Missing the obvious

I was in the Woman Cave doing some sewing the other day. As usual, the radio was on WGGL, the NPR station from the Michigan Tech campus. They carry a 2-hour talk show, "On Point," from 10 to noon every day. It being only a couple days after the event, it was no surprise that the first hour was devoted to a lot of bloviating about the bomb detonated in the Chelsea neighborhood in New York City. Two things struck me.

First, the complete sense of self-delusion and denial in the repeated statements that the U.S. will not give in to fear, we're going to respond with resolve and courage and general bravery. Bullshit. Osama won 15 years ago. Ever since 9/11 as a country we've been running scared. We see terrorists and potential terrorists every time we hear an Arabic name. We freak out when we see a woman wearing a hijab -- if head scarves scare the crap out of us, just how brave are we? We collectively agreed to treat a handful of fanatics as though they posed as existential threat, which is nonsense, and have been paying the price ever since. We're more risk of being shot by accident by a toddler who found a parent's unsecured handgun than we are of being the victim of a terrorist attack. Nonetheless, we talk a lot about how brave and courageous we are while behaving like the world's biggest cowards.

Second, the complete cluelessness about motive. Lots and lots of bloviating about the influence of on-line recruiting and the possible impact of trips the man made back to Afghanistan, as if all it takes are words from an outside source to inspire someone to turn radical. Neither of the so-called experts said one word about the fact that for words to have much impact they have to land on fertile ground. At the same time that news reports discussed the fact the man's family experienced harassment and discrimination on a pretty steady basis for years because they were Muslim, the experts were musing about what could possibly have turned someone who'd been in this country since he was 7 years old into a "terrorist." The stupid it burns.

The big question isn't what might have motivated a 28-year-old man who'd been in this country for 3/4s of his life to turn radical. What turned a person described by the neighbors as an "ordinary kid" into someone buying bomb components through Ebay was a whole lot of little incidents that eventually hit some trigger point. And it wasn't stuff happening in some Arab country -- it was what was happening in New Jersey. It was day after day, week after week, month after month of Islamaphobic neighbors calling in bullshit noise complaints, it was the city hassling his family's restaurant if it stayed open one minute too late but ignoring other restaurants in the same neighborhood doing the same thing, it was being repeatedly being accused of being a jihadi or called a raghead simply for looking Arab -- although Afghanis aren't Arabs, but most Americans are too dumb to know that.

There's a well-established principle in sociology and education: if you label someone and if you label them over and over again, sooner or later they're going to decide to live up (or down) to the label. Tell kids they're smart and they start to behave as though they are. Tell them they're dumb and before long they can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Tell young men they're not wanted because they're terrorists and, what do you know? They start buying 6-quart pressure cookers and filling them with shrapnel.

Of course, it's a whole lot easier to blame videos produced by Da'esh than it is to do some serious soul-searching here at home. Experts aren't going to get booked on to talk shows if they're honest enough to say we're fucking ourselves -- everyone wants a scapegoat after all -- so we're going to keep right on fucking ourselves. Once again I'm really happy I live in a rural area.

Fears of a jihadi mail order bride? You're kidding, right?

It must be hard being a comic doing topical humor these days. It's getting harder and harder to tell the difference between parody and real life. The latest example? The "jihadi wife." There's been an incredible amount of air time being wasted on speculating whether or not the mail order bride in the San Bernadino shooting was part of a nefarious plot to ensnare American Muslim men into participating in terrorism by setting them up with radicalized wives. Government officials and various "experts" who really should know better were tossing around phrases like "This could be a game changer" and "we need to look at fiancee visas more closely."

The stupid, it burns. In one breath, they're talking about how both Sayeed and Tashfeen were expressing radical Islamic ideas online before Daesh emerged as a formal organization in Iraq and Syria. In the next, they're speculating about whether or not Tashfeen could have been part of a larger plan by groups like Daesh to lure lonely American men, some sort of "honey pot" scheme. You know, even if it was, it would have to be one of the dumbest, most inefficient schemes of all time. This is not something that should be inspiring fear. It's more like, "Are you guys shitting me? Your plan is to strike fear into the hearts of the American people by sneaking in an occasional jihadi bride? Just how much hashish have you guys been indulging in while doing your plotting?" Because let's get real -- the whole jihadi bride fantasy has so many uncontrollable factors involved that there's no way it would be worth the effort.

First, you've got to recruit the women. And, yes, it's pretty clear that there are women who would be willing to be recruited. After all, there are naive teenagers running away from home in England to hook up with Daesh in Syria and Iraq, so logically there must be women who would be willing to go in the other direction. Of course, if you're recruiting the potential brides from women who are living in Islamic nations like Pakistan, there's always the risk you're going to recruit women who will go along with the scheme not because they want to don a suicide vest when they get to the U.S. but simply because they want to get away from wherever they happen to be now. Then you've got to get them to set up reasonably attractive profiles on whatever the Islamic equivalent of Cherry Blossoms happens to be, all the while remembering you've got no control over the potential bridegrooms who may view those profiles. Toss in the "on the Internet no one knows you're a dog" factor, i.e., the possibility that the prospective bridegroom is lying his ass off to the potential bride because he's probably motivated a whole lot more by the desire to acquire a woman -- any woman! -- to share his bed than he is by any mutual interest in reading religious texts or making the pilgrimage to Mecca, and the odds of being able to get a bunch of radicalized potential terrorists placed in locations that would make sense strategically drops to effectively zero.

In short, what you're looking at is a remarkably awkward scheme. So why waste time talking about it as though it was a serious possibility? I'd guess it's because no one wants to say out loud that they don't have a clue as to what exactly led up to the shooting in San Bernadino. Speculating vaguely about convoluted plots sounds marginally better than admitting ignorance. In fact, if it wasn't for the inconvenient fact that the shooters were Muslim, San Bernadino would fit fairly comfortable into an American classic: the disgruntled worker coming back to wreak revenge on the co-workers against whom he had a grudge of some sort. Unfortunately, that particular narrative feeds the push for gun control and raises uncomfortable questions about why no one noticed the guy was disgruntled. It's actually a more uncomfortable scenario than the alternative: the long arm of Daesh reaching out to instill fear in Americans. Thus, the shooters were Muslim, we're at war with Islamist terrorists, ergo (and conveniently), the shooting had to be part of larger scheme. And if speculating about unrealistic, highly improbable plots helps it all fit into that larger narrative, then the experts will speculate away. Whether or not jihadi brides make sense is, of course, completely irrelevant.

Political theater of the absurb

The latest high profile mass shooting -- the incident in San Bernadino a few days ago -- seems to have brought out record levels of The Stupid in various pundits and politicians. I was listening to the radio yesterday and got treated to a lot of blathering about maybe revisiting the idea of "threat levels" as well as working on ways to better monitor who's liking what on Facebook and other social media. Why? Because Tashfeen Malik and Sayeed Farook had liked posts on Daesh websites. Apparently if we can just magically monitor every Facebook account in the world and then place surveillance on every person who "likes" anything associated with Daesh or other terroristic groups, we'll be able to prevent incidents like the San Bernadino attack.

The Stupid, it burns. There are literally thousands of groups out there that advocate violence in some form or another. Then when you add in the millions of people who create memes using quotes from Chairman Mao, Lenin, Che Guevera, and others who advocated revolution, you're looking at a lot of server hours as various programs search for key phrases or names. If I quote Mao in a post, e.g., 'power comes from the barrel of a gun,' am I going to end up on a watch list or have FBI agents knocking on my door? Probably not, given that my profiles all indicate I'm an older-than-dirt white female retiree. But how would anyone know my profiles are accurate? Like they say, on the Internet no one knows you're a dog. People's profiles can be 100% fictitious. You may not be able to obtain a fake passport or a phony driver's license as easily as you once could out in the real world, but when it comes to creating fake personas in cyberspace? People do it all the time. Toss in the infamous "dark web" and various encryption programs and if someone is serious about hiding who he or she is, they're able to do it. Bottom line: bloviating about being able to protect us from fanatics of any ideological stripe is just that: bloviating. Sound bites meant to placate the public but almost utterly devoid of any practical content. I will concede that with sufficient personnel and computer equipment, it's possible to track down the dumber ideologues, the morons who do their plotting on devices sitting in their own living rooms, but intercepting the smart ones? Not nearly as likely.

Of course, the meaningless blathering about monitoring cyberspace isn't the only example of The Stupid, It Burns. Once again we got to hear about the "arsenal" the couple had assembled. Arsenal? Compared to the weapons stashes owned by quite a few Americans, the "arsenal" Tasheen and Sayeed had was pretty patethic. Even the ownership of the assault rifles is no big deal in today's gun obsessed landscape. When the younger daughter lived in Texas, she had a couple of co-workers who were ammosexuals, a married couple that loved to take their Bushmasters out into the back yard and fire off a thousand or so rounds almost every weekend. They lived in a rural area so didn't have to go to a range. Hearing about their hobby made me happy we don't have any neighbors quite that enamored of assault weapons -- the worst we deal with is a neighbor who's into black powder so for a month or two in late summer we get to hear him firing off what sounds like a cannon as he practices for deer season. I always wonder just how much of the deer is left if he actually shoots one because it always sounds more like he's firing off a mortar of some sort than a long gun, but that's a digression.

The bottom line is that there was absolutely nothing unusual about the number of guns the San Bernadino couple owned. When you can step into Dunham Sports (like the S.O. and I did yesterday) and find gun safes on display that will hold 36 long guns, you know that it takes a lot more than a handful of weapons to qualify as an "arsenal." Maybe a reporter or a pundit who isn't into guns would view a grand total of four guns as an arsenal, but to anyone who's ever been around hunters? Four guns? That's it? That's not an arsenal. That's barely dipping into a hobby. You get out into rural areas, and the average household is going to have at least double that (a small caliber varmint gun or two, a couple shotguns, a deer rifle or two. . . maybe some hobby stuff, like a muzzle loader that uses black powder. . .) The attempt to read something sinister into the possibility that the couple actually went to a gun range to practice was pretty bizarre, too. Lots and lots of people go to gun ranges every day. Some just go occasionally to brush up on their skills; some are there every chance they get. Ted Nugent used to brag about going out in the woods on his place to cut down trees with automatic weapons; I'm sure there other gun nuts out there who do similar stuff. Does that mean that one of these days they're going to stroll into their workplace and off their co-workers? Probably not. (Statistically they're more likely to kill themselves or a a family member before they go after casual acquaintances or strangers.)

And then there were the pipe bomb components. . . yet another sign of just how out of touch with the real world the pundits and talking heads are came when I heard someone on NPR talk about how hard it would be to make pipe bombs because there's all the work involved in cutting a pipe into the right lengths or how technically difficult it would be. The man has apparently never set foot in a Home Depot or, for that matter, a local hardware store. Walk into the plumbing section and you can find lengths of pipe ranging from just a couple inches in length to many feet. Why use a hacksaw when you can buy stuff ready cut? Although I guess I should be glad no one apparently thought about that. If the talking heads had, no doubt we'd get to hear a lot of blathering about how law enforcement should start monitoring hardware stores for people buying plumbing parts.

The Stupid, it burns. 

That was fast

I couldn't help but notice just how fast law enforcement slapped a terrorism label on that shooting in Tennessee.The news had just broken, only an hour or two had passed since the first reports came out, and it was terrorism. All it apparently took was learning the shooter had an Arabic name and, bang, instant terrorism case. Now they're scrambling to find some connection, any connection, with organizations such as ISIS or Al Qaeda. After all, a young man who was born in Kuwait and who still has relatives in the Middle East couldn't possibly make trips back to Kuwait for something as mundane as visiting his grandparents, could he? His travels must have been for nefarious purposes.

Let me make one thing clear -- I'm not saying those potentially nefarious reasons do not exist. Given all the reasons American foreign policy has given for Arabs to hate the United States in general and the U.S. military in particular, it is possible a connection to a formal terrorist organization will be found. What I am bothered by is the instant rush to judgement, especially in contrast to the Dylann Roof case. Roof frequented white supremacist sites on-line, clearly supported white supremacist organizations, and shot 9 people because he wanted to start a race war. . . but is he a terrorist? Law enforcement is still hemming and hawing about that one. Apparently terrorism can only be terrorism if it's foreign, not home grown.

Of course, by running around blathering about terrorism and foreign travel, everyone is conveniently distracted from asking questions like, "Just how did a guy with an Arabic name manage to acquire multiple weapons?" Then again, if those questions do start getting asked, the NRA will be on the scene pretty fast to explain why it's way, way more important why anyone and everyone should be allowed to buy whatever gun they want without anyone ever questioning it than it is to prevent more people from getting shot.  

I am, incidentally, pretty confident that if the investigation reveals the shooting occurred for purely personal reasons, like if the shooter was pissed that one of the recruiters had rejected him for enlistment or he had mental health issues, we'll never hear about it on mainstream media.

A small digression that illustrates just how bad things have gotten in this country when it comes to random gun violence and mass shootings: I couldn't remember how to spell Dylann Root's name (one "n" or two?) so I Googled "Charlestown shooting." Obviously, I also couldn't remember how to spell Charleston. Anyway, I got a long string of hits for recent shootings in assorted Charlestowns around the country: West Virginia, Massachusetts, and a couple others. And my co-workers in Atlanta wondered why I wanted to retire to the middle of nowhere. . .

What I'm thinking

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Words fail me

Doctor Slain at Church

Tiller was shot in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church, where Sunday morning services were being held, Stolz said. The gunman then pointed a gun at two men who tried to stop him before driving away in a 1993 blue Ford Taurus, authorities said.

Brilliant at Breakfast has a good post up about the American Taliban with links to other sites.