Shoddy Security At Boston Marathon Says DEBKAfile

Crime, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Israel, Media, Terrorism

As is its wont, America’s lapdog media is neglecting to track the facts in the April 15, Boston Marathon bombings, favoring shock and awe—a sensational, ratings-oriented focus. The same news networks are telling you that security at the event had been impressive. Really? Israel’s DEBKAfile strongly disagrees:

“… The lack of adequate security jumps to the eye after twin bombings struck the high-prestige Boston Marathon Monday, April 15, killing three people, including an 8-year old boy and injuring 140 – seventeen critically.
This was the world’s oldest annual marathon, with 28,000 runners representing athletes from every US state and more than 90 nations. Yet there was no sign of dogs along the route trained to sniff out explosives or a police helicopter overhead with sensors for detecting explosives or traces thereof on the person of anyone present around the finishing line after the blasts.”

So badly has the definition of news disintegrated that newsmen seem incapable of thinking critically and pursuing the right questions. They know one thing: they want a shock-and-awe fix.

Israeli civilians understand the deep and dark reality in the heart of their enemies; the existential meaning of painstakingly packing parcels of shrapnel, ball-bearings, nails and rat poison to lodge in the bodies of their civilians. Someone wants Americans to experience the same dark reality.

Although our networks rarely cover this aspect of Israeli life, “the task facing Israeli medics has become a routine. Surgeons must slice open the surviving victims of these fiendish devices, picking from the flesh and burrowing in the bone for embedded shards of shrapnel, ball bearings, and nails. The rat poison is a diabolic touch, intended to intensify internal bleeding. If they survive, victims are left maimed and wracked with life-long disfigurement and pain.” (“TO BE OR NOT TO BE BLOWN UP”)

Now we hear that our doctors are also treating “victims maimed by what looked like ball bearings or BBs. Doctors also said they removed a host of sharp objects from the victims, including nails that were sticking out of one little girl’s body.”

Diabolical.

Local experts, the president and his henchmen, instinctively tend to implicate their fellow countrymen as the possible culprits in the Boston Marathon bombings.

DEBKAfile, on the other hand, posits that a Saudi cell consisting of Al Qaeda of Arabia (AQAP) might be responsible for setting off the devices:

debkafile’s counterterrorism sources can disclose however that the investigation has in fact homed in on a suspected terror cell of three Saudi nationals, very possibly tied to Al Qaeda.
The flat they share in the Revere, Massachusetts, near Boston, was searched after the questioning of one of the suspects, a Saudi student, who was hospitalized with badly burned hands. One of his flatmates was taken into custody over “visa problems.” A third is on the run. All three hail from a prominent Saudi family belonging to a tribe from the Asir province bordering on Yemen.
The search for the wanted man led to the grounding of a plane at Logan International Airport Tuesday. The investigation has meanwhile broadened out to places in and outside Boston in a search for the cell’s accomplices.
The origins of the Saudi cell, if confirmed, strongly suggest that Al Qaeda of Arabia – AQAP –succeeded in planting a cell in the United States for the bombing attack in Boston – and possibly more than one in other parts of the US. Asir Province is known as a hotbed of resistance to the Saudi throne in Riyadh.

When The FBI Goes A Hunting, Remember The Ruin Of Richard Jewell

Crime, Law, Terrorism, The State

When I heard that a victim of the Boston Marathon bombings was being held as a “person of interest,” I thought of Richard Jewell. He was a “security guard … who became known in connection with the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Discovering a pipe bomb on the park grounds, Jewell alerted police and helped to evacuate the area before the bomb exploded, saving many people from injury or death. Initially hailed by the media as a hero, Jewell was later [hounded] as a suspect.” (Wikipedia)

Despite having never being [sic] charged, [Jewell] underwent a “trial by media” with great toll on his personal and professional life. Eventually he was completely exonorated [sic].

(Information and grammar courtesy of Wikipedia.)

The rumor about the apprehension of a suspect has since been dispelled by CNN. Still, let us hope that no lives are ruined, à la Richard Jewell, in the course of what promises to be a showy and politicized FBI hunt for the perpetrators.

While I was hoping no more innocent victims—this time in the form of the falsely accused—suffer; Bill Anderson, at LRC.COM, has a good idea who ‘The Southern Paranoia Law Center’ is “praying” will be implicated in detonating the Boston marathon bombs:

Anyone reading this post right now almost certainly does NOT know who was responsible for the despicable bombing today at the Boston Marathon. Yet, given that the USA is a hopelessly-politicized country, I am sure that accusations already are being thrown about like so much else of the ignorance that is spewed on various venues these days.
I AM sure, however, that the people at the Southern Paranoia Law Center (SPLC) are hoping, HOPING! that the perpetrators were “white supremacists” so that the SPLC immediately can send out fund-raising letters to turn this sad event into a cash cow. (And I am sure that Paul Krugman would love to be able to blame the Tea Party or maybe even Ron Paul supporters.)
According to news reports, federal agents are “flooding” the area and, I suppose, probably are doing as much damage as an overflowing Charles River would do. One thing is for sure: these “investigators” will botch the case and then lie about the results. The authorities seem to do that quite well.

Fisker, Tesla: Fisting* The Paying Public

Bush, Business, Fascism, Government, Intelligence, Political Philosophy, Private Property, Regulation, Sex, Socialism, Taxation, Technology

Last night we dined at a local eatery in our Washington State town. Parked outside the restaurant was the electric commie car, the Tesla Roadster.

Well of course, the pinkos who proliferate and rule my state are as dumb as they are dastardly.

DUMB because they fail to understand that, “Whether a vehicle is propelled by hydrogen-powered fuel cells or electricity, both electricity and hydrogen don’t magically materialize in the vehicle. They must first be generated. Be it coal, natural gas, nuclear or a hydroelectric dam, these cars are only as clean as the original source of energy that generated the vim that powers them.”

Other than to increase the consumption of gas, because people drive more in them, state-sponsorship of so-called fuel-efficient cars is a grand exercise in compulsory misallocation and waste of capital. It proves that the development of technologies is best left to the market, not to environmental bureaucracies. The electric car is a marvelous metaphor for the legislator’s attempt to shackle the ‘wayward’ consumer. Purchase one, and your best bet is to avoid straying too far from the socket in your garage, or, alternatively, drive with a very long extension cord, lest your vehicle turn into something not nearly as useful as Cinderella’s pumpkin at midnight. The benefits to the consumer are few, much less to the environment, unless a steady discharge of lead, cadmium, and nickel—the byproducts of batteries—is a blessing in disguise.

[“Commie Cars”]

DASTARDLY because the immoral pinko has no qualms about forcefully taking from taxpaying Americans to give to favored state-sponsored interests, like Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive.

The first “received a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy.”

Here, Republicans deserve to be reminded to hang their heads in shame. “The Department of Energy loan program was created in 2007 during the George Bush administration,” for the purpose of manufacturing the equivalent of the USSR’s “People’s Car.”

The second “has received $193 million of a $529 million Energy Department loan … Fisker Automotive — the electric-car maker that was granted a half-billion-dollar federal loan and on Friday dismissed about 75 percent of its remaining workforce — is purportedly facing a lawsuit from the same firm that sued the government-funded Solyndra company …Fisker laid off 160 of its roughly 210 employees Friday morning from its Anaheim, Calif., location.” (Fox News April 06, 2013.)

Don’t look to GOOGLE to serve you news straight up either. News about the bankruptcy or lack of viability of these subsidiaries of the state does not pop up first in related searches.

Writing in the Mises Institute’s indispensable Free Market, PETER G. KLEIN partially explains the dynamics that underpin these examples of American fascism (state-corporate collaborations). “Partially,” because Dr. Klein omits the private-property variable and philosophical fulcrum. (And the editor of TFM does Dr.Klein a disservice by giving the essay a title that is unexplained in the text: What on earth is “Tang”? Writers/editors should never assume their readers know what they’re talking about.) Explains Klein:

Today, when we look at private companies like Google,
Apple, and Facebook and marvel at their innovations, we
should remember that these companies are constantly
subject to market tests, and that the goods and services
they innovate must be accepted by consumers to be profitable. When they succeed, we know that they are creating value for society because consumers have chosen their products and services over others.
The goods and services produced by the Rand Corporation and the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation do not face any kind of market test. The goods and services they produce are valuable to the directors, and
members of Congress, and to the researchers themselves
who are on the payroll, but the value of this research is
determined arbitrarily.

Tesla and Fisker “produce” for the dim-witted Hollywood and D.C. elites, whom YOU are forced to finance. That’s it.

Fisker and Tesla are fisting* the paying public.

***

* Disclaimer: The reason I know about this practice is because I used to volunteer as an HIV/AIDS counselor in South Africa. Filthy and perverted, it’s an appropriate metaphor for robbery by state and special-interests.

Unscrambling Libertarian Scripts

Feminism, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Intellectualism, Intelligence, libertarianism, Liberty, Paleolibertarianism, Politics, Ron Paul

Here I answer my pal Myron Pauli, who, while a fierce individualist, all too often falls into the blasé libertarian, collective group-think, whereby only Ron Paul escapes blame for his imperfections (such as the incessant noodling about Congress’s need to declare war—as if the imprimatur of cockroaches turns unjust wars into just ones—or calling a focus on immigration in tough economic times a function of xenophobia; cleaving to the left’s tack on so-called endemic racism, being a career politician, on and on).

Myron’s Facebook comment below is a response to this week’s WND column, where I very specifically home in on Maggie Thatcher’s manifest individualism and cerebral acuity, not her policies.

Writes Myron Robert Pauli:

As a libertarian nerd, I will often claim that the most beneficial people are often anonymous innovators who come up with a medical or device breakthrough to benefit the world (who invented the thermostat?)…. – on the other hand, politicians are mostly parasitic – the best benign politicians like Thatcher are the ones who foil the MALIGNANT designs of the Footes, Galtieris, and Brezhnevs. Hence, she was a Giantess in a field of pygmies (of course, she might have accomplished more had she stayed in chemistry or took over her father’s store- a great lady nonetheless).

MY REPLY: Thatcher was no pigmy, however which way you slice it. Be it in her role in a laboratory, bringing us one step closer to the delights of soft-serve ice-cream (the left denies her involvement, naturally), or smashing the unions and keeping the England she loved out of the EU.

You are repeating the usual libertarian echo chamber/mantra: Apply a single analysis to each politician other than Ron Paul, of course, whose every indiscretion is ignored, and every endeavor, even parasitic, is elevated.

The independent, unaffiliated writer should fight for intellectual virtue against the Idicoracy and the mediocrity. Without those intellectual standards, there can be no liberty. For those attributes, Mrs Thatcher is to be lauded. It is careless to dismiss these gifts of hers so rare in the populace and the people, for these attributes were enormously influential at the time.

Pundit-cum-philospher Jack Kerwick once observed how virtually impossible it is to reduce the size of the state. As a practical matter, it is well-nigh impossible to choke the modern, Western managerial state without a coup, or without shedding blood, as Thomas Jefferson advised.

Let’s see the brave theoreticians, confined to their safe theoretical perimeters, waffling into the ether, accomplish what Mrs. Thatcher accomplished: smash the unions, defend Britain from Brussels, privatize so many of Britain’s Sovietized industries, prohibit subsidies to industry, on and on.

Was she flawed? Most assuredly. (As a longtime antiwar libertarian, I’d be the first to say so.) But even more flawed are those who dismiss her with the pat libertarian analysis of, “Oh, she didn’t achieve a market anarchy. I can go back to snoozing, rather than apply my intellect to an assessment of what she did do.”

More crucially, and that was the focus of “Margaret Thatcher: An Individualist, Not A Feminist”: Any woman who thought and spoke as she did is inspiring because so rare and getting rarer by the day.

“Big hair, an overbite, Botox and mind-numbing banalities”: that’s the contemporary role model of womanhood that infests TV.

Updates to the original Margaret Thatcher blog post are here.