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“No Finger Pointing”
In the wake of the security meltdown that nearly led to a Christmas Day disaster on an incoming international flight, President Obama scolded the American intelligence community and said that in his search for answers he would not tolerate finger pointing. Shifting the blame after all is just a sign of your own incompetence and lack of accountability, right? You know, like spending the first year of your administration blaming all the country’s problems on your predecessor…that kind of thing.
It’s probably no coincidence that Barry has developed his new-found aversion to finger-pointing at a time when he’s on the receiving end of most of the pointing. Columnist L. Gordon Crovitz makes a good argument that the fault for the latest intelligence “screw-up” lies in the administration’s insistence on pursuing the War on Terror as a criminal matter, applying to intelligence-gathering the “reasonable suspicion” standards created to protect American citizens from unlawful searches. It’s an approach that prevents intelligence agencies from taking action on “mere hunches,” as for example the hunch that perhaps an Army major with militant jihadist views just might be a threat to his fellow soldiers, or that a Nigerian father’s warning about his nutjob son — coupled, mind you, with previously gathered warnings of an Al Queada attack to be carried out by a Nigerian operative — might be enough to keep the man in question off a plane, or at least search him before boarding.
Maybe the real problem is that there’s not enough finger-pointing. As in “that guy over there looks dangerous,” or “that one fits the profile.” Instead we spend billions on TSA employees and scanning devices to see through clothes, but only pull aside grannies and women with babies to search and scan, lest we be accused of profiling. It’s a gutless, half-hearted approach to “security” and it gets the results you’d expect.
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– INFORMATION RESTRICTED UNDER LENSMAN’S SEAL, FOR YOUR PERCEPTION ONLY –
Youth, the thinking you have thus far demonstrated is unforgivably loose and turgid!
By the Omnipotent Witness! I would expect nothing less from entities less than stable at the Second Level of Stress. At this pace, how will your race ever qualify to receive the Lens?
Such an error is far outside even your race’s feeble intellect for visualization and clarity of cogitation, and thus must be corrected to ensure the viability of our optimal plans.
Consider the following error in your thought processes. For the statements you make in the above digital electro-wave signal you refer to as a “blog post” to be accurate, a logic chain must be constructed. All of the statements within the logic chain must be true, and none shown to be false:
1) The treatment of terrorism as a national security issue allows action on “hunches;”
2) Treatment of terrorism as a law enforcement matter prevents this action;
3) Acting on “hunches” prevents terrorism;
4) Action on “hunches” would have prevented terrorism in the two instances cited;
5) The policies of racial profiling are successful in identifying terrorists;
6) The policies of racial profiling would have successfully identified the terrorists in question;
7) A major change has taken place in how racial profiling is performed on air travel in the past year.
As for the first and second…while it is true that no terrorist attacks were performed in the tenure of the below-average breeding specimen referred to as “Bush,” a similar argument exists on your Earth for something known as “elephant repellent.”
“Why are you spraying that stuff around?”
“To keep elephants away.”
“But there aren’t any elephants around!”
“Wow, this stuff must really work then!”
As for the seventh point in the logic chain, I can see into your mind that you have traveled recently in the current presidency in the incomprehensibly primitive aeronautical vehicles referred to as aeroplanes. In your own logical estimation who is much more likely to be stopped by airport security: elderly females, or young males from the Earth-region known as the Middle East?
Think, youth – THINK!
This comment would probably make more sense if I read Doc Smith’s work. Then again, maybe not.
Also, I think it’s only fair to warn you that “Guardian of Civilization” has already been claimed as a job title, and Al Gore’s legal team will be contacting you soon.
This comment would probably make more sense if I read Doc Smith’s work.
As you’re no longer a fourteen year old boy, I think the moment has officially passed. It’s too late for me, but there’s still a chance for you and the next generation. If you catch any of your children reading E.E. Smith, smack it out of their hand and give them a copy of Heinlein’s “The Puppet Masters” instead.
Same goes for the Illuminatus! trilogy and John Carter of Mars. If it doesn’t come into your life at a certain age, you are faced with the unavoidable realization they’re embarrassing.
Discovering a writer when a kid or teenager is a little like falling in love: it makes you stupid and oblivious.
I do have a few old scientifiction fanzines from the early 1960s that I got recently. One that might be of interest to you actually has a casual mention of the growing fandom around the original Star Trek. The reaction from all the old-guard E.E. Smith, Leigh Brackett and Ed Hamilton fans pretty much boiled down to, “oh shit, there goes the neighborhood!”
Man, Dave, you really, really let me down here. Really let me down! And here I thought you were a pulp guy.
Pulp guy, yes. Science Fiction guy, no. It took me a few years of suffering through various Asimov and Clarke novels to realize it, but I really don’t dig the genre. Ray guns and warp drive, yes. Girls in tinfoil bikinis, you bet. But thought-provoking examinations of the human condition through alien proxies? Not so much.
“My” pulps are the “hero” fiction of McCulley, Dent, Grant, Page, Hogan and the like, or detective yarns by guys like Hammett and Daly. I guess I’m kind of interested in seeing stuff from Ed Hamilton and Otto Binder before they got into comics, but so far not enough to track the stuff down.
Re: John Carter. I recently found myself out of town with nothing to read, so I bought a nicely assembled trilogy of the first 3 novels with great illustrations by comic artist Tom Yeates. After I got over my initial aversion to funny names and phrases (one of my turn-offs with SF) like “jeds” and Tarkanians and whatnot, I quite enjoyed the “out of the frying pan, into the fire” pace of the first book. But about halfway through, I realized it was going to be like “Tarzan” (which I finally read a few years ago) all over again; fun while it’s happening, but at the end you feel silly for wasting all that time, and maybe just a little dumber.
After I bought the book, knowing only the vaguest things about Carter but knowing it’s considered important SF, historically, I checked your site thinking, “Julian’s the expert on old SF; let’s hear what he thinks.” Then I saw your post saying, as you do here, that if you’re not a 14-year-old boy, it’s not for you. Ah, well.
At the end of the day, you’re pretty much right; it’s faintly embarassing. But on the plus side, at least I didn’t learn anything. 🙂
Obviously I was being a little tongue-in-cheek about John Carter of Mars. Don’t get the wrong idea, though. I have a profound fondness for those stories, and recently, when watching Avatar, I gave James Cameron’s movies more than its fair share of virtues because it reminded me of what a good time I had reading those books.
I could not in good conscience recommend them, though…they always seemed like a guilty pleasure thing you either get or you don’t, which is what I meant by that particular “fourteen year old boy” crack. “Tarzan” was a one of a kind character that no imitator ever came close to equalling in creative power. On the other hand, I always personally thought that the Sword & Planet yarn was invented by Burroughs but perfected by Leigh Brackett and L. Sprague de Camp.
I do understand the vague guilt about not liking a certain genre. It took me quite a bit to realize I don’t care much for detective stories (with exceptions like the wonderful “Historical Whodunnits” anthologies but that’s because of my fondness for historical fiction, I guess).
Heck, I don’t even care much for doing newspaper crossword puzzles, much less figuring out really elaborate detective yarns!
This, after some relatives gave me hardcover Spanish language editions of the collected works of Dashiell Hamett.
On the other hand, the Lensman and Skylark of Space books are impossible to read for me now. Say what you will about Burroughs, at least he had incredible gifts as a writer. E.E. Smith’s prose style could best be described as yelling. I love pulp science fiction, but not enough to close ranks around that particular sacred cow.
I guess I’m kind of interested in seeing stuff from Ed Hamilton and Otto Binder before they got into comics, but so far not enough to track the stuff down.
Ed “the Planet Smasher” Hamilton was a treasure! I think you’d get a charge out of his later work, like “Battle Beyond the Stars.”
I did a blog post about this, but there is a noticeable break in quality between when the Binder brothers wrote the Adam Link stories together, and when Otto wrote them by himself. The early stories were pretty amazing though.
At the end of the day, you’re pretty much right; it’s faintly embarassing. But on the plus side, at least I didn’t learn anything. 🙂
In the words of Gore Vidal: “Burroughs was entirely innocent in creating literature.”