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Saturday, 6 August 2005
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New police guidelines: shoot suicide bomber suspects in head. Xeni Jardin:
An international group of police chiefs recently expanded its
guidelines for use of deadly force, instructing officers to shoot
suspected suicide bombers in the head. Details were printed in
yesterday's Washington Post .
According to the newspaper, the guide recommends that if
lethal force is needed to stop someone who fits a certain behavioral
profile, the officer should "aim for the head." The intent is to kill
the suspect instantly so the person could not set off a bomb if one is
strapped to the person's chest, the newspaper said. Among signs to look
for listed in the police organization's behavioral profile are wearing
a heavy coat in warm weather, carrying a backpack with protrusions or
visible wires, nervousness, excessive sweating or an unwillingness to
make eye contact, the Post said.
I can't help but think how much this sounds like a
description of any number of geek, raver, or chronically shy engineers
I know -- none of whom are suicide bombers. Yeah, I know there's a
distributed war on. And the stakes are high for cops out there. But God
help any iPod-toting, eye-contact-avoiding, sweaty nerds on the subway
from user error. Link
Update: Security analyst Bruce Schneier blogs a few thoughts on the matter here: Link (Thanks, Ken)
Reader Max Mitchell says,
The people proposing the idea of shooting suspected
suicide bombers in the head have obviously never watched any modern
thriller/action movie. What if suicide bombers build their devices to
go off if the bomber's heartbeat stops? We've seen it time and time
again in films -- "try and remove this bomb and it will explode".
There's also the possibility of those types of bombs being used to
send people out as proxy bombers (as the IRA did, holding people's
family hostage and sending them out in a car packed with explosives to
a military checkpoint).
[Boing Boing]
2:32:02 AM 
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Yes, it's Hiroshima day, the day
the USA perpetrated a monstrous war crime, one of so many. Compare
August 6 1945 to September 11 2001. Forget it.
We are constantly told that lives
were saved by killing the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that the
action stopped the war. This is bullshit.
The Japanese made the political decision to surrender to the Americans because of what happened two days after Hiroshima.
On the 8th of August the USSR, confident in its position in Europe,
turned its attention to Japan. China did the same. Japan realised that
the consequence of a Russion/Chinese invasion would be the partition of
the country into a Russian Japan and a Chinese Japan. Japan would lose
all cultural identity, and as far as it could see, never regain it.
Surrender to America would lead to what it did lead to, peace,
democracy, prosperity, but most importantly, continuity of identity.
Hiroshima was a crime, make no mistake.
2:27:07 AM
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I have been baffled by the recent
spate of people from my hideous past (Warren Zevon's "dirty life and
crimes") who have hunted me down lately. It's not all bad, but it did
mystify me why it was happening.
The group of people I was in school with are all turning 50, and it had not occurred to me that that might actually be the key.
The number 50 is a convenient number for most people. Half a hundred, 5
tens, easy to deal with. It actually has little attraction for me. I've
always tried to live in houses with prime numbers as their addresses
for example. And I quite like multiples of 7 or 13 if I can't have a
prime. Anyway 50 is clearly a big marker for many people.
But what does it signify?
I think I've sussed it. Mortality. We are so much more aware of ageing and death.
The first person from my dirty life and crimes to contact me from the
deep past was actually some time ago. But it was in response to the
death of a mutual friend whom neither of us had seen for some time. He
reasoned that we had the attitude that we could always "catch up", but
then when someone died, of course that was no longer possible. So that
coffee, dinner or casual sex that was possible last week, was not
possible now.
His solution, such as it was, was to contact people he had cared about,
to keep channels open. While I admired this, I didn't follow suit. I
haven't fully thought through why. I think maybe I feel that it is
somehow hypocritical. If I haven't kept up a relationship because of
its own value, why should the realisation that I or the other may die
give the relationship such value that it is worth rekindling.
Having said that, there are some relationships that just the business
of living has interrupted, and maybe now we have time to renew them. I
don't know, but I'm looking forward to finding out.
I think maybe the best example of how stupid I am is that I want to analyse this. Maybe I should just enjoy and/or suffer it.
2:04:41 AM
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Research pinpoints new breast cancer genes.
Scientists sat they have pinpointed four new genes believed to be involved in the development of breast cancer.
Great if this turns out to work
for breast cancer, but the stronger implication is that it opens up
possibilities for all cancers.
[ABC News: Health]
12:53:05 AM
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Test
12:45:00 AM
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© Copyright 2009 Peter Nixon.
Last update: 13/4/09; 4:23:04 PM.
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