WhirledView

Explosives Theft Update - 2

by CKR

Still none of the questions answered that I posed a few posts back.

Nor much national attention. They think that the explosives have gone out of state by now, but hey, it's just a few mafiosi getting ready to blow up a few cars, right?

Until they are told otherwise, aviation police will be making extra canine, vehicle and foot patrols around the Sunport, said Aviation Police Chief Marshall Katz.

"We're not going to see any delays or impact on those travelers," Katz said. "They may see more of us, but I can guarantee that I feel safe and those who travel should feel safe as well." link

Oh, and be on the watch for suspicious-looking penguins, too.

7 x 7 Meme

by CKR

I was a bit distressed when Mark tagged me with this, because I had about 300 posts in mind, some of them (like the explosives theft ones) urgent. But it’s fun and a way to get away from that harsh, rapid-fire newsworld, along with my houseplants. And I’ve still got about 300 posts in mind, some even partially written.

So here’s my 7 x 7:

1. Seven things to do before I die
Become fluent in Estonian (Saan ladus eesti keelt. Või saama? Saamaks? Keeles? That’s the kind of thing I need to learn.)
Get my French back
Have another cat
Roll in the snow after sauna
Have another vegetable garden
Spend time on Lake Baikal in all four seasons (one down, three to go!)
Complete a particular project on which I have procrastinated far, far too long. The project will remain unnamed because I don’t want to embarrass my collaborators.

Solstice Flower Blogging

by CKR

That's right! Today's the shortest day of the year! My plants and I are delighted.

This "Christmas cactus" was covered with blooms for Thanksgiving. It usually blooms twice, and, while there are a couple of flowers this week, if you enlarge it, you can see a host of small buds that should be ready, oh about New Year's.

This is the older plant, older species, that is attuned to blooming around the shortest day. Both plants' blooming is controlled by day length, not an uncommon feature, just uncommon that it's short days that bring them into bloom, not long ones.

Explosives Theft Update

by CKR

Not much to report. The morning tv shows are totally free of any more facts on this story. No leads and no suspects.

The owner of the mysterious company from which the explosives were stolen is an employee of Sandia National Laboratories. I hate to participate in the Los Alamos paranoia, but I'll just ask how the story would be treated if the company were run by a Los Alamos employee.

One account says that Cherry Engineering's business is the training of police bomb squads. To do what? I recall being shown, back in junior high or so, a board with blasting caps on it, mockups with no explosives of course. "If you see any of these, call the police. Don't touch them." So these guys would have to touch them, and it might be useful to have some of the real thing around, blow one or two up occasionally to show them what happens. A hamburger-filled glove on top of the blasting cap when it goes off mocks up a hand. But 2500 blasting caps? 20,000 feet of detonating cord? One of the safety rules in handling explosives is not to keep any more around than you need.

CNN interviewed Brian Jenkins:

Rand Corp. terrorism expert Brian Jenkins said such thefts are common, with 1990s figures showing more than 100 such incidents each year.

Several hundred bombings occur each year, most of which have nothing to do with terrorism, Jenkins said. "Most have to do with insurance fraud, organized crime, personal vendettas, extortion, revenge, vandalism and protest."

Oh. Okay. There are tens of thousands of pounds of high explosives loose in the US, with blasting caps, but we don't need to worry. I guess the remarkable thing is that we don't hear more explosions as some guy blows up his wife. Or maybe it's that telephone monitoring by NSA that is keeping us safe. As President Bush said about terrorist attacks, not having any proves that the monitoring is doing its job. (Or was that the guy who was snapping his fingers to keep away the elephants?)

Normal Distributions and the Body Politic

Stygius is tweaking me about a post I wrote a few weeks back.

I agree with some of his reservations, but I think my general argument works: It seems to be the Rovian strategy to start building from the extreme and then try to add the middle. That strategy is inherently unstable, because as opinion changes, large swathes of people can peel off. That seems to have been what is happening as President Bush's popularity declines. It may also account for a sudden jump in his popularity as he tries to put on the appearance of reasonableness. Then again, that jump might not exist.

Bottom line: building support from the extremes can lead to wide swings in popular support. Wide swings in popular support don't make for good government.

Stygius:

One way I view the problem, is that the situation of the "center" is always historically driven, there is no abstract, independent "center." For instance, the Bolsheviks remained a minority of a minority well into the Russian Revolution, but were still able to out-organize and out-maneuver everyone such that it was they in the end who determined what the orthodox status quo was. Hence, the center is always temporary. So let's caveat before celebrating centrism over all.

Explosives Gone Missing in New Mexico

by CKR

This story isn't getting much play yet (190 hits on Google News, maybe 150 relevant), but it might. It's been on Albuquerque tv since yesterday. The Albuquerque ABC affiliate broke the story, and ABC is going with it.

I haven't heard much in the way of hard fact yet, except that the 400 or so pounds of explosives includes C-4 (the famous putty-like explosive that you see in spy movies), DetaSheet (thin, flat, flexible sheets that can be wrapped around bridge supports or cut into pieces for letter bombs), and the blasting caps to set it off.

Explosives themselves are relatively hard to detonate, so that they can be carried around and worked safely. The blasting caps contain more sensitive explosives whose detonation (usually by an electrical charge) sets off the C-4 or DetaSheet.

This is indeed a lot of very powerful explosives that can be concealed, although the necessary blasting caps and electrical apparatus will show up in metal detectors.

Some questions that the media might follow up:

What is Cherry Engineering's business?

What was the security at Cherry Engineering?

Could it have been an inside job? ("inside" including others at Sandia, or other government workers.)

Given the attention being focused on Bush's NSA spying, will this be a way to justify a distracting terrorist alert?

So That's Where the Public Diplomacy Money Went

By PLS

I’ve been quite mystified by the Bush administration’s approach to Public Diplomacy: lots of blather about PD’s importance, near invisibility for the practice itself.

For instance, there was this bizarre scenario:

Karen Hughes, the newly appointed (and confirmed) Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, had submitted to the relevant Senate committee a statement outlining the critical importance of PD, then concluded the nomination process by drawling (in effect), “Thanks for the honor, guys. Ah will get mah ass to Washington, eventually, but ah’d really rather spend the summer with mah kids.”

Shortly after Hughes finally showed up at Foggy Bottom, she took off on what was billed as a modest fact-finding trip that turned into a disastrous demonstration of what happens when a neophyte who should be all ears turns into a spokesperson who can’t hear.

The tour proved that the conventional wisdom about the Hughes appointment had been all wrong. Most pundits had assumed that Bush was signaling his belief in the importance of public diplomacy by appointing his communications Wonder Woman to the post. Her performance proved the opposite. (See several WorldView articles under Public Diplomacy, esp. those with "Hughes" in the title .)

So this is the way I see it: at some point during a commercial break in “Desperate Housewives” Hughes (who'd resigned from her White House duties for family reasons) whipped out her cell phone, called Washington and said, “Don’t get me wrong, Dubya, ah love mah kiddies, but ah’m jes’ plumb bored out of mah tree.” What was Bush to do? He couldn’t ignore an old colleague’s distress. Fortunately, the PD post was vacant, again, so he turned to Rove and said, “Whadaya think?” and Rove shrugged, “Whatever.”

As it turned out, the Hughes appointment served brilliantly to divert attention from the Bush administration's actual public information strategy, even as the calls for a more effective conventional public diplomacy program had been multiplying.

Rice’s “Democratic Peace”

by CKR

As part of the administration’s current public relations push, Condoleezza Rice wrote “The Promise of Democratic Peace,” an op-ed in the 11 December WaPo.

Ivo Daalder, at TPM Café, says he doesn’t get it. I had a hard time reading it, too. It bounces around and tosses off too many phrases we’ve heard too many times already.

She’s right about one thing: the end of the Soviet Union changed the world in many ways that have not been well accommodated.

What is needed is a realistic statecraft for a transformed world.

Nobody’s come up with a new paradigm yet. She may think this is it:

Our experience of this new world leads us to conclude that the fundamental character of regimes matters more today than the international distribution of power.

Rice’s reputation when she joined George Bush on the campaign trail was that of a realist. The specialized meaning of that word is “someone who analyzes international relations in terms of power.” In the WaPo piece, she attempts to stitch realism together with what the administration likes to consider idealism.