The future of terrorism, according to John Robb, will be the story of individuals acting on their own initiative according to broadly shared narrative. That might include attacking artists in university lecture halls who’ve had the temerity to draw ‘Mohammed’ cartoons, encouraging piracy, sowing mines and IEDs at random, or using cell phone technology to stage flash events. Open Source Warfare is open season on everybody. According to this view the challenge comes from the grassroots. To some extent the challenge of distributed warfare has been accepted, and war in the grassroots it is. One example of a America’s counter is the so-called “pattern of life” of life targeting, which tracks individuals, such that if a person looks persistently guilty, then he is ‘engaged’. The LA Times reports:
The CIA received secret permission to attack a wider range of targets, including suspected militants whose names are not known, as part of a dramatic expansion of its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan’s border region, according to current and former counter-terrorism officials.
AdvertisementThe expanded authority, approved two years ago by the Bush administration and continued by President Obama, permits the agency to rely on what officials describe as “pattern of life” analysis, using evidence collected by surveillance cameras on the unmanned aircraft and from other sources about individuals and locations.
This implicitly requires a system of persistent surveillance which can track Person A through his life; notes whether he attends a Taliban training camp, records his comings and goings, observes how often he comes along on a trip where IEDs are later observed to explode, whose cell phone records suggest bad company, etc. Once that system finds his “pattern of life” sufficiently suggestive, some algorithm, assisted perhaps by some men on the loop, he may decide he needs to be zapped. The LA Times says such people are already being hit, and have been for a long time. Pattern of Life hits have been a big help at keeping down the weeds. As you live, so do you die.
The new rules have transformed the program from a narrow effort aimed at killing top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders into a large-scale campaign of airstrikes in which few militants are off-limits, as long as they are deemed to pose a threat to the U.S., the officials said.
Instead of just a few dozen attacks per year, CIA-operated unmanned aircraft now carry out multiple missile strikes each week against safe houses, training camps and other hiding places used by militants in the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan.
As a matter of policy, CIA officials refuse to comment on the covert drone program. Those who are willing to discuss it on condition of anonymity refuse to describe in detail the standards of evidence they use for drone strikes, saying only that strict procedures are in place to ensure that militants are being targeted. But officials say their surveillance yields so much detail that they can watch for the routine arrival of particular vehicles or the characteristics of individual people.
Smile, you’re on Candid Camera. And then surveillance tracks those vehicles and track the vehicles that associate with those vehicles. And on it goes. The result is a grassroots profile of the terrorist community as complete as database joins can make them. The demand for continuous surveillance is what’s behind a proposal to deploy stratospheric UAVs — blimps which can operate at the edge of space, above winds which can blow them about, and remain on station for months on end, watching, watching and watching. But the watching is not purposeless. Intelligence is the factor which limits how many targets can be engaged. Improve the intelligence and the number of known targets go up. Increase the eyes and you increase the rain of missiles. Certainly a lot more missiles have been fired under the Obama administration than ever before. The rate of fire is now one ever 3.5 days.
Missile attacks have risen steeply since Obama took office. There were an estimated 53 drone strikes in 2009, up from just over 30 in Bush’s last year, according to a website run by the New America Foundation that tracks press reports of attacks in Pakistan. Through early this month, there had been 34 more strikes this year, an average of one every 3 1/2 days, according to the site’s figures
The program has been criticized as a violation of human rights. But one criticism which is rarely heard is whether the program is moving the target list in the wrong direction. It is moving it down the chain. Suppose instead of moving down from the Taliban and al-Qaeda top leadership, it moved up? Suppose Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden were not at the top of the terrorist food chain? Why not hit the guys above them? Hillary Clinton recently hinted that Pakistani officials were more deeply connected to terrorism than they were letting on, and that they may have been sheltering Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban leadership. On a CBS interview the Secretary of State said, “We’ve made it very clear that if — heaven-forbid — an attack like this that we can trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences.” This suggests that the Taliban and al-Qaeda, rather than being the Alpha and Omega of terrorism, are just proxies in a war with bigger fish.
But what would Washington do with a bigger fish if it found it with stratospheric UAVs and super databases? Would the President impose “very severe consequences”? Or on the contrary, would it find a reason to let the monster fish go in the name of maintaining “world peace”. Suppose Hillary actually found a smoking gun linking the leadership of Pakistan to al-Qaeda? Which incentive would prevail? Is saving 500 or 1,000 American lives worth war with Pakistan? There would arguably be a huge incentive to do nothing because of the risks of taking action against Islamabad would be so great. One example of how catching a big fish can cause problems was recently illustrated by a New York Times report that the South Korea found torpedo explosive residue on the sunken hull of its corvette, the Cheonan. It is almost impossible to avoid concluding that North Korea torpedoed a South Korean Naval vessel. Does this mean “very severe consequences”? God a-mighty, no.
A premeditated attack by the navy of one country upon another would normally be an act of war. But in the modern world, business as usual sees war as the ultimate money loser and political risk. So the pressures against war are enormous. South Korea is not prepared to commence hostilities with the North, so there will be no war if Seoul can help it. Similarly, if American aerostats saw Osama Bin Laden receiving money from the President of Pakistan himself there would be a huge incentive to do absolutely nothing.
The only conceivable scenario in which the target list can be moved up instead of down is if Pakistan — or whoever — suddenly did something so awful that even Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama couldn’t overlook it. Like nuking New York. Maybe not even that. If that happened, then maybe, just maybe, the crosshairs on the UAV will be adjusted up the ladder rather than down. The implications of this dynamic is that the world may be tacitly slipping into a new species of Cold War. The War on Terror isn’t being fought to win, it’s being fought to keep the lid on. The conflict will be managed, not resolved. The War will be kept within bounds, at all costs. An explosion in New York will be met by a flurry of missiles fired from robotic aircraft circling over certain countries. Tit for Tat. Corpse for corpse. Missile for car bomb.
But unlike the Cold War, which was waged between two rational superpowers, a limited war between fanatics and rationally timid West is not necessarily stable. The levels of violence instead of stabilizing will tend to increase. They are already trending upward. If the Times Square bombing is any indicator, then the terrorists are ramping up their campaign. And so will the American drones ramp up the response. Smaller missiles, more drones, more surveillance. But there is no natural ceiling to the escalation. That is the specter which must haunt Washington. There’s no reason why, having reached N that you shouldn’t go to N + 1.
But there’s a remedy for strategic dilemmas like that. Don’t face it: kick the can down the road. What is likely to happen is that Washington will expand the targeting list downward until it watching every hut, every Internet cafe, every prepaid cellphone, every madrassa it can. We have Open Source Warfare and Swarming to the limit. But the core targets will may never be taken out. Why? Because that’s too dangerous. Will the target list ever expand it upward? Not unless it is forced to. Going upward is destabilizing because that’s where the elites are.
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“Pattern of Life hits have been a big help at keeping down the weeds. As you live, so do you die.” –Wretchard
It looks like the Russians are doing that with Somali pirates.
http://tinyurl.com/27m9syb
As for North Korea, I don’t believe they ever stop the war. The Cheonan was most likely hit by Nork torpedo for a variety of testing purposes.
I have a feeling that the Big Zero will harshly criticize the South Korean government for even thinking about taking action (protecting their own ships).
“But if you found the fish with the stratospheric UAVs and super databases, what would you do with it?”
Before we did anything we would need a bigger boat.
And unfortunately the bigger boat would be a tacit admission that You Have A Problem. We use unmanned little piston engined airplanes because they are not obvious – to either Them or US. It just cracks me up when I see a headline “Suspected US Missile Strike Kills…” Sounds like a UFO report. Maybe we will see a History Channel special one day on “Do Yeti or UFOs Cause The Mysterious Explosions in Pakistan?”
The day after 9/11/01 I said that our biggest problem in fighting the war would not be the enemy, who were pushovers, but the Reasonable Men on our side who would say “Be reasonable; you can’t go around invading sovereign nations just because they are a threat to you. Be reasonable; you can’t kill or capture people you suspect of being members of a secret organization.”
The only effective response to the terrorist threat would make the Cold War look like a garden party. And we’re too reasonable for that.
Is the “professional” interpretation of Sec. Clinton’s recent statement that it is a warning to Pakistan? That is, either they deliver Bin Laden, or we will begin targeting the Pakistani officials helping him?
Even if we do eliminate Bin Laden or Mullah Omar, it will in no way end the escalating war with radical Islam. Bin Laden is a symptom of that radicalism, not the cause. We do not have the political will to strike the cause itself, which would be too expensive and messy. Instead, as Wretchard says, we will manage the crisis, until the Islamofascists do detonate a nuke in NYC. At that point, the combined toll of death and destruction from that attack, and our even more devastating response, will prove that it would have been far better to have acted now, than wait.
All that surveillence tech is also very active in the US. Big Brother is cataloging your ‘pattern of life’ with every cell phone, email, keyboard, credit transaction, ticket, security camera, and UAV. And the Pres is joking about dropping missiles from Predator drones onto you, based on that ‘no fly list – pattern of life’ info.
Liberty? Or living in a penal colony under constant surveillance 24/7/365?
America and the West are strong when men are free.
Some damn fools choose some small measure of temporary safety in exchange for our very way of life, the founding principles of our civilization.
“If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were ever our countrymen.”
— Samuel Adams
IF YOU DON’T HAVE A LIFE, CAN THERE BE A PATTERN?
I fear not the drones
For my pattern of life
Is completely flatlined
You can just ask my wife
I sit at my desk
Little mouse in my hand
Staring at a flat screen
While the hour glass sand
Flows so swiftly it seems
That the days turn to night
With a wild rushing wind
Strong enough to give fright
No I fear not the drone
Nor the missiles it brings
For the CIA strikes
Only poor men, not kings
I sleep well at night
I know I’m not alone
For the UAVs know
That I too am a drone
If it’s come to truly open-source warfare, what’s to keep harassed citizens in the West from playing the game? I would think that there’s enough open-source intelligence to identify plenty of bad guys with “patterns of life” who determined men could reach out and touch right here in River City. Try putting a lid on that.
Somehow, somewhere between You’re either with us or against us ™ and Shock and Awe ™ , our response to the incineration / disseveration of 3,000 innocents morphed from Righteous War into Winning their Hearts and Minds ™ , tender hand holdings, and and deep abasements and bows.
Since 9/11, the Saudis and other Gulf Arab puppeteers of 9/11 have continued to export their main asset, contagious human filth, to the corners of the globe. They have done this unmolested and unimpeded in every way. They continue to build ever grander and more numerous mosques. The number of visas supplied to Muslims have increased, not decreased. Muslims continue to raise their murdering storm troopers and glittering towers for the glory of Islam. They grab more trillions, they amass heaps of diamonds, piles of gold, mountains of platinum in their vaults. And all the glitter cannot conceal the fact that Darkness has descended and threatens to devour Earth.
Wretchard, this post reminds me of the Three Conjectures post (http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2003/09/three-conjectures-pew-poll-finds-40-of.html). Would it be useful to update the framework of the Three Conjectures to include “the story of individuals acting on their own initiative according to broadly shared narrative”?
Anyone with a 4WD “pattern of life” instead of a camel or donkey is a suspect in those “lawless border lands”. A gathering of two or more 4WD in one place may be a training camp or a steering committee. Or the UN – aka Cows Drinking Their Own Milk!
There is some logic in chopping at the roots of the tree. What makes the Big Man so big? It is all the little men below him. Mao said the revolutionaries swim among the people like fish in the sea. If we drain the sea, or induce all the remoras to turn into piranhas then the big shark goes away. More realistically we can hope to get the little fish to avoid the big fish. My hope is for a cinematic image of Chavez types in funny hats wandering around an empty palace and looking for a replacement toilet paper roll because no one wants to go near them.
In the modern world when we go to war, especially when this is a protracted struggle, it is not personal dispute over an asset like a legal case is or most traditional conflicts were. It is a clash between cultures and communities who produce leaders. People who try to reduce the Arab Israeli conflict to the level of a tort claim over territory, as if it were some 18th century dispute between two monarchs over who owned a rock, fundamentally do not get the nature of what is at stake.
The leaders themselves in wars should be attacked for only two reasons;
1. to lance a boil and effect regime change in rare instances,
2. to humiliate and discredit the ideology that brought that leader power.
The best thing we did in Iraq was drag Saddam out of his spider hole. The second best thing was to hunt down the second level with the deck of cards. We have now supported the Iraqi government in ending deBaathification. It makes sense at some point to allow former supporters of the regime to rejoin public life. Not every German who had joined the NSDAP was a sadistic agent of the SS or Gestapo. What we must insist on is the permanent repudiation of the totalitarian ideologies that rallied the foot soldiers to support the tyrants. In AfPak we should hunt down the Taliban and enablers among the Pakistani ISI until they abandon the doctrine of permanent war with the dar al Harb. If North Korean officers just died every time they appeared in public, airborne lasers and snipers with a three mile range can do amazing things, and their ships just sank without any public comment Krazy Kim would end up trapped alone in corner when his starving people come for him. I envision that ending like a George Romero movie. If the bankers and brokers they used in Milan or Geneva or London found their cell phones explosively malfunctioning then no one would help the Norks ship weapons to Hamas, as they were caught attempting to do today.
Actions have consequences. That is what an action, as opposed to a purely internalized thought, is. At every level in life there has been a movement towards off loading responsibility.
The Palestinians face no consequences for their 45 year bloody campaign of terror, as if they were captives not of the Israelis but of the terrorists of Hamas that they voted for. In America’s cities people complain about crime and filth while cursing the police and business and tossing trash around. The two extremes are linked.
Under Bush there was at least an ideological construct supporting the tactical responses as being linked to efforts to change the beliefs that produced radicalism. That has all been abandoned.
Ever since 9/11 I have thought that tracing the money trail back to the Gulf would be productive. So to follow the thought and premise of the article, what happens when we find at the end of the petro dollar trail the 13 th. most important sheik in Saudi or the brother of the Kuwaite ruler or pick somebody with petro connections. Do we send in a hit team, prederatorize him, shoot down his personel jet, OR just ring our hands and tell him we know and to be nice. My vote is he dies along with every other jhihadi anywhere in the world. I am an acolyte of Bomber LeMay. They all need to die.
Pak is just the festering sore, the source of the intellictual infection is Wahabi Saudi. The war needs to include them but that won’t happen until all our power comes from unreliable low production windmills and we all ride bicycles to work.
Faster please!
#7 Morton Doodslag # Quite. And one day, perhaps soon, even the dimmest dhimmis among us will notice, and not too long after a miniature sun will bloom for a short while in NYC, or Paris, or DC, or Seattle, or San Diego, or London…
And when that happens the Darkness will be erased, forever and ever amen, from the Earth by the Light. The Light of dying atoms and the Light of ten thousand suns, the Light that kills and destroys and leaves shadows in the stones. To borrow a quote, World War II once a second for the length of a lazy afternoon.
And the Enemy will be no more, and the West will never again be the same.
“If it’s come to truly open-source warfare, what’s to keep harassed citizens in the West from playing the game? I would think that there’s enough open-source intelligence to identify plenty of bad guys with “patterns of life” who determined men could reach out and touch right here in River City. Try putting a lid on that.”
EXACTLY my thought.
I don’t exactly relish the idea because of the potential for ensuing chaos, but how long does the warfare remain truly asymetric?
The government, any government, may have very good reasons for containing even flagrant assaults, but a given populace may decide they are A) not good enough, B) plausible deniability can work both ways C) payback should be a b****.
Despite the incriminations of the left about the US being a seething cauldron of hatred and bigotry, there has been no backlash against Muslims in general over the continued attacks, failed and successful over the years. Good for us, but I expect as much because I am not a America hating lefty. We don’t look for scapegoats.
However, when car-bombings become less amateurish, when a Beslan like attacks occur here, at what point do the hatred spouting members of the ROP living here discover what real blowback is like?
Can a guy like that moron in NYC supporting the death threats againt Matt Parker and Trey Stone expect forebearance forever when bombs are going off?
I am not saying its a desirable future, but given current trends, and what you lay out above, it seems to be heading that way. Too bad we can’t seem to deal with the situation realistically now.
OT,
Mosque planned for the WTC.
Weary G,
Too bad we can’t seem to deal with the situation realistically now.
Most commenters here a BC have been saying exactly that since 9/11/01. And many of US have been saying that elsewhere since the Iranian Embassy Takeover in 1979, since Act ONE at WTC, since the Cole, since the African Embassy bombings. Islam has done nothing to lessen the need for the US to act realistically.
“Realistically” defines the size of the bullet required to end the terror.
Wretchard: …it find a reason to let the monster fish go in the name of maintaining “world peace”.
Our ruling oligarchs will never get serious about jihadist terrorism. It will be business as usual, something to be “managed” or finessed. It will require the loss of at least three U.S. cities before this will ever change.
Until then, it’s all farce.
Richard:
There’s no reason why, having reached N that you shouldn’t go to N + 1…
And you will thereby have proved, by mathematical induction no less, that you aren’t really committed to winning.
Jamie Irons
“If it’s come to truly open-source warfare, what’s to keep harassed citizens in the West from playing the game? I would think that there’s enough open-source intelligence to identify plenty of bad guys with “patterns of life” who determined men could reach out and touch right here in River City. Try putting a lid on that.”
This made me immediately think about the steady adoption of concealed carry laws across the country.
One wonders to what extent that reflects a – perhaps not very clearly articulated even by those carrying – neural network like conclusion that the environment required increased local / personal self defense capabilities.
One also wonders just how tolerate the liberal elite really is – measured in jihadi car bombs / week in NYC, DC, SanFran, etc. There are probably not going to be many targeted at rural Nebraska.
Geoffgo,
No argument. We’ve been told by our betters that this 40 year old war is not really a war, and if it is, we have to understand where our ‘opponents’ (not enemies) are coming from. You would have thought a pattern would have been seen, and been recognized, even so.
I guess why 9/11 stuck out, and why I am so amazed that its been cauterized so well in the American consciousness, is that both so dramatic and horrific, and so much a direct military attack. What more did one have to see? Amazingly, that was not enough.
Bill Whittle actually has a excellent commentary online, “None So Blind”, where he states what I was already beginning to believe. Not enough of the “wrong” people have been killed, meaning elites, for those same elites to accept the threat.
However, I think that a huge step we could take before it comes to THAT would be to attack and destroy this “root causes” meme. I mean shoot it, burn it, bury it, and pour bleach on the ground.
We are expected to pay homage to this idea that the West owes some debt to Muslims for things in the past, that they are merely acting out of legit grievances, even if they are ‘over-reacting’.
Its historically inaccurate for starters, and it places us on the defensive from the get-go. From citing the aggression of the Crusades while ignoring the militaristic expansion to Islam, to citing “unprovoked” attacks on Muslims while ignoring the Barbary Pirates, we’ve allowed them to seize a high road of their own creation. Or course, the left has been quite complicit in this for their own reasons.
Anyway, whenever someone starts talking about “root causes”, agree with them and say, “Yes, I wish Muslims had not started this war with the US back in the 1700′s.” When they talk about oppression, agree and say, “Yes, it is shameful that Muslims still participate in slavery, and in the subjugation of women and other religions.”
Maybe that’s an important part of the asymetrical war, information wise. Attacking the enemy at their philosophical and ideological roots, knocking them off-balance. It sure seemed to have worked against us.
A distributed response would require Congress to issue something like letters of Marque and Reprisal. While that might be very effective, it would also impact the Nation’s monopoly on violence. It is hard to see any one in the army or Congress giving up this particular privilege.
As regards Korea, the calculus is a bit different. It’s not that the folks in the South couldn’t bear open warfare with the North. Although there some significant factions that oppose any sort of military action against the North, that opposition wouldn’t amount to enough to stop a serious military campaign. The problem with the Koreas is what happens after the South wins? There is a lot of conjecture that the financial consequences of such a reunification would make the German reunification look like a cakewalk. Winning a war against the North could possibly be the worst possible outcome for the South.
The future of terrorism, according to John Robb, will be the story of individuals acting on their own initiative according to broadly shared narrative.
The rational response to that being that the attacked population retaliates on every possible perpetrator of violence against them without regard to the guilt or innocence of the individual. Which in this country would be labeled racism by the elite opinion makers, and thus denied as a means of collective self-defense.
As others have pointed out, we won’t have actually reached “open source warfare” until mosques are aflame from sea to shining sea.
We don’t trace the money trail of jihad because we already know where it leads — straight to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It has been funding Wahhabi mosques and madrassahs all over the world for decades.
The problem in the U.S.A. is that the KSA has bought off the White House, State Department, and CIA. (Well, they didn’t really need to buy off Obama — he sympathized with them already.)
There will be no decisive action from the U.S. against Wahhabi Islam.
A distributed response would require Congress to issue something like letters of Marque and Reprisal.
Hmmm… Isn’t the street organization and election fraud and violent activist behavior of ACORN run on a Letter of Marque principle out of the Democrat party? Plausible deniability and all that.
@11 Docbill:
Take a look at the entry for “Golden Chain” on wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Chain), a list of al-Queda funding sources found in a police raid.
The list includes some apparently prominent men in Saudi Arabia, CEOs of corporations, prominent bankers, etc.
When do we start whacking the people whose financial and governmental support enable the terrorists to exist?
Putting a hellfire in some jihadis back pocket is like trying to empty the ocean with a teacup. It may make somebody feel like they are accomplishing something but the long term affect is exactly zero. There are hundreds of millions of potential jihadis with more being birthed faster than our sissy ROE could ever handle.
The most recent threat assessment does not even use the word Jihad, Muslim, or Islam even one time. No reasonable person can include that the idiots responsible for our engagement of militant Islam have the faintest clue of what they are doing, or why.
I followed up wretchard’s John Robb link to find that is long-term view is consistent with my own – that while the political class is cooperating for their own benefit across national boundaries on economics, trade, banking, and security that the rest of us are fragmenting into smaller groups. Robb calls the best of these “resilient communities” but I prefer “communities of character”.
Maybe 20 years ago I would have included the USA and probably the whole Anglospere as a community of character that would preserve Western civilization no matter what. I do not think that is true any longer, not even with respect to the USA. Our current administration seems more intent on maintaining good personal and business relations with the international political class than it does with advancing the interests of the U. S. citizen.
Israel is a good example of what I mean by a self reliant community of character. Israel communes with the world beyond its border but it does not make itself wholly dependent on that outside world for sustenance or security. Israel is a special case because of what happened during the 20th century but is still a good example none the less.
I do not know exactly how, where or when it will happen but I do see a future of massive population shifts within the United States as people migrate toward centers where the other people already there are going to be “more like them” in measures beyond ethnicity and race. The technology already exists, including micro electricity generating nuclear reactors, to make these centers self reliant.
I think that is a good future in the sense that the best of Western civilization, including its Judeo-Christian tradition, will be preserved and able to flower again when the Age of Idiocy has passed, as surely it will.
I was doing some research at work yesterday and found a very disturbing item that has some bearing on this issue.
Sometime in the 1990’s North Korea acquired a number of Soviet SS-N-6 Sawfly ballistic missiles. These are sub-launched ballistic missiles that use storable liquid propulsion (yes, the Soviets were stupid enough to do that). Supposedly these were not acquired with the assistance of the Russian government, but we don’t really know. The Sawfly is the missile used in the Soviet Yankee class subs, weighs over 40,000 pounds loaded and is over 42 ft long; you don’t sneak one of those out of the country under your coat. Range is up to 1800 miles
And the Norks got more than one Sawfly. They later sold some to the Iranians.
Both of these countries are using the technology acquired to improve their ballistic missile systems.
Now, if the Russians deliberately sold these missiles we have a problem. If they let them slip out with a load of rutabagas we have an even bigger problem. Either way the problem starts in Russia and at best ends up with the Axis of Evil being presented with a list of cities and industrial sites that will disappear unless cough up those SLBMs. Worst case is that some Russian cities get added to that list. But that ain’t happening.
Pendejo grande @22:
“…population retaliates on every possible perpetrator of violence against them without regard to the guilt or innocence of the individual. Which in this country would be labeled racism by the elite opinion makers…”
You said a mouthful there.
A logical follow up question is then:
“Who said the best or most legitimate targets for retaliatory asymmetrical warfare in first world countries was “innocent” Muslim men, women and children who had at most a peripheral, plausibly deniable, possibly unknowing support or funding role in terrorist attacks against us Kafirs?”
Since our government and it’s lap dogs in the media are not going to protect us against Islamic terrorism, and indeed are going to hinder effective counter-measures that would protect us, perhaps we should take care of that problem first.
Since the political elite, their appointees, immediate employees, and their sycophants in the media all seem to enjoy living in the limelight, the targeting will certainly be much easier than trying to root out a well trained terrorist with decent tradecraft, or a conniving wishful terrorist who hasn’t struck yet.
Instead of blindly targeting the relatively innocent via mob violence and arson, if we’re going to take the law into our own hands because those who should enforce it are willfully derelict in their duty, let’s at least punish that dereliction. Pour encourager les autres.
Who knows, after several extravagantly reported “incidents” they may even figure out it’s better to uphold their oaths than to live in perpetual fear of sudden violent death out of the blue like the proletariat they so obviously despise.
There are over 20 Jamaat ul-Fuqra armed training camps in rural America. Their neighbors know who they are. They’re armed, too.
28.
I’ve contemplated that scenario as well.
Wow, Wr., you are truely revealing shards of light in darkening times.
Going upward is destabilizing because that’s where the elites are.
Now apply this concept to the banking and political system. Too big/important to live by their own consequences of choice. Apply it to TARP. Apply it to Federal Reserve using USA wealth, notes backed by the good faith of USA, to loan to foreign bank/countries, then bail them out when their policies go broke. The very thought of some N dollars of actual wealth being reserved into N*20, then optioned in N*20 and or derived into N*1000. All for the sake of making money? Or are the amounts of money so large that its really about making destiny? controlling outcomes? reducing solution space to sets chosen by this extravagent wealth control elite… for we “The People”?
I had always thought that a comprehensive campaign against the training camps in particular was a good idea. That part of the effort should be even bigger, more ruthless, and more devastating. Having raw terrorist recruits taste “combat” and mass martyrdom before they’re even fielded sounds like a capital idea to me.
If I lived in a country where a foreign power was keeping my fellow citizens under surveillance
(and very likely me as well) and, based upon patterns of behavior determined to be sufficiently
threatening by agents of that power, blowing up said fellow citizens (along with “collateral” damage
to anyone unfortunate enough to the immediate vicinity) I would take up arms against the power. It really wouldn’t make much
difference to me what the competing ideologies were.
When somebody from a US administration makes this speech at a UN sponsored inter-religious dialogue I will begin to believe that they actually give a hoot about the body count in Times Square and not just the Upper East Side.
Reminds me of Patton’s advice to his troops:
“The point of war is NOT to die for your country. The point is for the other poor bastard to die for HIS country.”
Going down the chain makes being a foot soldier a frustrating and pointless act. The saddest end for a soldier is to die before reaching the battlefield, without displaying courage – a pointless death.
Of course, the classic wisdom is that that middle management is the backbone of an army – the sargents and NCOs. The equivalent are the trainers and handlers. Their job is to communicate and so have a visible profile.
Start killing the NCOs en mass and one both sends a message and reduces the fighting strength.
We do have vulnerablities at the top level. Remember that the Saudis are the underwriters of jihad AND they have a the world’s energy markets by the balls. We must compete and reduce their strengths but without provoking total war with its terrible economic consequences.
This may sound like procrastination but there are tides in human affairs. Modernization is a tide on our side. Economic developmetn is a tide on our side. Technological development of energy is a tide running our way – if Western elites will permit it.
Attrition is a military strategy that the US has been very successful at, at times. It worked on the Indians, it worked on the British, it worked on the Confederacy. It worked against us in Viet Nam.
A premeditated attack by the navy of one country upon another would normally be an act of war. But in the modern world, business as usual sees war as the ultimate money loser and political risk. So the pressures against war are enormous.
………
The Norks will conclude that they got away with it. And they’ll get a tremendous charge out of the experience. However, it may well be that the nature of evil is that it has to increase just get the same charge. If that’s true then its appropriate to expect some still greater provocation from the Norks. Similiar thing happened with the world trade center. The 2001 plane attack on the towers was preceded by a truck bomb in 1992.
32. Don Rodrigo: Agreed. How about a B-2 dropping a nice fuel air bomb on a couple of the camps at night? We know where the camps are, we have the means, all we lack is the will.
28 Armageddon Rex,
I think this delightful idea of yours, “clean up our own backyard”, is a necessary and just first step to a revamped foreign policy. Long overdue and very much deserved. It would also serve message to the 9-11 street dancers and give them something to anticipate.
Whitehall @ 35:
That is why nuclear power and drilling for our own oil are essential to our freedom.
The Saudi ownership of our government is why it won’t happen.
The Nork attack was a SALES demonstration. Without it, no bucks.
———
The FBI destroyed the Mafia by working with the Italians and getting into the Pizza Connection.
Even before taking out the Dons, the FBI found that clipping the Capos caused so many succession problems that the impact was great.
Paranoia took off. The Network became untrusting.
The net effect was to give the organization the slows.
———-
Ike used airpower over Normandy to chronically snip the French rail net.
Even though the Germans were able to effect constant repairs it was later determined that it took more than twenty-days to get to the front from Paris!
Yet during the campaign this was NOT apparent to the Allies. Ike was just about the ONLY general in favor of the interdiction campaign.
———–
Lacking the ability to shut down the tennis-shoe recruit factory it is not a bad use of resources to chop up their mobility.
The psychological impact of apparently random death-from-above / the-hand-of-allah is not to be dismissed.
There must be so many ‘tells’ from the big-shots that it’s hard to understand why ANY vehicles are roaming the Kush.
The biggest big-shots are almost certainly using a harem as a shield. Any significant concentration of women is a ‘tell’ indicating that Mr. Big has roots there.
So, rather than avoiding women the network needs to concentrate on them. They’re gravity that pulls Mr. Big towards them. Whereas he is crafty and stealthy it is going to be impossible to be that subtle with the harem.
Plainly no high ranking islamist is going to deprive himself of the only entertainment to hand. His status needs will demand that he maintain a harem.
RWE:
Is this Sawfly from the German intelligence report?
Are we certain of this, there seemed to be some confusion on a translation or something. There are numerous other reports that collaborate this that I have seen, T Postol for one, so it seems pretty clear.
Some versions of that missile had what, three warheads and a 4200 mile range! This was one of the missiles the Soviets planned forward based re-loading, after realizing the futility of re-loading missiles in a port that glowed in the dark! There were reloads produced in the SS-N-6 missile deployment, something like over 3 extra missiles for each launcher. Maybe quite a few got sold, out of the hundreds available, you wouldn’t need to be able to produce missile components if you got a bunch of these with good internal engines.
Target list moving upwards, yeah, right. That’s a laugh!
It will, eventually, but not where and who you think!
Frigging jobs & money out the yazoo for Afghanistan, but not Gerogia, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, USA!
Sure feels like 1936.
The NoKos develop and test a nuke and nothing happens. Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland and nothing happened.
Iran develops nuclear weapons and nothing happens. Germany announced it was leaving the naval arms limitation treaties and Britain negotiated a bilateral treaty with them that allowed Germany a blue-water navy.
Japan seized Manchuria, sanctions were discussed but nothing happened. NoKo helps Syria develop a nuclear weapons facility which the Israelis bomb, and everyone pretends it didn’t happen.
Italy seized Abyssinia, sanctions were kicked around but nothing of consequence happened. Russia announces it will help Syria with a new reactor and it barely makes page 38, and nothing happens.
Japan provoked an incident at the Marco Polo Bridge and invaded China, killing tens of thousands in Nanking, and nothing happened. Iranian IEDs and other weapons are in widespread use by Iraqi insurgents and we wag a finger but nothing happens.
The Japanese attacked the Panay and nothing happened. Al Qaeda attacks the Cole, and NoKo sinks the Cheohan, and nothing happens.
Hitler threatened Czechoslovakia and the other European powers gave it to him thinking that will be the end of it. We try to find a way out of Iraq and Afghanistan, hoping that Iran and Pakistan will just give us a decent interval, because we lack the stomach and maybe the resources to see through what we got into.
History teaches many lessons, maybe the 1930′s will turn out not to be the appropriate model. But right now, it sure looks apt.
But, at least we know that turned out OK, right?
http://www.poemdujour.com/Sept1.1939.html
Charles 26:
In the early 90′s the Norks blew up a South Korean 747 in an attempt to disrupt – or simply get even for – the Olympics being held in South Korea. The North Korean agents that placed the bomb were captured. If this was not an act of war, what is?
It also points out an aspect of terrorism that few people seem to appreciate. Terrorist leaders derive some personal satisfaction from the act. It is hard to see how either blowing up an airliner or sinking a single ship could benefit North Korea in any way. It’s not like they had an insurance policy on the destroyed hardware. It was not a case of extortion where they got a pay off. The only reason for doing it is that they enjoyed doing evil. It made them feel better about their circumstances. It is the same thing that motivates teenagers to go around knocking over mailboxes. The only way to stop it is to “make it hurt” and we are not willing to do that.
42 Marty, After seeing some of the May Day footage, I wouldn’t mind a redux of the Zoot Suit riots. Well, I guess that was the 40′s technically, but it’s a warming thought.
LFMayor @ 44
I’m with you.
If NYC were nuked out of existence, about 52% easily of the public would want … apologies and surrenders. Recall this is not 1940 America. Not in any way. Most of Hollywood would want apologies to Muslims, and surrender to Sharia. Ditto most politicians, the media, the business elite, the legal leadership, and of course nearly all national politicians. They’d view at as karmic Retribution for America being rich and White — the two only unforgivable sins.
That being said, there is no intrinsic reason we could not adjust targets upward. Simply deny it was us, and blame someone else. Anyone can play that game. UAVs stripped of markings, or even more intriguingly “rods from God” would make a lovely statement. That the US can reach out and touch anyone, any time.
It simply takes a leader aligned with the people to do it, instead of those who hate the people because of the color of their skin. Or the craven creature of PC, Diversity, and Multiculturalism, a cringing apology for America’s existence that never ends.
On a more practical level, if you kill enough of them they stop fighting. Grant killed about 40% of the military age men in the South. He didn’t kill Forrest, or Lee, or any of the top Generals. It was decimation of the South’s military manpower that led to surrender. Not targeting leaders. Osama and Pakistan’s ISI may want a Jihad, but if they have no one to take them up on it because about 40% of the takers prior wound up dead very fast, they are as useless as Lee after Appamattox.
Finally, this kick the can down the road will find inevitably its own solution as the people eventually toss out their leaders. The solution will not be hideously expensive missiles, but simply removal of all who even “look Muslim” from the West after the loss of Copenhagen, or NYC, or DC, or London, or Paris. The way to deal with distributed attacks is simply to create a mass of people who only look and act and talk and believe like yourself. Which means btw, tossing out all the REST who are not of the native majority, particularly in Europe. If say, France decides to kick out all Muslims because Paris got nuked, Blacks and others will go too.
This will be the full harvest of decades of Multiculturalism, of PC, of Diversity. The full knowledge of those on the receiving end of lectures of “SOS Racisme!” that they, because of their skin color, are the enemy.
What this just points out is how failed the experiment in “notional Nationalism” or “Citizenship” really is, because it obviously won’t work when you have groups engaging in distributed terror, and others nodding sympathetically or screaming about racism! with their own axes grinding against the shrinking majority.
We have a fully naturalized US Citizen, born in Pakistan, trying to blow up Times Square. None of his associates went to law enforcement and said “I think he’s up to no good and might be a terrorist!” Meanwhile you have La Raza screaming about Reconquista wrt Arizona’s law.
A nation is not an idea, or a set of ideals, that just anyone can buy into. A citizenship ceremony does not make one American, any more than being born here. This truth has been on ample display. Moreover, just as Ed Driscoll, in quoting John Hughes about the Media and Obama was correct, so too must the majority follow that truth wrt non-majority populations. In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Bueller observes about friend Cameron, that he’ll marry the first girl who has sex with him, and she will despise him, because who can respect anyone who kisses your ass all day?
In order to make non-Majority populations love America, they must be required to prove, constantly, that they are “good enough” to be accepted, as real Americans. [And there must not be that many of them.] Otherwise what good is America if it kisses their ass all the time, to quote John Hughes? [This is why a woman will always love a man more, who treats her badly and makes her "earn" his affection, than one who just loves her unconditionally.]
37. jWarrior
32. Don Rodrigo: Agreed. How about a B-2 dropping a nice fuel air bomb on a couple of the camps at night? We know where the camps are, we have the means, all we lack is the will.
Or even take an old 737 (freight version), and load it to capacity with two MOABS (the biggest FAE we have), and have that go off over a camp? Nice poetic justice there.
“The future of terrorism, according to John Robb, will be the story of individuals acting on their own initiative according to [a] broadly shared narrative. “
That statement indicates a fundamentally flawed understanding of Islamic terrorism.
It inflates a minor, tactical aspect of Islamic terrorism, into a false presumption of the direction in which Islamic terrorism is evolving, while ignoring the actual infrastructure of Islamic terrorism’s primary purpose and strategic momentum.
Whether consciously or not it posits that terrorist networks are so degraded that all they can now do is mount ineffective, individual ‘grassroots’ attacks.
That is a demonstrably temporary condition, which only wishful thinking can support. There are many strategic factors which contradict that view.
Karzai is a dead man walking if he can’t reach accommodation with ether Iran or the Taliban. Within a year after we leave Afghanistan the Taliban will reassert control over Afghanistan and elements sympathetic to them will attempt a coup in Pakistan.
Once Iran has the bomb, its active promotion of terrorism will greatly increase. It’s already happening; Submarine Sneaks into Beirut? Why That’s Bad http://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/submarine-sneaks-into-beirut-why-that%E2%80%99s-bad/
The first step in curing a disease is in correctly diagnosing the condition.
Islam’s violent nature is one side of the problem. The ‘yang’ of the issue.
Russia and China are using Islamic terrorism in a covert campaign of regional and global aggression against the US, which is the other side of the coin of terrorism. The ‘yin’ of the problem.
We all know that Russia is actively facilitating, supporting and driving the Iranian push for nukes.
Most know of Russia’s announced intention to ‘facilitate’ Chavez of Venezuela’s pursuit of nukes.
Now Putin is ‘assisting’ Syria and Turkey;
Russia says may build nuclear power plant in Syria
http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-48399220100511?sp=true
Russia Signs $20 Billion Deal for Turkish Nuclear Power Plant
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/05/12/bloomberg1376-L2B28M0YHQ0X-4.DTL
China is actively blocking International sanctions against Iran in the UN.
CHINA, IRAN, AND NORTH KOREA: A TRIANGULAR STRATEGIC ALLIANCE
http://docstalk.blogspot.com/2010/05/china-iran-and-north-korea-triangular.html
The Middle East Review of International Affairs reports the same conclusions:
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2010/ea_china0383_05_07.asp
Including “China is increasing its naval presence in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, with a call in December 2009 by Chinese Rear Adm. Yin Zhou to set up a permanent naval base in the Gulf of Aden.”
Russia and China and many other nations in the EU and the Arab league are acting as ‘enablers’, blocking any effective action against the rogue nations. Many of the enabling nations provide covert support for the terror networks. The rogue nations offer refuge and logistical support for the terrorist networks.
Russia and China are promoting nuclear proliferation. It’s just a matter of time till it reaches the ‘tipping point’ and enough unstable third world nations have nukes for the terrorists to get their hands on them. When they do, they’ll use them.
Once they do, America will face an existential choice; retreat into isolationism or a new doctrine of nuclear retaliation.
Retreat into isolationism will inevitably result in near permanent martial law, the necessary and consequent suspension of fundamental safeguards such as habeas corpus and the certain rise of a military hunta which shall rule over ‘fortress’ America. That is not a sustainable societal model but the impetus to establish it will be powerful among liberals, libertarians and many conservatives.
The other choice, a new doctrine of nuclear retaliation, to be effective, would need to be fundamentally contrary to currently politically correct ways of thinking.
Therein lies the difficulty, premises and presumptions such as Just War Theory have been inculcated into our populace for generations. To such a degree that only a case of existential survival has any hope of breaking through that ‘reality map’.
Such a doctrine would consist of several factors. Identifying Islam itself as complicit in the terrorism and as criminally culpable in the violence, and would be targeted for retaliation.
Islam must be confronted with the realization that continued condoning of the violence will come at a terrible and absolutely certain cost; it’s holiest shrines and sites Mecca and Medina will cease to exist.
And the major cities of any Islamic nation, directly involved in providing logistical support in a terrorist attack, will cease to exist as well. That this will be the cost for continued condoning of radical political Islam. The message must be, either they cut out the cancer or we will.
It would be best if this doctrine was instigated right after Iran’s announcement that they have the bomb, prior to our being attacked. As it might well act as an effective deterrent.
This won’t happen of course, as the major difficulty America faces in fighting its enemies is not what to do or how to do it, it is the left’s active treachery and the squeamishness of that part of the American public best defined as liberal, ‘useful idiots’, wherein our greatest challenge lies.
Russia and China must be neutralized, financially and technologically. Energy independence, a balanced budget with low debt and a new, robust, robotic manufacturing base along with a renewed commitment to defense is the best way to achieve that neutralization.
When Islamic terrorists nuke NYC and D.C., the American public’s collective response shall determine our fate.
#46. whiskey: “The solution will not be hideously expensive missiles, but simply removal of all who even “look Muslim” from the West after the loss of Copenhagen, or NYC, or DC, or London, or Paris.”
That’s why there will not be any sudden “loss of Copenhagen, or NYC, or DC, or London, or Paris.” Puppet masters (both here and in muslim lands) are not so stupid as to kill the golden goose with one blow but rather with multiple pinpricks so that meaningful response will always seems out of proportion overreaction to each individual sting.
“The demand for continuous surveillance is what’s behind a proposal to deploy stratospheric UAVs — blimps which can operate at the edge of space, above winds which can blow them about, and remain on station for months on end, watching, watching and watching.”
Doesn’t this, somehow, remind anyone of “Project Manhigh” or “Project Excelsior”? (Granted those were manned, but perhaps…)
Going up the chain doesn’t stop the flow of replacements. You can’t take out the head of security for ISI and stop the war. You have to take out all of their equivalent of NCOs and lower officers, the ones who run the foot soldiers, and the ones who rise up.
Look at the MSA at universities here. They’ve already gotten far enough along to indoctrinate more. Taking out the top of the muslim brotherhood won’t make this woman change how she feels, and it won’t keep her colleagues from joining the hot war.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fSvyv0urTE
(clip of David Horowitz at UCSD:A Muslim Jew-hater and supporter of genocide is flushed out by David Horowitz at a speech during “Israel Apartheid Week at the University of California San Diego)
Can we really have an open source war inside our own borders? An open source civil war? Which side would our govt be on? Because that’s where we’re at. The Three Conjectures, bad enough as it is, only makes sense if the enemy is somewhere else.
When I posted it to a local forum I started it out this way:
The strikes from the sky can reach a thousand a day, but it won’t work until we take on Islam as an ideology, which we won’t do. We should be running a non-stop propaganda campaign (in effect, a truth campaign) about what Islam is all about. We should be blanketing Islamic countries with it. We should be shutting down every mosque in the US and we should have torn down every mosque in Iraq. We should be teaching school children that Islam is a corrupt, violent and demented system of oppression. We should be breaking its back intellectually. Given what it is, it wouldn’t be much harder than attacking the ideology of the KKK.
Compare how we discuss these issues today with this news reel about the death of Mussolini. Just listen to how they talk about him!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFSsRTDACCo
We could catch Osama tomorrow and the press vermin would barely condemn him.
Until we leave behind the “Religion of Peace” rhetoric and start talking the truth about the Islamic Death Cult, we’re just spinning our wheels.
As a side note, in one respect the election of Obama has greatly helped the military and CIA with these operations. Were this done under Bush, we’d be hearing non-stop about what a crime against humanity these air strikes are. Now, it apparently doesn’t interest anyone.
So, given the options of using drone attacks to decapitate or to disembowel, Obama choses the latter.
Given the situation, I can’t say that I can really fault him.
On the other hand, the INTERNAL threat to the US is increasing because of policies on immigration, intelligence, and law iendorcement that Obama has supported and pushed.
Papa Ray @ 52:
I believe you’re right. The problem is that the Saudis owned the Bushes, the State Department and the CIA. Wasn’t going to happen then and won’t happen now, no matter how great the provocation.
The future belongs to those with the guts to defend themselves no matter what. Instead we’re committing national suicide, led by those who have sold us out for their own personal gain (once known as treason).
When you can’t specify the culpable due to political prohibitions you wind up punishing the proxies. Just as PC speech is conducted in code to some extent PC warfare is conducted in code as well. There was a Polish spoof video about two couples who were strolling in a park lane. The male in one pair struck the female in the other; and outraged at the attack on his wife, the man hit the other man’s wife. And they finished up beating up each other’s wives.
This could almost describe the way terrorism has been treated. Radical preachers from Saudi Arabia descend on a country; the authorities let them keep preaching and ban burkhas. A man attacks Times Square and all of sudden talk show hosts are afraid that Tea Parties are going to start a race war. Iran starts developing a nuclear weapon; the administration starts worrying about Israeli nukes. It’s like a Three Stooges act. Moe slaps Larry, but Larry slaps Curley Joe because you see, Larry doesn’t want to slap Moe. And so it goes.
In the end the leadership of the West may find themselves surveilling everybody and attacking everybody except the people who’ve masterminded the attacks, because that would be too destabilizing. Iran, Syria and elements of the Pakistani leadership can never be confronted for one over-riding reason: the prime directive of the globalized world is to keep the status quo, on which everything depends, going. By itself that’s not a bad thing. But one unfortunate consequence has been to delay fixing anything: the financial system, the entitlements system, even the security system because it might interfere with the day’s trades. Yet inevitably the day comes when you can’t credit swap or missile your way out of a corner you’ve painted yourself into. And the question becomes, ‘what now?’
The obvious answer to the problem would be a robust clandestine intelligence and operational service that could both infiltrate and help deal with the “independent” actors, and be a credible threat against the state sponsors, combined with diplomacy that offers both positive and negative inducements to the state sponsors to “do the right thing.”
Unfortunately, we Americans have never been very good at that sort of thing, and post-Church “reforms” and with the leaks in Washington and the government’s refusal to prosecute journalists who traffic in classified information, we have unilaterally disarmed.
They love death, patterns of life, works for me.
Only comment I have is why we don’t extend the same privilege to all of our troops and the ROE.
Now that you mention it, all of Pakistan seems to work in a certain pattern, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Do you know what they call the capital of the place? ’nuff said!
“This implicitly requires a system of persistent surveillance which can track Person A through his life; notes whether he attends a Taliban training camp, records his comings and goings, observes how often he comes along on a trip where IEDs are later observed to explode, whose cell phone records suggest bad company, etc. Once that system finds his “pattern of life” sufficiently suggestive, some algorithm, assisted perhaps by some men on the loop, he may decide he needs to be zapped.”
I wonder how many reporters or stringers for AP will be killed using this method of detection. Not that I would lose any sleep over it, just wonder.
#3 Tom: “We do not have the political will to strike the cause itself, which would be too expensive and messy.”
How much more expensive is it to use a nuke than destroy it?
I can’t help but remember the lessons of the western films; There is always some bad guy who sends out raiders to disturb and/or kill the townspeople. As soon as Mr. Big is dispatched by the Good Sheriff, it all stops. My solution is less drastic than some here. Just force all Muslims back into the Middle East (politely even) and isolate them there. Let them stew in their own hatred.
So, it is going to be terrorism by lone vigilante?
How’s that going to work? Sounds a good deal like anarchy because who is going to exploit capitulation? Who is going to accept the surrender? Who will constitute the new rulers?
It won’t work. The Algerians threw out the French, but then fell upon each other because that was the only way they knew to address any problem, the simplest problem. They had never gotten around to fashioning leadership to exploit their victory.
If we have reduced them to that, we’ve won if we can keep them there. The level of amateurism will rise and recruiting will fall. Eventually they will be a dark joke. The wild eyed guy with a spherical bomb and a short fuze.
Most of the human race isn’t very brave. We get braver when we band together. Terrorism may not be bravery, but it requires a level of dedication that few loners can achieve longterm.
Should one have misgivings about building this latter-day Skynet? Is there some downside to enabling more and more surveillance and intrusiveness for the many just so we can avoid asking awkward questions of the few? What could go wrong? There are now proposed procedures for expatriating Americans and then putting them on the zap list. Suppose someone were to argue that any government powerful enough to blast anyone, anywhere would be powerful enough to blast anyone, anywhere?
Maybe the real worry is that society will sleepwalk its way into this, without ever passing any definitive milepost marked ‘point of no return’. Worse it will somnabulate itself into this slough for the best of all possible reasons: for the children, for the sake of world peace, to fight racism or simply because we’d like to buy the world a Coke. From a certain point of view the rulers of these lawless places will have succeeded in delegating their police responsibilities to the Western taxpayer, who will become correspondeningly guilty and enslaved by his own unwitting desire to ‘help’. By 2020 will we have micro-UAVs, autonomous insects, smart dust, nanoparticles, maybe self-organizing nano-machines crawling through Karachi, communicating via self-discovering networks of their own? And the real irony is that it all may have happened in the name of protecting civil liberties and inclusiveness. That’s the way you do it. Avoid engaging the malignant idea in the name of tolerance and then turn loose the nanobot killers and spies to manage the result. That’s modern politics in a nutshell. There is no right or wrong, just consequences to be mitigated. Let’s raise this to the level of principle and call it choice.
A society which decides it will no longer manage itself through culture will control itself by electronics. Look at the UK for example. Thirteen years of “progressive” government created a society with the greatest density of surveillance cameras in history. They even plan to put surveillance chips in garbage cans to make sure that people through the right trash in the right receptacles.
Time was when the rule was to go for the perps hard and leave the rest of the citizens free to graze. Today we watch all the citizens grazing so we don’t have to go after the perps. This is an exaggeration of course, but I wonder by how much.
60. wretchard wrote “They even plan to put surveillance chips in garbage cans …”.
This is already the reality in the Peoples’ Republics of Arlington and Alexandria. http://harrisonprice.com/2010/05/08/trash-nazis-visit-alexandria-virginia/
Subotai is right that if we accept a biometric id to control immigration, it will soon be mandatory for many, many more things. All for our own good, of course.
OT, if you want an idea of just how screwed we are financially, see this: http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/
Time was when the rule was to go for the perps hard and leave the rest of the citizens free to graze. Today we watch all the citizens grazing so we don’t have to go after the perps. This is an exaggeration of course, but I wonder by how much.
Don’t discount how the very existence of the perps helps perpetuate the power of the political class. They must rein in the people as a matter of unfortunate necessity which coincidentally just gives them much more power and influence. If they could press a button and wipe out the perps once and for all would they do it, especially if it meant a reduction or possibly the end of their influence and power? Perhaps. But I doubt it.
The current political class in the US seems to being doing their best in emulating blindness as the French nobility did shortly before the French revolution.
“My Queen, the people complain that they have no jobs.”
Giggling Reply: “Then make them buy health insurance!”
I would bet anything that the same technology used to track the Taliban in Waziristan is being used to track potential “enemies” of the administration within the USA. We can use the words of the Congress critters and the POTUS himself to define who would be likely to fall within the meaning of enemy.
I wonder what the over-under is for the first use? 2016?
The new rules have transformed the program from a narrow effort aimed at killing top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders into a large-scale campaign of airstrikes sez w.
This is ‘mission creep’ into ‘mission: creep’.
Richard, the traditional solution to what you term open-source warfare is today called “ethnic cleansing”, because “open-source” warfare is almost always rooted in ethnic conflicts.
We won as fast as we did in Iraq mostly because of the horrendous mistake by Al Qaeda and the Iranian mullahs in bombing the big Shiite mosque in Samarra, Iraq. That produced a savage and very widespread campaign of ethnic cleansing by Shiite death squads and militias directed at urban Sunni Arabs. This broke the back of the Baathist Party remnants whose presence in urban areas was necessary to support their terrorists and those of Al Qaeda. Borrowing from Mao tse-Tung’s phrase about guerrillas “swimming in the sea” of the people, the Shiites almost completely depopulated the urban sea of Sunni Arabs. I was paying attention to refugee statistics at the time. Most Sunni Arab areas in Iraq were depopulated in a period of about 4-5 months, and almost all of them fled to rural Sunni Arab areas, or to Jordan and Syria. Where they ran to depended on how much money they had.
That pretty much eliminated urban terrorism in Iraq and let American forces concentrate on the rural areas dominated by rural Sunni Arab tribes. That plus the horrible example of the urban Sunni Arabs’ fate got the rural Sunni Arabs to change sides, and the war was over.
I.e, ethnic cleansing works. It almost always has for this purpose, and certainly would here.
To engage their ideas is to let them set the narrative.
To engage their private parts with robot bugs loaded with milligrams of C4 is non-idiological.
Hey I just googled myself to a previous post here on BC, quoting Cordwainer Smith as saying that perfect information eliminates crime – and eliminates a viable society, too.
It’s a tricksy world.
When you’re in a plague area, you just don’t kill all the rats. The fleas will then jump attaching themselves to someone/something else and continue their sharing, speeding up the transfer contagion. First you go through a process of reducing the flea population down to a manageable level. Then you kill the rats.
pendejo grande #30
Me too. I have often thought that when I am on the way out I might perform a good deed for the Republic.
Until every single American has suffered from some attack by an islamist no American’s will unite against islam.
If everyday regular folks are beaten down, humiliated, and despised by the illegal aliens or the members of the religion of Peace then those not of the religion nor of the illegals will ban together and stamp them out.
The trouble is by that time it’s often to late for anything but a stroll to the ovens.
One solution to the problem of culture clash is to revive subsidiarity. When you have two incompatible ideas they can coexist for so long as their interaction is limited. Assume it is desirable to have societies where women can cover themselves completely and live in the 8th century. Such a society could exist within its own boundaries. It just can’t exist across boundaries without provoking conflict. The Ottoman Empire’s solution to the problem was the Millet system.
One way you can interpret modern Islamic terrorism is as a consequence of our half-baked globalist and multicultural ideas, which have allowed people to move across borders with their ideas and customs intact. Ultimately they find themselves in contact with people whose way of life is so different that conflicts can hardly fail to arise. So it hardly surprising that the fundamentalist Muslim feels like killing the Danish cartoonist, and in some sense it is neither the Muslim’s nor the Danish cartoonist’s fault. What changed was the context and suddenly everything changed for both. For the Muslim it is a choice between hearing his beloved Prophet ‘insulted’ or becoming a Dane. The Dane, for his part, is faced with a conflict between rejecting his own “tolerant” system and getting himself cut open with a knife.
The global world will have to find some way of managing diversity within a unity. The Ottomans insisted on a loyalty to the empire in exchange for autonomy within the communities’ own spheres. To some extent the world has to set similar ground rules and enforce them. Of course in a world where “no one is better than the other” and “all cultures are alike”, nobody wants to be the empire. But really the only way a multicultural world without borders can exist is to have some kind of overarching rule that says the millets can’t attack each other.
The other alternative is to reimpose borders and make long-term settlement inside of nation states contingent on assimilation. But the idea of a multicultural societies within nations is probably going to be in for a rough ride. It was fine while the variance was tolerable. But with the arrival of the outliers from the ends of the distribution, the bounds of tolerance either have to be increased to meaninglessness or reimposed in a disguised form.
This is what the Politically Correct people are actually doing. They’re reimposing artificial PC cultural norms in place of the old ones they’ve destroyed in order to regain order. The end point of the Left isn’t freedom, it is fascism described as freedom.
Don Rodrigo: Or even take an old 737 (freight version), and load it to capacity with two MOABS (the biggest FAE we have), and have that go off over a camp? Nice poetic justice there.
Waste of a good plane, waste of two MOABs. When you want to kill everything in a wide area, you drop cluster bombs, which are bundles of many grenades that go off at once. They have the added bug (feature) in that a certain fraction of the bomblets fail to go off, which renders the entire training camp unusable. They are so effective that France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, and the Vatican have signed a treaty swearing never to use them.
Rumors that Mullah Omar has been captured, but of course they want to save the news for an October Surprise.
This is what the Politically Correct people are actually doing. They’re reimposing artificial PC cultural norms in place of the old ones they’ve destroyed in order to regain order. The end point of the Left isn’t freedom, it is fascism described as freedom.
If you replace the words “regain order” with “gain power” I would agree with you 100%. If civilization does survive I think future historians will refer to this time as the “Age of Equivocation.” Propaganda rules because appealing to reason, if reason is followed, will undermine the cause Leftists espouse. Just take a word that has a good emotional connotation and stamp a meaning on it that is totally beyond and outside the original meaning of the word. The term “social justice” comes to mind as a good example.
Not only does the “Newspeak” definition hide the ugly motives of the people who pervert the word it casts doubt and misunderstanding upon those who use the words in their original and unadulterated terms.
It used to be, or at least they said it was, that the Left used to be about the “people.” These days the people be damned– its all about who gets to be the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and how many perks you’ll get from that.
I don’t have a link at the moment, but the Long War Journal has some very informative graphs on this. The most dramatic upturn in the drone attacks occurred in 2008 under Pres Bush; Pres Obama has continued to increase the rate.
Really, the question is what counts as community. Is it religion? Is it class? Is it a shared self-interest in certain market arrangements or bureaucratic structures? If it is not clear how people relate to each other, then the temptation to resolve the uncertainty through violence is inevitable. At the bottom there is one language everyone speaks: the language of the body, the compulsion of pain and death.
I suggest the question is only answered by whatever manages to perpetuate itself across generations. The body also allows procreation, and those who reproduce own the future by tautology.
David Josllin
Wretchard #61: “A society which decides it will no longer manage itself through culture will control itself by electronics.”
In other words the kind of people who sent Gort the robot in the original Day the Eartth Stood Still. They had given their machines the power to enforce their laws against war because they could not hack it themselves. And that worked so well they let the machines go out and start imposing those laws on places that were none of their damn business. Sure sounds like Europe, with judges in Brussels issuing indictments against U.S. generals, the rough men who do rough things to which Brusssls owes its very existance. And as one US General put it to the facists he defended Belgium against: “Nuts!”
So Skynet or Dr. Forbin’s Colossus did not seize power; people who could not hack it built it for that purpose. We have seen the future and it is controlled by wimps.
Ouch. The never-ending war? “We have always been at war with East Asia.”
wretchard, you seem in a darker than usual mood lately. Can’t say I blame you. The insults to freedom keep piling up.
Wretchard: “The global world will have to find some way of managing diversity within a unity.”
The muslim ” diversity ” that does not respect another’s life, liberty and his pursuit of happiness is one we can do without. I’m afraid on this matter it’s gotta be our way or the highway – probably to the death.
The cultural diversity cat is out of the bag, and the means for easy global contact are too available for a return to something like the “millet” system.
Back prior to the late 20th Century information revolution, I believe that those muslim areas geographically remote from Saudi Arabia and/or those that had lost contact culturally to fundamentalist Islam, could chose to round the edges off nasty murdering Islam over time , and present a more palatable Islam that could coexist somewhat with western based philosophies and religions. The millet system could work then. Pakistan and Afghanistan were such places before the Saudi Money and Jihadis came. That has all ended now and there is no going back. Fundamentalist Islam teaching is a quick click away on the internet and that teaching of cultural hegemony and subjugation of others is too strong and appealing for the deranged often to resist. As a result, there likely will be no “reformation” in Islam to our liking, and we in the end will have to impose our will over Islam over the entire globe to prevent a truly ghastly destructive war with hundreds of millions dead. That is our challenge.
That said, our American creed of the inalienable rights of man is one of our greatest strengths. While I applaud that at least the Dems are doing something to fight the Taliban, this ‘latter day Skynet” comes perilously close to sacrificing our own values just to win this battle for freedom. The Dems contorted PC logic has led us here. If only we could clearly identify the real perps ( Iran, House of Saud, and Pakistan among others,) and deal directly with that threat.
Ya I know at times we gotta do what we gotta do, but as others have pointed out, this Skynet may be turned on us here in America someday soon if we aren’t careful. When you have a soon to be Supreme Court Justice who believes” “Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs, ” one should be careful to protect those inalienable rights, or soon they will be gone.
rwe/77; i know you know, but for them others, General Anthony McAuliffe –known as “Nuts” McAuliffe after the battle of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.
DJ/76; i think you’re right –’collective vs individual’ is all language construct and not of real life, as it doesn’t move its units thru time, and no one has ever had a human relationship with a collective. It’s a stagnant pond, a mile wide and an inch deep, and evaporating all the time, hoping for another rain of misery to avoid drying up and blowing away. The real, non-category-error, collective is the three-generation human ‘active unit’ –an inch wide but a mile deep, and flowing at all times. This unit has about a forty year flood phase, overlapping of course with the unit in front and the one behind, as well as on both kin sides. One notes with some trepidation that neither of Obama’s SCOTUS ladies have reproduced –so that they’ve made certain their connection to the future will be academic and soon timed out; never instinctive nor organic as it would be had they turned loved hostages over to the judgement of the future.
Don’t know if it’s been mentioned upthread, but there was another bomb scare in Times Square last night (Tuesday), at about 9 pm. They cleared out the people in the blocks around the TKTS booth at 48th St., from 46th north to 50th. I had to trend south to 42nd to catch my train home. The tourists were straining at the barricades, fascinated, cameras and cell phones held high.
I avoided the area, mindful of the Arab nutters’ love for nail-wrapped bombs.
#61 Wretchard – Yes, of course eventually we will all be surveilled cradle-to-grave by trillions of things too small to see. This sort of thing is precisely why we have to destroy totalitarianism very soon, by the way.
The other side of this extremely unattractive coin is that the nanobots don’t have to be passive. Imagine a world in which everyone in (for example) the USA has a colony within them – established within minutes after birth – of networked nanobots with a powerful AI running them. And when the host does something the authorities don’t like (a pleasant to contemplate example; reciting the Shahada) then the host is reduced to a puddle of goo.
We are rushing headlong into something worse than Huxley or Orwell ever dreamed of. I just hope we will start addressing this problem before it’s too late.
We don’t need networked transapient-AI nanobots (although we are going to get them anyway) to control terrorism. We need a willingness to act in a non-PC manner, for a start – and a willingness to trade Islamic lives for ours at a thousand (at least) to one. The price for the WTC should have been Riyadh.
“Nuke them till they glow, then shoot them in the dark.”
I come to this post late, having spent the day engaged in hand to hand combat with the garden. Having a source of food may come in handy in these interesting times. I am shifting to production of staple crops in case it gets hungry out. But I am not young anymore and it took a lot out of me. And it is late. This may not be expressed as elegantly or precisely as I would like. I would ask that Wretchard review this post to see if he wants it up in what is, after all, his house.
There was some mention of parts of what I am putting up here, but the thoughts were not taken farther and connected. The thoughts are such that Wretchard may decide to make this comment disappear. If he does so, it will be understood, because I am running along the razor’s edge.
# 76 David Joslin
Really, the question is what counts as community. Is it religion? Is it class? Is it a shared self-interest in certain market arrangements or bureaucratic structures? If it is not clear how people relate to each other, then the temptation to resolve the uncertainty through violence is inevitable. At the bottom there is one language everyone speaks: the language of the body, the compulsion of pain and death.
In US -v- Verdugo-Urquidez the Supreme court had to try to define the concept of “National Community” in a case that turned on how far the rights guaranteed under the Constitution reached. It is not a decision that anyone on the Left likes to cite, and in fact Democrats and other TWANLOC would like to pretend that it does not exist; because they do not agree with one of the main points. When parsing the meaning of the Constitution, the first definition that they all agreed on was that anywhere the words “the People” were used, it was a term of art specifically referring to a right that was inherent in the individual, inalienable, and not subject to removal by the State. This is fundamental.
One of the defining characteristics of those I refer to as TWANLOC [and I admit, the title I give is chasing the tail of what I am saying now] is that they are unrelenting and consistent in their efforts to alienate and remove just those rights enumerated in the Constitution and replace them with qualifications determined by them that determine if rights can be exercised. Democrats by their nature would love the old Soviet Constitution that promised all sorts of rights granted by the State, and in practice took them away via the all powerful Party; especially something like Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code. An example of this type of person is Buraq Hussein’s latest nominee to the Supreme Court, one Elena Kagen.
First let me say, since TWANLOC are trying to invent a bogus claim of Conservative homophobia when Kagen’s sexual orientation is at worst uncertain; that I do not care who or what she sleeps with, in whatever numbers, combinations, or complicated formations so long as certain caveats are not broken. All parties need to be mentally competent consenting adults, the ASPCA does not need to get involved, and they don’t do it in the streets and scare the horses, cause traffic jams, or require an emergency call out of the Department of Sanitation.
What does concern me is her political intentions. No one nominated by Buraq Hussein Obama is going to be an impartial jurist seeking to preserve the Constitution and the rule of law. Neither is a concern of the current regime. So far [and it is early days] I would want to know if she believes that the Constitution’s Commerce Clause is so all encompassing that it can be used to force all individuals to purchase a specific product as dictated by the government as the price of breathing, and I would like to have a detailed explanation, with follow up questions as needed, of her 1996 article in the University of Chicago Law Review entitled, “Private Speech, Public Purpose: The Role of Governmental Motive in First Amendment Doctrine”. Specifically, there is the matter of her interpretation of the First Amendment. She argued that government can restrict speech if it believes that speech might cause harm, either directly or by inciting others to do harm.
Laws that only incidentally affect speech are constitutional, Kagan said, because the government’s motive in enacting them is not the restriction of First Amendment freedom but the prohibition of some other – unprotected – activity. One assumes, given the last year and a half, that opposing the will of the government would be considered subject to restriction on both basis’ of “harm”. And that her arguments for the government reining in all that inconvenient Free Speech was a factor in her being named Solicitor General and appointed to the Supreme Court.
She cannot run away from that article, by claiming that her views have changed over time; because last September she testified as Solicitor General before the very Supreme Court that she would sit on, that the government has the right and power to ban political pamphlets. Video at the link below:
http://cnsnews.com/cnsnewstv/v/Xd6USU2G2G
“Congress shall make no law” is so 18th Century. Especially since now the perfect regime is in power.
While Kagen is but the latest example, can one rationally conclude that she, and those who appoint her, and those who support her are really of the same Community as the rest of us? And after pondering that, look back at Mr. Joslin’s most edifying paragraph.
Continuing:
# 64 Peter Boston
I would bet anything that the same technology used to track the Taliban in Waziristan is being used to track potential “enemies” of the administration within the USA. We can use the words of the Congress critters and the POTUS himself to define who would be likely to fall within the meaning of enemy.
I wonder what the over-under is for the first use? 2016?
That bet is already outdated, because it is already being done. Keeping in mind that the one consistency in this regime is their disregard of the law and the Constitution, it is indulging in fantasy of the first order to believe that a mere statute, Posse Comitatus, would limit the actions of a Federal government led by ‘Teh Won’. We recently had proof, and it was done slickly enough that we can be sure that it was not the first time.
CBSTV, Channel 2 had a story, which we commented on here at BC, on May 4 claiming that military planes circling New York City and waiting for the Times Square Bomber Faisal Shahzad to use his cell phone were instrumental in his rapid capture. Within a few hours, that paragraph was removed from all CBS news reports. It is without doubt that any such capability is at the interface between military and NSA. Neither are allowed by law to operate within the United States as law enforcement.
Despite the belated censorship, a number of sources pinned it down to the use of RC-12 Guardrail Signals Intelligence platform, which is described here:
http://tinyurl.com/2g5e56x
The ground-based Guardrail system uses airborne receivers to collect signals intelligence (SIGINT) and geolocate enemy communications and radar emitters in near real-time. Linked by satellite to an Integrated Processing Facility at Fort Hood, Texas, the antenna-spiked turboprops of the 15th Military Intelligence Battalion (Aerial Exploitation) were the first manned intelligence collection platforms to fly combat missions over Iraq in 2003. Guardrail intelligence has been credited with saving coalition lives in Afghanistan as well.
Now, does this sound like part of what Wretchard described
According to this view the challenge comes from the grassroots. To some extent the challenge of distributed warfare has been accepted, and war in the grassroots it is. One example of a America’s counter is the so-called “pattern of life” of life targeting, which tracks individuals, such that if a person looks persistently guilty, then he is ‘engaged’.
applied domestically?
In my small mountain town, our TEA Party gatherings have been photographed by obvious strangers in town. Who are they from? I have seen people who do not look like media taking pictures from a distance with very big lenses at larger demonstrations. Who are they working for? Every organ of the State and its controlled media are insistent that disagreeing with the Democrats in DC is the same as terrorism. Are the tactics being used by the military against “distributed warfare” overseas being used by the government against Americans at home whose legal political opposition is considered a threat analogous to terrorist activity abroad? It is a question with many implications no matter how it is answered.
Aside from the immediate intentions of the regime, there is the fact that if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. How long before the domestic system evolves to parallel the overseas “pattern of life” template?
We opened with a discussion of Community. If our political class [and I do not exempt a goodly part of the Republican Party from being willing to go along with this] is engaging and possibly preparing to further engage the American people with the same tactics used against the Taliban and Al Quada, are they really part of the same Community that we are part of? Where do they stand when we are defining “us” and “them”? I originated TWANLOC as a form of shorthand some time ago. That shorthand may become a hard definition soon.
If the government is using the tactics it uses against “distributed warfare” against us now, what is the appropriate response once people are “engaged” at whatever level? What rational preparations should each Patriot be making, mentally and otherwise?
I will add another thought expressed by one of the other commenters:
#33. Foont
If I lived in a country where a foreign power was keeping my fellow citizens under surveillance
(and very likely me as well) and, based upon patterns of behavior determined to be sufficiently
threatening by agents of that power, blowing up said fellow citizens (along with “collateral” damage
to anyone unfortunate enough to the immediate vicinity) I would take up arms against the power. It really wouldn’t make much
difference to me what the competing ideologies were.
If the government is no longer of our Community, is indeed TWANLOC, and acting as Foont describes, are they not a “foreign power” in fact, if not in name?
Which may lead to the questions offered by #6 Mike Anderson and #25 Michael acquiring some urgency.
I opened by mentioning that this comment is running along the razor’s edge. The government acts setting up this situation are also running along a similar edge. The consequences of slipping are non-trivial.
Subotai Bahadur
If such a capability as a blimp in low orbit exists that permits continuous visual and electronic surveillance, then we obviously know where Bin Laden is, and we obviously currently surveil everyone who reports to him and we surveil well down the chain of command.
In some future year we will learn that we knew of the Underwear bomber plot well in advance and that the Underwear bomber failed because the CIA Dirty Tricks Bureau had replaced his explosive underwear with dud underwear! And that the CIA had replaced the Time Square Bomb with a dud!
Today we bomb the terrorists. We don’t try to capture them or their papers because why bother?
This skynet has domestic uses.
SV/84; Today we bomb the terrorists –i wonder how these targets are being selected, and who is doing the selecting, on what information, and from whom. Basically wondering who is targeting, the administration or the professional military?
Claire Berlinski has an article up (at City Journal) that possibly sheds light on some of the mysteries alluded here, on several fronts and from several points, like the vision of that two-headed eagle.
The use of fuel-air explosives (FAE) such as the MOABs, contained within a air freighter won’t work, I think.
A FAE bomb works by squirting liquid fuel into a large volume of surrounding air then detonating the fuel/air mixture. One gets more power per pound of freight that way since the explosive doesn’t carry oxidizers. Plus one can control the overpressures, etc,
You have to free drop a FAE weapon for it to work. Packing it inside a confined space nullifies it.
Wretchard @ 71
Or as Huey Long once said “Yes, of course America will have Fascism, but we’ll call it Anti-Fascism.”
The same meme works equally well substituting “Racism”.
Subotai @83:
Sir: I submit for your enlightenment, if you haven’t seen it yet:
http://formerspook.blogspot.com/2010/05/catching-shahzad.html
When a warrant isn’t forthcoming, or there’s no time to get it, and law enforcement agencies can’t deploy the necessary surveillance assets themselves, which they much prefer, No Such Agency asks our cousins at GCHQ to monitor the traffic on a specific number, email recipient, etc. and send anonymous tips, (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) to the CIA controller, FBI taskforce, U.S. Secret Service Special Agent, etc.
ECHELON. There really is no such program. Instead there are several other programs and capabilities that, taken together, accomplish most everything attributed to ECHELON by the tin hat wearing brigades.
Please remember that anything you send electronically via the Internet, radio, or telephone is monitored. Certain email addresses, telephone numbers, use of key words or phrases may trigger further interest, and analysis by an actual human being, and possible flagging for further analysis or reporting to “interested” parties.
Mostly they just ignore things that aren’t judged to be serious & credible threats; otherwise the entire system would be overwhelmed. Routine, banal criminal activity is ignored out of hand in nearly every case. It is, very common, and reporting incidents of common criminality would point to methods and sources in a way that would render them less effective against the actual intended targets of such monitoring.
If you really want privacy in your electronic communications, develop and use a set of one-time cryptographic keypads, and practice good COMSEC techniques.
What did you plant in your garden? I’m in the process of putting in onions, corn, turnips, carrots, and lima beans myself.
#88 Armageddon Rex
Yeah, there are a lot of “workarounds” and technical fudges in gathering the information. I understand that technically they were monitoring the satellite feeds and not the cell phone directly; which gives them some legal cover. And yes, there are the monitoring and keyword programs. I assume that if BC as a whole is not already flagged, that this thread has stomped on a number of tripwires in discussing both “means and methods” and sensitive political topics. Oh well.
The problem remains the transference of the “us-them” mindset and possibly tactics from Iraq and Afghanistan to the domestic political arena. It seems to be happening. To be honest, our National Command Authority feels a closer kinship with our putative foes in the Middle East than with our own population. I have long felt that this is not going to end well.
As far as the garden, in addition to the mandatory home grown tomatoes, salad greens, etc.; I am shifting from green traditional vegetables to staple and storable crops. Winter Squash of a couple of types, high yield limited space potato container gardening, and I am experimenting with quinoa and amaranth for a high yield limited space grain crop. Both of the latter are known to grow at my altitude and normal relatively arid conditions. However as a result of the drop in temperature and increase in water caused by Algore’s “gorbal wormening” [do I really need a sarc tag there?] I am wondering. I mean, today well within an hours drive in two directions there is heavy snowfall in the middle of freaking May, and we are getting rain. I do commend quinoa and amaranth to your attention if you are in an area it can grow.
Doing some long-term soil amendment, while it is still possible. You might want to consider the material “Perlite” and a rototiller if you have clay soil.
Also I recommend heirloom varieties of all crops as the hybrids most commonly available are sterile and the seeds cannot be saved for the next year. Heirloom varieties breed true. One never knows if the government ration of soylent green will be enough to get through the winter [yeah sarc], although not being thin and emaciated may get one classified as a kulak
I have made temporary solar oven cookers before for a buck or so. You can use a modified cardboard box and some scrap material to braise a pot roast in the back yard. I hope to both make a permanent solar oven with higher capacity this year capable of low level baking/roasting, and if personal energy allows I have the makings for an 8′ parabolic cooker that I should be able to use to broil foods [or maybe smelt metals, I have heard of some really powerful ones in Napoleonic France that could smelt bronze. The metal smelting is a joke, I think. I really don't know what temperatures I can reach at the focus point. I once was playing around with a far less than perfect home made 12 inch dish and suddenly set fire to some paper while looking for the focus point, so that was >451 degrees.] If I really get energetic, I have the plans for a solar air heater for the south side of the house.
All appropriately protected, of course. *smile*
Subotai Bahadur
The best theory I’ve heard on the Times Square bomber is that he changed his mind, but his family is in Pakistan, so he went through with an idle attempt.
The guy is now cooperating with the Feds.
Hillary’s warning about consequences was then meant as a pointed statement to somebody that we’ll take you out if you try this again.
That somebody may be pretty high up.
A caller’s theory, here, the end of Armstrong and Getty 051310 H3, starting 26:45
#90 rhhardin
Hillary’s warning about consequences was then meant as a pointed statement to somebody that we’ll take you out if you try this again.
That somebody may be pretty high up.
A caller’s theory, here, the end of Armstrong and Getty 051310 H3, starting 26:45
I confess to being dubious at best, and this has not been that good a day, about the caller’s theory.
I just wonder what it would be about that warning that would counter the effect of decades of called American bluffs? And when you add in that it was delivered by Hillary, who is not the most threatening personality [except to Americans] on the international political scene the threat loses some of its sting. Further, officially she is a spokescritter for Buraq Hussein Obama. Name one Islamic leader who trembles in fear at the mere prospect of incurring the displeasure of “Teh Won”.
Until some unfortunate and unexpected set of circumstances causes something tragic [and hopefully exothermic] to happen to someone who is behind some of the attacks on us; followed shortly by at least one and perhaps more unfortunate circumstances from the same population group, I ain’t buying it. And I suspect no one else in that group will either.
Subotai Bahadur
Too good not to read. This author would fit right in here.
“‘A Muslim has no nationality except his belief,”
Maybe, maybe not. But there are two tribes of Islam and they hate each other almost as much as they hate us.
Papa Ray
P.S. Hey, don’t forget pickles…everybody loves pickles!
“Pickling Vegetables”
“We’ve made it very clear that if — heaven-forbid — an attack like this that we can trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences.”
Gales of riotous laughter. Clinton would (1) cut the increase in their foreign aid, (2) apologize give a gift of a “reset” button, (3) denounce Israel. What kind of moron waits for a successful attack? A Pakistan-based nuclear attack on America is OK if it fails?
More today on Armstrong and Getty 051410 H2 starting 6:00, betting that the Times Square Bomber’s first words when captured were “You get my family safe and I’ll tell you everything.”
“Open source warfare” sounds fairly untidy. Sadly, that seems to be exactly what is being directed towards us; only problem being that the process seems to be unilateral.
It goes against the grain of civilised folk to engage in generalised slaughter, such qualms are anathema to the vermin attacking us.
The situation now is that the bad guys no longer need to be directly commanded by “bigger fish”, all they need is a little logistical assistance, of which there seems to be a fair supply. Their system is pretty much running on auto-pilot now.
If attitudes are not adjusted soon, the “two-way firing range” will be coming soon to a town near you.