Weekend Update – Homeland Insecurity

I was unable to stay awake over here in Germany long enough to hear the live capture of the second Boston bomber suspect.  I had spent most of Friday listening in on the live feed of the Boston police department (thru a link on Twitter that led to a live UStream police scanner feed).  I hit the sack about the time the Boston police were shutting down their city wide dragnet.

There were so many reports of suspicious vehicles that I began to wonder if I was really listening to a live feed from the police in Boston, or if they had just put previously recorded conversations from troops stationed at Iraqi Checkpoints on continuous loop.

But I digress.

As I listened to the stream and followed Twitter hashtage #bostonscanner, it was obvious that the authorities were busy trying to disable the live feed.  I started seeing tweets from people watching the UStream via mobile phone apps that were finding their scanner apps shut-down.  There were tweets from the authorities imploring citizens not to retweet the very same information they were BROADCASTING all over the city (as if the suspect would read a Twitter feed instead of just listening directly to the cops themselves if so inclined?) The direct http feed from UStream that I was listening to on my computer never suffered from such blocking.

So let’s do a quick recap here. Homeland Security has spent billions of US taxpayer dollars in an attempt to “make us safe(r)’. We’ve seen countless stories and photos from every Podunk county sheriffs office in the US sporting military grade machinery and weapons.

Buying at all those fancy weapons, and seeing all those highly polished black boots obviously helped loosen the constricted sphincter muscles of a decidedly nervous nation, (while simultaneously enriching the military industrial arms dealers).  But as the incident with the Grand Theft Auto/Boston Bombers scanner feed on UStream shows, our intrepid terrorist warriors overlooked at least one MAJOR GAPING hole in the system.

Somewhere along the way, they forgot to upgrade the police radios of a major American city with police communications gear that can’t be intercepted by any 14 year old kid (or terrorist) with a $99 Radio Shack police scanner.

And to top it all off, this just popped into the picture : Boston Bomber Bin Laden Determined to Attack America.

The FBI and Homeland Security apparently STILL don’t have the manpower to track KNOWN targets of HIGH probability of terrorism or enough money to upgrade Boston police radios? We know they spent bazillions of dollars of Homeland Security money on tanks for the tri-county area of Tuscaloosa (and the like), but not properly following the trail of IDENTIFIED THREATS is WAY over the top.  The FBI, like the town of Waco, must have been lulled into a false sense of serenity as they sat in the cool shadow of their local fertilizer plant.

In the old days (before torture was “enhanced interrogation”) there would probably have been some sort of oversight or review set up to examine these failures, but since Obama decided on a FAIL FORWARD strategy of leadership, that seems highly unlikely.

Enjoy

Denigrating the Venerated

It looks like I am not the only blogger willing to risk the backlash of an angry mob by going against custom and speaking ill of the dead. The subject of today’s tirade is the recently departed Margaret Thatcher, who is certainly a much more prominent target for scorn than the lowly Tea Party fundamentalist I took aim at just the other day,

The individual invoking the same type of vituperative invective against Thatcher as I did to Mark Krebs is none other than George Galloway, a long-time politico and current member of the British parliament. A brief pause is in order to allow for a standing ovation for Mr. Galloway!

The tendency to gloss over even the most blatant public vulgarities of our dead on the event of their demise is highly over-rated and counter productive to society. It also gives a warm and fuzzy feeling to the living monsters among us that their legacy (of torture and death) won’t become the highlight reel for their remaining kin and countrymen. Screw that.

Here are a few tasty bits on Thatcher from Mr. Galloway. The whole post is here at this link.

On one of my first political demonstrations – against the Conservative government of Edward Heath (1970-74) the slogan of the day was “Margaret Thatcher- Milk snatcher”. It was the first but not the last time I spat out her name in distaste.

She destroyed more than a third of Britain’s manufacturing capacity, significantly more than Hitler’s Luftwaffe ever achieved.

In the infamous sermon on the Mound in Edinburgh addressing the Church of Scotland she opined that there was “no such thing as society”…”only individuals”

Enjoy

Lady and the Scamp

I have been asked to reflect on my experiences dealing with a young lady named Julia Rose, who first caught my attention on Facebook a couple years ago. She has a Facebook tribute page dedicated to preserving and distributing the works, and highlighting the memories, of Peter McWilliams.

The Lady

Here is Julia speaking about Peter in a public YouTube video taken at one of the many rallies, conventions or speaking (and singing!) venues she attends.

The Scamp

The many uplifting stories of Peter, as well as his accompanying trials and tribulations, are too broad to relate here. I know I would feel blessed to have my own wikipedia page, let alone a youthful cheerleader like Julia, so long after my ashes are scattered. FWIW, I have chosen to honor my personal memories of Peter by ending all my correspondences with Enjoy. But I digress. Let us move on to my personal account of this energetic young lady.

Getting to Know Her

The first time I spoke with Juila was when she contacted me thru Facebook after seeing my New Year’s tribute to Peter here in this blog. She indicated that she was in contact with Peter’s mother who had inherited a great deal of Peter’s literary memorabilia, some of which she was letting Julia share on the web.

We chatted on Skype a couple times times after that. We communed over the ghost of Peter, his legacy and his works. She probed my calcifying neurons for first person recollections and stories from my calls and correspondence with Peter, the majority of which (sadly) came during the hectic months of his arrest and deprivations under the thumb of America’s fascist drug warriors.

Julia shared with me that Peter’s mom was reluctant to publicize the more risqué or controversial aspects of Peter’s political life. Julia’s main interest in honoring Peter was his poetry and self-help writings.

All that touchy-feely emotional hoodoo is just fine by me (and the 32.4% of me that is gay), but the rest of me negotiated stridently with Julia for a much more prominent emphasis on the politics of the subject that cost Peter his life. She agreed and promised to discuss the issue with Peter’s mom.

She seemed a rather shy and reluctant spokesperson at first, but as the last couple years have shown, her message and music have bounced to one event or the other all over the planet (or at least a tri-country area).

She’s some kind of a hippie-chick rock goddess guru within the medical marijuana community these days now that she’s embraced my early mentoring. I’m too old to even keep up with her frenetic pace on Facebook, but I proudly point her out as a protege and someone I knew before they got famous.

Enjoy.

A Bullet Dodged

Whew. With the election finally behind me, I can start to breath a little easier now. Had Romney managed to beg, borrow or steal the thing, my time as a free soldier of army of truth would have been in serious jeopardy. There is no doubt in my mind that my name would have raced to the top of the list of American citizens targeted for drone attacks because of suspected terrorist activity. How’s that you ask?

I was copy and pasting JZ lyrics and placing them where they would most likely be seen by my old racist neighbors back in Mississippi, as well as Tea Party Patriots everywhere!

Those people would have put their hand on a Bible (Even the Mormon one!) and honestly sworn an oath to the almighty that what I was doing by posting those lyrics was terrorizing them in far worse ways than anything Osama Bin Laden ever imagined.

Good thing for me that JZ won the election!

Enjoy.

Homegrown Drone

Francis Fukuyama wrote about the off-the-shelf technology available in February 2012 when he said this:

It is extremely easy to build a drone now that can do not just surveillance but can carry rather large payloads.  If you want to see how large some of these planes get, check out this video of a model Airbus A380.

I suppose you could watch the video of the Airbus for inspiration and then go back to the article that Fukuyama wrote for a parts lists and directions.  Maybe that’s where Hamas got the idea?  From Scott Adams (Dilbert):

Hamas has its own drone production facility, or did, until Israel found it. One presumes Hamas will build more. How long will it be before Israel is facing suicide drones that only cost its enemies $100 apiece, fit in the trunk of a car, and can guide themselves to within 20 feet of any target? I’d say five years.

Five years?  Are you serious?  The Iranians are expected to be able to gear up for a nuclear bomb by the weekend whenever it suits the powers that be, but Scott Adams, (commenting on a contemporary story of a disrupted production facility) thinks it will be FIVE years before the hoi polloi are using this tech routinely.  Shorter, much, much shorter.

Probably get so bad in the near future that you will have to give a DNA sample to buy any device that has a GPS chip in it.  Gonna make getting a new cell phone more like a trip to the doctor’s office.  You might want to hang on to that “old” iPhone 4 for awhile.

Enjoy.