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So there’s this item, let’s say a TracFone® prepaid wireless cellphone, for example. Now poor people living in the inner city can’t afford the regular wired telephone, so they use these prepaid phones.

The phones and the cards you have to buy for airtime minutes are available in the convenience stores that actually exist in the inner city, but the big stores, let’s say Wal-Mart, for example, sell a package that costs $50 in a convenience store for $38.

You’re an intelligent guy/girl and you have access to a car, unlike your neighbors, so you drive to the nearest Wal-Mart, which is nowhere near any inner city, to buy these packages to sell back in the city for $43.

If your name is Park Lee, you are a free market entrepreneur living the American dream.

If your name is Osama Abulhassan or Maruan Muhareb, you are a terrorist.

Amazing how that works.

Update: FBI: No terror threat to Michigan bridge. The three guys from Texas with the 1000 TracFones, bought them to re-sell them and had pictures of the bridge because it’s an amazing sight for people from Texas, according to the FBI.

Ron Suskind has a piece in the nest issue of Time, How to Stay One Step Ahead, in which he writes:

Here’s another lesson from London. Human intelligence routinely trumps fancy and often legally problematic surveillance techniques. The key to discovering the plot was apparently a citizen from Britain’s diverse Islamic community who, in the days after last summer’s bombings in London, overheard something troubling. He contacted authorities. An investigation took root. Imagine: a Muslim man sitting across from a British intelligence official at a cafe, off hours. They have little in common. Some would say they are natural opponents. But a thread of shared interest leads to the passing of information and, a year later, to saving grace.

The U.S. intelligence community is in a poor position to replicate that. Concerned citizens in the Muslim world who are close enough to radicals to see or hear something pertinent seem less inclined than ever to sit down with an American. “They see us right now as an angry, reckless giant supporting the bombing of kids in Lebanon,” says a top U.S. terrorism official. “If they were to see something troubling nowadays, they’d be more inclined than ever to simply look the other way. It’s their inaction-on a vast scale-that’ll kill us.”

It does no good to hoover up phone conversations: there is too much data. A single tip from a person can point to a “thread” that can be traced, and if “pulled gently” can unravel the entire plot.

Shock and Awe™ ^{The Shrubbery Inc.} didn’t work in Iraq or Lebanon, and can’t work in the GWOT™ ^{The Shrubbery Inc.}.

The people in charge are a bunch of sniveling cowards who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more dangerous than a cotton ball.

Pierre provides an erudite version in his post, When Terror Is the Foil, but John Rogers at the Kung Fu Monkey lays it out, down and dirty, in his post, “Wait, Aren’t You Scared?”.

They couldn’t rescue people in New Orleans until the “security situation was stabilized,” because military chopper pilots who dropped through hell to hit a hot LZ for a med evac would be too intimidated to chance the possibility of a gun shot!?! If they hadn’t blocked them, there were dozens of “good ol’ boys” from the bayous with their jon boats ready to help, and if you shot at them you better duck, because they would shoot back.

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I have actually used these explosives…as a child. We called them “Poppers” and they were little gray pebbles that “exploded” when you threw them on the sidewalk. That should give you some idea of how unstable TATP is.

The pertinacious penguin, Badtux, is annoyed with the idiotic screening process at airports: Beware the Shampoo of Mass Destruction!

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BBC reports that Hezbollah ‘will observe UN truce’. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said, “We will not be an obstacle to any decision taken by the Lebanese government.”

He also said that Hezbollah would continue fighting as long as Israeli soldiers remained in Lebanon and that includes the Shebaa Farms area, which means that he hasn’t actually changed his position. If Israel stops attacking Lebanon, he won’t send rockets into Israel, but he will still attack any Israelis in Lebanon.

Israel is about to change governments and there will be major changes in the IDF as a result of this invasion. Nasrallah has all of the cards, as the Likud and supporters will find out if and when they talk to the military. If they attack again they will probably finally meet the real Hezbollah army, which will come as a nasty shock, followed by finding out how effective the Kornet missile system is against helicopters.

One loss against Hezbollah is bad, but a second loss would be disastrous for the state of Israel. Hezbollah has slowed its rocket attacks to get ready for the attack it knows is coming after the next Israeli election. The Likud and their allies will want to recoup their pride and that will be a fatally stupid move.

CNN is reporting: Security Council passes resolution to end conflict in Lebanon. Israel won’t vote on the measure until Sunday because of the Sabbath.

No word yet on whether Hezbollah is willing to accept the deal.

Everything I’m hearing and reading indicates that not long after the fighting stops, Likud will force a no confidence vote and call for elections to replace Kadima and Olmert. There will probably be a major purge in the IDF staff.

The reason is that people are upset that the IDF couldn’t roll into Beirut in 48 hours, like the last invasion.

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At the beginning of a segment of Day to Day with Juan Williams titled: Lieberman’s Loss Sparks Iraq War Debate , Madeleine Brand noted that people were using the UK terrorist arrests for political purposes, and she specifically pointed to Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney.

I may be wrong, but the media might be beginning to understand the difference between reality and spin.

It didn’t occur to me, but the airline security regulations are going to cause chaos for the arts: Cabin baggage ban hits musicians.

The baggage holds are unheated and the baggage handlers are not known for delicacy. Insurance companies won’t cover instruments that are put in the hold. Most musicians buy a separate ticket for their instrument so that it has its own seat, so even if they buy a special case to protect the instrument, they are uninsured and the airlines are going to lose that second ticket.

Ships and trains may come back in vogue.

But only about import things: their jobs.

From Eric Alterman’s piece, The Punditocracy vs. History:

It’s 1972 all over again or so Cokie, Broder, Marty, Jacob, Bill, Bob, Joe, are telling us. The Democrats blew it by endorsing a left wing “elitist” antiwar candidate who hated Middle America back then, and now are getting read to do the same. Here’s the thing, being a pundit makes you stupid. All these pundits supported the war, natch, and understand at some subliminal level, that they too are being rejected by the voters who blame Lieberman for trusting Bush and getting us into this horrific war. They reach for the nearest historical analogy they can find to bolster their argument and settle on 1972. Thing is, they understand very little of history, most of them having stopped reading anything but one another in college.

Later he capture this: “White House spokesman Tony Snow put it more succinctly, ‘A white flag [in Iraq] in short means a white flag in the war on terror.'”

Actually, most of the “liberals” I know felt and feel that Iraq is a distraction from the real “war on terror”: the dismantling of al Qaeda and the capture of Osama bin Laden. The failure to capture bin Laden makes us look impotent in the Muslim world.

After five years of the Shrubbery our border’s a sieve; there are minimal cargo inspections; we can’t respond to disasters; the military is broken; and we are several trillion dollars further in debt. Why would any sane individual want to continue on this course?

In June it was the RCMP and CSIS in Canada and now it’s the Metropolitan Police Services and MI5 in the United Kingdom who are blocking “terrorist plots.”

Terrorism is a crime. When criminal investigations are conducted in accordance with existing procedures, the criminals are caught. There is no meaningful difference between al Qaeda and other “crime families.”

Every time I give people the benefit of the doubt and assume that they will catch up with reality when things calm down, I see something that makes me think it isn’t the “fog of war”, it’s the steaming mist hovering over another pile of bovine excrement.

The Israelis apparently decided to send the deputy chief of staff to the north because they were planning this: Israel approves deeper offensive.

So far the “moles” are winning in this obscene version of “whack-a-mole” that the IDF is playing along the Lebanese border. With all of their firepower they can’t really control the villages just over the border. At this point the villages are nothing more than piles of rubble, but the “moles” keep popping up and destroying armored vehicles.

If the Israelis push in with a huge force, the “moles” will stay underground, pop up when the army has passed to re-supply from the Israeli trucks, and strand the army against the Litani River.

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What’s with the Department of Homeland Security warning Windows users to install the latest patches?  They can’t do their own job so why are they issuing reminders for Bill Gates?

Badtux strikes again with Whine, whine, whine.

The Republicans are halving the budget for the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center. Because of “budget constraints” and the need to preserve Paris Hilton’s sense of entitlement they are cutting the budget from $14 million dollars last year to $7 million dollars this year to treat the returning casualties from the Shrubbery’s great adventures.

The perceptive penguin notes that ADM is getting $4 billion dollars worth of corn subsidies this year and wonders why no one thought to move $7 million from that fund to provide for people injured in service to the country. I would wonder why the “supermarket to the world” needs a government welfare check? Why don’t they get a job like the rest of us? Haven’t they heard of the free market?

I was listening to Fresh Air tonight and the first guest was intriguing. His voice reminded me a little of Truman Capote and he was talking about the Lebanon situation.

Augustus Richard Norton (Ph.D., University of Chicago)(Colonel, US Army retired) is a Professor in the Departments of International Relations and Anthropology at Boston University. He taught at West Point, served two tours in Vietnam, and was stationed in southern Lebanon. He also seems to be a “go to pundit” on Shi’ia issues.

He was interviewed by Harper’s and written an opinion piece, Time won’t help Israel disarm Hizbullah, for the Christian Science Monitor.

His bottom line could be summarized as: the US and Israel seem to be doing everything they can to help Iran and make Hizbullah the most popular party in the Islamic world.

On the military side he thinks Hizbullah is going to be able to finance itself in the future by running training seminars for insurgents on how to defeat a regular military force on a budget.