By Richard Fernandez in PJ Media and the Belmont Club blog
What do you mean, dead?
A study by the Director of National Intelligence argues that Osama Bin
Laden is alive and well where it matters: in the
imaginations of his followers, living in virtual space.
“Imagine that jihadist
supporters create a detailed avatar of Usama bin Ladin and use his many voice
recordings to animate the avatar for up-close virtual reality experiences that
could be used to preach, convert, recruit, and propagate dogma to the media,”
the study states, using the spelling “Usama” widely used within the
intelligence community. The report noted that those conclusions did not
represent an endorsement by the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, which oversees the federal intelligence community.
“The Bin Ladin avatar could preach and issue new fatwas for
hundreds of years to come, as the fidelity of his likeness would be entirely
believable and animated in new ways to keep him current and fresh.”
To many people, the virtual is real. Take money for example. It is
for the most part only a database entry. Or take enrollees in Obamacare for
another. How do we know they are real? They are real because they can execute a
telephonic signature. You don’t have to put
your name on the dotted any more. Say and it’s good enough. As Enroll America explains, you can now send
a variety of government services to a voice on the phone.
A telephonic signature is a type of electronic signature that uses
an individual’s recorded verbal assent in place of an ink signature, and it is
considered legally enforceable in both the private and public sectors under
certain conditions. In addition to significant use of telephonic signatures in
the private sector, the federal government has been testing various ways to
implement telephonic signatures since the 2008 Farm Bill, which allowed state
agencies to accept “spoken signatures” for the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the Food Stamp Program).5 The goal of this
rule change was to develop a more efficient and cost-effective application
process for individuals and government agencies by allowing SNAP applicants to
avoid the lengthy and often unreliable mail exchange to submit ink signatures.
A review of various approaches to implementing telephonic signatures approved
by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) provides useful insight into the
kinds of technology that work best for consumers.
It is the modern equivalent of the “X” mark made by “illiterate,
incompetent, or disabled people”. The fact that Obamacare must rely upon such
methods in a 21st century America is indicator of something; probably of the
level of instruction of our modern and fine public schools.
Billions of dollars are sent to these voices. And maybe they vote
too. Why recently New York City’s Department of Investigations found
that non-existent voters were allowed to vote 97% of the time.
DOI undercover agents showed up at 63 polling places last fall and
pretended to be voters who should have been turned away by election officials;
the agents assumed the names of individuals who had died or moved out of town,
or who were sitting in jail. In 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, the
testers were allowed to vote. Those who did vote cast only a write-in vote for
a “John Test” so as to not affect the outcome of any contest. DOI published its
findings two weeks ago in a searing 70-page report accusing the city’s Board of
Elections of incompetence, waste, nepotism, and lax procedures.
I once got a Skype message from someone who was dead. It turned
out to be a relative cleaning out the computer of the deceased. But the
electoral system goes that one better. It receives votes from people who are
actually dead and the administration still assures us there is no problem with
the validity of the message.
Take another thing that is not a problem. Was the President’s War
Strategy ever real? Michael Crowley, writing in Time,
hearkens back to memory lane. It seemed real enough then.
On Sept. 12, 2007, Barack Obama gave one of the most important
speeches of his first presidential campaign. Then still an underdog challenger
to Hillary Clinton, Obama — speaking, perhaps impishly, in the town of Clinton,
Iowa — laid out his plan for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. The plan was
good politics, but Obama also carefully cast his position as responsible — not
a hasty, politically-motivated retreat that could jeopardize American security.
To that end, he assured that the U.S. would retain the capability to continue
striking against terrorists within Iraq even after our combat forces were
gone….
Six years later, even with al-Qaeda showing alarming strength in
Iraq — and across the border in Syria — nobody thinks Obama will “go back into
Iraq” anytime soon. As Secretary of State John Kerry put it Sunday: “This is a
fight that belongs to the Iraqis.”
“We are, in the worst-case scenario, months away from even
starting to think about direct U.S. action,” says Douglas Ollivant, a senior
fellow with the New America Foundation and former national security council
director for Iraq in the Bush and Obama White Houses.
Now it’s a distant dream. Don’t even bring it up. We’ve moved on,
remember?
Did it ever exist? Maybe, as Robert Gates explained in his new
memoir, President Obama’s war strategy was only virtually real. He apparently
never intended Afghanistan as a “war of necessity” to be won or Iraq as an
interest that was going to be defended against al-Qaeda. It was all for show,
as real as press release, as genuine as a three dollar bill.
“President Obama simply wanted to end the ‘bad’ war in Iraq and
limit the U.S. role in the ‘good’ war in Afghanistan,” Gates writes. “His fundamental
problem in Afghanistan was that his political and philosophical preferences for
winding down the U.S. role conflicted with his own pro-war public rhetoric
(especially during the 2008 campaign), the nearly unanimous recommendations of
his senior civilian and military advisers at the Departments of State and
Defense, and the realities on the ground.”
So he lied. Maybe the word is misspoke. Because we live in a world
without lies we necessarily live in a world without truth. Real must be
relative. Take insurance. Recently the Daily Mail described the experience of those who attempted
to claim treatment under their Obamacare in northern Virginia.
‘They had no idea if my insurance was active or not!’ a coughing
Maria Galvez told MailOnline outside the Inova Healthplex facility in the town
of Springfield.
She was leaving the building without getting a needed chest
x-ray.
‘The people in there told me that since I didn’t have an insurance
card, I would be billed for the whole cost of the x-ray,’ Galvez said, her
young daughter in tow. ‘It’s not fair – you know, I signed up last week like I
was supposed to.’
The x-ray’s cost, she was told, would likely be more than $500. …
It’s unlikely that a valid insurance card would have changed Galvez’ fortunes,
however.
Her Carefirst plan, identified on the Obamacare website as BlueChoice
Plus Bronze, carries a $5,500 per-person deductible for 2014 – an amount she
would have to pay out-of-pocket before her coverage would apply to medical
expenses.
Virtual things can appear and disappear. These patients are still
covered, except they’re not. CNN recently ran an article “Help! I can’t use my Obamacare
benefits”. It described the experience of Jeanne Patterson who always had
insurance in the past and now finds the number given for her to call is wrong;
her ID card doesn’t work and who after being treated at an emergency room
made an appointment with her doctor only to discover she couldn’t see him. She
had not designated him as a “primary care provider”. ”I can’t get a person
no matter what I do,” said Patterson, who is unemployed and lives with her
husband in Drexel Hill, Penn.
But she does have Affordable Health Care.
There’s no contradiction, Obamacare is as real as the
administration wants it to appear to be. Healthcare means a health card. As to
getting better, why bring that up? In such an atmosphere, how far behind can an
avatar be? Would a virtual Osama bin-Laden be real? The avatar would be as real
as its ability to order those who believed in it to kill. And it can do that.
Spirits have long spoken through the mouths of men. Why should they not speak
through a computer avatar?
By that standard, it will be real enough. At least to generations
of Jihadis to whom the avatar is as authentic as anything in their world ever
was.
The Left has always said that “you can’t kill an idea”. Or
as Tom Joad once put it, “Then I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be
ever’where—wherever you look.” That’s Osama’s promise too: to be
everywhere and be able to kill you. He might do just that.
But to promise everything and be nothing, well that’s the White
Houses’ shtick. And by that standard Osama bin Laden may prove to be more real
in the long run than Barack Hussein Obama.
Richard
Fernandez was an early joiner of PJ Media, and
he is a longstanding PJ Columnist.
Richard
has been a software developer for nearly 15 years. Before that, he worked in
forestry, assisted in the negotiations between Muslim rebels in the southern
Philippines and the Cabinet, organized tribespeople in the Philippines and
played a role in the anti-Marcos movement.
On
his PJM blog, titled Belmont Club, Richard
provides a discussion of history and history in the making:
I
write about current events and look back at their antecedents. This usually
focuses on politics, security affairs, science and technology, and some social
commentary. Ideologies of all kinds, including religion, are very often the
subject of commentary.
In
every post he publishes, Richard aims to start a discussion around a defined
set of issues that never have clear answers: “The ideal piece will create a
ground of agreement but also substantial room for debate, so that about 80
percent of the commenters agree on the premises and a significant percentage can
differ on the conclusions.”
When
he’s not engaging people in discussion about important issues, Richard likes to
take long walks, find shortcuts and explore little-used byways: “One day I hope
to do an extended tour focusing on the history of a landscape. That is a dream
that is very unlikely to come true. But come to think of it, most everything
that actually did come true in my life was even more improbable.”
Richard’s
blog is available at http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/.Take
a few minutes now to read his latest entry, and share it with your friends.
Poster's comment:
Mr. Fernandez also
has a Master's Degree from Harvard in the USA.
No comments:
Post a Comment