The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith; he is said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger is, ‘Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world’.
The WSJ editorial section hits on one of the most pervasive yet utterly unsupported myths of 9/11/01:
If 19 terrorists (the number who carried out the 9/11 attacks) each blew himself up at one- or two-week intervals in a shopping mall or a movie theater, America likely would become a seething nation of paranoid shut-ins. That it hasn’t happened tells you something: Al Qaeda doesn’t have a ready supply of competent suicide bombers, domestic or imported, to carry off serious attacks.
I’ve seen this false supposition treated as plain fact again and again. It’s one of the most pervasive media and governmental frames there is: that all 19 members of the “team” on 9/11/01 were 100% in on the plan and had committed themselves to fly planes into buildings. Clearly, the optimal way to plan this mission given the obvious (and ongoing) limit re: reliable, willing, and able suicide bombers (in this case “suicide pilots”) is to tell most of each team that you’re just going to pull the old “seize the plane, fly somewhere, and then make some demands.” Exactly what the passengers thought was going to happen, too. Only one or two members of each team need know the true mission on the day and the remaining three or four are merely muscle, and, ultimately also a kind of unwitting victim of the very attacks they helped carry out. In fact, the fewer “in on it” the better, in that under this analysis you only require one suicidal zealot (and this is always going to be the rarest resource, really) per plane. Thus you potentially had only four “suicide bombers” for 9/11. Not 19. It’s at least conceivable that some of that muscle, also finally realizing what was really going on contemporaneously with the other passengers, were in on the struggle that ultimately ended in the crash in Pennsylvania. Unlikely, but possible. Fundamentally, though, if al Qaeda had 19 suicide bombers they could use to carry out the attacks the WSJ theorizes above: they would have done it. There is no reason at all to believe they did not wish to carry out the most spectacular attack possible with the resources at hand. An unremitting series of attacks spreading over weeks would have fit that bill to a T. That they chose another, extremely spectacular but vastly more concentrated style implies strongly that the resources simply weren’t there for the WSJ-style attack. Period. Not on 9/11, not today.
The economics of suicide bombing and the number of willing participants is, was, and will always be a primary limitation on its use so long as the target nation remains a relatively comfortable place to live. Give people a reason to stick around, minuscule as it may be, mostly they will choose to live. This is the underlying logic of the shoe- and underpants-bomber failures: these guys just aren’t the brightest bulbs in the world…but they’re what’s available that has any reasonable chance of getting the job done. You’ll note that they weren’t planted here prior to attempting their attacks; they weren’t deemed sufficiently reliable for a long-term, slow developing infiltration style plan, apparently.
Worth noting that the Israeli government is still working this terrorism opportunity cost issue out as well. With even modest improvements to the daily lives of Palestinians, most of the quasi-daily attacks would begin to melt away, and without further recourse to walls or super-high security. Even a tiny bit of hope is a powerful incentive to the potential suicide bomber to continue living. And the Israelis will continue to fail to understand it so long as they receive billions in untethered, unregulated support from us. The old Sinclair saw applies [with a minor addition]:
“It is difficult to get a man [or a government] to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Index Israel’s support to GDP of the Palestinian territory going forward. Things would change rapidly. Suddenly, their salary would depend on it.
The change you experienced last night at midnight is available to you every moment of every day.
I’m left fearing the future of America’s leadership on the world stage of science and technology.
This leadership, as any historian will tell you, drives the economic strength and security of nations. The fall is not from a cliff. More like a slow, downward slide – almost imperceptible from day to day. But as the years pass America will have descended from leaders to players to merely followers as we fade to insignificance, at best hitching a ride on the innovations of others.
Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country’s way of life; it’s only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we’re doing the terrorists’ job for them.
We pass our time and our lives in contemplating what we have already contemplated, and by this we are most insidiously imprisoned. This redundancy constructs our habitat, we construct by analogy and by resemblance, it is our architecture. Those who perceive, or build differently, or elsewhere, are our hereditary enemies.
Ladies and Gentlemen: your GOP. Dangerous people, of course, can be told by their names. Which are Abdul or Ahmed or Mohammed. They will have their own line. For scrutiny. Everyone else: come on aboard!
Worth noting that disgraced former Speaker Newt has been the most frequent guest featured on Meet the Press this year. Number of times Nancy Pelosi, sitting Speaker of the House, third in line for the Presidency, and senior member of majority caucus in Congress has been on? Zero. Your Liberal Media at work again.
If we didn’t have a feckless Democratic majority, they might be in front of microphones just about now giving a preferably rhyming, two sentence version of this information for the evening news and cablers:
An attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day would be all-consuming for the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration – if there were one.
Instead, the post remains vacant because Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., has held up President Barack Obama’s nominee in an effort to prevent TSA workers from joining a labor union.
and, while they’re at it, they could see fit to mention that (emphasis added):
Republicans have cast votes against the key TSA funding measure that the 2010 appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security contained, which included funding for the TSA, including for explosives detection systems and other aviation security measures. In the June 24 vote in the House, leading Republicans including John Boehner, Pete Hoekstra, Mike Pence and Paul Ryan voted against the bill, […] A full 108 Republicans voted against the conference version, including Boehner, Hoekstra, Pence, Michelle Bachmann, Marsha Blackburn, Darrell Issa and Joe Wilson.
I guess pointing out this sort of brazen hypocrisy from our National Security Party, the GOP, just wouldn’t be polite, and would undermine the extreme and ongoing displays of real comity we’ve seen thus far.
Fixing the problem doesn’t mean voting out the feckless Democrats or the obstructionist Republicans. It doesn’t even mean voting out Senator Lieberman. As long as our legislative process is held in thrall to an economy of influence that nearly requires members to play nice with the special interests, the will of the people — on the left and on the right — will continue to be stymied on every issue, in every Congress, under every administration.
Lemkin 