Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

A Nigerian national allegedly attempted to blow up a Northwest Airlines jet as it descended into Detroit today around noon. The small explosive device burned the suspect’s hands but did no other serious damage, it appears. It’s too early to know exactly what to make of the incident, but a few thoughts to help sort through the frenzy of news that is already whipsawing into circulation.

* Who dunnit? Nigerian suspect, Yemeni device, al-Qaeda connection...?

The bomb, which the New York Times is saying was made partly of liquid, partly of powder, reportedly came from Yemen, and the suspect is said to be claiming an al-Qaeda connection. If true, this is not a shocker. We know that Yemen is a haven for al-Qaeda. In fact, al-Qaeda members have explicitly announced their intention to use Yemen as a regional base. The instability and weak government in Yemen make it very vulnerable to exploitation by extremists. To see footage from a very recent al-Qaeda rally in Yemen, check out this al Jazeera (in English) clip:

* Who’s to Blame? Obama! Yemen! Airport security! Fill in the blank!

Wasting no time, the ranking Republican on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee seized upon the news of the attack to criticize the Obama administration for not taking the Yemen threat more seriously and call for more aggressive action. “People have got to start connecting the dots here and maybe this is the thing that will connect the dots for the Obama administration,” Rep. Pete Hoekstra told the Detroit Free Press.

An odd thing to say on the very same day that Yemeni forces, back by the United States, launched an air strike on suspected al-Qaeda leaders in Yemen. That strike killed some 30 people and was the latest attack in a series. Last week, a battery of strikes killed about 34 people. The attacks were ordered by President Obama himself, ABC News is reporting.

To further complicate the blame game, these kinds of military raids can actually make the al-Qaeda threat worse, at least in the short term, by boosting recruitment and support among locals. No cruise missile goes unpunished, that old American story. From TIME:

But regardless of who did what, a primary target in the attacks — Qasim al-Raymi, the al-Qaeda leader who is believed to be behind a 2007 bombing in central Yemen that killed seven Spanish tourists and two Yemenis — is still at large. And reports of a U.S. role, and mass civilian casualties at the sites of the attacks, have sparked a public outcry and added to anti-American sentiments across the country. ...
Indeed through the backlash that followed, the attacks have started to look like more of a boon than a bust for Yemen’s al-Qaeda revival, as well as for other opponents of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime. Iran — which Yemen accuses of backing the Shi’ite Houthi rebellion in the north — headlined the attacks on its state-sponsored Press TV with: “Obama ordered deadly blitz on Yemen.”

For now, most of the televised speculation will probably focus on airport security: How could a passenger carry incendiary materials from Nigeria through a connection in Amsterdam? And that’s worth exploring. But if it’s true that the suspect mixed the materials on the plane and injected the liquid with a syringe into powder, which was strapped on his leg, as the New York Times is reporting.... AND none of this worked...well, it’s probably worth focusing most of our energy on understanding U.S. policy and intelligence in Yemen and Nigeria.

* Who is Not to Blame?

Once again, we are reminded that are most reliable counter-terrorism assets are...regular people. As on 9/11, the people who took the most courageous and impactful action were fellow passengers--who helped tackle the suspect and put out the fire, according to the eye-witness account of a passenger sitting three rows back. Check out the blow by blow from the Detroit Free Press:

Syed Jafry of Holland, Ohio, who had flown from the United Arab Emirates, said after emerging from the airport that people ran out of their seats to tackle the man. Jafry was sitting in the 16th row—three rows behind the passenger—when he heard “a pop and saw some smoke and fire.” Then, he said, “a young man behind me jumped on him.”...He said the way passengers responded made him proud to be an American....By all accounts, the suspect was immediately tackled by at least one man, and several other passengers ran towards him immediately trying to put the fire out.

None of this will come as any surprise to regular readers of this blog. But it’s worth pointing out since, in all the hearings that Congress will inevitably hold about the Detroit incident, I doubt much time will be spent talking about how the people in charge should trust regular Americans with more information and work much harder to leverage the dedication of regular people with the same conviction the government invests in new (fallible but highly profitable) explosive-detection equipment. 

Thanks to a cocktail of fear, Internet technology and actual complexity, the misinformation spread this year faster than the actual virus. The end of the year (and hopefully the phase of the virus) seems like a good time for a wrap-up of rumors and all-out frauds about H1N1. Here’s a few that seem to still be in circulation:

**PEEL AN ONION!**

One email making the rounds claims that you can ward off the flu by placing onions around the house to absorb the badness. Apparently, this one dates back to the 1500s. People have long believed that peeled onions can rid the air of germs. People have long been wrong.

**GARGLE & SWAB!**

I actually got this one myself from a friend who had gotten it from her mother. It sounds just convincing enough to be believable. Apparently, this list of medical “tips” for avoiding H1N1 has been circulated under a variety of doctor’s names, none of whom appear to have written it. Some of the advice is sound (frequent hand washing). Others are reassuring, but not based in science. For example, the claim that even if H1N1 has infected your throat and nose, you still have 2-3 days to “prevent proliferation” by gargling with warm saltwater… I really wanted to believe that one, because it creates the illusion of control. But in a steel cage match, the influenza virus stomps saltwater. 

**JOIN THE VACCINE REGISTRY!**

The CDC is warning people about phishing scams disguised as H1N1 vaccination efforts. This email scam directs you to register your profile with the CDC. Should you click on the link, you could end up with malicious code invading your computer. (Speaking of viruses, my computer got one this year while I was searching for a place to get the H1N1 vaccine in DC. That is harsh… A virus directed at people trying to avoid a virus. Anyway, I got rid of it without much drama, but it was a good reminder never to click on weird-looking links.)

Please post a comment if you have any others to add!

Another emergency, another news story about ...(dramatic pause)… regular people behaving exactly as they normally do.

In Cape Cod yesterday, an ambulance got stuck in the snow on its way to help a man who had collapsed outside his home. Out of the haze, an untrained force of neighbors appeared. Five neighbors used snow blowers to clear the road ahead while the others dug out the snow around the ambulance with snow shovels. It took two hours, but the elite squad of regular people and emergency medical technicians eventually got the man out, and he’s doing fine.

I like stories like these, but it is always intriguing how they are portrayed as exceptional. We know by now that the people who do most of the rescuing in big emergencies are regular people. God love ‘em.

When I give talks about my book, people often ask me about how they should prepare for a disaster, what they should have in their “kits,” etc. I tell them: Put batteries in your smoke detector. Exercise. Get good insurance. And if your neighbors invite you over, drop the duct tape and go, man, go.

This year, I’m proud to report, we got invited to three neighborhood holiday parties--all on our block, and we went to all of them. Finally some advice I can follow while drinking wine…

Fascinating piece by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker about why Americans are so much more likely to murder each other than people in other comparable developed nations.

As you might imagine, the answer is: no one knows! But a couple of new books are making provocative new arguments based on actual data, not just conjecture. One thing seems clear: the answer is probably not what you think--or at least not that one thing alone. Not just the prevalence of guns, nor just the violence of our popular culture, etc.

The most startling data point in the piece comes early on, when Lepore reviews the murder rates around the world, over time. It may not surprise you to hear that America’s murder rate is twice that of any other rich democracy. But how to explain the fact that it has always been so--if not worse? In fact, America’s homicide rate has been dramatically higher than comparable nations since, well, the beginning of America.

If there is any solace in the numbers, then it is that the citizens of developed nations (even Americans!) are much less murderous than they were hundreds of years ago. Today, the American murder rate is just over five victims per hundred thousand people per year. (In Europe, the rate has been below two for much of the past century.) But in medieval times, the European rate was closer to 35. It dropped to five by 1700.

Then again, the murder rate has been dramatically lowered in recent decades by the progress of emergency medicine. It’s not simply that people are getting more peaceful, in other words; it’s that a violent assault (like a car accident) is far less likely to end in death. Good news, but not especially heartening.

U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling is right to impose a 50% tax on banker bonuses, as announced earlier today. I know, I know: It could lead to an exodus of “talent,” as everyone in the financial “talent” industry likes to tell us. (Although that is less likely if more countries sign up for such a tax, reducing the number of alternative options for banks in search of relocation.) And I know that clever banks will find a way to slither out of some of the taxes. I don’t care. Fairness matters. Even if we can’t get fairness, it’s important to make every effort. That’s how the human brain works, something the Obama administration doesn’t seem to understand.

The best explanation I have heard about the brain’s need for punishment came from social psychologist Jennifer Lerner, the head of Harvard University’s Decision Science Laboratory. We spoke last year for a story I was working on. The economy was imploding, and she predicted, right from the very beginning, that voters would not forgive Obama for the bailout unless and until they perceived a sense of justice:

”People often care more about fairness than they do about financial outcomes. Anger and a desire for fairness and punishment [are] very human phenomena. I’ve yet to see a public leader addressing this desire. And there is, in my view, unlikely to be widespread support for these policies unless the anger and punishment is addressed.”

Since we spoke, the U.S. Congress considered a 90 percent tax on bonuses at companies that got more than $5 billion in aid. The measure died in the Senate after President Obama said the U.S. shouldn’t “govern out of anger” and AIG employees promised to repay their bonuses.

What happened instead? Well, Obama appointed Kenneth Feinberg to be the country’s pay czar, a nice idea that hasn’t yet produced any surge in fairness. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase’s investment bank combined will hand out $29.7 billion in 2009 bonuses, up 60 percent from last year, according to Bloomberg, and since they repaid the government aid they received last year, those banks aren’t subject to Feinberg’s review.

So while Obama refuses to govern out of anger, the anger has not gone away. That’s not how anger works. A recent Washington Post poll suggests that, in the void, anger has found a new target--in Obama:

“Republicans and GOP-leaning independents are overwhelmingly negative about Obama and the Democratic Party more broadly, with nearly all dissatisfied with the administration’s policies and almost half saying they are “angry” about them. About three-quarters have a more basic complaint, saying Obama does not stand for “traditional American values.” More than eight in 10 say there is no chance they would support his reelection.”

Cut back to Prof. Lerner, who saw all this coming a year ago:

“The anger is not likely to go away without some feeling of it being resolved. The angrier people get, the more they will continue to blame. The problem is unlikely to die out on its own....Most policies in the United States are informed by an economic analysis that assumes people behave in order to maximize their monetary outcomes. That assumption is being increasingly eroded from this new field of decision finance....There is no council of psychological advisers in Washington, just a council of economic advisers.”

Granted, angry Republicans are unlikely to be overjoyed by a new tax on rich people. But I think it could be one (of several) steps that would ameliorate the ambient anger with an injection of fairness. There is a sense among many Americans that Washington is allowing its own institutions and certain industries to take risks and spend money without consequences or limit. And there is some truth to it. I say, write a smart tax to hold the bankers accountable and give our brains a sense of fairness--in a civilized, reasoned fashion. (Also, we should totally start up a Council of Psychological Advisers!)