(urth) Predictions Re: The Politics Of Gene Wolfe

Jeff Wilson jwilson at clueland.com
Wed Aug 1 20:44:44 PDT 2012


On 8/1/2012 9:26 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>
> On 8/1/2012 10:08 PM, António Pedro Marques wrote:
>> But what did you mean by it requiring a lot of work and their
>> likeliness to be caught? Those are the bits I inquired on. Lot of work
>> to set fires? I mean, that could apply to lots of other ideas, but here?
> In order to create a wildfire that is bigger than "natural" wildfires,
> you'd have to start several fires over a wide area. If it's not bigger
> than normal fires, what's the point?

Considering how much press and FUD  just a threat like a fake bomb scare 
can get, it wouldn't have to be even as "big" as a natural fire. Natural 
and accidental fires happen infrequently, but if you make it plain you 
are willing to set them on purpose, you create a perception of 
significant risk on a daily basis.

A terror org could deliberately set a fire in an area with a high danger 
of spread to inhabited areas, then when fire fighting resources are 
concentrated there, they set another one at another high-risk area in a 
distant part of the same or adjacent state - now there are two fires! 
Limited resources have to be diverted from the big established one to 
fight the new one, they take much longer to respond than normal because 
they are already deployed instead of at the ready and farther away, and 
now the pols get to explain to the first fire's victims why they decided 
the second fire was more important, to the second fire's victims why 
help was so slow to arrive, and to the fire fighters why they cut the 
budget last year, etc.


Then whenever the terror org needs some publicity, they call in another 
arson threat, and everyone running an unsanctioned weenie roast gets to 
enjoy the half-assed security theatre "zero tolerance" policies...

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >





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