Britain had plenty of coal, but she had no oil.
Of the great powers, only the Americans had any. Just one of the many threads that make up this Gordian Knot.

The unvarnished history of the Middle East isn’t a comfortable subject for staunch defenders of capitalism–the secular history, this isn’t about a holy war, much as the powers-that-be wish we’d believe it so, this is about resource extraction by force, a slow secular war, that began when Sykes and Picot sat out WWI in a sidewalk cafe in Paris, and drew the lines on the map that became the Middle East we know and love today. (What a tortured, convoluted sentence…but I wouldn’t change a word.)

Focusing on the secular reality and not getting distracted by the shiny bauble of holy war leads away from existential terror of a tangible sinister organization like ISIS, with all the Bond-villain simplicity that implies, into a perhaps even scarier, for conservatives, world of complexity and shades of grey, of shared responsibility for the mess there, after a century of stretching the Middle East on the rack of mercantile geopolitics. You can’t stop knowledge of that history at the border; Farook heard about it from inside America. And the circulation of those ideas is pretty scary, even if you’re not an RWA.

Because how the hell do you fight an idea?

They’re just the opposite of “My Redneck Friend”.

They always have an answer, but they never have a plan.

It absolutely suggests wanting to hide some kind of criminal or illicit activity. It’s by-the-book the advice to be found in all those “jihadi cookbooks” and training materials to be found on the Internet. Malik and Farook appear to have been excellent online students.

It’s also what I would do if I were engaged in any sort of criminal activity. It’s not indicative specifically of the particular crime of terrorism. Just common sense we all learn reading crime and spy novels and watching TV.

Rob, you’re still trying to drag ISIS into it as the mastermind behind the slaughter in San Bernardino, because I guess that amps the adrenaline thrill to 11. But you’re trying too hard. All the facts turned up so far say they were a lone wolf couple, not Agents of ISIS(tm). There but for an acronym goes a Marvel Comics TV show. But this isn’t a comic book. There doesn’t have to be a conspiracy or a network of terrorists. Just a synapse firing somewhere to create an on-the-spot terrorist and a pop-up terrorist act.

The mastermind behind the massacre in San Bernardino was an idea circulating invisibly around the world.

How do you kill that idea, Rob?

It really can’t mean anything else other than they were having conversations and sharing information with people they didn’t want identified. Doing so right before the attack narrows any other explanation for these actions to zero

Pakistani authorities probe shooter Tashfeen Malik’s possible ties to militants

Punjab Pakistan 2013

Kathy Gannon of The Associated Press reported in September that militants from Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, were massing in the tribal areas to join the Taliban and train for an anticipated offensive into Afghanistan this year. In Punjab, mainstream religious parties and banned militant groups were openly recruiting hundreds of students for jihad, and groups of young men were being dispatched to Syria to wage jihad there. “They are the same jihadi groups; they are not 100 percent under control,” a former Pakistani legislator told me. “But still the military protects them.”

If all you want to do is poke the bear, find another zoo.

Its quite a clever strategy- what could possibly go wrong?