The underwear bomber failed

An article in Time Magazine by Peter Beinart is worth taking note of:

Here's a fact about the underwear attack that you might have missed in the media shoutfest: it failed. It failed, first of all, because Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was just one terrorist. Once upon a time, al-Qaeda's modus operandi was to launch multiple, simultaneous attacks. . . .

Second, the underwear attack failed because Abdulmutallab wasn't particularly well trained. The 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were personally selected by Osama bin Laden . . . [and] got extensive training on the design of airplanes and the behavior of aircraft crews, even before they enrolled in U.S. flight schools. . . . Abdulmutallab, by contrast, reportedly used a syringe to try to detonate a notoriously hard-to-detonate explosive called PETN. "To make this stuff work," says Van Romero, an explosives expert at New Mexico Tech, "you have to know what you're doing." Abdulmutallab, it appears, did not. . . .

A 2007 study by Canada's Simon Fraser University found the global death toll from terrorist attacks has substantially decreased since 2001. While al-Qaeda plots do sometimes succeed--like the double-agent operation that killed seven CIA officers in Afghanistan last month--they have become, Rand terrorism expert Brian Jenkins points out, less frequent and less potent. . . .

All this means that even in places like Pakistan and Yemen where al-Qaeda or its affiliates retain some organizational presence, it is much harder to train lots of would-be terrorists for complex, mass-casualty attacks. In response, al-Qaeda seems to be relying more on solo operators . . . These lone wolves are harder to catch, but they're also less likely to do massive damage. Al-Qaeda's new motto, according to New York City police commissioner Raymond Kelly, seems to be "If you can't do the big attacks, do the small attacks." Not exactly cause for celebration, but certainly not cause for the hysteria that has gripped Washington since Christmas Day.

To say that al-Qaeda can't do what it once did is not much comfort when actual damage is done and people are killed. But this perspective is a needed balance from the media hype and the Republicans' glee at pointing out the security failure on Obama's watch.

It's time to sit back, take a deep breath, and realize that we cannot have a perfectly safe country. No one wants to accept even one attack; but hysteria and political posturing do not help. We need to learn from what works for the Israelis: more eyeball scrutiny and more talking to people as they come through checkpoints, looking for behavioral clues and relying on well trained, skilled screeners and selective body searches. And, most of all, for-god's-sake we need to get our act together in the sharing and synthesizing of intelligence information. Stop the inter-agency turf battles and the inefficiency. Make it work.

Ralph

Gay marriage update

The New Jersey Senate joined legislatures in Maine and New York, along with voters in California and about 30 other states, in rejecting a bill that would have permitted same-sex couples to marry. The New Jersey courts had mandated that gays have the same rights as marriage and left it to the legislature to implement it. They opted for civil unions. This bill was a response, declaring that civil unions still leave same-sex couples without all of the rights of marriage. Now it is back to the courts.

California's Supreme Court upheld Prop8 and overturned their gay marriage provision. Now that is being challenged in the Federal courts as an unconstitutional infringement on rights for equal treatment under the law. Hearings in federal court are for next week. It's proponents plan to carry it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, today, the Parliament in Portugal voted in gay marriage, and the President is expected to sign it into law. Thus a predominately Catholic country joins Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, South Africa -- and in the U.S., Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa, and District of Columbia -- in including gays and lesbians in its marriage laws.

Ralph

Lies, lies, and more lies

Come on, you gutless TV stenographers and megaphones, who simply pass on and amplify any old lie Republicans want to spout. It's time to start saying: "Oh, really? What about . . . ?"

First it was Dana Perino, then Mary Matalin (mouthpiece for Dick Cheney). I believe even first XVP daughter and mouthpiece Liz Cheney said it too:

Now it's Rudy Giuliani himself -- remember him? the Mayor of New York City on 9/11/01 when the twin towers were toppled by terrorist hijackers -- spouting the same lie:

"We had no domestic attacks under Bush; we've had one under Obama."

Incredible, bald-faced lies. And George Stephanopolis, who conducted the interview on Good Morning America, repeated the quote on his blog without questioning the truth of it.

Even if all these folks meant to say no attacks after 9/11 on Bush's watch, what about the shoe bomber and the anthrax terrorist attempts? In another interview the day before, Guiliani even claimed that the shoe bomber incident occurred before 9/11, which it did not. It was after.

And just for the record: what about Bush's responsibility for lack of action on the intelligence that could have prevented the big one itself on 9/11? That certainly did occur during Bush's term. Even they can't deny that -- they just hope we'll overlook that little detail.

Come on -- they're reviving this slippery lie just to try to make political hay out of the fact that we have now had an attempted terrorist attack during Obama's presidency. These are the patriots who put their country first?

You can't really expect better from these partisan hacks. And apparently it's only a dream to expect more from supposed journalists and pundits. What's happened to George Steph? Being popular enough to land the GMA job went to his head?

Ralph

Lieberman tanks

The good news:

A Public Policy Poll in Connecticut gives Joe Lieberman very low ratings: 25% approval and 67% disapproval. As the poll concludes: "Barack Obama's approval rating with Connecticut Republicans is higher than Lieberman's with the state's Democrats."

The poll's interpretation attributes it to how out of touch Lieberman has become with his constituents.

Among voters who support the health care bill 87% disapprove of how Lieberman handled it with only 10% supporting it. But by voting for the final product after getting it watered down he also managed to earn the unhappiness of constituents opposed to the bill, 52% of whom say they disapprove of what Lieberman did to 33% in support

Overall just 19% of voters in the state say they like what Lieberman did on the issue with 68% opposed.

The bad news:

Lieberman's term runs until January 2013. Another three years of him gumming up the works and enjoying every revengeful minute of it.

Ralph

"That's my story, and I'm sticking to it."

From an article in the Huffington Post:

Sarah Palin is standing by her claim that Democratic-authored health care legislation includes the infamous "death panels" - even after the assertion was labeled the "lie of the year" by a prize-winning fact checking organization.

The former Alaska governor told Sean Hannity, in a taping of the conservative firebrand's radio program on Wednesday, that she was "not gonna back off" the criticism that the health care bill would pursue cost saving measures by rationing end of life care.

"If the health care bill goes the way Obama wants it, we're gonna have something very much like foreign countries' systems of health care like the British, and it's the American people -- if we have our health care paid for by the bureaucracy, by government -- depending on our health condition, depending on our age -- we're gonna be subject to bureaucrats deciding, panels and commissions deciding -- just like they do overseas -- who will be worthy of receiving the health care that government is going to provide."

"So that is the death panel that I referred to, and I won't back off on criticizing that aspect of the health care bill."

That's what the people love about Palin. She won't back down, even when she's proved wrong and unqualified for the job. She's not going to let those elites in Washington push her around.

I think we're finally beginning to realize that proving Sarah wrong/unqualified is not going to make her go away. If anything, it only enhances her appeal to her constituiency. They want someone with "common sense," someone who will "tell it like it is," and someone who will not back down to the ways of Washington and the liberals.

Given a continuing bad economy, things blowing up in Afghanistan, or a major terrorist attack -- and we could see a Republican Congress in 2012 and a President Palin in 2016.

Ralph

The long slow death of the death penalty

For an exam in a freshman English class 59 years ago, I chose to write my essay on the death penalty and why I opposed it. It was perhaps naive, but very earnest. I have never wavered from that position since.

There are, of course, the rational arguments: there are far too many innocent people wrongfully executed, and we can't seem to eliminate those mistakes; studies show that it is not a deterrent to serious crime, despite supporters insistence to the contrary; it has historically been applied disproportionately to minority groups.

But to me the over-riding argument has always been the moral one. I cannot accept the role that forces me to participate, as a citizen of our society, in the decision that someone else must die. All arguments about what heinous crimes the person may have done do not change my mind on that position. Not that the suffering of the victims doesn't matter, but to me it's irrelevant to the moral position that, when society decides in cold deliberation to kill one of its members, it descends to the level of the criminal. No august judges in black robes and no marble walls are enough to make this anything other than eye-for-an-eye, murderous "justice," in my view.

The idea of vengeance has never appealed to me. Some have said that I am too afraid of my own aggressive impulses and shun violence for that reason. Maybe. But to me it feels more like a philosophical and moral position.

But yesterday there was a story by Adam Liptak in the New York Times about the American Law Institute, a group of about 4000 judges, lawyers and law professors that "synthesizes and shapes the law in restatements and model codes that provide structure and coherence in a federal legal system that might otherwise consist of 50 different approaches to everything." In this function, it had provided the intellectual framework for the modern legal system for the death penalty system some 50 years ago.

Last fall, the group declared the project a failure and "voted in October to disavow the structure it had created 'in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment.'”

In effect, they were saying that the system of fairness guidelines they had tried to establish was "irretrievably broken." Although it will make little immediate difference in decisions -- because this group's decision does not change any laws -- it will have long term implications for the way people think about it. For example, Law Professor Samuel Gross said:

“Law students who take first-year criminal law from 2010 on will learn that this same group of smart lawyers and judges — the ones whose work they read every day — has said that the death penalty in the United States is a moral and practical failure.”

So be it. May the death penalty RIP.

Ralph

Odds and ends

1. Michele Bachmann: "So if the Republican Party is wise, they will allow themselves to be re-defined by the tea party movement. And I hope that that will be the case."

2. Alabama Congressman Parker Griffeth, elected last year as a Democrat, has switched to the Republican party. As a result, his entire legislative and communications staff and his chief of staff resigned, saying:

". . . we cannot, in good conscience, continue working for him. . . . because we are unwavering in our own principles, we have no choice but to move on. We do not know what the future holds, but we are taking a leap of faith with the belief we will soon find ourselves in the employment of principled public officials."

Wow!! That must have stung, as it should have. The principled thing would have been for the Congressman himself to have resigned, if he felt he could not fulfill the expectations of those who elected him just one year ago.

3. In spite of the Christmas eve terrorist scare, which reminded us of the inadequacy of our airport security system, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) continues to block the confirmation vote on Obama's nominee to head the Transportation Security Administration.

What is it with those three South Carolina politicians? Secret trysts in Argentina, shouting "You Lie" in the middle of the President's State of the Union speech to Congress, and now this?

4. So, last year three American "healing homosexuality" type evangelicals traveled to Uganda to present themselves as experts (on how homosexuals can change) at a conference organized on the theme of "the hidden, dark gay agenda" and the threat to Bible-based values and the traditional African family. The conference was attended by some members of the Ugandan parliament.

And now they are shocked that, one month later, a bill was introduced by one of those attendees that would include the death penalty for some homosexual acts and jail for friends or relatives that fail to report such behavior. That's the problem with these anti-homosexual zealots: they don't realize the harm they do, both in the direct effect on gays themselves and in stirring up and rationalizing anti-gay violence.

Or perhaps they do realize. Missionary Scott Lively said, on his website, that he had been told by a respected observer of society in Kampala "that our campaign was like a nuclear bomb against the "gay" agenda in Uganda. I pray that this, and the predictions, are true."

You pray that your effect will be "like a nuclear bomb" -- and then you're surprised when these people take you seriously and want to put homosexuals to death?

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In sharp contrast to such ignorant bigotry, President Obama has just taken an historical step in appointing a transsexual woman as Senior Technical Adviser to the Commerce Department. Amanda Simpson, a former test pilot and 2004 YWCA "Woman On The Move," has worked in the aerospace and defense industry for 30 years, including being Deputy Director in Advanced Technology Development for Raytheon.

Now, Mr. President, just keep going and work to end DA/DT and DOMA.

Ralph

May 21, 2011

Mark your calendar for May 21, 2011. That's the day the world will end and The Rapture will occur.

The movie "2012" got it wrong, according to 88 year old Harold Camping, self-described biblical scholar, who also heads an evangelical radio station that broadcasts worldwide via satellite dishes. He figured it out by decoding hidden numerical references in the Bible. It goes like this:

First you have to take his word that the number 5 = atonement, that 10 = completeness, and 17 = heaven. Multiply 5 x 10 x 17 and then square the result = 722,500. I'm not clear on the significance of multiplying those numbers and then squaring the result, but hold on to the total.

Then you have to accept as fact that April 1, 33 AD was the day that Jesus was hung on the cross. Count forward 722,500 days from that date, and ergo you get: ***May 21, 2011***. Judgment Day and The Rapture.

Don't laugh. People believe this. All over the world, on every continent. Never mind the fact that Camping had for two years predicted that Christ would return on September 6, 1994. The faithful gathered in California with Camping on that day, holding their bibles open-face toward heaven, and waiting . . . and waiting . . . and [Waiting for Godot? Sorry, I just couldn't resist].

But nothing happened.

He says he made a mistake in his calculation back then. According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle Rick LaCasse, who was in that group, says that his faith in Camping has only strengthened since then. "This time we have proof," he says, meaning that it's not just a prediction this time but actually based on the word of God in the Bible, as deciphered by Camping. He was asked if his opinion of Camping would change if it doesn't come to pass. "I can't even think like that," he said. "Everything is too positive right now. There's too little time to think like that."

Obviously, I am not a believer in Mr. Camping's theology or his mathematics. So why bother with this? People have been predicting the end of the world, in one form or other, for a long time. And it hasn't ended yet. We may be getting there via climate change and depletion of our ability to feed our over-populating selves. Which is a different problem.

Or is it? Isn't all of this the result of people believing what they want to believe, what they need to believe, for whatever psychological reason they need to believe it, or for whatever crass payoff reason they choose to adopt it -- and then trying to persuade others, or issue edicts, or pass or obstruct laws that have power over people? And it's all based on faith or cynical distortions or out right lies -- rather than established facts based on empirical evidence and logical reasoning and lessons from history.

I am not a scientific absolutist or puristic realist. I believe there is a place for faith in the world. It can inspire and comfort. So can great works of art, literature, and music. So can great moral leaders like Jesus, Mohammed, Ghandi, Schweitzer, King, Mandella, Mother Teresa. Moral teachings call us to our better selves and lead people to remarkable sacrifice for the good of others.

But no one should exercise power over others based on his own particular brand of faith when it contradicts empirical evidence. Whatever affects us all should be governed by the universally accepted set of principles of evidence-based facts, as best we can know them.

As far as I know, Harold Camping is harmless. I am not aware of his ever trying to force his belief on anyone or to get laws passed that discriminate against non-believers. But there are far too many who do try to impose their blind beliefs on others.

"Secular humanists" may be scorned by many religionists for lacking faith in a god; but their principles are based on empiricism, reason, and moral teachings of equality, justice and liberty. I suppose that's what I would be if I had to choose a label. You won't find secular humanists standing on a mountain top, waiting for their savior to return for them on a certain date, based on some esoteric math done by a zealot who arbitrarily assigned his own meaning to numbers written thousands of years ago and three language translations removed, and thinking he had uncovered God's code.

I've never heard of them invading another country or discriminating against those who believe differently. It is not secular humanists that hold health care reform hostage to religious opinions that declare a zygote a person from the moment of fertilization, so that abortion is actually murder, but killing the doctor who performs it is not. It is not secular humanists who quietly transfer a priest to another parish school to hide the fact that he molests children. It is not secular humanists who are about to pass a law in Uganda decreeing death to homosexuals and jail to their families for not turning them in. Secular humanism does not lead preachers to picket the funerals of AIDS victims, waving large signs saying "God hates fags. Matthew is burning in hell."

I may regret it when the great space ship arrives to take the faithful to heaven, and my name is not on the list. But I just don't think I can fake the belief that leads people to do such things -- or that sits silently while zealots do it in their name.

But that's a topic for another secular sermon: Where have all the liberal Christians and Jews gone? Was their leadership during the civil rights struggles just a fluke?

Ralph