Category Archives: Terrorism

Man With The Reverse-Midas Touch

Barack Obama, Economy, Energy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Free Markets, Government, Labor, Propaganda, Terrorism

The excerpt is from “Man With The Reverse-Midas Touch,” my new WND.COM column:

I’m really looking forward to hearing a speech by someone who is involved in innovation, knows America’s place in the world market and has fiscal responsibility. And I hope that Obama is listening very carefully when Steve Jobs speaks tomorrow.

“That was Penn Jillette on the eve of Barack Obama’s first, much-anticipated State of the Union address. The celebrity libertarian magician was making mischief with one of Larry King’s stock
questions.

It takes a magician to know one. On the day of Obama’s State of the Union sermon, Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., launched a magic mobile device called the ‘iPad.’ Perhaps Jillette thinks that the solution to America’s economic inertia lies in visionary producers like Jobs, and not in vain, profligate politicians like the president.

Technology is certainly a task for which Obama and minions are singularly ill-equipped. But that has not stopped them from tinkering – and attempting to bend industry in ‘green’ directions.

‘We should put more Americans to work building clean-energy facilities,’ Barack boomed last night. “You can see the results of last year’s investments in clean energy – in the North Carolina company that will create 1,200 jobs nationwide helping to make advanced batteries.’

Not according to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Against its politically correct instincts, the IEEE was forced to ‘cast stones at a wide selection of … poorly conceived technology projects.’ One of these was Government Motors’ Chevrolet Volt, ‘a car known as a plug-in hybrid because it will get most of its power from the wall socket in a garage.’

You see, unless the Big O issues a mandate compelling Americans to purchase the commie car, the Volt won’t be making money. …”

Read the complete column, “Man With The Reverse-Midas Touch.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Security With Intelligence

Affirmative Action, Government, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Israel, Terrorism

Inadvertently—and in a characteristically witty way—Isaac Yeffet seems to second my diagnosis that, “Homegrown retardation is far more pressing a problem than homegrown terrorism in modern-day America.”

The multi-talented Yeffet is the former security director of Israel’s airliner, El Al, “pioneer in counter-terrorism,” and entrepreneur.

Yeffet attempted to explain the concept of utilizing intelligence, as in brain power, to Huckabee. (Please someone locate and post that YouTube), but Heehaw Huck kept insisting on blaming the system.

Updated: ‘The System’ Did It

Free Markets, Government, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Propaganda, Regulation, Terrorism, The State

“A nimble adversary” is how Obama characterized a bunch of rag-tag terrorists—Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—who had resorted to recruiting for their mission a clumsy, inept boy, about whom ample warnings existed in “The system.”

Mr. Abdulmutallab was not placed on the no-fly list “despite the government’s having information that showed him to be not only a threat, but also a threat with a visa to visit the United States.”

Inflating 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s abilities does wonders to lessen our failings, which are legion.

Remember and rehearse: What failed was the (intelligence) system. No flesh-and-blood was involved in the many monumental mistakes. All there was was an amorphous thing called “The system.”

Pray tell if you know of a private company, subject to market forces, getting away with assigning blame to their “system,” rather than to its constituent parts—individual operators. Such a firm would be without customers.

(And people who know they’d get fingered and fired from their private-sector jobs for such failings are clamoring for a public option to serve as competition to the health care insurance industry.)

Under the stumble-bumble Bush administration, we experienced, and forgave, the criminal negligence that facilitated the most devastating terrorist attack on US soil.

Condy Cow (CC) ignored “a 1999 report by the Library of Congress stating that suicide bombers belonging to al-Qaida could crash an aircraft into U.S. targets,” stating that it belonged to the realm of analysis, and wasn’t ‘actionable intelligence.'”

We’re still debating the same disconnected darn dots.

CC then blamed her ineptness on the need to reform Washington’s atrophied alphabet soup of intelligence agencies. Ten years on, the Obama administration is doing the same, although to his credit, the president has taken responsibility for the failures; says they embarrassed him, and accuses his people of letting him down (brownie point for Barack).

The bare-bones truth is that the National Security Council, headed by Rice, was an office created to advise the president on anything relating to national security and to facilitate inter-agency cooperation. “If suspicion existed – analytic, synthetic, prosaic or poetic – Rice should have put the squeeze on the system she oversaw.”

The same goes for the people (the same folks, really) operating “The System” today.

On Condy’s watch America experienced perhaps the worst intelligence lapse ever: Remember the Phoenix FBI agent who wrote a memorandum about the bin Ladenites who were training in U.S. flight schools? Agent Ken Williams’ report was very specific. Over and above the standard sloth the memo met in the Washington headquarters, it transpired that the FBI was as concerned about ‘racial profiling’ then as it is today.

Since Bush, the way we talk about security failures has changed little, bar some semantic tweaks. Neither will it. There are simply no incentives in a government “system” to make it amenable to corrective feedback. The reason nothing changes is because of the nature of “The System.”

Update (Jan. 8): And the concept of terrorism in its aspirational stage? What state-speak is that?

Updated: 'The System' Did It

Free Markets, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Propaganda, Regulation, Terrorism, The State

“A nimble adversary” is how Obama characterized a bunch of rag-tag terrorists—Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—who had resorted to recruiting for their mission a clumsy, inept boy, about whom ample warnings existed in “The system.”

Mr. Abdulmutallab was not placed on the no-fly list “despite the government’s having information that showed him to be not only a threat, but also a threat with a visa to visit the United States.”

Inflating 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s abilities does wonders to lessen our failings, which are legion.

Remember and rehearse: What failed was the (intelligence) system. No flesh-and-blood was involved in the many monumental mistakes. All there was was an amorphous thing called “The system.”

Pray tell if you know of a private company, subject to market forces, getting away with assigning blame to their “system,” rather than to its constituent parts—individual operators. Such a firm would be without customers.

(And people who know they’d get fingered and fired from their private-sector jobs for such failings are clamoring for a public option to serve as competition to the health care insurance industry.)

Under the stumble-bumble Bush administration, we experienced, and forgave, the criminal negligence that facilitated the most devastating terrorist attack on US soil.

Condy Cow (CC) ignored “a 1999 report by the Library of Congress stating that suicide bombers belonging to al-Qaida could crash an aircraft into U.S. targets,” stating that it belonged to the realm of analysis, and wasn’t ‘actionable intelligence.'”

We’re still debating the same disconnected darn dots.

CC then blamed her ineptness on the need to reform Washington’s atrophied alphabet soup of intelligence agencies. Ten years on, the Obama administration is doing the same, although to his credit, the president has taken responsibility for the failures; says they embarrassed him, and accuses his people of letting him down (brownie point for Barack).

The bare-bones truth is that the National Security Council, headed by Rice, was an office created to advise the president on anything relating to national security and to facilitate inter-agency cooperation. “If suspicion existed – analytic, synthetic, prosaic or poetic – Rice should have put the squeeze on the system she oversaw.”

The same goes for the people (the same folks, really) operating “The System” today.

On Condy’s watch America experienced perhaps the worst intelligence lapse ever: Remember the Phoenix FBI agent who wrote a memorandum about the bin Ladenites who were training in U.S. flight schools? Agent Ken Williams’ report was very specific. Over and above the standard sloth the memo met in the Washington headquarters, it transpired that the FBI was as concerned about ‘racial profiling’ then as it is today.

Since Bush, the way we talk about security failures has changed little, bar some semantic tweaks. Neither will it. There are simply no incentives in a government “system” to make it amenable to corrective feedback. The reason nothing changes is because of the nature of “The System.”

Update (Jan. 8): And the concept of terrorism in its aspirational stage? What state-speak is that?