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The Flight Before Christmas (2008)
IMDB rating: 6.70
Plot: A reindeer boy named Niko dreams about flying like his father, whom he has never met. Despite constant mocking from others, he sneaks out of his home valley to take flying lessons from Julius, a flying squirrel.
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Directors: Hegner Michael
Actors: Jantunen Olli,Bjorkman Hannu-Pekka,Vierikko Vesa,Lampi Jussi,Kaskilahti Risto,Veijonen Juha,Valtonen Puntti,Korpela Tommi,Karen Aarre,Hamalainen Arttu,Animation,Animation,Adventure,Family,
Could Computer Search Technology Like Google Help USA Security?
Has the USA Learned Any of These Things Since the Christmas Bomber Attempt?
Here are some things that perhaps we could have learned from the Christmas Bomber’s attempt to kill 300 people with explosives in his underpants. Which, if any, of these things do you think we may learn.
#1. To use a Google style system on a national security intra-net grid, which allows every word in a psot to be indexed, and then allows all posts in the system to be cross-correlated based on incoming questions, like for example, just inputting somebodys name, or just the word "nigerian", or just the word "visa"
#2. That systems which have the capacity to get slack, become much more likely to get slack at major holidays like Christmas Eve, and that Al Qaida is so smart that they have figured that out, and are fully able to plan their attacks for our most vulnerable moments.
#3 That we need to start tracking potential America haters long before they do anything wrong. We need to have a list of potential enemies of the USA based on behavioral factors. This list would not be an accusation, or an indictment. It would just be sort of like a radar reflector tag, so if one of these people shows up at any security related event (like a flight), at least we know a bit about that person’s background.
#4 With shoe bomber and the underpants bomber both failing for lack of a proper detonator, it’s likely that Al Qaida now knows that most high explosives do require a blasting cap to set them off. Electronic blasting caps can be radio controlled. Al Qaida does know that, they don’t have to rely on Lonely Answers Club to learn it.
#5 The next aircraft bomber is probably going to carry the bomb tucked in to their intestines. Properly shaped and placed 3 oz of semtex would be very hard to see on a full body scanner. Al Qaida has such a scanner, so they could make sure the HE was invisible. Radio controlled detonators can be made of lightweight plastics and installed with the HE. 3 oz of semtex would blow a 747 out of the sky. Suicide bombers are there to die, so having the bomb inside their intestines is not a problem for them. For us it could be if we haven’t done any behavioral profiling and we have no idea who our enemies are likely to be (like the guys at the CIA camp had zero clue about who was their friend and who was their enemy).
#6 John Brennan has not tendered his resignation, or if he has Barack Obama has not accepted it. Both men are talking about general diffuse systems failures. Obama now says that all leads should be run down by some person who will be held accountable for doing so. Running down leads combined with an intranet Google style database of indexed notes would be a powerful way to find needles in haystacks. Somebody is putting queries in to a system that is designed to correlate previously unconnected data based on incoming queries. So dots get connected. The machine does it. It does the "analysis". Lead chaser just puts in the well-written queries. By the way Admiral Poindexter was fired from DARPA and the CIA for suggesting just this sort of data mining in real-time approach. Maybe the government owes his an apology.
You may feel that we won’t learn any of these things. Or maybe just one or two. If nothing on my list seems worthy to you, let me know your list. If you like some of my things, let me know what you like.
Thank you so much.
To John Q Public:
I assume from careful reading of your post that you are Moslem. My general impression is that you are a .22 caliber man speaking about 80 mm problems. I really can’t address what you say except that it seems to be on a very narrow perspective. Biblically, you are obviously well read. As an atheist that cuts no mustard with me. I don’t want to hear about People of the Book. I want to hear about sane people and those that are not. As far as I can tell all the Children of Abraham have some birth defects, they are a bit touched in the head. Wake up! God is dead. Find a more rational guide for your behavior. Religion, and most especially pork-rind eating Mohammad with his baloney laden Qu’ran, full of hate violence and militancy, needs to be quelled, or it will eliminate the human species on this planet. The cockroaches and sharks will laugh. As well they should.
To: John Q. Public (aka well-read Devil Dog) — my own service was as a JAG with the 7th Fleet which included a SEAL unit that I worked with. I was the only Junior Naval Officer on base invited to the Marine Corps Ball every year — and to sit at the head table. The Colonel thought I was a mighty good JAG, as staff pukes go. You have been reading my posts for some time and have a good memory to recall my love of Neitzsche. Yes, I believe that we become the ubermensche or we become the LaBrea Tar Pits.
As a jarhead, you naturally favor the ground assault, so we disagree on that. I favor predators. But for predators to work well NRO has to be built up a lot, and so does NSA. We have the resources, the money and the smarts, but we don’t have enough techniques. We need massive ramping up of targeteering techniques. There’s expert systems and fuzzy logic and general systems theory involved. Safe houses and training camps need to get in the cross-hairs. After that, downrange solutions OK
To: John Q. Public (aka well-read Devil Dog) — my own service was as a JAG with the 7th Fleet which included a SEAL unit that I worked with. I was the only Junior Naval Officer on base invited to the Marine Corps Ball every year — and to sit at the head table. The Colonel thought I was a mighty good JAG, as staff pukes go. You have been reading my posts for some time and have a good memory to recall my love of Neitzsche. Yes, I believe that we become the ubermensche or we become the LaBrea Tar Pits.
As a jarhead, you naturally favor the ground assault, so we disagree on that. I favor predators. But for predators to work well NRO has to be built up a lot, and so does NSA. We have the resources, the money and the smarts, but we don’t have enough techniques. We need massive ramping up of targeteering techniques. There’s expert systems and fuzzy logic and general systems theory involved. Safe houses and training camps need to get in the cross-hairs. After that, downrange solutions OK
none sorry
~T~
omg i pwned you | Jan 07, 2010
EDIT, REPLY II: I agree fully on vastly increasing the resourced available to the NRO and NSA. SIGINT and HUMINT are both necessary pieces of the puzzle; neither works nearly as well alone. It seems our debate here stems from which one is most important. The IAO (commanded by Admiral Poindexter) was a great idea while it lasted, until the liberals got it shut down.
I don’t recall ever reading any of your posts before, but, from my experience, your comment, "Wake up, God is dead!" is usually uttered by fans of Nietzsche’s work. I can’t say I’m not a fan myself. Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche are quite possibly the best 19th century philosophers. I imagine you’d much love Kafka as well - especially "The Trial." Contact me through my profile, or I’ll email you: I imagine we can debate similar issues ad infinitum. Contrary to the public perception of Marines, I’m well educated. Ph.D. in Psychology, and D.Pharm.Dip.Sci in Pharmacology (to name the doctorates); not quite law, but I have a good grasp of rhetoric and debate.
I’m quite the autodidact; I know more about what I’ve taught myself than anything I learned in school. Quite a bit of law (mostly federal, USC, criminal and civil liberties, suprisingly), foreign affairs, public policy, information security (my current occupation pending rehabilitation of my psychology license) and information warfare, and a deep and abiding love since childhood of mathematics of every kind, mainly of the pure variety.
Not many people can converse about such subjects at a level approaching ours. Overwhelmingly, the ones who can are bleeding-heart liberals who study such things so they can get a rudimentary and oversimplified grasp of the facts in an attempt to shoot us down.
The fact that you’re a lawyer makes a lot of sense. Overwhelmingly, lawyers view America as a country of laws which are not to be broken, lest we lower ourselves to our enemies’ levels.
It’s funny, if not outright ironic: I intended on majoring in Law, from my teen years until the second year of college, where I chose a double major of Psychology and Chemistry (it was hell to get the administration to sign off on that; I used all six degrees of separation to connect them together, eventually convincing knowledge of Psychology would be invaluable, since I intended to go on to postgrad in psychopharmacology).
Not quite the average Marine has letter soup after their name, do they? I wasn’t as educated when I was active-duty, but still had BSc O. Chem and BA Psych.
First Lieutenant L Marchese USMC,
Ph.D., D.Pharm.Dip.Sci., CCDC/III
I Marine Expeditionary Force, 2003-2005
EDIT, REPLY: I am not a Muslim, and my religious beliefs are not on trial here. I have studied religious writing from all seven major religions. I must agree with you that religion causes more problems than it solves, as does any belief, theory, or technology put in the hands of the ignorant. The Qu’ran does not teach hatred any more than the Bible does. Both have passages of vengeance; and any writing, whether religious or not, can incite hateful and violent people to violence. What is preached by the Imams of jihad is not a rounded version of the Qu’ran; most of it is not from the Qu’ran at all. It is in man’s nature as an animal to be violent; a throwback to our evolutionary ancestors. It is our duty to become the ubermensch that Nietzsche, who you speak so highly of, spoke of, and rise out of the parochial teachings and indoctrinations of our society, out of the outmoded customs, and use our higher brain to suppress our more primordial urges: "What is ape to man? A laughingstock. And what will Man be to the ubermensch? A laughingstock….Everything that has come before you has risen above itself. Will the tide ebb here? Or will you walk across the bridge to your destiny?" (Or something like that. Book I, Also Sprach Zarathustra)
I suggest you re-read my writing. I am not against electronic systems, but electronic systems cannot track people who have gone "off-grid" and eschewed all modern conveniences that can be tracked, such as telephone service and email, as the leadership of al-Qaeda has. I am for bringing the fight to the terrorists on the ground with redoubled strength, an order of magnitude above with which we currently pursue them, using the independent military units - covert operatives, commando units, and elite firesquads acting on human intelligence, not solely signals intelligence - in order to stun and disorient the enemy. Let the military and CIA do what they do best: attack, and launch double- and triple-feints, to get the enemy to doubt themselves, their own organizations, and their own intelligence, and the terrorist groups will self-destruct and be nothing more than a group of violent, indoctrinated teenage anarchists.
The bottom line being there is too much oversight, too much red tape in Washington. Too many rules to follow in order to effectively fight an enemy that has no rules and a decentralized command structure.
Signed,
First Lieutenant Luciano Marchese
I Marine Expeditionary Force, 2003-2005
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I’m a libertarian, favoring unregulated markets, and civil liberties.
I still support the USA PATRIOT and other acts, vehemently. The only people I personally know who have problems with such legislation and systems are bleeding-heart, burned-out, acid-casualty, pot-smoking, idealist hippies, with no concept of "pragmatism" or "practicality."
Especially when fighting a war, vis a vis Vietnam, where out of a specific group of people, there is no way to tell who may be a combatant or not. The Geneva Conventions govern war between two NATIONS, with soldiers fighting in uniform, under a flag, on a defined field of battle. Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Hamas, and other militant Islamic groups are not nations, and are not signatories of the Geneva Conventions.
The war needs to be brought to these people as they bring it to us - with blitzkrieg tactics and psychological warfare, leading to a degradation of morale, and sheer terror in the enemy. Regular units are not best-suited to this kind of war. They must follow laws, fighting under the flag of the USA.
I believe the CIA and other similar agencies should be given carte blanche when it involves waging such an asymmetrical war, using whatever tactics - "intense interrogation," "rendition," and, yes, "assassination" - it can bring to bear. We are fighting a backwards, bigoted enemy that deliberately targets women and children, with no respect for the rules of war. Not to say they are cowardly: it takes a pair of balls to strap on a bomb and go "martyr" yourself.
This radical, fundamentalist perversion of the Qu’ran needs to be stamped out, now, and funding needs to be cut - including the Saudi-funded ultra-raddical Wahhabi sect madrasas - which, indirectly, gain millions a year in financing from the US. Embargoes and official sanctions must be placed on these countries that harbor said organizations - and such embargoes and sanctions need to be enforced through whatever "unofficial" (black market, black operations) means necessary.
Contrary to what many politicians, and liberal, pothead hippies, preach, playing nice with terrorists won’t make them like America: they’ll lose what respect they have for our military might and will to fight, and just laugh at us.
Politicians aren’t hawkish enough, when it comes to this war. And wars in general. All talk, no action.
Just like medicine. Politicians shouldn’t tell doctors how and what to prescribe to who, as they now attempt to with opioid pain medications, both for their use in myriad diseases, and addiction treatment - limited, if the people on the Hill had their way, to end-stage cancer patients. NOR SHOULD POLITICIANS TELL ORGANIZATIONS DESIGNED FOR THE DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF WAR TELL THEM HOW TO WAGE IT: IT IS ONLY THEIR DUTY TO DECLARE IT.
The Joint Chiefs and the Director of the CIA and the Director of the NSA are who should be running this thing. Homeland Security, National Intelligence, and the FBI should be following the formers’ lead, when matters become domestic. Politicians are lawyers - not warriors.
As a conclusion to an all-too-brief statement, I must say: don’t think I’m bigoted against Islam in any way. The radical, fundamentalist Jews, hard-liners in Israel - are just as flagrantly flaunting any semblance of civility or respect for international law. Look at their indiscriminate attacks on the Arab States, the Palestinians in particular (not to say the PLO aren’t a bunch of terrorists themselves). Look at their nuclear program - everyone knows they have the Bomb, but never once has a UN inspector set foot near it, and never once have the Israelis acknowledged it. Sound a little like Saddam without all the stereotypical Arabic bluster and tough-talk?
I believe if fundamentalist, born-again evangelical, Pentecostal, etc. Christians were put so close to the war, geographically, they’d be no better than the Jews or the Arabs. It is solely by virtue of their geographic distance, and therefore, relative lack of threat and detachment, that they can claim the high ground. If the Christians were put in the mid-east, I don’t know what side they’d be on, or whether there would be triplicate allegiances.
If any of the "religious" were as holy as they claim, they would know, as Sons of Abraham, they all worship the same God, and have essentially the same religion with only minor alterations. They are all, as the (non-radical) Muslims say, "Children of the Book." The Qu’ran is an expansion on the Bible, which, in turn, is an expansion of the Torah and other Jewish h
John Q Public | Jan 07, 2010
