The MAGA Republican Party is a terrorist organization, but one that has infiltrated enough of the Justice Department, State Department, and Congress to not allow our country to classify it correctly as such. Hopefully in a few days, enough voters will realize this that they won’t be allowed to take over our country.

It will be a very sad day if we wake up on November 9th and realize that Americans have chosen to end democracy.

No one was hurt, not much damage, but it could have been bad. A threat of further attacks was made.

Spiritual and physical terror.

They caught the guy, but they are treating it like he was passing out pamphlets or something:

This is domestic terrorism. This is serious criminal conduct. But we are still making excuses for it instead of prosecuting it to the full extent of the law, as we should be. https://t.co/1i2Evo3lsY

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) October 2, 2021

I have yet to see an expression of fear or edginess on the part of any of the recipients of these bombs, or their surrogates. Democrats are concerned about civilization, the future, our children, our planet, education, the environment. Attacks on these key elements of society cause concern, and Democrats fight those attacks. Democratic values don’t include being afraid. Nobody is afraid.

To be clear, over the last three years, Donald Trump has publicly compiled an enemies list, that includes President Obama, Secretary Clinton, Vice President Obama, George Soros, Maxine Waters, Director Brennan, AG Holden, and several others. This enemies list has been converted into a hit list, and a fake bomber, or an utterly incompetent bomber (not sure which is better), has taken on the obvious task of attempting to terrorize those individuals. For now, I’ll assume that the lack of a bomb in Elizabeth Warren’s mailbox is the slowness of the postal system around Boston this time of year.

There is an attack going on, but not one that will do anything but elevate paragraphs about Trump’s hatred and his enemies list to an earlier position in the eventual Wikipedia page on his regime.

Muslims must take the blame for all things done by anyone linked to an extreme Islamic group or ideology. Christians have nothing to do with anything, they were just standing there minding their own beeswax.

The video below was fixed by Media Matters for America thusly:

In a notably hypocritical segment on Fox & Friends, the hosts and their guest, David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, attacked media outlets that called on Christian leaders to denounce white supremacy and the recent violence in Charlottesville, VA. Fox & Friends highlighted articles that noted that many white evangelical leaders have been silent since white supremacists in Charlottesville attacked counter-protesters on August 12 and that historically many Christians and Christian organizations have enabled systemic racism, from slavery to Jim Crow and into the current era. Co-host Pete Hegseth asked why the articles were “trying to make that link” and “rush[ing] to say” that “pastors or churches … are to blame.” Fellow co-host Abby Huntsman said that “people are pointing fingers” and “you have some journalists that are blaming white Christians.” And Brody claimed that “the fix is in, if you will, against evangelical Christians, white evangelical Christians in this country.”

From WCCO:

An Islamic State-run news agency claims the man who stabbed and wounded eight people at a mall in Minnesota before being shot dead by an off-duty police officer was a “soldier of the Islamic State.”

Original Post:
We know nearly nothing about the Saint Cloud attack, but I’m going to offer some preliminary context-related thoughts anyway. Not conclusions or guesses, just context. (See below for some basic info on the attack.)

One thing you need to know is that Minnesota is a state with the least racist and most socially and culturally enlightened people in it. And, some of the most racist and anti-civilization people in it. Saint Cloud is, essentially, the capital of the latter subculture, a very racist place. This is Michele Bachmann territory.

This is one reason to be really careful about drawing conclusions about what happened there. When I hear “Saint Cloud,” “Stabbing Attack,” “Asked if Muslim,” and “Said Allah” all in the same report, my best guess is that a local Islamophobe tried to kill or injure recently immigrated Somalis (of which there are some) in Saint Cloud.

Gun nuts will point out that this is a case of a “good guy with a gun” doing some good. It is. But, the “good guy with a gun” was a cop. So, really, this is a cop stopping an attack. Meanwhile, apparently, the attacker did not do a lot of damage to others, because, it seems, he wasn’t using a gun. He was using a knife. So, no, “you could do the same thing (as some guy with a gun) with a knife or a piece of string therefore GUN FREEDOM!!!1!!” is not an argument.

If this does turn out to be an attack BY a Muslim on others in Saint Cloud, I suspect there will be white rage turned into violence soon in that community and nearby places such as Little Falls and Big Lake.

Report from the New York Times:

ST. CLOUD, Minn. — Eight people were injured during a stabbing attack at a Minnesota shopping mall that ended with the suspected attacker — who was dressed in a private security uniform and made references to Allah — shot dead by an off-duty police officer, authorities said.

…eight people were taken to St. Cloud Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries following the attack first reported about 8:15 p.m. Saturday at the Crossroads Center. One person was admitted. …

… an off-duty police officer… shot and killed the unidentified suspect, who was armed with a knife and wearing a private security firm uniform …

Local police had three previous encounters with the suspect, most for minor traffic violations…

We have a problem with the wholesale removal of petroleum from the Bakken oil fields, and the shipping of that relatively dangerous liquid mainly to the east coast on trains, with hundreds of tanker cars rolling down a small selection of tracks every day. I see them all the time as they go through my neighborhood. These trains derail now and then, and sometimes those derailments are pretty messy, life threatening, and even fatal.

There has been some effort in Minnesota to get the train companies to upgrade their disaster plans, which is important because about 300,000 Minnesotans live in the larger (one half mile) disaster zone that flanks these track. A smaller number, but not insignificant, live int he blast zone, the place where if a couple of train cars actually exploded you would be within the blast area. For the last couple of years, my son was at a daycare right in that blast zone. I quickly add that the chance of being blasted by an oil train is very small, because the tracks are in total thousands of miles long, derailments are rare(ish), and the affected areas can be measured in city blocks. So a blast from a Bakken oil train may be thought of as roughly like a large air liner crash, or may be two or three times larger than that, in terms of damage on the ground.

But yes, the trains derail at a seemingly large rate.

Now, here is where the terrorists come in. And by terrorists I specifically mean Osama bin (no relation) Laden, or his ghost, and that gang of crazies that took down the world trade center in New York. When that happened, we became afraid of terrorism, and everyone who could use that fear for personal gain has since exploited it. I’m pretty sure that the rise of the police state in America has been because of, facilitated by, and hastened due to this event. For years the American people let the security forces and related government agencies do pretty much whatever they wanted. The Patriot Act, you may or may not know, is a version of a law that conservatives have been pushing in the US for decades, a draconian law that gives great power to investigative and police agencies. That law never got very far in Congress until 9/11. Then, thanks to Osama bin Laden, it seemed like everyone wanted it. Only now, years later, are we seriously considering rolling it back (and to some extent acting on that consideration).

So now, the railroads have been forced to come up with a disaster plan related to the oil shipments. And they did. But for the most part they won’t let anyone see it. Why? Because, according to one railroad official, “… to put it out in the public domain is like giving terrorists a road map on how to do something bad.”

What does he mean exactly? As far as I can tell, the disaster plan pinpoints specific scenarios that would be especially bad. These scenarios, if they fell into the hands of terrorists, would allow said terrorists to terrorize more effectively.

I’m sure this is true. But I’m also sure this is not a reason to keep the plans secret. There are three reasons, in my view, that the plans should be totally available for public review.

1) If you want to know what the worst case scenarios for a rail tanker disaster are, don’t read this report. It is easier to get out a map, maybe use some GIS software if you have it, and correlate localities where the train tracks cross over bridges, cross major water sources, and go through dense population areas. A high bridge through an urban area over an important river, for instance. This is not hard. Indeed, I call on all social studies teachers with an attitude (and most of the good ones have an attitude) to make this a regular project in one of your classes. Have the students try to think like terrorists and identify the best way to terrorize using oil trains. The reason to do this is to point out how dumb the railroads are being.

2) Secret plans are plans that can be exploited or misused by those who make them. We will see security measures taken that, for example, limit public access to information unrelated to oil trains, with the terroristic threat used as an excuse. I’m sure this has already happened. It will continue to happen. It is how the police state works.

3) The plans can be better. How do I know this? Because all plans can be better. That’s how plans work. How can you make the plans better? Scrutiny. How do you get scrutiny? Don’t make the plans secret.

MPR news has a pretty good writeup on this situation here. MPR is fairly annoyed at the secrecy, as they should be, but frankly I’d like to seem this and other news agencies, as well as the state legislators involved, and everyone else, more fired up. We should all be working harder against the police state.

I want to end with this: I like trains, and you should too. Trains are among the most efficient ways to move stuff across the landscape. Those of us concerned with things like climate change should be all for trains. Ultimately, I think we can increase the use of trains to move goods and people, and at the same time take the trains off fossil carbon. They are already mostly electric, using liquid fuel to run generators. That liquid fuel could be made, largely, from renewable biodiesel and a bit of grown biodiesel, and more of the trains can probably go all electric. But this secrecy thing is not OK.

Muslim people in the Middle East are getting fed up with Islamic extremism. This is indicated by a new poll from the Pew Research Center. Nigerians, regardless of religion, dislike Boko Haram. Ninety-two percent of Lebanese are concerned about extremism in their country (that’s the highest number in the poll) up from 81 percent last year.

Majorities in most of the nations polled are concerned about extremism. And in most Middle Eastern countries, concern about extremism has increased in the past year.

In Lebanon, which shares a long border with conflict-ridden Syria, 92% of the public is worried about Islamic extremism, up 11 points from the already high figure of 81% in 2013. Lebanese Christians (95%), Shia Muslims (95%) and Sunni Muslims (86%) all share high levels of concern.
…

In the Palestinian territories, 65% worry about extremism, with much greater concern in the Gaza Strip (79%) than in the West Bank (57%).

You can see more of this poll here.

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h2>America says “Sara Palin should STFU” …

… more or less.

An NBC News/ Wall Streeet Journal/Annenberg poll indicates that a large number of Republicans and a very large number of Democrats, adding up to a majority of americans, are tired of Sarah Palin and wish she would stop.

Fifty-one percent of voters say they’ve heard enough from former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson; 45 percent say they’ve heard enough from former Vice President Dick Cheney; 43 percent say they’ve heard enough from former House Speaker (and presidential candidate) Newt Gingrich; 40 percent say they’ve heard enough from former Vice President Al Gore; and 32 percent say they’ve heard enough from former President Bill Clinton.

The same poll also finds 36 percent of voters saying the U.S. economy has improved and President Obama deserves credit for it, 16 percent saying the economy has improved but he doesn’t deserve credit and 47 percent saying the economy hasn’t improved during his presidency.

Was it just some kid who thought this would be an outrageoius thing to do?

The bomber used pressure cookers, two of them. Shrapnel was encased in the pressure cookers, I assume using some sort of packing material. Commonly available chemicals were used to make the low grade explosive. The police have hinted (this could be wrong) that they know something of the detonation device. The venue was full of people and many of them possessed cameras and thousands of photographs were taken. There are security cameras. This act was either done by someone who has come and gone and will never be found, or by someone who will be run to ground by the largest law enforcement agency in the world after figuring out the make and model of pressure cooker and where they have been sold, the kind of play-dough used to secure the bb’s and ball bearings, the isotopic signature of the shrapnel and the explosive materials, and the sources of any electronics used in the devices. They will reconstruct the bomber’s shopping list and then investigate every place that list could have been fulfilled. If the bomber is not already gone, after scanning photographs and videos not just of the scene but of every Walmart and Target store that sells pressure cookers and pay-dough and common household items, they will identify the bomber and run him to ground. And when I say “bomber” I mean “bomber or bombers and their associates.”

The horror of this event is shaped like an onion. At the center are the dead, then the maimed, then the walking wounded, then those shocked by the explosion, then those who saw it, or heard it, then the 9000 runners who were not done with the race and were turned back blocks away, and the countless friends and family members at the finish who must have lived anguished hours as they sought out their loved ones with cell phone service overloaded and any plans to use the already confused and chaotic Boston infrastructure to meet up after the race thwarted by the city center closing down, then the people who live in Boston. They, the “Bostonians” (and by that I mean the six million or so who live in the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area including the smallish but dense city itself) were attacked and they can feel that palpably even if they were not near the blast. And, of course, the Americans, and the rest of the world, the outer layers and peel of the onion.

Then there were the people who ran towards the blast, including the first responders. They deserve our accolades but I will not be shy to suggest this: After the attacks on 9/11 2001, first responders and the laws and systems of government they represent were put on too high and too permanent of a pedestal. Osama bin Laden made us fear everything and he made us grant authority too much power. Let’s caution ourselves to not do that this time. We can reward and respect, and meekly thank those who ran towards the blast and those who undeniably saved many lives with their quick action, without losing any more liberty.

Which kind of horror do we prefer this to turn out to be? A kid who thought it would be funny, that’s a horrible thought. A foreign agency, which once discovered could draw us into another endless war with tens of thousands of casualties. That would be horrible. Disaffected Americans full of hate and vitriol, our own people sufficiently deranged by the politics of hate we have allowed to grow, even nurtured, killing innocents instead of just screaming at the children trampling their lawn. That would be its own kind of horror. It would almost be better if we never found out. But of course, we need to find out.

There were people from Newtown Connecticut in the race and watching it, close enough to see the blasts. Many of the racers in this phase of the marathon were those running for causes of various kinds, not the lead racers, not the old guy who finishes last every year under police escort because the race is done but at least he finishes. We wonder if the bomber knew that the blasts would go off while people running to raise money to cure cancer or help the homeless or whatever were going by.

Thousands of people ran away from the blast. Some of them were injured. One man who ran away from the blast site was burned, but he was also brown, and from Saudi Arabia. He got his house searched and he got his interrogation. He will be his own kind of reluctant hero. We hope he holds no ill will, and we can guess that he holds less ill will than the average middle class privileged white male would hold under identical circumstances.

President Obama said there are “no Republicans or Democrats” only citizens. That was wishful thinking. We are already seeing the center and right questioning his use of word, or really, his lack of use of the word “terrorist.” But they should hold their tongues, the angry right. Because this could have been one of them. That would be horrible.

The truthers bring their own horrors to the table, claiming that this event was created by the government in order to get something, but knowing more details of what their argument is means sullying one’s ears, polluting one’s brain. We need to learn to turn away from the truthers the moment we see them coming. They are walking, living, breathing low level acts of terrorism of a kind.

So many Bostonians described the blasts as being “like a cannon going off.” If you are not from Boston, that may sound strange. Who has enough experience hearing cannons going off to know what that sounds like? But that’s Boston. Cannons are frequently fired in the First American City. There are a number of them left over from the old days, kept and maintained and used as very loud alarm clocks or fired off at patriotic events. Bostonians do in fact know what a cannon sounds like when it goes off.

Be good to your fellow humans, your fellow Americans, your friends from Boston, your friends who run marathons and your friends who hear cannons. It is only by chance that they were not ripped asunder by the person who did this thing. This sort of thing has not happened often in this country, and having happened this week does not mean that it will happen often. This means we are lucky, we are not Londoners during the Troubles or citizens of Sarajevo during the siege or Rwandans during the slaughters or Israelis or Palestinians at pretty much any time. But it also means that we are not well prepared to react properly, to adjust reasonably, to act in our own best interest. The attacks on September 11th proved that we are vulnerable to two things: Horrific violent attacks and the aftermath we cause for ourselves by bending to our own desire for authoritarianism, which seems to live inside ourselves right next to our desire for liberty and for just being left alone.

But also, go ahead and be angry.

Photo Credit: hahatango via Compfight cc

A passing police officer noticed the young woman alone in her car talking on the cell phone. He pulled into the parking lot and switched on his emergency lights, got out of his police cruiser and approached her. He started asking her questions about what she was doing, who she was talking to, where she came from, where she was going, and he demanded her ID. She was flustered by this and he feigned dissatisfaction with her answers and used this as a reason to ask her to get out of her car. She didn’t have to do so, but she did. He then asked her if he could search her car. She didn’t have to agree, but she did. He found a remnant of a joint and busted her with possession. He then ran her name and found out that there was a warrant for her arrest for violating a protection order against her, which in turn was based on charges that she had committed terroristic acts against her boyfriend’s family.

There are two lessons to be learned here: 1) Don’t pull over to the side of the road to use your cell phone, it is dangerous; and 2) Don’t allow the slow and steady formation of a Police State following a major terrorist attack on your country.

The Republican National Convention was held four years ago in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The liberal city in a liberal state was run by a liberal mayor who agreed to recommendations to significantly enhance police activities related to the Convention, including the investigation of all suspicious characters for months prior to the event. Dozens of people were arrested in their homes, their possessions confiscated, and more were arrested at the convention, all believed to be part of a plot to disrupt the convention and possibly throw urine on some Republicans. Among those arrested were members of the press who were observing the arrests. Many were released right away with charges dropped, but many others were charged with a variety of very serious crimes under the Patriot Act, and if convicted could have spent a long time, in some cases life, in prison. Those arrested pled innocent and eventually all the charges were dropped. Counter suits against the city and police department were initiated. The suits were all found in favor of the plaintifs (those arrested). It turns out that the entire investigation and these arrests were inappropriate and unbecoming of a Democratic government (small and large “d”) in a democratic nation.

There are two lessons to be learned here: 1) Don’t ever forget that the Police State is already here; and don’t trust an elected official to not be a dick even if they are a “Liberal” because they may be held firmly in the grip of post–911 fear.

Consider the following:

• We now know that the September 11, 2001 attacks could probably have been prevented had the Bush Administration been even remotely competent.
• 2,996 people died in those attacks (including the attackers) and over 6,000 people were injured.
• The US carried out a war in Iraq that was rhetorically justified by the Bush Administration by the attacks (though there was no relationship) which resulted in the death of over 4,000 American troops, hundreds of non-US “coalition” troops, over 16,000 Iraqi troops, over 1,500 “contractors,” and so on, adding up to over 24,000 “good guys” and on the insurgent side, about 35,000 military dead, as well as something over 113,000 civilian dead from violent acts related to the war by some counts (over a half million by other counts) and a very large number of others dead due to disease and other less direct effects of the war.
• The US carried out a war (still ongoing) in Afghanistan that was much more closely related to the 9/11 attacks, which has resulted in a smaller number of military casualties on the “coalition” side currently totaling over 14,000 dead with between 12,000 and 15,000 civilian dead.
• The US has implemented the most draconian and oppressive set of laws as well as expensive and extensive physical plant upgrades in response to the 9/11 attack. (see Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power for a discussion of this and other relevant issues.)
• Meanwhile, a steady effort by US and other intelligence agencies and special forces has resulted in the ongoing attrition of the organization known to have carried out the 9/11 attack, including the capture and killing of all of its leaders active at the time of the attack.

The Israelis used to say “for every Israeli that dies, 10 of our enemies will die” referring generally to Arabs or Palestinians or whatever. Look at the list above. Do the math. Are we fiercer than the Israelis or what?

It has become common practice for people to say “remember 9/11” or “9/11 never forget” but I think it would have been better to have forgotten 9/11 the day after it happened. I did not think that way then, but it is hard to argue otherwise now. Obviously a better choice would have been to respond correctly to the attack instead of the way we did. (Hint: One of the items on the above list is the correct response, though not perfect.)