Draw Breath

It's been my feeling for quite a while, but the JFK fuel bomb 'plot' and yesterday's and today's events in London and Glasgow seem to confirm it. We're not facing a dire threat to civilisation. We're not often facing a focused and determined organisation in a struggle against our societies (whatever that might mean). For the most part, we're facing individuals who, just as they didn't realise that liquid explosives will probably just burn your hand, don't know that gas canisters and oil pipelines don't blow up in fires (forgive the tone of that article: it's the chemistry 101 I'm interested in). Even given the horrifying successes of some, for the most part the only product from the amateur bomb-makers has been, with some encouragement from various daft or self-interested rhetoriticans, that they manage to frighten us far more than they deserve to.