According to experts, young, middle-class American Muslims are most at risk — men who don't know a lot about their religion and in an effort to educate themselves fall victim to an extreme ideology.
Yet American Muslim groups say that formula amounts to racial profiling.
"Giving parameters as far as race, religious views or age groups really misses the point. We should be much more sophisticated in the way we approach threats against our country," Shora said.
U.S. lawmakers also are looking at ways of addressing the root causes of homegrown terrorism.
Notice the sucking vacuum from the quote which is the absence of a suggestion on how to deal with domestic terrorist recruiting. I seem to remember that the biggest threat of domestic terrorism used to be from white separatist groups. I don't recall anybody saying the FBI was racially profiling white losers. For that matter, I don't remember anyone crying on behalf of the white separatist nut-jobs' culture and religion. Where was the redneck version of CAIR?
So back to modern terrorism and the media. It's apparent the media, in general, have gone out of their way to appear non-judgmental toward the root cause of most terrorism, radical Islam. Notice, I wrote "most", acknowledging the small percentage of anti-technologists, abortion clinic bombers, militant IRA members, as well as soccer hooligans. The old guard terrorists never hired PR firms and used AP stringers to evoke sympathy through staged and doctored photographs. While claiming it's only a few radical Muslims who are terrorists, the entire Islamic community frequently circles the wagons around this supposed few.
Back in the day when our homegrown white-supremest terrorists ruled the roost, the media wasn't so kind. However it is hard to sympathize with backward-thinking, inbred, stone aged, misogynistic, cousin-marrying, Jew-hating, bomb-making, isolated-terrorist-camp-training, government-hating, theocratic, socially retarded imbeciles who want to force everybody else to conform to their twisted world view. And that goes for the white separatists too.
Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price is sticking to his comments that the term "black hole," which a colleague used, is racist.Price also says language such as "angel food cake" and "devil's food cake" are also racially insensitive.
Other racially insensitive terms I want in on the ground floor to objecting:
white out
red eye
greenhouse effect (definitely offended at that one)
little red wagon
white liberal guilt
brown bear
black bear
blond headed
redhead
brown rice
white rice
fried rice
head lice
old spice
green thumb
green tea
dog poop brown (the color of a car I drove in high school)
any color associated with crayons, curtains, carpets, tiles, grout, cars, paint, wallpaper, and sheets like "rogue red", "peaceful pink", and "yummy yellow"
Come to think of it, let's just ban English altogether.
The recent discovery that data thieves infiltrated Hannaford Bros' network and stole more than 4 million credit card numbers (see Data thieves steal credit card data from supermarket chain). According to articles related to this incident, Hannaford had some controls in place, like not associating names with account numbers. This incident is proof that basic controls are not enough.
Black hat hackers will continue to do the bidding of organized crime, regardless of the security in place. The future of personal information is bleak. At odds are the convenience of modern life and the ability of criminals to take advantage of it.
Think of all of the online services available. Many of the companies practice good security. Assuming that all involved parties are dedicated to security, as we know is not even realistic, the security is not future proof. Eventually, the best security practices will be deprecated. With the millions of servers, billions of transactions, and the march of time, your chances of being a victim of identity theft increase every day.
There are no answers. I have resisted many online services until I realized that I have no real control over my information anyway. Between the government and businesses being cavalier with my information. Unless I move into a cabin in Montana and live the rest of my life in seclusion, I'm no more able to protect my personal information than I can anyone else's. In ten years, will somebody be posting email, documents, or other files they found on a server they bought at an auction? If a company like Yahoo goes out of business, what happens to all of that information, including passwords and associated usernames?
Earlier this week, a most excellent opinion piece was published by the Christian Science Monitor on the constitutionality of nationalized health-care: Must You Buy Health Insurance.
In making the case for her plan to mandate private health insurance, Clinton said in a recent Democratic debate that not doing so "would be as though Franklin Roosevelt said, 'Let's make Social Security voluntary,' or if President [Lyndon] Johnson said, 'Let's make Medicare voluntary.'"
In fact, under the law, there's a big difference between participation in a government health program funded by taxes and privatizing such a program, with individuals forced to purchase private health insurance.
Taxation involves representation, as when Congress appropriates money and controls a government program for the general welfare. This describes Social Security and Medicare. But government cannot simply delegate its taxing powers to private business.
What representation do we have in the insurance firms whose products we would be required to buy, at prices and terms they set? Can we vote out an insurer's board of directors for denying claims or paying its CEO a multimillion-dollar salary? Here, too, the Supreme Court has drawn a distinction between taxes imposed by government and mandatory fees set by entities with private interests.
A health insurance mandate is essentially a forced contract, in which one party (the insurer) gets to set the terms. You must buy their policies, even if you prefer to self-insure, rely on alternative medicine, or obtain treatment outside the system. In constitutional terms, such mandates may constitute a violation of due process or a "taking of property."
The state Court of Criminal Appeals voted 4-1 in favor of Riccardo Gino Ferrante, who was arrested in 2006 for situating a camera underneath the girl's skirt at a Target store and taking photographs.
Ferrante, now 34, was charged under a "Peeping Tom" statute that requires the victim to be "in a place where there is a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy." Testimony indicated he followed the girl, knelt down behind her and placed the camera under her skirt.
In January 2007, Tulsa County District Judge Tom Gillert ordered Ferrante's felony charge dismissed. That was based upon a determination that "the person photographed was not in a place where she had a reasonable expectation of privacy," according to the appellate ruling issued last week.
The District Attorney's Office had appealed Gillert's ruling to the Court of Criminal Appeals.
"We agree with the district court's analysis," stated the opinion written by Appeals Judge Charles Johnson, with Judges Charles Chapel, David Lewis and Arlene Johnson concurring.
In a dissent, Appeals Judge Gary Lumpkin wrote that "what this decision does is state to women who desire to wear dresses that there is no expectation of privacy as to what they have covered with their dress."
"In other words, it is open season for peeping Toms in public places who want to look under a woman's dress," Lumpkin wrote.
He said he found the majority's finding of no reasonable expectation of privacy "interesting and disturbing."
Not only did the court say women who wear dresses are okay targets for perverts, they also said 16-year-old girls, minors, are fair game too. While the law may not have caught up with technology, as stated in the article, the spirit of existing law was shredded.
Pay attention in public places for men carrying shopping bags getting too close, especially if you are wearing a dress. Also look out in dressing rooms and bathrooms. The courts continually refuse to come down hard on these predators, using a lack of existing laws as an excuse so it's up to individuals to protect themselves. I wonder if you beat the crap out of a peeping tom with his own camera if you could get off since the laws don't specify anything about his camera. Just a thought.
