

It also may have been part of a larger strategy to remove Western media influence from Iraq, as Donald Sensing outlines near the end of his post.

Do the people who work in the media know that they are being used? Do they know that they are being used to amplify the visibility of a limited-capability force?

And why does Time magazine admit to talking to members of the terrorist organizations? (Look for the phrase "insurgent sources" in the article, and ask yourself what that means.)

More news from Iraq

I wonder what the news people living in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad think about their position in Iraq now.

Donald Sensing gives quite a good analysis of the attack. In short, three seperate vehicles carrying bombs approached the hotel, known to be a favorite location for foreign jounralists in Baghdad.

The news channels are apparently full of speculation as to what the focus of the assault was. Journalists? Foreigners who worked with American troops? Was this an attack to specifically wipe out a large group of foreigners, or an attack to get a big explosion on worldwide television news?

There was an apparent plan to use one or two smaller cars to blast a hole in a wall that surrounds the hotel grounds, with a larger bomb arriving in a cement truck about a minute later. One car bomb did puncture the barrier wall, and a cement truck tried to go through the hole in the damaged wall a minute later. A second car-bomb detonated between those two events, but it detonated on the far side of the square.

At the very least, this looks like a failed attempt to stage a big, noteworthy attack. I don't have enough confirmed details to get a better idea of why the attack failed. It definitely killed people, but it could have been much worse. A certain level of foresight and planning is required to plan on using one bomb to open a corridor for a larger bomb to strike. A good deal of logistics would be involved in coordinating three separate suicide bombers to attack in sequence at a specific location.

One of the big reasons for failure was apparent miscalculation in how hard it would be for the cement truck to use the hole in the breached retaining wall. Perhaps the fact that the second car-bomb didn't explode in a position to expand that hole has something to do with it. Some people have claimed that this explosion happened right after the second car came under fire by Iraqi policemen, and that it exploded near a police-post.

There are also indications that some concertina wire got wrapped around the axles of the cement truck, pinning it down. (According to answers.com, concertina wire is a variant of barbed wire, wrapped in a spiral and put on top of a barrier or fence. I think I've driven past several prisons that had concertina wire on top of their fences.)

Even the best plans get ruined by small details. And we have no idea how well-planned this assault was.

A strange note alongside all this: some news agencies claim that they were tipped off for the attack. Why would attackers tip off potential victims at a large, visible target? And did the potential victims have time to alert the Iraqi police, Iraqi military, or American military?

If they did have the time, did they do it?

That important Presidential Appointment

No, not Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

President Bush has just appointed someone to an important position, that impacts the personal lives of every American on a daily basis.

He as appointed a new chairman for the Federal Reserve Board. (Hat tip: Ace.)

The new guy, Ben Bernanke, is relatively young at 51 years. (GreenSpan turned 79 in March, according to Wikipedia.)

Put it a different way--during my short lifetime, every time I have heard about the Federal Reserve Board in the news, I have heard Alan Greenspan mentioned. During the past 18 years, he has become synonomous with the Federal Reserve.

The Fed doesn't do much in the public eye, but they have the ability to tell banks the minimum rates they can charge each other on loans. That base rate affects all loans offered made by banks, which affects everything from the housing market to business expansion to personal credit-card rates.

This is a "changing of the guard" that was bound to happen sooner or later, given Greenspan's age. I am happy to see that the man appointed appears to already have a good deal of experience at the Fed, and is a respected economics professor.

I am also happy that institutions like the Federal Reserve don't become the focus of intense passions in the way that the United States Supreme Court has. The Fed seems to have been doing its job quite well; I hope that it continues to do so in the future.

Follow-up reporting on the Iraqi election

A good report about the recent Iraqi elections is available at Michael Yon's place. (Hat tip: Matt at Black5.)

This on-the-ground report of how election day went reinforces my earlier thoughts about this election. It was a good, quiet election day.

There were, admittedly, a few attacks. The number of attacks on polling places was roughly one-fifth the number that occurred in the last Iraqi election.

At the very least, this sends a clear message to the rest of the world. The nation of Iraq is on the mend. And the people of Iraq like that fact.

Embarassing IT Mistake of the Month Award

The Embarassing Information-Technology Mistake of the Month Award goes to the United Nation bureaucrat who altered an official report just before its release. (Hat Tip: lgf.)

Apparently, someone deleted the names of 3 Syrian officials from a report detailing Syrian connections to the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Harari.

Unfortunately, they didn't realize that the names hadn't been deleted from the file itself. It had only been deleted from the document that was displayed when the file was opened.

Microsoft Word had done them a favor--it kept the deleted names in the file, with a few extra information-tags next to them. This allowed anyone who used Word to track changes in the document to see the deleted names, the date and time of the change, and the place in the document that the names were deleted from.

According to the Telegraph, the names had been changed to a phrase about "unnamed Syrian officials". These changes occured between 11:38 (after the meeting to present the report to Kofi Annan had begun) and 11:55 (after the meeting had ended) on Thursday, the day of the report's release.

This highlights a significant problem involved in making a powerful office-program that is also supposed to be user-friendly. There are a large number of options that the program could (and should) be capable of taking care of--but the average user would be swamped with questions to answer if he had to enable or disable every option himself when he opened and edited a file.

Thus, most software suites come with a large set of options already enabled or disabled by default. Usually, the user can only change these options if he knows that they exist, and knows where to find them in the menu. This greatly streamlines the use of programs like Microsoft Word. It can also create gaping holes in information security, if the user is not aware of the way that programs like Word handle all the information that they are given.

This shows us that there are at least a few people at the UN--possibly even Mr. Annan himself--don't know a good deal about their office-software suite and its inner workings.

More importantly, these people also have a vested interest in hiding certain details about the assassination of Rafik Harari. When all is said and done, that will likely be much more important than the software-usage mistake that led to this revelation.

Gun-blogging: first 500 rounds

My friends tell me my Ruger Mk. III pistol isn't totally broken in yet.

When I purchased the weapon, I purchased a box of 525 rounds of Remington 0.22LR with it. That box is now nearly empty.

I know, it took me quite a while to burn through my first 500 rounds--my range of choice wasn't always open. Also, the beginning of the school year has caused spare time to become a rare commodity.

So far, the pistol has behaved itself quite well. Occasionally, I have had issues with the bolt not sliding all the way forward after firing. The extraction of the spent casing and re-loading of the chamber go smoothly, but the bolt comes to a stop about an eighth of an inch short of its full-forward position. This keeps the hammer from re-setting properly, so the next trigger-pull does nothing. (The trigger doesn't have any resistance in its motion at all, which is my usual hint that this has happened.) This almost always happens with one particular magazine out of my collection of magazines. However, it doesn't happen every time, or with every round from the magazine.

My more-knowledgeable friends say that this might be because the clip needs a little breaking-in, by having the bolt cycle over it lots of times. (Translation: shoot a lot of rounds at the range from that particular clip.)

A gunsmith gave a recommendation of putting trace amounts of gun-lubricant onto the first round in the magazine before loading it. He also recommended that I watch for build-ups of soot and wax in the firing chamber, since [Remington] 0.22LR cartridges come with a coating of wax.

There aren't many other good explanations handy. Since this bug doesn't happen very often, I suppose I have to gather more data about it.

Which means I'll be spending as much time as I can at the range.

UPDATE:
after trying 100 rounds of ammunition that didn't have a coating of wax, I think that the wax is the culprit. So it looks like I won't be buying more Remington 0.22 ammunition for my pistol.

I also learned that if I don't pull the trigger smoothly, it is too easy for my wrist to twitch during firing. That explanation helped me understand why I used to regularly put two or three rounds in the lower right of my target-sheets.

History

As an American, I don't often hear much about the Napoleonic Wars. We tend to call our part in that worldwide series of conflicts the War of 1812. And a war which involved a British re-invasion of American soil, even the burning of the White House, isn't often remembered very proudly.

Two things cropped up in the blogosphere that remind me of that war. Both are linked to the British side of the war, and the naval hero Horatio Nelson. The first was a short commemorative post, which caused me to research Nelson's greatest moments.

His greatest (and last) battle was fought at Trafalger two centuries ago, on 21 October 1805. The British Navy managed to sink 22 enemy ships without losing any of their own ships. After that day, the British Navy dominated the oceans for a century.

The second event was a historian's note about a series of letters from a young midshipman which have just been found and acquired by the National Maritime Museum in Britain.

The midshipman, aged 11 (!), wrote many letters to his family back home. Some of the letters he wrote detailed preparations for Trafalger, his experiences in battle, and what he saw of the death of Lord Nelson.

This coincidence provides an interesting look into the minds of the men who helped make Britain a great power. It also provides a good look at the forces involved in the rise of Great Britain. The victory of the fleet at Trafalgar meant that the Redcoat army didn't have to wait in Britain for a foreign invasion. They could quite easily embark onto ships travelling to the Continent, and engage in battle there.

Without that freedom on the part of the British Army, Napoleon might not have met his defeat at Waterloo.

Amazing thought

Found at the group blog known as The Jawa Report (cross-posted at two other places in the blogosphere):
Abstinence vs. indulgence: two paragraphs of thought on morality, by the Demosophist.

An incredible thesis is sketched in these two paragraphs. It begins with a temptation--a desire to do something that gives immediate pleasure without thoughts about morality, damage to others, or non-obvious damage to self.

A man can be tempted to do many things--to embezzle, use lies to cover his mistakes, take his family's grocery money to the casino, cheat on a spouse--and he has two responses available. He can do it, or he can not do it.

Put another way, he can abstain from the tempting activity, or he can indulge in it.

These two actions support (and, in an interesting connection, feed upon) thought patterns about the world at large. The path of abstinence--of denying the immediate pleasure due to ethical or moral considerations--assumes that the fundamental nature of the world is moral, and that morality is a good thing for a person to have.

The path of indulgence--just giving in to have a good time--assumes that the universe is indifferent to such questions. It may even hint to us that good and evil are human inventions.

At this point, the Demosophist mentions an interesting example: the Marquis de Sade, whose lifestyle put the word sadism into the English language. He claims that the writings of Marquis de Sade open with an argument that the universe doesn't care about good and evil, and that the two categories are human inventions.

I don't know this myself, as I've never had any interest in de Sade's writings--but the point makes sense.

At any rate, de Sade is there as an example. Because the Demosophist then talks about Islamist terrorists, Stoics, Christian martyrs, and similarities between them. The Islamist terrorist apparently wants to combine the self-discipline of a classic Stoic, the abstinence of a Christian martyr in the Colosseum, and the self-indulgence of de Sade.

Self-indulgence that leads the Islamist terrorist to gratify his desire to strike a blow for Islam by killing anyone connected with the perceived enemy. Self-indulgence that heaps blame for the failure of Islam onto others. Self-indulgence that turns one man's private struggle with temptation into an explosive method of self-expression in a suicidal attack.

The result? They get all the indulgence of de Sade, with a heaping side-helping of self-righteousness. They also get the friendship of a Western intellectual class that assumes that good and evil are human inventions, while maintaining to themselves that they will be rewarded for their pure moral vision and actions.

However, this requires blending moral claims with amoral attitudes. The result appears to be cynicism.

This thesis provides a good deal of insight into human character, and how the Islamist terrorists have human motivations for their deeds. It also shows why their deeds are so repellent to a large part of the Western world, whlie not so repellent to certain intellectual schools of thought. It is not coincidence that those schools of thought often assume that the common morality of Western civilization isn't absolute.

It also helps shed light on personal struggles with temptation, and the incredible difference between the "just let me enjoy this once" response, and the "I know that this will hurt me in the long run" response.

Thanks to Demosophist, for compressing so much wisdom into so few words.

Battle In the Shadows

I have several times told people that the biggest successes in the Global War on Terror are the ones we never hear about.

Imagine a Spec-Ops team hunting down an enemy target in Afghanistan, and uncovering information that allows terrorist-hunters in the US to interrupt a subway attack, or a plane hijacking plan, or a bombing at a football stadium, before it happens.

For an even more secretive scenario: imagine a nameless, faceless hacker who tries to crack the biggest Al-Qaeda affiliated website in Iraq, figures out when the website manager is logging in and where on the Iraqi Internet he's logging in from...and supplies the US Military with information to help them capture the man. (Hat tip: Howie at The Jawa Report.)

Actually, the only part of the story I know is that the US Military captured the website manager (and prolific digital-video producer) who ran such a website. Serendipitously, they captured him right before the elections.

His website was apparently still up--it wasn't generating "Not Found" errors--during the election weekend. But it was strangely quiet.

The website had provided an interesting communications link for an organization which couldn't afford to meet in large numbers and didn't want to risk using telephones heavily. When it goes quiet for a period of time, it means that the people involved are either busy, unable to connect, running for their lives...or captured.

The news article I linked above also claims that a handful of Al-Qaeda in Iraq top aides have been captured in a weekend full of sweeps. (Is it more debilitating to the enemy to decimate the 2nd-layer and 3rd-layer leaders rather than hit the guy on top of the totem pole? Or is it that they are easier targets? Either way, if people move up from the lower ranks, the new "upper circle" has to re-learn everything that their predecessors knew.)

Perhaps somone with inside access to the web-site changed loyalties, and brought his web-site access to Allied Intel to prove his change of loyalty. Perhaps someone with access to the site wasn't able to log out (or destroy automatic-password-fill-ins) before he got nabbed a month ago.

Perhaps a clever hacker found a back-door open on the server, and managed to hide his infiltration from the server manager.

However it happened, this string of sweeps looks like the results of months of hard work. Someone got inside information on where and when to find these people, and they weren't tipped off before they were taken captive.

Bravo for all the warriors involved in this operation. Including the ones who fought by dissecting data on their computer system.

So, whose Internet is it anyway?

I'm probably a bit late in catching up to this news. On the other hand, it's not much of a news event--except that a bunch of politicians in Europe want to break an "American stranglehold" on worldwide computer networks.

I didn't take the time to go to geek news central about this one, because the answer has already been given by the United State Department of Commerce. It is not going to change its current, loosely-controlling relationship with the Internet Corporation for Assigning Network Names. The ICANN is the organiztion that oversees all of the "root servers" on the worldwide internet.

For the less knowledgeable among us, the root servers are the computers that tell your computer where to find "google.com", "darpa.mil", "nasa.gov", "umich.edu", "sourceforge.net", "kernel.org", or "denbeste.nu"...or any other internet site. (In practice, finding a particular computer on the Internet involves several layers of Domain-Name-Servers, but the bare-bones version I give is the essence of the process. But your computer has to use numeric IP addresses to talk to any other computer, and all computers on the internet have to assume that they can find the master directory of IP addresses at the same location.)

The global internet as we all know and love won't work unless there is a single place we can go to look for IP addresses. Admittedly, that single place can actually end up being one of 13 servers scattered across America. But all 13 servers hold identical copies of the same basic information.

But the rest of the Internet--the actual information (and misinformation) found online--is as separate from the root servers as the citizens and houses of a city are separate from a list of names and addresses in a phone-book.

So, in a sense, the Internet isn't owned by any country or agency. The United States happens to have a firm grip on publishing the phone-book. But it puts no other controls on the system.

And that is what people in America fear would change, if a body of international politicians gained control over the root servers. They might put other controls into place, controls which could hamper the current freedom of the Internet.

Which is one reason why all efforts to convince the American government otherwise will probably fall on deaf ears.

The other reason is, the Internet was originally a computer network created by American scientists and technicians, for American purposes, under the auspices of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This American invention has become what it is by remaining in the hands of the U.S. Department of Commerce and the ICANN.

Election Day

It is a good day in Iraq.

Elections are happening. With a curious lack of bloodbaths promised by certain dangerous elements.

Blogger Donald Sensing says that it is ironic that, even in Fallujah, voting is heavy.

Sensing further notes that suddenly the US is admitting that the Syrians have been sneaking over the border to attack American and Iraqi formations. Suddenly under-the-table scuttlebutt has become official news, and the US government will be putting pressure on the Syrian government to crack down on such attackers.

Sensing opines that the United States military is now strong enough in the region to threaten Syria, and that the Al-Qaeda in Iraq elements which Syria had hoped would keep America busy aren't quite up to the job.

We'll see...but things are definitely going well in Iraq.

The Al-Qaeda in Iraq elements will probably continue to attack for some time to come, but their chance for a big surge of surprise attacks just passed. And they have to know it.

Scripted Questions

So, I heard that the President of the United States held a televised Q&A session with some American soldiers about the conditions in the ground in Iraq.

But, most news reports about the event seem to think that it was faked, because the soldiers and the President had done a little set-up work beforehand. They had reviewed a basic set of questions and who would answer them before going on the air.

This looks like a tempest brewing in a teapot to me. But it reminds me of something I learned years ago about TV news.

On TV news sets, there are many times when the anchor will say "...and on the scene, we have our reporter...". Then the TV screen will fill with an image of a reporter with a microphone, showing pictures related to a news story. The reporter will give a minute-long spiel about the event, ask someone a question. Then the anchor will come back and you'll see a split-screen with the anchor and the reporter. The anchor will ask a question, something like "Can we expect more demonstrations of this type?", or "What did the Other Political Party say about this?". Then the reporter will give a two-sentence response, and the news story will be done.

Those questions are never spontaneous. They cannot be, it would destroy the timetable of the TV news show. Everything on television happens on a timetable, with bare seconds to spare in each event. Most news shows are scripted (unless it is one of the "breaking news" events, like the live TV coverage of the Twin Towers falling in New York). Even if the news show is done live, any interaction between the anchor and reporter is scripted.

The reason? If an event on TV is not scripted, timetables will be messed up. Contract advertisers will miss their prime top-of-the hour broadcast slot. The three news stories that have to be covered in the next 6 minutes won't all be covered before the cut to commercials. Pandemonium will break loose in the producer's office.

In short, if someone puts an unscripted question/answer session on television, it isn't professional.

So, I expect our President and the military representative to put on a professional TV production for our nation. I am also fully satisfied that the soldiers weren't coached on what to say for the camera.

Humor

After a long-delayed revisit to one of the blogosphere's more outlandish comedians, I discovered a good piece about the most recent Supreme Court nomination.

In his own distinctive way, IowaHawk tells us what is best and worst about the nomination of Harriet Miers for the United States Supreme Court. And he does it by writing up a mock job-application.

The unfortunate thing is, almost everything that we know about Mrs. Miers and her skills and qualifications for the position can be contained in the standard two-page form that IowaHawk created.

And that, by itself, says more about the nomination than any PR piece or opposition screed.

I remain unconvinced that she is either a bad or a good nominee. But that is mainly because she hasn't stood before the Senate Judiciary Committee yet.

And she is definitely not the best nominee.

[UPATE: unrelated humor about Ms. Miers at Captains Quarters. This time, someone is trying to be serious, and they claim somethng that is pathetically funny.]

Remember...

...the good ship U.S.S. Cole.

Attacked on this day five years ago. A multimillion-dollar warship designed to fight the most modern Naval enemy on the oceans was attacked by men in a rubber raft packed with explosives.

Seventeen men died and twice as many were injured. Somehow, we as a nation seemed to have missed the fact that it was an act of aggression by a group of people who considered themselves to be at war with the United States.

Today, we must remember.

WTF? [UPDATED]

[UPDATES: I shouldn't have trusted the headline...Dafydd claims he has a transcript that disagrees with the news story.]
I knew that trouble would come from nominations to the United States Supreme Court.

I didn't know that the trouble would take this form. First, we get a nobody with stellar scholarship. (Now the current Chief Justice Roberts.) That was a surprise, but a pleasant one.

Now, we get a nobody with a record as long as...my little finger. An unpleasant surprise, in more ways than one.

My first thought was, who decided that this seat has to belong to a woman?

My second thought was, what happened to all the women at lower levels of the judiciary?

I was happy to wait this period out, and let the Senate try to decide her competance in an atmosphere of near-total ignorance on Ms. Miers' personal views. Perhaps we would finally see a judicial confirmation process that doesn't include filibusters or speeches disguised as questions.

In the meantime, many people are complaining about the pick. Most of those people couch their complaints in terms of experience/documentation concerning Ms. Miers, but the underlying feeling is a feeling of betrayal. A vocal minority feel betrayed by a President they though they had trusted.

Now, the White House (the First Lady, no less!) has begun to counter-attack. With accusations of sexism. (Hat tips: Michelle, Cap'n Ed.)

[UPDATE: I had already heard rumors of sexism as a claim, but the only person to overtly say that sexism was at work was a White House representative named Ed Gillespie. However, Mrs. Bush wasn't careful to avoid the subject herself. She allowed it as a possibility, but not say it outright.]

There are many responses possible to this, but my mind has already settled on this one: accusations of sexism are often tantamount to saying "we don't have the ability, time, or energy to form a reasoned response to you, so we'll call you a sexist instead."

Where sexism is real, it is wrong. Where it is imagined, it too-quickly becomes a badge of shame which destroys rationality on all sides. (The same conclusion can be shown for any other form of bigotry.)

When I am accustomed to hearing it from one side of the political spectrum, I can usually ignore it. When it begins to come from apparent political allies, with plenty of evidence available to rebut the charge, I begin to wonder what has happened.

What is going on? I knew that the President had a poor set of choices, given the lackluster Senate leadership. But I never thought he or his supporters/family would stoop this low.

Is this the result of a siege mentality inside the White House? Or is something else going on?

Tech-blogging: What's DARPA up to now?

I saw this news at a site that usually offers something else:

DARPA Grand Challenge has a winner.

For those who don't know, the Defense Advanced Research Products Agency has been around for quite some time. One of their projects was a computer network that would continue to route data, even when one of the major nodes on the network went down. Twenty years later, the World Wide Web was born.

This challenge was one of their more recent endeavors. They challenged a series of robot-builders and programmers to build something that could navigate a series of unknown obstacles by itself, without human intervention.

This would appear to be a first in robotics. There have been robots used in predictable, controlled environments for years now. Assembly lines at companies like Nissan and General Motors are good places for such devices. There have also been remotely-controlled robots used to help explosive-disposal squads in their work.

Now we have a robot (several, actually) that take in data about their environment and use the data to maneuver through unknown territory. Of course, there are limits on the difficulty of the terrain that the robots can manage. But these robots have been designed a step above the previous technology, and designed to make limited decisions based on unpredictable data.

Impressive.

Even more impressive is the fact that if DARPA had handed this project off to a single group of scientists, they would probably still be working on the design of the robot hardware, and be several years away from a working software package. But DARPA posts an award, and lets a bunch of teams try to beat each other to it.

Comic relief (and a little geek-blogging)

I was perusing my list of regularly-read blogs, trying to ignore more commentary about Harriet Miers. (She's the President's good friend...so he should have been more circumspect. Other than that, we don't know a thing about what she would be like as a justice. Isn't that what the hearings are for?)

My eye suddenly caught a commenter's name, and I almost laughed out loud.

This commenter at neo-neocon had chosen the moniker strcpy.

In seeing that name, I instantly know that he and I are members of a large but not-widely-known brotherhood: people who have mastered the C programming language. People who have programmed to the point that they think in terms of arcane function-names (and decision trees, recursive methods, etc.)

I also discern that he is the kind of programming geek who flaunts his geekiness by using C-language functions to identify himself online.

I am also reminded of patterns of quirky humor, shortened command-names, and in-jokes that persists among the creators and users of the C language.

Imagine the confusion on the face of an un-geeky bystander when they hear one programmer say to another: We need to fflush the stream so that scanf won't bring in garbage. Otherwise it might segfault when we strcpy before we put the pointer on the stack...

It is one of the small pleasures in the life of a computer geek, to have such efficient shorthand -language to use in talking about computers with associates.

However, such shorthand isn't too hard to learn. The strcpy command does a very simple thing: it takes a list of letters and copies the list, one by one, into another list. This can cause trouble if it's not used carefully, though. A special "end of string" character exists to tell the computer when it's reached the end of the list of letters. If this "end of string" character isn't there, the computer will keep on copying until the copy process produces a system error (like running out of space to copy to, or trying to access system memory that it isn't allowed to touch).

Seeing this computer-command used as a name in the blogosphere did provide a for a little levity. Additionally, it made me read the "strcpy" argument a little more carefully.

Sealed warrants in Oklahoma

As I have posted on twice already, a recent explosion in Oklahoma killed one man and raised many questions.

There is, of course, the obvious question of why Joel Hinrichs would commit suicide by bomb. Especially after that person was seen in a store attempting to purchase large amounts of fertilizers, and trying to get a good idea of their ammonium nitrate composition--that is, their utility in creating an explosive.

And then rumors cropped up of this young man attending a local mosque. Other rumors started floating around that jihad-related materials had been found at his apartment.

Now, there are indications that the warrants used to search Hinrich's apartments are sealed warrants (hat tip: Rusty Shackleford). Two possible conclusions can be drawn:

• The police forces investigating the death need to hide their reasons for the search from a dead man
• The police forces investigating the death need to hide their reasons for the search from possible accomplices in a larger criminal conspiracy
  

Add the fact that the FBI has been involved from the first moment (or at least, the first press conference), and this looks very fishy.

I'll continue to follow this case, but I don't think I'll post much more on it. I am settled in my opinion--this has every appearance of an attempt at a large, Baghdad-style (or Jerusalem-style?) suicide bombing.

The security at the football stadium may have averted the disaster by demading to search all backpacks brought into the stadium. Reports have surfaced of a young man who was denied entrance to the stadium at least once, due to this rule.

I am thankful for those security guards, who did an important thing by enforcing a simple rule. Keep up the good work, guys.

And I hope that the FBI resolves this case.

More suspicions about Oklahoma bomb blast

Michelle Malkin and Rusty Shackleford are both tackling two different sides of the question: why did Joel Hinrichs blow himself up outside of the OU stadium on the 1st of October?

There is fragmentary evidence that the police were already watching the young man. That story also gives evidence that Hinrichs attempted to purchase a large amount of fertilizer a few days before the bomb went off. The salesman declined to sell the ammonium nitrate, and claims to have recognized a plain-clothes policeman in the store during the encounter.

(A similar fertilizer was used in the attack on the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City on April 1995.)

Malkin links to Zombietime, which has a detailed map with plenty of sources named and linked.

On the other side of the question, Rusty Shackleford is asking lots of questions about Hinrichs possible conversion to Islam in the past year, and the denials of said conversion. The local Muslim Student Association claims he never converted or attended the mosque around the corner. But his roommate was a member of the MSA, and attended regularly. His father claims that it would be impossible for Joel to have converted to Islam.

Many bloggers either assume or allege that he attended the local mosque. Only Flopping Aces cites a sources, and he doesn't have a link to it. The FBI is looking into possibility, though.

[UPDATE: the counterterror blog has a link to the TV news report that claims Hinrichs attended a mosque regularly. I am unable to view the video at the moment, but at least it's some kind of source on that claim.]

Again, there's lots of speculation and disparate facts floating around. The FBI probably has the best idea what is going on here. But where is the much-vaunted Main-Stream Media? I somehow doubt that they have a sudden attack of conscience after the rumor-fest that surrounded the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Hurricane Relief effort: After Action Report

As I have posted on several times, I recently found myself involved in an effort to help Hurricane Katrina victims on the coast of Mississippi.

One of the teams that I helped support has recently returned. That team had been designed to work around as a self-contained unit, complete with their own tents, food, water purification supplies, portable generators, and tools to help in an extended clean-up effort.

The man who led that expedition came back in a state of moderate shock at the scale of the damage he had witnessed. He did what he could, under guidance given by a local church that he had networked with. From my acquaintance with him, I know that he did what he could.

However, he reported a noticeably large number of locals who had no idea what to do. These people would sit in a yard full of downed trees, stare at the remains of their house, and wonder what to do next.

There also appeared to be a shortage of organizational brain-power in the area. A thousand things needed doing and required more than one person to o them. Whatever the local manpower was, there weren't enough people going around, collecting helpers, and setting to work on these projects.

Someone who heard this hypothesized that most of the "organizer" type personalities had left the area before the storm hit...

At any rate, the clean-up work has just begin. And there will probably be a large need for volunteers (and paid workers) for quite some time. It just happned that this team was at the limit of their resources, and had to return home.

Suicide Bombing?

Almost missed this event in the news this weekend. At first, I thought it might be one of those forms of insanity that occasionally strike sports fanatics. Especially near a crowded University stadium, during a big game.

At any rate, the only casualty is the man who triggered the blast. The explosion also didn't affect the playing of the football game in the Oklahoma U. stadium.

Now, I don't know what to think about the event. Michelle Malkin is hunting down data about the man who did it.

According to one news story (the first link above), police found an unexploded device at or near the scene of the explosion. If the picture accompanying the story is accurate, a robot was used to safely remove and detonate that second bomb.

That detail all by itself makes me wonder what the potential destructive power of the bomb was. It also makes me wonder who planned/assembled the event.

What should we make of the fact that he might have tried to buy a large amount of ammonium nitrate the day before? What about rumors that he has a Middle-Eastern roommate, and frequented a local Islamic center which was around the corner?

A much more detailed post on the topic is available at Flopping Aces. (Hat tip to Michelle Malkin...you sure know where to find good sources, Michelle. He had lots of good pictures, even a campus map!)

Right now, we have more questions than answers. But the questions are disturbing.

The Road to Bali

...just got a little more dangerous.

Of course, the film is still safe to watch. But the tourist area of Bali suffered on Saturday from several simultaneous explosions. (Hat tip: Mike at the Jawa Report.)

It's been a few years--but Bali's tourist industry has suffered from bombings before. In the fall of 2002, a bomb exploded at a nightclub in Bali.

This looks like a better-organized version of the London subway attacks this summer. That is, at least 3 bombs detonate at the same time to injure people, attack structures/businesses that are significant to the local economy, and cause mayhem that will make the news on international TV channels. No word on any coordination/supply issues like the ones that marked that attack, and its follow-up.

According to Reuters, there is video evidence that the culprits were suicide-bombers. There may be evidence that the bombers were linked to Al-Qaeda.

Once again, we are reminded that the global war on (Islamist) terrorism is a worldwide struggle against a vicious enemy. They have no qualms about attacking a rich nation with a large Muslim population, simply because they don't have the influence and control that they think they should have in that nation.