Closer Look at the Fault Lines

In this great tradition of the eminence of detail, all the minutiae of Christian education, of scholastic or military pedagogy, all forms of  'training' found their place easily enough.-- Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, p 140

It is difficult to remember how frightened we all were in the year after 9/11, and most analysts believed, at least before the timeline became cogent, that Muhammad and his protege signaled the dawn of a new era. As far as mass murders go, Muhammad was atypical, not an impulse spree killer like the Aura shooter. The discipline he displayed was true anarchy against the state, at least initially, and biography is a bit disingenuous with its quick facts. Muhammad was a solder first and foremost, and then a domestic terrorist in the last months of his life, and probably has more affinity with Lee Harvey Oswald than we would care to credit. Both men were molded for the sake of the national defense, and both the assassin and the serial sniper had a degree of temerity rare when it comes to treasonous behavior, if one accepts that Oswald was a lone actor.

This is the price we pay for being the sole animal able to manipulate biology and body to the aerodynamic extent that we do, as Foucault's analysis explores, a homosexual so fascinated with control and assembly, ironically to pay an exorbitant price, perhaps unwittingly, for his own sexual desire.

The digital age has made us aware, conversely, of how rapidly we're superseding our own bipedal engineering, toppled in hubris by complex financial instruments and proxy conflicts which could trigger global aggression of some sort, especially as Turkish destabilization is not a headache NATO needs on its plate. Not that anyone cares what an impoverished spastic thinks, but it might be time for NATO to close ranks against Putin's recidivist incursions. Russia is hardly in a position to re-establish its Soviet empire, and could be stopped with a firm display of unity and muscle. Let Isis have what it wants. The US made Iraq ungovernable in an ideological argument with extremism that it failed to win, hence, let the new Islamists create their modern caliphate. They'll evolve. Everything does.