What’s wrong and right with the world.
This will be a brief Ready Room; basically little more than a string of tweets. But it’s important. The subject is the terror attacks in Israel in recent days, which have now taken the lives of 11 people. The first was a gruesome mass-knifing attack, the other two shooting attacks.
Terror using small arms is not unusual in Israel, but the attacks we’ve been seeing also don’t fit recent patterns. Continue reading “TOC Ready Room 29 March 2022: Eyes front (not back), on attacks in Israel”
What’s wrong and right with the world.
Just a short update for Tuesday, as sites across the Web take note of a new National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin published on 7 February 2022.
The bulletin is not hard to interpret. It says the following in the first paragraph: “The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence.”
The bulletin goes on to say, Continue reading “TOC Ready Room 8 Feb 2022: Domestic terror alert results “changing quickly,” says Google”
What’s wrong and right with the world.
This will be the roughest and readiest of Ready Rooms. What I want to focus on is insights readers may not have gleaned from elsewhere on two important topics.
The first is Russia and Ukraine, and on that topic the initial observation must be that the subject is being comprehensively suppressed on Twitter, and may be on Google as well. I can tell what’s being suppressed on Twitter, as I’m posting some of it and watching the reach of others’ tweets, as well as mine, be throttled. Popular tweeps on the matter are posting updates and links, and the number of “likes” and retweets is abysmal, far below what you’d normally see.
If we were to read something into that, it would seem to be that someone expects something to happen soon. Continue reading “TOC Ready Room 17 Jan 2022: Rumors of war; Antisemitic attack in Texas”
War without leadership.
If you’re not convinced we are now in a “post-American” (and hence post-NATO) world, consider these events of the last 72 hours.
After the Paris attacks on Friday, the G20 leaders gathering in Turkey knew that both Syria and ISIS would top their agenda in Antalya. On Sunday, UK Prime Minister David Cameron expressed the standard position of the Western allies, since late summer, that Russia should stop prosecuting what is essentially a unilateral war in Syria.
How odd that that position should seem antique a mere 48 hours later. In the wake of the most recent events, one now has the sense that Cameron was speaking in another world and time.
Obama’s watershed moment Continue reading “After Paris, post-NATO ‘solution’ for Syria blasts off without U.S.”
The center cannot hold.
his will be a quick update tonight, with less of the usual analysis, because I just don’t have time.
I have no doubt that ISIS is behind the recent attacks that have been spreading out around the Syria/Iraq theater. ISIS has claimed responsibility for all of them, and it is credible that ISIS is behind them (although they are being executed through ISIS affiliates in each local area. The core leadership of ISIS doesn’t have to be involved in planning or managing each attack, and I assume unless it’s proven otherwise that it is not).
But this is not a minor campaign of pinpricks from single-venue terror attacks, randomly distributed here and there. This is a full-blown campaign: a strategy on ISIS’s part. Continue reading “Paris, the Russian airliner, Lebanon: ISIS is enlarging the war”
The Optimistic Conservative 