Killing Osama bin Laden won’t have much effect on the way business is conducted by the US. The war on terror is too valuable to the national security infrastructure and its attached media.
This wire article, which is long, just repeats the same cant about the nature of the threat.
There are always new enemies. People don’t know what they don’t know. al Qaeda is out there. And we’ll never be rid of Michael Isikoff.
One thing to note. Since it’s a forever war, people have now gone through it into retirement. And the names are changing in the counter-terrorism industry.
Now we have someone named Ricky “Ozzie” Nelson — no joke — as a “terror expert” at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. (Click the link.)
But two weeks after the world’s most infamous terrorist was buried in the North Arabian Sea, there’s a central, lingering question in the sanctums of intelligence and military planning: Who are the new terrorist leaders causing U.S. counterterrorism officials to lose sleep?
Electromagnetic pulse is now the official plot device for most invasion science-fiction or any drama the requires the nullification of the US military.
Paradoxically, the US military is hardened against EMP — the old Cold War thing, remember. Hadda be able to continue mutual assured destruction even if everything else had fallen down.
Anyway, the trailer is from Falling Skies, a new alien invasion series for television.
I made the point when reviewed Battle: LA that any “alien invasion” that has weaponry that relies on the same things we know — explosives, projectiles, with some directed energy thrown in on the side — is doomed.
No invading force with that level of technology can bring enough with it in supply to prevail.
Plus, there’s the mixing of the incompatible. If you have levels of armament only superior to western might by matters of degree, not orders of magnitude, than you can’t travel faster than light, either, and you’d never have been able to get here.
But if you have some miraculous faster-than-light travel then any civilization you encounter that doesn’t is like ants beneath the feet.
The Stargate franchise got around this by having found wormhole gates.
And Battlestar Galactica‘s science never impressed me. And Sanctuary,Eureka and V were and are just ridiculous.
But that doesn’t mean you still can’t have a good show. The trailer to Falling Skies doesn’t provide many clues to its dramatic quality.
A few months ago I came up with the Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein rule.
It’s simple:
Even if there’s an appetite for a lynching in the public, if nobody knows the names of the to-be-lynched, the lynchees, then the latter are probably safe.
When I used to announce the band was going to play the song, “Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein,” the audience — all adults, many of whom have had very bad luck since the economic collapse of 2008 — never knows who the guy is.
So I have to explain it.
In so doing, it illustrates how the mainstream media in collusion with US financial interests which captured the financial regulatory structures of the US government, betrayed everyone.
For a graphic example, the current issue of Rolling Stone has Matt Taibbi’s piece on the Levin report, the big book on the economic collapse and Wall Street skullduggery. His story is here.
It explains the Levin report in Taibbi-style, focusing on Goldman Sachs.
Taibbi relates how the Levin report documents Goldman’s systemic global fraud, a process in which the company realized it was over-leveraged into billions of dollars of toxic mortgages and crap assets.
However, it then decided to unload the toxic financial waste — which Lloyd Blankfein called “cats and dogs” — to suckers, further betting against the newly diced-up and repackaged assets. And it told no one it was doing this.
In this manner Goldman came out a big winner when the economy cratered in 2008.
Taibbi digests material from the Levin report that show Goldman lied continually to its clients about the worth of the products it was selling to them.
Goldman’s biggest client, Morgan Stanley, begged it to liquidate the investment and get out while they could still salvage some value. But Goldman refused, stalling for months as its clients roasted to death in a raging conflagration of losses. At one point, John Pearce, the Morgan Stanley rep dealing with Goldman, lost his temper at the bank’s refusal to sell, breaking his phone in frustration …
Goldman insists it was only required to liquidate the assets “in an orderly fashion.” But the bank had an incentive to drag its feet: Goldman’s huge bet against the deal meant that the worse Hudson performed, the more money Goldman made. After all, the entire point of the transaction was to screw its own clients so Goldman could “clean its books” …
The crime was far from victimless: Morgan Stanley alone lost nearly $960 million on the Hudson deal, which admittedly doesn’t do much to tug the heartstrings. Except that quickly after Goldman dumped this near-billion-dollar loss on Morgan Stanley, Morgan Stanley turned around and dumped it on taxpayers, who within a year were spending $10 billion bailing out the sucker bank through the TARP program.
It is worth pointing out here that Goldman’s behavior in the Hudson scam makes a mockery of standards in the underwriting business. Courts have held that “the relationship between the underwriter and its customer implicitly involves a favorable recommendation of the issued security.” The SEC, meanwhile, requires that broker-dealers like Goldman disclose “material adverse facts,” which among other things includes “adverse interests.”
And the firm continued to lie to Congress in investigations the body launched after 2008.
Taibbi goes through details culled from the Levin report and he makes the case that there is now more than enough evidence to bring criminal cases against the firm. However, Goldman has made the bet that it has so captured the US government that no serious cases will be brought against it.
And, so far, that looks like the smart money.
Was Taibbi’s piece big news. Is anyone even talking about the Levin report on Goldman being in jeopardy?
Nope. The big news is Osama bin Laden’s porn stash.
For an example of journalistic malfeasance in action, here’s Taibbi on CNN — backburnered to Ali Velshi’s territory for assorted pantywaists.
Velshi and CNN set it up as the usual journalistic polarity, with Taibbi on one side — the one for lynching Lloyd Blankfein and Goldman Sachs, and Megan McCardle on the other.
Somewhere in between the two, the mores of modern journalism dictate, must be the truth.
Ummm, no.
Taibbi despises McCardle as a witless high-button shill for Wall Street at the Atlantic. He visibly sneers at her near the end, quipping sarcastically: “Morality is so trite.”
McCardle doesn’t care for Taibbi, naturally, but that’s more a consequence of his damaging her reputation through regular refutations published at Rolling Stone.
Well, what’s the moral here? It’s the Lynch Lloyd Blankfein rule in action.
What did you hear more about this weekend, Osama bin Laden’s porn stash, Mike Huckabee not running for president, or the case for criminal prosecutions against Goldman Sachs?
Relief officials inundated with donations after the flurry of twisters that killed more than 300 people across the South are sorting through the broken toys and used underwear they don’t need while hunting for places to store mountains of vital supplies like canned food …
ith storage space scarce, most say they can’t handle any more used toys or cast-off clothing.
“That becomes the disaster within the disaster,” said Salvation Army spokesman Mark Jones. “When people make those mass donations … it causes the community to be overrun with them …
As for the Salvation Army, Jones said the agency only recently found warehouse space in hard-hit Tuscaloosa and still desperately needs new underwear, nonperishable foods, pet food and sports drinks.
Canned food and cleaning products are urgently needed ..
I know the first thing that always occurs to me when I see these kinds of things is to bag up some of my used underwear, socks and broken shit.
A pair of Taliban suicide bombers attacked paramilitary police recruits eagerly heading home for a break after months of training, killing 80 people Friday in the first act of retaliation for the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
It underscores the inadequacy of Pakistan.
It was possible to be complicit in hiding him and incompetent elsewhere in alleged pursuit at the same time.
The President had to pull the trigger. No one there would have ever done so.
In Pakistan you have a country with an idiotically large defense budget and military.
Even more swollen by US arms deals, it’s an aggravating suck on the masses. It provides little security — jobs programs and grift for the privileged. And it was something there was the possibility we would have had to destroy if things had gone wrong in the raid.
If, for instance, the US were like Pakistan, you could imagine it as a place still with the largest military in the world. But Montana and the Dakotas would be hideouts for a small semi-professional insurgent army fond of killing the neighbors in fits of pique, with an occasional trip to the port of Seattle thrown in on the side.
“The bombers blew themselves up in Shabqadar at the main gate of the facility for the Frontier Constabulary, a poorly equipped but front-line force in the battle against al-Qaida and allied Islamist groups like the Pakistani Taliban close to the Afghan border,” the story reads.
“Like other branches of Pakistan’s security forces, it has received U.S. funding to try to sharpen its skills.”
After almost ten years, a truly independent oversight committee would have to firmly say: Good example of entrenched failure.
And so bin Laden has had a measure of his revenge, in a place where,
a couple months from now, it will be hard to separate from all the other subsequent miseries. The al Qaeda men will continue, if they can, a campaign in futility, taking it out on the locals and diminishing their numbers further, turning more people against them.
In the last few seconds, the live footage of Booker T & the MG’s doing “Green Onions” fades away to Jeff Beck calling it a milestone in rock ‘n’ roll records.
From standing in front of Marshalls and pounding out crunching organ for the young and middle class to selling incontinence products to them.
Words fail. The brain turns to mush. Everything is spoilt.
“Green Onions has been used extensively in radio, television, film and advertising,” reads Wikipedia, it’s listing not yet updated to include the Depends commercial.
More nose gold from the fall of Osama bin Laden, jihadis are angry. In slow motion, apparently, because it takes awhile for the private sector industry devoted to translating their chat boards to deliver the goods.
From Morocco to the foothills of the Himalayas, the call for revenge echoes across the internet. Online forums associated with al Qaeda overflow with eulogies for Osama bin Laden, and with declarations that global jihad will continue. Even Facebook groups have emerged to mourn the demise of the world’s most wanted man.
There have also been calls in jihadist forums for al Qaeda to revive its experiments with weapons of mass destruction. The SITE Institute translated one such appeal on the Shumukh al-Islam forum: “We want to manufacture soman, ricin, mustard gas and VX nerve gas,” it declared. But there have also been calls for more basic attacks. “Go out at night in a targeted infidel compound with thirty canisters and a phone,” read one.
Old news. Wishing for ricin and poison gases doesn’t make it so. Neither do Internet recipes.
SITE Institute, in case you have forgotten, has been translating no account jihadi texts for a decade. Unlike the price of barrels of oil, the value has depreciated quite a bit, only enough to finance a small office now, maybe.
Readers note: “Treasure trove” used once in connection with the worldly refuse of Osama bin Laden.
What can jihadis do — right away — now that the ol’ man is dead? What’s suitable for the next chapter, The Revenge of Osama bin Laden.
I’m almost tempted to start a new tab to supplant “ricin kooks” and the Cult of EMP Crazy covered in “crazy weapons.”
And name it either “Goldbugs” or “Fiat Money Kooks.” They certainly share some characteristics with the Cult of EMP Crazy.
They’re all from the GOP, they’re all white and they’re fearful of imminent catastrophe always defined in subtext as the unjust end of white god-fearing American-led civilization.
So now whenever something with “fiat money” or “Weimar” ends up in the text and anchored somewhere in Google, it attracts those who’d never read this blog. Just like those who occasionally drift in to post comments in the old Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy threads.
Guess what the US Dollar, the ZIM Dollar, and Weimar marks have in common? Everything!
Oh, wait. Unlike Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany, the USA has a balanced budget, no debt, and responsible politicians who don’t spend more for entitlement programs than we net in taxes!
Never mind, our FIAT DOLLAR is safe.
I don’t care if someone wants to open the mouth and remove all doubt as to being the fool.
However, I do have one question.
Are there any women — at all — who are goldbug/fiat money kooks?
Being the spouse of one doesn’t count.
And that’s because I’m thinking this is embedded on the genetic material for maleness but recessive, so it doesn’t show up in all us white guys.
Plus it’s linked to other strong traits — like wearing of baseball caps indoors, predilection to quotation of meaningless scripture, ownership of certain small businesses associated with ammo, petrochemicals, hardware, sales of fertilizer, pest eradication and control, and so on. I haven’t been able to nail the entire list yet.
It’s now baldly obvious bin Laden was a slack old man but one who, in isolation, still thought he meant quite a bit. And he was a pack rat.
The only impediment to reading through the stuff must be the sheer amount of it.
And if you had a button to push that would now immediately annihilate any person using the word “trove” on TV or in print in speaking about the man’s worldly remains, you’d use it.
Until Navy SEALs killed him a week ago, bin Laden dispensed chilling advice to the leaders of al-Qaida groups from Yemen to London: Hit Los Angeles, not just New York, he wrote. Target trains as well as planes. If possible, strike on significant dates, such as the Fourth of July and the upcoming 10th anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Above all, he urged, kill more Americans in a single attack, to drive them from the Arab world.
Bin Laden’s written words show that counterterrorist officials worldwide underestimated how key he remained to running the organization, shattering the conventional thinking that he had been reduced through isolation to being an inspirational figurehead, U.S. officials said Wednesday …
In one particularly macabre bit of mathematics, bin Laden’s writings show him musing over just how many Americans he must kill to force the U.S. to withdraw from the Arab world. He concludes that the smaller, scattered attacks since the 9/11 attacks had not been enough. He tells his disciples that only a body count of thousands, something on the scale of 9/11, would shift U.S. policy.
He also schemed about ways to sow political dissent in Washington and play political figures against one another …
And here’s another question: How does one write and publish something like “[he] schemed about ways to sow political dissent in Washington and play political figures against one another …” and maintain a straight face?
That’s the collective conduct of assholes — in this case, the usual anonymous leakers and journalists.
Very few can maintain over an entire decade. Bin Laden was no exception. It was probably never in the cards. One is curious if he ever questioned why his men weren’t more effective as the years came and went.
Meriting more laughter, the oh so busy man
The writings of Osama bin Laden, much in the news the last couple of days, amount to a single notebook of “10 or so pages” in his handwriting, a senior U.S. intelligence official says.
The singular impression of analysts, said the official: “He was down in the weeds … a micromanager.”
