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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, January 01, 2010

EXCLUSIVE: Jumped Shark Devours Newsweek's Michael Isikoff In Self-Defense 

...wait!! What!? Would your faithful servant actually suggest that the man who essentially made his bones stoking the fires of the Clinton Impeachapalooza should be consumed by a thoughtless cold-blooded piscean killing machine just because he doesn't even seem to have a sufficiently vague grasp of journalistic ethics to keep this sort of intentionally divisive tripe from seeing the light of day?

Well, no. I would never suggest such a thing.

That would be ridiculous.

I am a far bigger fan of Orcas, but "jumped the killer whale" just doesn't have any cred on the street, so any suggestion that a Newsweek 'superstar' should be devoured by an intelligent, warm-blooded mammalian killing machine that may have well-reasoned malice aforethought would simply be a lost, wasted metaphor...

This entire report looks like little more than a journalistic hatchet job more worthy of FAUX News than some entity that still - rightly or wrongly - considers itself to be a real-live old school Fourth Estate enterprise. From the headline on down, it is a wealth of innuendo and carefully shaded suppositions, none of which provides anything approximating the barest hint that we are looking at anything that even rises to the level of that infamous 6 August 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing...

The inflammatory headline says "Obama Got Pre-Christmas Intelligence Briefing About Terror Threats to "Homeland", but what are the facts of the story?

Did the briefing mention Yemen? No.

Did it include any mention of the potential of an African national being involved? Well, no, not really.

Did the briefing have any information that suggested that anyone at the mid-level or higher layers of the US government had "threads" that could have been pulled together to make Barack Obama go all Harrison Ford and clamber on board Northwest Flight 253 in Amsterdam on Christmas day and personally take down Umar Abdulmutallab? Nope.

Was there anything - any little piece of evidence at all - available to anybody who either gave or received the briefing that would point to a Nigerian man getting on a US-bound flight in the capital city of the Netherlands for the express purpose of blowing up his plane over Detroit? Get real!! Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) couldn't get any farther inland than Bangor, Maine, and his only real crime was "Moon Shadow".

Yes, there were "threads". No, they didn't point to Abdulmutallab, and the fact that his dad tried to raise red flags reflect more on the intelligence structure that Gee Dub's administration left behind rather than on the efforts of the current administration. More to the point, none of this mattered in that EXCLUSIVE Breaking news report about the briefing that Isikoff is so breathlessly taken by...

There were failures in any number of systems that allowed Abdulmutallab to get on Northwest Flight 253 on Dec. 25. There was not, on the other hand, a single thing offered by this EXCLUSIVE Isikoff "report" that suggests that the upper levels of the Obama administration had a single clue to go on in order to interdict this particular terrorist attack. The headline and the reporting look good, though, in the sort of newly discovered context of a media that somehow lost its voice when Republicans were in charge but suddenly doesn't feel constrained about 'speaking "truth" to power' now that Democrats have hands on all those levers of power...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:57 PM 0 comments

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Forests And Trees, Anti-Terror Division 

...aside from all the finger-pointing going on right now in the intelligence community and amongst various critics dug out of the woodwork by Politico in this story, there is still one really important point that is being missed:

The Guy Got On An Airplane...

Regardless of any information that any particular officer of the federal government had in his or her possession at any given moment, The Guy Got On An Airplane...

Yes, there appear to be ongoing problems with various agencies and departments being able to play well together, but that doesn't actually surprise me. My years of exposure to the Fed Borg have caused me to develop a simple philosophy that I call the Rule of Concentric Circles:

Employees tend to occupy a native environment controlled by an 'us vs. them' mentality that is bounded at varying levels of intensity in outwardly expanding circles. There is the 'us' in a room vs. 'them' in the rest of the office; there is the 'us of the office vs. the 'them' of offices in other locations; then there is the 'us' of our organization vs. the 'them' of other organizations. Finally there is the big encompassing 'us' vs. all those 'thems' who represent some other culture or state or movement. There can be any number of extra circular boundaries in between, adding layers to this construct, but there are always those next outer circular boundaries defining where some version 'them' lives. There is, of course, a certain sort of bond as we move across the adjacent boundary to the next larger version of 'us', but as you move across those boundaries to outer circles, the valence of that bond tends to weaken.


So, sure, there are turf wars between groups who - from the outside - would seem to an objective observer to be otherwise naturally disposed to work together for the good of the order. That problem surely needs to be fixed (though, for the life of me, I don't know how one goes about doing that in light of the ancient animosities and historic disagreeable relationships amongst various intelligence and security agencies without resorting to performance incentives like directed reassignment to Afghanistan for failure to cooperate), but it misses the main point...

Anti-terrorist intelligence work has never been the sole forward edge of the battle area (FEBA) in the effort to keep militants and wackos and lone wolves from threatening the lives of air travelers. We have been subjecting ourselves to varying degrees of personal scrutiny in our efforts to get on a commercial airliner for a few decades now, and the reality of strangers forking through our suitcased underwear, pawing through our carry-ons, and sending our camera bags full of precious memories through powerful x-ray machines has been around far longer than the TSA. Those security screening lines have long been a primary FEBA, initially because most folks didn't care to have their Seattle-to-Phoenix itinerary include an intermediate stop in Havana. The Guy Got On An Airplane, and the problem isn't so much that a couple of jackbooted Federal Lackeys (as my friends and neighbors so lovingly label we Fed Borg types) couldn't see their way clear to talk to each other; the problem is that the airport security system failed. Forget that there were little cartoon arrows with "he's the one" balloon captions pointing at this guy as he moved through the system because of the available information; the fact is that He Got On That Plane and, even if his dad hadn't been a stand-up guy or if he was just some lone actor with a head full of hate and some interesting contacts, He Still Would Have Gotten On That Flight...

The trees are blocking the view of the forest here; the point that is being missed is obvious. The most important failure that apparently came close to resulting in a tragedy over Detroit on Christmas day was the failure of the passenger screening process. It's true that there are plenty of waypoints where this particular fellow could have and should have been identified and interdicted, but the fact remains that some guy was able to get onto a commercial flight with a pants-load of PETN and a loaded syringe he wasn't forced to explain. At one important level, it doesn't matter what his human connections were; those two important facts are what matters to most of us who go through all those hassles of putting ourselves and our loved ones onto commercial flights...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:17 PM 0 comments

List? We Don't Need No Stinkin' List! 

...this is the time of year, of course, where we are inundated with Top Ten "Best/Worst/Most of" lists, and this year we are facing a bit of a double whammy because we are not only running up against the back end of the Gregorian fantasy of a "year" but are also even facing the end of a decade. Or maybe not; it all depends whether you think counting starts with 0 or 1 (I've always been a "count to 10" kind of guy myself, but somebody who has the pull to do so says we start counting decades at 'zero', so there you are). In this case, I don't really have a real problem with ending the decade tonight, because it is a decade that deserves more than any in recent experience to be beaten with a shovel until it quits wiggling...

This hasn't been a decade that deserves any sort of enumeration of lists of ten of anything. This decade deserves to mostly be bitterly remembered for the number '8'; specifically, it deserves to be remembered - as a warning, if for no other reason - for eight years starting on the Constitutionally mandated date of Jan. 20, 2001, and ending (mercifully, but far too late) on Jan. 20, 2009. You could probably crank out any number of lists of Bottom 10 or 20 or 50 lists just accounting for the assault on our personal freedoms, civil rights, or democratic ideals as a result of the cheap shills, fixers, and neo-despots who carried George W. Bush on their shoulders through the White House door and straight into the Oval Office on that first day. They gave him a massive, shiny desk and a purty rug for it to set on, propped him up in a sumptuous leather chair, and told him not to touch anything...

The Smart People took over and began taking crowbars and clawhammers to just about anything that looked like it might represent a common understanding of who we are. Any legitimate timeline of the Bush administration's domination of this departing decade demonstrates, aside from the raw war-mongering bellicosity of the whole thing, a wholesale effort to stamp out just about any aspect at any level of The American Dream. The only thing that even vaguely and perversely looked like a saving grace in Bushco's effort to shift the social services burden to the middle class through massive tax cuts to the wealthy and businesses was the fact that - at the same time - they were working like rabid feral dogs trying to tear apart those social services. Pell Grants, 'Teach For America', and stem cell research were just the tips of this ugly iceberg...

The putative representatives of the idea of keeping government out of peoples' lives brought us the Patriot Act, wiretapping of just about any person for any reason, banning of 'the morning after pill', and direct interference in the end-of-life decision of one single person. These supposed defenders of America's freedom established, through law and Executive Directive, a virtual roadmap for the creation of a dictatorship under the flimsiest of "national emergency" circumstances (and if I were the 44th President of The United States I would be sending weekly cards, Candygrams, and notes to the Republican leadership thanking them for the foresight of doing some of the heavy lifting on these items, just for the pure joy of keeping them up nights)...

Through the auspices of the office of the vice president, they dared Senate Democrats with a 'nuclear option' of blowing up the practice of filibuster over judicial nominations; in hindsight, since we ended up with Roberts and Alito anyway, it was a dare the Democrats probably should have taken. They essentially rewrote over 750 laws passed appropriately under the terms of the US Constitution by crafting "signing statements" that without actual Constitutional authority or any testing in Constitutionally-authorized courts gutted those laws to greater or lesser degrees...

One could, with sufficient time and inclination, write a fairly passable "Declaration of Independence" against the brutal reality of those eight wasted years that sit like a huge dung-beetle smack dab in the heart of this departing decade. I don't have either the time or the inclination, so a hearty wave goodbye will have to suffice. It is ironic, as I think about it, that one creation that GWB's minions certainly wouldn't care to point pridefully toward is the vibrant on-line political community that fought against everything GeeDub and his handlers tried to do. On the other hand, the current interactions of that community may suggest that Will Rogers' famous observation about 'not belonging to an organized party' doesn't even get all the way to the nut of the matter...

In any case, I don't need no stinkin' list...or, if I do, that list only need consist of 8 years off of the last decade's calendars. Or failing that, the list only needs one entry: Bush-43. That works just fine for me...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:25 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

And I Missed It 

...when you are an alumnus of the University of Idaho, there are certain things that you have been trained to accept, sort of in the same fashion that planaria are trained, by the use of various powerful painful stimuli. You learn to accept that nobody who lives more than a day's drive from the Palouse knows how to properly pronounce the name of the community (long 'o' at the end, not the 'cow' sound used when saying the name of the Ruskie capitol); you learn to come to grips with verbal abuse accruing from the historical accident of an occasional publicly prominent nitwit having spent a few months on campus. Most of all, you learn to cope with the sort of long-suffering patience that can only come from long years of witnessing doom and failure in intercollegiate athletic endeavors...

This afternoon, for the first time in just about forever and perhaps only the second time since the glaciers last receded, the Idaho Vandals played in a college bowl game against Bowling Green University in the Humanitarian Bowl at, of all places, Bronco Stadium on the campus of long-time arch rival Boise State University. In the course of the last 30 seconds of the fourth quarter, the boys in Silver and Gold pulled out a wild, improbable victory, Live On ESPN...and I missed it.

Why I missed it doesn't really matter - suffice it to say that family duty called me away when there was 1:30 left to go and the score was tied at 35. I missed it. The Vandals drove 66 yards in three plays in the last 30 seconds and went for two to win instead of kicking the PAT that would have sent the game to overtime. Even had I not missed it, I didn't have any Vandal paraphinalia to wave because I'm - well - a Vandal and we don't (especially those of use from the '70's) do a lot of gear-waving. We don't have much experience in doing that in any case, and those of us who live in Orygun's bifurcated Duck/Beaver country would be crazy to even try: Vandal fan clubs exist in Orygun but they operate like spy cells, speaking only in code and holding meetings in cold, candle-lit barns and root cellars like some modern manifestation of the French Resistance...

There was a time - not all that long ago, in fact - when I could take pride in the fact that both the national and the regional directors of my FedBorg agency were Vandals. I could at least point to the fact that those leaders and others farther down the org chart were graduates of the University of Idaho during those unruly "how's your school doing" confabs that usually erupted when talk turned to the prospects of the Oregon Ducks or the Oregon State Beavers amongst my locally-born coworkers. Tonight I can stand on my own, however, howling to that rare Blue Moon that my Vandals won. In fact, the headline tomorrow should read "Vandals Win On The Hideous Blue Boise State Smurf Turf"...... just because, for reasons that only alumni of the University of Idaho could posssibly understand. But still, a group of players who don't have any understanding if the pain we Idaho students felt in the 1970' brought it all home.

And I missed it...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:37 PM 0 comments

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Random Thoughts: Air Travel Edition 

...is there going to be any more hassle-freighted experience over the next little while than being a Nigerian passenger on a Delta/Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit?. I mean, everybody (including my first-born traveling back to Georgia in a couple of days) is going to have to deal with more issues than just a couple of days ago on any flight, but certain prospective passengers will no doubt receive special attention...
Posted by: Jack K. / 4:20 PM 0 comments

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