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Archive for the ‘Terrorism’ Category

World Ends. Long and Smooth Finish.

Posted in General, Terrorism, Things That Suck on January 15, 2013 | 1 Comment »

No.

Just . . . no.

Ron de Jeremy Spiced Rum
That’s right: “Ron de Jeremy” Spiced Rum, named after . . . you know . . .

Like its namesake, Ron de Jeremy Spiced is full of flavor. It is artfully blended with spices and all natural ingredients. The rich and deep color supports the well-rounded and complex aroma, with hints of vanilla and spices. The long and smooth finish is extremely pleasing. Ron de Jeremy Spiced is an exceptionally good mixer with cola and juices, but also great straight up.

Ron Jeremy loves his rum and is highly involved and active in promoting it; “Ron de Jeremy is great- the taste is long and full, and the finish is smooth, which suits me perfectly! And I love the idea. Ron means Rum! I am very proud of my Ron and I hope my many friends all over the world will have a chance to try it.”

What I really love is that they pass it off as some sort of artisanal product of the legendary Cuban rum-making craft:

Ron de Jeremy Rum is hand crafted by another legend, 72-year old Cuban Master Distiller Francisco “Don Pancho” Fernandez. Don Pancho is one of the most experienced and renowned Master Distillers in the rum industry today. His skills have been directly responsible for the success of countless rum brands. Don Pancho inspected his best barrels to hand pick the ones worthy of becoming Ron de Jeremy.

So drink up! You’re getting the good stuff. Don Pancho himself ensured it is “worthy of becoming Ron de Jeremy”. I can’t bring myself to imagine how.

UPDATE: I have to admit, the distributors’ response was cool (see Comments). And apparently the drink is getting good reviews at professional tastings. So I’ll give it a try and report back!

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9/11

Posted in Terrorism on September 11, 2010 |

What Atrios said:

A tragic day which brought out the worst in our country. Not right away, but once evil people saw opportunity to exploit it for their own dreams of destruction.

The worst of this is that we had won. Al-Qaeda had thrown the absolute worst they had at us and the country didn’t even wobble, much less totter. The country was never in any existential danger, we had crushed the Taliban, Al-Qaeda was being rejected in even the most militant parts of the Muslim world, and we had cornered the bulk of Al-Qaeda and it’s leadership.

Then we threw it all away out of unreasoning panic and immoral dreams of empire. If I had told you on 9/12/2001 that we would ease off the hunt in Afghanistan in order to attack a Muslim country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and thus let Bin Laden escape and give Al Qaeda evidence that the US really did want to subjugate all Muslims, you would have called me a lunatic infected with Bush Derangement Syndrome. Now, if you are a Republican leader, odds are you would argue that Bush didn’t go far enough in making a religion, instead of a terrorist, the enemy.

So lets end on a reminder of what America is supposed to be:

For if there is a lesson to be drawn on this anniversary, it is this: we are one nation – one people – bound not only by grief, but by a set of common ideals. And that by giving back to our communities, by serving people in need, we reaffirm our ideals – in defiance of those who would do us grave harm. We prove that the sense of responsibility that we felt for one another was not a fleeting passion – but a lasting virtue.

…

This is a time of difficulty for our country. And it is often in such moments that some try to stoke bitterness – to divide us based on our differences, to blind us to what we have in common. But on this day, we are reminded that at our best, we do not give in to this temptation. We stand with one another. We fight alongside one another. We do not allow ourselves to be defined by fear, but by the hopes we have for our families, for our nation, and for a brighter future. So let us grieve for those we’ve lost, honor those who have sacrificed, and do our best to live up to the values we share – on this day, and every day that follows.

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Why Is It Insensitive?

Posted in Conservative Bullshit Debunked, Culture, Legal Issues, Politics, Religion, Terrorism on August 16, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Boehner seems to think that the community center being put up by a Muslim organization a couple blocks from ground zero is insensitive:

The decision to build this mosque so close to Ground Zero is deeply troubling, as is the president’s decision to endorse it. The American people certainly don’t support it.

The fact that someone has the right to do something doesn’t necessarily make it the right thing to do. That is the essence of tolerance, peace and understanding. This is not an issue of law, whether religious freedom or local zoning. This is a basic issue of respect for a tragic moment in our history.

I need a conservative to explain this to me. The organization has no ties to Al-Qaeda. The organization has no ties to Islamic radicals at all. In fact, the leader of the organization was tapped by George W Bush to be an ambassador of moderation to the Islamic world. Unlike a place like Auschwitz or Treblinka, the dead of Ground Zero were not a special religious or ethnic group — the Towers were targeted because they were symbols of American and, to a lesser extent, Western secular power. The dead were deemed worthy of murder because they were American. And Muslims died in the towers alongside their fellow Americans. So why is a Muslim community center two blocks from Ground Zero insensitive?

It is not, of course, unless you are a bigot. Only a bigot or a monster playing to bigots would argue that the mere fact of a shared religious label would justify treating the center in question as if it was an outpost of Al-Qaeda. There is no other reason, at all. It is bigotry, plain and pure and simple and it has become the primary plank of the Republican Party. They have replaced the Southern Strategy with the Muslim Strategy and may God have mercy on their souls.

I cannot understand how anyone with an ounce of decency would support these people. Whatever your feelings about the size of government, or economic theory, or immigration or any other normal political issue, supporting the GOP means supporting the worst kind of bigotry. The Boehners and Gingirches and Palins, the leaders of the Republican Party, are deliberately trying to equate all Muslims with terrorists. There si no excuse for it and it represents a horrible attack on American foreign policy and an even worse attack on American values. This kind of bigotry strikes at the heart of American ideals. it is as corrosive as acid and as deadly as poison.

In the 1960s, Nixon and Atwater had the chance to drive racists out of the mainstream of American politics. The Democrats had finally driven them out of their party, and the GOP had never been hospitable territory to them. But to their everlasting shame, Nixon and Atwater invited them into the GOP with open arms. In 2001, George W Bush had the same choice with anti-Muslim bigots. In his finest moment, Bush turned them away.

Now the leaders of the GOP seek to emulate Nixon instead of Bush. Voting for the GOP is voting to empower the worst sort of bigotry, a kind of pre-Enlightenment tribalism and bloodlust that our Founders explicitly rejected. We have a chance to strangle this particular version of establishment bigotry in its crib — but only if people of conscience explicitly reject the GOP.

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All You Need to Know About Our Liberal Media

Posted in Economics, Politics, Terrorism on March 30, 2010 | 23 Comments »

Samuleson on HCR:

Suppose the CBO estimate is correct. So? The $143 billion saving is about 1 percent of the projected $12.7 trillion deficit from 2009 to 2020. If the administration has $1 trillion or so of spending cuts and tax increases over a decade, all these monies should first cover existing deficits — not finance new spending. Obama’s behavior resembles a highly indebted family’s taking an expensive round-the-world trip because it claims to have found ways to pay for it. It’s self-indulgent and reckless.

Samuleson on the Iraq War:

Even when huge, terrorism’s costs can get lost in a $13 trillion economy. At last count, Congress had committed $432 billion to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — a far cry from informal estimates of $50 billion to $200 billion before the Iraq war. The Congressional Budget Office now projects that those costs could easily exceed $800 billion by 2016. A study by Linda Bilmes of Harvard and Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia puts the war’s ultimate budget costs even higher, at a minimum of $1.1 trillion in present value. Still, this spending is a tiny share of all federal spending, estimated at $47 trillion from 2001 to 2016.

So, to recap: fully funded 900 billion to provide health care: a reckless indulgence.  Completely unfunded 1.1 trillion dollars to, in part, invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11: no big deal.  Apparently, money is only well spent when you use it to blow up random brown people for dubious reasons.

These people are pathological; you can practically see them twirling their mustaches in anticipation of throwing out the orphans and tying the damsel to the railroad tracks.

Links from Ezra Klein and Balloon Juice comments.

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Those Who Would Give Up Their Liberty For Some Temporary Security Deserve Richard Cohen

Posted in Legal Issues, Media, Politics, Terrorism, Torture on February 3, 2010 | 2 Comments »

We are ruled by cowards and fools:

There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer. Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded, reciting terrorists their rights, or the legally meandering and confusing rule that some terrorists will be tried in military tribunals and some in civilian courts, what is missing is a firm recognition that what comes first is not the message sent to America’s critics but the message sent to Americans themselves. When, oh when, will this administration wake up?

Osama Bin Laden has already beaten Richard Cohen.  Cohen is so scared, so terrified that he is perfectly willing to throw away everything that keeps us safe in order to be protected from his terrors.  Maybe, just maybe, if the country was really fundamentally threatened by Bin Laden this might be justifiable.  Might.  But Bin Laden is not a threat to this country.  He cannot conquer it.  He cannot cripple it.  He cannot bankrupt it, directly.  He can kill Americans, in sometimes spectacular fashion, but he cannot threaten the well-being of the country as a whole.  And yet Cohen wants to legalize torture:

Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded,

Never mind that torture just doesn’t work. (And it doesn’t.  History has proven that torture is effective pretty only for getting people to tell you what you want to hear. )  It is a moral abomination, a strike against the best of our morals and a direct assault on the dignity of the individual.  It directly contravenes the Fifth Amendment and punishes a person who has not been convicted of the crime in question.  It either breaks the practitioners or turns them into monsters and it absolutely destroys the people it is practiced upon.  It is among the lowest forms of human behavior, the mark of the savage.  And Cohen wants to embrace in the face of what is, in historical context, a nothing of a threat?  What the hell would this coward have done in the face of a Hitler or Stalin? 

My wife and I talk about current events all the time, as probably surprises no one.  We have young children, so we sometimes uses euphemisms and talk around issues.  Recently the eight year old asked for details for something we were talking about, something that involved kidnapping in Haiti.  When we tried to talk around what we thought were the scary details, he said “No.  Tell me the whole truth.” 

Richard Cohen doesn’t have the strength of character of my eight year old.  He doesn’t want to know the whole, scary truth.  He wants the President to lie to him, to tell him that world isn’t a scary place, that 24 isn’t just a show, that torture is perfect and that nothing will ever, ever hurt him ever again.  The real world isn’t like that.  It is telling that my eight year old can face up to that and Richard Cohen cannot.

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Read This

Posted in Terrorism on January 19, 2010 |

Now. It does a find job of explaining, yet again, how we’re allowing the terrorists to win by reflexively overreacting to even their failed attacks.

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Our Broken Press

Posted in Foreign Policy, Media, Terrorism on January 14, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Steve Brennan has an interesting catch regarding our woeful press and the President’s terrorism performance:

It seemed to start in earnest over the weekend. The New York Times‘ Maureen Dowd said she knows what Americans expect from their president in the wake of a terrorist scare, and President Obama doesn’t get it. The president’s calm, unflappable demeanor isn’t good enough, she said — he should do more to be "the strong father."

Other pundits are running with a very similar line. The Washington Post‘s Michael Gerson believes the president seems "disconnected" from the public’s fears, and should show more "empathy." Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly lamented Obama’s "unemotional" response to the failed plot.

…

But as Greg Sargent noted, it’s not the president who’s out of touch. He pointed to four independent national polls — Gallup, CNN, Quinnipiac, and CBS — all of which were released this week, and all of which found strong public support for the president’s handling of the issue and his personal trait

Steve doesn’t highlight this, but this is a deep indictment of our political press.  Major political reporters – people who are supposed to help the country understand what is happening and what it means to them – failed miserably in this case.  And they failed miserably because they simply did not do their jobs.  It apparently occurred to none of these fine and upstanding political gurus to attempt to find out how the public actually thought about the way Obama handled the Christmas Bombing and terrorism in general.  Instead waiting for some solid information, they simply ran with the first thought that popped into their little heads.  They substituted their own fears and prejudices for reporting and insight.

This should be inexcusable.  it should be a firing offense to do this poor a job.  It cannot be acceptable to be paid for political insight and to simply pour the contents of your fears and preconceived notions onto the page instead of doing reporting and research.  But apparently it is.  Apparently you can just use your column as a substitute for therapy and keep the plumiest of media positions. How can this possibly do anything but harm to our democracy?

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Unclear on the Concept

Posted in Conservative Bullshit Debunked, Terrorism on January 5, 2010 | 18 Comments »

I’m still catching up on reading after the holidays, and I see that RCP’s Tom Bevan gripes:

Many thanks to Katrina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation for just beating the December 31 deadline for the dumbest comment of the year award. Regarding the failed terror attack on Flight 253, Vanden Heuvel writes:

I believe the lesson is that we need to end as quickly as possible the military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and call for an end to permanent war against Islamic terrorists.

Because the terrorists will stop trying to kill us if we do these things, right? You would think that if the last decade has taught the world anything – from 9/11 to London to Bali to Madrid to scores of other places around the globe – it’s that laying down our arms and giving the Islamic terrorists a big hug will not achieve the preferred outcome.

Bevan makes a classic conservative (neoconservative?) mistake here, asking the wrong question. What matters isn’t whether us ending the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan will make the terrorists stop trying to kill us. No, what matters is whether continuing those wars will make them stop trying to kill us. If the answer to that question is “no,” then it’s all a colossal waste of time, money, effort, and human life. And to Vanden Heuvel’s “dumb” point, that’s time, money, and effort (and, potentially, human life) that could be better used in other ways that do make them less likely to try to kill us.

As plenty of counterterrorism experts have pointed out, our military actions in that region of the world ironically makes them more likely to try to kill us, so it’s exactly counterproductive. Of course, since those experts envision approaches that extend beyond
blowing up brown-skinned people, they’re “unserious.”

But Bevan gets even worse:

These people wanted to kill us yesterday, they want to kill us today, and they will want to kill us tomorrow (and every day after that) until either 1) we cease to exist or 2) reform-minded Muslims finally stand up and take their religion back from these violent lunatics.

To think otherwise is to indulge in a fantasy – and an exceedingly deadly one at that.

OK, Mr. Wizard: In what way does our continued occupation of two sovereign Middle-Eastern nations make option 2 the slightest bit more likely? We’re left to wonder, because Bevan doesn’t bother to explain it, and, as I mentioned, those “unserious” experts claim that quite the opposite is true. It’s as if he’s wholly unaware that he’s just completely undermined the point he was trying to make, even if one buys the risible “they hate us for our freedoms” logic that seems to underlie his argument (which I obviously don’t).

In trying to call out the alleged “dumbest comment of 2009,” Bevan has instead provided us with arguably the dumbest blog post of 2009.

Footnote to the Preceding: His colleague David Paul Kuhn makes a valiant early attempt at the 2010 honor, writing a blog post in which he argues that political reporters pay too much attention to political bloggers. I’ll take that as a sign that political reporters can safely ignore his posts. :)

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What He Said

Posted in All Linky No Thinky, Terrorism on December 29, 2009 |

Go forth and read E-Mart.

Crazy hippie talk, indeed.

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The Attempted Bombing

Posted in Terrorism on December 28, 2009 | 16 Comments »

A few thoughts about the attempted bombing:

  1. If this is the best that Al Qaeda can do, isn’t that a good thing? I mean this seriously: they managed to get one confused loser to carry out this attack, and it was apparently planned by the same people that managed the New Coke roll out. Compared to 9/11 or Bali or Madrid or even London (which I think is different since the terrorist apparently were entirely homegrown, unlike the other attacks, and that gave them some serious advantages) it was a pathetic attempt that failed pathetically. That seems to suggest an organization on the wane.
  2. Can we please, please stop panicking? The attack failed. It was probably destined to fail, depending on the people in the plane to be completely helpless and on a bomb that was meant to burn rather than explode. We can never be perfectly safe, and unless someone can point to a specific test or process that failed that would have prevented the attacker from getting on the plane, any extra security is just mindless theater and the world has enough of that. Instead of wasting money on more theater, lets spend that money on better luggage screening, air marshals an intelligence.
  3. Why is the TSA getting grief for this? The flight came form Amsterdam, so isn’t any screening failure theirs?
  4. The safe haven theory appears to be dead as a useful means of fighting terrorism. It was always a bit tenuous — the 9/11 attackers planned and trained in Germany and the US after all — but the last few years have killed it. Occupying Iraq and Afghanistan has done pretty much nothing to prevent the training and planning of attacks. They just moved, apparently to Yemen. And if we indulge Lieberman’s militaristic fantasies and occupy Yemen, they will move somewhere else. With today’s technology, small groups of people can do an immense amount of damage without needing an immense amount of infrastructure. Trying to deny them safe havens makes no sense because they don’t need safe havens. It makes much more sense on concentrating on intelligence and denying them recruits and the sympathy of their target populace — something occupying countries does not help.

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