Home, land, security. Great concept, but put together, it spells NSA, and it's nasty.

9/11.

Two planes on the twin towers, another on the Pentagon, and one crashing in a field in Pennsylvania. I'm sure we all remember where we were when the footage started coming out, and we probably watched those impacts in New York many times.

I remember a journalist saying on TV: "The world will never be the same again". I though at the time that he was exaggerating, but no, he was right. The world has not been the same since.

Now, I am not a conspiracy theorist, I believe it's very hard to conceal big things that involve lots of people for a long time (remember a secret is something you only share with one person at the time), and in this case, I am unconvinced, either way. I can't believe that a government would do this and get away with it, and at the same time I have reservations about the Pentagon plane, and am sort of not sure about the whole thing. Anyway, that's not really the point.

It happened, killed hundreds, and indeed the world has not been the same since.

There are few things that make me wonder however about the post - 9/11 era.

The first one is that I find it very coincidental that the moment the Berlin wall came down, we found ourselves a new enemy. Bloody commies didn't make it and raised the white flag, and bingo! Muslim fanatics pop up everywhere. There was no such thing prior to the late 90's, was there? Not in that structured, focused and dangerous way anyway (Ok, the PLO blew up a few planes, as did Gaddafi, but is wasn't really muslim fundamentalism, was it? It was local politics using violence to advertise their case as I recall). Mostly, anyway.

All of a sudden we have "Al Qaeda", a very sophisticated, well financed, global organization with a clear objective to impose a global caliphate, at least in the Middle East, but preferably world-wide.

Right.

What were these buggers doing when the wall was still up? And how come they only pop up their ugly heads after most of the wall was sold as souvenirs?

Secondly, after the Afghanistan invasion and the partial and temporary demise of the Taliban (nasty people, these, unless you like your women to be seriously obedient, don't drink, sing, dance or generally enjoy anything but beheading folks.....armed to the teeth by the Western world, I might add), some Texan schmock decides that Saddam is really a very bad guy, protects muslim fundamentalists (he never did, he quartered them), has weapons of mass destruction (anybody knows a weapon of no destruction? Oh, and he didn't by the way, which is what the UN said all along), and really, my dear, he is just a bad person, isn't he?

Now, North Korea has bad stuff - proven and tested. It has a very friendly little man as leader, right in the footsteps of his father and grand-father. OK, no muslims there, but still. No, he's ok, let's ship some fertilizers and stuff so these poor people don't starve.He's just a communist, they are not threatening are they?

Want a list of countries led by "bad" people (in the opinion of the Western world) and enjoy membership at the UNHCR, the commission for refugees, OHCHR, the commission for human rights, or other perfectly decent organizations?

Anyway, so Irak is invaded, the US makes a mess of it, and eventually leaves.

Meanwhile the "War on Terror" is launched. Homeland security is set up, new powers are granted to the "authorities" to "protect" the people (American people mostly that is, the others are just potential terrorists). Many countries follow suite. Too good an occasion to tighten the noose and get a grip on all those free thinkers that bother the smooth running of government.

Massive data basis' are set up, new detention powers granted, Guantanamo becomes the shame of the Western World, and... and we, the poor citizen of this world, we... get our mugs shot, fingers printed, passports changed to biometric, and then biometric mkII, our mails are collected and sometimes read, our phone conversations are listened to (ask Angela Merkel), and if you buy a rucksack AND a bottle of gas on the same day at the same shop, you risk the police raiding your house at dawn...

On a boat, we risk "hard boarding", i.e. armed people getting aboard never mind that your wife is naked in the shower (it happened to a catamaran in Trinidad not very long ago). We risk getting boarded by US coast guards in international waters, against all Maritime laws (also happened to some friends on a yacht not too far from Cuba (another dangerous place, that, hence the "embargo" without which, no doubt Cuba would invade the US).

 We are all very thankful of all the attention. Nice change...

I obviously take exception to all of this. If it did make any sense at all, I may actually go along with it (reluctantly)(not really)(no. I probably won't go along with this at any time). But anyway, the thing is it DOESN'T make sense..

At all.

Imagine you are Al Qaeda. You are a bunch of very smart, well financed fanatics, dedicated to destroy this evil Western society and set up the law of Allah.

Just imagine.

Would you go only for airplanes and airports? And the odd embassy?
Would you attack only the best defended parts of Western society?
You: sophisticated, smart and well financed?

Would you?

I know there were attacks on the London tube and a couple of buses, as well as the Madrid railway station*. But frankly, how well are bus stops, railway stations and the tube defended? The answer is NOT AT ALL. Yet for some reason the incidence of attacks on these targets is extremely rare.

Now imagine you are really smart, well financed, etc... Wouldn't you go for other things than just planes? Bridges, tunnels, shopping malls, undergrounds everywhere, whatever makes a big bang with little risk? Disrupting the western world in a really big way (can't go to work, searched before shopping, infrastructure blown up left right and center). Boy that would mess up our system...

I took the TGV (French rocket train) from Paris to Brussels a few years ago. No controls upon entering the railway station or boarding the train in Paris (I think they carry about 1500 people at close to 400 km/h). In Brussels, I was taking a plane to Heathrow. I showed my passport about 6 times before boarding the plane, went through multiple "security" checks - by the way, those "security" people are obviously the cream of humanity - and they love to ask sexy girls to take off their boots, particularly if they have a short skirt and don't you dare challenging them... but that's beside the point (Is it?) - and guess what: I had to go through security again upon LANDING in London!

How come I am not checked going to Brussels, or taking the subway in Brussels or Paris, or anywhere, but  I'm controlled so many times getting on a plane, or out of a plane for that matter? Will I blow up Heathrow, when I could have blown up the plane getting there? I probably would blow up the queue in Brussels, before the security check (there were hundreds of people waiting to be checked), as I mentioned to one of the security guys there (that was stupid, I was almost pulled out of the line for questioning, and probably would today)

Making a bomb is easy. Concealing it is easy. Sticking it in a shopping mall is easy.
Yet these Al Qaeda  imbeciles use some liquid stuff (hence the 100 ml allowed on the plane) or shoes sole explosives (hence taking off your shoes) to down planes, after going through various types of controls.
Man they are stupid! WHY PLANES?

Need I go on ? (and please don't tell me there are no attacks on the targets suggested above because our security apparatus is so efficient. Please!  Also, please don't tell me it's now the John Doe nut head that's attacking planes in the name of "Al Qaeda". If so, he/she is equally idiotic).

Conclusion, either:

1) Al Qaeda is really a bunch of pteromerhanophobics (look it up). They are afraid of planes, and just outright hate them. It's possible, and I could live with that, just like I can live with all sorts of phobic people. Many civil servants are one such group, they hate civilians who bother them while they are having their coffee (Know the joke about the civil service in Holland, where it is prohibited to look out of the window in the morning? Why? Because they would have nothing to do in the afternoon...). Ok I'm unfair.  So are they most of the time. Anyway, who am I to complain, they are the "authority" (I have a phobia about authority).

2) Al Qaeda is seriously stupid, in which case we are quite safe. They never thought of anything else but planes. So it should be easy to keep them in check. But then, why the "security" apparatus (snooping etc...)?

3) They don't exist (at least not as described, or at least not any more)? Convince me they do exist, please, I really need the reassurance. Until anyone does, I will continue to think this is just a story made up to keep us within the confines of Georges Orwell's 1984 logic (invent an enemy, focus people's energy on fighting that enemy).

Meanwhile our civil liberties are going, going, gone. This IS IMPORTANT. It's impossible to regain civil liberties except via revolutions, and these, folks, are painful, bloody, and rare.

But this is all for our own good, right? Meanwhile we don't bother too much with drug money, how it's used (we are talking billions here, enough to finance a US presidential campaign every year or buy a few countries every month), about the lack of transparency in politics generally, about what government debt really means, about how good/bad our leaders are, about how to keep population growth in check (remember my earlier blog?), or any other such topic that really matters.

We are officially safe.

In the middle ages, there was a guy going round the walled city at night, shouting: "All is quiet, sleep tight". This was the precursor of Homeland security. W improved it. Obama changed nothing. Why?

NSA, thank you for listening. You are my best public.

Next blog: Sharks and whales and dolphins and lionfish. Dangerous vs. cute species, and why Spielberg is a dangerous fellow, and why we are wasting energy on the wrong topics.

Comments, as usual, are most welcome.


  * I am not talking about bombs going off in many parts of the world on a regular basis. Doesn't impact the West, really, does it?

Sleep tight! Cheers.

Hearing impaired, surface technicians, blacks and other misnomers

Do you sometimes get fed up with the oppressive political correctness in our world?

Nobody is deaf any more, but hearing impaired. Surface technicians are the sweepers of old. Blacks are African or African Americans, or anything but black (As I recall, black is a color, not an insult. Maybe we will eventually have a traumatized eye and an African coffee? What if it comes from Colombia: African Colombian coffee? That's if Colombia becomes too synonymous with drugs, then it will be African coffee from South America, or maybe "Sleep Prone Remedy from Somewhere"?  ).
Shell shock is no more. Nobody is handicapped or old or retarded. Everything is dandy, and as long as the appropriate term puts a veneer on things, all is good. Another good one is "authorities". Since when is Public Service an "Authority"? They are supposed to SERVE, not order around, but then maybe it's me who misunderstood?

There is a great book that deals with this, along with many other issues of how we went from the age of enlightenment to total horseshit: Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul (the full title is Volataire's Bastard: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West). Basically the book analyses the shift from reason to system, from free thinking to the straightjacket of organization, and the corresponding shift in language from clarity to "lingo".

Lingo is a way to appear knowledgeable. It's a code, used by specialists to communicate amongst each other and keep the rabble out of the conversation. Every profession has its lingo, codes, specific terminology, which could very well be expressed in layman's terms, but sounds so much better when interlaced with words that make the whole topic totally unintelligible.

This applies to professional communication, political rhetoric, and certainly to mankind's issues. Why can't I be critical of Israel without being labelled an anti-Semitic bastard? Why is Black a term to be used only as a primary color? Why is a senior or "third age" person not old? When one starts hiding facts behind cosmetics, and one is not allowed to address issues as they are without becoming the target of hundreds of pressure groups that will take exception to anything that is not smack on their agenda, human debate becomes sterile and progress becomes impossible. That's if I don't end up outright in jail...

I think one consequence of this very insidious process is that we are regressing back to the age prior to the enlightenment. These were times when dogma was prevailing over reason (religious dogma, royal autocracy, etc...). Now it's another form of dogma: the systemic one, where once the book is written, one has to stick to the book, never mind that it makes no sense any more, or never did.

In our travels, we have been confronted to rules and regulations in various countries that clearly make no sense, even to those who are supposed to implement them. But it's in the book, so it has to be done. Examples?

8 copies of every passport page (even the blank ones) to enter India by boat, plus 8 copies of the detailed inventory of how many cans of peas and beans and tomatoes we have on board, plus 8 copies of the list of navigation equipment - including serial numbers... That's about 4 inches high worth of paper, which gets filed in huge piles with nobody ever looking at it.

Or the story of this Thai girl trying to fly home to Bangkok from Grenada, via Trinidad and the USA, being held at Miami airport for 4 hours (when her confirmed onward flight to Bangkok was only 2 hours after her arrival), and then sent back to Trinidad because she had no "transit visa". Upon arrival in Trinidad, she applies for a transit visa, pays 120$, waits for a week (in a shitty hotel next to the airport - she speaks hardly English and has very little money), and her visa application gets rejected because she entered the country "illegally" when she first tried to get home. She ends up flying via Bogota and god knows where, and misses the cruise ship she was due to work on upon arrival in Bangkok. Wouldn't it have been easier to let her board her scheduled flight, she'd been out of the US two hours earlier...

Want more? Mandela's funeral was a grand event, as he deserved (although let's please remember he WAS a "terrorist" at one point)*, attended by all the great leaders of our world, most of whom have a serious problem with any dissidence on their own turf. Obama was standing tall but meanwhile Julian Assange is in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, basically a prisoner, and Edward Snowden is a host of the great Russian democracy. Will they be honored at some stage when it becomes clear that there is more than one way to be a good citizen? And by the way, what about what the ANC is doing to South Africa? How come the whole world went up in arms against Apartheid but remains perfectly still when it comes to the massive racism many African and Caribbean countries show towards the white (is that a Caucasian?), South Africa being a prime example...

My point is that seemingly minor lingual evolutions can be extremely dangerous. When one cannot call a cat a cat any more (we still can, I think, but I'm sure it will be "domestic feline" soon) one opens the way to a level of hypocrisy that leads to a loss of all we have gained over the 200 or so years when Western mankind liberated itself of some of the chains of dogma.

Society is moving towards a new form of dogma: the politically correct, the veiling of the truth in lingo and the drowning of liberties in loud assertions of concern for security. All these become a "System", where rational thinking takes second place to the "Rule", however stupid, irrelevant or counter-productive.

Reminds me of this joke where a female journalist interviews Ray Charles and tells him: "Oh Mr Charles, you are such a brilliant man, I admire your work so much, what a pity you are blind". And he answers: "It's OK my dear, it could be worse, I could be black"

Next blog: Security, Al Qaeda, airports and other nonsense. Hi NSA guys. You busy today?


* The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter depends on who wins in the end, not on the means used to achieve victory. Terrorists of the past include American colonists, French freedom fighters, PLO, ANC amongst others. At the same time Stalin's, Mao's or Genghis Khan's rule never were that bad, were they? How about water boarding or NSA snooping?