iftttwall

A new article from the
Associated Press quotes U.S. intelligence officials
unknowingly acknowledging a fatal flaw in Obama’s anti-terrorism
strategy.

Reporting on a “barrage” of missile strikes against an Al-Qaida
affiliated group in Syria known as the Khorasan Group, the article
presents a string of comments from intelligence officials on the
effectiveness of the strikes.

From ABC News:

“The strikes were certainly effective in setting back the
Khorasan Group, but no one thinks they were a permanent solution or
a death blow to the threats that come from this cell,” said Rep.
Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who serves on the House Intelligence
Committee…

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said
the strikes disrupted the group’s plotting, but he did not know for
how long. FBI Director James Comey said he believed the plots had
not been disrupted and that the group remains a threat to the U.S.
Other intelligence officials embraced Comey’s view.

What this shows is a clear consensus that the strikes have
likely done little more than delay the group’s activities. However,
bombing also has unintended consequences, which the article
acknowledges—namely the loss of innocent life:

One of the U.S. missiles went awry and killed a dozen civilians
in the village of Kfar Derian, according to Mohammed Abu Omar, an
activist in the northern province of Idlib.

This highlights the central problem with the Obama
administration’s strategy in the war on terror. Relentless bombing
campaigns can only ever disrupt the activities of terror groups.
They cannot counter the existence of terrorist organizations and
cannot stop them from plotting attacks.

Furthermore, any progress that is made in the short term is
likely to be undermined by the inevitable civilian causalities that
accompany such a strategy. These
casualties increase hostility toward the U.S. and its
allies, creating a fertile recruiting ground for terrorist
organizations to replenish their ranks and expand their supporter
base. If the U.S. is to avoid Orwellian style perpetual war, it
needs to find a way to combat terrorism without increasing
anti-U.S. sentiments.

Any delusion I might have harbored that a world where women have
a bigger voice than Rush Limbaugh’s would be less ugly was
shattered this week. In responding to my column about the idiocy of
California’s new affirmative consent law, feministas at Jezebel and
Wonkette demonstrated one thing loud and clear: When it comes to
talking about issues concerning their lady parts, they turn into
bigger dicks than Limbaugh. These ladies ejaculated expletives such
as “fuck” on their screens several times, speculated about my
personal sex life, and called me names — all
of which would one would have chalked up to girls having fun if
they’d actually managed to sneak in an argument or two.

But they didn’t.

Wonkette’s Kaili Joy Gray got the ball rolling by the following
tweet:

Accusing women of enjoying rape was something that men used to
do to justify raping them. Now, apparently, it’s a club feminists
use to clobber other feminists who disagree with them.

But what precisely got Joy’s pretty pink “consent is sexy”
panties knotted up? She explained in a blog accompanied with a
picture of the said panties that it was my suggestion that
human sexuality is too complicated to be shoehorned into a strict
“yes-no framework” without ruining sex for a lot of people. As an
example, I pointed out that lots of people routinely end up having
awesome sex even when one partner is reluctant and hasn’t offered
“affirmative consent.”

 “The reality,” I wrote is that,” much of sex is not
consensual — but it is also not non-consensual. It resides in a
gray area in between, where sexual experimentation and discovery
happen.” (For useful elaborations of my point, check out my
colleague Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s blog here
and Megan McArdle
here. Also check out New Yorker magazine’s Jonathan Chait’s
excellent
piece making a similar point while discussing why crude and
heavy-handed laws might not be the best way to change the rules of
the sexual game.)

This, harrumphed Gray, showed that I was “too dumb to be having
sex in the first place” because I didn’t “understand the difference
between seduction and forcing someone to do sex when
she’s, say, too drunk or drugged or asleep or pinned down and
gagged to say “yes, let’s have sex.” (Emphasis original.)

Hey, Joy Gray, let me say this very s-l-o-w-l-y so that you get
this (go ahead and take notes if you like): “forcing someone to
do sex when she’s, say, too drunk or drugged or asleep or
pinned down and gagged” is already illegal under the law. You can
put away the motherfucker who “forces you to do sex” for
any reason whatsoever for years and years. Really.

The conversation that we adults are having right now is how
— and by what evidentiary standards
— does someone (and let’s arbitrarily
stipulate that its a woman) prove that she was “forced to do sex”
when there are no witnesses or obvious signs of physical violence?
Do judges or campus disciplinary committees just take her word for
it – or do they allow the accused some voice too? How do they
determine the truth where all they have is a he said/she said? Will
the California law, that allows things other than words to be
regarded as consent, count moans and groans as valid forms of
acquiescence? Are its stipulations that consent needs to be
obtained on an ongoing basis at every stage realistic or
enforceable? Will it allow real rapists to get away while
destroying the lives of innocent men (and maybe some women, to be
sure) not shrewd enough to game its rules?

But if Gray short-circuited these tough issues to suggest that I
like being raped, her funnier — though equally intellectually lazy
— sister-in-arms Erin Gloria Ryan over at
Jezebel
suggested that I like rapists. “’Won’t somebody please think of
the rapists?’” is apparently what I’m pleading.

Never mind that I note at the outset of my column that much of
campus rape is perpetrated by assaulters who “know exactly what
they are doing….and don’t give not a damn about what the woman
wants.”

How do you deduce my love for rapists from that? By doing what
rapists used to do to question their victim’s credibility before
feminists rightly put an end to the practice: drag in their sex
life!

As per Ryan, my “life experiences” have obviously led me to the
conclusion that heterosexual sex involves “a horny guy trying to
convince a tired woman to lie there while he pumps away at her sex
hole.”

In other words, in a Wonkette-Jezebel gynocracy, discrediting
someone’s sex life = discrediting their argument.

When Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student
who wanted taxpayer funded contraceptive coverage, a “slut,” the
whole feminist establishment rose in unison to condemn him
— and rightly so. Ultimately, he was forced
to do the decent thing and
issue an apology. “I did not mean a personal attack,” he said.
“My choice of words was not the best, I sincerely apologize to Ms.
Fluke for the insulting word choices.”

The question now is can Gray and Ryan manage to rise to
Limbaugh’s level?

I’m waiting sisters!

The tech industry continues to play Cassandra, warning anyone
who will listen that federal surveillance practices could
have dire consequences if the National Security Agency (NSA)
continues on its course. At a recent Silicon Valley event, Google’s
Eric Schmidt cautioned that the NSA is a bull in a virtual china
shop threatening to break the Internet as we know it. The
Hill‘s Julian Hattem
reports:

Schmidt said the revelations about U.S. surveillance could
prompt countries to wall off their networks. “The simplest outcome:
We’re going to end up breaking the Internet,” Schmidt said,
“because what’s going to happen is governments will do bad laws of
one kind or another, and eventually what’s going to happen is:
‘We’re going to have our own Internet in our own country, and we’re
going to do it our way.'”

Fearing the pervasive powers of the NSA—or perhaps feeling a bit
jealous—foreign governments have already begun imposing limits on
American tech companies and erecting barriers in the name of
protecting data:

Some countries, including Russia, have taken steps to require
that companies keep data centers within their geographic borders —
a potentially prohibitive cost for start-ups and small
companies.

Many in the tech industry predict a so-called balkanization of
the Internet, that is, a curtailment of the free flow of
information between countries. Such restrictions could establish
“nationalistic clouds” for data storage within individual
countries. Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie
recently warned that this could jeopardize global commerce
itself, saying it “would be an incredibly bad outcome for the type
of interconnectedness we’re starting to see from global
companies.”

Michael Kickins echoes Levie,
writing in The Wall Street Journal:

CIOs of multinational companies may have to find multiple
vendors to host applications or internal software development
platforms in the cloud — defeating one of the benefits of
cloud-based services, namely simplification.

Large companies like Amazon have taken steps to anticipate the
coming data fragmentation, although, as Kickins writes, “these
investments are hardly trivial, even for such large vendors.”

The biggest loser in this fiasco—other than us plebs whose
privacy is being violated—is America’s tech industry. As domestic
surveillance becomes more of a concern, distrustful consumers and
governments may seek to take their business elsewhere. Writes
Hattem:

According to analysis firm Forrester Research, the losses for
the tech industry from the NSA backlash could amount to as much as
$180 billion over the next two years.

Schmidt’s warnings should not be taken lightly, especially by
those in Congress with the power to reign in the NSA’s excesses.
But lawmakers seem content to blithely look the other way,
skipping town before voting on the issue and continuing to let
the tech industry’s admonitions fall on deaf ears.

For three years, Los Angeles court Commissioner
Catherine Pratt has set aside Tuesdays
for focusing exclusively on sex-trafficking cases. A Los
Angeles Times profile of Pratt’s work starts with what’s
designed to be a heartwarming anecdote about the personal interest
she takes in the teens that appear before her. This particular teen
was both pregnant and locked up on prostitution charges. 

Pratt told the girl that if she would stop running back to the
streets, Pratt would place her in a group home where she could eat
what she wants, keep her child out of foster care and hold the baby
shower she fantasizes about.

“You’ll have to let me know when it is. I’d like to go,” Pratt
said, prompting a startled chuckle from the girl. “You’re not doing
this alone. We’re going to help you.”

I suppose “help” is in the eye of the beholder. In this case, it
means keeping a pregnant teen locked up in juvenile jail because
she accepted payment for sex, but still talking to her in really
nice tones. The Times article thinks this is a wonderful
illustration of the “softer approach” that Los Angeles County
supervisors, social workers, and police officers are taking when it
comes to prostitution. It even trots out what’s become the sine qua
non of sex trafficking scaremongering: the idea that “criminal
gangs are increasingly turning” to it because “a drug is sold once,
but a child is sold over and over.” 

But if you read on, it becomes clear that many if not most of
the teens who appear before Pratt aren’t being held against their
will and forced into selling sex. They may be runaways. They may
have grown up and live in poverty. They may not have a lot of
options available to them. They may want help finding another path,
even. But they’re not the image of “sex trafficking victims” that
most have in mind. And I think the distinction does
matter. 

Pimping out young girls, even in the absense of abuse or force,
should be against the law, just as having sex with minors is
against the law. But even young girls have agency. I was a
precocious and rebellious teen not so far long ago that I can’t
remember what it felt like. And it felt like I was perfectly
capable of making sexual choices for myself. The point I’m trying
to make is that it can be both a) wrong to aid the sale of sexual
services from minors, and b) not necessarily a situation in which
the minor is acting counter to his or her will.

Because people don’t like the idea of teens engaging in sex
work—and I’m not saying they should—they want the government to do
something about it, and the way to get people under state
jurisidction is to define them as either criminals or helpless
victims. So if teen sex workers aren’t criminals, they must be
children whom the state has an obligation to protect
coercively. 

L.A. has at least decided that these young sex workers aren’t
criminals. “Police officers are receiving training in many
parts of the county to call the child abuse hotline when they find
children engaged in prostitution instead of booking them for a
crime,” the Times piece notes. Yet people can’t make the
leap from teen (or any) prostitutes not being criminals to teen
prostitutes not being victims. They must be one of the other. They
must so that the state can step in.

Los Angeles county officials are currently “debating whether to
ask Sacramento lawmakers” to change California law. Right now, they
can’t legally send juvenile sex workers to locked detention
facilities without charging them with a crime. County officials
don’t want to charge them with a crime, they just want to be able
to lock them up “to prevent them from returning to their
pimps.” 

This shouldn’t be acceptable. Teenagers may not have the full
capacity to consent or bear as full a responsibility for their
actions as adults do, but they’re not mentally incapacitated. The
government shouldn’t be able to lock up a 15-year-old girl ’til her
18th birthday to stop her from having sex in a way of which it
disapproves. 

Luckily, others in L.A. think getting these teens into foster
homes is a better option, and are working toward making that more
of a priority. Critics complain that “children will use the freedom
of unlocked facilities to spend more time on the streets.” But if
it’s a choice between a system where some small percentage of teens
will engage in prostitution and a system where we create elaborate,
state-expanding, liberty-infringing mechanisms to prevent these
teens from engaging in prostitution, I will take the
former. 

Reminder for those who like to pat themselves on the back for
how much more civilized we are what with our modern prison-based
penology over, say, a few hours in the public stockades, out of
Florida, where inmate Latandra Ellington died this week in Lowell
Correctional Institution in Ocala.

This was a few weeks after warning her family that a guard had
threatened to kill her, and 24 hours after her family had called
the prison to warn them about the threats.

Her family’s lawyers are seeking federal investigation,
Flagerlive reports:

Benjamin Crump and Darryl Parks, lawyers representing
Ellington’s aunt Algerene Jennings, wrote in a letter to U.S.
Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday that a private autopsy by a
doctor hired by the family “revealed hemorrhaging caused by blunt
force trauma consistent with kicking or punches to the lower
abdomen.”

The state medical examiner contradicts that report, saying
that 

 “that there was no identifiable trauma anywhere in the
body,” [Department of Corrections Secretary Mike] Crews said.
Toxicology reports have not yet been completed and a cause of death
has not yet been determined, he said.

“At this point, that’s all we know. So right now what we have is
conflicting information between the medical examiner and whoever
this physician is or doctor is that the family decided to hire,”
Crews said.

FreeThoughtProject reports that:

According to family members, Latandra may have been planning to
speak out about rampant sexual abuse that the correctional officers
at the prison have been inflicting on the inmates.

For what crime was Ellington segregated from decent
society in a form of modern, sophisticated punishment that turned
out to be a death sentence?

Fraud charges for filing fake tax returns.

I wrote on a similar theme in June, involving a woman
who died in prison (at least not murdered) because of not
paying fines for her kids being truant, and last July
about a kid beaten in prison for making obvious ridiculous
threats in the context of online gaming.

As I wrote then:

This is worth contemplating and thinking more
about: being behind bars in America is a goddamn serious
thing with goddamn serious consequences, and it’s horrible to
be used as a quick general interest problem-solving tool.

Sadly, Thomas
Eric Duncan died of an Ebola virus infection in Dallas, Texas on
Wednesday. He arrived at Dallas on September 20 and sought
treatment for a fever at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital
emergency department on September 24. As we all now know, he was a
turned away despite having a fever of 103 degrees. Duncan was
finally admitted on September 28 for treatment.

In the meantime, public health officials have been tracking and
monitoring some 100 people who may have come into close contact
with Duncan after he began to exhibit symptoms of his illness. Four
family members who were with Duncan in his grilfriend’s apartment
have been quarantined and will remain isolated until October 19.
Depending if one counts from the onset of symptoms or from the time
Duncan was admitted to the hospital, the number of days that have
passed since contacts (especially those in the apartment) were
exposed to Duncan now amount to either 17 or 13 days.

The Dallas deputy who feared that he might have been infected
after he entered the apartment where Duncan was staying has been
given the all-clear.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes
that ” symptoms may appear anywhere from 2 to 21 days after
exposure to Ebola but the average is 8 to 10 days.” So far, so
good.