Jack Nicholson in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
by Mary W Maxwell
Here are two short pieces from The Hill, a website that reports “news” from the Capitol building in Washington DC. Both appeared yesterday, September 11, 2016. First, from the Secretary of Homeland Security, then from Senator Marco Rubio. I ask which is more completely bonkers?
The first headline said: “DHS chief: We’re in a ‘relatively new environment’ regarding terror threats.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnson on Sunday said that 15 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the country now has to prepare for a new kind of threat.
“We’re on a constant state of alert, against not only the terrorist-directed attack of the 9/11 attack but also terrorism-inspired attacks, the so-called lone wolf, the homegrown violent extremists,” Johnson said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Johnson said this new threat makes for a more “complex environment,” which involves law enforcement, the intelligence community and the DHS working to combat these types of attacks.
Johnson said the country is safer today than it was 15 years ago when it comes to the “9/11-style attack.” He said the government has become “pretty good” at detecting plots against the homeland from overseas.
But the country now has this “new environment and new threat,” which makes it more difficult.
“We’re better now with detecting the 9/11-style attack, but it’s more challenging now with this new environment we’re in,” Johnson said when asked if the country is safer now than it was 15 years ago.”
I think he said it a few hours before the Minto episode in Sydney.
The second article, written by Rebecca Savransky in The Hill today is about a young Republican senator from Florida, Marco Rubio. The headline is:
“Rubio: We need ‘cooperation of the patriotic Muslim Americans’ “
He says it’s important to work with the Muslim community to prevent the types of terrorist attacks that have been happening in this country from continuing to occur.
“It’s not about spying on law-abiding people.[Don’t even consider it!] It’s about being able to get ahead of a plot before it happens,” Rubio told CBS Miami’s Jim DeFede.
“I do believe that we need to do more work, including in the Muslim American community — to identify radicalism, and to fight against it. And we’ll need the cooperation of the patriotic Muslim Americans, and there are many.”
Rubio said he thinks Muslim Americans are cooperating in “many cases.”
He referenced the terrorist attack in Orlando, Fla., earlier this year as an example. [Ahem, ahem]
“One of the reasons why the killer, the terrorist in Orlando, came on the FBI’s radar is because a gentleman at the Islamic center he was attending tipped the FBI off to him, so there’s no doubt that there are,” said the Florida senator who is up for reelection after ending his presidential bid earlier this year.
“And then there are other places where I think it’s become more difficult, but in the end I think that’s a big part of it, both here and around the world.”
In this country, Rubio said the ideology of radical Islam needs to be delegitimized. He noted Muslims will also “play a key role” in that.
“But the biggest thing we can do is to take out the ability of groups like [the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria] to have a core of operation anywhere in the world,” Rubio said, “because it is from Mosul, it is from Barakah, where they have their core operation that allows them to disseminate propaganda, which, in the end, is what causes and inspires people around the world to take action against us.”
Based on the last four articles by Dee McLachlan at Gumshoe, and this new insanity from America, the following bit of Tennyson comes to mind. It’s from The Idylls of the King:
To which I can only add, from Tennyson’s The Passing of Arthur:
Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere:
“Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?
Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led…
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds.
— Mary W Maxwell is giving up, any day now.
Photo credit - weheartit.com
“Mary W Maxwell is giving up, any day now.”
Giving up what?
OK, Paul, you asked for it. I meant: give up the crap about “How like an angel” and go to something Montaigne-ish like
“Is it possible to imagine so ridiculous as this miserable and wretched creature, which is not so much as master of himself, exposed and subject to offences of all things, and yet dareth call himself Master and Emperor?”
You’re going scary?
i have been re-reading the Port Arthur witness statements tonite and that is about as scary as it gets.
I guess Terry Shulze is right about sociopaths. Come to think of it Nurse Ratched was a sociopath.
I find that re-reading things of that nature much later leaves you numb, knowing something was staring right at you and you couldn’t see it at the time.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was 41 years ago , but I’ll bet many of us can remember the awful nurse after Billy had had a visit from an Escort:
Nurse Ratched: Aren’t you ashamed?
Billy: No, I’m not.
[Applause from friends]
Nurse Ratched: You know Billy, what worries me is how your mother is going to take this.
Billy: Um, um, well, y-y-y-you d-d-d-don’t have to t-t-t-tell her, Miss Ratched.
Nurse Ratched: I don’t have to tell her? Your mother and I are old friends. You know that.
Billy: P-p-p-please d-d-don’t tell my m-m-m-mother.
The politicians are speaking to their bases. They assume, and rightly so, there are still a few people who don’t know that every word they utter is a lie. Politics in the churches has become a huge source of propaganda. (Maybe it always has been.) And then, there are the ones who can’t be bothered to research. Some of those really don’t seem to care either way. Apparently, most people feel safer as followers rather than thinking for themselves. But the majority are coming around. https://kauilapele.wordpress.com/2016/09/12/paul-craig-roberts-veterans-news-now-vnn-9-7-16-the-tide-is-turning-the-official-story-is-now-the-conspiracy-theory/
Wow, look at this. Start at 35 miniutes. “The shining light of lobotomy.