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Generational Dynamics World View
*** 4-Jul-16 World View -- Massive bombing attack Baghdad Iraq blamed on bogus bomb detectors

This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
  • Iraq declares 3 days of national mourning after massive Baghdad bombing
  • Iraq orders police to stop using bogus 'bomb detectors'
  • Former ambassador Jim Moriarty describes the dancing people of Bangladesh

****
**** Iraq declares 3 days of national mourning after massive Baghdad bombing
****


[Image: g160703b.jpg]
Aftermath of Sunday's bombing in Baghdad's Karrada district (EPA)

At least 125 people were killed and 200 wounded in two bombing attacks
on Baghdad on Sunday. The first attack occurred when a large
refrigerator truck packed with explosives blew up in a busy
marketplace in the mostly Shia Karrada district of Baghdad, killing
120 people, and partially collapsing four buildings. The second
attack occurred when a roadside bomb blew up hours later in a market
in al-Shaab, another Shia district, killing at least two people. The
so-called Islamic State (IS or ISIS or ISIL or Daesh) claimed credit
for the attacks.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi visited Karrada to view the damage, and
was greeted by angry rock-throwing crowds who blamed government
corruptions and incompetence for the fact that it seems helplessly
unable to prevent ISIS from striking anywhere, anytime, as desired.
Later, al-Abadi announced three days of national mourning.

The bombings came about a week after Iraqi government forces
recaptured the city of Fallujah, an ISIS stronghold near Baghdad. The
Iraqi government had hoped that liberating Fallujah would increase
security in the capital as authorities believed Fallujah was a launch
pad for such attacks. In fact, ISIS has lost about half the territory
it controlled as of about a year ago, but still can use suicide
bombers to strike Baghdad at will. NRT (Iraq) and
BBC
and Rudaw (Iraq-Kurds)

****
**** Iraq orders police to stop using bogus 'bomb detectors'
****


Six years ago, the Iraqi government learned that a manufacturer had
been supplying the country with bogus "bomb detectors." They came to
be used and trusted by soldiers, police, border guards, and hotel
security staff, and were (and are) used at security checkpoints, where
they're supposed to protect the public from suicide bombers by
detecting bombs before they can be exploded.

Some reports indicate that Sunday's bombing at Karrada was made
possible because the bomber wasn't stopped at a security checkpoint
because the bogus detectors didn't set off an alarm.

So Sunday's truck bombing can be blamed on the bomb detectors that
have been known for years to be phony. So it was not until now,
Sunday, that prime minister al-Abadi finally ordered police to stop
using the so-called bomb detectors, which are little more than empty
boxes containing electronics that do nothing.

The bomb detectors were a scam. A British businessman named
James McCormick would buy novelty "golf ball detectors" for $20
each, changed the label, and sold them to the Iraq government
as bomb detectors for $5,000 each. McCormick is thought to have
made $75 million from the scam. He is currently serving
a ten-year sentence in jail, after being convicted in 2013.

So why the hell are the Iraqi police still using them years after they
were known to be pieces of junk? This is one of these stories that
drive me completely crazy, but are so typical of what goes on today
Why did it take a massive truck bombing for al-Abadi to order the
change?

I've seen this kind of credulity and duplicity repeatedly in the
computer industry in the last 25 years. It's perfectly obvious that a
software development project is going to fail, and I say so to my
manager and I get fired. You can say that I must have some obsessive
compulsion to keep doing this, and maybe I do, but I'm always right,
and every one of these projects crashed after I left. I wrote about
some of this in my article "Healthcare.gov -- The greatest software development disaster in history".

What's happening is that a software development manager with a project
that's going to crash doesn't care that it's going to crash. He just
wants to keep the project going, get as much money for himself as
possible, and then simply move on to the next project, after
describing his experience on the project in glowing terms on his
resume.

I also see the same kind of thing in financial media, including CNBC
and Bloomberg. Ten years ago, during the housing bubble, I was
telling people not to buy real estate, and all I got was grief. One
friend who bought a house anyway actually blamed me when she lost
everything, as if I'd caused the bubble to crash. The "experts"
didn't even admit that there had been a housing bubble until after it
started crashing.

I've written repeatedly that the stock valuations are astronomically
high, most recently last week ( "25-Jun-16 World View -- Fallout from Brexit: Impact on geopolitics, economics, and stock markets"
). But every day on
CNBC and Bloomberg, you hear experts say that stocks are
"underpriced." I used to post the names of these people and call them
liars and crooks, but nobody cares, so I don't bother anymore. That's
the thing that never ceases to amaze me. People openly and blatantly
provably lie about stock valuations on CNBC and Bloomberg, and
nobody cares. It's incredible.

And why shouldn't they lie? No one is going to call them on it,
except a nobody like me. And when the bubble bursts, they'll just
come back on and say, "Wow! That sure was a 'black swan.' Who could
have seen that coming?" Incredibly, these experts have absolutely
nothing to lose by lying, and everything to gain, and it's just grief
for anyone who calls them on it.

So let's relate this back to the situation in Iraq. The Baghdad
police have been using bogus "bomb detectors" for years, and
everyone in the government knows that they're bogus. Corruption
runs deep in Baghdad, so probably a lot of people in government
and in the police have made a lot of money reselling these bogus
bomb detectors. So what if people's lives are at stake? "If
there's ever a bombing, I'll just say I didn't know." Better
to let hundreds of people be killed than to tell the truth.

That's the world we live in. Everyone in Washington, on Wall Street,
in London, and elsewhere have absolutely nothing to lose and
everything to gain by lying and defrauding people. If there's a
problem, they find a scapegoat like James McCormick.

Bankers created tens of trillions of dollars of phony subprime
mortgage backed securities, with the result that millions of people
lost their homes or went bankrupt. But barely a single person has
gone to jail, even though the people who committed fraud are well
known to the Justice Department. Why should the Obama administration
prosecute anyone? These criminals have donated millions of dollars to
Obama's election campaigns and projects as payoff, so it's better to
be a criminal than to prosecute criminals. Meanwhile, the same
bankers are still in their jobs in banks, still defrauding people,
causing more people to go bankrupt and lose everything.

And that's how the government officials in Baghdad undoubtedly feel.
Al-Abadi has ordered that the police stop using the bogus devices, but
the same Iraqi officials are all in the same jobs, finding new forms
of corruption, and not caring in the least how many more people end up
with their guts sprayed around a public market somewhere in Baghdad.
Guardian (London-16-June) and Middle East Eye

****
**** Former ambassador Jim Moriarty describes the dancing people of Bangladesh
****


In the aftermath of the Friday overnight terror attack in Bangladesh's
capital city Dhaka, the BBC interviewed James F. Moriarty, America's
ambassador to Bangladesh, 2008-11. Here's what he said (my
transcription):

[indent]<QUOTE>"You're talking about the eighth most populous country
in the world, you're talking about a country with probably 150
million Muslims, most of them pretty moderate in terms of their
religion, and I think that's why you're seeing such a big emphasis
from the external terrorist groups right now. They're really want
to see countries like Bangladesh or for example Indonesia come
under a lot of stress, and see whether they can turn fairly
moderate countries into bastions of support for extreme Islam. ...

I think in both cases it's going to be fairly tough [for the
terrorists]. Bangladeshis have a fairly strong sense of national
identity. Part of that is Islam, but as I said it's a fairly
moderate form of Islam, and a large part of that is a Bengali
nationalism, not necessarily tied directly into the sense of being
an Islamic nation. It's got traditions, it's got singing,
dancing, it's got things that go back in history before the region
became Muslim."<END QUOTE>
[/indent]

This is about as silly as you can get. Moriarty paints a picture of
Bangladesh as a land of singing, dancing moderate Muslim Bengalis
being invaded by terror groups like ISIS.

As I've written several times, most recently yesterday,
there are two ethnic groups in Bangladesh, the
dominant Bengalis and the subservient Biharis, and outcome of the
bloody civil war of 1971. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of
Biharis living in refugee camps in filthy conditions, with the largest
camp just north of Dhaka. So Friday's attack was from a local group
of activist Biharis, inspired by ISIS. When these people see singing,
dancing Bengalis, the visceral reaction would be to kill them, not
join in the dancing.

At first I thought Moriarty was just another hack who had been given
an ambassadorship in return for a campaign donation, but I looked up
his background and it's quite impressive. It's almost certain that he
knows that his statement is completely ridiculous.

If that's true, then why did he do it? My guess is that it's the same
thing as the stock valuations or the bogus bomb detectors or crashing
software projects. You can't tell the truth because all you get is
grief. But if you lie, then you get plush jobs and invitations to
speak on the BBC.

In fact, just last month, he was appointed as the Bangladesh Country
Director by the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a platform of
28 North American retailers and brands. He will lead strategic
oversight and outreach activities, with key stakeholders in
Bangladesh’s Government, garment industry, and non-governmental and
non-profit organizations. That's his reward for lying. Apparel Resources (23-May)


KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Iraq, Baghdad, Karrada district, Haider al-Abadi,
Islamic State / of Iraq and Syria/Sham/the Levant, IS, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh,
Fallujah, James McCormick,
Bangladesh, James F. Moriarty, Bengalis, Biharis

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Messages In This Thread
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by radind - 05-14-2016, 03:21 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by radind - 05-23-2016, 10:31 PM
4-Jul-16 World View -- Massive bombing attack Baghdad Iraq blamed on bogus bomb detec - by John J. Xenakis - 07-03-2016, 10:21 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by radind - 08-11-2016, 08:59 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by SomeGuy - 01-18-2017, 09:23 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by tg63 - 02-04-2017, 10:08 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Galen - 03-13-2017, 03:33 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by SomeGuy - 03-15-2017, 02:56 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by SomeGuy - 03-15-2017, 03:13 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Galen - 05-30-2017, 01:04 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Galen - 07-08-2017, 01:34 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by tg63 - 08-09-2017, 11:07 AM
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RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Galen - 10-25-2017, 03:07 PM
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RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Galen - 12-28-2017, 11:00 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Galen - 12-31-2017, 11:14 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by JDG 66 - 06-22-2018, 02:54 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by JDG 66 - 07-11-2018, 01:42 PM
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RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by JDG 66 - 07-19-2018, 12:43 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by JDG 66 - 07-25-2018, 02:18 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by JDG 66 - 07-11-2018, 01:58 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Galen - 08-18-2018, 03:42 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Galen - 08-19-2018, 04:39 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by tg63 - 09-25-2019, 11:12 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by JDG 66 - 03-09-2020, 02:11 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Camz - 03-10-2020, 10:10 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by tg63 - 03-12-2020, 11:11 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by JDG 66 - 03-16-2020, 03:21 PM
RE: 58 year rule - by Tim Randal Walker - 04-01-2020, 11:17 AM
RE: 58 year rule - by John J. Xenakis - 04-02-2020, 12:25 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Isoko - 05-04-2020, 02:51 PM
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RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by mamabug - 01-12-2021, 02:53 AM
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RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by mamabug - 01-13-2021, 04:16 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by mamabug - 01-15-2021, 03:36 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by galaxy - 08-19-2021, 03:03 AM
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RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by galaxy - 02-27-2022, 06:06 PM
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RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by galaxy - 02-28-2022, 12:26 AM
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