War Commentary

Maybe Brits Don’t Make Suicide Bombers After All

The people who set off the bombs in London may have expected to get away:

one police hypothesis is that the bombers were tricked by a “master” who told them they would have time to escape – when in fact the devices were set to go off immediately.

“The bombers’ masters might have thought that they couldn’t risk the four men being caught and spilling everything to British interrogators,” an unnamed security official told the Telegraph.

Lending weight to the theory is the fact that all four men had paid up their parking tickets before boarding a train at Luton for King’s Cross, and that they all bought return tickets to the capital.

Moreover, the paper said, the men were carrying their explosives inside rucksacks, as opposed to strapped to their bodies as is common practice among suicide bombers.

None were reported to have cried “Allah Akbar” (God is Greatest) before setting off their charge – something which most Middle Eastern suicide bombers do.

If they were duped into it, as it looks like might be the case, it will make it harder for future recruitment, because bombers unwilling to sacrifice themselves may not trust their masters. Of course, this isn’t unprecedented. Bin Laden joked on the videotape about many of the September 11 hijackers having no idea why they were hijacking the planes.

War Commentary

Maybe Brits Don’t Make Suicide Bombers After All

The people who set off the bombs in London may have expected to get away:

one police hypothesis is that the bombers were tricked by a “master” who told them they would have time to escape – when in fact the devices were set to go off immediately.

“The bombers’ masters might have thought that they couldn’t risk the four men being caught and spilling everything to British interrogators,” an unnamed security official told the Telegraph.

Lending weight to the theory is the fact that all four men had paid up their parking tickets before boarding a train at Luton for King’s Cross, and that they all bought return tickets to the capital.

Moreover, the paper said, the men were carrying their explosives inside rucksacks, as opposed to strapped to their bodies as is common practice among suicide bombers.

None were reported to have cried “Allah Akbar” (God is Greatest) before setting off their charge – something which most Middle Eastern suicide bombers do.

If they were duped into it, as it looks like might be the case, it will make it harder for future recruitment, because bombers unwilling to sacrifice themselves may not trust their masters. Of course, this isn’t unprecedented. Bin Laden joked on the videotape about many of the September 11 hijackers having no idea why they were hijacking the planes.

War Commentary

Maybe Brits Don’t Make Suicide Bombers After All

The people who set off the bombs in London may have expected to get away:

one police hypothesis is that the bombers were tricked by a “master” who told them they would have time to escape – when in fact the devices were set to go off immediately.

“The bombers’ masters might have thought that they couldn’t risk the four men being caught and spilling everything to British interrogators,” an unnamed security official told the Telegraph.

Lending weight to the theory is the fact that all four men had paid up their parking tickets before boarding a train at Luton for King’s Cross, and that they all bought return tickets to the capital.

Moreover, the paper said, the men were carrying their explosives inside rucksacks, as opposed to strapped to their bodies as is common practice among suicide bombers.

None were reported to have cried “Allah Akbar” (God is Greatest) before setting off their charge – something which most Middle Eastern suicide bombers do.

If they were duped into it, as it looks like might be the case, it will make it harder for future recruitment, because bombers unwilling to sacrifice themselves may not trust their masters. Of course, this isn’t unprecedented. Bin Laden joked on the videotape about many of the September 11 hijackers having no idea why they were hijacking the planes.

Space

Wrong Lesson

There are many lessons to be drawn from the programmatic disaster that is the Shuttle program. Unfortunately, many of the most popular ones are wrong. Alan Boyle has apparently succumbed to one of them, when he writes:

Of course, it takes a lot of innovation to replace a manned spaceship capable of putting almost 30,000 pounds of cargo into orbit. I

Media Criticism

Didn’t He Actually Read The Story?

Check out the subheadline in this story:

Action may mark end of 5-month truce

One would think that there had been no hostilities whatsoever prior to this attack, that it was just those bloodthirsty Jews ending the truce by lobbing rockets at innocent Palestinians. You know, just restarting that ol’ cycle of violence?

But the article itself says:

The military wing of Hamas, known formally as the Islamic Resistance Movement, has fired more than 100 mortar shells and rockets into Israel and Jewish settlements in Gaza in recent days, one of which killed a 22-year-old Israeli woman Thursday.

I just can’t imagine how the mind of a copy editor works who could come up with such a headline.

Media Criticism

Didn’t He Actually Read The Story?

Check out the subheadline in this story:

Action may mark end of 5-month truce

One would think that there had been no hostilities whatsoever prior to this attack, that it was just those bloodthirsty Jews ending the truce by lobbing rockets at innocent Palestinians. You know, just restarting that ol’ cycle of violence?

But the article itself says:

The military wing of Hamas, known formally as the Islamic Resistance Movement, has fired more than 100 mortar shells and rockets into Israel and Jewish settlements in Gaza in recent days, one of which killed a 22-year-old Israeli woman Thursday.

I just can’t imagine how the mind of a copy editor works who could come up with such a headline.

Media Criticism

Didn’t He Actually Read The Story?

Check out the subheadline in this story:

Action may mark end of 5-month truce

One would think that there had been no hostilities whatsoever prior to this attack, that it was just those bloodthirsty Jews ending the truce by lobbing rockets at innocent Palestinians. You know, just restarting that ol’ cycle of violence?

But the article itself says:

The military wing of Hamas, known formally as the Islamic Resistance Movement, has fired more than 100 mortar shells and rockets into Israel and Jewish settlements in Gaza in recent days, one of which killed a 22-year-old Israeli woman Thursday.

I just can’t imagine how the mind of a copy editor works who could come up with such a headline.

Technology and Society

More Tech Support Idiocy

So I’m paying my Chase bill on line, and I log in with Firefox, as usual. It takes me to my account page, but any attempted link from that page (e.g., to actually pay the bill) yields a timeout error indicating that the page has gone too long without activity. Which is nonsense, because I only just logged in. After wasting a long time getting through to someone in tech support on the phone, she asks me who my ISP is.

Me: What difference does it make who my ISP is?

Her: We need to know to diagnose this.

Me: [scratching head] Ummm…OK. It’s Bell South.

Her: So what browser do they use?

Me: ?? What browser do they use? They don’t use a browser. They’re an ISP. I use a browser.

Her: When you log in to Bell South, what browser do they make you use?

Me: Log in to Bell South? With a browser? Why would I do that?

Her: How do you log in?

Me: I don’t log in. I have a permanent connection. It’s called DSL. It’s called broadband. You should try it, I hear it’s all the rage.

Her: Well, do you use a browser?

Me: [long silence, as steam slowly starts to waft out of my ears] Why yes, yes, I do use a browser, funny you should ask. Someone told me once it’s how one accesses stuff on the World Wide Web. I find it handy, occasionally.

Her: What browser do you use?

Me: I usually use Mozilla. Why didn’t you ask me that in the first place, instead of giving me the third degree about my ISP and how I log into it, which is a subject as far removed from the problem, as far as I can see, as the price of beef jerky in Tibet?

Her: I’ve never heard of that browser. Do you have Internet Explorer?

Me: Yes, I do. I tend to avoid using it, unless someone is sufficiently user hostile as to create a web site that doesn’t use standard HTML. Should I try that?

Her: Yes, go ahead, I’ll wait.

Of course, it works fine with IE. I issue a complaint.

Me: I’ve been paying bills for years with a Mozilla browser. You seem to have broken your site, since I can no longer do so.

Her: Oh, we don’t support any browsers other than IE and Netscape.

At this point, I’ve wasted enough time on this, thank her, and hang up.

Economics

Non-Mutual

“Non Mutual” was the accusation when The Prisoner was pilloried for not having enough community spirit. Mutual funds are being accused of being non-mutual by Ross Miller in his paper that decomposes an actively managed mutual fund into an active market neutral part and a passive part that looks just like an index. What he finds is that expense ratios on the active part look like about 7% if you consider most funds only have about 10% of their portfolio actively managed and that means the 1% vs. the .3% annual fees for managed vs. index fund has to be attributed just to the managed portion. This is great for hedge funds that if their fund is going up 10% a year only charge 2% fees + 20% of the 10% profits or 4% altogether. That’s quite a bit less than the comparable active mutual fund.

This is make quite a stir in financial circles.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!