a ryan's blog

I’d rather be in Cape Town scuba diving — Wander Weeks

Thu, 10 May 2012 11:55:54 -0500

I’d rather be in *Cape Town* scuba diving — Wander Weeks

"Sustained high inflation is not a threat in this environment." Sing it, Adam Posen!

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:18:33 -0600

“Sustained high inflation is not a threat in this environment.” Sing it, Adam Posen!

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from Ryan Jones - Google+ Post Feed http://bit.ly/sYGQxZ

OK, now it's TOMATO PASTE that's a vegetable.

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:17:32 -0600

OK, now it’s TOMATO PASTE that’s a vegetable.

from Ryan Jones - Google+ Post Feed http://bit.ly/tU9rqf

vladimir putin is, by far, the funniest world leader.

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 12:02:49 -0600

vladimir putin is, by far, the funniest world leader.

from Ryan Jones - Google+ Post Feed http://bit.ly/ttRaEp

gutsy!

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:03:23 -0600

gutsy!

from Ryan Jones - Google+ Post Feed http://bit.ly/snRJFh

Time to go conquer the world!

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:48:12 -0500

Time to go conquer the world!

from Ryan Jones - Google+ Post Feed http://bit.ly/vGsFU7

The guy in front of me on this flight was watching a DVD of 'early edition.' Technology is amazing!!

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:33:15 -0500

The guy in front of me on this flight was watching a DVD of ‘early edition.’ Technology is amazing!!

from Ryan Jones - Google+ Post Feed http://bit.ly/sGYFVJ

this is sensational, even though the picture is a bit ridiculous.

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:17:50 -0500

this is sensational, even though the picture is a bit ridiculous.

from Ryan Jones - Google+ Post Feed http://bit.ly/vtlZ7v

"In 2009, 237,000 taxpayers reported income above $1 million and they paid $178 billion in taxes. A..."

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 21:10:36 -0500

“

In 2009, 237,000 taxpayers reported income above $1 million and they paid $178 billion in taxes. A mere 8,274 filers reported income above $10 million, and they paid only $54 billion in taxes.

But 3.92 million reported income above $200,000 in 2009, and they paid $434 billion in taxes. To put it another way, roughly 90% of the tax filers who would pay more under Mr. Obama’s plan aren’t millionaires, and 99.99% aren’t billionaires.

”

- http://on.wsj.com/oVUkIt

This makes NO sense. A millionaire is someone with a million dollars in assets, not someone who makes a million dollars per year. Does the WSJ editorial page think a billionaire is someone who makes a billion dollars per year?

Toward a Unified Theory of the Counting Crows (1993-98, obv)

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 22:32:05 -0500

After a conversation with +Ruben Brosbe and +Ben Kowitt about whether ‘Live on a Wire,’ Disc 2, could be considered the Counting Crows’ best, or even second-best, CD (no), we quickly turned to the inevitable question: August and Everything After or Recovering the Satellites?

After confidently and, admittedly now, hastily, responding that ‘Recovering’ was clearly better, I finally got around today to listening to both albums straight through in an attempt to defend my assertion. What I realized is that there is much more to the debate then I considered at the time, and there’s a lot more here than I could hope to unpack on my own, which is why I’m turning to you.

Song-by-Song

First off, ‘Recovering’ is a significantly longer album, by three songs and 12 minutes, than ‘August.’ This means that the best songs on the album are diluted by extra tracks, and means that, on a tracks-per-hit basis, ‘August’ is a tighter record.

Now, though, let’s take a look at the quality of the also-rans. Take the four ‘best’ from each album off the table (based on commercial popularity as best I can remember, not personal preference). Here are the tracks you are left with:

August and Everything After
Omaha
Perfect Blue Buildings
Time and Time Again
Anna Begins
Sullivan Street
Ghost Train
Raining in Baltimore

Recovering the Satellites
Catapult
I’m Not Sleeping
Children in Bloom
Have you Seen Me Lately?
Miller’s Angels
Another Horsedreamer’s Blues
Recovering the Satellites
Monkey
Mercury
Walkaways

I think Duritz might have erred by keeping all of these songs on ‘Recovering’ (It comes in so close to an hour exactly that it seems like it might have been pressure from the label, but who knows). I think if you go head-to-head on these songs, though, allowing you to conveniently eliminate the three worst songs on ‘Recovering’ (probably walkaways, monkey, and mercury, which are all at the end of the album, which definitely, as we will see, props them up), it’s a tight battle. ‘Anna Begins’ is a winner, but ‘Catapult’, ‘Horsedreamers’, the title track, ‘Have You Seen Me Lately’, and ‘I’m Not Sleeping’ will all give the rest of the songs on ‘August’ a run for their money. ‘Omaha’ and ‘Sullivan Street’ are fine, if both a little campy (Melloncampy in the case of ‘Omaha’), but the rest of the songs on that album are a bit forgettable. ‘Raining in Baltimore’ is swept over by some of the Counting Crow’s later slow, emotional songs, so despite its merits I don’t think it gets through here. Might be worth actually trying to set up a fair head-to-head to see what we think.

So that’s the bottom of the order. What about the heavy hitters? Personally, though it might be controversial, I believe the best Counting Crows song is on ‘Recovering the Satellites,’ and that song is ‘A Long December.’ Maybe it’s just because ‘3,000 Miles to Graceland’ was on yesterday, and I got to see Courtney Cox at her best, but I think it’s a masterpiece, perfectly placed at the end of the Crow’s most introspective album. My personal rankings for these songs:

1. A Long December - RECOVERING
2. Mr. Jones - AUGUST
3. Angels of the Silences - RECOVERING
4. Round Here - AUGUST (might be number 1 if not for the weird funky bass solo in the middle of the song)
5. Rain King - AUGUST
6. Daylight Fading - RECOVERING
7. Goodnight Elisabeth - RECOVERING
8. A Murder of One - AUGUST

So it’s pretty even. the ‘best song’ designation carries a lot of weight with me, but ‘August’ really has some good songs on it.

Album qua Album

Songwise, I think the albums are roughly equal on the upside, but the extra length of ‘Recovering’ is a liability, so the edge here, in my mind, goes to ‘August.’ What about the full album experience, though, since that’s what we’re really talking about? Here, i think that ‘Recovering the Satellites’ is clearly superior.

While ‘August and Everything After’, like most freshman albums, is a collection of very good songs, call it a polished demo tape (which i don’t mean as an insult), ‘Recovering’, because of both the maturity of the band and the depth of their shared experience over the years during its creation, reflects a much more coherent and well-articulated vision, rewarding a through-listener, and a repeat listener, far more than does ‘August’. Sure, the songs on ‘August’ are all linked by a sort of desperate, pre-apocalyptic joy, but the album as a whole contains little of the thematic unity and narrative progression of its older brother. While ‘Recovering’ might get a little heavy-handed at times with the hypersensory imagery—never before has there been more seeing, sleeping, fading, and silence in one place—it’s still an incredibly valuable portrait of one artist’s attempt to come to terms with the complex trappings of fame and success.

The entire journey wouldn’t be nearly as effective as it is without the haunting and redemptive ‘December,’ a song that doesn’t hit you in the face with the loud thematic language of the rest of the album, but instead gives us a series of snapshots of the unusual nature of young fame. where ‘daylight fading’ is a manic, cynical attempt to escape pain, ‘a long december’ is the sober come-down, the acceptance, no doubt just as the sun begins to rise over the hollywood hills, of the inevitability of that pain. ‘maybe next year will be better than the last.’ maybe it won’t (and in the case of the Counting Crows post-‘Recovering,’ things just got awfully crappy), but that’s life. Finally, is there a better quatrain in mid-90’s american pop than

the smell of hospitals in winter
and the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters, but no pearls
All at once you look across a crowded room
to see the way that light attaches to a girl

?

half of fiji's population doesn't have reliable access to clean drinking water.

Sat, 01 May 2010 18:47:54 -0500

half of fiji's population doesn't have reliable access to clean drinking water.

SXSW 2010: Sharon Jones And The Dap-Kings, Live In Concert : NPR

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:43:57 -0500

SXSW 2010: Sharon Jones And The Dap-Kings, Live In Concert : NPR:

sensational

the spectre of jimmy carter

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:47:36 -0600

to people like dana milbank, comparing a presidency to the carter administration is just about as bad as it gets. malaise-y, passionless, one-term, it was the epitome of a well-meaning gang of intellectuals trying to do something good and failing. for washington pundits on both sides of the aisle, ‘carter’ is the code word for screwing up big time.

carter’s presidency was pretty bad. still, i can think of at least one recent president who might give him a run for his money, depending on how one measures success. here’s some quick and dirty comparisons between that miserable failure carter and george w. bush:

unemployment:
carter: 7.5 % in Jan 1977, 7.5 % in Jan 1981
bush: 4.2 % in Jan 2001, 7.7 % in Jan 2009

real gdp growth:
carter: annual rate of 3.4 % over 4 years, 14 % growth over term
bush: annual rate of 1.7 % over 8 years, 14 % growth over term

inflation-adjusted S&P 500:
carter: $1.00 invested in January 1977 was worth $0.92 in January 1981
bush: $1.00 invested in January 2001 was worth $0.50 in January 2009

and then, of course, there’s foreign policy and things: carter had the iran hostage crisis, where his big problem was negotiating too hard and neglecting his reelection campaign, only to have the hostages released minutes after his term ended (thanks in part, at least allegedly, to possible treason on the part of reagan and his advisers). bush failed to stop the largest terrorist attack on US soil in history, began two massive, underfunded, underplanned wars, one of which had little or nothing to do with American national security interests, and sanctioned the use of torture on human beings.

of course, to milbank et al., carter can never be anything but the biggest presidential failure in the modern generation. bush might have had some bad breaks, but he got reelected. the country spoke! he won! in this sense, beltway-type writers are basically sportswriters, for whom winning the game is basically the whole story (or at least the most interesting story). nbc’s chuck todd, for example, wishes every day was election day. to someone with that attitude, of course george w. bush is going to be a hall of famer, and jimmy carter will always be bush league, despite any type of objective measure of the state of the world during their respective terms.

there’s definitely a place for this sort of beltway analysis about process and image and legacies, and people like todd, milbank, and leslie gelb will always be there to deliver it. but there would be a lot to gain from stories about how policies would affect actual lives, not public perceptions or 2012 electoral math. it takes bravery to suggest that maybe the carter administration wasn’t any worse than the bush II administration, at least from the perspective of normal people; where are the heroes ready to tell that story?

mitt romney on letterman

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:31:00 -0600

he repeated that old saw about how healthcare in the US can’t be bad because kings and prime ministers come here for surgeries. isn’t this like saying hunger in the US can’t be a problem because kings and prime ministers like to go Per Se and the French Laundry?

the debt explosion

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:24:00 -0600

if you’ve been wondering why, in the face of giant increases in federal government spending, rates on treasuries are lower than they were in june 2008, take a look at the graph i put together below:

this graph shows debt flows (green, red, and blue areas) along with the total stock of debt owed by businesses, households, and the federal government. as you can see, the collapse in borrowing brought on by the financial crisis in mid-2008 more than makes up for the subsequent recent increase in federal borrowing. in fact, the total stock of debt held by these three sectors of the economy has dropped for the first time since the early 90’s, and has dropped more quickly than any time since 1960 (as far back as i looked). if you assume that catastrophic debt losses by households and businesses would have an adverse effect on the treasury’s ability to pay its bills, then the new debt taken on since the crash isn’t all that much different than the private debt (except that the interest rate is much lower).

this graph also gives you a rough idea of why a lot of economists say the stimulus was inadequate. given the severity of the drop in private borrowing, federal borrowing would have had to be almost double the stimulus to make up the whole difference.

now, the point is not that the U.S. should keep up wild rates of debt growth. in fact, a reduction might actually be a good idea. but a crazy steep drop, like what we would have had with no green on that graph, would have been catastrophic.

UPDATE: This graph is a more accurate way of showing the severity of the recession on output. the debt graph up there shows that the annual debt the economy is accruing isn’t unprecedented.

go see this (if you can)

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:56:27 -0600

fortuitously (or, probably, by design), the last weekend of ‘free february’ at the art institute of chicago happened to line up with the opening of a new william eggleston exhibit there. getting to see it for free was a thrill, as it meant i could just spend an hour looking at that exhibit, and not feel like i had to tromp around the whole museum, just to get my money’s worth. however, it’s march now, so you’ll have to pay, but it’s worth it.

if you aren’t familiar with eggleston, this exhibit is a great intro to his highly saturated work. one of the first art photographers to work in color, he delivers a deeply lonely, almost scornful picture of classic americana. his subjects are always bored or disdainful or lonely, and his landscapes are dull, dusty, abandoned. even the smiling faces he captures seem to have nothing behind them, or else they all swirl together into meaningless ordinary-ness. stop and watch the film of kids out at a nightclub, and see how quickly their reverie becomes depressing. their smiles are painted on, their conversation is pointless, and all their happy gyrations are to no meaningful end. they’re there because it’s what people do at night.

some might suggest eggleston’s work is more resonant now, during a time where despair and empty edifices are easier to relate to, but i hope not. his photos aren’t of poor people wallowing in their misery; they’re more about finding emptiness and darkness in the midst of prosperity. if rockwell made the milkman a visiting angel of community and patriotism, eggleston turns the shopping cart-wrangler into a symptom of the dreary, anonymous monotony of american consumer culture.

i should mention that his photos are gorgeous before i scare you away from the exhibit. it’s not just that eggleston has an ability to take the mundane and make it beautiful, which is kind of a useless trope; he puts the mundanity itself up front in the photo. He takes the depressing familiarity of the peeling paint, the rusty tricycle, the yet-another-barbeque, and makes that feature the star of the piece, instead of the objects themselves. in a country whose landscapes are even more homogenized now than when eggleston began shooting them, this confrontation leads to some stark meditation.

Something Much Sadder - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 01:11:29 -0600

Something Much Sadder - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

james fallows on npr

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 01:11:29 -0600

james fallows on npr

this site ready to destroy the planet

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:05:00 -0600

In 1988, Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy developed a theory [pdf] of ‘rational addiction’ that helps to distill the elements of an addictive good. Basically, if consuming something now will both impact my future welfare (for good or bad) and make me more likely to consume it in the future, it’s addictive. Becker and Murphy call these characteristics shadow prices and adjacent complementarity, but just think about the whole ‘chasing the dragon’ nature of drug use, along with some before-and-after meth addict shots. if there was a product whose actual cost was really low, like free, but its shadow price was high — making life after you use it much worse — and repeated use of that product made you more and more likely to use it again, we’d all be in a lot of trouble.

enter ChatRoulette. note i didn’t link to the site, because no one should ever go there, for the sake of our future. sam anderson, who wrote that article, was brave enough to explore the twisted landscape of this web site that randomly matches your webcam feed with a total stranger’s. then, well, nothing. you can stare at each other, attempt to interact socially, or just press ‘next.’ since a large proportion of potential matches on the site are close-ups of masturbating men, you’ll be using the ‘next’ button a lot. also, since you probably aren’t a naked lady, the other person will probably be nexting you a lot as well.

clearly, we’ve met becker and murphy’s first criteron. your life will be worse after you go on this site. you will see the faces people just as pathetic as you are, and you will see the private parts of those who are more pathetic. faced with the vast majority of pairings ChatRoulette sends your way, you will be so bored or so repulsed that you will press ‘next,’ bringing on another interaction likely very similar to one you just left behind. by clicking next, you are saying ‘i would rather take the chance of looking at a man’s genitalia right now than continue to interact with you.’ this is the definition (or should be) of a negative-sum interaction.

occasionally, though, just occasionally, you might have an experience you would’t trade for a look at a stranger’s junk. indeed, as anderson recounts his one positive experience:

We ended up staying on, talking and dancing, connecting and disconnecting, for four hours. We chatted with Pratt students in Bed-Stuy, with a man inexplicably sitting on his toilet, with a kid waving a gun and a knife, and with a guy who went to my wife’s old high school in California. We saw Chinese kids in computer cafés and English kids drinking beer. We danced with a guy in his bedroom to the entirety of Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.” We talked for half an hour with a 28-year-old tech writer from San Francisco

oh the magic. perhaps i’ll have great experiences like that if i go on the site! perhaps every time will be as good as that one good time! and perhaps crack will just be pure physical ecstasy with no consequences. oh yes, we’ve arrived in adjacent complementarity land. one positive experience, one small bit of proof that the site isn’t a total waste of time, and you’re in. having a good interaction, accidentally click ‘next,’ and want to go back? too bad! it’s completely random and irreversible, so just keep clicking next until you’re plopped back together or something else catches your eye. who cares about the penises? it’s so easy just to press ‘next’! even anderson calls the site, which seemed to disgust him for the most part, ‘weirdly magnetic.’

But why is this site so dangerous? partly because it’s free to access, anonymous, and easy to use, eliminating most potential barriers to people starting to use it. mostly, though the danger comes from the nature of what it offers — actual human interaction. people, according to gary becker himself, are the most addictive substances on earth; nothing fits his model better. this is true not only of long-term relationships with loved ones, which people might stay in for momentum’s sake, but also of these random encounters with strangers. we crave human interaction, and ChatRoulette offers it in a fast, compact, easily ingestible way, just like cocaine offers energy, ecstasy offers dancing skills, and nicotine offers stress relief. it’s packaged, empty, and ultimately destructive, but so tantalizing i’m not sure the world will be able to resist.

take heed of my warning. against my better judgment, here’s a link to ChatRoulette. hold your nose before jumping in. if you get stuck, perhaps i’ll see you in ten years, by which time ChatRoulette will have conquered us all.

click this and say goodbye

in case the fp needs it

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:54:52 -0600

Foreign Policy magazine recently gave Marc Thiessen the chance to explain why it’s bad that the Obama Administration is killing terrorists. Somehow, Thiessen, an unrepentant apologist for torture, managed to write this entire article, which is predicated on his beliefs that (a) torture is acceptable and (b) torture works without ever explicitly defending torture. he even went so far, in an article that all but advocates torturing human beings, to say that drone attacks that killed civilians abrogated American principles.

The interesting thing about this article is that it doesn’t really have an evidence that the administration is shirking on capturing terrorists. Therefore, as a favor to Foreign Policy, I rewrote Thiessen’s article in case there’s a report of Special Forces capturing terrorist leaders. As you can see, the article works just as well arguing the exact opposite of what it is arguing, since there’s never an explicit defense of Thiessen’s main point, which is that the United States should torture more people more often.

Dead Terrorists Tell No Lies
Is Barack Obama capturing too many bad guys before the U.S. can kill them?

BY FARC A. FIESSEN | FEBRUARY 8, 2010

The CIA reportedly succeeded in capturing the head of the Pakistani Taliban — the most recent in a flurry of missions to capture enemy leaders the agency has launched in South Asia and the Middle East. Another strike in Pakistan reportedly nabbed of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists; another in Pakistan captured a master bomb-maker for the al Qaeda affiliate in the Philippines, Abu Sayyaf; and a strike in Yemen targeted a senior military leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the group behind the Christmas Day attack (his fate has yet to be determined).

President Barack Obama’s escalation of these raids is one area in the counterterrorism fight where he has earned plaudits from even his most vocal critics on the right. Hold the applause. Obama’s escalation of capturing senior terrorist leaders alive and interrogate them for information on new attacks comes at the very same time he has eliminated the CIA’s capability to continue their effective “Predator War”. Capturing terrorists has become for President Obama what the cruise missile was to President Bill Clinton — an easy way to appear like he is taking tough action against terrorists, when he is really shying away from the hard decisions needed to protect the United States.

To be sure, capturing terrorists is critical in the struggle against al Qaeda. As one high-ranking CIA official explained to me, in an interview for my book Courting Disaster, “In the wake of 9/11, [the CIA] put forward a program that had a lethal component to strike back at the people who did this. But the other component was to prevent this kind of catastrophe from happening again. And for that, killing people — especially killing senior al Qaeda leaders — is potentially counterproductive in that we can’t know or learn of future attacks. You can’t kill them all, and you don’t want to kill them all from an intelligence standpoint. We needed to know what they knew.” All this is for the good.

The problem is that Obama is increasingly using operations to bring terrorist leaders in alive for questioning as a substitute for killing them — and that is putting the country at risk. Drone attacks allow the CIA to reach terrorists hiding in remote regions where it would be difficult for special operations forces to reach them, or to act on perishable intelligence when the only choice is to kill a terrorist or lose him. Constantly hovering Predator (or Reaper) drones also have a psychological effect on the enemy, forcing al Qaeda leaders to live in fear and spend time focusing on self-preservation that would otherwise be used planning the next attack.

Granted, in the years after the 9/11 attacks, the CIA worked with Pakistani and other intelligence services to hunt down senior terrorist leaders and take them in for interrogation. Among those captured were men like Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ammar al-Baluchi, Walid bin Attash, Riduan Isamuddin (aka “Hambali”), Bashir bin Lap, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, and others. In all, about 100 terrorists were detained and questioned by the CIA. To be sure, not all of their interrogation was fruitless: Some information gathered from those interrogations, once separated from false confessions and misleading information, helped supplement existing intelligence that pointed to terrorist cells that were planning to blow up the U.S. Consulate in Karachi and the U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti; explode seven airplanes flying across the Atlantic from London to cities in North America; and fly hijacked airplanes into Heathrow Airport, London’s financial district, and the Library Tower in Los Angeles. There’s no clear evidence, though, that the marginal vale of the intelligence received from these terrorists was worth the cost to the taxpayer, the threat to the homeland, and the incredible risk to or men and women in uniform that their capture entailed.

Today, the Obama administration is not simply killing men like these alive; it is still attempting to capture them. This may be satisfying, but it comes at a price. With every small bit of actionable intelligence a terrorist’s capture ma or ma not bring, we lose the chance to t vaporize a senior al Qaeda leader. Dead terrorists can’t carry out their plans to strike America.

The recent capture of Qasim al-Raymi, a senior military leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, is a case in point. After having been caught blind by this terrorist network’s near success in blowing up an airplane over Detroit, why not try to kill its senior leaders instead of capturing and interrogating them? Wouldn’t it make sense to exact justice on these men, rather than giving them the full protections of American prisoners of war in an unlikely attempt to get them to reveal whom they have trained, where they have been deployed, and what their plans are for the next attack? But the Obama administration is blinded b a misguided hope that one day, some interrogation of some mastermind somewhere will actually be an unmitigated success, rather than the mixed successes and blind alleys to which so man previous interrogation attempts have led.

Obama’s ‘intelligence gathering’ campaign is costing the United States vital chances to take out those that would destroy the homeland, and it has also exposed him to the charge of hypocrisy. The president has claimed the moral high ground in eliminating the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, saying that he rejects the “the false choice between our security and our ideals.” Yet when Obama fails to order a Predator or Reaper strike, perhaps because he is worried about collateral damage on relatives that ma or ma not be involved in terrorist activities, he is signing the death warrant for the women and children who might be killed b that terrorist and his fellow plotters during the extended and uncertain time period it would take to pt together an extraction force. Is this not a choice between security and ideals? And why is it a morally superior choice? Is it really more in keeping with American ideals to take more time, spend more money, and pt more American lives at risk to capture a terrorist alive, and try to get intelligence from him than to kill that terrorist and the possibly innocent people around him, in order to save many other innocent lives as well?

It is true that Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush also reportedly maintained and exercised the CIA’s capability to capture and interrogate such leaders. But the Bush administration also increased the use of drone strikes against senior terrorist leaders toward the end of his term. Obama has now dramatically increased attempts to capture terrorists while eliminating what is arguably the most important and successful program to take down terrorist leaders in the war on terror. This is not a sign of Obama’s seriousness. To the contrary, he is using the faces of captured terrorist leaders as cover for his dangerous decision to eliminate the CIA’s capability to take out or enemies before the can car rot their plots. That is nothing to praise.

When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was located in 2003, the United States did not send a Predator to kill him. It captured him alive, whereupon he began spouting out hundreds of details, some true, man false, about how al Qaeda ma more ma not operate, and about plots that ma or ma not be happening. Remember, at this point, Mohammed had been away from the actual al Qaeda decision makers for months, if not years, so all of his ‘facts,’ even those he believed to be true, might have been obsolete. The decision to question him might have saved lives, or it might simply have allowed a terrorist responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans to continue to draw breath for almost a decade after or military had located him. Now, with the prospect of a civilian trial for the mastermind of the worst terrorist attack in or history looming, The Obama administration is about to heap untold expense, obstruction, and risk of another attack on the very people Mohammed targeted on 9-11. The fact that Obama’s administration continues to attempt to take senior terrorist leaders into custody today means the president is voluntarily sacrificing the chance to protect the American people b killing a terrorist in order to try to glean some small piece of intelligence, however irrelevant, from or enemies — and that the U.S. homeland is at greater risk of a terrorist attack.