Somali-Americans Convicted of Joining ISIS

Saw this piece from June about the ISIS trials in Minnesota.  Worth sharing.  The feds got nine convictions in this trial.   We have done a good job at intercepting ISIS wannabes from heading over to Syria.  ISIS in the Twin Cities

Disturbing how poorly we are doing assimilating these immigrants.  It has been 25 years since they started here as refugees.  Now the next generation wants to wage jihad against the west?  This is not a good look.  Maybe we should be rethinking temporary refugee status for Somalia?   When does it end?  TRS for Somalia facts

UVA Vindicated in Libel Trial

A federal jury convicted Rolling Stone of libeling the assistant dean in the infamous Jackie rape case. Jury Finds Rolling Stone Guilty 

Good for the jury.  After a while, Rolling Stone questioned the veracity of its own story, but then didn't take it off its website for months.   The journalist responsible is finished.  Unfortunately, the publisher Jann Wenner won't be "gawkered" by this,  but it will surely hurt. 

The fraternity's suit against Rolling Stone was thrown out in June.  

UVA's president Teresa Sullivan should have been fired over her terrible leadership during this smear campaign.  She let the university's reputation be sullied without putting up a fight.    All you had to do was to read the first few pages of the article to know it was a hatchet job. 

Russian Fleet Sails Again!

Some headlines recently blurted out the alarm that the Russian fleet was invading the English Channel.  Here's a good post from Peter Hitchens' weekly column, telling us all to calm down.

Look at the black smoke coming from the aircraft carrier Admiral Kutnetsov.  That just doesn't look right.

US ships shadowed them in the area, in case there was need of a tow.

In fact, a breakdown tug is accompanying the squadron!   russian-carrier-plagued-by-technical-problems/

This is the great Russian military we are supposed to be so afraid of.

Don't panic! They're just sad old wrecks 

How we love to frighten ourselves about those wicked Russians.

There was a sort of frenzy on Friday as portions of Moscow’s museum-piece fleet slogged past the White Cliffs of Dover, as if the Spanish Armada were at our gates.

Actually the Channel is an international waterway, and we don’t own it. Russia (whose Gross Domestic Product is smaller than Italy’s) is quite entitled to send her ships through it. And Russia is in no fit state to invade anything much larger than Rutland.

+3

There was a sort of frenzy on Friday as portions of Moscow’s museum-piece fleet slogged past the White Cliffs of Dover, as if the Spanish Armada were at our gates (pictured)

The Russian ships are handsome, but doddery. The ancient Soviet-era carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, started life in a Ukrainian shipyard and was then named after the decrepit Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

She left a shocking trail of black smoke as if she was burning coal.

Her main escort, the outwardly majestic Peter The Great (originally named after the KGB chief Yuri Andropov), recently spent two years rusting gently, tied up at Severomorsk. 

No wonder, given that  most of her class are unusable thanks to wonky nuclear reactors. 

The really sad thing is that, having madly scrapped our own carriers and sold off the Harriers that flew from them, not to mention axeing a huge number of destroyers and frigates, we have reduced our own naval power to a pathetic level. Is it perhaps envy that makes us so fretful? 

If Russia is now better at projecting power in the Middle East than we are, it is because we are weak by choice, not because Moscow is strong.

Russian warships sail down English Channel en route to Syria

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The Great Debate

Too painful to watch the whole thing...I gave up trying when Trump was explaining how Sean Hannity could vouch for him about his opposition the Iraq war, or something.  What a dumpster fire! Certainly Trump deserves blame for not offering much substance, but what's Hillary's excuse?   She HAS been at this for 30 years, and that pap was all she could come up with?  

Here's a few interesting takes on the debate, worth reading and which, somewhat, match my impressions.  Who knows how the public will judge it in the end.  Obviously content will not factor into it.   I'm not crazy, you are  and trump reality TV

NJ Terrorist Caught!

Has anything good ever come out of the Elmore section of Elizabeth?   Here's the article:  new-york-explosion/a-family-business-that-aggravated-neighbors/

You can't make up the name of his family business:  

9/11 After Fifteen Years: We are Safer

Don't forget:  a tribute:  Lest we forget

It is worth remembering that, as bad as the 9/11 attack was, it was an anomalous event no terrorist group today could hope to duplicate.  Al Qaeda still exists but as a shadow of what it was.  ISIS, which has picked up its fallen baton, only inspires to deadly but inconsequential attacks against soft targets.

The authors of the 9/11 report are simply wrong when they say terrorism has gotten worse.  See their column in USA Today:  911-commission-kean-hamilton-column/89978558/  Most terrorist events worldwide take place in a handful of war-torn countries.  Terrorism as a threat has not significantly increased in Western countries.  But the serious threat remains:  the French just captured three women who are pledged to ISIS and connected with the Paris attackers.

The "terrorist mastermind" is largely a mythological being.  As John Mueller details in "Chasing Ghosts," terrorists that have hit targets in the US are mainly disturbed and incompetent individuals.  Cold comfort, perhaps, but at least it suggests the damage they do will be limited.  Only in the broadest sense can recent attacks be attributed to international Islamic jihad.  And the FBI has never uncovered a "sleeper cell" in the US.

Even if in some sense we are beating the terrorists, we still must keep working the problem so we can never have a true terrorist conspiracy commit evil against Americans.

Are Drugs Behind "the Summer of Terror"?

The more I look at the terrorism problem, the more convinced I am that we are misdefining the problem.   We are focused on Islamic terrorism, but other examples of mass killing are just as bad. Look at this case in Japanese nursing home recently. Is there a common link?

Peter Hitchens believes a consistent thread in many of the recent cases has been drug use by the perpetrators.  He puts together an impressive list of the types of the drugs, legal and illegal, that many of the attackers have had a history of taking.  The Orlando killer was a steroid user.  The San Bernardino killers were on Xanax and Adderral.  Mental illness medication has been tied to the murderers of the priest in Normandy and to the mall shooter in Munich.  See one-common-link-DRUGS

He asks:  shouldn't we be looking at this issue of drug abuse more closely?  Yes we should.  That doesn't mean that militant Islam isn't a motivation for many, but its significance in this global phenomenon might be overstated.