Spy vs. Spy: Beaver State Fathead Edition

So it turns out that I now know a total of something like a dozen people who were in Pioneer Square in downtown Portland when this fucking idiot thought he was committing an act of guerilla violence.

The following couple of days my Facebook page was littered with posts to the effect of "OMG! I was there! Thank you, FBI!" and appended with comments praising God and the solder (or FBI agent) whom we adore.

Perhaps it was because I hadn't the slightest interest is watching the lights go on a big fir tree so I was at home playing Jenga. Or perhaps its because I'm a nasty, cynical SOB by nature. But you'll excuse me if I beg off the universal congratulations to my government for catching the next Khalid Sheik Mohammad.

Because from what I understand;

1. This idiot did everything but wander around Corvallis wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Osama and the legend "I'm With Stupid".

2. Ignoring the First Rule of Internet Hookups ("The chance that the hot sixteen-year-old soliciting for no-holds-barred wild monkey sex over the Internet is actually either a vice cop trolling for morons or a 42-year-old pervert looking to get you to post pictures of your pecker approaches unity the longer you keep searching the Net for loli-porn") the idiot splattered the Web with his jihadi spam until the FBI was unable to continue to ignore him.

3. The feds then:
a. contacted Mohamud in a June 2010 e-mail under the guise of being a jihadi.
b. met with the guy multiple times, where he pushed them to help him with his nefarious plans. Supposedly the agents "cautioned Mohamud several times about the seriousness of his plan, noting that there would be many people, including children, at the event"
c. pretended to help him with logistics, including "assembling" the bomb and testing a smaller version somewhere in backass Lincoln County, Oregon.
d. appeared in a video with him to record his "mission statement".
e. picked up Mohamud to travel to Portland to finalize details of the attack.
f. set him in the seat of his bomb-van with several fake drums of pretend explosives in the back (which the idiot failed to check, proving that he was a no-go at the first performance test of walking-while-breathing, "You need to be smarter than your equipment") which he dropped off near the tree-lighting spot
g. let him make the detonating phone call - twice - and then busted him.

So excuse me if I'm not celebrating the takedown of the greatest criminal mastermind since Professor Moriarty. This moron Mohamud sounds like he might have spent the next five years in his bedroom playing the jihadi version of "Call of Duty" and eating cheetos if the FBI hadn't pretty much handed him the color-by-numbers handbook for would-be jihadi truck bombers. This wasn't fucking Tim McVeigh. This wasn't even your basic Palestinian pay-for-kaboom suicide bomber. This was a fucking idiot who didn't have the basic common sense to check the equipment his suddenly confiding new "friends" procured, engineered, assembled, transported, and emplaced for him.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad this guy didn't kill anyone. I'm GLAD he is a fucking idiot.

But I'm reading the skittish Facebook responses from the people who were in the square that evening, and wondering what will happen the next time someone proposes some sort of additional security theatre, or profiling the Somali immigrant community, or loosening the entrapment laws, or some other sort of exchange of liberty for "security".

And, of course, demands that all response to the nose-led idiot be based on panic fear and reflexive condemnation rather than skepticism and the Rule of Law.

Or, even better, turns into lynch mob counter-terror and attacks on American muslims because...well...because, y'know, they're terrists!

Because if the study of history and politics has taught me anything, it has taught me that there is no practical limit to the damage to a society that the society can do to itself when prodded by a single idiot.

Update 11/28 p.m.: Greenwald has more, including the vexing details that the FBI 1) may not have actual evidence that the moron chose his moron path and was not entrapped in some form, 2) paid him as part of smoothing his path to Pioneer Square, and that 3) "Here we find one of the great mysteries in American political culture: that the U.S. Government dispatches its military all over the world -- invading, occupying, and bombing multiple Muslim countries -- torturing them, imprisoning them without charges, shooting them up at checkpoints, sending remote-controlled drones to explode their homes, imposing sanctions that starve hundreds of thousands of children to death -- and Americans are then baffled when some Muslims -- an amazingly small percentage -- harbor anger and vengeance at them and want to return the violence. And here we also find the greatest myth in American political discourse: that engaging in all of that military aggression somehow constitutes Staying Safe and combating Terrorism -- rather than doing more than any single other cause to provoke, sustain and fuel Terrorism."

Weekend Wrap Up

Hi all!

Happy after Turkey day weekend massacre! I just gave all 4 of my dogs the leftover turkey and I think they were the only ones who could still enjoy it!! lol I'm turkeyed out to say the least.

Mostly just been working on a few projects. Yes, I always say I don't work anymore but how can I tell my best clients no? Let's just say I'm not seeking work anymore..

So the twitter continues to grow and I've got almost 300 followers in one week! Come join me if you haven't already, I always follow back.

Twitter Tara

I have a growing list of promotions from sellers for tomorrow aka CYBER MONDAY.

http://giveittometara.blogspot.com/2010/11/get-ready-for-cyber-monday.html

Hoping that if everyone stays on the computer all day, I can hit up the malls! But maybe that's the trick of it all and the malls will still be packed?? hmmmmm...

There is still a FREE Happy Holidays Banner in my Etsy shop.

http://www.etsy.com/listing/62658669/pif-etsy-shop-happy-holidays-banner

Please vote for this blog and help me to become number 1! Okay, I'll take top 100;)



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In the life of moi news...

Band practice today, not sure if I want to sing? I'm in a foul mood, my son has that anxiety disease where you pull your own hair out and it scared the crap out of me when I discovered it this week.

Last night we watched "The Prince of Persia" movie, which I liked and the boys hated. Too much mushy for them. They didn't love the video game too much either but said it was better than the movie!

My husband has decided to not only be a pilot, aerobatics champ, judge at competitions, drummer, etc. etc. But has now moved on to covet my bass. ♫Anything you can do, I can do better...♫ Mama shares enough and that is all I have to say about that! lol

Tomorrow I go and dump this all on my therapist, maybe I should just send her a link to my blogs???

Thanks for reading,
T♥

Unsplit Ends

Took Little Miss out to dim sum this morning and then to her first real movie in a theatre.

Dim sum was good, as always; Wong's King doesn't disappoint.

But the pleasant surprise was that the movie didn't either.

I don't have much left in the way of expectations from the Disney factory. Outside of the Pixar shop, most of the horses trotted out of the Disney stable lately seem to have been the broken-down get of the old sire Walt. Given that the man has been dead for decades, it's not surprising that his progeny are starting to get more than a little, well, sickly looking. So I expected something that would be barely tolerable for a four-and-a-half-year-old.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

The story was nothing surprising - you can't exactly break the mold with fairy tales, right? And the "spunky princess" and the "rogue with a heart of gold" are chestnuts off many a tree other than the one in the Disney backlot.But the animation was lovely; bright and cheery in the Disney style but still rich with detail. The main characters, stock company troupers that they were, were rendered with loving care, well-written, and nicely voiced. The supporting "actors" stole the show (as they often do) in the form of the stalwart guard-horse and Rapunzel's little tough-guy chameleon pal.

Even the Bad Guy, who in this case was a Bad Gal, was rendered with care and attention; she was a villainess, yes, but one with flair and relish, a very diva of demonesses.So all together it made a really delightful hour-and-a-half for a dad and daughter to spend as part of a midday Saturday.

I think what made all the difference in "Tangled" was the sense I got of a genuine love of its creators for the two cartoon leads and the world they inhabited. I've sat through some of the worst of the Disney dreck - a father sacrifices for his progeny, sigh... - but much of the recent stuff the outfit produced since losing the Great Helmsman in the middle Sixties wasn't just bad, it was really soulless. By-the-numbers commercial crap with the heart of an adding machine and the soul of a cash register. The people making it hadn't just forgotten how to make a good movie; they'd forgotten how to make any sort of art at all.To make something of worth, you have to care. Your caring might come from love, or hate, revenge, anger, or desire. But if you don't care about your creation it will show, and it did.

The people who made Disney's latest picture may have had one eye on the bottom line; commercial art has to pay for itself, after all. But the other eye was on the characters they brought to life on the screen, and that eye was full of love.

Qualified

The U.S. Women's National Team qualified for the finals of the Women's World Cup today, winning 1-0 over Italy to go through 2-0 on aggregate.This would once have been a "dog bites woman" story, but this year has been very different from the qualifiers the USWNT has played from all the way back to 1991.

For one thing, the team did not go through at the top of the CONCACAF group; that would be Canada, led by Christine Sinclair. Mexico, as always staffed with U.S. collegiate players from Mexico, went second.So the USWNT had first to defeat Costa Rica for third place, and then beat the sixith place European team - Italy - for a spot in the finals.

And the other real difference is that the U.S. doesn't have either an individual player or a group of players significantly better than the best in Europe or Brazil.

Instead, this U.S. team has showed itself to be; often flawed at the back, where missed communication has led to several ugly goals or good chances for the opposition; lacking the controlling midfield that was key to American success in 1991 and 1999, and especially sterile up front, where the only real consistently successful weapon has been Abby Wambach.I've talked about this before; Wambach is a genuinely great player, but her ability makes her a perfect target and she tends to be badly over-used by a U.S. midfield that lacks passing dexterity and control and has no real wingers. The U.S. tends to go hey-diddle-diddle right through the middle, where it exposes the defensive ineptitude of most of the rest of CONCACAF as well as the clumsy soccer played by most of the women's teams from South America, Africa and Asia.But the Germans have proved in the sternest fashion, by beating the Americans to the Cup the past eight years, that they have solved Wambach. Four years ago the brilliance of Marta combined with the tight marking that neutralized Wambach to allow Brazil to put a hurting on a badly coached, demoralized, and overage U.S. team.

The change has been in part because the northern Europeans always had, and the Brazilians have gained, the skills they needed to play world-class football. But in part is has been because the U.S. team that burst on the world like an explosion in 1991 was a truly brilliant squad made of uniquely gifted players. We only partially realized at the time how good the Ninety-oners were; Mia, Tiff, Loudy, Brandi, Joy, Kristine, Michelle, Brianna...we can see now that they have to be considered one of the great teams of history, and the modern USWNT looks smaller only in the long shadow they cast now that they are gone.Two goals over the hapless Italians is just sad. And the lack of goalscoring isn't an aberration; the US has had difficulty scoring against decent teams all year. This year the U.S. begins its campaign for the Women's World Cup in an unusual position, as a challenger, and not a favored one at that.

I will be cheering and hoping for glory in Germany. But this year I suspect my support will, like many other WNT fans, be tinged with more than a little nervous anxiety. For the American women will be landing in Germany next spring not as the Team of Destiny, but the Team of Doubts.

Christmas

Christmas

Christmas