It has been revealed that Iran has provided to terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan a handy and inexpensive device called a SkyGrabber, and trained them in its use. SkyGrabber can download pictures from American drones, thereby allowing terrorists to track the drones as the drones fly around tracking them. In theory this will enable Commander Ahmed to see his house on his laptop and thereby know a drone has him in its sights. There has been much wringing of hands over this revelation, with cries for investigations and screams that the drones should not broadcast in the clear. This misses the point. If Ahmed decides to stay in his house, he dies in his house. If he jumps in his car and runs for it, he dies in his car. 

A drone’s a bee that has no sting

And gathers him no honey

Or parasite who knows one thing

Like spending others’ money

Now sound can be a kind of drone

Like buzzing or like humming

Or talking in a dull like moan

Or fixed incessant drumming

Another drone, like bees, can fly

Much higher though, and stealthy

They fly in loops around the sky

And if you’re seen? Not healthy

The terrorist’s a stingless drone

A parasite who’s humming

And just because he taps our phone

He won’t know when it’s coming

A Nigerian Muslim boarded a Northwest jet in Amsterdam with explosives in his underwear, evading the airport screeners, and managed to set the bomb off as the plane approached Detroit. The bomb fizzled, causing only a small fire, and a Dutch passenger jumped on the terrorist and held him till other passengers subdued him. When asked about the incident, Janet Napolitano, head of Homeland Security, smiled and said the system worked. Shortly thereafter it was revealed the FBI and CIA had known about the terrorist for years, his own father had warned the American Embassy in Nigeria about him, and the man was on an airport watch list, along with 500,000 other names. Despite all this comforting security the man was allowed to board an airplane with a bomb strapped to his crotch. To Janet Napolitano and the Department of Homeland Security, the fact that the bomb fizzled and the plane and all its passengers were not destroyed is proof that the security system worked.

Our Janet thinks a fizzled bomb

Is triumph for our side

She treats the thing with calm aplomb

Detractors are decried

Five hundred thousand on the list

And not a one is checked

She says so there’s one we have missed

That surely can’t affect

The way we handle terror threats

We do so with dispatch

We always try to hedge our bets

In looking for a match

If she’s the anti-terror czar

Then you would think she would

At least not let them in the car

That much be understood

She thinks that we are all so dumb

To think men mean us harm

And thinks the magic aura from

The O will be the charm

To turn this world to happy days

By making real amends

That steers them from their terror ways

And make them lasting friends

Complaints are coming in from the field that response times are too slow. A few weeks ago a high level Taliban commander was determined to be in a certain house drinking tea. Special Ops guys and Afghan commandos were ready to go, helicopters revved up, the capture of the Taliban commander a certainty. But the force never left. The American unit commander spent hours on the phone trying to get permission from eleven different officers, some of them not available, some of them not American but Nato. At dawn he shut down the helicopters and told everybody to get some sleep. He never did get permission to capture the Taliban commander, who finished his tea and vanished. Such are the rules of engagement in Afghanistan, where the thought of injuring a civilian while killing the Taliban gives shivers of horror to higher headquarters, who know full well the New York Times would full page front page a picture of an Afghan or Pakistani child injured by the heartless and brutal Americans, notwithstanding the Taliban hide behind little girls. It was thus from the first. We all remember how Mullah Omar raced down the road, escaping, unaware a Predator had him in its sights. But the order to fire was not forthcoming. There were civilian cars on the road, and someone might get hurt.     

Mullah Omar on the road

To Pak from Kandahar

A Predator with a full load

Caught sight of Omar’s car

Permission asked to fire, then

A longish strangled pause

As conference calls went out to men

To see if there was cause

To worry if collateral

Infliction might occur

And if there might the matter’ll

Be deemed to be no sir

So Mullah Omar got away

Not knowing just how near

He came to death that very day

From that Hellfire spear

And when he heard how he was spared

He closed his eyes and wept

So thankful that the Yankees cared

That civil norms be kept

He wept and bathed and went to bed

Alive and without sin

And thanked his God he wasn’t dead

And knew that he would win

Are nations and governments corrupt because they are poor, or are they poor because they are corrupt? Why are some nations ruled by law and others by the gun? Why do some people build skyscrapers and others thatch huts? Is there something in the DNA of different people that led them to establish different cultures, different ways of life, different ways of looking at the world? Why is there such a difference between the First world and the Third world? We’re all equal aren’t we? Aren’t we?

Archaeology, paleontology, each will have his say

But both insist that man came from one place

From Africa to Europe and from there along the way

To Asia and Pacific, filling space

That once was verdant plain or forest, ice or brutal heat

They tracked the game and gathered tree hung fruits

But by and by they found that plants gave more for them to eat

And so they built their huts and put down roots

Now if this story’s true then we are somehow all the same

Though clearly we have taken different paths

For some their lot was poverty with someone else to blame

While others built their temples and their baths

And with the baths came law and with the law came order too

And written constitutions and the like

And with consent of governed came society that’s new

Where wealth and freedom brought the golden spike

That ushered in a continent where free men could breathe free

And build a better world for kith and kin

While elsewhere people lived the life they lived back in BC

Who know not where they are or where they’ve been

Where clans and other big men rule the way the world is run

And all the words and deeds of first world men

Can’t change the fact that law for them is barrel of a gun

And nothing ever changes now or then

In 1938 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from the Munich conference waving a piece of paper, happily claiming, “Peace in our time!” Unfortunately, he didn’t get peace, he got Hitler. President Obama recently returned from the Copenhagen conference on Global Warming waving a piece of paper, declaring victory in the phony war on the global warming scam. Fortunately for us, all Obama got was a snowstorm and record cold temperatures, and not the destruction of the United States and western civilization he so ardently desires. 

The president will take a bow

For handling well this crisis

And bowing’s something he knows how

Among his other vices

The Copenhagen summit failed

To kill our jobs and nation

But even so Obama hailed

His triumphal oration

 That made the third world envoys mad

That money they expected

Was not forthcoming ‘cause the bad

Chinese had still rejected

The suicide Obama sought

To save the world from warming

Despite the fact the world’s now fraught

With icy cold and storming

Our so-called elite universities have deteriorated over the past thirty years from places of learning to places of Marxist indoctrination. The professoriate is composed almost entirely of former 60s radicals who never lost their love for Marx and Stalin or their hatred and disdain for the life and culture of the United States. And yet people still send their children to places like Harvard and Yale, believing that an Ivy education will see their kids into the economic promised land. The frightening thing is that these indoctrinated kids, upon graduation, go out into the world and into government and academia, corrupting succeeding generations in their turn.

It seems a long, long time, how sad

That JFK could say he had

The best of worlds with no exaggeration

He told the story with much glee

That now he had a Yale degree

And top of that a Harvard education

But this is now and that was then

And Ivies now, including Penn

Have drifted far below the radar screen

Too many lefties in the gown

Too many sneers at those in town

They’ve sunk so low that people now have seen

That what once passed for elite schools

Are now just crappy cess filled pools

Where tender young’uns have their brain pans fried

With marxist liberal mumbo cant

From profs who scream their red rimmed rant

Then graduate to stride the world with pride

Here it is again, the new year, full of promise as always. One hopes for the best, again as always, knowing one is doomed to disappointment. The coming year seems difficult enough, what with the Iranian nuclear bomb being ready sometime before the year is out, probably by summer, with Tel Aviv its target. Is 2010 the year the Middle East blows up? Will Iranian cities be reduced to cinders by an Israeli retaliatory strike? Will Israel wait for Tel Aviv to be incinerated or will they strike first? Will al Qaeda succeed in a major attack on a US target? Will the Democrats succeed in their quest to dismantle the finest health care system the world has ever seen? Will the Democrats succeed in destroying the economy of the United States with a punitive carbon cap and trade scheme? Maybe the baby boy in the top hat with the sash proclaiming it is now 2010 knows, but if he does, he isn’t saying.

That baby boy is here again

This time as baby 2010

He smiles as 09 slinks away

But knows he’ll look like that someday

He looks so fine on day the first

But knows full well the very worst

Will happen sometime down the road

But nonetheless does not forebode

We wish him well, this little chap

And hope the coming year mayhap

Will bring us all full peace and cheer

That lasts throughout the coming year