¡Feliz Día de los Muertos!

heeeeeeeeere souly souly souly souly…

So, it’s Day of the Dead. Did I have a lame Halloween night? The answer to that is a resounding YES. But it was nice, anyhow. Did some time on my cycle trainer while I watched some high-quality X-Files. What more could a fella want?Also, I think I have (at least temporarily) fixed the rear brake on Señor Pulga. It’s not terribly satisfactory, however. It’s really really hard to drill a hole through a stainless steel bolt. :(

In other other news, there’s an excellent editorial on Wired’s “Security Matters” Blog today. It’s about how the “War on Terror” is becoming “… an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected. It’s a war on different.”

Cutting & Pasting:

The problem is that ordinary citizens don’t know what a real terrorist threat looks like. They can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a tape dispenser, electronic name badge, CD player, bat detector or a trash sculpture. Nor can they tell the difference between terrorist plotters and imams, musicians or architects. All they know is that something makes them uneasy — usually based on fear, media hype or just something being different…

The police cordon off the area, make arrests and/or evacuate airplanes, and in the end the cause of the alarm is revealed as a pot of Thai chili sauce, or flour, or a utility bill, or an English professor recycling or a cell phone in an airplane seat. Of course, by then it’s too late for the authorities to admit that they made a mistake and overreacted…

…these incidents only reinforce the need to realistically assess, not automatically escalate, citizen tips…

Equally important, politicians need to stop praising and promoting the officers who get it wrong. And everyone needs to stop castigating, and prosecuting, the victims just because they embarrassed the police by their innocence.

Causing a city-wide panic over blinking signs, a guy with a pellet gun or stray backpacks is not evidence of doing a good job: It’s evidence of squandering police resources. Even worse, it causes its own form of terror, and encourages people to be even more alarmist in the future.