Politcal Parties Not Always Party Poopers

We Americans must accept that we have political parties and that we should find our party based upon our ideals and stick with it for awhile. Since early in our nation’s political history, partisanship has been here to stay. We must learn to grow with it, changing it from within, and enjoying its victories, and learning from its losses.

In the beginning we were not supposed to have political parties. In fact the framers spoke of the demerits of party politics in the few years before drafting a constitution. But within fifteen years of adopting our Constitution, the congress broke-off into two camps, or “parties,” and the presidential and gubernatorial candidates followed behind. Former loyalists (to the King) became the Whigs, and revolutionaries became the Federalists. The Whigs favored a strictly republic form of government with little to no citizenship representation or decision making. The Federalists favored a republic but wanted representative democracy. Thus formed the popular terms and then form parties: the Republican and the Democratic parties. Today the party conventions, primary elections, party officers both local and national, are all inventions which are not mandated in the Articles of Confederation which lay-out the architecture of our government.

We have all heard it or even said it before; “there’s no difference between the parties, they’re both a bunch of corrupt crooks and money hungry (etc..).” The statement reflects an ignorance of what is really going on. Those parties and those representatives within are no more corrupt, no more crooks, than the members of your own family, or if not, the family next door to you. Sometimes they can’t balance their check book. Sometimes the infighting is so bad, the car has to pull over off the road for the ruckus to settle. Sometimes they grow so fat and lethargic and glutinous that it becomes obvious and members must be expelled. The founders were right about the congress, its alive, its reflective of our citizenship and its no better or worse than you or I.

The parties also, each have a philosophy to be followed. Sometimes the philosophy is not written but can be examined and defined from a distance. The best way to determine a political party’s philosophy is to study their actions – as is the case with all of us, i.e. “we are what we have done.”

It is understood that there will always be two parties of merit able strength in American politics. In actuality, in most politics around the world, especially where some form of democracy is in place, a single body comprised of individual entities will form-up into legions that have coalesced into two formations.

In nature; bi symmetry is found in almost all life forms. There are not life forms where, for instance, the Democratic Party female, mates with a Republican Party male, and then an Independent and a Green Party Senator must join in to complete the process. In all warm blooded reproduction on Earth there are two phases to fertilization, the forming process (the body politic comes together), and the addition from outside of a fertilization body into the formation (a legislative act, a bill, a need, a demand).

Accept there should be two. Know that two camps of everything is natural. For example; vote for your Green Party candidates with devotion, disregarding what ever is happening in the major parties, and you really do throw away your vote. But, you also reverse the progress of a natural process that has evolved over the years. In the future, one party, or three, or four parties, will eventually be two again. Don’t put American citizens through the growing process of failed representation, all over again.

Currently in divided American party politics, one party is filled with followers who require leadership to follow, to hear its party dogma from, and to absorb that dogma into their psyche. This is one of many generalizations of the Republican Party.

The constituents who support this party are hard working, blue collar and white collar middle to lower class peoples. They are more likely to occupy the land area away from the major cities (where people live densely together they vote Democratic). They are less likely to have the time to spend investigating media reports of what politicians are doing, or which ones are responsible for what actions. They do have the time to listen to am radio in their vehicles, either at work, or driving to or from work. Since 1987 when the Ronald Reagan administration released all broadcast radio and television stations and owners from responsibility to follow an 70 years old law requiring all political opinion or campaigning be balanced with opposition, the Fairness in Broadcasting Act, religions and conservative ownership immediately moved into those markets and suddenly politically Conservative and Christian right-wing fundamentalists began owning large chunks of middle American market. The blue and white collar middle and lower working classes who really only had time to get their media from the radio in the care, could now hear Rush Limbaugh all over the country, without hearing an opposition viewpoint.

The other party proceeds slower but with more detail, more complexity, seeing and preparing for more contingencies. The members of this party base their judgments on what they have seen, or what they have read from those who make it their life’s career to know the related subjects. This is the Democratic Party and they are sort of a free pastoral range herd of independent and critical thinkers. A herd that refuses to follow a leader in any procession towards any matter they themselves have not investigated to full understanding. As disorganized as this may seem, their goals are more closely related than is first perceived. Each of them is facing toward their goal together and it’s a long term goal, with big solutions, permanent fixes to age old problems. Their goals have something else in common; for any numerous reasons, over the many years and decades, the people have not be able to reach these numerous goals themselves.

I challenge anyone reading this opinion article to disprove the following generalization which I feel accurately describes the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties:

Under Republicans

Man Exploits Man.

Under Democrats

It’s the Opposite.

This statement could be disproved by searching for legislation advocated for almost exclusively by the modern Republican party (post Civil Rights Act 1968) which does not contain provisions allowing the further, or easier, or newly created exploitation of workers, of consumers, or of immigrants, or of public servants. Go ahead look it up. The Republican party of today throws in something for the big corporations to exploit, in almost all legislation. They fight Democratic party legislation that seeks to aid and assist workers and consumers, to live better and to have equal opportunity. So, Democratic Party members and supporters seek to reverse exploitation, and Republican Party members seek to allow the exploitation of men by other men.

Hard Drives in Space: the Ultimate Long Term Data Storage Solution

Hard Drives in Space (announced with a large ambient echo) might be the ultimate in long term reliable data storage for the people. Behemoth satellites can be built with principle of design for duration, for capacity, for durability, and for access from any Earth bound users.

As we see our planet reach closer towards an ends, either by war violently, by viral plague, or catastrophic geologic and or climate change, we must consider our data and what is to be the fate of all that we have done digitally. What is to become of those novels on Microsoft Word, you worked so hard on. What about those two hundred family photos you would like to keep. How about all that email you have saved for ten years? What about that 30,000 image collection of women’s naked butts you spent years downloading in your office with the lights out? There is no need for the capacity in hard drives in space to be restricted to a certain few for example the military, and government, and for that reason Hard Drives in Space must be a combined government and private citizen’s endeavor.

The satellites (as vessels for protection, maintenance of orbit, and routing upload and download streams) must be high enough in orbit not to degrade and burn up, ever. The protection from meteors and meteorites and micro-meteors must be primary in the design. A steel triple hull of the type some modern oil tankers are now using would be adequate. Sophisticated security programs must police the integrity of everyone’s data for centuries to come, assuring users that their own data will never be deleted to make room for someone else’s. Several (perhaps six) should be built and launched in the same time period. But only one uploaded to working capacity at a time. A satellite over an opposite hemisphere should function as a replicate data copy for the first. A full drive can be moved into an even higher orbit, or even sent to a lunar orbit for added safety.

Again; Hard Drives in Space, is not necessarily for our selfish use, but primarily to preserve and pass-along human history, human endeavor, and human pictures of Janet Jackson’s right nipple and record of other time consuming totally hedonistic and voyeuristic activities. In the far future there will be archeologists roaming about Earth or traveling through this solar system called “Sol.” Perhaps they will be humans who’s ancestors originated from Earth. But we can assure that they do not just find a planet of water and dust, of crumpled ruins resembling piles of rock, and all metals turned to reddish brown piles of rust. We can assure they have access to all that was us, every thought a human of our time may have had, every pleasure, every disappointment and so on.

Out of Room – We Should Dump on the Moon!

It's reasonable to expect that one day we'll be up to our necks in garbage and desperate to put our waste somewhere else. Naturally we’ll want that somewhere to be “not in my backyard,” and that category will one day soon cover the entire planet. We’ll want the somewhere to be where our waste will never harm any living thing, as it has many of us over the many years. We may want to remove the waste we have already dumped and add it to the export. Its inevitable; burying what’s left of our garbage after recycling will no longer be an option sooner than we might think. On average each American uses 4.5 pounds of waste per day. Our nation buries 229 MILLION pounds of garbage per year (each of these rates only increase – where recycling has only slowed the rate, the problem sill grows). This is only the “municipal waste,” a.k.a. the stuff you put in a can at your curbside, which only represents about %20 of the entire flow all waste materials in the U.S. per year. Exporting and importing waste has become practically a trading commodity by governors and state waste commissioners. New York toped the list recently with 4.5 million tons shipped out, on trains, and on barges.

The raw human energy and the carbon monoxide smog, and the fossil fuel involved in disposal of all of the waste in our country is immeasurable, but be assured, this would be a huge and troubling number. Another immeasurable consideration is the workers, faced with the ill health effects of spending forty hours per week breathing in everything from carcinogens released from industrial and household containers, to large amounts of methane, and petrol carbons from the vehicles they work on or near.

What do we humans do? We are literally piling our problems and sweeping them under the rug of the Earth. Do we all start wearing artificial lungs on our backs? Do we convert our largest landfills into ski slopes, fall-out shelters, hang gliding launches? Sure, in the interim, that’ll be fun. But a long term solution is needed:

There it is above us. The Moon, or “our moon.” Staring us in the face. That gray and lifeless chunk of rock that may have broken off from our planet a billion years ago. Radioactive. Without atmosphere. Too hot in the sun. Way too cold on the dark side. Any dessert landscape on Earth is more attractive to look at , than this moonscape of shades of grayness. If we were one day to establish a moon colony, complete with residential homes (or survival bubbles?), the families residing there would go nuts and kill each other or leave within months, having realized their big mistake. It might be a good place for a giant Death Ray to protect us from Socialists and alien invaders from the planet Mexico (formerly Mars). The point is made that the moon isn’t worth much in a non science fiction context.

Let us send our waste there. All of our waste there. Lets use the waste up there, to begin a hydrogen atmosphere, largely of methane, and unbreathable matter, but in the future the possibility could exists that this atmosphere could be altered and repaired, and sustain life, plants only at first. (scientific advancements will be flying off the shelves during and after having achieved the moon-waste project).

We would build and design an efficient launch to get our waste into space. Perhaps a tether and elevator system between a low orbit space station to reach shuttles that would be docked and waiting loading. On inauguration day we can ship Rush Limbaugh to begin the new waste pile. A single burst of fuel can send a shuttle on its way to moon orbit within days. The dumping shuttle would be remote controlled by a waste manager’s station on the surface.

The garbage would be dumped strategically to form an artistic pattern to display back towards Earth. A resident artist will reside at the moon manager’s station to direct the art-work. Several artists will win a chance to reside and to contribute their vision over the course of more than two generations. This artistic creation will have been one of the large selling points to the people of Earth that will have paid for the project. The finished canvas of color by design will face the people of Earth for nearly eternity. It will be a reminder of this first generation, to thousands of generations to come, of those who first chose to dump their garbage on the moon and recreate its surface into something magnificent, efficient, and beautiful.

Cognitive Dissonance Around 9/11 Questions is Understandable

Cognitive Dissonance is a state of mind a person experiences the moment he or she realizes that their well held beliefs, or physical perceptions of the world, are directly challenged by new information which is contrary to these beliefs or perceptions. Actually, the new information is shocking. The subject basically freaks-out upon hearing or seeing the unbelievable (sometimes this is but a brief moment) and immediately will concoct justifications or even lies to defend his or her beliefs or perceptions.

A relatively few people are hearing the conspiracy theory that certain elements within the Bush administration may have been involved in planning and carrying out the Nine Eleven attacks. These relatively few people are using the defensive mechanism of cognitive dissonance. They are few because the major media are also experiencing cognitive dissonance and therefore not covering the issue.

An extreme but too common example of this challenge to the mind, is the wife who discovers that her husband is sexually molesting their daughter. The brain of the wife and mother launches into a strong defense mechanism of cognitive dissonance. She’ll convince herself she saw something else. She’ll convince herself her husband would never ever do such a thing. These rationalizations will seem perfectly reasonable to her and allow her to continue in her life without having a nervous breakdown, or murdering her husband.

There is a mountain of evidence that the Nine Eleven attacks were not solely, if at all, the result of twenty Arab hijackers. The physical evidence and the undeniable coincidences that implicate our own government are too many for a reasonable person to ignore. Still, many do, many upon hearings these amazing facts and questions without answers (that reasonably should have answers) immediately begin their own cognitive dissonance. I have been told that “those who think the government would have done this are just sick!”

Conspiracy is a word that should not be equated with irrational thinking, or wild ideas, or paranoid delusions. Conspiracy only takes two people at minimum keeping a secret about a plan. An easy measure to accomplish when considering the history of the United States government what’s conspiracies include, but certainly are not limited to; the Boston Tea Party, the wooden one man submarine the USS Turtle, the small pox blankets given to native Americans, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, the Cuban Bay of Pigs assault, the Gulf of Tonkin Vietnamese “attack,” the Tuskegee STD live experiments, the assassination with a “magic bullet” from a single shooter of John F. Kennedy, the Nixon “Plumbers,” the Reagan Iran hostage secret deal and the corresponding Iran Contra arms for hostages illegal dealings, the Mellon-Scaiffe backed framing of Bill Clinton throughout the nineteen nineties.

These and all conspiracies have several factors in common:

• Their goals would not have been legally permissible or publicly palatable if conducted openly.
  
• Each covers-up the truth. Deception is the foundation of its existence. In uncovering each conspiracy there is one truth and there is one conspiracy, but one can become the other, if the truth seekers are successful.

• The goals are determined to be worth significant cost and risk to those conspiring to carry out the actions.
  
• Often carrying through is deemed worth the loss of life of innocents. The ends justifies the means.
  
• No conspiracy is perfect. All are found to be suspicious by someone, either during the actions, or in the months and years following the actions. All leave clues.
  
• Disclosure of suspicions of all conspiracies always meet with disbelief from reasonable people.
  
• Prior to planning, the accomplishment of the goal is thought to be unlikely by those involved. This dismay is the motivating factor for secretive human manipulation of circumstances towards the desired goal. This doubt of the realistic lingers with the conspiracy for an indeterminate number of years.
  
• Every conspiracy begins with the desires of one person. A large or greatly influencing goal is always supported by power and money or both.
  
• Never is a conspiracy learned in full, or in part, by anyone with involvement, who does not have a need to know. Each will use unknowing participants when possible.

A great protection for a conspiracy’s principle actors is the ever present and reliable cognitive dissonance of the public. “Oh hell Winston, we’ve nothing to worry about! They’ll never believe it old boy!”

In the example in paragraph three (above) of a woman who is in denial (cognitive dissonance) that her daughter is being molested by her husband, cognitive dissonance could be broken down. But it would take radical actions. Someone would have to tie the mother up to a kitchen chair, tie the husband the same across from her. Make him confess aloud using a red-hot spatula. Then shake and slap the mother until she breaks down and cries and hopefully she shouts profanities and spits at her scumbag husband sitting across from her.

But how does the public get awoken from its slumber of cognitive dissonance? Repetition of consumable messages of short length in the media is the only way. Even little tid-bits of doubt, broadcast outward like grass seed that might not sow, might not sprout, but is broadcast anyway to be there just in case. When the public turns its busy head, perhaps in a quiet moment, the seeds of doubt will be there and truth will sow into the soil and begin its long journey to the forefront of the mainstream thoughts.

Why question this government’s official story of the events of Nine Eleven? Do it because of the incredible weight that this event has. The weight of this event versus all others in our history, or in the history of all governments and societies. Weightier than the J.F.K assassination, heavier in relevance than the Bay of Pigs secret revolution attempt, a boulder in importance to the grain of sand that was Iran Contra, or Watergate, or Gulf of Tonkin, sinking the Maine and etc.. For those events don’t threaten the integrity and existence of a nation. Those events didn’t begin a series of irrational war related decisions, killing and wounding tens of thousands more people who certainly would not have died otherwise.

Nine Eleven was a horrific event and it is not a surprise that the great majority of Americans want to put it behind them. But the event is so impacting, so life changing that if one or two questions remain, they should be answered. If the event was planned and carried out from within our government, than that fact would make the event a thousand times more impacting, more weighty, more important in its scope. Given that, each question is also a thousand times more important.

Far too many clues were left behind on Nine Eleven Two Thousand and One. Do not discount that as few as twenty people might have conducted this horror with full knowledge, but they could have used their power and money to involve as many two hundred others who unwittingly took part, whose careers or possibly even their lives were threatened by people perfectly capable of carrying through. Do not discount the power and ability of righteous indignation, religious fervor, extreme patriotism “for the good of the nation a few must die!” While investigating facts around the Nine Eleven events do not forget the tried and true axiom: The Ends Justifies the Means, because this phrase exemplifies the ability of the mind to rationalize, and to possibly do something awful.

Ignore the questions and accept the presidential appointed commissions answers and live comfortably with that knowledge and you may be allowing a heinous and massively important crime to go undiscovered. You may be allowing the next group of righteously indignant, power and money hungry conspirators, to get away with a similar crime in the future.

I won’t write about Nine Eleven conspiracy in any detail. That kind of exploration is best done on one’s own initiative. Suffice to say there are literally hundreds of reasonable questions to be answered. Many are questions that confront physical impossibilities offered by our government as explanations by the Nine Eleven Commission.

One good non-profit organization's website to start with is The Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Independent Commission, and their: Unanswered Questions page:

http://www.911independentcommission.org/questions.html

Conservative Psych-Out . . Whoops!

If you’re a politically apprised liberal you may have already heard the reference to conservative policy as “everyday is opposite day.” That refers to their actions resulting in the contrary of their rhetoric, or of their legislative initiatives with titles designed to fool the large segment of the public, that is not paying attention. But there is another kind of opposite the conservatives practice, which could be called “Freudian Theory Gone Wild!” It’s the general acknowledgement that all people resist and revert, or resist and convert, or just run the other way when faced with an action to initiate that resistance. It’s the Republican Psych Out! It requires arrogance and hubris and goals which have secondary and self serving outcomes.

Usually the outcome is not what the conservatives had planed on, and might have been prevented just by knowing more of what they were talking about, or by consulting with non-partisan experts. But it also comes about by believing the postulations of conservative think-tanks that publish suppositions on everything from social policy that deals with the poor, to foreign policy that prepares for war. Of course the authors of these well dressed documents had never fought in a war, or for example had never gone grocery shopping with a poor family. These misguided preclusions occur almost entirely when the conservatives try to estimate the reactions of people.

Remember when you were a child and you thought you had the world figured out? There was a short while when it seemed that opposing action seemed to be the results of most actions. That everything had a resistance which caused it to move in the other direction, go up instead of down. As we entered adulthood some of us came to learn that complexity dictated reactions and they are individualized in nearly all matters, especially among people. But there were others among us (conservatives) that decided that these rules seemed to apply broadly, and they kept that belief, and became policy makers.

Examples:

• If you fight that school yard bully who has been pestering you; then he’ll respect you and stop picking on you. Child Psych!
  
  Whoops. The bully is into revenge and wrath and protecting his dominance. He beats the piss out of you the very next day. Mom was wrong.
  
• If you leave your bike unlocked on the sidewalk, it won’t get stolen, because the thieves will be surprised and think that your watching them, and assume that it’s a set-up. Criminal Psych!
  
• If you cut the beejeezus out of the Welfare programs, the lazy bums will all run-out and get jobs, saving the taxpayers millions. Republican Psych!
  Whoops. Poverty has increased exponentially, with four million more families living below the poverty line, and almost two million more children living below the poverty line. Apparently the reasons for having welfare to begin with, were not addressed when attempting to get rid of it. The Republicans were wrong.
  
• If you bomb the hell out of the nation’s infrastructure, killing several thousand civilians (as collateral), invade the nation, then occupy it, the people will “greet us with candies and flowers.” (Dick Cheney, February, 2003). War Psych!
  Whoops. The conservatives forgot to ask the population how they might feel about being invaded and occupied. The bombings really pissed them off. The deaths even more so. The invaders never gained control of the streets and mayhem ensued and never really stopped. Infrastructure has never been fully restored. The candies and flowers became Improvised Explosive Devices and car bombs.
  
• If you stop teaching sex education in schools, the kids will stop having sex. If you stop allowing them condoms, they’ll stop getting diseases and unwanted pregnancies. Education Psych!
  
  Whoops. It turns out kids weren’t having sex due to the presence of, or absence of, condoms or sex education anyway. All the data was available, but the conservative’s hypothesis were just so convincing! In fact the numbers of sexual diseases and unplanned pregnancies among teens went up. Apparently the taboo factor was increased for the teenagers. Also those teens were far less likely to discuss sex with their parents, being the subject was literally off-the-table.
  
• Arrest and incarcerate over four million men and women for drug offenses and eventually drug use will go way down or stop completely. They’ll realize the error of their ways! Fear Psych!
  Whoops. Conservatives and Republicans continued, year after year, to fail to provide proper funding for drug treatment clinics. They didn’t want the psych-factor to occur among drug addicts. The addicts might see those carpeted clinics as a reward for breaking the law. Drug use went up, selling drugs became more profitable because the incarceration possibility was more likely. The majority of the imprisoned are minorities as they are the easiest to arrest, living more poorly, more visibly. New and cheaper drugs were invented in the streets to better feed and begin new addictions.
  
• Criminalize abortion services and that will cause pregnant teens and women to realize they love their fetuses, and then they will carry their little babies to term, and will probably keep them and wrap them up in soft pink or blue little blankets and will great parents. And we can indoctrinate them into Christianity while they are staying at our “women’s health center.” Criminalization Psych-Out!
  Whoops! Several newly pregnant young mothers committed suicide in each state that has severely restricted abortion each year. Many others mutilate themselves in attempts to abort their own fetus. Doctors establish hidden clinics to perform illegal abortions, risking their careers. Raped women, and those determined to abort are held in quasi jail-houses to carry to term forcefully.
  
• If you bomb a nation, killing civilians and destroying their homes, in order to get to an enemy faction within that nation. The people in that nation will rise up against the enemy faction, blaming them for the bombing and not you. War Psych!
  
  Whoops! Those people turned out to not be idiots. They knew who was dropping bombs on their heads, they experienced the death and destruction, and they saw no excuse good enough to pardon the bomb-droppers from their actions. In fact they now hate them with a vengeance and most of the regular populace has joined the enemy faction.

Often to carry out a Conservative Psych-Out, the conservative policy maker requires the presumption that the effected persons will be stupid, or just ignorant. But the policy begins focused upon people assumed to be so from the start – or else there would be no policy.
A conservative policy wonk might say: “Those stupid welfare mothers, those stupid Arabs, those stupid teenagers, those stupid pregnant sluts, those stupid drug addicts. They don’t know what’s best for them. We can concoct a solution which favors us primarily, them secondarily, and give the appearance to the population that we’re handling a problem. Why we’ll use psychology! Television psychology!”

If today’s Conservatives did not exist. We would have to invent them.

"Quick! Toss a Blanket of Denial Over that Angry Muslim Family!"

If anyone thinks for one moment that George W. Bush and the Cheney administration were ever intent on stopping terrorism, then they are thinking deficient loyalists of the authoritarian variety, followers, and champion deniers. The current leadership in Washington D.C. has not shown any evidence, through one single example, that they want to actually stop terrorism. Don’t get my allegations wrong: they want to kill terrorists, and their families, and anyone in the same neighborhood, and anyone they attach a new label of terrorist upon. But addressing the cause of the actions of terrorists is not in the White House rule book. In fact what they have done is to increase the numbers of persons who would be terrorists against us one day soon enough.

Iraq is in itself a recruiting tool for terrorism better than any could be. Americans killing tens of thousands of Muslim civilians with our fancy jets and missiles. Occupying a formerly secular and controlled nation for four years. Failing to rebuild our own destruction against a nation that never attacked us and had nothing to do with Nine Eleven. The repeated bombings of Baghdad and the atrocities of the Fallujah bombings alone were enough to solidify hatred against us. We set military bases in more than two hundred locations around the world, we established an air base on the land walked upon by Mohamed and left it there for more than ten years, kissing-up to a ruthless Saudi regime that oppressed its people tirelessly.

Many American Conservatives (about %27) just don’t get this. It is as if they are not capable of grasping causality. I continue to hear them phoning in to CSPAN or Air America Radio and being completely oblivious to the concept that being in Iraq, and killing more people, just makes more terrorists. That is contradictory to “fighting the war on terrorism.” But they don’t get it. They’ll say “ but if we get enough of them they’ll learn that we can’t be messed with, that they won’t get away with it again.” Well guess what my conservative village idiot, they are getting away with, Osama (if he did do it) is still not apprehended or dead.

Common statement: “Either we fight em over there or we fight em over here! I’m with Bush on that!”

Best reply: “You moron. Do you actually think that statement makes rational sense? We’re not fighting terrorists over there! Barely %5 of the insurgents in Iraq are from a foreign country, and those few are probably there because they hate our guts and they had some time off, like the majority of Muslim males, in the mid-east ages ten years old to ninety-eight! If anything we’re making more terrorists and providing a American-killing training ground for would be terrorists. Jesus H. Christ either you really do have s#@# for brains or you don’t take five minutes a day to read something that doesn’t say Fox News on it!”

Best evidence that the Bush crime family has no intention of stopping terrorism is that not one legitimate American arrest has been made of an actual terrorist. Not one trial of anyone legitimately proven to have connections to terrorist organizations. Sure, there’s been a coook or two, terrorist wanna-be's making confessions of Martyrdom grandeur. But no physical evidence, no reliable witnesses, just American political grandstanding. Back in the good old twentieth-century we used detective work to arrest terrorists, conduct real trials, and throw them in prison for life. Police work thus far has been focused upon violating the privacy rights of the rest of us, to find a few. It is our far more enlightened kin across the Atlantic that have been successful. The British and the Germans and Italians and the Spanish, don’t bomb their suspects into oblivion like little boys squashing an ant colony with a basketball on a boring day. They use good police work. They creep around their suspects and gather information. Silently, smartly, with advanced technology and under cover operatives, they actually find terrorists. This type of intervention is a real night mare to a Muslim extremist. Being arrested means he might spend his life alive in a prison cell – nightmare.