“When the final accounting is done, 2014 will have been the most lethal year for global terrorism in the 45 years [since] such data has been compiled,” intoned National Intelligence Director James Clapper, speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. Of course, the director may have been lying, something Big Jim does on occasion when speaking before Congress. At any rate, he did fail to mention that the number of Americans killed on U.S. soil by Islamic terrorists, who are the kind we’re mostly worried about, amounted to a big fat zero in 2014. Well, you can’t have everything, can you?1
But Big Jim isn’t the only one to have his knickers in a knot. The New York Times is pretty much freaking about a new report on North Korea’s nuclear weapons/ballistic missile program. Even though “[d]etails about the programs are hard to come by given North Korea’s closed system,” well, you can still worry, a lot, if you want to.
And let’s not forget about China! Another report, conveniently arriving just as Congress begins consideration of President Obama’s request for a measly 7.7% increase in defense spending, warns that “China’s goal is to become a space power on par with the United States and to foster a space industry that is the equal of those in the United States, Europe, and Russia.”
The report was prepared by University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, which apparently goes heavy on the conflict and light on the cooperation, because BloombergBusiness dude David Tweed sums up the report’s message as follows: “The assessment that space is the dominant battlefield has led the People’s Liberation Army to conclude that war in space is inevitable, the institute said in the report led by Kevin Pollpeter, deputy director of the Study of Innovation and Technology in China at the IGCC.”2
Inevitable, huh? Well, shit, I guess I better hurry up and die, because I don’t want to be around for that one.
