Terrorists Plots Foiled

How the FBI's Network of Informants Actually Created Most of the Terrorist Plots "Foiled" in the US Since 9/11


The FBI has built a massive network of spies to prevent another domestic attack. But are they busting terrorist plots—or leading them?

October 9, 2011
: On September 28, Rezwan Ferdaus, a 26-year-old graduate of Northeastern University, was arrested and charged with providing resources to a foreign terrorist organization and attempting to destroy national defense premises. Ferdaus, according to the FBI, planned to blow up both the Pentagon and Capitol Building with a "large remote controlled aircraft filled with C-4 plastic explosives."

The case was part of a nearly ten-month investigation led by the FBI. Not surprisingly, Ferdaus' case fits a pattern detailed by Trevor Aaronson in his article below: the FBI provided Ferdaus with the explosives and materials needed to pull off the plot. In this case, two undercover FBI employees, who Ferdaus believed were al Qaeda members, gave Ferdaus $7,500 to purchase an F-86 Sabre model airplane that Ferdaus hoped to fill with explosives. Right before his arrest, the FBI employees gave Ferdaus, who lived at home with his parents, the explosives he requested to pull off his attack. And just how did the FBI come to meet Ferdaus? An informant with a criminal record introduced Ferdaus to the supposed al Qaeda members.

To learn more about how the FBI uses informants to bust, and sometimes lead, terrorist plots, read Aaronson's article below.



James Cromitie [8] was a man of bluster and bigotry. He made up wild stories about his supposed exploits, like the one about firing gas bombs into police precincts using a flare gun, and he ranted about Jews. "The worst brother in the whole Islamic world is better than 10 billion Yahudi," he once said [9].

A 45-year-old Walmart stocker who'd adopted the name Abdul Rahman after converting to Islam during a prison stint for selling cocaine, Cromitie had lots of worries—convincing his wife he wasn't sleeping around, keeping up with the rent, finding a decent job despite his felony record. But he dreamed of making his mark. He confided as much in a middle-aged Pakistani he knew as Maqsood.
"I'm gonna run into something real big [10]," he'd say. "I just feel it, I'm telling you.feel it."




Maqsood and Cromitie had met at a mosque in Newburgh, a struggling former Air Force town about an hour north of New York City. They struck up a friendship, talking for hours about the world's problems and how the Jews were to blame.
It was all talk until November 2008, when Maqsood pressed his new friend.
"Do you think you are a better recruiter or a better action man?" Maqsood asked [11]."I'm both," Cromitie bragged.
"My people would be very happy to know that, brother. Honestly."
"Who's your people?" Cromitie asked.
"Jaish-e-Mohammad."
Maqsood said he was an agent for the Pakistani terror group, tasked with assembling a team to wage jihad in the United States. He asked Cromitie what he would attack if he had the means. A bridge, Cromitie said.
"But bridges are too hard to be hit," Maqsood pleaded, "because they're made of steel."
"Of course they're made of steel," Cromitie replied. "But the same way they can be put up, they can be brought down."
Maqsood coaxed Cromitie toward a more realistic plan. The Mumbai attacks were all over the news, and he pointed out how those gunmen targeted hotels, cafés, and a Jewish community center.
"With your intelligence, I know you can manipulate someone," Cromitie told his friend. "But not me, because I'm intelligent." The pair settled on a plot to bomb synagogues in the Bronx, and then fire Stinger missiles at airplanes taking off from Stewart International Airport in the southern Hudson Valley. Maqsood would provide all the explosives and weapons, even the vehicles. "We have two missiles, okay?" he offered [12]. "Two Stingers, rocket missiles."

Maqsood was an undercover operative; that much was true. But not for Jaish
  ... read more
http://www.alternet.org/story/152670/how_the_fbi%27s_network_of_informants_actually_created_most_of_the_terrorist_plots_%22foiled%22_in_the_us_since_9_11?akid=7702.35630.frnArS&rd=1&t=2

Secrets of being happy revealed

According to research:
Despite the fact that users of these disparate social media cannot agree on which day of the week makes them happy or glum, there are some commonalities: holidays and birthdays make people feel happy, and deaths of celebrities make them feel sad.
What can we advise the average person to do to be happier? Go out with your Facebook-using friends, but not every day, and stay away from honey badgers.
Read the whole story for yourself - you will find it very interesting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/opinion/sunday/are-bees-sad-on-wednesday.html

The science behind Women's Orgasm - ummmh!

Salon / By Tracy Clark-Flory - What's the Scientific Reason Women Have Orgasms?


A popular theory has been criticized as male-centric, but it might have unexpected feminist results.

October 6, 2011
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Start an Online Petition � Decades of research have failed to answer the question of why the female orgasm exists — and two recent conflicting studies on the subject have hardly changed that. Interestingly enough, though, both focus on a theory sure to anger some women: that their ability to climax is the mere byproduct of men’s orgasm, which has a clear evolutionary purpose. We may not have proof of this one way or another, but it’s worth exploring the potential cultural implications.



The most obvious explanation for the female big “O” is that it motivates women to have more sex, resulting in more babies (or, in wonkier terms, “reproductive success”). Another intuitive theory is that it serves to cement feelings of love and intimacy, thereby supporting parental investment. Then there’s the, um, evocatively named “sperm upsuck” theory — that uterine contractions during orgasm help draw in little swimmers. But many of these approaches have been empirically discredited and it’s the “byproduct” theory that has been held in increasing esteem by researchers.



The thinking behind the “male nipples” explanation, as I like to call it, is that women have the tissues and nerve pathways needed for orgasm simply because of their shared embryological origins with males, whose orgasms serve a clear evolutionary purpose. In other words, women have orgasms for the same reason men have nipples. On the face of it, the byproduct theory seems rather male-focused and maybe even anti-feminist. It falls right in step with the Freudian notion of women’s penis envy: Men have prominent, easily orgasmic members, while we ladies are stuck with our itty-bitty imitator, the clitoris.



But as Elisabeth Lloyd, a philosopher of biology, argued in her 2005 book “The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution,” “The real problem with this view is that it assumes that in order to be really important, female sexuality, and in particular female orgasm, must have been a direct target of natural selection among females. But there is no reason at all to think that only directly selected traits are ‘important.’” She points to examples of valued traits that aren’t directly selected: “refined musical ability, the ability to design rockets, and even the ability to read.”



On the other hand, it’s also possible that the byproduct view could actually support feminist efforts against the so-called medicalization of female pleasure. “If female orgasm is seen as having no particular evolutionary function, but rather as an evolutionary freebie, then many diagnoses of ‘Female Orgasmic Disorder’ would be out the window, and women anywhere on the spectrum of orgasmic performance might be seen as normal,” Lloyd writes in an upcoming article. She argues that this view, which she refers to as the “fantastic bonus” theory, has the benefit of casting “all women as equally ‘normal’ in their orgasmic responses to heterosexual intercourse. The account expects no particular ‘adaptive’ set of responses to intercourse, and thus privileges none.” Meaning, “women who don’t have orgasm at all are as normal as women who always have orgasm with intercourse.”



That just might throw a wrench into pharmaceutical companies’ machinations over the potential for a “female Viagra.” Speaking of, Leonore Tiefer created the New View Campaign to “challenge the distorted and oversimplified messages about sexuality that the pharmaceutical industry relies on.” She wrote me in an email that an orgasm is “a nice thing,” but “it doesn’t last very long, and it’s not the easiest thing to have, so I think it’s overrated.” Tiefer, a psychiatry professor at New York University, quoted journalist Malcolm Muggeridge: “The orgasm has replaced the cross as the focus of human longing and fulfillment.” That line, she says, “summarizes for me the symbolic importance of the orgasm in contemporary life.” As for the uncertainty surrounding it, she says: “It’s mysterious, I think, because its symbolic value is so high (it ‘proves’ to a partner and to oneself that one is sexual, satisfied, fully female) and yet the material essence is complicated.”



Carol Queen, a legendary staff sexologist at Good Vibrations, isn’t convinced that the female climax is an inherently enigmatic creature. “The idea that women’s orgasm is mysterious is simply cultural, and it has developed in a culture that actively refuses to give its youth good information about sexual functioning, especially arousal and pleasure, and which is loaded with subcultures and communities that actively encourage fear of sex, shame, body image issues, confusion about what sex ‘means,’ and other responses that distance people from sexual possibility and pleasure,” she says. “The idea that women have a difficult time having access to pleasure, or scientists can’t imagine why on earth that pleasure is valuable — that’s just another layer of icing on this icky cake.”



Ultimately, of course, the cultural outcome and feminist analysis of the byproduct theory say nothing of its actual scientific merits. As Lloyd says, “I am not a believer in deriving social norms from biological findings, whether they’re about adaptations or not.” The cultural importance of the female orgasm doesn’t have to be determined by its evolutionary origins. So much in our sexual lives is disconnected from baby-making. And let’s not forget one of the things the birth control pill taught us: separating pleasure from reproduction can be tremendously empowering — and fun.








http://www.alternet.org/story/152641/what%27s_the_scientific_reason_women_have_orgasms?akid=7675.35630.Jub6_m&rd=1&t=24