Down The Rabbit Hole: Congressional IT Scandal

Great swathes of the internet are aflame with news about Imran Awan, his family, and their various entanglements with the halls of power and law enforcement. The interest is most noticeable among the right-wing alternative media, but there are representatives of both the so-called “mainstream media” and internet conspiracists circling the fringes of this […]

Securing Security

As some of my readers may already know, there was a bunch of bombings in Brussels last weekend which the Islamic State took credit for. Two of the explosions occurred in an airport. Because, unfortunately, terrorists aren’t totally incompetent idiots, these two went off before the security checkpoint. It’s much easier than trying to get […]

Revisiting Gun Rights for Terrorists

Some readers may remember a time not quite a year ago when I wrote an in-depth rebuttal of a New York Times Op-Ed titled “Gun Rights for Terrorists” by Mary Lewis Grow. I am a long-time critic of the watch-lists and no-fly lists that, hypothetically, are filled with dangerous characters bent on destruction, possibly via […]

The Irony of Security

This won’t be a very long post. It hardly needs to be – the stories speak for themselves. Various security procedures, implemented at great cost, have made people less safe.

Recently, it was discovered that (presumably Chinese) hackers obtained access to millions of forms related to background checks of those who apply for U.S. security […]

Feared & Fearful

The United States is the predominant world power, the world’s lone superpower. This is said so often that it is easy to forget just how ridiculously unbalanced the situation really is.

The United States spends $581 Billion a year on its military, more than the next nine largest budgets put together. China, #2 on the […]

Painting Mao Gold

From a recent high of 51% in 2011, US opinion of China has fallen precipitously in the years since to a ten-year low of 35% in 2014. Negative perspectives of China are proliferating as China’s GDP plays catch-up to the US economy. The game is tense, the stakes are high, and US politicians are […]

On “Gun Rights for Terrorists”

This post is a much needed deconstruction and critique of a New York Times opinion piece titled ‘Gun Rights for Terrorists’, by Mary Lewis Grow. Go ahead and read it, though I’ll be quoting and paraphrasing liberally.

The author’s complaint is that “Those on the terror watch list are free to buy and own unlimited […]

Classified Ignorance

“Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites, disclosed to the media, or otherwise in the public domain remains classified and must be treated as such until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. government authority.” This is the opening line in June 2013 memorandum from the office of Timothy Davis, Director of […]