LilSugar

Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs

Roarman — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:42:41 -0800

Even as the American economy shows tentative signs of a rebound, the human toll of the recession continues to mount, with millions of Americans remaining out of work, out of savings and nearing the end of their unemployment benefits.

Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record-setting ranks of the long-term unemployed.

Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives - potentially for years to come.

Yet the social safety net is already showing severe strains. Roughly 2.7 million jobless people will lose their unemployment check before the end of April unless Congress approves the Obama administration’s proposal to extend the payments, according to the Labor Department.

Here in Southern California, Jean Eisen has been without work since she lost her job selling beauty salon equipment more than two years ago. In the several months she has endured with neither a paycheck nor an unemployment check, she has relied on local food banks for her groceries.

She has learned to live without the prescription medications she is supposed to take for high blood pressure and cholesterol. She has become effusively religious - an unexpected turn for this onetime standup comic with X-rated material - finding in Christianity her only form of health insurance.

“I pray for healing,” says Ms. Eisen, 57. “When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got to go with what you know.”

Warm, outgoing and prone to the positive, Ms. Eisen has worked much of her life. Now, she is one of 6.3 million Americans who have been unemployed for six months or longer, the largest number since the government began keeping track in 1948. That is more than double the toll in the next-worst period, in the early 1980s.

Men have suffered the largest numbers of job losses in this recession. But Ms. Eisen has the unfortunate distinction of being among a group - women from 45 to 64 years of age - whose long-term unemployment rate has grown rapidly.

In 1983, after a deep recession, women in that range made up only 7 percent of those who had been out of work for six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. Last year, they made up 14 percent.

Twice, Ms. Eisen exhausted her unemployment benefits before her check was restored by a federal extension. Last week, her check ran out again. She and her husband now settle their bills with only his $1,595 monthly disability check. The rent on their apartment is $1,380.

“We’re looking at the very real possibility of being homeless,” she said.

Every downturn pushes some people out of the middle class before the economy resumes expanding. Most recover. Many prosper. But some economists worry that this time could be different. An unusual constellation of forces - some embedded in the modern-day economy, others unique to this wrenching recession - might make it especially difficult for those out of work to find their way back to their middle-class lives.

Labor experts say the economy needs 100,000 new jobs a month just to absorb entrants to the labor force. With more than 15 million people officially jobless, even a vigorous recovery is likely to leave an enormous number out of work for years.

Some labor experts note that severe economic downturns are generally followed by powerful expansions, suggesting that aggressive hiring will soon resume. But doubts remain about whether such hiring can last long enough to absorb anywhere close to the millions of unemployed.

A New Scarcity of Jobs

Some labor experts say the basic functioning of the American economy has changed in ways that make jobs scarce - particularly for older, less-educated people like Ms. Eisen, who has only a high school diploma.

Large companies are increasingly owned by institutional investors who crave swift profits, a feat often achieved by cutting payroll. The declining influence of unions has made it easier for employers to shift work to part-time and temporary employees. Factory work and even white-collar jobs have moved in recent years to low-cost countries in Asia and Latin America. Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000 - the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks.

“American business is about maximizing shareholder value,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”

During periods of American economic expansion in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the number of private-sector jobs increased about 3.5 percent a year, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, a research firm. During expansions in the 1980s and ’90s, jobs grew just 2.4 percent annually. And during the last decade, job growth fell to 0.9 percent annually.

“The pace of job growth has been getting weaker in each expansion,” Mr. Achuthan said. “There is no indication that this pattern is about to change.”

Before 1990, it took an average of 21 months for the economy to regain the jobs shed during a recession, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the National Employment Law Project and the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research group in Washington.

After the recessions in 1990 and in 2001, 31 and 46 months passed before employment returned to its previous peaks. The economy was growing, but companies remained conservative in their hiring.

Some 34 million people were hired into new and existing private-sector jobs in 2000, at the tail end of an expansion, according to Labor Department data. A year later, in the midst of recession, hiring had fallen off to 31.6 million. And as late as 2003, with the economy again growing, hiring in the private sector continued to slip, to 29.8 million.

It was a jobless recovery: Business was picking up, but it simply did not translate into more work. This time, hiring may be especially subdued, labor economists say.

Traditionally, three sectors have led the way out of recession: automobiles, home building and banking. But auto companies have been shrinking because strapped households have less buying power. Home building is limited by fears about a glut of foreclosed properties. Banking is expanding, but this seems largely a function of government support that is being withdrawn.

At the same time, the continued bite of the financial crisis has crimped the flow of money to small businesses and new ventures, which tend to be major sources of new jobs.

All of which helps explain why Ms. Eisen - who has never before struggled to find work - feels a familiar pain each time she scans job listings on her computer: There are positions in health care, most requiring experience she lacks. Office jobs demand familiarity with software she has never used. Jobs at fast food restaurants are mostly secured by young people and immigrants.

If, as Mr. Sinai expects, the economy again expands without adding many jobs, millions of people like Ms. Eisen will be dependent on an unemployment insurance already being severely tested.

“The system was ill prepared for the reality of long-term unemployment,” said Maurice Emsellem, a policy director for the National Employment Law Project. “Now, you add a severe recession, and you have created a crisis of historic proportions.”

Fewer Protections

Some poverty experts say the broader social safety net is not up to cushioning the impact of the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Social services are less extensive than during the last period of double-digit unemployment, in the early 1980s.

On average, only two-thirds of unemployed people received state-provided unemployment checks last year, according to the Labor Department. The rest either exhausted their benefits, fell short of requirements or did not apply.

“You have very large sets of people who have no social protections,” said Randy Albelda, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. “They are landing in this netherworld.”

When Ms. Eisen and her husband, Jeff, applied for food stamps, they were turned away for having too much monthly income. The cutoff was $1,570 a month - $25 less than her husband’s disability check.

Reforms in the mid-1990s imposed time limits on cash assistance for poor single mothers, a change predicated on the assumption that women would trade welfare checks for paychecks.

Yet as jobs have become harder to get, so has welfare: as of 2006, 44 states cut off anyone with a household income totaling 75 percent of the poverty level - then limited to $1,383 a month for a family of three - according to an analysis by Ms. Albelda.

“We have a work-based safety net without any work,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “People with more education and skills will probably figure something out once the economy picks up. It’s the ones with less education and skills: that’s the new poor.”

Here in Orange County, the expanse of suburbia stretching south from Los Angeles, long-term unemployment reaches even those who once had six-figure salaries. A center of the national mortgage industry, the area prospered in the real estate boom and suffered with the bust.

Until she was laid off two years ago, Janine Booth, 41, brought home roughly $10,000 a month in commissions from her job selling electronics to retailers. A single mother of three, she has been living lately on $2,000 a month in child support and about $450 a week in unemployment insurance - a stream of checks that ran out last week.

For Ms. Booth, work has been a constant since her teenage years, when she cleaned houses under pressure from her mother to earn pocket money. Today, Ms. Booth pays her $1,500 monthly mortgage with help from her mother, who is herself living off savings after being laid off.

“I don’t want to take money from her,” Ms. Booth said. “I just want to find a job.”

Ms. Booth, with a résumé full of well-paid sales jobs, seems the sort of person who would have little difficulty getting work. Yet two years of looking have yielded little but anxiety.

She sends out dozens of résumés a week and rarely hears back. She responds to online ads, only to learn they are seeking operators for telephone sex lines or people willing to send mysterious packages from their homes.

She spends weekdays in a classroom in Anaheim, in a state-financed training program that is supposed to land her a job in medical administration. Even if she does find a job, she will be lucky if it pays $15 an hour.

“What is going to happen?” she asked plaintively. “I worry about my kids. I just don’t want them to think I’m a failure.”

On a recent weekend, she was running errands with her 18-year-old son when they stopped at an A.T.M. and he saw her checking account balance: $50.

“He says, ‘Is that all you have?’ ” she recalled. “ ‘Are we going to be O.K.?’ ”

Yes, she replied - and not only for his benefit.

“I have to keep telling myself it’s going to be O.K.,” she said. “Otherwise, I’d go into a deep depression.”

Last week, she made up fliers advertising her eagerness to clean houses - the same activity that provided her with spending money in high school, and now the only way she sees fit to provide for her kids. She plans to place the fliers on porches in some other neighborhood.

“I don’t want to clean my neighbors’ houses,” she said. “I know I’m going to come out of this. There’s no way I’m going to be homeless and poverty-stricken. But I am scared. I have a lot of sleepless nights.”

For the Eisens, poverty is already here. In the two years Ms. Eisen has been without work, they have exhausted their savings of about $24,000. Their credit card balances have grown to $15,000.

“I don’t know how we’re still indoors,” she said.

Her 1994 Dodge Caravan broke down in January, leaving her to ask for rides to an employment center.

She does not have the money to move to a cheaper apartment.

“You have to have money for first and last month’s rent, and to open utility accounts,” she said.

What she has is personality and presence - two traits that used to seem enough. She narrates her life in a stream of self-deprecating wisecracks, her punch lines tinged with desperation.

“See that,” she said, spotting a man dressed as the Statue of Liberty. Standing on a sidewalk, he waved at passing cars with a sign advertising a tax preparation business. “That will be me next week. Do you think this guy ever thought he’d be doing this?”

And yet, she would gladly do this. She would do nearly anything.

“There are no bad jobs now,” she says. “Any job is a good job.”

She has applied everywhere she can think of - at offices, at gas stations. Nothing.

“I’m being seen as a person who is no longer viable,” she said. “I’m chalking it up to my age and my weight. Blame it on your most prominent insecurity.”

Two Incomes, Then None

Ms. Eisen grew up poor, in Flatbush in Brooklyn. Her father was in maintenance. Her mother worked part time at a company that made window blinds.

She married Jeff when she was 19, and they soon moved to California, where he had grown up. He worked in sales for a chemical company. They rented an apartment in Buena Park, a growing spread of houses filling out former orange groves. She stayed home and took care of their daughter.

“I never asked him how much he earned,” Ms. Eisen said. “I was of the mentality that the husband took care of everything. But we never wanted.”

By the early 1980s, gas and rent strained their finances. So she took a job as a quality assurance clerk at a factory that made aircraft parts. It paid $13.50 an hour and had health insurance.

When the company moved to Mexico in the early 1990s, Ms. Eisen quickly found a job at a travel agency. When online booking killed that business, she got the job at the beauty salon equipment company. It paid $13.25 an hour, with an annual bonus - enough for presents under the Christmas tree.

But six years ago, her husband took a fall at work and then succumbed to various ailments - diabetes, liver disease, high blood pressure - leaving him confined to the couch. Not until 2008 did he secure his disability check.

And now they find themselves in this desert of joblessness, her paycheck replaced by a $702 unemployment check every other week. She received 14 weeks of benefits after she lost her job, and then a seven-week extension.

For most of October through December 2008, she received nothing, as she waited for another extension. The checks came again, then ran out in September 2009. They were restored by an extension right before Christmas.

Their daughter has back problems and is living on disability checks, making the church their ultimate safety net.

“I never thought I’d be in the position where I had to go to a food bank,” Ms. Eisen said. But there she is, standing in the parking lot of the Calvary Chapel church, chatting with a half-dozen women, all waiting to enter the Bread of Life Food Pantry.

When her name is called, she steps into a windowless alcove, where a smiling woman hands her three bags of groceries: carrots, potatoes, bread, cheese and a hunk of frozen meat.

“Haven’t we got a lot to be thankful for?” Ms. Eisen asks.

For one thing, no pinto beans.

“I’ve got 10 bags of pinto beans,” she says. “And I have no clue how to cook a pinto bean.”

Local job listings are just as mysterious. On a bulletin board at the county-financed ProPath Business and Career Services Center, many are written in jargon hinting of accounting or computers.

“Nothing I’m qualified for,” Ms. Eisen says. “When you can’t define what it is, that’s a pretty good indication.”

Her counselor has a couple of possibilities - a cashier at a supermarket and a night desk job at a motel.

“I’ll e-mail them,” Ms. Eisen promises. “I’ll tell them what a shining example of humanity I am.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/business/economy/21unemployed.html?sq=... New Poor&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all

Ron Paul Wins CPAC Presidential Straw Poll

hausfrau — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:03:02 -0800

Here's something from CPAC actually worth discussing...

(Feb. 20) -- U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, on Saturday won a straw poll for president on the final day of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.He got 31 percent of the vote. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who won the straw poll the past three years, was second with 22 percent and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin with 7 percent.The straw poll provides an early window into who conservative activists believe should be the next GOP nominee.The three-day meeting Saturday that has featured speeches by Republican leaders, training sessions for local political activists and a renewed purpose to stand firm behind their principles heading into the midterm elections.
In the first two days, speakers at CPAC played up voter frustrations and predicted a comeback for the GOP, a little more than a year after suffering political losses.U.S. Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana made no apologies for trying to stop President Obama's agenda in Congress, telling attendees that he proudly wears the "Party of No" label that Democrats have tried to pin on Republicans."Some folks like to call us the 'Party of No,'" Pence said during his speech Friday. "Well, I say 'No' is way underrated here in Washington, D.C. Sometimes 'No' is just what this town needs to hear."On Saturday, attendees will hear from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and a host of conservative luminaries. The conference will close with the results of a 2012 presidential straw poll and an address by conservative commentator Glenn Beck.Pence, a potential 2012 presidential candidate, used his address to the influential bloc of GOP base voters to promote his conservative credentials further and sharply criticize the president and the congressional Democratic majority.Pence, who is chairman of the House Republican Conference, predicted the GOP would reclaim a majority in the House of Representatives in November and the White House in 2012."Welcome to the conservative comeback and the beginning of the end of the Pelosi Congress," Pence said to applause.The congressman from Indiana is one of several Republicans said to be eyeing a White House bid who addressed the meeting.Romney spoke Thursday, the opening day of this annual meeting, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty preceded Pence on Friday morning. Paul spoke Friday afternoon, while Santorum and Gingrich are scheduled to appear on the closing day.Paul ignited the crowd with a scorching indictment of lawmakers in Washington, whom he accused of failing to address the nation's growing debt."Debt is the monster," Paul said, condemning federal borrowing to support government spending. "Debt is what will eat us up, and that's why our economy is on the brink."Particular attention was paid to not only what these potential presidential candidates said, but how their comments were received by the attendees.Unlike Romney, who delivered a polished, rousing speech to the conservative audience, Pawlenty opted to speak without a teleprompter and riff off his notes.Having drawn an early time slot for his speech, Pawlenty spoke to a relatively low-energy crowd in a ballroom with scores of empty seats."When we were here a year ago at CPAC, there were a lot of naysayers," Pawlenty said Friday."We had all these pundits and smart alecks saying the sun was setting on the conservative movement. ... We had people talking about how the new era of hope and change was sweeping aside our values and principles. Hope and change and teleprompter," he said.U.S. Rep. Steve King of Iowa followed Pawlenty and fired up the crowd by declaring that Obama has "lost his mojo.""He had more mojo than any president that I remember when he was inaugurated a year and a month ago. But now, the master-mesmerizer has lost his mojo," King said. "And if we stand our ground as constitutional conservatives, he's not going to get it back."U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota blasted Obama's economic policies Friday, and declared that the president is leading America into a state of "decline."During her speech, Bachmann also took aim at Democratic efforts at health care reform and cap-and-trade policies designed to combat global warming, saying such measures will keep the U.S. economy on "an unsustainable path."The CPAC conference follows a meeting of "Tea Party" activists that took place earlier in February in Nashville, Tennessee. Followers of the Tea Party movement express independence from the national Republican Party, but a CNN Opinion Research Corp. poll shows that these activists would vote overwhelmingly Republican in a two-party race for Congress.Tea Party Movement activists held a late afternoon reception for attendees that featured patriotic songs, hors d'oeuvres and an open bar.House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, spoke out Thursday about the conservative grassroots movement that emerged in the past year out of concerns about certain policy issues and gridlock in Washington."The Republican Party should not attempt to co-opt the tea parties," Boehner said. "I think that's the dumbest thing in the world. What we will do, as long as I'm the leader, is respect them, listen to them and walk amongst them. The other party will never, ever do that."Other opening-day speakers included former Vice President Dick Cheney, Sens. Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Jim DeMint of South Carolina, and Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio.Conservatives were in a different mind-set a year ago. At the 2009 conference, the Republican Party was still reeling from Obama's victory over Sen. John McCain as well as the additional gains Democrats made in Congress in 2008.But in the past 12 months, Republicans have seen the political tide turn: Obama's approval rating has dropped below 50 percent, several congressional Democrats have announced they will retire at the end of the year and Brown took the seat once occupied by Sen. Ted Kennedy, the liberal lion of Massachusetts for more than four decades.CNN's Mark Preston, Peter Hamby, Kristi Keck, Alexander Mooney and Rich Barbieri contributed to this report.

Christina Romer Testifies Before Joint Economic Cmte On Recovery Act

Rob's Details Interview

athena4rob — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 08:34:10 -0800

COFFEEIt's the unseasonably cold November of 2008 when I go to New York's Bowery Hotel. There's a young man sitting in the garden, wrapped in about nine black sweaters and wearing a wool hat, smoking cigarettes, sipping a latte the size of his head, and furiously making notes on a script in the bitter cold. I have read about teenage girls lighting themselves on fire in front of his hotel, but at the moment Robert Pattinson is warming his hands on a coffee cup.
Hello, I'm Jenny. I think I'm here so you can check me out."Okay. I'm Rob. Um . . . would you like some fries? With gravy?"
Allen Coulter, the director of Hollywoodland and a creative force behind The Sopranos, has sent me. He was thinking about doing this movie-it wasn't quite there yet, but I should "come meet Rob."
Rob. When he came to the United States, he slept on his agent's sofa and then got a small part in a movie called Harry Potter and the Something of Something, which grossed nearly $900 million worldwide. And then he made another one, called Twilight, which grossed $385 million in theaters and almost another $200 million in U.S. DVD sales. Box-office riches, like so much of the female population of this planet, follow him from continent to continent, nursing a raging crush.
Coulter suggested I do some rewrite work on Remember Me (for the record, there is only one credited writer, Will Fetters), the first American release in which Rob will portray a mortal, nonmagical, carbon-based life form of the earthly realm-Salvador Dalí, whom he played in Little Ashes, surely doesn't qualify. As Rob scribbles away on the script's pages, it's clear he is starting his own revision process.
Rob's face is constantly busy-especially his kaleidoscopic eyes, which are continually rolling and dilating, because he is always thinking. Over the course of that latte, he contemplates Jimi Hendrix, French fries, girls, art, beer, his cousin the philosopher, girls, truth, God, his dog, girls, and whether this week's stalker has followed him from L.A. I don't think he could turn his brain off if he wanted to.
Despite the legion of fans trailing him from hotel to hotel, laying siege to each like the Roman army, he is neither fearful nor cocky-he's hungry, curious, forever reaching intellectually. That may not sound like a big deal, but think of the context: Complete strangers want to f*ck you, shoot you, be you, buy you, sell you, run their fingers through your hair, watch you have sex, hear you pee, eat chips with you, and kidnap you and stuff you in the trunk of their car. And you? You must know more, more, more about exotic tropical diseases.
Rob and I discover we share a mutual fascination with afflictions that maim and disfigure and disgust: He brings up cancrum oris, in which bacteria eat away at your face until you get kind of a window in the side of your head and the entire world sees your teeth; I mention cyclic vomiting syndrome, a condition in which you puke literally all the goddamn time; he delights in lymphatic filariasis, where parasitic worms burrow into your lymph nodes and can make your balls swell to the size of watermelons, forcing you to tote them around in a wheelbarrow.
We come up with a blockbuster hit movie, entitled Candiru Infestation, about a tiny fish that swims up your urethra and into your urinary tract and lodges in your cock with backward-facing umbrella spikes it shoots from its spine.

"f*cking brilliant! It could be like Finding Nemo!" says Rob. "And the little candiru is lost in the balls! Think of the soundtrack!"

BEER NO. 1Fourteen months later we're in London. New Moon, the second movie in the Twilight saga, has set box-office records for largest midnight opening and biggest opening-day gross. Remember Me, Rob's young-man-in-crisis drama, has wrapped. He has 24 hours before he has to start rehearsals for Bel Ami, based on the Guy de Maupassant novel, in which he plays a bed-hopping social climber.
He is waiting to pick me up in the bar of my hotel. He has ordered himself a pint of beer and, remembering my beverage of choice, a Diet Coke for me. He has the lovely manners of the good son of a good mum.
He says he wants to take me to a particular restaurant nearby, "just a little out-of-the-way place." So out of the way, it turns out, that after wandering around nearly all of Covent Garden, we can't find it. He doesn't seem too surprised, really. Of late he's been getting lost a lot in his own hometown. But then it's been a couple of years since he's actually lived here, and London is confusing as hell anyway.
Considering alternatives, we peek into a crowded café full of the young and beautiful, but he recoils. A few minutes later, when we come to a tiny Mexican place, his hackles go up a bit. Hmm. I ask him whether, at this point, he's able to sniff out crazed fans lurking under the tables.
"Yes. Sure. But last time I was here, the guacamole was bad."
Rob has made no sartorial concessions to Britain's ugliest winter weather in 30 years. A button-down, light Carhartt-like jacket, no gloves. He does have a hat, perhaps the same one he wore in New York. I'm swaddled like the Michelin Man and I'm f*cking freezing. He's cheery, unfazed, giggling away. It occurs to me that London seems to afford him a freedom he doesn't have in New York or Los Angeles. And a London night with deserted, snow-piled streets, after an epic storm that paralyzed Heathrow and shut down the Eurostar trains, is like an unbridled romp while going commando.
Without trying, we arrive back where we started, in front of the Covent Garden Hotel. Across the street there's a high-end sex-toy-and-bondage shop called Coco de Mer. I mention that I popped in there earlier (before the National Gallery, thank you), and I tell him about this insane S&M body-harness contraption they have that allows you to dress up like a horse and have a long tail.
"That's so English. I want to do this entire interview wearing it, from an equine point of view," he says, stomping the sidewalk with make-believe hooves. "Seriously. As an experiment in public perceptions. Is the place still open?"
BEER NO. 2We're inside, at a warm corner of the hotel's Brasserie Max, and Rob is having another beer. We're talking about how he copes. "When I was 17 until, I don't know, 20, I had this massive, baseless confidence. This very clear idea of myself and how I would achieve success, which involved making decisions. I saw myself picking up the phone and saying 'Absolutely not' or 'Definitely yes.' Having control. Except you have to figure out whether the way you think at 19 or 20 has any value. And eventually I understood, with all that control, which was probably illusory, I wasn't progressing. So now I'm relinquishing a bit. I'll be a tiny bit naked. Except tonight I won't, because it's f*cking freezing and my balls will shrivel up."

He may keep his balls covered in winter, but Allen Coulter says that during the shooting of Remember Me, Rob did bare himself: "It was about control, for him, in the beginning. But he wanted forward motion more than he wanted to protect himself. Really brave-especially for a young guy with a big target on his back."
Rob does seem eager to shed some clothing, to give up the reins.
"Shall we go see about that harness? Seriously, you eventually realize you can't make every single decision. I was always building, always protecting something. At the same time, I seemed to be losing the ability to move. I'd protected myself into checkmate. Even mentally." In that moment, he has a realization: "I can barely remember the last two years. Not like a haze of partying or anything like that. Just . . . it's been crazy."
There's been surreal stuff. Like the time at a charity event in Cannes when two attendees bid nearly $60,000 combined to have Rob give their daughters a kiss on the cheek. There's been scary stuff, though the idea he might truly be at risk strikes him as absurd: "I find it really funny-if I got shot, I would literally be in hysterics. I would be like, 'Are you serious? Jesus Christ, get Zac Efron! He's got more social relevance than I do.'" He's pretty sure there was some good stuff, too. "There was this one time with some elephants on a golf course in Barcelona . . ."
He drifts into a reverie. He gets amazed easily, and at the moment he's fixated on the mysterious green bar snacks. They're sort of like wasabi peas, but not. They're covered in chili powder and look like tiny tumors. He's eating every single one.
"f*ck, these are good. What are they? I want to snort them-they'd clear up my sinuses."
BEER NO. 3Rob's hunger is more than merely metaphorical. He orders two entrees-the mini beef burgers with tomato-and-onion relish and the mini chicken burgers with mango chutney-along with another pint. "I eat so much, I'm like a compulsive eater. I've been eating room service, and I'm always really worried about it, so I choose like six things on the menu and eat them all."
He doesn't want to miss anything, which implies a hint of regret. He didn't always want to be an actor. He modeled. He's a talented guitarist and keyboard player who has toyed with following his older sister Lizzy into pop music. But he's a serious type, and his most serious aspirations involved political speech writing. "It's fascinating. You'd have two or three minutes to affect someone. Make them hear you. Get the message out and maybe it will echo. I quite enjoyed doing press for the first Twilight, because there was a similarity. But after a bit I was ladling it out. If you want people to listen to you, you'd better have something to say. I felt a responsibility to be fascinating. You're bargaining with the audience. Is this enough for them? And that affects the way you look at art."
Art. It's illogical to think he's not allowed to have ideas about it merely because he has helped a lot of people make a lot of money.
"Before, I felt like I couldn't break through anything, including myself. And now it feels a bit as though I've climbed along the side of my brain and am at least looking in. But I know it will take me at least another 10 years before I'm remotely satisfied with anything I do. But with acting you keep trying in the hopes you might be . . . great. But then I think, does wanting to be good or even great, or even just wanting to make art, cheapen the experience?"

I worry his head is going to explode. He answers questions with questions. Doors open onto more doors. This sometimes leads to trouble with scripts: Since he sees every character's point of view, he often needs some sort of distillation. The catch is that unless the distillation somehow encompasses every character's essence, it only causes his imagination to fire more wildly. It's the kaleidoscope-vision thing.
Some people can have the ocean in front of them and just put their big toe in. Rob wants to swim until he drowns, and he's going to try to drink it all up before he goes under. His striving is a source of worry because he can't really tell anybody he wants more: "Please don't make this about me complaining. Please. I'm the luckiest bastard on the planet." He worries he might be selfish. He worries maybe he's a nonhumanist-separatist-weirdo because his most profound moments have been with his dog. And he worries about whether he can be an actor who can reach the masses and still ask for anything.
"If it exists out there-this invisible-creative-spirit-idea thing-then you're the medium through which it travels so everybody can touch it. But . . . what gives you the right to be the medium? What gives you the right to claim it? And then get an agent and say I want $20 million and a fruit basket to be the medium, thank you very much.
"As an actor, you can elevate the human condition or cheapen it. I would assume it's the same with anything you do-you try to elevate and maybe someday you will." An actor may indeed have the ability to raise us, but Rob unconsciously starts speaking sotto voce each time he utters the word actor or any variation of it.
Rob, did you know that every time you say actor or acting you lower your voice to a whisper?He's genuinely startled. "I do?"Yes, so quietly it's like you're saying Negro.He laughs, lightens up. "What if we were 'acting' like 'Negroes'? Then we'd be f*cked-we couldn't hear anything. . . ."
BEER NO. 4Rob asks the waiter for another beer. He's talking about an uncle who worked in a steel mill in the Yorkshire town his dad grew up in. Rob's father and his other uncles moved away as soon as they were old enough, but the eldest brother stayed there his whole life.
"They're bulldozing houses, whole streets of houses. And my dad asked him, 'Why stay?' He said, 'Who's going to look after our mom?' And I was just thinking, Jesus f*cking Christ, there might be something wrong with my emotional sight, because I'm not sure if I could make that kind of sacrifice. The only emotional connection of relevance is with my dog. My relationship with my dog, it's ridiculous.
"I think you need to be able to break through what you think about yourself to try to make any sort of art. I used to play music all the time, and the most amazing part was the freedom that came with kicking myself in the ass, letting go, and surprising myself."
He tried to let go a little bit with the photo shoot accompanying this interview-it wasn't easy.
"I really hate vaginas. I'm allergic to vagina. But I can't say I had no idea, because it was a 12-hour shoot, so you kind of get the picture that these women are going to stay naked after, like, five or six hours. But I wasn't exactly prepared. I had no idea what to say to these girls. Thank God I was hungover."

Is your mom going to have something to say about it?"Oh, God." He puts his head in his hands, shrugs. "Well, she quite enjoyed when I got her cable." It's not that Rob's mother now spends all night watching Skinemax in her London home. "No, no! God, no! It's just that there's nakedness all over the place now. But this shoot, it's kind of eighties nakedness, you know? If you look at porn in, like, the eighties, there was something kind of quaint about it, quite sweet-like this little naked community. The people who made it liked it, they had respect for it. Not remotely like the porn that's available now. No community in it at all. It's just everything, everywhere."
CANDYIn the U.K., Smarties are made of chocolate and are kind of like M&M's in weird colors like mauve and teal but somehow more delicious. Rob's not really a dessert guy, yet he's rapidly hoovering my last packet of Smarties. "Amazing. I've eaten like 5,000 of these already. See what you have to deal with?"
In Remember Me he plays a guy whose issues are eerily like his own. Tyler is a young man who has retreated into himself, but then he meets a woman, becomes conflicted, and has to choose whether to remain in lockdown or step into life and the world.
"Tyler is so aware of his actions. But he has no idea whether they're of any value at all. Can you be a person if you live in the bubble? He's stuck in the middle. At the same time, he's lucky to have the choice. Conflict is innate in a lucky person."
What attracted you to the role?"I'm a lucky person. Thank God. And I'm conflicted. Thank God."
He tells me about a book he read called Eat the Rich, by P.J. O'Rourke (full disclosure: P.J. was married briefly to my sister, though Rob had no idea). He was drawn to a part that says something like: One man's wealth does not mean another man's poverty-and vice versa. Rob's slightly embarrassed to voice this idea.
He is unsure whether to feel guilty, to bask in it all, or both. Thing is, there aren't any rules for a life as extraordinary as his is right now. He tells me an elephant story. Not the one about Barcelona elephants-one about some he'd met recently in California.
"Did you know elephants purr? It's completely scary if you don't know what it is. They purr like cats, but their heads are so deep they sound like velociraptors. You feel it in the ground under your feet. So this big female started sniffing my foot-big female elephant, that is. She sniffed it so hard it came up off the pavement like her trunk was a vacuum cleaner. Then she took my entire body in her mouth. I was holding on to her head, and as I slowly let go she tightened her grip really carefully until I'm just upside down in her mouth and she's going through my pockets with her trunk, looking for peppermints. It was the best day of my life."
So you gave up control to an elephant, got groped, mugged, had your candy tugged at-and it was glorious? "Yeah. So beautiful you can't imagine. And the baby elephant was so excited that it sprinted out and did its routine in five seconds and then curtsied to everybody. It was actually laughing. Brilliant. Did you know they can also do imitations of other animals? A horse, a chicken, a monkey-these elephants could, anyway. They were movie elephants. One had written a screenplay, and one really wants to direct."

He laughs. He was in Los Angeles, in discussions to star with Sean Penn in Water for Elephants, an adaptation of Sara Gruen's novel. The elephants are actors like him, and he wonders if he might, on some cosmic level, be a bit like them.
"Do you know how they die? The elephant guy told me their molars get ground down from eating wood but regenerate like six times. And after that they slowly starve to death. Which is poignant, but that must also be what gives them time to get to the elephant graveyard. They're incredibly designed creatures. I mean, people hang on way too f*cking long. If I knew that when my teeth fell out, that was it . . . Wow. The best day of my life. Beautiful, beautiful day."
A few moments later, Rob announces he's going to get a cab home and excuses himself.
Can I walk you? I don't like you going out there all by yourself."I'll be okay."

Beijing -Famous Cities of the World

beijingtours — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:23:12 -0800

Beijing is well-known transportation hub in northern China with a well-developed transportation system. Since the inner city, there are different possibilities of transportation to choose from in order to Beijing by plane, train or bus. It is home to some of the finest architectural wonders of the world. Imperial residences, parks, like the Forbidden City and Summer Palace was never in awe visitors with their size and scope of military fortifications and the Great Wall and gates, the visitor of its modest size, the walled hutongs that are the most important people in the course of the centuries never denied not refuse to take the visitor with what surprise lies around the corner. This is really an ideal place to visit all year round. Beijing is also a very cosmopolitan city with a large foreign community (all embassies and many large foreign companies and multinationals are located here). There is no shortage of cultural and recreational opportunities, from local punk bands in the international opera events. It is also considering regional prevention and control mechanism for cleaning the air at the Olympics. This includes the exchange of information and feedback systems, such as monitoring of radiation and discharge data reports, monitoring of air quality report shows that air quality alerts, and air pollution control and reduction of conferences in various cities and provinces. Beijing is also famous for its street snacks and meals such as lamb shish kebab (Yang chuanr ROU), at every corner, where vendors set up shop bought. He is also the most developed educational base of China. There are also many different museums and libraries, residents and tourists provide a wonderful opportunity to enjoy its history and culture. It is clearly a model for China's development and is a city that dramatic changes in the last 20 years has gone through, as an example to emulate for the rest of China. These changes are continuing to this day and offer a wide range of opportunities for foreign investment. Beijing is far from achieving the limited ability of the United States in the Middle East challenge, even in their performance. In addition, he drew Chinese astronauts landing on the moon will stop in 2015. All these add up to no-holds limits of power projection, which is rare in the 5000-year history of China. It is the capital of the Republic of China and its political, cultural, national and international clearing. This is one of the largest known historic and cultural cities and the capital of China, 15 Century. Beijing is one of the places of birth of Chinese civilization and one of the six ancient capitals of China. In the past 3000 years, he served as the capital of several dynasties. This is recognized as the political, educational and cultural center of China, while Shanghai and Hong Kong predominate in economic fields. This is a modern city with tall buildings, shopping centers and major international hotels, through a complex freeway system crisscrossing connected through the city. This is an amazing city of contrasts - ancient capital with incredible historical sites and many bustling, modern metropolis, which was held the Olympic Games in 2008. After arriving in Beijing, our guide and take you to your hotel. This is a cool city. Upon arrival at the new airport, one of the first things you notice is the architecture ... A new airport is the largest airport building in the world and absolutely stunning. It is relatively dry from July to September rainy season, a larger share of rain, but spring rather windy. In the summer you can have up to 35 degrees, and winter can go as low -10. It is a place for walking. There are millions of bicycles and large sidewalks in downtown Beijing and pedestrian traffic remains the main mode of transport. This is one of the few cities in the world, it is very difficult to grasp at once. To enjoy the full understanding, feeling and respect for the city of Beijing, one can use a Beijing theme tours. This is the direct responsibility of central government, and it is in 10 districts and 8 counties. It has a temperate continental climate. Beijing full historical heritage. Have a good time.
If you have time to visit Beijing,The following hotels you maybe first to choose to stay
Lusongyuan Hotel Beijing Dongfang Hotel Beijing Airport Garden Hotel Beijing Dong Jiao Min Xiang Hotel Beijing Fujian Hotel Beijing Central garden Hotel Beijing Yuexiu Hotel Beijing Chong Wen Men Hotel Beijing Fuhao Hotel Beijing Presidential plaza Hotel Beijing Oriental garden Hotel Beijing City Hotel Beijing Guangzhou hotel Beijing

Profiling: Sketching the Face of Jihadism

Grandpa — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:09:15 -0800

Profiling: Sketching the Face of Jihadism

By Scott Stewart

On Jan. 4, 2010, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) adopted new rules that would increase the screening of citizens from 14 countries who want to fly to the United States as well as travelers of all nationalities who are flying to the United States from one of the 14 countries. These countries are: Afghanistan, Algeria, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Four of the countries - Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria - are on the U.S. government’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. The other 10 have been labeled “countries of interest” by the TSA and appear to have been added in response to jihadist attacks in recent years. Nigeria was almost certainly added to the list only as a result of the Christmas Day bombing attempt aboard a Detroit-bound U.S. airliner by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian man.

As reflected by the large number of chain e-mails that swirl around after every attack or attempted attack against the United States, the type of profiling program the TSA has instituted will be very popular in certain quarters. Conventional wisdom holds that such programs will be effective in protecting the flying public from terrorist attacks because profiling is easy to do. However, when one steps back and carefully examines the historical face of the jihadist threat, it becomes readily apparent that it is very difficult to create a one-size-fits-all profile of a jihadist operative. When focusing on a resourceful and adaptive adversary, the use of such profiles sets a security system up for failure by causing security personnel and the general public to focus on a threat that is defined too narrowly.

Sketching the face of jihadism is simply not as easy as it might seem.

The Historical Face of Terror

One popular chain e-mail that seemingly circulates after every attack or attempted attack notes that the attack was not conducted by Richard Simmons or the Tooth Fairy but by “Muslim male extremists between the ages of 17 and 40.” And when we set aside the Chechen “Black Widows”, the occasional female suicide bomber and people like Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph, many terrorist attacks are indeed planned and orchestrated by male Muslim extremists between the ages of 17 and 40. The problem comes when you try to define what a male Muslim extremist between the ages of 17 and 40 looks like.

When we look back at the early jihadist attacks against the United States, we see that many perpetrators matched the stereotypical Muslim profile. In the killing of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing and the thwarted 1993 New York Landmarks Plot, we saw a large contingent of Egyptians, including Omar Abdul-Rahman (aka “the Blind Sheikh”), ElSayyid Nosair, Ibrahim Elgabrowny, Mahmud Abouhalima and several others. In fact, Egyptians played a significant role in the development of the jihadist ideology and have long constituted a very substantial portion of the international jihadist movement - and even of the core al Qaeda cadre. Because of this, it is quite surprising that Egypt does not appear on the TSA’s profile list.

Indeed, in addition to the Egyptians, in the early jihadist plots against the United States we also saw operatives who were Palestinian, Pakistani, Sudanese and Iraqi. However - and this is significant - in the New York Landmarks Plot we also saw a Puerto Rican convert to Islam named Victor Alvarez and an African-American Muslim named Clement Rodney Hampton-el. Alvarez and Hampton-el clearly did not fit the typical profile.

The Kuwait-born Pakistani citizen who was the bombmaker in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing is a man named Abdul Basit (widely known by his alias, Ramzi Yousef). After leaving the United States, Basit resettled in Manila and attempted to orchestrate an attack against U.S. airliners in Asia called Operation Bojinka. After an apartment fire in Manila caused Basit to flee the city, he moved to Islamabad, where he attempted to recruit new jihadist operatives to carry out the Bojinka plot. One of the men he recruited was a South African Muslim named Istaique Parker. After a few dry-run operations, Parker got cold feet, decided he did not want to embrace martyrdom and helped the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service special agents assigned to the U.S. Embassy orchestrate Basit’s arrest. A South African named Parker does not fit the typical terrorist profile.

The following individuals, among many others, were involved in jihadist activity but did not fit what most people would consider the typical jihadist profile:

* Richard Reid, the British citizen known as the “shoe bomber.”
* Jose Padilla, the American citizen known as the “dirty bomber.”
* Adam Gadahn, an al Qaeda spokesman who was born Adam Pearlman in California.
* John Walker Lindh, the so-called “American Taliban.”
* Jack Roche, the Australian known as “Jihad Jack.”
* The Duka brothers, ethnic Albanians involved in the Fort Dix plot.
* Daniel Boyd and his sons, American citizens plotting grassroots attacks inside the United States.
* Germaine Maurice Lindsay, the Jamaican-born suicide bomber involved in the July 7, 2005, London attacks.
* Nick Reilly, the British citizen who attempted to bomb a restaurant in Exeter in May 2008.
* David Headley, the U.S. citizen who helped plan the Mumbai attacks.

As reflected by the list above, jihadists come from many ethnicities and nationalities, and they can range from Americans named Daniel, Victor and John to a Macedonian nicknamed “Elvis,” a Tanzanian called “Foopie” (who smuggled explosives by bicycle) and an Indonesian named Zulkarnaen. There simply is not one ethnic or national profile that can be used to describe them all.

An Adaptive Opponent

One of the big reasons we’ve witnessed men with names like Richard and Jose used in jihadist plots is because jihadist planners are adaptive and innovative. They will adjust the operatives they select for a mission in order to circumvent new security measures. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when security forces began to focus additional scrutiny on people with Muslim names, they dispatched Richard Reid on his shoe-bomb mission. And it worked - Reid was able to get his device by security and onto the plane. If he hadn’t fumbled the execution of the attack, it would have destroyed the aircraft. Moreover, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wanted to get an operative into the United States to conduct attacks following 9/11, he selected U.S. citizen Jose Padilla. Padilla successfully entered the country, and it was only Mohammed’s arrest and interrogation that alerted authorities to Padilla’s mission.

But their operational flexibility in fact predates the 9/11 attack. For example, some of the operatives initially selected for the 9/11 mission were Yemenis and could not obtain visas to the United States. Since Saudis were able to obtain visas much easier, al Qaeda simply shifted gears and decided to use Saudis instead of Yemenis.

Pakistan-based militant groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and Harkat-ul-Jihad e-Islami likewise sought to fool the Danish and Indian security services when they dispatched an American citizen named David Headley from Chicago to conduct pre-operational surveillance in Mumbai and Denmark. Headley, who was named Daood Gilani at his birth, legally changed his name to David Coleman Headley, anglicizing his first name and taking his mother’s maiden name. The name change and his American accent were apparently enough to throw intelligence agencies off his trail - in spite of his very aggressive surveillance activity.

Most recently, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) showed its cunning when it dispatched a Nigerian, Abdulmutallab, in the Christmas Day attack. Although STRATFOR was among the first to see the threat AQAP’s innovative devices posed to aviation security, there is no way we could have forecast that the group would conduct an attack originating out of Nigeria using a Nigerian citizen. A Saudi or Yemeni, certainly; a Somali or American citizen, maybe - but a Nigerian? AQAP’s use of such an operative was a total paradigm shift. (Perhaps this paradigm shift explains in part why U.S. officials chose not to act more aggressively on intelligence they had obtained on Abdulmutallab that could have prevented the attack.) The only reason Nigeria is on the list of 14 countries now is because of the Christmas Day incident, and there is no reason that jihadists couldn’t use a Muslim from Togo, Ghana, or Trinidad and Tobago instead of a Nigerian in their next attack.

Jihadist planners have now heard about the list of 14 countries and, demonstrating their adaptability, will undoubtedly try to use operatives who are not from one of those countries and choose flights that originate from other places as well. They may even follow the lead of Chechen militants and the Islamic State of Iraq by employing female suicide bombers. They will also likely instruct operatives to “lose” their passports so that they can obtain new documents that contain no traces of travel to one of the 14 countries on the list. Jihadists have frequently used this tactic to hide operatives’ travel to training camps in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Moreover, jihadist groups have no lack of operatives from countries that are not on that list. Jihadists from all over the world have traveled to jihadist training camps, and in addition to the large number of Egyptian, Moroccan and Tunisian jihadists (countries not on the list), there are also Filipinos, Indonesians, Malaysians and, of course, Americans and Europeans. Frankly, there have been far more jihadist plots that have originated in the United Kingdom than there have been plots involving Nigerians, and yet Nigeria is on the list and the United Kingdom is not. Because of this, a British citizen (or an American, for that matter) who has been fighting with al Shabaab in Somalia could board a flight in Nairobi or Cairo and receive less scrutiny than an innocent Nigerian flying from the same airport.

In an environment where the potential threat is hard to identify, it is doubly important to profile individuals based on their behavior rather than their ethnicity or nationality - what we refer to as focusing on the “how” rather than the “who”. Instead of relying on pat profiles, security personnel should be encouraged to exercise their intelligence, intuition and common sense. A U.S. citizen named Robert who shows up at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi or Amman claiming to have lost his passport may be far more dangerous than some random Pakistani or Yemeni citizen, even though the American does not fit the profile requiring extra security checks.

The difficulty of creating a reliable and accurate physical profile of a jihadist, and the adaptability and ingenuity of the jihadist planners, means that any attempt at profiling is doomed to fail. In fact, profiling can prove counterproductive to good security by blinding people to real threats. They will dismiss potential malefactors who do not fit the specific profile they have been provided.

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100120_profiling_sketching_face_jihadis...

Army Doctors Could Face Discipline In Fort Hood Case

Roarman — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 07:38:38 -0800

The Army has told some of the psychiatrists who supervised Fort Hood shooting suspect Nidal Hasan that it's investigating them - and they could face punishments from letters of reprimand to court martial.

The Army said it's going to decide if the doctors at Walter Reed "failed to take appropriate action" against Hasan and were "derelict" in their duties.

Evidence shows a lot of doctors were worried about Hasan - some for years. Evidence also shows that only one supervisor, Scott Moran, actively tried to kick Hasan out of the psychiatry program. Now sources involved in the investigation say Moran is one of the officers who's in big trouble. Moran wouldn't comment, but the sources say the supervisors under investigation are fairly low level officers like Moran, who is a major.

"They're attacking the wrong target," says Gary Myers, a lawyer who's representing Col. Charles Engel, another psychiatrist whom Myers says is under investigation.

Engel was Hasan's main supervisor in the fellowship program at the military's medical school, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Myers says the Army is trying to find scapegoats and that everybody knows officials in the nation's intelligence agencies bear at least some responsibility for what happened at Fort Hood.

"The notion that it is attributable to lower-level physicians who were also mentors strikes me as being a bullet fired high and to the right," he says.

Spokesmen for the Army wouldn't confirm or deny that they've notified any officers that they're under investigation.

Failure To Act?

After Moran took over the psychiatric residents program in March 2007, he reviewed Hasan's record and told colleagues they should get rid of him. Moran wrote a memo to the powerful credentials committee, denouncing Hasan for a "pattern of poor judgment and a lack of professionalism." But sources and documents confirm that higher-ups told Moran to back off; they said going after Hasan might cause legal hassles.

The notion that it is attributable to lower-level physicians who were also mentors strikes me as being a bullet fired high and to the right.

- Gary Myers, lawyer
Hasan then went to a fellowship at the military's medical university. Documents show supervisors there got upset, too. Some supervisors were concerned that he seemed to have extremist Islamic beliefs. Hasan seemed obsessed with the Muslim-American soldier who killed fellow troops in Kuwait. Some supervisors even wondered to colleagues: Could Nidal Hasan be psychotic?

Sources say the Army is investigating Engel because he knew about these concerns, yet he allegedly didn't take enough action. The sources say the Army is also investigating a psychiatrist named Col. John Bradley, who runs the psychiatry department at Walter Reed until a few days ago. Colleagues say both men failed to act at least partly because they were running training programs and saw themselves as teachers who felt they were supposed to help people like Hasan try to improve. When they got on his back, the sources say, Hasan occasionally did better work.

The investigation of Moran is more puzzling since documents suggest he's the only one who actively tried to go after Hasan. Documents show Moran did sign paperwork later that recommended Hasan for promotion, but that was after higher-ranking officersrebuffed him. So far, there's no sign that the Army is investigating them.

Moran, Bradley and Engel did not respond to requests for comment. Sources say the Army has notified several other mid-level officers that they're being investigated, too, but the Army wouldn't confirm those details either.

Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122778372

Our frenzied response to terrorism only feeds it

stephley — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:13:45 -0800

In responding to the attempted bombing of an airliner on Christmas Day, Sen. Dianne Feinstein voiced the feelings of many when she said that to prevent such situations, "I'd rather…overreact than underreact." This now appears to be the consensus view in Washington, but it is quite wrong. In fact, precisely the opposite is true. The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction. Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn't work. Alas, this one worked very well.

The attempted bombing says more about Al Qaeda's weakened state than its strength. In the eight years before 9/11, Al Qaeda was able to launch large-scale terrorist attacks on several continents. It targeted important symbols of American power-embassies in Africa; a naval destroyer, the USS Cole; and, of course, the World Trade Center. The operations were complex-a simultaneous bombing of two embassies in different countries-and involved dozens of people of different nationalities who trained around the world, moved significant sums of money around, and coordinated their efforts over months, sometimes years. And every attack succeeded.

On Christmas a Qaeda affiliate launched an operation using one person, with no special target, and a failed technique tried eight years ago by "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. The plot seems to have been an opportunity that the group seized rather than the result of a well-considered strategic plan. A Nigerian fanatic with (what appeared to be) a clean background volunteered for service; he was wired up with a makeshift explosive and put on a plane. His mission failed entirely, killing not a single person. The suicide bomber was not even able to commit suicide. But Al Qaeda succeeded in its real aim, which was to throw the American system into turmoil. That's why the terror group proudly boasted about the success of its mission.

Is there some sensible reaction between panic and passivity? Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and later a senior State Department official in the Bush administration, suggests that we should try to analyze failures in homeland security the way we do airplane catastrophes. When an airliner suffers an accident, major or minor, the National Transportation Safety Board convenes a group of nonpartisan experts who calmly and methodically examine what went wrong and then issue a set of recommendations to improve the situation. "We approach airline security with the understanding that it's a complex problem, that we have a pretty good system, but that there will be failures-caused by human beings, technology, or other factors. The point is to constantly fix what's broken and keep improving the design and execution," says Zelikow.

Imagine if that were the process after a lapse in homeland security. The public would know that any attack, successful or not, would trigger an automatic, serious process to analyze the problem and fix it. Politicians might find it harder to use every such event for political advantage. The people on the front lines of homeland security would not get demoralized as they watched politicians and the media bash them and grandstand with little knowledge.

Overreacting to terrorist attacks plays into Al Qaeda's hands. It also provokes responses that are likely to be large scale, expensive, ineffective, and perhaps even counterproductive. More screening for every passenger makes no sense. When searching for needles in haystacks, adding hay doesn't help. What's needed is a larger, more robust watch list that is instantly available to all relevant agencies in the government. Almost 2 million people travel on planes in the United States every day. We need to isolate the tiny percentage of suspicious characters and search them, not cause needless fear in everyone else.

As for the calls to treat the would-be Christmas bomber as an enemy combatant, torture him, and toss him into Guantánamo, God knows he deserves it. But keep in mind, the crucial intelligence we received was from the boy's father. If that father had believed that the United States was a rogue superpower that would torture and abuse his child without any sense of decency, would he have turned him in? To keep this country safe we need many more fathers and uncles and friends and colleagues to have enough trust in America that they too would turn in the terrorist next door.

Fareed Zakaria is editor of NEWSWEEK International and author of The Post-American World and The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/229996

Jessica Biel 'Kicking Butt' on Mt. Kilimanjaro Climb

kty — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:04:05 -0800

By Joanne Fowler
A star-studded group including Jessica Biel and Into the Wild star Emile Hirsch endured torrential rain Friday during the second day of climbing the 19,340–foot Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa's tallest peak, to raise awareness of the global water crisis. "But it cleared up and we hiked up," Elizabeth Gore of the United Nations Foundation tells PEOPLE by satellite phone. "The climb is really tough, but I'm proud to say no one has turned back." After seven hours of climbing, the group reached 13,600 feet and settled in for an evening of singing and dancing. Grammy-nominated musician Kenna and rappers Lupe Fiasco and Santigold joined 200 locals for a singing contest between two teams of climbers. "We had two groups singing and dancing back and forth," says Gore. "When you have these great African voices and the likes of Kenna and these other musicians, it was pretty awesome. It was really, really fun." After months of training, Biel seems to be handling the climb well. "She's kicking butt," says Gore. "She's doing just great. She and I are throwing jokes at each other back and forth every 10 steps. Then we'll switch back to talking issues. She is doing awesome. Awesome." To keep their energy up, the group of climbers – which also includes Alexandra Cousteau, granddaughter of ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, and Kick Kennedy, environmentalist and granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy – snacks on dried fruit and popcorn popped over an open fire. The group plans to reach the summit on Jan. 12. Next up is a trip to UNHCR refugee camp in Ethiopia for a first-hand look at the water crisis followed by a visit to the village where Ethiopian-born Kenna's family grew up and where his uncle died of a waterborne illness. To follow the expedition and see photos, videos and Tweets, visit www.summitonthesummit.com

Profiling Will Never Work

Roarman — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 12:16:42 -0800

Remember when conservatives believed in color blindness? Before 9/11, when affirmative action was a hot topic; they were positively weepy on the subject. Discrimination based on skin color is just plain wrong, they used to declare, no matter whom it benefits. Martin Luther King was invoked. It was a matter of high principle. Conservatives had a dream.

That was then. Now, when it comes to terrorism, color blindness is the problem. With Pavlovian predictability, right wing pundits greet terror scares with the chant: Profile the swarthy! Stop treating people of all races alike! Don’t let political correctness (once known as the high principle of color blindness) put us all at risk.

Religious profiling, in reality, is often racial profiling. And racial profiling is not only ugly, but counterproductive.
Actually, it’s a bit more subtle than that. Conservatives don’t call for racial profiling; they call for religious profiling. Strip-search the Muslims! After all, as my Daily Beast colleague Tunku Varadarajan recently put it, “incidents of terrorism by non-Muslims are trivial these days.”

Really? The biggest terrorist attack in U.S. history prior to 9/11-the 1996 Oklahoma City bombing-was carried out by a white ex-Marine with a crew cut. The only major WMD attack of the “war on terror” era-the 2001 anthrax mailings-was apparently the handiwork of a white, Christian microbiologist angry that prominent Catholic politicians were pro-choice. And who stormed the Holocaust Museum last year, killing a security guard? Ayman-al Zawahiri? No, neo-Nazi octogenarian nutcase James Wenneker von Brunn.

Not all terrorism is jihadist Muslim terrorism. And for that matter, not all mass murder is terrorism. When Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, it wasn’t terrorism, since he didn’t have a political motive. But the Homeland Security Department has to stop that kind of stuff from happening on airplanes nonetheless. And frisking people named Ahmed won’t do the trick.

So even religious profiling has its problems. But religious profiling is also a backdoor to racial profiling. The reason is that people don’t wear their religions on their foreheads, or even on their passports. Yes, you can give special scrutiny to travelers from certain overwhelmingly Muslim countries, something the U.S. has done in various forms since 9/11. But last time I checked, Britain, Canada, France and Germany-all of which have produced terrorists trying to reach U.S. soil in recent years-weren’t on the special scrutiny list. Nor was India, the country with the third-largest Muslim population in the world. Screening for nationality, in other words, is not the same as screening for religion.

So what are conservatives really demanding when they demand that airport officials profile Muslims? Whether they recognize it or not, what they’re demanding, in practice, is that screeners profile people who look like Muslims. The normally sensible Stuart Taylor put it bluntly. Screeners should look for “Islamic-world origin, as evidenced by speech patterns, facial characteristics [and] skin color.”

OK, go look for it. You’d likely miss Shoe bomber Richard Reid (British citizen of Afro-Caribbean descent), London subway bomber Germaine Lindsay (ditto), alleged dirty bomber Jose Padilla (Puerto Rican), Beltway snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo (African-American), Taliban fighters John Walker Lindh and David Hicks and Al Qaeda operative Adam Gadahn (white, white and white).

You’d also get some problematic false positives. In 2005, when the British Police went on a profiling spree after the London subway bombing, they ended up shooting a Brazilian electrician named Jean Charles de Menezes who they mistook for one of the bombers because, according to one officer, he had “Mongolian eyes.”

Religious profiling, in reality, is often racial profiling. And racial profiling is not only ugly, but counterproductive. The reasons are simple. Airport officials have finite resources. The more they concentrate those resources on a profiled subset of the population, the less scrutiny everyone else gets. And the less scrutiny everyone else gets, the greater al Qaeda’s incentive to recruit terrorists who fall into that less-scrutinized category. Profile people who “look Muslim” and they’ll sign up Jose Padilla or David Hicks. Profile men and they’ll hire women. (Women have already committed suicide attacks in Russia and Israel). Profile people who “dress Muslim” and they’ll dress up as Orthodox Jews. (It’s happened in Israel). It’s not that hard to move from Category A to Category B.

Profiling is also counterproductive because the best way to catch terrorists is by gathering intelligence about specific plots. And the people who are best-placed to give you that intelligence are the very people you’re likely to profile, and thus potentially alienate. Imagine if officials had singled out Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father for unfriendly attention on his way through some U.S. airport? Would he have been as likely to report his son to the CIA? Would the Yemeni-American outside of Buffalo who in 2002 sent the FBI the letter that led to the busting of the al Qaeda cell in Lackawanna have done so if he had been given the once over? After the profiling frenzy that followed the 2005 London subway attack, London police admitted that their efforts had had a “hugely negative impact” on their relationship with British Muslims, whose help they desperately needed.

There’s nothing wrong with paying more attention to people who have recently traveled to terrorist hotspots (something the feds have always done). But the harsh truth is that if you want more security at airports you have to get tougher on everybody. Longer, testier interrogations by better-trained personnel. Higher-tech screening equipment. More opening of bags. More intrusion. More schlep. And that’s exactly what the profiling-demanding conservatives hate. They’re sure they can have more security and more privacy, if only the feds would violate the privacy of others instead. At root, they simply don’t believe that people who look and pray like them could ever be terrorists. But they’re wrong. People who look and pray like them are terrorists. And we have to stop them, too.

Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-08/profiling-will...

23 year old finally gets adopted.

CaterpillarGirl — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 05:38:40 -0800

JUST A GOOD STORY!!!!!!

He had given up on ever having parents.Now, the man formerly known as John celebrates his one-year anniversary this month as Sampsen May Ferraro-Hauck, the son of Mark Hauck and Tim Ferraro of Minnesota. Some things just take time. He was not formally adopted until he was 23."To us, Sam was simply our son," Mark Hauck tells CNN. "It didn't matter that we didn't bring him home in a blanket."Back six years ago when he was still known as John, he wasn't really thinking about finding parents when he left California's foster-care system, after a hard and lonely childhood. He spent his early years abused and neglected, and authorities took him away from his mother -- who would scream his name at him frequently -- when he was 7. And one thing was for sure. The boy hated his name. "She was always using drugs, always yelling at me," he says. "When you have someone doing that, you grow very tired of your name very quickly," he tells ParentDish.New life, new name. His adoptive parents, Hauck and Ferraro, helped him pick his new, legal moniker."If they had been my parents from birth, they would have been able to choose my first name," the young man says. "I thought they should have that experience. They chose the name, but I wanted to choose the spelling, so we worked on it together."

Adult adoption in the United States is rare. According to government figures, there were fewer than 200 people between the ages of 18 and 20 adopted in 2008. But Ferraro-Hauck is among the small but significant number of older children and adults who are finding families. Michael Oher, the defensive tackle for the Baltimore Ravens who was adopted by Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy of Memphis when he was in high school, is a famous example. His story was the basis for the new movie, "The Blind Side."By the time he reached high school, John's odds of getting adopted were down to a national average of 7 percent, and his chances were even slimmer since he was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, depression and behavioral issues. When he was 21, he was living temporarily with his former high school nurse. That's when he met her next-door neighbors, Hauck and Ferraro. They invited him to dinner and chatted about politics and religion.A friendship evolved. Hauck and Ferraro loaned him money for doctor visits. They helped him with groceries and hired him for odd jobs around the house. They taught him how to write a resume and track his finances. They also found him a counselor to help with his depression. The two older men, partners of 20 years, long considered adoption. However, they never considered adopting a grown man. Likewise, Sampsen stopped thinking about having a forever family.While completing an adoption training program in the summer of 2008, Hauck and Ferraro listened to teens and young adults share their stories. The young people talked about how a permanent home gave them the support and confidence to succeed. Suddenly, they knew who they wanted for their son. "He needed us. He needed a family," Ferraro says.Hauck and Ferraro asked the young man to be their son on Sept. 12, 2008. It took him a few days to think it over and he ended up telling them he was tired of spending Christmas and birthdays alone. He realized, even as an adult, he still needs people close by to provide him advice -- and compassion."You never outgrow the need for a family," Ferraro says.

To help other young people without families, Hauck now works for Ampersand Families in Minnesota. The organization recruits and supports families for teenagers and young adults. Another Ampersand project is the Minnesota Heart Gallery -- an online collection of professional portraits of young people who need families. The efforts of Ampersand Families and other organizations are helped by the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008, which gives funding incentives to states that promote older adoptions. The act extends the foster-care payment cutoff age from 18 to 21 years of age.These days, Ferraro-Hauck is writing and recording music. One dad, Hauck, has experience in musical theater while the other, Ferraro, knows computers and the technical side of things. "That's been a big part of our family bonding," Ferraro says. Some of Sampsen's songs are available on iTunes."I need a love song to get me through," he sings in "Only Love," one of the songs he and his parents recorded. "No more people crying in the night. No more children left to face their fright."He may not be a little boy anymore. But he is someone's child
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http://www.parentdish.com/2009/12/30/23-year-old-gets-adopted-at-last/