Tag: terrorism

Categories
crime and punishment national politics & policies too much government

Armed Americans

Terror Warnings

Scared? “July 4 terrorist attack on U.S. soil a legitimate threat, officials warn” — headlines the Washington Times.

Scared now?

Last weekend on Fox News Sunday, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mike McCaul (R‑Tx.) expressed his extreme concern that “Syrian and ISIS recruiters can use the Internet at lightning speeds to recruit followers in the United States … and then activate them to do whatever they want to do. Whether it’s military installations, law enforcement or possibly a Fourth of July event parade.”

Michael Morell, former CIA deputy director, told CBS This Morning, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re sitting here a week from today talking about an attack over the weekend in the United States. That’s how serious this is.”

In the last three weeks, the FBI has arrested ten U.S. citizens allegedly plotting attacks here — in solidarity with the Islamic State.

Just a week ago, I suggested we dump the Department of Homeland Security and start anew, because the DHS bureaucracy is hardly the best way to organize government to stop terrorist attacks.

Yet, no matter how well organized, government cannot possibly stop every act of violence.

While contemplating the Independence Day prospect of lone-​wolf lunatics or homicidal decapitators and suicide bombers organized “at lightning speeds,” a thought came to mind: We had better depend on ourselves.

If those who will heed “the siren calls” of the Islamic State do get past Homeland Security and our alphabet quilt of security agencies, let’s do everything we can to make certain they still have to face us, armed Americans.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Terror Warnings

 

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folly general freedom government transparency national politics & policies too much government

Safety, Savings and Symbolism

NSA Hydra

How can the U. S. save $2.5 billion a year, reduce the federal workforce by 4,000 hires, and engage in a symbolic act of undoubted patriotism, all at the same time?

Get rid of the Department of Homeland Security.

Matt A. Mayer, a former DHS employee who claims to have “written more on DHS than just about anyone,” writes in Reason that dismantling DHS would increase co-​ordination and decrease inefficiencies.

Since DHS was put in place, in 2003, to increase governmental co-​ordination in the face of terrorist threats, Mayer’s charge that it serves the opposite cause should … give us pause.

Establishing the DHS didn’t get rid of turf wars. Why would it? It increased the turf rather than merely reroute chains of communication and command. All other agencies still exist. Extra turf exacerbates co-​ordination difficulty.

And then there’s what state and local law enforcement faces: “the multi-​headed hydra.” The federal operation remains fragmented, which “only ensures that key items will fall through the cracks between these departments, whose personnel spend far too much time fighting each other for primacy than they should. Our enemies couldn’t ask for a more fertile environment within which to attack us.”

I added the italics, for emphasis.

Ever since Jimmy Carter ran for the presidency on consolidating bureaucratic departments in the nation’s capital, but delivered, instead, new departments, the “logic” of adding new bureaucracies onto old has proven to be the “easy answer” for insiders. But a transparent failure, for everyone else.

So, start over. Get rid of the inefficient monster.

And take heart: republics don’t have “homelands”; empires do. Let’s stop playing the wrong game.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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NSA Hydra

 

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folly general freedom national politics & policies too much government

Political Theatrics

TSA

Our suspicions have been proved: the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) doesn’t secure much of anything; it is mere “security theater.”

After revelations that TSA screeners failed to find weapons and other deadly contraband in 96 percent of tests, David A. Graham, writing for The Atlantic, asked “what kind of theater this is.… A period drama, satirizing the 2000s? Vaudeville farce?”

Easy answer: the genre is “statism.”

Statism is the worship of government, or the reliance upon government to do many more than a few tasks. It is very old.

The ancient states arose from conquest, developing as a way to milk the masses for the benefit of the few. That’s what states traditionally do: use force to move wealth from one group to another.

Along the way, the states did do some good. Amidst all their horrors.

But mostly rulers just leveraged myth and bluster to cover crimes.

In more recent times, in this great country, the idea arose that the state should be limited to a few necessary jobs, tightly controlled by the people so that government might actually defend rights, not abridge them.

But this revolutionary democratic-​republican ideology did not alter the basic nature of reality, turning the sow’s purse of the conquerors’ art into the gold of the Public Interest.

Without our vigilance, government always reverts back to its roots.

The TSA is simply the latest myth-​and-​bluster-​backed scam aiding the ludicrous notion that government is all-​powerful … while providing only faux security. Get rid of it; let its people go. Then watch airlines come up with more effective, less intrusive, more passenger-​friendly security systems.

Want theater? Try “vigilance theater.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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TSA

 

Categories
general freedom too much government

More Civilization

Civilization is a choice, a habit, a line in the … sand.

For modern, prosperous society to progress, to grow more healthy and wealthy and wise, most of us have to agree on a small set of principles. Mostly, we must agree not to rush to violence at the merest provocation.

There has to be a lot of negotiation to get anything done. At least, in a free and open civilized society.

Terrorism is the repudiation of this principle.

The main perpetrators of terrorism these days hail from Muslim peoples. But there are non-​Muslim terrorists, too. Many of the “school shootings” and similar violent acts in America and even in Europe rarely get listed as terrorism, though they certainly look terroristic. And most don’t have anything to do with Islam.

Even when Muslims are the ones committing the terrorism, their victims are often also Muslim.

Some folks estimate that as many as 95 out of a hundred terrorist victims are Muslim. Why? Because so much of this violence goes on in countries like Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

While this estimate is probably too high, the fact that Muslims themselves are the most common victims of Muslim violence suggests that the underlying problem is the lack of institutions in those lands that hold to the choice — the habit — of civilization.

So, yes: tyranny is at the root of the problem.

Americans, if we want fewer terrorists, might want to restrain our governments from propping up or closely allying ourselves to “Muslim” dictatorships, then.

This is something we can control.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

Terrorized?

This week, a major-​party politician said that “we cannot let a minority of people — and that’s what it is, a minority of people — hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority.”

How can simply having a viewpoint — a very American thing to possess, by the way — terrorize anyone?

But of course, this person wasn’t talking about real terrorism. This person — a Democratic Party politician of high standing — was using the T‑word to smear defenders of the Second Amendment.

Yes, it was Hillary Clinton, former First Lady, and former U.S. Secretary of State (an office she has now taken “full responsibility” for holding), who trotted out those words, allegedly to encourage “a more thoughtful” debate about gun control.

Demonizing her opponents as “terrorizing” her comrades is hardly a way to produce the stated result.

Them’s fightin’ words.

I know of no one who defends the Second Amendment and opposes the gun control agenda of the Democratic Party who also supports the terroristic activities of spree murderers. Not one.

We have more complicated reasons to oppose gun control than merely focusing on such violence.

But understanding those reasons would require a “more thoughtful” attitude than besmirching opponents with the word “terror.”

And as for terrorizing, there are few words more frightening coming from an American politician than “we cannot let a minority” exercise their rights — whether to arms or … holding “a viewpoint.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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video

Video: Odds Against

How safe from terrorism are we? Well, look at the odds.…

Some very basic truths are not very popular. So, folks, let’s start with those very basic truths. The ones most politicians, for example, don’t dare say.

Categories
general freedom

Against Terrorism

It’s the business of reporters to report on events like the Boston bombings, and the business of commentators to explain them. But since we don’t have enough evidence, yet, about who did what, all commentators can do is speculate …

And that’s not very illuminating. Anyone can speculate.

Instead, let’s take a step back.

“Terrorism” is old. Anarchists at the end of the 19th century began their “propaganda by the deed” campaigns, eliciting from the U.S. government a vast repressive effort against anarchists (even peaceful, non-​terrorist anarchists) and syndicalist unionism.

Striking out and terrifying a populace tends to unite that populace, making people more supportive of their government and its policies, not less. This has been observed from time immemorial. So anarchist terrorism was probably the dumbest terrorism in history.

An earlier bout of terrorism was the mob of “democrats” in France, during the late French Revolution. The furor to kill and dispossess got so out of hand that the French were prepared for a tyrant, Napoleon.

Not very effective there, either.

The most common form of terrorism in the last century was state terrorism, where governments brutalized their citizens, the better to solidify power. These regimes seem to succeed, sometimes for long periods. But people eventually turn on such tormenters, preferring peaceful life under a rule of law.

As Bostonians reel from the bizarre bombing, we should remember: the rule of law is better than terrorism. It’s plodding, yes. It is never ideally just, since it is run by human beings. But refusing to resort to indiscriminate violence to “obtain justice” or “make a point” or “get/​maintain power” is the basic idea of civilization.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
education and schooling folly

A Pointed Reminder

“In schools,” the Washington Post headline warned, “a pointed finger or a toy gun can spell trouble.” The front-​page feature detailed a far too extensive and growing list of zero tolerance, zero commonsense punishments meted out to children as young as five at various “educational” institutions.

A ten-​year old boy in Alexandria, Virginia, showed kids on the bus his new toy gun, which sported a bright orange tip to let even the most dense person know its essential toyness. Police arrested him the next day.

His mother points out that her son did not threaten anyone. Or pretend to. Nevertheless, he has been “fingerprinted and photographed,” writes the Post. “He now has a probation officer, lawyers and another court date.”

In my Virginia county, Prince William, an eight-​year-​old boy contorted his hand and fingers into an apparently loaded pistol and through insidious manipulation of his mouth and lips may have imitated the sound of firing hot lead at a classmate, while said classmate was, in an evil orgy of violence, simultaneously pretending to be shooting arrows from an invisible bow.

The finger-​slinger was suspended for “threatening to harm self or others.” He did neither, of course, but his offense is equivalent to having waved a loaded gun. (No word on the whereabouts of the silent-​but-​deadly pantomime archer.)

A five-​year-​old girl was interrogated by three school staff members, summarily found guilty of issuing a “terroristic threat,” and suspended for ten days for allegedly attempting to murder her friend and then commit suicide. She offered to unload her weapon all over her friend and herself. The weapon? A Hello Kitty gun, which fires bubbles.

The Post suggests the schools are jumpy after the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. But this zero tolerance insanity didn’t begin last December.

My grandson was suspended from his public school more than a year ago. He was six and playfully shot his finger at several fellow students.

Educators, who long ago abandoned the distinction between play and reality, must have been shocked at the lack of fatalities.

Does the crusade against crime really require public institutions to reject, utterly, common sense?

Shouting “No!” … I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture

Ends, Means, Evils

Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who used bombs and guns in a terrifying killing spree a little over a year ago, got what he wanted: He was judged as a political terrorist and not insane, sentenced to prison for ten to 21 years, Norway’s unbelievably minimum “maximum” — with the state’s option of keeping him confined indefinitely if judged too dangerous for release.

Which sounds rather “clinical” to me. Even without a ruling of insanity, Norway appears to treat its murderers as madmen.

But as one survivor of the Utoya massacre explained, “I believe [Breivik] is mad, but it is political madness and not psychiatric madness.” Exactly.

“Madness” is some sort of loss of self-​control, a dangerous instability; “insanity” legally defines that subset of madmen who cannot distinguish between right and wrong. It is pretty obvious that though Breivik is deeply off his rocker, his condition is the result chiefly of bad ideas channeling base impulses.

And yet …

Breivik’s terrorism — like all others — justifies killing innocent people to serve a political goal. In doing so, the terrorist’s ideology becomes de facto insanity, rendering the terrorist incapable of recognizing his own evil.

In this case, his ideology also kept the terrorist from seeing the actual consequences of his horrifying violence. Breivik’s politics is of an extreme anti-​Muslim nature. It has surely been fed by the rise of radical Islamic terrorism. But killing 77 people, including scores of non-​Muslim teenagers, doesn’t exactly serve to rally European “militant nationalists” to an anti-​Muslim pogrom. Mad. Wanton. Feckless.

But just “evil” will do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability general freedom national politics & policies

Against Regimentation

On Monday, Senator Rand Paul got caught in a contretemps with the TSA. He was not in transit to or from his work in Congress, so he couldn’t enlist constitutional protection from being detained.

And detained he was.

Well, the TSA insists that he was not “at any point detained,” but what he says is this:

I was detained by the Transportation Security Administration … for not agreeing to a patdown after an irregularity was found in my full body scan. Despite removing my belt, glasses, wallet and shoes, the scanner and TSA also wanted my dignity. I refused.

I showed them the potentially offending part of my body, my leg. They were not interested. They wanted to touch me and to pat me down. I requested to be rescanned. They refused and detained me in a 10-​foot-​by-​10-​foot area reserved for potential terrorists.

Both Senator Paul and his father, Congressman Ron Paul, have criticized the TSA. They echo those 19th century classical liberals who had a word for the kind of treatment that modern security-​obsessed Rand Paul makes a statementgovernments inflict upon a (too willing) populace: “regimentation.” What’s more regimenting than being forced to wait in lines, holding shoes in hand, emptying the contents of pockets into institutional-​gray trays, submitting to a variety of scans and gropes?

There have got to be better ways of securing big ol’ jet airliners. Why not apply greater legal liability to airlines for safety, and let them figure out more customer-​friendly methods of keeping terrorists out of cockpits?

Any government security effort ought to focus on spotting and stopping terrorists … without sacrificing everyone’s freedom and dignity.

It’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.