Predicting the behavior of the Lone Wolf

The New Neo Posted on by

The always-admirable Richard Fernandez has written this about the Lone Wolf terrorist:

It is a mistake to dismiss the Lone Wolves as “cowardly and depraved”. On the contrary, their tactics require a willingness to die and the intelligent use of abundant dual-use materials that is rarely if ever equaled by the political leadership of the West…

…attack [Lone Wolves] do, surprisingly yet unsurprisingly. It is Western leadership that is more deserving of criticism for turning in such a poor defensive performance despite their vast resource superiority. Obsessed with looking good, timid to the point of inactivity, determined at all costs to proclaim their own virtue, the Western elites have proved singularly incapable of combating their vastly weaker foes. The ritualistic candle-lighting, trite speeches, frightened processions and self-congratulation of the political class are completely ineffective against the laser-like menace of their foes. They haven’t noticed but the voting audience is starting to.

I agree with all of that. But in addition I would add that the West has a huge problem that’s inherent in our entire system of law and punishment. Western law is designed to balance the rights of the community—including its right to protect itself—with the rights of the individual, and we have made a conscious effort that if we must err (and being humans, we are going to err) we’d rather it be on the side of protecting the individual against government tyranny.

The prospect of predicting who will be a Lone Wolf terrorist and stopping that person in time is one that falls into that dilemma. Many Lone Wolves are citizens, born in the West, and even those who are not have certain rights if they are legal immigrants (fewer if they are illegal immigrants, but we have seen that most of these people don’t fall into that category).

Another dilemma the West faces has to do with at what point we decide an act is criminal. Ordinarily, we don’t prosecute thought-crime, and if we were to decide to do so we would have fallen pretty far down the slippery slope. Until they commit a crime, what have Lone Wolves done? Expressed a jihadi thought on Facebook, perhaps? Is that—or should that be—a crime? That’s why some jihadis are caught by using agents posing as jihadis, to be witness to the plotting of the actual crime. But Lone Wolves ordinarily have no confederates and need no confederates, so agents are less likely to be able to trap them.

And then there’s the problem of numbers. At this point, there are so many possible Lone Wolves in each Western country that monitoring them would almost certainly overwhelm the systems. How to distinguish the serious ones from the mere talkers is the question. Recent travel to a country such as Syria would be a huge clue. But you can’t lock someone up for that, you can only monitor that person more closely.

In the case of a Lone Wolf, even monitoring their communications after getting permission to do so from the proper authorities would not necessarily reveal the plotting of a crime, because Lone Wolves don’t have to coordinate with accomplices. Steal a truck, drive down a street and veer off into pedestrians, and you’ve done the deed. It’s a rather brilliant parsimony of terrorist creativity, simple and effective and capable of being executed by almost anyone should they care to do so.

Of course, one might say that so many immigrants from countries known for jihadi terrorist behavior shouldn’t have been let into the West in the first place. That is where the governments of Europe have been very slow on the uptake. But those decisions are inherently difficult, too; who is okay and who is not, and from where (as Trump found out recently with his EO and its courtroom fate so far). And many of the people involved (the parents or grandparents of today’s Lone Wolves, for example) emigrated to the West long ago. Their children and/or grandchildren are native-born citizens, or at least legal residents (European countries differ on that score).

The cat is out of the bag. Pandora’s box has been opened. The horse has left the barn. The die has been cast. Take whatever expression you want, the point is that solutions are far from easy and some of the more effective-seeming ones would compromise our entire legal system and our liberties. And even then there would be no guarantee that Lone Wolves would be caught in time.

Michael Totten on Europe: things fall apart

The New Neo Posted on by

This article by Michael Totten is a review of a book by James Kirchick entitled The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. The most important line of the Totten article is “the West is losing the will to defend itself.”

But we already know that.

More about what’s happening in Europe:

“The Visegrad Four regional alliance of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia now shows signs of developing into a populist, neo-authoritarian rump within the EU,” Kirchick writes. Czech President MiloÅ¡ Zeman is the staunchest supporter of Vladimir Putin on the continent, even going so far as to deny, in the style of Baghdad Bob, that Russia invaded Ukraine at all. His campaign, not coincidentally, was funded by the Russian energy company Lukoil.

Now would be the time for Western Europe to straighten its spine. Instead, it’s doing the opposite.

And the situation, as well as the reaction to it, is more potentially problematic and extreme in Europe than here:

Britain, though, has a serious problem of its own apart from its fateful Brexit decision: the country’s political center has all but collapsed…

What’s happening in the United States is just one act in an epic drama unfolding across the entire Western world. That drama could take a much darker turn in Europe, where the far-left and far-right draw upon a relatively recent fascist and communist past that is entirely absent in the United States.

The “migrant” problem is worse in Europe, too:

“What made Merkel’s decision to open Europe’s gates to an untold number of Muslim migrants so problematic,” Kirchick writes, “is that the continent has done such a poor job integrating the Muslims who already live there.” Even the European-born children of immigrants tend to be thought of and treated as guests in Europe rather than permanent residents and citizens…

Europe, like anywhere else in the world, needs a middle path between open borders and Fortress Europe, but the political parties of the mainstream right as well as the left have spent years branding anyone who utters even a meek protest as racist. Voters who are disturbed that a million refugees can arrive at their door all at once because a foreign head of state said it’s okay have only one voting booth option””the far-right.

Yeats said it about a century ago:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Passover: a celebration of freedom

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly edited repeat of a previous post.]

Monday evening was the beginning of the Jewish holiday Passover.

In recent years whenever I’ve attended a Seder, I’ve been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that’s not really primarily religious: freedom. Yes, it’s about a particular historical (or perhaps legendary) event: the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But the Seder ceremony makes clear that, important though that specific event may be, freedom itself is also being celebrated.

Offhand, I can’t think of another religious holiday that takes the trouble to celebrate freedom. Nations certainly do: there’s our own Fourth of July, France’s Bastille Day, and various other independence days around the world. But these are secular holidays rather than religious ones.

For those who’ve never been to a Seder ceremony, I suggest attending one (and these days it’s easier, since they are usually a lot shorter and more varied than in the past). A Seder is an amazing experience, a sort of dramatic acting out complete with symbols and lots of audience participation. Part of its power is that events aren’t placed totally in the past tense and regarded as ancient and distant occurrences; rather, the participants are specifically instructed to act as though it is they themselves who were slaves in Egypt, and they themselves who were given the gift of freedom, saying:

“This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people…”

Passover acknowledges that freedom (and liberty, not exactly the same thing but related) is an exceedingly important human desire and need. That same idea is present in the Declaration of Independence (which, interestingly enough, also cites the Creator):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

It is ironic, of course, that when that Declaration was written, slavery was allowed in the United States. That was rectified, but only after great struggle, which goes to show how wide the gap often is between rhetoric and reality, and how difficult freedom is to achieve. And it comes as no surprise, either, that the Passover story appealed to slaves in America when they heard about it; witness the lyrics of “Let My People Go.”

Yes, the path to freedom is far from easy, and there are always those who would like to take it away. Sometimes an election merely means “one person, one vote, one time,” if human and civil rights are not protected by a constitution that guarantees them, and by a populace dedicated to defending them at almost all costs. Wars of liberation only give an opportunity for liberty, they do not guarantee it, and what we’ve observed in recent years has been the difficult and sometimes failed task of attempting to secure it in a place with no such tradition, and with neighbors dedicated to its obliteration.

We’ve also seen threats to liberty in our own country, despite its long tradition of liberty and the importance Americans used to place on it. I fear those days may be over.

Sometimes those who are against liberty are religious, like the mullahs. Sometimes they are secular, like the Communists. Sometimes they are cynical and power-mad; sometimes they are idealists who don’t realize that human beings were not made to conform to their rigid notions of the perfect world, and that attempts to force them to do so seem to inevitably end in horrific tyranny, and that this is no coincidence.

As one of my favorite authors Kundera wrote, in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”

Note the seamless progression from lyricism to violence: no matter if it begins in idealistic dreams of an idyll, the relinquishment of freedom to further that dream will end with humans being crushed like insects.

History has borne that out, I’m afraid. That’s one of the reasons the people of Eastern Europe have been more inclined to ally themselves recently with the US than those of Western Europe have—the former have only recently come out from under the Soviet yoke of being regarded as those small black and meaningless dots in the huge Communist “idyll.”

Dostoevsky did a great deal of thinking about freedom as well. In his cryptic and mysterious Grand Inquisitor, a lengthy chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, he imagined a Second Coming. But this is a Second Coming in which the Grand Inquisitor rejects what Dostoevsky sees as Jesus’s message of freedom:

Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

Freedom vs. bread is a false dichotomy. Dostoevsky was writing before the Soviets came to power, but now we have learned that lack of freedom, and a “planned” economy, is certainly no guarantee of bread (just ask the Ukrainians).

Is freedom a “basic need,” then? Ask, also, the Vietnamese “boat people.” And then ask them what they think of John Kerry’s assertion, during his 1971 Senate testimony, that they didn’t care what sort of government they had as long as their other “basic needs” were met:

We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart…

So that when we in fact state, let us say, that we will have a ceasefire or have a coalition government, most of the 2 million men you often hear quoted under arms, most of whom are regional popular reconnaissance forces, which is to say militia, and a very poor militia at that, will simply lay down their arms, if they haven’t done so already, and not fight. And I think you will find they will respond to whatever government evolves which answers their needs, and those needs quite simply are to be fed, to bury their dead in plots where their ancestors lived, to be allowed to extend their culture, to try and exist as human beings. And I think that is what will happen…

I think that politically, historically, the one thing that people try to do, that society is structured on as a whole, is an attempt to satisfy their felt needs, and you can satisfy those needs with almost any kind of political structure, giving it one name or the other. In this name it is democratic; in others it is communism; in others it is benevolent dictatorship. As long as those needs are satisfied, that structure will exist.

I beg to differ. I think there’s another very basic need, one that perhaps can only really be appreciated when it is lost: liberty.

Happy Passover!

Questions raised by the United incident

The New Neo Posted on by

The world seems to be abuzz about the passenger-ejection incident on United.

Why did this tap into so much reaction? One reason is that a lot of people are fed up with crowded airplanes, long lines, the TSA (which probably was not a prime mover in this particular event), and what seems like arbitrary behavior by airlines. Whether these incidents are common or not in your experience depends on how often you fly, on what routes, and on what airlines.

My personal opinion is that United handled it stupidly and should have offered more money for the switch, and probably would have gotten some volunteers. But I also think that airlines must reserve the right to remove unruly or uncooperative passengers.

Note that last bit: uncooperative. When you get on an airplane, unfortunately you temporarily surrender some rights. I say “temporarily” because you don’t actually surrender your liberty or your rights: you can always sue the airline later if they’ve mistreated you or treated you unfairly. But in the moment, the need to preserve some sort of order on the plane takes precedent. It’s a question of common sense, too, as in dealing with a police stop.

In other words, if they tell you you have to get off a plane, you better get off the plane and iron it out later. Oh, you can object, and you can say why you need to get to your destination. You can certainly plead your case. But if the answer is “No, you must deplane,” don’t make them drag you off.

Because what else would you recommend they do with a passenger who won’t get off when the airline says he/she must? The airline’s request may have been arbitrary, or even wrong and unjustified, but once the passenger has stood his or her ground in the face of it, that passenger has demonstrated the potential to be a problem once the plane is in the air.

You may not like it. I certainly don’t like it. But I consider that when I’m flying I have temporarily surrendered at least some of my autonomy, and the airline, its employees, and the TSA become the bosses for a while. If they say remove my shoes in line, I do. If they say I have to get off a plane (and fortunately they’ve never said it), I do. If they say I must change seats (also fortunately something I’ve never been asked to do) I’ll do it. I might and probably would protest and explain why it’s a bad idea, but if they insist, I’m going to do it. I’ll try to get them to pay the consequences later.

There’s a limit. I wouldn’t hurt another passenger if they asked. I wouldn’t commit a crime. But any request that’s in their bailiwick is something with which I’ll probably be complying, although not without protest and not without a later attempt to get legal or financial redress.

The bottom line is that airlines must be able to determine who stays on that plane and who leaves. If an airline’s actions in doing so are unfair or unreasonable, iron it out later, if necessary by a lawsuit. The airline should never need to physically hurt someone unless that person is physically resisting to the point of combat. But sometimes people will need to be carried out forcibly, and that is the airline’s decision. Uncooperative passengers are potentially a problem later on, and if the airline doesn’t want to risk that possibility it doesn’t have to. But the airline will bear the consequences for how it treats that person if the decision was a bad one or if it was handled badly—the PR consequences, the economic consequences, and the legal consequences.

A little background—about 30 years ago, my husband was on a plane on which a passenger (who apparently had either been drinking or doing some drugs) became unruly and somewhat aggressive while in flight. My husband was one of two or three passengers who rushed up to subdue the other passenger, holding him down in the aisle for the rest of the flight until after the plane landed. It was pretty harrowing, although we got a few free tickets from the airline afterward. Airlines are trying to prevent that sort of thing from happening, and they are trying to predict who might become unruly. Unless they’re throwing off people quite often (which does not appear to be the case with United), it’s a judgement call that’s sometimes not easy to make. Should they err on the side of caution or not? In the case of the recent United incident, once the man refused, and kept refusing—whether his refusal was reasonable or not, and whether the airline’s request had been reasonable or not—he became a potentially unruly and uncooperative passenger, and the airline had to make a decision about what to do.

My guess is that, once he dug in with his refusal, it seems to have become an issue not just of bumping the guy off the flight, but also of how to deal with a noncompliant passenger. The airline may not have wanted to risk a further incident with him if they let him stay on the plane.

I don’t know the whole story of what actually happened here. But I do know that videos rarely tell the whole story.

And is this history of the passenger relevant? Perhaps not, and certainly not in the legal sense. What’s legally relevant is how each party behaved and why, and what are the rules about airline and passenger behavior in such circumstances. That remains to be determined here. And of course, intentionally roughing up a passenger who was passively resisting and not actively and physically belligerent would almost certainly be grounds for a successful lawsuit. The use of excessive force would not be justified, and that may have occurred in this incident.

The case has become a lightning rod for all the frustration people feel about other incidents they’ve witnessed or experienced in which they felt unjustly or disrespectfully treated while traveling. As for me, I remember when women almost never boarded airplanes in slacks but wore dresses instead, when there were almost always plenty of empty seats, and when everybody was almost unfailingly polite. These days are gone, gone, gone.

Audio books and me

The New Neo Posted on by

In this thread from Saturday, quite a few people rhapsodized on how much they like audio books, and they recommended them to me. I’ve written before about my problems with auditory learning (see this and this), but now I’d like to talk (correction: write) about my problems with recorded books.

Years ago when my arm injuries were at their peak, I couldn’t even hold a book or turn the pages for very long. That was before the days of Kindle, and I experimented with every book-holding gadget that was made at the time. None of them worked for me, because they all involved too much arm labor. At the time, even a few minutes was too much.

But I missed my books terribly. After all, when your activities are as markedly limited as mine were then, books can become more important than ever for the already-bookish. So I went to what you’d think would be the natural alternative, Books on Tape (as it was quaintly called at the time).

It was a total bust for me. Within minutes of beginning to listen, my mind would go on walkabout. Daydreaming, wandering, cogitating, woolgathering—the drift would inevitably happen. Later, I’d find myself coming to without a clue as to where I’d left off.

When you stop reading a book you know you’re doing it, and you can place a bookmark there to note the exact spot to come back to when you resume reading. No such luck in finding where you’re stopped listening to an audio book. I had no idea where I’d stopped concentrating; no idea where I’d begun to drift, and anyway it wouldn’t really help to find the spot because I’ve just do it again in fairly short order, even though I’d resolve not to.

It didn’t seem to matter what the subject was. Fiction or non, biography or novel, all were merely a jumping-off point for me when I listened to them. When I read a book I usually am sharp and focused, as well as quick. But listening seemed to bring out some stubborn resistant part of me, or perhaps it was a real inability to process information that way or at least to attend to it.

That had been a big problem for me in my school days—not a learning problem, because I was an excellent student, and almost all the information could also be accessed in books—but an attention problem. I would sit at my desk, uncomfortable and bored, eyes and mind glazing over at the drone drone drone of most of my teachers. It was particularly acute during reading time, when the teacher would often call on the slowest of readers to read aloud.

I was embarrassed for them as they slowly and stumblingly read the passage in our little readers (in which the stories were already stupifyingly dull). I had sympathy for the slow readers, at least in the abstract. But it set my teeth on edge to have to listen as their humiliation and suffering went on and on and on. Later, in college, I was puzzled by lecture halls. Why should I have to sit there for an hour listening to a lecture when I could have read it in a few minutes if the text had been given me?

There’s a clue there to some of the problem: reading a text aloud takes longer than just reading it to oneself, and I apparently wasn’t very patient with that process. I don’t think that’s the whole explanation (which remains a mystery), but it may be part of it.

I was one of those people who sat at the very back of the room during lectures, swinging my leg restlessly, doodling and smoking.

There were only a few classes in college that I liked. They were almost always small, and involved discussions rather than lectures—such as the one on poetry, where the professor and I would schmooze about Robert Frost while the rest of the class yawned.

So audio books are not a good match for me. The only one I’ve ever listened to successfully was someone who read James Herriot’s short stories with zest, verve, and appropriate accents. Those tales are already remarkably entertaining, though, and they’re not long. The person reading them on that particular recording was able to turn them into amusing little radio plays, and my attention never wavered. But that was a rare phenomenon for me in the world of book listening.

So although I see the point of audio books in terms of practicality and ease, for me it just doesn’t seem to work. It’s an odd quirk of mine, since I have no problem listening to normal speech in the real world. If you talk to me, I’ll listen intently. I might even remember what you said longer than another listener might remember it. I’ll pick up on nuances of expression. I usually can tell a lot about people from their speech and tone, even the way they answer the phone—sad, tired, half-asleep, lying, telling the truth. But lectures and books seem to erect a wall between me and the speaker, the talk turns into a drone, and before I know it my mind is elsewhere.

And then there’s my problem with cartoons…

Mostly quiet on the southern front

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “DNW”]

Trump may have lost his EO battle with the courts for now, and the sanctuary city conflict is probably going to heat up. But he’s been winning a quieter battle (so far) on the southern border, without even needing to build a wall:

Migration experts, Border Patrol agents and advocates offer plenty of reasons for the sharp decline in people crossing over, from President Trump’s aggressive stance on securing the border and media coverage of recent immigration raids to heightened security on Mexico’s southern border. A rise in smuggling fees could also be a factor.

“We don’t really have a normal anymore,” said Castro, who has worked for Customs and Border Protection for nearly 20 years. She insists agents are not doing anything differently; the Trump administration’s executive orders are simply enforcing laws already on the books.

“Are you going to risk a 1,000-mile journey and pay $8,000 to be smuggled if you’re not sure you’ll get to stay?” Castro said, offering a reason she thinks fewer asylum seekers are crossing over. “I wouldn’t.”

Decrease rewarda for a behavior and up the risks, and you’ll get less of the behavior.

United: in a culture dominated by social media…

The New Neo Posted on by

…an airline can’t get off scot-free with this sort of heavy-handed action, which dominated the public chatter today.

United Airlines and many other airlines overbook for perfectly understandable economic reasons. It doesn’t usually cause problems, because they also offer economic incentives—for those passengers who aren’t in such an enormous hurry to get where they’re going—to change their flight. But sometimes it doesn’t work that way, and if an airline is going to drag a passenger off a flight, that airline is going to pay the price in PR, which translates to money in the end.

So the airline should have been smarter, and paid the price instead up-front:

United has confirmed that they overbooked the flight and dragged a passenger off when they didn’t get enough volunteers. United had previously offered money ”” up to $800 ”” for passengers to voluntarily get off the flight. The passengers who needed to be seated were United employees who needed to get to another destination in order to work a flight there, apparently. But when $800 wasn’t enough to get volunteers, they used a computer model to randomly select people for removal. A man seated on his flight with a ticket he paid for was then removed forcibly. Now they’re facing a social media backlash as a result…

United should have simply started offering more money. If $800 wasn’t enough, what about $1,000? If $1,000 wasn’t enough, how about $1,200? They were receiving real-time information about price setting and they weren’t responsive to it. Every passenger has a price point at which he or she is willing to disembark a given plane. For some passengers, they need to get to a funeral and the price will be high. For others, they might not even want to be making the trip and can be bought for much cheaper. United needed to find the passenger with the lowest price point. The way to do that would have been to make incremental offers until they found it. Now they’ll suffer much more through negative public relations and earned bad media. A bit of knowledge of economics might have helped them.

Oh, I think United understands economics well enough (although whoever made this particular decision might not have understood it). After all, economics is what dictates the general policy of overbooking and of compensation for those willing to change. What United doesn’t seem to understand is how much good PR is worth, and the power and ubiquity of social media.

The Rise and Fall

The New Neo Posted on by

Last month I got William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich out of the library.

I had actually read it many moons ago, when I was a teenager. But “read” is a bit of a euphemism. It was so very long—over 1,000 pages—that although I did “read” all those pages, I did so rather quickly, focusing only on the bits that interested me most at the time. I did get an overview, but I was so young that I had no context in which to place that overview.

What I got from the book was more or less “This happened and then this and this and this.” I had so little knowledge or life experience to relate it to that it seemed just a series of inexplicable although terrible events.

It’s seemed to me more recently that I’d be able to bring more to the table if I managed to read it now. But it’s still over a thousand pages long, and there a lot of demands on my time these days. So back it went—mostly unread—to the library when due.

I have a host of books like this, all of which I want to read, and so little time. I was merely middle-aged when I started the blog, but somehow here I am and I’m—well, let’s just call it “older.” Prioritizing my time seems more important now than ever for that reason. But getting and spending we lay waste our powers.

Gotta have some fun, too. Each thing that I do seems important to me as I do it. And I have to eat and shop and cook and clean. I want to see friends, and take in theater or a movie now and then. YouTube is a huge time-sucker, but a lot of what I watch there is cultural, such as looking at dancers or musicians of the past or even the present.

Then there’s paying bills, filing the papers that come with dismaying regularity. Taxes at this time of the year (I’m about 95% finished at the moment). It seems as though getting rid of a lot of old stuff—papers and otherwise—would help, too, but that is incredibly time-consuming in itself. I used to joke to my husband that he’d spent the first half of his life amassing things (especially paper and photos) and might spend the second half getting rid of those things. It’s no joke.

And that first sentence of the paragraph two above this—“gotta have fun, too”—predictably sparked a trip to YouTube. So it shouldn’t be a total waste, I’ll share with you the fruits of that trip:

Suspect in Swedish terrorism attack appears to be another known wolf

The New Neo Posted on by

No surprise here:

The suspect in Stockholm’s deadly beer truck attack is a 39-year-old native of Uzbekistan who had been on authorities’ radar previously, Swedish authorities said Saturday…

There is nothing that tells us that we have the wrong person,” Dan Eliason told a news conference Saturday, but added he did not know whether others were involved in the attack. “We cannot exclude this.”

Eliason also said police found something in the truck that “could be a bomb or an incendiary object, we are still investigating it.”

Prosecutor Hans Ihrman said the suspect has not yet spoken to authorities and could not confirm whether he was a legal resident of Sweden…

[Police] said the suspect had been on their radar before but not recently, and did not explain why authorities apparently had not considered him a serious threat.

I have little doubt that some Swedish people are alarmed enough to think that something needs to change in terms of Swedish policy towards immigrants—or migrants, or whatever word you want to use. But these quotes from the article illustrates what I imagine might be the prevailing attitude of acceptance that this is the price Swedes must pay to consider themselves tolerant:

Steve Eklund, 35, who works in an office nearby, said “maniacs can’t be stopped.”

“It’s very simple. Things like this will always happen in an open society,” Eklund said. “Sweden is not a totalitarian society.” …

“We must get through this. Life must go on,” [Swedish Prime Minister] Lofven said Saturday after again laying flowers near the crash site. “We in Sweden want an open society.”

“Open,” that is, even to people who don’t believe in the principles of Swedish society, including its openness (an openness they nevertheless exploit to get their own feet into the door of that society).

Here’s a fact I had forgotten but which that article reminded me of (the following is from an article written in mid-February of 2017):

During a rally in Florida on Saturday, Mr. Trump said “look what’s happening last night in Sweden” as he alluded to past terror attacks in Europe. It wasn’t clear what he was referring to and there were no high-profile situations reported in Sweden on Friday night.

Two days later, there were some riots in Sweden. Now this—which occurred on a Friday, by the way.

If Trump ever does get impeached, or retires, maybe he can go into the fortune-telling business.