Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation
June 30th, 2007Simulex Inc.’s Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation system is almost certainly how the priests of the technocracy are now maintaining “normal” operations.
The system allows for terra scale datasets with granularity of results down to one node (individual). It has a physics engine for tracking any number of people (or other elements) in virtual cities or spaces. It can correlate any amount of social, economic, political, environmental or other data with the behavior of groups or individuals on the ground. The U.S. Government, and some of the most powerful corporations on the planet are using the SEAS system.
There’s really no way to know how many ways this system is already being used against us. I tried to think about it for a few minutes and it’s mind boggling. “How isn’t it being used?” is probably a more interesting question. If the Architect was interested in tools that could help him more effectively run the Matrix, he’d have Simulex reps on the phone ASAP.
I thought about some of the high level but simple studies They could run to, for example, evaluate the overall effectiveness of the various control mechanisms most people have to contend with on a daily basis.
A status quo indicator could be easily devised that would show how effectively “normal” operations were being maintained. All They would need to do is track the time most people spend commuting to and from work, the amount of time spent at work, some guestimate about the time spent in front of television and computer screens at home and a final guestimate about the time spent on recreational activities outside of the home (live sporting events, movies, etc.). Plot those components as a single moving average. That’s it. If the line is sloping up, Their power is increasing. If the line is sloping down, Their power is decreasing. If the line is going sideways, Their power is staying the same.
Think about how powerful of an indicator that would be.
And that would be a boneheaded child’s exercise for the SEAS system.
The really weird and disturbing aspect of this is the level of granularity that it provides to the system operators. They admit that the system is designed to run simulations on a 1 to 1 basis. That is, it can simulate activities not just with some aggregate model based on limited samples, but with ALL nodes simultaneously in a population with terra scale data sets. Meaning, the focus could be on tracking and simulating the activities of any individual in the system.
If you’re like me, this is the point at which you will start to experience a vague feeling of foreboding because all of this seems somehow familiar, somehow related to something I’ve written about on Cryptogon recently…
In NSA, AT&T and the NarusInsight Intercept Suite, I wrote:
Are They building electronic dossiers on as many of us as they can? I don’t know, but it sure looks that way.
We must assume that they are using the full spectrum of surveillance information to try to PREDICT HOW EACH OF US IS LIKELY TO BEHAVE ON A DAY TO DAY BASIS. Where we go. Which routes we take. What we buy. Etc. All of these things can be broken down into a kind of moving average that wiggles around between an upper band and a lower band, kind of like a standard deviation from a mean. Stay within the bands, and the Magic 8 Ball probably won’t bother to flag your profile for closer analysis by some genius at the Terrorist Screening Center.
Obviously, most of us aren’t worth the attention of a human analyst, and they know it. Most of the sheep just go with the flock. They do what they’re told, shop at WalMart, pay their taxes, go to church, the end. More educated sheep read Business Week or the New York Times, etc. Within a fairly wide range of activities, it’s no more complicated, for the vast majority of the people out there, than the way pool balls behave as they bounce around the table and each other.
This is a key point, so I’m going to emphasize it:
These systems would excel at finding the artifacts, the outliers, the people who haven’t internalized the programming, but continue to act “normal.”
It would identify the thought criminals.
Recently, Michael Chertoff, the head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, mentioned “clean skin” terrorists. These are people who appear “normal” in society, but are secretly plotting the next big terrorist event. How do you find the “clean skin” terrorists? Well, according to Chertoff, the U.S. Department of Magic-8 Ball Theories, Studies and Predictions requires every foreign traveler’s email address and credit card information. It didn’t occur to me before, but They already have this information—and much more—for Americans.
I’ve wondered why my site and thousands of sites like it are allowed to continue to operate…
Simple: More and better targeting data.
They don’t care about me, or what I’m saying.
They’re more interested in who’s paying attention to me, and people like me. Are those numbers increasing, or decreasing? What types of jobs do readers of these sites have? What is their income? What other sites do readers of these sites read? Do the people who read these sites continue to show up to work? (You haven’t been paying attention if you think that They don’t have this information.)
Whether or not you have anything to do with sleeper cells, “clean skin” terrorists, leaderless resistance movements, our outright “let’s shoot the bastards” insurgency movements, the list of usual suspects, I would almost bet my life, is being drawn up through the use of the NarusIntercept Suite systems for collection and the SEAS systems for analysis.
Who gets pulled for what probably depends on how seriously They feel threatened. The point is, these systems can model and assist with the visualization of any imaginable set of circumstances. We don’t know what criteria They’re using, but it is admitted that the terrorist watch list has ballooned to include over half a million individuals.
Do you think these systems have anything to do with the “out of control” expansion of that list?
I do.
This isn’t tinfoil. All I’ve done is make logical connections between two publicly admitted technologies that we know the U.S. Government uses. Look at how hungry that SEAS thing is for data.
Remember Russell Tice, the NSA SIGINT officer who had knowledge of a special access NSA operation that was so disturbing that he tried to tell the U.S. Congress about it?
What was Tice talking about here:
Tice said his information is different from the Terrorist Surveillance Program that Bush acknowledged in December and from news accounts this week that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of millions of Americans. “It’s an angle that you haven’t heard about yet,” he said.
An angle that we haven’t heard about. Since everyone and his dog knows about the mass surveillance, what could that angle be?
More recently, Tice said that the NSA intercepts of civilian traffic is “the tip of the iceberg” and says, again, that there is something else, something we still don’t know about. Here’s part of the interview between Tice and Reason:
REASON: What prompted you to step forward now?
Tice: Well, I’ve known this for a long time and I’ve kept my mouth shut…
REASON: You’re referring to what James Risen calls “The Program,” the NSA wiretaps that have been reported on?
Tice: No, I’m referring to what I need to tell Congress that no one knows yet, which is only tertiarily connected to what you know about now.
Ok, so the outrage that Tice was willing to ruin his life over is only “tertiarily connected” to the operation we already new about.
Tice continues:
In my case, there’s no way the programs I want to talk to Congress about should be public ever, unless maybe in 200 years they want to declassify them. You should never learn about it; no one at the Times should ever learn about these things.
The surveillance side of this is the chickenfeed. There’s something far more sinister than the simple surveillance… an angle we haven’t heard about yet.
Tice never did tell his story to Congress about this different aspect of the program.
Well, my guess is that it has something to do with providing surveillance data for this SEAS World Sim thing, and that individual Americans are being watched and potentially targeted with it. Tice’s background seems to involve a lot of traditional electronic warfare, radar and ELINT stuff. Maybe Tice’s deal involved the collection of the mobile phone GPS and/or triangulation data which would provide realtime spacial/geographic data to the SEAS system. In other words, SEAS sees you. They could bring up a map of a city and plot your path based on the information that your phone is exchanging with the mobile network.
Via: The Register:
Perhaps your real life is so rich you don’t have time for another.
Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.
The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.
Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information”, according to a concept paper for the project.
“SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP),” the paper reads, so that military leaders can “develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners”.
SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.
SEAS can display regional results for public opinion polls, distribution of retail outlets in urban areas, and the level of unorganization of local economies, which may point to potential areas of civil unrest
Yank a country’s water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.
“The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions between multiple sides,” said Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, co-author of the SWS concept paper.
Chaturvedi directs Purdue’s laboratories for Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations, or SEAS – the platform underlying SWS. Chaturvedi also makes a commercial version of SEAS available through his company, Simulex, Inc (http://www.simulexinc.com).
SEAS users can visualise the nodes and scenarios in text boxes and graphs, or as icons set against geographical maps.
Corporations can use SEAS to test the market for new products, said Chaturvedi. Simulex lists the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed Martin among its private sector clients.
The US government appears to be Simulex’s number one customer, however. And Chaturvedi has received millions of dollars in grants from the military and the National Science Foundation to develop SEAS.
Chaturvedi is now pitching SWS to DARPA (http://www.darpa.mil) and discussing it with officials at the US Department of Homeland Security (http://www.dhs.gov), where he said the idea has been well received, despite the thorny privacy issues for US citizens.
…
Alok Chaturvedi wants SWS to match every person on the planet, one-to-one.
Right now, the 62 simulated nations in SEAS depict humans as composites, at a 100-to-1 ratio.
One organisation has achieved a one-to-one level of granularity for its simulations, according to Chaturvedi: the US Army, which is using SEAS to identify potential recruits.
Chaturvedi insists his goal for SWS is to have a depersonalised likeness for each individual, rather than an immediately identifiable duplicate. If your town census records your birthdate, job title, and whether you own a dog, SWS will generate what Chaturvedi calls a “like someone” with the same stats, but not the same name.
Of course, government agencies and corporations can add to SWS whatever personally-identifiable information they choose from their own databases, and for their own purposes.
And with consumers already giving up their personal information regularly to websites such as MySpace and Twitter, it is not a stretch to imagine SWS doing the same thing.
“There may be hooks through which individuals may voluntarily contribute information to SWS,” Chaturvedi said.
Related: Vertical Farming in the Big Apple
What constantly gets me about people like this Chaturvedi cat is they talk about their wunder products and the “people” they focus on with the dispassionate manner akin to someone looking at single celled microbes. Its like listening to sales pitches by furnace manufacturers to the Nazis.
Another excellent article. I think I’ll just put a gun in my mouth. I have a question, how different is my take on oil from yours?
I don’t think 85 million barrels a day is ‘running out of energy’ though, so hopefully I don’t have to wear a dunce cap. I do think that even a small drop below 85mb would week havoc on the economy; and that this has been known and to some degree engineered, I except. But if a drop in petroleum output at some point in the future is a reasonable forecast, that alone could be reason not to invest in more refineries; especially if you didn’t give a damn about the society the refineries servered.
I’ve climbed wind turbines in a few countries and I can tell you the steel towers that hold them up are not made in factories powered by solar cells, anywhere. Many alternatives are simply accessories to the current fossil fuel infrastructure in place; wind is a case in point. As you said (roughly), the ‘same military-industrial complex that gives us tanks gives us chicken wire’ and that current system is oil. There are some great alternatives, and no doubt technology we can’t even view – but the undeniable fact that it is currently not mass produced, is a crisis-in-waiting for our society the way it is currently structured. So I monitor petroleum output and exports for signs of trouble; for timing.
i wonder what the macro level of integration is for the nodes.
or if at a particular resolution behaviour greys out to the individual. while predictive analysis can be applied, it can only be applied by and to the ‘data’. every ‘i suppose’ and ‘likely choice’ without corresponding verified data could pull the predictive nature further from reality. general templates of ‘slacker would likely do this across a given time period’ may be ‘generally’ accurate, but certainly not precise. there’s always room for a surprise.
it pretty much answers my questions before however. in a previous thread i’d wondered about realtime response mechanisms and the use of digital records as a survillance camera system, after the fact. now we know.
In this context the business of getting microchips implanted under our skin looks like nothing more than an attempt to draw our attention away from what they’re really doing. I mean, the way you tell it they won’t need anything as obvious as implanted chips to acheive the next level of control they’re aiming for.
@bob m
“i wonder what the macro level of integration is for the nodes.”
That’s a good question and the answer involves the “SimBridge” system. This is how the thing can keep scaling to involve increasing complexity and interaction of different factors. From my reading of it, the thing acts as a kind of traffic cop between major components of the simulation.
http://www.simulexinc.com/products/technology/#simbridge
Re: predictive capability: I don’t know. I can see how it could tell Them some things with a high degree of accuracy. I think this thing is FAR most frightening as a real time model, applying actual surveillance data as it goes.
I do think that They could use this to actually develop stimulus/response mechanisms that could be extremely effective. Think about it. With this kind of top level insight, you could observe the results of your stimuli. This obtained the desired result, that didn’t. This obtained a different but desirable result, etc.
My mind is blown. Makes me wonder about where and how They actually hook into the system of control. I mean, who’s in on this?
I guess if you give NSA/CIA/DOD control freaks and psychos enough money to play with, this is what they spend it on. Inhuman.
Is it within the realm of reason to assume that televisions have been two way devices since the eighties? How about lcd screens for high resolution feedback, heh. We’re fooled into being concerned about street cameras and voice surveillance… sidebar events really, small protrusions on the surface, like an alien creature only kinda fitting into its human host.
“All They would need to do is track the time most people spend commuting to and from work, the amount of time spent at work, some guestimate about the time spent in front of television and computer screens at home…” – Kevin
No guessing needed I do believe. I’ve had enough experience with the ‘paranormal’ aspect of these technologies that to presume that my life is not an open book would be to dismiss my better judgement and to ignore my own experience.
If you have read a material item in the high volume printed press (e-print as well) it is obsolete as far as cutting edge perception goes. No need to be surprised like “wow, I’m so flabbergasted that this is being presented by mainstream outlets!?”. It’s old news and kinda irrelevant to where things are really at.
The upper echelon NSA and the abc’s in the subterranean depths below live on another planet, they live within another social apparatus altogether. I remember seeing quite clearly one evening a hovering vehicle above some pine trees about fifteen meters from me. I was driving on an expressway so I had no opportunity to stop, though I knew instinctively that it was being manned by system agents. Somehow the small craft had become uncloaked for a short span of time, enough anyways for me to witness a quite evident, to me, man made antigravity unit. I’ve no doubt those memory wipe tools were somewhere in the drivers side glove box…
Break out the tinfoil..eh…
A managed energy crisis, sure. A managed population decline, yes sir. Though the effects will feel quite real, and that’s the predicament we’re in. The course ahead can be simple enough though – Know what you stand for and be willing to die for it. Gosh darn, that sounds like something a ‘real’ human being would do.
We are being challenged to evolve, to overcome our material vanity and gravity.
Predator forces serve a function, those that learn to recognize that function can modify their own positions, thereby attaining alternate perceptions through which novel actions are given the space to arise. By changing the position of a lever the amount of work that can be achieved changes. The real energy crisis is thus one of human leverage. We now lack the leverage within our own psyche, on a collective scale, to manage the necessary action of change. We have been out leveraged and out positioned, dulled by slowness, the inevitability within rear view mirror media boxes.
Good day y’all.
So potentially we could all just game the system by altering our habits. We could manipulate our personal set of ones and zeros by changing our habits randomly. Maybe that would get me labeled as “too aberrant to figure out – potentially dangerous”.
Is the machine smart enough to figure out my internet purchase of seed explains my changed shopping habits? Does that make me more, or less, a threat?
@comrade simba
My guess is that the thing is not too concerned with most of what we’re doing. There is a decades long U.S. military tradition of emphasizing the importance of defeating the enemy IN HIS MIND. Indeed, that is, by far, the most desirable method of attaining dominance/victory/whatever you want to call it. It’s not bloody. It doesn’t leave a lot of crying women and limbless children and mass graves around. It’s not that They won’t resort to the nastiness, They will if necessary (look at Iraq). They’d just rather use the culture bomb:
https://cryptogon.com/?p=895
So, knowing all of that, and knowing the level of dominance that has already been achieved through dumbing down of public education, TV, etc. the only people who pose any potential threat are the thought criminals. Every insurgent is a thought criminal first. There are very few of them. My guess is 1% of the total population.
What They require is a way of making sure that the number of these people remains low. If the number grows, killing is probably not necessary. It just means more bullshit honeypots and distractions need to be introduced to keep thought criminals busy thinking about pointless pursuits, or get them involved with activism, etc. Problem solved.
Most important would be a focus on the handfull of people who are genuinely radicalized and willing to use asymmetric methods against the system, infrastructures, corporate executives, etc. In a mentally defeated state like the U.S. you’re talking a maximum of a few hundred to a few thousand people. This is easily manageable with systems like SEAS combined with COINTELPRO, targeted executions, etc.
Buy your seeds. That thing doesn’t care. Well, it probably doesn’t care. I’m just guessing. Nobody on the outside will know the tasking package.
I’m almost certain, though, that given the importance of mind war and PSYOP, people who demonstrate mental resistance to the programming—by their web browsing profiles, book buying habits, library book requests, etc—will be flagged. Once they are flagged, the system can keep a VERY close eye on them and possibly the spot the move outside those bands of “normal” behavior. The Magic 8 Ball is probably very concerned with thought criminals who are looking to escalate beyond their blogs, books, words, sign waving, etc.
Once flagged as a thought criminal, maybe the person is picked up, via CCTV, mobile phone, or some other method, near sensitive infrastructure, for example. SEAS would sound an alarm and provide a detailed description to law enforcement of a “potential terrorist” near XYZ power station. Another wild ass guess as to how this thing could be used.
You see, leaderless resistance cells are a BIG problem because they can’t be infiltrated. Part of this simulation/visualization system is an attempt to deal with that. They have built a surveillance mesh in which it would be virtually impossible for a would-be insurgent to move through the radicalization curve undetected. As I have demonstrated, VERY few will have what it takes to stay anonymous online.
SEAS keeps that blacklist updated in realtime in an automated way.
It is truly horrifying.
In 1984, O’brien talks about using technology to stop the wheel of history from spinning endlessly from revolution to stability and back again. Social engineering technology is used to prevent most people from even considering resistance. Surveillance technology alerts the state to the handfull of thought criminals.
Of course, the system we got is MUCH more diabolical than the grim, gray hell described in 1984. The managers of modern societies have gone with a tits and ass and iPods approach and turned the prison inside out but covered the thing with cameras, microphones, NarusIntercept Suites, etc. The choice is the mechanism of control. Destroy people’s ability to think, and they’ll choose to remain zombie consumes and call it freedom.
It’s like the Architect said about the Matrix:
…she stumbled upon a solution whereby nearly 99.9% of all test subjects accepted the program, as long as they were given a choice, even if they were only aware of the choice at a near unconscious level. While this answer functioned, it was obviously fundamentally flawed, thus creating the otherwise contradictory systemic anomaly, that if left unchecked might threaten the system itself. Ergo, those that refused the program, while a minority, if unchecked, would constitute an escalating probability of disaster.
NSA whistleblower Tice was alluding to a program that monitors surveillance devices that have BEEN IMPLANTED INTO PEOPLE. That was why it was so shocking. And these devices can detect more than just what you say or where you are, they can to some extent read minds. Check out http://www.angelfire.com/or/mctrl or use the Internet Archive to view http://www.datafilter.com/mc .
Well. . . I had hoped this level of technology in the US government would be at least 10 years in the future.
I never thought I’d be glad that a fiat currency like the US dollar is doomed to collapse. I can’t see any other way to pull the plug on this. Ha, then again, if it isn’t the US government, it’ll end up being China, right?
. . .and to think I was so irked over the thought policing teachers in public schools and universities were pulling.
thank you kevin, the simbridge is a very interesting bit of tech. neural bridging anyone?
to expand on
“it pretty much answers my questions before however. in a previous thread i’d wondered about realtime response mechanisms and the use of digital records as a survillance camera system, after the fact. now we know.”
i’d meant to suggest that everything can be done in realtime now. a direct ‘bridge’ from the system to and from it’s data mines would allow for immediate dispatch on any high level flags at any point in the co operating system, without ever leaving the office. hurray for efficiency.
//MOD I’m tired of your shitty attitude. Keep it on topic or keep it to yourself. Thanks. -Kevin
It would take an Apple II or a Commodore 64 with less than 100 KB of RAM to churn through the US population and identify the greatest threat to the country based on part crimes and current atrocities:
George W Bush
Paul Wolfowitz
Dick Cheney
Donald Rumsfeld
Condoleezza Rice
James Baker
Karl Rove
and the list of other folks who are complicit instigators of the unprovoked murder of nearly 1 million innocent people. I bet this program has exemptions that flag W and his terrorist allies as ‘good people’ when the native algorithms that they apply to everyone else would be screaming ‘Threat!’
It looks like a nice proposition and it’s probably true that some entities want as much information about us as possible.
That doesn’t stop a few things though: you have to actively implement or want to implement some policies and instigate events.
This article does not give enough attention to the law of large numbers. As the number of people increases, so does the number of permutations and prediction becomes chaotic. Even considering boundaries, there’s just no telling what anyone of us could do at any given time. And then there’s the delay between observation / analysis / synthesis / response.
Unless you could actually predict and respond beforehand a reactive system is only useful up to a point. I have a hard time believing we’re at that level of sophistication already.
And, when you think about it: what is the tool used for. To acquire and maintain power. The kind of personality that obsesses about power is a [functional] psychopath, a more common type of individual than seems to be understood.
Power is an illusion. As long as people accept power from a third party, somebody -has- it. Power is in the hands of those who are deemed subject to it. People who have a psychological need for power are either unable to feel empathy and should be removed from society for that reason, or they’re afraid, and more specifically: afraid of dying. Whatever fun tools and methods are employed to ‘control’ us, the people doing the controlling can be summed up pretty succinctly: useless.
I’m sorry, but I really have to say that I find the idea of surveillance tech that can literally read your mind to be just a tad far-fetched.
So now we know where some of the “trillions” announced missing at DOD Herr Rumsfeld the day b/4 they pulled 911, (with the dancing/cheering Israeli Mossad agents as the towers fell etc.) and mass murdered 3000+ of their fellow citizens . . . thankfully there is divine justice and one day each Rockefeller, Rothschild, Bush, Hitler, Stalin, Cheney, “International Bankers”, DOD Planners/Contractors, and Wall Streeters etc. will have a life review after leaving this plane of existence, feeling all the damage they did to all their victims as they felt it, and then have another rebirth to which they have sentenced themselves due to their actions in this life . . . that’s why we need to focus on our own conduct as much as possible, do the right thing w/o fear (knowing we all are going to leave this level of existence at some point and face a higher level of consciousness in judgment – -whether we are David Rockefeller or one of us peons he despises so), and let the divinity deal with the networked psychopaths who seek to enslave and destroy the rest of us . . . .
trying again… the server is really bogged down
maybe the other surveillance tech is this
http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1275&category=Environment
Emmanuel Goldstein
You missed Zibigiew Brzezinski.
We have a genocide criminal complaint against Brzezinksi docketed in federal court.
We’re asking Jimmy Carter for some help.
http://www.prosefights.org/nmlegal/nsalawsuit/nsalawsuit.htm#carter
I agree with tmb…have no fear.
This is great news! The flaws of bureaucracy has infected the software as well. The dumbasses are going to sink themselves.
Human ingenuity is the answer to this issue. As man is imperfect, so are his creations. Someone always finds a way to outwit the system. No computer, either now or in the future, will ever be able to accurately predict what any individual is thinking or doing – or *will* think and *will* do. Such ideas rely heavily on the flawed concept of generalities; i.e. if a person falls into this particular category/job title/gender/age group/whatever, then they will do this or that at such-and-such a given time. It seems many people aren’t aware that each human being is a class unto himself, and that every generality he falls into will always ultimately fail to predict his next move, just as it fails to describe him completely. The system is flawed; all it takes are people with the intelligence to spot the flaws and the courage to exploit them. And they are not as rare as you may think.
Simple way to stop this “crap” is to turn off your mobile phone, unless you are going to dial out. To arrange to be in the same place or places when you do turn it on. To agree times when you will do this with your “pals” so everyone is in their “spot”. And take out the battery from your mobile or wrap it in two tin foil bags when it is “off”. (Check with a “pal” your phone cannot be called from inside the bags (with it on). This stops the snoopers, trackers, and other shuleens/gombeenmen as well as the Washington alphabet soup gang and their foreign goon pals. This guy is been involved with the next big-brother scam. Your tax dollars are paying for their gee-whiz gismo to zap us all, spook on us etc, [they get very rich on selling useless wasteful mis-applied technical and know-how to Uncle Sam], and get their pals to sign the chequs on behalf of uncle Sam – that’s you and me remember.
Perhaps if the necons had not invaded other folks countries all this crap would not be needed but it is about time Washington realized they lost the war period, Cuba, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Korea, Central and South America. As for the USSR, it simply faded away, knowing full well the fall out from it’s end would eventually destroy the dinosaurs of NATO and the EU. Knowing the historical animosity to the Germans and French from those countries known as Eastern Europe and the Balkans, once they became part of the West, they would destroy it. The significance of 9/11 is not the destruction of the twin towers but it proves the US is just as vulnerable as ever other group. Finaly the bomber has got through, and since America as a nation, despite having brave guys to fight for it, is a hysterical, it reacts, rather than acts after consideration. That the yellow-belly failed oilman Bush happens to be in the White House is no help. Kick them all out and look for the “Few honest Men”, there are none in Washington, Langley or Fort Mead. Very few left anywhere but there might just be the odd one in some remote Navy ship or base. We can hope.