Our mania about terrorism reached a crescendo with the Boston Marathon bombings, where a couple of disaffected young men with little or nothing in the way of military training (or common sense) were the focus of a massive manhunt that shut down a major city for a day.
As Maher said in the clip:
After 9/11 we were shell shocked. We didn't know what kind of enemy we were dealing with, but twelve years later, we have a much better idea: Losers, fuckups, idiots!
...
Bin Laden's plan wasn't to kill us all. It was to scare us into overreacting, and destroy ourselves. Because if there's one thing those terrorists proved they can blow up, it's our balance sheet.
I've mentioned this thought before, but bin Laden succeeded brilliantly. The best thing we could have done to persuade them to try something else would have been to, as the old British war posters said, "Keep calm and carry on". Instead, we reacted like Daffy Duck on his first hit of methamphetamine. Not only did our reaction encourage more efforts from the more-or-less professional terrorists, but it showed the losers that this was one sure-fire way of getting attention.
Nothing about this recent bombing gives me hope that we'll be getting over it anytime soon.
One of the more amusing claims I kept reading and hearing about the collapse of the World Trade Center back in 2001 was about how the "physics didn't add up", or some such phrase to indicate that what happened didn't make sense. I thought this was so much twaddle at the time, and said so. Of course, that meant I was a naive dupe of the New World Order, but I digress.
The important thing to remember here is that what we should have learned from 9/11 is that when particular things composed of particular materials come together at speeds and in ways we haven't experienced before, it's anyone's guess what will happen. What "physics" apply in a particular situation are often very different from what we assume will apply.
The show Mythbusters provides lessons in this sort of thing quite often. In it, they test some urban legend, bit of folklore, or seemingly outrageous claim to see if it makes sense. Whether the question is if a Saint Bernard bringing you a shot of cognac when you're trapped in a snowdrift is a good thing, or how plausible an anti-Gorn cannon is, they use science and mechanical abilities to see what might be true. Often, they do this by destroying something in pretty spectacular fashion.
Yes, I really like the show. It's one of the few things I miss about cable television.
This particular segment from Mythbusters features a rocket slide slamming into a car at 500 miles per hour, or thereabouts. The episode's premise was to test a claim that a snowplow had once cut a small imported car in two. The Mythbusters had already tried this out, and found that, sure enough, it wasn't possible. I think enough of us have seen auto accidents to visualize what would happen. We're used to what happens when steel vehicles collide at, say, 20 to 100 miles per hour. But, this being Mythbusters, they wondered if it was possible at any speed.
So, they hired a place with a rocket sled track to set up an experiment. Here it is:
The reason this episode reminded me of 9/11 is the speed with which the sled hit the car, and how this was outside the experience of all the testers. Both they and I made guesses about what would happen. Mine was that the engine would be either crushed or splintered, and the rest of the car more or less cut in two. Watch the video to see the Mythbusters' guesses. I'm an engineer with some experience with cars and aircraft. The people in the episode were experienced at destroying, working with, and building quite a few mechanical devices. None of us, though, is a materials scientist or an expert in the technologies and metals involved in car manufacturing. None of us was right, really. Those points are related.
So, just like we'd never seen anything like an airliner loaded with fuel hitting a skyscraper with a steel external structure at more than 350 miles per hour, this experiment had a result few laymen, if any, would have guessed correctly. As NASA demonstrated during the Columbia accident investigation, even the experts can be wrong sometimes. They didn't think the foam that covered the main tank could damage the Shuttle if it broke off in a launch, but it turns out that's exactly what happened. That's why talking about how the physics don't add up in a new situation like this is nonsense.
Politics has been a thoroughly depressing subject of late. Here are some pictures of some rocks...
These are pictures of some bits of columnar basalt surrounded by breccia basalt that I saw while at Cape Perpetua a couple of weeks ago. This first one shows the contrast pretty nicely:
Image credit: All photos by Cujo359
[click on the images to enlarge]
Believe it or not, that's all the same basic kind of rock, made out of the same basic materials. The only difference is that the columnar basalt, the stuff that's more obviously crystallized, cooled more slowly than the breccia that surrounds it.
As Lockwood DeWitt, who was our geological spirit guide on this journey, put it yesterday:
Others have also pointed out that columns are not necessarily "columns," i.e. up and down. Here are some horizonal columns in a basaltic dike cutting through basaltic breccia. Again, the consistent theme is that the fractures form perpendicular to the surface of cooling. This was from Cape Perpetua[.]
[I added that embedded link to the picture Lockwood is referring to in the text.]
Here's a picture of more columnar basalt from that beach, which shows a little better how differently the two types of rock have weathered:
[I should note that both of these pictures are panoramas stitched together from two or more pictures. If you notice a discontinuity that doesn't make sense, it's possible that's the reason.]
This stuff was all over the place at Cape Perpetua. At first, I assumed that the rocks with the different colors and structures must be layers of different kinds of rocks. My companions set me straight on this, and I soon noted that these dikes were everywhere, going in many different directions, so it was most unlikely they were different layers of rock. But then, as I've mentioned before, I'm not a geologist.
I don't feel bad. There were more than a few times when Lockwood and Dana, my traveling companions who are both enthusiastic rock hounds, weren't sure what the heck they were looking at.
One of the things that amazes me about such geology is how much small differences in the rate of cooling can affect the appearance and the properties of rocks. I took physics and materials science courses in college, yet the more I learn about geology the more I'm reminded that understanding how something happened is often a matter of figuring out which physical and chemical processes are the predominate ones in a situation.
This is something I've written in the past regarding various 9/11 conspiracy theories. You can be very knowledgeable about basic physical sciences, and yet look at a pile of rocks or a pile of broken construction materials and still have no idea what it all means. There's considerable context to learn before assuming that there's no other rational explanation to what you're looking at than the first one that pops into your head.
Thanks to Lockwood and Dana Hunter for trying to educate me about this stuff. It may not have looked it, but every once in a while that effort had an effect.
Finding this story about Iraqis determined to laugh about their terrible situation was nothing short of inspiring. Checkpoints and all the potential for danger they bring are a part of daily life in Iraq, and bombs are an all too frequent part of life there, too. Yet the people who produced that television show had the courage to try to make light of it, and there were plenty of people like that moronic psychologist who criticized them for it. Of all people, you'd think a psychologist would understand that laughter is a way to relieve tension and dispel fear. In a country that has far too much of both, that's essential.
One of the few things I remember a rock artist talking about to this day was a radio interview with Canadian rocker Tom Cochrane back in the early 1990s. I can't find a transcript of it on the Internet, which is unsurprising given how long ago it was. He was discussing his song "Life Is A Highway". He said he got the inspiration for the song while working for the relief organization World Vision in West Africa. Seeing children in some of the camps that were formed there to house people during one of the seemingly incessant civil wars and famines that occur on that continent showed him how resilient people could be. He said he was amazed that in the midst of all that suffering, there were children smiling and laughing. At least, that's how I remember it now.
The first verse of "Life Is A Highway" goes like this:
Life's like a road that you travel on, When there's one day here and the next day gone. Sometimes you bend sometimes you stand. Sometimes you turn your back to the wind. There's a world outside every darkened Door, Where blues won't haunt you anymore, Where the brave are free and lovers soar. Come ride with me to the distant shore.
The secret to life, Cochrane seems to be saying, is to just get on with it. In contrast to what those people in West Africa were going through, or the people in Iraq, our troubles seem mostly theoretical. Yes, we have our problems. I write about them all the time. If you don't think I take those things seriously, you just got here. But being able to laugh or sing about what hurts and frightens us is a way to avoid obsessing about it. When you obsess about things like this, it can turn you into the sort of people who burn books, or try to stamp out every hint of Islam within a thousand miles of Ground Zero. In short, it might prevent you from becoming the people I find scary.
Or, perhaps worse, you'll just stop living.
I wrote two years ago that we needed to get past the events of this day and carry on:
Last September I was trying to write an essay like this and just couldn't stand it. It's too painful to contemplate what a fear-plagued, panic-stricken country we've become. As Kung Fu Monkey claims to be, I'm not very brave, and I'm certainly not fearless. Yet I see through this without difficulty. Why can't the rest of the country?
For those who lost someone that day, or were directly involved in the events, this day will always bring back painful memories. I grew up within an hour's drive of New York City. I had reason to fear for both family and friends that day. Thankfully, my fears turned out to be unfounded. For those whose fears were realized, I am truly sorry, and hope that someday that pain will go away, at least a little. The rest of us, though, need to get up and move on. Don't tell me to "never forget". Do something to make sure it doesn't happen again. Because, trust me on this, no one who experienced it will ever forget. For my part, I refuse to dwell.
Life's a highway. So just shut up and drive.
Let me end this article with the most relevant video ever for a day like this - Steve Martin playing a banjo for a bunch of puppets:
Afterword: Consider this notice that I will never write about the events of September 11, 2001 on this day again.
UPDATE: A couple of afterthoughts that occurred to me via comments over at the Seminal version of this article:
- One difference between we Baby Boomers and our offspring is that we had Vietnam and the Cold War to provide some perspective on what an existential threat looks like. Folks in their thirties and younger really don’t. It’s like how our generation didn’t listen well enough when our parents were telling us about how much the Great Depression sucked, and why we should avoid another.
All we can do, I suppose, is write how we feel and hope they’re more inclined to listen than we were.
- When I see the first comedy show about terrorism in America, the TSA, perpetual surveillance, and all the other stuff that’s followed 9/11, I know we’ll finally be on our way to getting over it. It will be a bit like Hogan's Heroes was for the WWII generation. You can look at it as trivializing the experience of being a POW, or you can notice that Schultz and Klink were, in some ways, more trapped in their roles than the Allied prisoners were. Or, you can just look at it as being a goofy TV show. So it will be with the first comedy about 9/11.
The day that show premieres seems further in the future than ever.
This article has been temporarily post-dated to keep it at the top of the blog page until Friday. New content, if any, will be below until then. The article was originally published on Aug. 23, 2010.
Caption: Pakistan relief efforts continue
A Chinook in Company B, Task Force Raptor, 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade, TF Falcon, flies over a bridge destroyed by flood waters, Aug. 11, in the Swat valley, Pakistan.
The extent of the devastation in this part of Pakistan is clearly visible.
In all the talk about "Ground Zero Mosques", a larger issue has been largely forgotten, as Princeton Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell said on The Rachel Maddow Show the other day:
I know that it‘s a midterm election. And so, yes, I think part of this is some GOP leaders trying to pull the last little bit of political capital they can out of 9/11. But it is Ramadan. It is a holy time for Muslims. And on top of that, in the Muslim world right now, there is an enormous tragedy. Fifteen million people in Pakistan are suffering.
And one thing that we could do as Americans is to say, OK, rather than being exclusionary , rather than fighting over a piece of ground—as sacred and hallowed as it may be in our national understanding—that instead, we will reach out to the millions of Muslims who are currently suffering, through no faults of their own, as a result of this horrifying natural disaster during a high holy moment—what that might that say about who we are as Americans instead of having this fight over this little parcel of land.
The flooding situation just keeps getting worse. It's still the monsoon season in southern Asia, as Reuters noted a few days ago:
The floods, which began in late July after heavy monsoon rains over the upper reaches of the Indus River basin, have ploughed a swathe of destruction from northern Pakistan's Gilgit-Baltistan province to the southern province of Sindh. ... The monsoon season in Pakistan lasts until the first week of September.
The UN now estimates that the number of people who need basic shelter has gone from two million to six million.
Nearly 17 million people have been affected by the floods.
This week marks a month since the flooding started, and although the United Nations says it has raised close to 70% of the $460m (£295m) needed to provide emergency relief, many people have yet to receive any help, says the BBC's Jill McGivering in Sindh, the country's worst affected province.
Some $54m of that money is in uncommitted pledges. Resources available now total $263m.
Seventeen million people is nearly the population of Florida, which the U.S. Census reports, now has 18.5 million people. The CIA World Book's entry on Pakistan lists Pakistan's population as 177 million. That means that one Pakistani in ten is now affected by the floods.
Caption: Andrew Mitchell in Pakistan
The Secretary of State for International Development walks through flood affected areas of Pir Sabak, near camps funded by UKaid.
To me, this says so much about our world - a government official going to a disaster location, as much to be seen as to see.
The other thing to note, of course, is that this is a tent city in a country that isn't known for a temperate climate. Millions of people will be in them for at least the next few months.
Units of the U.S. and United Kingdom militaries, among others, are in the area providing transportation and medical services. A whole slew of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are either on the ground, assembling relief supplies, or providing aid funds.
As Mary notes at Pacific Views:
Enough with the posturing and the fake outrage about the Cordoba House. It's time to live up to our better selves. ... Here are a couple of organizations that are helping on the ground: Mercy Corp[s], Doctors without Borders. Please do something to help.
I couldn't have said it better. For international readers, the BBC has a list of websites that lead to various national and international organizations that are providing relief.
The Gawker article is a study in sarcasm, and is perhaps best read to be understood. Nonetheless, if they are telling the truth about this, then this is yet more evidence that people who think this thing is worth protesting are mouth-breathing imbeciles. That is, it's more evidence besides this:
Reading comprehension is one of those skills we seem to have largely lost in America, so I'll try to make this simple by using "bullet points":
It's not a mosque
It's not at Ground Zero
... It's a community center run by people of a particular religion, like a Jewish community center or a YMCA. It's two blocks from the World Trade Center, which given how built-up Manhattan is, might as well be in another city.
Now doesn't that just sound so enlightened? Some kid screws up, so send him off to someplace he probably hasn't heard of to kill foreigners. Of course, as people who have actually listened to the lyrics know, it just goes downhill from there. No wonder people want to play it at a place where they tell us all how offended they are by people who are different from them.
So, we have people protesting a "Ground Zero Mosque" that isn't a mosque and isn't at Ground Zero, who love to play a song that demonstrates how pathetic their bigotry is.
It's like they never pay attention to anything.
There are days it's tough to remember that we're the country that went to the Moon. Oh, wait. That was our parents, wasn't it?
Last week I received an e-mail from The Skeptic. Two things were unusual about this:
This is an e-mail list I deliberately joined.
They had something optimistic to say that didn't look like it was so forced that it could have pushed cement through a thimble.
The blurb discussed the 9/11 "Truther" movement, and how in the end, it appears that for once sane people were actually part of the majority opinion:
Skeptics today bemoan the overwhelming proportion of people who claim to believe in all manner of conspiracy theories from the JFK assassination to the origins of HIV-AIDS. For that reason, it may be worthwhile to take a moment to stop and celebrate one area in which skeptical advocacy has been overwhelming successful: the world of 9/11 conspiracies. Through the work of scholars like Michael Shermer and James Meigs, along with everyday skeptics on the grassroots level, critical inquiry has been overwhelmingly successful in calling these conspiracy theorists to task.
What should go down as a knockout blow to the 9/11 denier movement, what Michael Shermer called “just about one of the best things ever done in the history of skepticism,” is the now-famous Popular Mechanics article turned into a best-selling book that debunked many of the top points the conspiracy theorists relied on. Joining a chorus of mainstream publications including Skeptic and taking the central claims head on, the Popular Mechanics article became a cornerstone for the 9/11 denier movement’s undoing.
The spike in 2006, prompted by the live debate between the editors of Popular Mechanics and the producers of the documentary Loose Change, shows that not only was the skeptical perspective more well-accepted than the conspiracy perspective, it began to dictate the conversation. (Graph produced using Google Trends by the author.)
The Popular Mechanics article was published in its March 2005 issue and became an Internet hit after the live debate hosted by Democracy Now! between Popular Mechanics editors Jim Meigs and David Dunbar and Loose Change creators Dylan Avery and Jason Bermas. In the aftermath of that debate — if this is any indicator of which side presented the better case — that article became the most popularly searched item pertaining to 9/11 conspiracies and, from that point on, the skeptical perspective became the dominant voice pertaining to the movement. The conversation was brought to the mainstream, and the mainstream made its decision.
The 9/11 conspiracy theories started out as nonsense, and then became progressively worse. They started with some physics professor who didn't seem to know that steel softens at temperatures well below its melting point. If it didn't, you'd have to think that we'd still be cutting our cheese with bronze flatware, and we'd still be riding horses to work. At least, I can't imagine all those blacksmiths and swordmakers making a living if they had to melt steel to change its shape. If I had ten dollars for every time some clown tried to tell me that the "physics just didn't add up" I'd be able to retire by now.
The theories just got wilder from there. It was suggested that there was some secret government program with the purpose of flying aircraft into buildings so that it could assume more powers, or get us involved in a war with Iraq. Quite clearly, that wasn't necessary. Bush was well on his way to lying us into that war even before the Towers fell. One could perhaps speculate that they were willing to ignore warnings about terrorism with that in mind, but given how compliant the press in this country has been, the excuses they already had would have been enough. It was also seizing powers that it shouldn't have before the attacks. Once again, no attack was necessary, because neither the press nor the Congress were going to get in the way.
Eventually, we were expected to believe that trained professionals, who already had more work than they could handle, would have rushed into burning, collapsing buildings to set explosives. Or, we were expected to believe that they set all those explosives in occupied buildings without anyone knowing about it. Anyone who spent even a little time finding out how controlled demolitions experts work would have known just how preposterous an idea that was. As I mentioned before, someone produced a terrific video explaining all that.
Of course, there will always be a few people who believe this nonsense. It's inevitable, I think, given how much some people have invested emotionally in the idea that this could have happened. All the facts and knowledge in the world won't convince them. It's nice to know, though, that if outlandish ideas are confronted, sanity can prevail.
After you've lived long enough, you can observe this same pattern repeating itself over and over again - first wide-eyed acceptance, followed by poorly researched coverage by the "news", or downright pandering. Then serious people start looking at the issue, and most people move on to new fantasies, or in some cases, a greater appreciation of reality. In the end, only a stubborn few believers remain. I've seen this happen with the Bermuda Triangle, Ancient Astronauts, and the UFO movement. While the latter certainly still has adherents, for the most part I think they're made up of people who just can't quite believe that we're alone in the Universe, but just don't realize how rare and fleeting intelligence in a species can be. It's hard to blame them, I suppose, until you realize how rare and fleeting intelligence is in our own species.
I think part of the reason this keeps happening relates to what Brian Greene was referring to last week - science education is so bad, and so pointless, that people can't be expected to know any better. I think, if nothing else, the time and effort spent on arguing about nonsense could be better spent confronting our real problems.
That alone should justify the added effort.
UPDATE (Jun. 16): I finally realized I hadn't provided a link to the Popular Mechanics article. I've now fixed that oversight.
UPDATE (July 25): Changed the sentence about the physics professor's distressing lack of awareness of the properties of steel. It is now more precise.
[How it should be - Liberty standing tall in the face of terrorism, not running around in a panic. Image credit: National Park Service]
Via Christy, Kung Fu Monkey puts our times in perspective [emphasis and bold from original]:
I am just not going to wet my pants every time some guys get arrested in a terror plot. I will do my best to stay informed. I will support the necessary law enforcement agencies. I will take whatever reasonable precautions seem, um, reasonable. But I will not be terrorized. I assume that the terror-ists would like me to be terror-ized, as that is what is says on their nametag, rather than, say, wanting me to surrender to ennui or negative body image, and they're just coming the long way around.
A little caution and even a bit of fear might be a good thing. Blinding, panicky, wet-your-pants-as-you-throw-your-civil-rights-in-their-path fear isn't:
I am absolutely buffaloed by the people who insist I man up and take it in the teeth for the great Clash of Civilizations -- "Come ON, people, this is the EPIC LAST WAR!! You just don't have the stones to face that fact head-on!" -- who at the whiff of an actual terror plot will, with no apparent sense of irony, transform and run around shrieking, eyes rolling and Hello Kitty panties flashing like Japanese schoolgirls who have just realized that the call is coming from inside the house!
The irony is so thick these days it's tough to see through it.
How do all those folks with those big stones measure up against figures from our past?
Maybe it's just, I cast my eyes back on the last century ...
FDR: Oh, I'm sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we're coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How's that going to feel?
CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We'll be in the pub, flipping you off. I'm slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I'm sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.
US. NOW: BE AFRAID!! Oh God, the Brown Bad people could strike any moment! They could strike ... NOW!! AHHHH. Okay, how about .. NOW!! AAGAGAHAHAHHAG! Quick, do whatever we tell you, and believe whatever we tell you, or YOU WILL BE KILLED BY BROWN PEOPLE!! PUT DOWN THAT SIPPY CUP!!
... and I'm just a little tired of being on the wrong side of that historical arc.
Me, too. Last September I was trying to write an essay like this and just couldn't stand it. It's too painful to contemplate what a fear-plagued, panic-stricken country we've become. As Kung Fu Monkey claims to be, I'm not very brave, and I'm certainly not fearless. Yet I see through this without difficulty. Why can't the rest of the country?
To tell you the truth, I think I know the answer to that one.
Here is the title of a report from(PDF) the Government Accountability Office on combating terrorism released today:
The United States Lacks a Comprehensive Plan to Destroy the Terrorist Threat and Close the Safe Haven in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
That is not some line buried in the report. That is the title.
Screw Loose Change notes a new video by Mark Roberts. It carefully explains why the idea that the World Trade Center was demolished using controlled explosive demolition, is, without trying to put too fine a point on it, fracking nuts. It explains how controlled demolition is done, what it looks like, and why it couldn't possibly have been used in the manner that the raving half-witsthe "truthers" say it was.
The image is a screen shot from the movie. It's a construction worker cutting a beam so that explosives can be placed on it prior to demolition. You'd think someone would have noticed these guys working in the WTC, wouldn't you?
So, watch it. Enjoy. Even if you don't learn anything you'll have seen lots of explosions.
