As the aftermath of the attempted Christmas Day plane bombing sizzles on, an internal debate is raging amongst populace and ruling class alike over the lessons learned by this foiled plot. While much of the political commentary provided by CNN, the New York Times and the BBC focuses on the security breaches by alleged hijacker Farouk Abdulmutallb, few have dared discuss the motivations behind the attack.
And in the wake of the hatched plan, the conversation turns to the failure of security. In evaluating this topic, however, the analyses given by the so-called "experts" fail to pass the bar.
With reports indicating that the Nigerian born student acted in response to U.S. bombings in Yemen in early December that killed nearly 100 (reportedly including many civilian deaths), no newscaster will discuss the importance of such motivation in preventing future similar attacks.
While President Obama announced a comprehensive TSA airport security review in both intelligence-related and physical screening procedures shortly after the attempted bombing, it is unlikely even with more restrictive procedures that the American public will be made any safer.
To pursue a response-activated strategy that is guided by the principle we must retroactively address possible threats by insulating ourselves with another 'layer' of security is pure fallacy. If anything, more invasive physical screening procedures for average Americans will distract from true threats. With a "stay-the-course" foreign policy continued into the 2010s, threats remain possible and likely.
It is clear terrorism became a political football long ago. But as it continues in a new era, there appears no end to the Democratic-Republican enforced use of it to scare the people, then coddle them in an effort to break their will. By discouraging simple freedoms and introducing new humiliating screening procedures, which are at best, invasive of privacy and morally dubious, the American government is clear in its message of retributive action against the People, who are evidently blameless in the intelligence security breach which occurred on Christmas Day.
After investigation, Farouk Abdulmutallab was actually on a terror-watch list but was not flagged before boarding his flight. Clearly, there was a failure of screening on the front line intelligence level, which remains the best tool for authorities in the modern War on Terror. However, when this very list does not serve its purpose and the suspect's fathers reported him to authorities over two months prior to the incident, questions arise as to the viability of international security. Some have even suggested Abdulmutallab was helped to board the plan without holding a passport, aided by a well-dressed and explanatory American. While unsubstantiated, it certainly adds to the questions of how Abdulmutallab passed through security and who may have assisted in the act.
Simply put, security is not perfect nor will it ever be close to it. It is especially true with an organization as inefficient as the federal government running it. To expect the government (honestly folks, only so limited) to protect every person pre-emptively from any violent act in any part of a giant nation of 300 million people is absurd and untenable.
Just imagine the attempt! Stationed police and screeners at every private business or public place, all in efforts to "prevent terror". How far does this faulty paradigm have to go? What type of sane society would ever accept this arrangement!?
Stereotypically, the government has again decided to collectively punish an entire nation for one failure of airport security in a foreign land. Clearly, the failure here occurred due to negligence on behalf of Dutch and Nigerian authorities, not those working at the TSA. Mind yhou, the whole incident even ended prior to the plane touching down in Detroit, Michigan. And at that, the heroes of the failed attempt at terror were in fact those who will now be punished retroactively.
Without recourse or even a frank public debate, it appears the sheltered security-obsessed screening bureaucrats will win the day with morally-misguided and further repressive screening. Passengers have to contend with possible passage of a federally-backed "Rules of Behavior" enforced in all airports and all planes nationwide, and perhaps internationally. As Peter Greenberg of CBS reports, the more extreme of the privately-implemented security reforms in recent days include provisions prohibiting passengers from accessing any carry-on items for a whole hour prior to landing.
As old Aunt Ethel will be scolded and shunted for trying to finish that last page of the chapter in that paperback romance novel, little time will be left to deal with real possible threats who've been flagged by intelligence communities.
Meanwhile, political commentators call for mandatory full-body image screening for each person boarding aircraft in the United States, and this time with no "pat-down option". For those who are unfamiliar with full-body image scanning, the machine takes amazingly lifelike X-ray body photographs, seeing entirely through all clothes and producing a real nude image, with genitalia and facial images later blocked out from the generated picture.
Yet, it remains hard to believe agent Jim won't be looking even for a split second at grandma's kahoonies or little Tommy's rear. To assure against this possibility, the TSA has assured the American public no images are ever recorded and that all private parts are scrambled.
While it's likely there will be some compromise on this highly debatable front, security will be tightened in upcoming times and the American people will face greated frustration with the TSA. Fronted by the Department of Homeland Security as a self-appointed agency, the TSA is too laughably a creature of its own creation. 'Til that creature seriously catches up with reality and the reckoning of Americans, it is assured to drown in its own inept mediocrity and ineffectiveness.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
No Justice, No Peace
As thousands of University of California students protested at campuses state-wide this week in opposition to the now-passed the 32% tuition hike, the University has ignored student cries for a more reasonable dialogue and tactful approach. And in even furtherance of their seething contempt for freely gathering students, they watched and even tipped off police to students who engaged in political acts by freely demonstrating their First Amendment rights.
With hundreds of students arrested to Sahil Kapur of RawStory reports that 52 were arrested yesterday at UC-Davis and cordoned off to a According to Kapur, one PhD. activist claimed a 19-year old student protester was held in solitary confinement and physically abused and emotionally traumatized by police. All of the arrests at the behest of the university were allegedly done without the simple courtesy of the university informing their parents or making any effort to provide practical help.
While such movements as "Occupy California" and others have pushed for real political student action, the institution would not simply allow it. While "walk-outs" and "sit-ins" were popular and even in some places common occurrences in America in the 1960s and 70s and before, it has now become a cause extreme and reason for suspicion and harassment.
But no matter what the university may do, or may wish to do, it will not change the path University of California students, while small in proportion, may be choosing to attempt change in their small world. And without compromise from the power-wielding faction of the institution, it is highly unlikely a more compromising attitude will be one students will have.
The vast amount of young people of this country are not stupid, or liable to be taken as fools, but only if they are treated so will they be all the more eager to show the fool of the other.
So let this message be carved into every school's weighty cornerstone, that these scrawls of students are not without reason or certainly not to be taken lightly. For without students, there is no university and without the educated seeking an education, little can be expected of these once grand institutions.
With hundreds of students arrested to Sahil Kapur of RawStory reports that 52 were arrested yesterday at UC-Davis and cordoned off to a According to Kapur, one PhD. activist claimed a 19-year old student protester was held in solitary confinement and physically abused and emotionally traumatized by police. All of the arrests at the behest of the university were allegedly done without the simple courtesy of the university informing their parents or making any effort to provide practical help.
While such movements as "Occupy California" and others have pushed for real political student action, the institution would not simply allow it. While "walk-outs" and "sit-ins" were popular and even in some places common occurrences in America in the 1960s and 70s and before, it has now become a cause extreme and reason for suspicion and harassment.
But no matter what the university may do, or may wish to do, it will not change the path University of California students, while small in proportion, may be choosing to attempt change in their small world. And without compromise from the power-wielding faction of the institution, it is highly unlikely a more compromising attitude will be one students will have.
The vast amount of young people of this country are not stupid, or liable to be taken as fools, but only if they are treated so will they be all the more eager to show the fool of the other.
So let this message be carved into every school's weighty cornerstone, that these scrawls of students are not without reason or certainly not to be taken lightly. For without students, there is no university and without the educated seeking an education, little can be expected of these once grand institutions.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Rep. Brady Grills Geithner
Congressman Kevin Brady of Texas Questions Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner on November 19, 2009.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Carbon Police: Intendants Extreme
It comes as no shock that every centralized national government in history longs for a way into the lives and business of their citizens, often at great expense. In imperial France under the reign of Louis XIV, the "Sun King", the royalty discovered a new way to control the masses. Systematically, the king transformed a method of replacing local autonomous town councils with hand-picked 'Intendants' that usurped the former rulers' stature and powers.
After castrating the force of town councils whose existence based itself on long standing post-feudal tradition in France, these stand-ins gave the royalty new unspeakable power to micromanage the breadth of a nation.
And with the passage of H.R. 2454, the "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009" (better known as the Waxman-Markey Bill), a little noticed provision may introduce that principle into action.
Alexis de Tocqueville, famed French dignitary and historian, in The Old Regime in the French Revolution blames the system of enabling centralized non-appeal-able decision making for not only the collapse of the regime, but also for the failure of the French Revolution to cement its original goals. As traditional autonomous politicking had been severed in France for several generations before the outbreak of revolution, Tocqueville theorizes that the Intendant system reaped irreparable harm on the French political-social order.
To create "green jobs," the new bill which requires the U.S. to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050. To enforce these new proposed limits and collect payments of "carbon tax credits" from every home and business in America, the federal government will have to hire hundreds of thousands if not well over a million "environmental" inspectors whose influence will eventually reach to anything in America bigger than a doghouse.
Radio host and political analyst Alex Jones in his new film Fall of the Republic highlights this issue as a new attempt to force greater unnecessary government surveillance and intrusion into people's homes.
Provisions of H.R. 2454 call for each municipality in America down to a village (usually consisting of less than a thousand citizens) to employ at their own expense, a federally tied city planner along with an environmental planner to have sole decision making authority to approve or deny the legal live-ability of any construction or pre-existing structure. With this arrangement, the ultimate Intendant now arrives.
City planners have been staples of major cities for decades. But, when serving only the city government, their actions must meet the standard of the local people. This formula in itself is often the most significant power and resource of a community. In contrast, replacing well-accounted for city officials with federally-instructed implants will only serve to undermine local autonomy in America. And such was the exact intent of placing Intendants in place of local councils in imperial France.
First, university trained environmental planners and urban studies majors go to tiny villages and towns in isolated flats and ridges to instruct generations-rooted locals how best to develop their streets, buildings and insulate their homes. While honest efforts to construct a better infrastructure and sustainable environment should be lauded and pursued, federally mandating and supervising of these pursuits could create uniformed and disastrous effects. For many villages without one paid municipal employee, even financing this helpful yet unneeded regime will strain budgets, stymie diversity and ultimately hamper innovation.
And a 'city planner' would be the first for starts. Next, a presiding mayoral Intendant or even a uniform system of Intendant city councils in cities nationwide could constitute the new plan.
Jones points out in Fall of the Republic that the main agenda of the climate-change bills comes to its insistence on using federally trained watchers, spies if you will, to further regulate and weaken the power of the American people. As obscure as it may sound, this sinister provision of the cap and trade legislation in efforts to "build a green economy" may permanently regulate and even possibly destroy the very economy it promises to save.
In regulating only carbon and not the true environmental disasters which presently face us (ie. contamination of water, nuclear proliferation and genetically modified food), the cap and trade bill lacks any real solution and only exposes itself as another clever Ponzi scheme brainstormed by America's saviors at Goldman Sachs.
In this heavily politicized and emotionally charged subject often interpreted as either being for or against the environment through a simplified myth, we must remember that while putting limits on elements like carbon and oxygen may sound environmentally helpful, these elements themselves are the building blocks of human life. To begin a massive national, if not soon to be global system, of element regulation in a day where registered corporations own the seeds of life, it is no farce to say that ironically life is under attack with an arm twisting Intendant seizing and twisting the dagger of control.
Tocqueville warned much about centralization of power and in his masterpiece Democracy in America identified local autonomy as the force behind free and equal society in America. To him, the Intendants of France gutted a once-apt group of independent localities and forever severed the French people's institutional ability to rule themselves. For even after the Revolution, France forever centralized and transformed could never return to the egalitarianism which straddled the burgeoning of the modern world.
In America, similar circumstances beg the future's fate. The questions remains if this moment of Intendant does come to pass, once the People realize, will it be too late?
After castrating the force of town councils whose existence based itself on long standing post-feudal tradition in France, these stand-ins gave the royalty new unspeakable power to micromanage the breadth of a nation.
And with the passage of H.R. 2454, the "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009" (better known as the Waxman-Markey Bill), a little noticed provision may introduce that principle into action.
Alexis de Tocqueville, famed French dignitary and historian, in The Old Regime in the French Revolution blames the system of enabling centralized non-appeal-able decision making for not only the collapse of the regime, but also for the failure of the French Revolution to cement its original goals. As traditional autonomous politicking had been severed in France for several generations before the outbreak of revolution, Tocqueville theorizes that the Intendant system reaped irreparable harm on the French political-social order.
To create "green jobs," the new bill which requires the U.S. to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050. To enforce these new proposed limits and collect payments of "carbon tax credits" from every home and business in America, the federal government will have to hire hundreds of thousands if not well over a million "environmental" inspectors whose influence will eventually reach to anything in America bigger than a doghouse.
Radio host and political analyst Alex Jones in his new film Fall of the Republic highlights this issue as a new attempt to force greater unnecessary government surveillance and intrusion into people's homes.
Provisions of H.R. 2454 call for each municipality in America down to a village (usually consisting of less than a thousand citizens) to employ at their own expense, a federally tied city planner along with an environmental planner to have sole decision making authority to approve or deny the legal live-ability of any construction or pre-existing structure. With this arrangement, the ultimate Intendant now arrives.
City planners have been staples of major cities for decades. But, when serving only the city government, their actions must meet the standard of the local people. This formula in itself is often the most significant power and resource of a community. In contrast, replacing well-accounted for city officials with federally-instructed implants will only serve to undermine local autonomy in America. And such was the exact intent of placing Intendants in place of local councils in imperial France.
First, university trained environmental planners and urban studies majors go to tiny villages and towns in isolated flats and ridges to instruct generations-rooted locals how best to develop their streets, buildings and insulate their homes. While honest efforts to construct a better infrastructure and sustainable environment should be lauded and pursued, federally mandating and supervising of these pursuits could create uniformed and disastrous effects. For many villages without one paid municipal employee, even financing this helpful yet unneeded regime will strain budgets, stymie diversity and ultimately hamper innovation.
And a 'city planner' would be the first for starts. Next, a presiding mayoral Intendant or even a uniform system of Intendant city councils in cities nationwide could constitute the new plan.
Jones points out in Fall of the Republic that the main agenda of the climate-change bills comes to its insistence on using federally trained watchers, spies if you will, to further regulate and weaken the power of the American people. As obscure as it may sound, this sinister provision of the cap and trade legislation in efforts to "build a green economy" may permanently regulate and even possibly destroy the very economy it promises to save.
In regulating only carbon and not the true environmental disasters which presently face us (ie. contamination of water, nuclear proliferation and genetically modified food), the cap and trade bill lacks any real solution and only exposes itself as another clever Ponzi scheme brainstormed by America's saviors at Goldman Sachs.
In this heavily politicized and emotionally charged subject often interpreted as either being for or against the environment through a simplified myth, we must remember that while putting limits on elements like carbon and oxygen may sound environmentally helpful, these elements themselves are the building blocks of human life. To begin a massive national, if not soon to be global system, of element regulation in a day where registered corporations own the seeds of life, it is no farce to say that ironically life is under attack with an arm twisting Intendant seizing and twisting the dagger of control.
Tocqueville warned much about centralization of power and in his masterpiece Democracy in America identified local autonomy as the force behind free and equal society in America. To him, the Intendants of France gutted a once-apt group of independent localities and forever severed the French people's institutional ability to rule themselves. For even after the Revolution, France forever centralized and transformed could never return to the egalitarianism which straddled the burgeoning of the modern world.
In America, similar circumstances beg the future's fate. The questions remains if this moment of Intendant does come to pass, once the People realize, will it be too late?
Monday, November 2, 2009
Pakistanis Harangue Clinton, Reveal U.S. Imperialism
When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Pakistan late last week for a three-day public relations tour, upon meeting with leaders of Pakistani society a general outburst of anger and incredulity became desperately apparent.
When pressed by one Pakistani whether a U.S. drone attacks violate the judicial process and qualify as terrorism, Clinton carefully paused and relayed, "No I do not." The Star Tribune reports a drone attack killed nearly 100 civilians in Peshawar earlier last week.
Another man respectfully remarked, that Pakistanis feel they are fighting America's war. Clinton could offer little sympathy after a Washington Post article intimated Obama very well may send an addition 15,000 U.S. troops to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region where Al-Qaeda terrorists are suspected of hiding.
Moreover, with the announcement yesterday of the pullout of Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah of the Nov. 7 retrial "election" after massive vote-fraud perpetuated by President Hamid Karzai was discovered, public legitimacy of U.S. interference in the region is reaching an all-time low. Little hope the partisan-politique smash-up Mrs. Clinton could offer. Instead of attempting true diplomacy, her style of negotiation only offers ultimatums and forced partnerships as acceptable solutions in working with other nations.
Most notably, famed Pakistani journalist Sana Bucha of GEO-TV interviewed Secretary of State Clinton. The Star Tribune reports that she scolded Clinton, instructing er that, "It is not our war, it is your war [...] You had one 9/11, we are having daily 9/11s in Pakistan."
Sadly, western mainstream media marginalized Bucha's heroic stand by only vaguely identifying her as "a woman."
Clinton did not participate much better as conversation indicates. The Star Tribune noted she tersely replied to passionate concerns over extrajudicial U.S. surprise drone executions. Attempting to allay worries, Clinton could only remarked that, "there is a war going on."
These real concerns can no longer be marginalized as people around the globe are now screaming for state leaders to recognize and address these grave inequities. For a great nation who in the past aimed to take the moral high ground, that same concept, now in perverted form, is used to justify mass-executions of innocent bystanders. In some twisted sort of morality, even the unfathomably evil is fair game.
When pressed by one Pakistani whether a U.S. drone attacks violate the judicial process and qualify as terrorism, Clinton carefully paused and relayed, "No I do not." The Star Tribune reports a drone attack killed nearly 100 civilians in Peshawar earlier last week.
Another man respectfully remarked, that Pakistanis feel they are fighting America's war. Clinton could offer little sympathy after a Washington Post article intimated Obama very well may send an addition 15,000 U.S. troops to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region where Al-Qaeda terrorists are suspected of hiding.
Moreover, with the announcement yesterday of the pullout of Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah of the Nov. 7 retrial "election" after massive vote-fraud perpetuated by President Hamid Karzai was discovered, public legitimacy of U.S. interference in the region is reaching an all-time low. Little hope the partisan-politique smash-up Mrs. Clinton could offer. Instead of attempting true diplomacy, her style of negotiation only offers ultimatums and forced partnerships as acceptable solutions in working with other nations.
Most notably, famed Pakistani journalist Sana Bucha of GEO-TV interviewed Secretary of State Clinton. The Star Tribune reports that she scolded Clinton, instructing er that, "It is not our war, it is your war [...] You had one 9/11, we are having daily 9/11s in Pakistan."
Sadly, western mainstream media marginalized Bucha's heroic stand by only vaguely identifying her as "a woman."
Clinton did not participate much better as conversation indicates. The Star Tribune noted she tersely replied to passionate concerns over extrajudicial U.S. surprise drone executions. Attempting to allay worries, Clinton could only remarked that, "there is a war going on."
These real concerns can no longer be marginalized as people around the globe are now screaming for state leaders to recognize and address these grave inequities. For a great nation who in the past aimed to take the moral high ground, that same concept, now in perverted form, is used to justify mass-executions of innocent bystanders. In some twisted sort of morality, even the unfathomably evil is fair game.
Ron Paul on Corporatism
Congressman Ron Paul (R) of Texas lectures Larry King on corporatism, managed capitalism and free markets. From CNN's Larry King Live, Sunday, November 1.
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