christ on a cracker.

Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot. Useful little article.

The JFK Airport plotters seem to have been egged on by an informant, a twice-convicted drug dealer. An FBI informant almost certainly pushed the Fort Dix plotters to do things they wouldn't have ordinarily done. The Miami gang's Sears Tower plot was suggested by an FBI undercover agent who infiltrated the group. And in 2003, it took an elaborate sting operation involving three countries to arrest an arms dealer for selling a surface-to-air missile to an ostensible Muslim extremist. Entrapment is a very real possibility in all of these cases.

...

Remember the "Lackawanna Six," those terrorists from upstate New York who pleaded guilty in 2003 to "providing support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization"? They entered their plea because they were threatened with being removed from the legal system altogether. We have no idea if they were actually guilty, or of what.


Who the fuck needs real terrorists, when we're so capable of manufacturing cheap American knockoffs all on our own?

And now, a meme. Tagged by murasaki_kaze, from whom I HAD suspect

Rules: Post the explanation of where your username came from. Then tag TEN users whose explanations you'd like to hear. If you are tagged post the explanation to your page.

"Lina Darkstar" was the name of an FF OC who was probably a Mary Sue, only I didn't know that term at the time. Which would make it a long time ago, internet-wise. Anyway, nobody fell in love with her brown eyes/blonde ponytail/foul mouth, and her weapon was that she punched things. She wasn't strong, though, just clever- she thumbed beasties in the eyes and snapped giant-insect wings and cast low-level thunder spells directly into monsterbrains and so forth. So I was fond enough of her to take her name when I hopped on my first RPG forum some five or six years ago... she was pretty new at that point, so let's say she's a six-year-old construct by now.

I dropped fanfic fairly soon, but by the time I was tired of that RPG forum I was rather used to being Lina. So I kept it when I strolled on into Icy's, and again when I hopped into Livejournal as an extension of that social circle.

A few weeks ago Livejournal deleted & purged a lot of old usernames, and I amused myself for a few minutes searching shorter variants of mine. I didn't expect 'lina', 'dark', or 'star' to be open, but I had brief hope for arkstar, which I use in chat ever since we gave each other One Piece names and I spur-of-the-moment dramatically revealed that I was actually Lina D. Arkstar.

And then arks was open, and I thought to myself, how many people can say they have a four-letter username that makes sense and sounds nice? So I splurged on a rename token, 'cause in the end I'd rather have that than even a paid account.


I tag!

angahith
arthayamana
deadshrimpblues
eva_kasumi
jan_the_verse
kahmelon
mongoosehuman
seris
spiderflower
themis56


Back to bed for me.

fgsfds

The lead character in the new Gundam series is Kurdish.