Ken Nelson

Worst President ever?

A terrorist, never before in this country, not a citizen of this country, attempts to suicide bomb the plane he is in over our country, and our illustrious President lets him “lawyer up”?

Abdulmutallab remains in a Detroit area prison and, after initial debriefings by the FBI, has restricted his cooperation since securing a defense attorney, according to federal officials.  Authorities are holding out hope that he will change his mind and cooperate with the probe, the officials said. (Emphasis added)

Are these people, supposedly here to protect us, complete and utter idiots? Are they insane?

Take the guy and interrogate him, firmly, with pain, using any means to unravel the network of terrorists he so recently left.  Slather his wounds with pig fat, make him lie with dogs, I don’t care – just make him TALK.

This guy has NO Constitutional rights, and IMHO no human rights, he forfeited them when he tried to blow up 300 men, woman and children out of the sky.

That our President doesn’t intervene and say “habius whattis? – uh uh brother, that dude is going to our little part of Cuba for some talkie time” makes him and his Presidency a dangerous joke.

Maybe narcissism will save the day… I suspect that once Obama gets wind of how much Abdulmutallab is hurting him, he may play tough with the guy.

Actually it is almost perfect. The newspaper box is extraneous. Obama in a TSA uniform is all we need.

http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/30/ramirez-on-systemic-failures/

Uhmmm… no thanks. You stay there.

Jeffrey Goldberg asks Bruce Schneir, his security guru, that question… I’m sympathetic to the answer:

I want President Obama to get on national television and project indomitability. I want him to dial back the hyperbole, and remind us that our society can’t be terrorized. I want him to roll back all the fear-based post-9/11 security measures.  We’d do much better by leveraging the inherent strengths of our modern democracies and the natural advantages we have over the terrorists: our adaptability and survivability, our international network of laws and law enforcement, and the freedoms and liberties that make our society so enviable. The way we live is open enough to make terrorists rare; we are observant enough to prevent most of the terrorist plots that exist, and indomitable enough to survive the even fewer terrorist plots that actually succeed. We don’t need to pretend otherwise.

I agree. BUT I’d put in place very stringent immigration and entry restrictions from Muslim countries.  Terrorists plotting from afar can be handled as he says above. A large, internal, Muslim population, providing haven and a place to hide wouldn’t be a good idea.

We CAN and SHOULD deny entry and immigration to cultures and individuals that put us at risk.  Muslims certainly fall into the “dangerous” category.  Individually they may be fine people, but in mass, their culture represents a danger to America.

"This weekend in Prague," he said, "I will lay out an agenda to seek the goal of a world without nuclear weapons."  
Barack Obama

Some would say “admirable goal but unrealistic”.  And they would be stupid.

Some would say “admirable goal and we should do it”. And they would be dangerous.

Why?  Because there will never, again, be a world without nukes. Even if successful getting rid of the weapons, the world would never be more than a week or two from having them again. Such a world would be dangerous, unstable, and prone to rapid preventive escalations.

I have to wonder, is Obama just naive? Or is there some underlying ill will he has against the world and our country?

Isn’t it sad I have to wonder such questions.  300+ million people in our country, and THIS is the best we can elect? Sad.

Terrorism training, like a leak in a dike, pops up somewhere else when you push your thumb on a hole in Iraq or Afghanistan. The spout currently flows in Yemen. So will we put our thumb on the Yemeni leak?

First off, where the heck is Yemen? Here you go:

To a certain extent Yemen puts the kabosh on the notion that “democracy” will prevent terror support:

Yemen (Yaman) is a Presidential republic with a bicameral legislature. Under the constitution, an elected president, an elected 301-seat House of Representatives, and an appointed 111-member Shura Council share power. The president is head of state, and the prime minister is head of government.

See that “Shura” thing… it basically means “Islamic Democracy”. You get the picture.

Culturally split between Shia and Sunni, a median age of 16 and with over half the population under age 14, Yemen is more like Somalia than its neighbor Saudi Arabia. Yemen is one of the poorest Arab countries – over 1/2 live below the poverty line. Yemeni’s diaspora largely went to England – which has about 70,000 Yemeni immigrants.

Like the Northern Territories of Pakistan the primary social unit for Yemen is the tribe not the state.  Hence, their  “Democracy” it isn’t one that we would recognize as such, and there is in insurgency underway against the relatively recent (1999) Democratic rule.

So what should we do about terrorist training and hide-a-ways in Yemen? 

Well, if it were me, I’d tell each tribal leadership that their lives depend on booting the terrorists out. Personally. There. Lives.  If not, Predators and special forces deal with them.

No need to “invade”. Make it personal for leaders and their behavior will change.

Politicians are the same all over… they will consistently do what is best for themselves.

I see no need to kill lots of Yemeni, nor put at risk lots of American youth.  Lets try something different in Yemen – put the hurt where it belongs – On older self-dealing politicians in the country and the terrorists themselves.

It should be after this jewel:

Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit were released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November, 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents.

The only changes we should make to Guantanamo are one-way gates.

Also, Obama and company continue to consider all possible options before then acting on the worst. How? The Christmas bomber, a Nigerian, non-citizen and member of Al-Qaeda will be “tried” with full Miranda and other Constitutional rights.

He ought to get a one way trip to the water board at Guantanamo. Since he isn’t a citizen and is a foreign terrorist. He should be interrogated, tortured if necessary, and then killed.

"We will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable."

Barack Obama, 10:10AM

Fore!
Barack Obama, 10:40AM

A mob of angry Iranian protestors rush a regime hanging and cut down the two victims.

It seems like we ought to be doing more to help these groups.  After all, what kind of country has portable hanging platforms readily available to their government employees?

Via Ace

Because the idiots at the TSA couldn’t screen out a Muslim with explosives in his pants, air travelers last hour before arriving are a lot more uncomfortable now:

2. Passenger access to carry-on baggage is prohibited beginning 1 hour prior to arrival at destination.
3. Disable aircraft-integrated passenger communications systems and services (phone, internet access services, live television programming, global positioning systems) prior to boarding and during all phases of flight.
4. While over U.S. airspace, flight crew may not make any announcement to passengers concerning flight path or position over cities or landmarks.
5. Passengers may not have any blankets, pillows, or personal belongings on the lap beginning 1 hour prior to arrival at destination.

So for a whole hour, I’ll get to meditate on HOW STUPID the TSA is.

Frankly, I predict passenger mutiny when some unfortunate air crew tries to enforce these obviously silly rules.

Coming next…. passengers banned from air travel.

Is it too much to ask, to OBVIOUS to ask, that they just have a special line for Muslims?  It would lead to a Greyhound bus?

BTW: Will our new healthcare bureaucracy be different from the TSA?

Apparently, spaghetti of the Counter Insurgency inter-relations in Afghanistan:

means you can’t win a war.

But spaghetti like this, of the Model E GISS climate modeling simulation source file interdependencies, should be trusted implicitly:

I know war can be complex. And I’m quite familiar with how thorny software complexity can be.

But if you have concerns about the one, shouldn’t you about the other?

I know… I ask too much!

BTW: This is not to impugn the folks at NASA who expose themselves by posting their source code on the net.  I don’t know any specific issue about the quality of the NASA software. I can, however, measure its complexity. And I can guarantee you, at the level of complexity measured, it probably has hundreds of significant bugs. As does virtually ALL software of similar complexity and size.

Software graph done by “Understand” from Scitools.

To the stockade with you!

An Army Major General in command in Northern Iraq will soon have his hat handed to him, but I admire his effort. The general, sick of losing skilled soldiers to pregnancy, intends to put a little teeth in his efforts to stop the losses by court martialing both the woman, and the father, if they are on active duty.

‘I’ve got a mission to do, I’m given a finite number of soldiers with which to do it and I need every one of them,’ Maj Gen Cucolo said.

‘So I’m going to take every measure I can to keep them all strong, fit and with me for the twelve months we are in the combat zone.’

Married soldiers on active service should either put their love lives on hold or take precautions. It was a ‘black and white’ issue, he said.

I like it.  His command loses more soldiers to pregnancy than the enemy and he puts a reasonable measure in place to stop it. Good thinking.  While some of these pregnancies are inadvertent, many aren’t. When I was in, I heard more than a few female soldiers say they would use pregnancy to get out of a deployment or assignment they didn’t want to do. Now they have some consequences to consider.

Alas, he should prepare to retire as a Major General. But hey, career is over rated.

Personally, I’d promote him and put him in charge of the whole war. Sounds like he knows how to achieve a mission.

Navy Seals

Just as our troops try to implement the new counter insurgency (COIN) in Afghanistan, they encounter a revived enemy… Bureaucracy.

Our soldiers have learned, adapted and adjusted – but the bureaucrats haven’t been standing still.

For some units, ground movement to dislodge the Taliban requires a colonel’s oversight. In eastern Afghanistan, traveling in anything other than a 20-ton mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle requires a written justification, a risk assessment and approval from a colonel, a lieutenant colonel and sometimes a major. … Combat commanders are required to submit reports in PowerPoint with proper fonts, line widths and colors so that the filing system is not derailed.

Bureaucratic sclerosis results from a few things… first, the length of the war permits bureaucracy to take hold and urgency to wane.  Second, the lower the mission urgency, the more risk prevention that will be done.

That a  “bureaucracy” developed means the war has taken too long and the mission isn’t urgent.

Endless wars should be avoided

An unintended consequence of the Confederacy’s fight for states rights is that it ended up building a large central government:

Although southerners rebelled against growing centralization of the federal government, they had no qualms about establishing a strong national state of their own.  Scholars have classified the Confederate central government as a form of "war socialism."  The Confederacy owned key industries, regulated prices and wages, and instituted the most far-reaching draft in North American history.

War causes large government growth. Permanent war, like the War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terror…. leads to permanently larger governmental roles.

I favor strategies that fight wars away from America and that lead to short wars. As Afghanistan drags on for 8 years now, I can’t help but wonder what just the length  of the effort costs us, over and above the casualties and military spending.

Be careful… thinking this way leads to very un-PC steps… like not letting Muslims into the U.S., legalizing drugs, and having states and cities – not our federal government – address poverty.

For freedom, think small, be practical, and make your wars short.

“My role is not to advocate policy but to execute it.”

Arron Conley
President of the Class of 2010
United States Military Academy

He had been asked about Obama’s Afghanistan speech.

I agree with Mr. Conley, but would stress that when you feel the policy isn’t wise you should be willing to resign rather than participate.