Revoking permission to make us a victim

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, self preservation, violence, terrorism, mass murder

Dr. Gary M. Jackson has worked in anti-terrorism more than 30 years. Over such a time, patterns become clear. He has distilled his expertise into a very useful reference book, Surviving Mass Victim Attacks: What to Do When the Unthinkable Happens.

If you read through the book, as I did, it develops in you a view of self-preservation as a solemn responsibility. Please do get the book, and read it through, even if some of the repetition gets tedious. Any good educator knows that repetition aids learning. After reading it keep it handy, and go back over sundry items as they come to mind, perhaps prompted by yet another outrage covered in breathless haste by the media.

The author wants us first to understand the commonalities behind mass attacks, from a "going postal" shooting incident to a bombing to a truck/knife attack. He boils down the motive to five categories:

• International Terrorism (usually religion based)
• Domestic Terrorism (religion based or anti-government)
• Self-Radicalized Terrorism (also usually religion based)
• Mental Health Issues
• Hate and Bias

In the three Terrorism categories, the overwhelming majority of religion based incidents are motivated by Radical Islam (read my review of Muslim by Hank Hanegraaf to see why "radical Islam" is a redundancy). However, in all the categories above means and weapons used by the attackers fall into categories that help us better understand ways we can increase our chances of survival:

• Firearms
• Knives
• Vehicles
• Bombs

The news media focus primarily on mass shootings, but cars and trucks are being used more frequently, particularly based on urging by ISIS and al Qaeda, as are knives. Lately, crashing a truck into a crowd is followed by knifing that continues until the attacker is killed.

For the first three categories of attack, the first three rules of survival are:

• Escape
• ESCAPE
• ESCAPE

OK, I know that in the book they are Escape, Hide, and Counter-attack. But the author takes pains to drill it into our brains, that a mass attacker intends to kill as many victims as possible, and seldom intends to leave the scene without either committing suicide or being killed by police or the crowd. Therefore, he stresses many times that we should have no thought except to escape, until it becomes clear that we cannot do so.

We have all likely heard of survivors who "played dead" and were passed over. But all too often, the attacker goes back and puts more bullets into all the prone bodies, to be sure his victims are truly dead. Also, for every report of someone who survived by hiding, there are many reports of a seemingly-good hiding place being found full of bodies later on. So, escape! Hiding and attacking the attacker are kind of Hail-Mary attempts when escape is impossible and you are practically nose-to-nose: dead if you stand still, so why not try something? If you must attack the attacker, do your best to use a weapon, either one you brought with you, or something improvised, like a broken bottle or table leg. The cardinal rule here: there is no such thing as a fair fight, and the mass attacker already has a big advantage.

Only in the case of a bombing is escape not the best. If you survive the blast, running could put you in the path of a second blast. Remember the Boston Marathon bombings; there were two bombs. Running would be a bad strategy. Tend to your wounds and keep hidden.

Later in the book we read how to formulate our own preparedness, so that we know how to get quickly out of a place if it is attacked. A quiet, small restaurant, for example, is unlikely to draw a mass attacker, who will instead look for a target with more potential victims. If we plan to be somewhere amongst a crowd, then, we need to check out all the alternative exits. Even in a mall, it's well to remember that all the bigger stores will have a back exit, but some of the smaller ones may not. That will inform our choice of escape routes if an attack happens while we are there.

There is a lot I could say, but I'll leave that to the book, which says it very well. It is well worth getting familiar with its contents.

Putting America-based Jihad in perspective

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sociology, terrorism

For those of us who were adults in 2001, the 9/11 attack that destroyed the World Trade Center towers was a before-and-after moment. For those of us a generation or two older, it is remembered as keenly as the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. A certain few events, lesser in scope, perhaps, but serious enough, can loom as large for many people who were close enough to be affected.

In my case, the Oklahoma City bombing just 22 years ago affected me in two ways. I was in Stillwater, 70 road miles but 52 straight-line miles away. I was outside on a fine Spring day and I heard it and felt it. Initially, I thought it was a somewhat large explosion within Stillwater, such as a natural gas explosion demolishing a house. Then I heard radio reports of what it really was, although they were garbled at first. I had to be in OKC the next day, so I drove by, as close as I could get. Seeing how the front of that enormous building had simply been removed was a gut-hit experience.

Such an event happening today would immediately bring Islamic terrorists to mind. But Timothy McVeigh was no Muslim. He did not claim any religious motive at all in the things he wrote about the attack. He professed that he sought vengeance for Federal hypocrisy.

America has a long history of terrorism upon its territory; see this Wikipedia article, for example. Probably the most famous terrorism campaign prior to 2001 was the long history of the KKK, primarily active from 1865-1877 (more than 3,000 victims), but with scattered bombings, lynchings, riots and smaller massacres reaching into the 1970's.

Today Americans are worried about terrorism at home and abroad, wondering whether this country is in danger of "Islamofascist takeover" for example. No doubt, the past 16+ years have taken their toll on the American psyche, but fortunately, most of the worrisome incidents have happened in other countries. Yet people worry, "Is it time to arm myself? To get shooting lessons for the whole family?" and "What do we do if someone comes for US?"

Into this ferment author Peter Bergen offers his new book United Stated of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists. Although Mr. Bergen deals at some length with events throughout the Middle East and around the world, his focus is on American citizens and legal residents. He studied the case histories of more than 300 such people. Some of them, such as the Tsarnaev brothers, committed terrorism within the USA. Some managed to "join jihad" by going to Somalia, Yemen, Syria and other places where they could learn to be a muhajid (colloquially, a Muslim guerrilla fighter) and fight (and usually die) alongside member of ISIS or other groups. A goodly number of them were caught before they could do anything, and quite a number started attacks that failed, such as the "underwear bomber".

America's law enforcement and military leaders have been trying to learn, mostly the hard way, what makes a terrorist's mind tick. You can look at any sort of situational arc, and find the entire range of responses to it. For example, long before 9/11 there was the phenomenon of someone "going postal", named for the killing of 14 in a post office in Edmond, OK by Patrick Sherrill. While this was a revenge killing rather than a specifically terrorist action, it is otherwise similar. He had a grievance of long standing and, in the parlance of the day, "snapped" and went on a rampage.

As we often hear, many people have chronic grievances, but most tend to blow off steam by singing along with "Take this Job and Shove it" or frequenting "happy hour" or taking on a vigorous sport such as Rugby. An example in the book struck me very memorably, for it exemplifies the spectrum of response. It is used to illustrate the difference between "affective" violence and "predatory" violence. Rather than quote, I'll paraphrase:

You are in a bar at happy hour and get just tipsy enough to spill a drink on the guy next to you. Nine times out of ten, he'll say, "Hey, buy me a drink and we can forget about it." One time out of ten he'll take a swing, or offer to "settle it outside", and the violence that ensues is "affective". That is, he gets mad, you get mad, and the two of you have it out. But in a very few cases, a guy who says, "...we can forget about it" will surreptitiously keep an eye on you, follow you home, drive around the block a time of two, get into your house by a back door or window, and slit your throat. That is "predatory" violence. It is the source of the proverb, "Beware the wrath of a patient man."

Going postal is similar. The kind of psychopathic mind that "snaps" in that way doesn't really "snap." It calculates and when the cost/benefit ratio is favorable, watch out! True mayhem takes planning.

As it happens, getting into the mind of someone who shows signs of radicalization (by Islam or any other ideology, including conspiracy theories) has not proven fruitful. Gathering behavioral signals works better. All too many of the 300 talked to a few or even several friends in ways the friends thought worrisome, for example. A method now known as MOSAIC does a fair job of gleaning the signal from the noise. It was developed by Gavin de Becker, the author of The Gift of Fear, which I read a few years before I began blogging.

I won't take up space by listing the steps and so forth. Take a look, for example at the online Mosaic Threat Assessment method that de Becker maintains. It uses indicators that are not specific to any religion or ideology, but are behavioral, and while it can indeed yield a better sense of someone's level of potential for jihad, it can also help you determine if your chronically angry spouse or co-worker is a threat to you. Note: the site contains instructions to help you ensure that "someone" won't find out you are checking out a threat. If such a person is a genuine threat, that's helpful!

Circling back to the core of the book's message: While the threat of jihad in America is real, it is over-hyped. International terrorist organizations such as ISIS know how to keep the 24-hour news business humming, and take full advantage of the premise, "There is no such thing as bad attention". But how much threat is there, really? Not every plot is foiled. Some come "out of the blue", or so it seems. We would have to educate all 200 million adult Americans in MOSAIC-style assessment to catch nearly every case. So some risks always remain. How much? Left to ourselves we are poor judges of risk. I like this example:

On the beach one day, someone yelled "Shark!" Most folks ran up the beach and jumped in their car. About half of them lit up a smoke. Many started the engine and drove off.

What is the real risk here?

• Is there really a shark? Maybe...perhaps probably.
• A dangerous shark? Maybe...I've bumped into "sand sharks" four or five times. Most shark species don't bite anything bigger than they are.
• A few people per year genuinely die of shark bite.
• In America, almost 40,000 die yearly in auto accidents. Driving ten miles puts you at about the same risk of dying as the chance you'll die of shark bite in your lifetime.
• In America, about 400,000 die yearly because they smoke/smoked. I don't know how to figure out how many ciggies equal the risk of dying of shark bite. Probably less than a pack!
• If the person screams "Shark!" with real, curdling terror in their voice, the chances you'll die by being crushed in the rushing crowd are much greater than the chance that a deaf guy over there who stayed in the water will actually get bitten.

Final thought. The number of people who died in America in massacres and similar events that were not connected to jihad is greater than the number who died of events such as the Boston Marathon bombing or the Fort Hood shootings. And if we contemplate single events: if you happen to be murdered, by far the most likely culprit is a relative of yours, someone who is not a Muslim or any other kind of religious fanatic.

Terrorism in America began while the colonies were a-borning. Twenty or fifty years into the future, will Islamic terror still be at the forefront? Maybe. Maybe not. Probably not, I think. But acts of terror will go on. Until we find a way to "breed out" the seeds of terror, it will remain some people's chosen revenge.

Illustrating the value of HUMINT

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, counterintelligence, spies, terrorism, memoirs

My first exposure to Muslims was in graduate school, where many classmates were from Iran and Saudi Arabia. I guess that makes sense for a graduate program in Geology. My collecting partner the first two years was an Alaskan who had married a woman from Iran and had converted to Islam. We didn't talk much about religion, mainly because the branch of Shi'a to which he belonged was not particularly evangelical. But I did observe him and his co-religionists, as I suppose he observed me, as it was known that I led a small church. One particular event has stuck with me.

We had returned from a day in the field, and happened to meet two Iranian men in the lab. He cheerfully greeted them, "As salamu alaykum!" One remained silent, and the other, almost shamefacedly, mumbled the standard Arabic response. I am familiar with such things. Converts to a faith are typically more ardent than "old hands" who have been brought up in it. Those guys would probably defend Islam to the death, but were only glancingly observant in their daily life. They were the Islamic version of "nominal Christians".

There is another characteristic of religious conversion. After a number of years, or a decade or two, one who was converted as an adult is somewhat likely to re-convert, either to a different faith, or back to the former one. While most converts retain their new faith their whole life, a significant number do not. Having been "elsewhere" for their formative years, they are more open to different ideas.

In the case of Morten Storm, his conversion to Islam at age 20 was rapid and almost a shattering experience. He'd been quite a troublemaker, in and out of jail in his native Denmark. But he developed a conscience and became disaffected with gang life. He read about Islam in a local library book and was entranced. He plunged into his new faith, and was soon radicalized, even traveling to Yemen, both to learn Arabic and to live among the most devoted Muslims he knew of. He initially followed Salafism, which is comparatively peaceable. His progress into fully radical Islam, and later disaffection with it, to the point of working for three Western intelligence agencies, are revealed in Agent Storm: My Life Inside Al Qaeda and the CIA, written with Paul Cruikshank and Tim Lister.

Islam is not the monolithic entity Westerners tend to see. There are "denominations" that compete strongly with one another. The competition and even hatred within Islam got to Storm's conscience, and after ten years, shortly after being questioned by an agent of the Danish intelligence agency PET, he contacted them and began a near-decade of living a double life. He tells of his association with many radical leaders in Yemen, Denmark, London and elsewhere. The core of the drama is work that led to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011.

Morten Storm had considered Awlaki a friend, in spite of his disgust with Awlaki's plans to terrorize civilians, and felt guilty over his death. He was at that time working with both the CIA and PET and MI6. The Americans drove the assassination, against the objections of the Danish and British agents. They'd promised Storm quite a reward for his work, but cut him loose right afterward, claiming they had used other channels to reach Awlaki, not him. He had the documentation to prove them wrong, but they ignored him.

I have read a number of memoirs of former CIA "overseas assets", who were all treated shabbily. The CIA has a pattern of courting an "asset" very diligently (and expensively) but later dropping the ball, leaving him dangling. Such cavalier behavior has a lot to do with the CIA's poor reputation in the spy world.

However it happened, Storm had a third conversion, so to speak. He actually made one more go at helping PET against other al Qaeda leaders who still trusted him, so much so that MI6 and the CIA regained interest. But he was warned by another "asset" that the CIA was planning to allow him to be killed along with their next target. This may or may not have been true, but he was sufficiently distrustful that he decided to get out of the spy business. That is no easy task, and his last chapter is titled "A Spy in the Cold", indicating that neither CIA nor MI6 nor PET did anything to rehabilitate him or even offer him protection.

In the epilogue, we find that he had to rehabilitate himself. Somehow, he managed. The street kid from Denmark had the street smarts to record key conversations, which probably kept the various agencies at arms' length. All the spy agencies have been remarkably slow at recognizing the power of the phone in everyone's pocket. His co-authors simply state that he now lives in "an undisclosed location". May it remain undisclosed.

Why the war on terror is an illusion

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, terrorism, crime

Cast a net wide enough, and everyone will be in it. This is the single flaw in Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat by Jeffrey D. Simon. I'll get to that anon; otherwise, this excellent book is a comprehensive survey and diagnosis of a phenomenon that has always been with us, but could become much greater in the future.

We all know what is the greatest terrorism incident in U.S. history: the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks by al Qaeda members in NYC and Washington, DC (the Shanksville, PA crash was probably intended to terminate in DC also). What was the second? The April 19, 1995 bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh and abetted by Terry Nichols.

It is hard to imagine a blast that large. I was in Stillwater, OK that day, and I heard the sound. Hearing what it had been on the radio later that evening, my wife and I went the next day to see it. The sight was amazing. So is the thought of a sound heard more than fifty miles away!

Simon introduces three themes:

• The lone wolf is changing the dynamics of terrorism.
• Technology plays a key role in terrorism, and this will increase.
• A lone wolf can me more creative and innovative than a group.

He traces the history of terrorists who worked alone, or with only minimal help, such as the help Terry Nichols gave to Timothy McVeigh in helping him construct the fertilizer bomb. The early examples are primarily assassins, such as John Wilkes Booth. But he includes John Gilbert Graham, the first person to bomb a commercial aircraft in 1955, whose motive was entirely pecuniary; he'd heavily insured his mother who unknowingly carried the bomb onto the plane. This is because he has produced five categories of terrorism:

• Religious – those such as radical Islamists or certain white supremacists who claim a religious motive for their racism.
• Secular (i.e. political) – those such as the assassins of presidents or other public officials, including Timothy McVeigh, and Joseph Stack, who flew a small airplane into an IRS building in 2010.
• Single-Issue – such as those who bomb abortion centers or sabotage logging equipment in old-growth forests.
• Criminal – those who perform terroristic acts for financial gain.
• Idiosyncratic – insane persons, such as schizophrenics or those with "antisocial personality disorder", driven by their delusions to kill or destroy. The Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, is included here.

J.G. Graham was a criminal terrorist by this scheme. For that matter, so is the Mafia when its depredations erupt into the public sphere, though they are usually more circumspect in their tactics of intimidation. I find myself troubled by this classification.

I understand his reasoning, to a point. He includes as "terrorists" all who commit acts that cause public terror. If, for some reason, a group of organized criminals had committed the 9/11 attacks, then issued a demand for, say a few billion dollars ransom in return for not doing it any more, is that a terrorist incident? I think not. It is a kind of extortion. There is an entire category of actions for which people who intimidate others too severely are charged with "terroristic threatening", but they are not considered terrorists; they are considered extortionists or other kinds of criminal. So I would deny the category of "criminal terrorist". Otherwise, it will develop into a wide net that includes everyone who goes on a destructive spree, like the guy who blew a gasket and used a tractor to tear down a neighbor's house.

Setting that matter aside, I was (properly) unsettled by his analysis of lone wolf creativity. A loner is not bound to the decisions of a leader or a committee. Thus it was a lone wolf, Bruce Ivins, who first committed bio-terror in the modern era, by sending anthrax spores through the mail in 2001. It is not certain, though, whether his intent was criminal (seeking publicity leading to quicker acceptance of an anthrax vaccine he'd developed) or political (anger at those blocking his research). I wonder if the distribution of "smallpox blankets" among Indian tribes in the 18th Century qualifies as bio-terror, or was it "just" attempted genocide? Simon predicts it will be a lone wolf who first creates havoc with Cyberterror (haven't hordes of virus coders already done that? Most of them work alone).

In the late chapters, Simon turns his attention to ways to prevent lone wolf terrorism—indeed, of terrorism in general—and, failing that, ways to ameliorate the conditions that lead to terrorism. This I find most useful. Terrorism, particularly by small cells and lone wolves, is an arms race between law enforcement agents and the terrorists. For example, it took a generation, but you can now take training courses in defeating a Polygraph. And terrorists are always coming up with new ways to smuggle bombs or bomb-making materials into airplanes and other public venues; the police and TSA and Homeland Security are engaged in a "catch up" race.

I liked the discussion of biometric identification by video, coupled to a hot computer. The way people walk is characteristic, for example. But then I remembered things like putting a tight piece of duct tape between someone's shoulder blades, or taping two of their toes together, to change their posture and gait. These methods are pretty old hat, but could easily defeat a biometric ID scheme.

Simon considers the ways our government and society have aroused ire in others. It is pretty well known, for example, that a lot of Osama bin Laden's hatred for America arose from our cavalier treatment of Muslims and rather open denigration of Islam. But the fire in his belly was because of what he saw as a promiscuous, excessively sinful society. So we may be able to reduce some of the resentment by treating the Muslim countries more respectfully. But what do we do about those who plan to impose Sharia law on the entire world?

By the way, my Islamic friends: this sort of thing was tried by the Christians, several times, most recently by John Calvin in Geneva in the 1600s. It has never worked. The Catholic Church imposed Canon Law for a few hundred years on much of Europe, but it fell apart as people learned more and more about science and psychology. Ironically, much of the impetus for the overthrow of Canon Law during the Enlightenment came from rediscovery of Greek scientific texts that had been preserved by Islamic scholars. The current generation of Sharia promoters are trying to bury the effects their remote ancestors brought about!

I have wondered for a long time, if a society could be developed in which the greatest number of people could develop their genuine abilities and use them to the fullest. Even those we consider unsavory. During the long ages in which European laws required death for a wide range of infractions, kings and governments employed great numbers of executioners. The squeamish need not apply; there were plenty of psychopathic killers whose urges could be in some measure satisfied by such work. I don't know what we would do with people who like to pull wings off butterflies, but such activities are sublimating something else and better understanding of psychology just might ferret out the real motive, and help such a person find a calling that makes him happy without harming others. We Americans claim to believe that the basic rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. While it is foolish to believe we can help absolutely everybody actually to achieve happiness, it is worthwhile striving to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.

Yet a very good society, were it achieved, would not eliminate terrorism, either by groups or by individuals. "There is no pleasing some people." So the continuing "war on terror" is actually a branch of criminal jurisprudence, where the action is domestic, or of international diplomacy. Overcoming criminality, including terrorism, is a permanent game of Tetris. The blocks keep falling, and you never quite get them all. And I remember a saying from the Vietnam War: "It is costing us a quarter million dollars for each Viet Cong we kill. We could pay them off for less than that." Is it too crazy a notion to think we can just bribe most of the potential terrorists? I mean, we could have BOUGHT Viet Nam for what the war cost us.

Yeah, I know, the ideologues and single-issue (e.g. anti-abortion) folks will never be satisfied. But a happier society would go a long way toward removing two or three of the five categories above. Worth thinking about.

One way it might be going

kw: book reviews, science fiction, terrorism, natural disasters

Let's see how many projections Fred Pohl is making in All the Lives He Led:

1. The Yellowstone supervolcano erupts in about 2065, burying half of North America in ash to depths between a meter and a kilometer. Millions die and the US is instantly relegated to Third World status.
2. Virtual reality based on free-space holography is developed (so I don't know why people in the novel still watch the news on screen displays).
3. Plastic surgery can make anybody look like anyone else, irrespective of race or gender. A key player in the novel is a transsexual, and the "he" of the title.
4. Terrorism becomes the ordinary way to protest. Kind of like the '60s on steroids; just replace every sit-in with a bombing.

That'll do. There are a few minor points, such as the data coil replacing flash drives and a personal data visualization device called the opticle. Add a lens attachment to a high-rez smart phone display, and the opticle is already in use.

The background is a "millennial Jubilee" celebration of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD and its consequent incineration of Pompeii. Brad Sheridan, an ordinary low-life punk who was eight when Yellowstone blew up and sent his Kansas City-based family into refugee status, has become an indentured worker at the Jubilee (Giubileo in Italian). Never one to make friends, he has over time acquired a friend or two and, eventually, a lover. But he has a past, including his "Uncle Devious", who ripped off family and friend alike to fund "Tibetan aid" causes that turned out to be funding terrorists.

When I wrote "a friend or two" above, I meant it. One of his two friends is murdered, and first he is implicated, then his girlfriend. Of course, she has gone missing, and finding her leads to a whole 'nother ball of worms. At the book's end it is still unknown whether the human race will survive the latest terrorist threat, and it is an even bigger surprise whose decision that is.

But the mechanics of the tale are riveting. If Yellowstone does explode within the next few decades, the book's scenarios are a pretty accurate projection of its effects. With the flip-flopping of who is poor and who is rich, for a time at least the world is a meaner place. And it just may be that terrorism becomes "business as usual" everywhere.

One historical point needs attention: a character describes Hitler and Stalin as the two deadliest leaders in history. Chairman Mao propounded policies that killed three or four times as many as those two combined. But the collection of incidents recounting human inhumanity is telling, and the philosophical point remains: Is humanity worth saving from the ultimate terrorist threat? Grandmaster Frederick Pohl leaves the reader to ponder that one.

A plea for ensuring human survival in a dangerous universe

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, polemics, space policy, NEAs, NEO's, near-earth objects, near-earth asteroids, cosmic risk, terrorism, superweapons

For at least 2,000 years, the moon and other heavenly bodies were considered perfect, the Earth (and Hell beneath) being the sole demesne of imperfection, sin, and suffering. Aristotle was probably not the first to promote such a view, but was certainly the most influential. Following his lead, the Catholic church built its theology on an Earth set but one step above Hell and Purgatory, with the Heavens (plural concentric abodes) above; the Earth being a place of testing to determine whether one became heavenly and arose, or hellish and sank.

Just under 400 years ago, Galileo first looked at the moon through a small telescope. He saw not the perfect sphere he'd imagined, but a ruined, fully cratered body. However, as late as the 1960s, a strong contingent of astronomers and othes contended that the craters were volcanic, taking a cue from Jefferson, who'd said, "I'd rather believe a Yankee professor would lie than believe stones fall from the sky". The underlying unease was at least partly religious.

Once we saw Mars and Mercury up close, with spacecraft, however, it could not be denied that something had banged them and the Moon about quite thoroughly. The current theory describes an early Earth having its entire outer portion (at least a few hundred kilometers deep) melted by impacts, more than once; even the moon is now seen as originally impact debris, ejected when the Earth was hit by something the size of Mars—this must have happened early enough for it to get quite beat up after such an origin. But the same theory puts an end to this "Hadean Era" at about 3.9 billion years ago.

I visited Barringer Crater near Winslow, Arizona once. It is quite impressive; nearly a mile across and 570 feet deep. The mini-asteroid that caused it came in about 50,000 years ago, and was perhaps 150 feet in diameter. This isn't the only recent or "nearly recent" meteorite impact crater. This set of lists in Wikipedia lists 36 well-known craters by size, then 182 (including a few clusters of craters as one item) in a continent-by-continent list.

Half of the craters listed exceed five miles (8 km) in diameter, and the two largest are over 300 miles across. The Chicxulub crater, scar of the impact that destroyed the dinosaurs, is just over 100 miles across; four of the known craters are larger than that, and one of these that is offshore of India is the same age, so maybe there were several dino-killers, perhaps a string of chunks like the broken comet that peppered Jupiter in 1994.

Some statistical points: The craters are clustered in age-size space. Craters older than 10 million years range upwards from about 1.3 km in size, with no visible trend. Younger craters show a size versus age trend, which is probably due to smaller craters being eroded quickly. Interestingly, the third-youngest crater listed is Mahuika crater, offshore of New Zealand, about 600 years old and 20 km in diameter. That's big enough to have multi-year weather effects, which may explain the century-long cooling after about 1420 AD.

This brings us to the major point of The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth by William E. Burrows, the reason he wrote the book. Several (about 4?) tons of meteoric dust settles on Earth's surface each day; a few pebble-size or larger meteorites land each month, somewhere; a chunk big enough to crash through a roof does so about every decade (if we count the oceans and uninhabited places, it could be several per year). What do we know about larger, more damaging objects?

Researchers such as Louis Frank state that a number of meter-scale to "house size" comets hit the Earth's atmosphere daily, depositing mainly water. Based on dust-gathering studies, these little comets must have very little solid content.

The crater lists I mention above give us a rough idea, which competent statisticians restate thus: the chance of another Barringer Crater object (50 meter size) coming in is about one per ten thousand years. At kilometer size, it is one per few million years. The dino-killer was probably about six kilometers in size, and arrived 65 million years ago. Two of nearly that size hit about 35 million years ago, and one about 2 km across hit some five million years ago, causing a 50-km (30 mile) crater.

We know how big a blast a particular asteroid will create: it is all physics, once you know its mass and velocity. Size isn't the only criterion, because asteroids that circle the sun in the "normal" direction (prograde orbits) can hit Earth with speeds mostly under 25 km/s, while those going the opposite way (retrograde orbits) can hit at a speed as high as 75 km/s, which means ten to twenty times the impact energy.

Author Burrows wishes to influence policy so that we'll create and maintain a permanent presence in space, with the aim of preserving human life in the face of the next big asteroid to come our way. However, his is no simple nor single goal, as he details throughly. We are at risk from a violent universe, it is true. We are also at risk from our own violence. To put his thesis simply, if human life is made extinct, there is a roughly equal chance that it will occur from our own use of superweapons as from external asteroids and other cosmic causes.

However our potential demise is figured, Burrows and others wish to have a backup strategy. First and foremost, he desires a human presence in multiple off-Earth locations, first the Moon, then one or more large orbiting colonies. This is getting some of our eggs out of the single basket in which they currently reside. A lunar colony would have as its main aim keeping a breeding population alive through any disaster Earth might suffer and keeping a record of all of earth's cultural, scientific, and artistic attainments. This is backing up your hard drive in a big way (and how many of us actually do so?).

With equally great threats from Earth (evil or stupid people with megaton bombs or bioweapons) and from space, there would be two other significant thrusts to a space endeavor, but probably physically located in other venues. One is detection and exposure of superweapon preparations by rogue states (he has a long discussion of North Korea), the other is detection and diversion of NEAs, near-earth asteroids. Pitifully little money is being supplied to the latter endeavor, but one day of the Pentagon's budget per year would make it a much more robust, and effective, enterprise.

Thus the book is a long polemic (positively speaking) toward these aims. Sadly, the writing is too scattered to easily grasp. The author appears to have a hop-toad mind, and the focus jumps accordingly. It is written on too high a level to hold the interest of the average congressman or senator. Also, just as very few of us, and even very few corporations, do a really good job of backing up our computer data, the human race is probably way, way to short-sighted to do much of anything before Rome or San Diego vanishes into the next crater.

Implausible Deniability

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, terrorism, statecraft

I lived about a year in East Los Angeles in the 1970s, in the Barrio...don't ask me why! I got to know a kid named Tony who was the leader of a gang of youngsters all under 16 years old. All the older kids were already in jail or prison, so these kids pretty much ran the place. I lived with nine others. We were college students, renting two houses. We suffered a little petty trespassing and thievery, then one day a more major theft from our premises. We went looking for Tony.

Tony usually ran with a couple guys, bodyguards I suppose, but that day there were eight of us. Tony of course denied any of "his guys" were responsible. But we simply told him, we didn't care who did it, we knew all the kids for a half mile around were under him. Anything more happened, we were coming after him. We made it clear we could "take" any number of "his guys" he cared to throw at us, but that we would be sure he, personally, suffered, very much. End of story.

Would that it were so easy to deal with a nation like Syria that trains, supports, and offers sanctuary to several groups of terrorists, perhaps numbering a thousand or so. After the Twin Towers attack of 9/11/01, we couldn't just make the Taliban leaders suffer. They seemed to welcome that. We had to annihilate their military capability. I'd say we did just that, about 95%. A small number of Taliban fighters are still waging a guerilla war against us.

In Deadly Connections: States that Sponsor Terrorism, Daniel Byman analyzes for the general reader (i.e., political innocents like me) the connections between several of today's more important sponsors of terrorism, including the rather unique case of the Taliban with Al Q'aida (there are so many ways to spell this, I just picked one). Here is what I take away from the book.

• Terrorism is the warfare of the weak.
• Sponsoring terrorist groups is typically (not always) the foreign policy of a state too weak to affect events directly.
• "Passive sponsorship," usually turning a blind eye, is a result either of being too weak to drive the group out, or of political naivety, thinking they pose little threat.
• States that sponsor terrorists often claim they are not responsible for their depredations. Nobody is fooled.

States that sponsor terrorism for ideological reasons (Syria, Iran, and the Taliban are the sharpest modern examples) are the least likely to change their ways, because they think they are doing God's work (I discuss the question "Does the Devil know he is evil?" in a post of about ten days ago). The only state to seemingly about-face on the issue, that formerly was an ideological sponsor, was Libya, just in the past couple of years. It took Qaddafi some thirty years to come to such a point, and even the minor changes in stance we have seen in Iran since the mid-1980s took thirty years and the passing on of the earlier, more radical leaders.

Modern religious terrorism is not a simple problem, and in my opinion, the current crop of terrorist organizations will be defeated only over one to two centuries of effort...if at all! But they most likely will die away over that time, even if they are not militarily eliminated, just because later generations have less fire than their forefathers, and later zealots don't join old groups, they start new ones.

A religion struggling to grow up

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, religion, terrorism, islamic extremists

Of the world's great faiths, only two are territorial:

• Biblical Israel is required to worship in Jerusalem and to live under a theocracy in “the good land.”
• The Koran requires an Islamic theocracy, which is to be actively spread to all the world.

Point 2 is the source of World War Three, which has been going on for twelve years, at least. Islam is the youngest of the global faiths, 1,400 years, with a following of 1.3 billion. Considering that religions last millennia, Islam is in its adolescence! Until it grows up, it will be a source of global instability. Religions become more tolerant with age.

The largest faith (2.1 billion) is presently Christianity, and though it is not inherently territorial ("My kingdom is not of this world"), medieval Romanist Christianity certainly was (e.g. the Crusades), and the Protestant Reformation period (14th-17th Centuries) was marked by warfare that led to the current division of the world into three regions dominated by Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant practice.

Although Hinduism, the world's oldest active faith (4,000 years or older), is mainly esoteric, and Buddhism (aged 2,500 years) even more so, both experienced sustained periods of conflict during their "spiritual adolescence", the teen centuries (~1,500 y of age). Together, 1.3 billion follow one or both of these esoteric faiths.

Judaism, though not a great faith in numbers, only 15 million, has had a great, continuing effect on the world. It is the third-oldest faith, at 3,400 years. It underwent several upheavals, but its most warlike period was very early in its history, as the "children of Israel" wrested Canaan from its inhabitants. The spiritual teens for Judaism and a long struggle for national survival began in the Maccabean period, lasting from two centuries prior to the birth of Jesus, until 70AD. From then until 1948, Judaism was a territorial faith without territory, but matured as the jingoistic language of the old Hebrew prophets was reinterpreted in a more spiritual way.

If these faiths are any guide, religions tend to be very unstable as they pass through an adolescent stage after the first millennium or so. They are bad citizens of the world for a while, like self-centered, spiteful "young adults".

Thus it seems almost inevitable for Islam to be in a period of sustained upheaval. 'Tis a pity it occurred in a generation that has access to nuclear weapons! But few of us in the West have observed that Islam's internal struggle is more intense, and its outcome more crucial, than the external struggle we call Islamic Terrorism. As a point of plain fact, the struggle within Islam will determine whether "the war on terror" lasts one generation or ten.

Mary Habeck, formerly a popular lecturer at Yale, now an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins, teaches and studies military history. She asks a wonderful question, "What do the Islamic extremists say about why they are at war with the West?" She brings us the answer in her new book, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror. To me, this book is required reading for every human on the planet. The outcome of Islam's internal conflicts will have some impact on the lives of us all, every one of us.

Hitler didn't invent the Big Lie, he is just the first to embrace it publicly. Today the jihadists are its most ardent practitioners. They know if they say it often, say it loud, and stifle all other voices (make them feel guilty for their virtues), they will win hearts. Professor Habeck outlines their motives and their reasoning, from their own writings. In a world where perception is everything, it doesn't matter that they are twisting the Qur'an (Koran) and their other semi-sacred writings. The studies of millions of Islamic scholars don't matter; such scholars are vilified as false Muslims. To some extent, the hope of the world rests in the laziness of the majority of Muslims.

Ms Habeck has a brilliant suggestion. We must rename the "war on terror" as the "war on the khawarij." To quote her, "They khawarij were heterodox Muslims who appeared soon after the death of Muhammad to claim that they alone were true believers...", precisely the position the jihadis take today.

As I have written elsewhere, should the majority of Muslims embrace the Jihadist view, a generations-long conflict will result in extermination, either of jihadism, or of the rest of us.

Forget what the Western commentators are saying, forget both liberal and conservative viewpoints. The jihadists themselves make it clear that their purpose is entirely religious. They really, really believe that God requires them to bring the entire planet and every person on it into subjection to Allah, or to the grave.

Think on this: Does the Devil know he is Evil?

Think on it some more.

I think, No. He thinks he is Good, even the Best. The Devil thinks he got a raw deal from God, that he is the victim of bad press, that he ought to be running things. The Devil thinks the problem of sin in people is because they are too free; he'd love set up really strong law with superior—even supernatural—enforcement, to take away all causes of straying, until nobody has the opportunity to disobey. That's how he'd run things: nobody can steal from his neighbor, because neither party has anything worth stealing; nobody can commit mayhem, murder, or adultery, because everyone works too hard and is too tired; nobody can lie because the demons can read minds and they'd be everywhere (they outnumber us...); and coveting? a level of mind control that would make Mao blush would take care of that. Then, he thinks, everyone would love him.

Absent mind-reading minions, the above is a fair description of Shari'a, at least as defined by the Jihadists. The religious heart is the power of the movement.

Get Knowing the Enemy. Read it, learn its lessons, keep it handy and read it again. And again. Until jihadism is eliminated.

Cultures don't clash, people do

kw: book reviews, science fiction, posthumanism, terrorism

It would not surprise me to find out that James Patrick Kelly began life among the Amish or a similar "simple life" people. Then again, maybe he took all his inspiration from Thoreau, whose quotes adorn each chapter of Burn.

An aside about Thoreau. Two of the quotes Kelly uses are, "I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet, and I have het to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors" (Journal, 1852), and "I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating" (Walden). I have read Walden and these quotes reinforce the impression I had, even thirty years ago, that Thoreau was a morose 15-year-old who never grew up. Remember the joke: "When I was 15, I thought my Dad was the dumbest guy ever born. Within five years, it's amazing how much he'd learned." Henry David, you just never listened; too self-absorbed to realize your own depression was fed by your solitary habits, you inflicted sorry lifetimes of low self-image on generations of young Americans.

Oh, my, I feel better already! Kelly is a better writer than Thoreau. I hope he outgrows his impressionable youth soon. Burn has a very telling counterplay among three cultures, two of which are at war, though a bit unconventionally.

On one planet among a thousand, named Walden, colonists are striving to retain their original soil-bound humanness, in the face of a hugely dominant humanity, called "upsiders." The upsiders use technology that allows them to transmit themselves across light-years in some quantum way. They have, to a degree, transcended death, for their psyche can be "saved," retained in a form that can live on in (unexplained) machinery. The upsiders have contracted not to mess with Walden.

The planet was bought on the cheap from some folks that expoited it to ecological ruin. They are called pukpuks (if there's a reason for the term, I didn't find it). With all the ores mined out, it is good only for farming...but that's all Walden's residents want to do. For some reason, some of the former residents have stayed on, in remote parts of the planet, and now they object to the re-forestation going on. They fight back using a mid-60s method, self-immolation to start forest fires.

At the cultural triple point between Waldenites, pukpuks, and upsiders, the story plays out. This book is more hopeful than many recent SF offerings.

The Political Gap in the War on Terror

kw: opinion, terrorism, political correctness, bill of rights

As I write this, reports of more "incidents" on buses in London are in the news. Strangely, newsmakers everywhere minimize any report that the bombers of two weeks ago were of "Mideastern" ethnicity or followed the "Islamic" religion. Even less is being said today.

When I was in Jr. Hi, a minor gang got started in my school. It was just a clique run out of control at first. But it got ugly pretty quickly. One of the teachers was wise. He knew who the leader was, so he went to see him, got him alone, gut-punched him, slapped him up against the wall, and said something like this: "This is a sample. Every time one of 'your' fellows gets out of hand, I'll do something worse to you. Don't tell me they are not in your control. That's not my problem, it is yours. I am not alone. I have friends, too." He only had to act one more time.

This is, in effect, the message sent to other terrorist leaders by the deposition and capture of Saddam Hussein. It will need to be sent a few more times. There are 'radical islamic' leaders who daily preach sedition against Western governments, while living in the US, England, and other nations. Why do we not arrest them? Only in the name of policital correctness. We need to start with them, and work our way down. You don't kill a hydra by attacking the multiplying biting heads; you must go for the heart.

It has always been a crime, even under the Bill of Rights, to speak sedition or treason in the U.S. If we are to win the War on Terror, we will follow the laws of the land, and abandon political correctness.