Naviblogger says... Collective yawn on New York Times article

* So what? That's what I want to know the answer to. So what if a couple of British guys kept some fertiliser in their shed, kept aluminium powder in another shed, were familiar with remote-controlled devices in another case (amateur radio fans anybody?), or kept a pack of beans in his cupboard. That kind of lineup rings true to a lot of British guys, and not only the Muslim ones... Bad Muslim boy, no beans for you.

I suggest a simple way out of homemade terrorism: outlaw fertiliser and beans altogether. Then at least you know that you've got illegal activity if these guys have some stashed away, as opposed to arbitrary rulings about, quote the New York Times "they are charged with involvement in a criminal conspiracy to make explosives to commit murder, allegations that they all deny. Their target, the authorities say, was unclear - a nightclub, perhaps, or a shopping mall, public utilities, a British airliner or even the House of Commons."

Or maybe you have to look at the problem in the eye and see that there is no problem: a lot of British people are just fed up with the way the government is treating people around the world. Simple as that. Was Guy Fawkes a Muslim? Sure would be more expedient if he was. Were the 1960s riots Koran-inspired? What a shame they weren't. No clear scapegoat, damn, gotta make up something else instead.

But how about the real explanation: that these may be REAL Brits, with REAL concerns, and the only ones that are prepared to do anything about it any time soon? Maybe these guys did absolutely nothing, and innocent until proven guilty is certainly the little I retained of the time I grew up in England. You see, you lose both ways. Either these guys had nothing to do with this, whereby you have an institutionalised racism and religionism that can't be swept under the carpet like another Stephen Lawrence inquiry. Or these guys had something to do with it, and you have some seriously disaffected young Brits, who feel they have to do their part to redress the tail wagging the dog of British Politics.

Remember that the only thing that keeps Britain up in the moral stakes is its domestic rule of law and the illusion that it ruled over its ex-empire magnanimously (except for a few institutionalised bad apples). If you lose both of those, you might as well hand in your security council veto and any other democratic credentials: your power's not worth the paper it's written on.