One of the most puzzling things about ordinary life is the question of where all lost ballpens and drug store sunglasses go. Some eventually turn up under the cushions of the sofa or reappear under the refrigerator. Yet when compared to the sheer numbers that are bought they are never enough; and it is hard not to think there does not really exist some mysterious dimension into which they disappear.

Those who imagine that we find eventually find each other’s lost  items should consider that we must come into the possession of the total number of objects aggregately purchased which would mean we would all be the proud possessors of about 135 ballpoint pens, 15 pairs of drugstore sunglasses and 17 baseball caps all of each other’s.

The same question can be asked of all the information we throw away. Where does it go?

Victor Davis Hanson has an piece in the National Review describing the systematic misplacement of what we know. Hanson argues that by a Borg-like process, the collective American brain was made to throw away whatever it knew about the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Jihad, or Nidal Hassan, and pretty well everything the Russians communicated to the security forces about the Boston Bombers.

He might have added we’d taken the trouble to forget a whole bunch of other stuff as well. Such as forgetting that Afghanistan was a “war of necessity” or that the Guantanamo prison was supposed to be shut. That there was once a promise to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed somewhere, someplace.  Maybe that memory runs together with the announcement — faded now — that the Arab Spring was going to bring freedom to the Middle East. Can we be mistaken in recalling that once we knew that Iran was never going to get a nuclear weapon?

Now we no longer knew that we even knew that.  And speaking of ballpens, isn’t there somewhere in our recollection the faint trace of the vow that the attackers of the US Consulate in Benghazi would be brought to justice? Jay Carney when reminded of it thoughtfully replied that was “a long time ago” as if the passage of a few months was enough to consign something to permanent oblivion. Indeed the Benghazi vow is now older perhaps than even the stirring “red line” drawn by President against the use of chemical weapons in Syria, now itself forgotten.  Who can say? The dates all run together, disappearing in a point ‘a hundred years ago when white males wrote something’.

And yet, like the ballpens and sunglasses that we knew — they must be somewhere. Victor Davis Hanson has a conjecture. He metaphorically suggests they’ve been burned, like the trash in which our lost junk probably finished up and have gone up in smoke.  For surely knowledge like that must be burned on one of the numerous altars with which our secular and atheistic world abounds because it is too dangerous to leave such things lying around. Hanson describes one altar:

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While the US is focused on its own domestic dramas, Europe as the Economist puts it, “is bleeding out”. Silently, exsanguinating below the fold, but bleeding all the same.

It is a car crash of a data release. One simply can’t look away. Hard to know precisely which part of the euro area’s latest unemployment report is the most grimly compelling. …

Individual country numbers inspire their own brand of horror. Greek joblessness topped 27% in January (the most recent month for which data there are available), while Spanish employment has risen to 26.7%. Joblessness in France rose by slightly more in the year to March than it did in Italy. And did you know that Dutch unemployment rose by 1.4 percentage points over the past year? German unemployment, of course, has held steady at 5.4% since last summer.

It is the youth figures that are most remarkable, however: 59.1% of those under 25 are unemployed in Greece, 55.9% in Spain, 38.4% in Italy, 38.3% in Portugal, 26.5% in France—3.6m youths in all.

Yet that would not appear remarkable to anyone who understands what state-controlled economies really are. Hope and Change economies are crony capitalist systems which pick winners and losers. They maintain the status quo at all costs — and reward those who have captured government over those who innovate. Thus the Reuters headline “Banks saved, but Europe risks ‘losing a generation’” is perfectly comprehensible.

What else would happen but that?

Naturally this plight is explained to the desperate voters as the consequence of the remaining vestiges of capitalism. The growing impoverishment, we are told, is occurring because socialism hasn’t gone far enough.  Only give the government more power and all will be well. And so the low information voters turn out in the streets offering to exchange what little freedom they have left for some low paying jobs and a little welfare.  The poorer they are the more eager they become to trade their last liberties for one more benefits check.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way.

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The Daily Mail reports that Saudi Arabia warned the US in writing about Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2012.  The Saudi official cited by the Mail said the warning “was separate from the multiple red flags raised by Russian intelligence in 2011, and was based on human intelligence developed independently in Yemen.”

Citing security concerns, the Saudi government also denied an entry visa to the elder Tsarnaev brother in December 2011, when he hoped to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Tsarnaev’s plans to visit Saudi Arabia have not been previously disclosed.

The article says the warning letter was given to the DHS. But while one DHS official confirmed knowledge of it to the Mail, the agency itself denied ever having heard of the Saudi warning.

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Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah has openly upped the ante in Syria by declaring his organization on the side of Syrian President Assad.  ”Nasrallah – a close ally of Assad – also hinted that Russia and Iran, Syria’s principal supporters, would intervene militarily to prevent his defeat.”

By throwing his turban into the ring Nasrallah served notice that the Syrian conflict might drag in Israel via Lebanon or the long-range rockets Hezbollah has aimed at the Jewish state. In short, Hezbollah has escalated the Syrian conflict and internationalized it. The Guardian writes “‘Nasrallah just made sure Syria will get a lot worse,’ quoting analyst Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.”

Meanwhile the President — who drew the Red Line on chemical weapons in Syria, a line which has now been crossed — is parsing and parsing and parsing. Having in the words of Andrew McCarthy, “judicialized” the fight against al-Qaeda he  judicialized the chemical weapons threat in Syria. In a press briefing Obama said of the chemical weapons whose use proclaimed would be punished ‘we have evidence’ of use of weapons but says ‘what we don’t know is who used them’.

“What we now have is evidence that chemical weapons have been used inside Syria,” Obama told reporters. “What we don’t know is who used them. We don’t have a chain of custody. Without evidence of what happened, how can I make a decision what to do? I have got to make sure I have got the facts.”

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The regular media is finally covering the Kermit Gosnell trial in a big way. It’s as if they woke up from a deep sleep to notice that a poor black doctor offering a service to the community is being lynched in Philadelphia by ‘racist’ and ‘elitist’ prosecutors.  Now they’re making up for lost time. The Washington Post’s head is, “in closing remarks at Pa. abortion clinic trial, defense asks jury to look beyond politics”. CNN banners, “case against abortion doctor is ‘hype and exaggeration,’ defense says”.

But the New York Times comes closest to stating the issues when it leads “they are known as Baby Boy A, Baby C, Baby D and Baby E, all of whom prosecutors call murdered children and the defense calls aborted fetuses — the very difference in language encapsulating why anti-abortion advocates are so passionate about drawing attention to the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, which wrapped up here on Monday with summations by both sides.”

Thus the while facts may not be in much dispute the debate over whether a crime has been committed is alive and well. More vital and living than any of babies, fetuses or tissue in Gosnell’s clinic. Nor are definitions important only in the case of Gosnell. Events have always been subject to interpretation. But perhaps never has action been more contingent on interpretation. Take the problem of whether or not to punish Assad for crossing the “Red Line” in using chemical weapons in Syria.

That should have been straightforward. In Syria the victims are presumably adults. Not baby A, B, or C. They are not even fetuses or embryonic tissue. Has Assad killed them by crossing the Red Line? It should be clear … but

… but.

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Ed Driscoll has a fascinating article on President Obama’s hatred for the Internet, especially social media,  as described by Chuck Todd on ‘Meet the Press’. Todd described how the President clearly made his feelings felt at the end of the White House Correspondent’s dinner.

CHUCK TODD: What I wonder how many people realized at the end [of Saturday's White House Correspondents' Dinner] when he did his, you know, there’s always this part at the end where they get serious for a minute. And it’s usually the part where presidents say, “You know, I think the press has a good job to do and I understand what they have to do.” He didn’t say that. He wasn’t very complimentary of the press. You know, we all can do better.

It did seem, I thought his pot shots joke wise and then the serious stuff about the internet, the rise of the internet media and social media and all that stuff — he hates it. Okay? He hates this part of the media. He really thinks that the sort of the buzzification — this isn’t just about Buzzfeed or Politico and all this stuff – he thinks that sort of coverage of political media has hurt political discourse. He hates it. And I think he was trying to make that clear last night.

‘But why should Obama hate outlets like Politico?’ asks Driscoll. After all, more than few of its staff members are his supporters.  Ed Driscoll writes, “Politico has numerous journalists who during the campaign in 2008 were on the infamous “JournoList,” which dubbed itself the “non-official campaign” for Obama’s election bid.”

Part of the answer to Driscoll’s question comes from Andy McCarthy, who painstakingly examines the administration’s efforts to shape the narrative in the Tsarnaev case.  He traces how the administration took credit for preventing the future Times Square bombing when that plot is not even mentioned in the charges against the suspect. He points out how some overly zealous Federal judge showed up to Mirandize Tsarnaev and ostensibly stop the FBI in its tracks when “it was not the magistrate judge who decided Tsarnaev should be Mirandized. It was President Obama and Attorney General Holder”.

He comes to the conclusion that’s it a show, a very deliberate campaign to demonstrate to the public that the “judicialization” of the fight against terrorism works even when it doesn’t.

Because you are being softened up. Steered by its Gitmo Bar veterans and Lawyer Left compass, the Obama administration is executing a massive national-security fraud: the farce that the jihad against America can be judicialized, that civilian-court processes are a better answer to enemy warfare than are combat protocols. …

So in the effort to tame you into believing civilian due process has proved wildly successful in the Marathon bombing investigation, just as Obama and Holder promised it would, the government is now strategically leaking interrogation details.

Sure it may look like the investigation was a tragicomedy of errors in which our $100 billion national-security edifice, despite investigating Tamerlan Tsarnaev for a year and a half before the bombing, had to ask the public’s help in identifying a picture of him. But look: We stopped a spectacular bombing at Times Square! And sure, there’s a lot of innuendo about Islam and overseas “extremists,” but after 16 hours of penetrating scrutiny we’ve figured out that this was just wanton “homegrown” violence committed by a couple of confused kids — the sort of thing that is bound to happen if we don’t crack down on gun ownership and Islamophobia.

The fraud is on. Will we keep falling for it?

Shows are a part of governance, but shows will require a script. In answer to McCarthy’s rhetorical question, many will probably fall for for the show, now that the administration has had time to produce it in the leisurely aftermath of the arrest. But there was a frightening moment while the action was breaking —  driven by the Internet and especially by social media — when the drama was unfolding faster than the establishment’s feedback loop could cope.  When they couldn’t issue talking points fast enough to their buddies in Politico to spin it. The action outran the script.

That is why the President hates the Internet.

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When Tom Brokaw’s denounced the dumbing-down of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he was unintentionally talking about one of the underlying reasons for the FBI’s inability to see the threat of the Tsarnaev brothers, even when it was pointed out to them.  ”The dinner has been a tradition since 1920 for journalists who cover the White House and the President … in 1975 … Saturday Night Live stars Chevy Chase and Jim Belushi made appearances. However, Brokaw said that standards of the red-carpet fete have now fallen so low that his ‘daughter’s junior prom has more dignity‘.”

“The breaking point for me was Lindsay Lohan,” Brokaw told POLITICO during a recent interview in his office in the NBC News Rockefeller Plaza headquarters in New York. “She became a big star at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Give me a break.”

A break was what the FBI gave Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

Despite an abundance of suggestive information, the FBI seemed singularly unable to see Tsarnaev as a threat. Part of the reason, according to the Washington Examiner, was that blindness was engineered into the system. The agents were trained not to see it.

It is quite possible, though, the FBI agents who interviewed Tsarnaev on both occasions failed to understand what they saw and heard because that’s what they were trained to do. As The Washington Examiner’s Mark Flatten reported last year, FBI training manuals were systematically purged in 2011 of all references to Islam that were judged offensive by a specially created five-member panel. Three of the panel members were Muslim advocates from outside the FBI, which still refuses to make public their identities. Nearly 900 pages were removed from the manuals as a result of that review. Several congressmen were allowed to review the removed materials in 2012, on condition that they not disclose what they read to their staffs, the media, or the general public.

The process which has dumbed down the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and blinded the FBI is essentially the same: that of removing information from the system in order to make it predictable, manageable, and nonthreatening.  To make it consistent with the internal ideology of the human institution. Institutions do not always seek to find the truth. More often than not they seek to find the approved solution.

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Chemical weapons — the ‘red line’ which President Obama said he would so resolutely oppose — have emerged in Syria.  Blood tests have confirmed the exposure of patients in hospitals to these weapons. Readers will recall that President Obama issued a stern warning against their use. Now they’ve been used. The problem is now how ignore them. The National Journal’s article is headlined: “Obama Is Looking for Reasons to Delay Response to Syria’s Chemical Weapons Use.”

It would seem to add up to certain U.S. military action: On Thursday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel confirmed the findings of a White House letter to congressional leaders that said the United States now believes “the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically, the chemical agent sarin.” That finding appears to be a direct violation of the “red line” for action that President Obama set last year and which he reaffirmed last month, when on a trip to Israel he declared that “the use of chemical weapons is a game changer.”

In truth, the same game is still going on, and the administration appears to be equivocating over a response while all the “facts” are established. “We want to continue to investigate above and beyond those intelligence estimates,” a senior administration official told reporters Thursday afternoon, in order to gain “a definitive judgment for whether a red line has been crossed.”

The probable truth is that Obama was never prepared to take any large scale action against Syria for any reason any more than he is prepared to stop the Iranian nuclear bomb. Damascus has now called his bluff so the challenge is to find some way to run while seeming to keep the field.

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Persons unknown hacked the AP’s Twitter account and spread a bogus story that two explosions in the White House had injured President Barack Obama. The fake report sent jitters through the markets and convinced more than a few uncritical news watchers that it was true before the real facts emerged.

It was an illustration of the power of information to affect material events. This power was never greater than it is today. A few decades ago the financial minister of a Third World country made a trip to the Western banking capital in which his nation’s foreign reserves were kept. After meeting with bank executives he asked if he might see the vault in which his government’s money was stored. The minister was duly escorted into the depths of the headquarters building. There inside a vault a bank executive handed him a spool of magnetic storage tape. “There are your country’s reserves,” he said.

That was it. The tape.

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Most younger people have probably heard of the phrase Fifth Column only from 1940s movies and cartoons. It refers to what would today be called “sleeper cells”.  The phrase itself was coined by Emilio Mola, who fighting on the side of Franco for Madrid declared that in addition to the four columns marching on the city there existed a “fifth column” of supporters waiting in the city.  The first hunters of the “Fifth Column” were of course the Communists. And to demonstrate the original understanding of the term note that Ernest Hemingway wrote a play of the same title, which was a flop.

The Fifth Column is generally regarded (when it is regarded at all) to be something of an anomaly in the Hemingway canon. The author’s only full-length play, and one which has garnered little critical or commercial attention, it is, as John Raeburn diplomatically puts it, a work “not integral to [Hemingway's] literary reputation”

In it Hemingway’s hero hunts down fascists.

The play concerns the activities of counter-espionage agent Philip Rawlings, a hard-drinking man’s man and Communist party operative posing as a war correspondent. He works out of the Florida hotel [the 'Florida' being the name of the hotel in Spain], tracking down members of the “fifth column,” Fascist sympathizers working from within against Loyalist-defended Madrid. … Philip captures a fifth column member whose confession under torture leads to the discovery of three hundred more fifth columnists.

Hemingway’s play was forgotten for decades, but it was revived in 2008 with a few changes, one being that the characters no longer called each other “comrade” on stage.

But that illustrates the context.  Historically the “sleeper cells” sought out by progressives weren’t terror cells from another culture. The sleepers were people who looked just like them, indistinguishable except in one respect: that you couldn’t call them “comrade”.

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