You can't keep 'em out, ya gotta catch 'em

The United States has a 3000 mile long northern land border.  A great deal of it runs thru primeval forest, un roaded, un settled, un patrolled.  Anyone can hike across the border for little more than a decent pair of boots.  We have two long coasts, 2000-3000 miles each.  Each coast is covered with harbors, ports, boat launch ramps, marinas, gas docks, shore restaurants, you name it.  Come in from the sea in a small craft and you are just another fisherman or sailor, or boater coming in at end of day.  No papers needed.  It doesn't take much cash to rent a slip at a marina to leave the boat.  Light aircraft can fly across the border and land at any of thousands of tiny town airports, the kind that doesn't even man the tower, let alone a customs and immigration post.  So, the terrorists who want in, can get in, even if they don't have the paperwork to fly in by commercial airline.  And, we cannot subject every tourist to the sort of background investigation that we use on personnel cleared to handle nuclear weapons.  It just costs too much. 
   So anyone from a reasonable country, a place like France or Germany or Britain, who has a passport, can just fly over here.  And people from crazy places like Syria, there is little a US passport agent can do other than interview the traveler and take a hard look at his/her passport, make sure the picture matches the face in front of him, look for signs of forgery.   Sometimes that works and some times it doesn't.
    We have to catch them here.  That takes tips to the cops, wiretaps (or the internet equivalent thereof), and checks for papers (aka stop and frisk) as often as legally permissible.  The cops would get more tips if they were more careful about gunning down innocent citizens.  And us loyal citizens ought to make it a point to always have some ID on us.  

Don't help ISIS propaganda

ISIS  just claimed responsibility Garland Texas  terror strike.  If believed, ISIS will gain stature among it's friends and fellow travelers.  That sort of people will be impressed that ISIS was able to strike the Great Satan on its own soil, even if a Texas cop snuffed both attackers with only a handgun. 
   We should not offer an opinion as to the truth or falsity of the ISIS claim.  Let ISIS persuade the world wide audience that it really happened that way.  Give ISIS the burden of convincing skeptics that they are telling the truth.  DO NOT issue a US government stamp of approval to ISIS propaganda.  We should just keep it zipped.  And the TV newsies would do their country a favor if they would just stop talking about the ISIS claim of responsibility. 
  I would rather learn the name of that Texas cop, and what he used for a handgun.  Did he pack a big .45 Colt sixshooter?  Or merely a skinny little 9mm Glock? 

Stalingrad

The Russians have a security problem.  Terrorists bombed a railway station (awful video showing the bomb flash and smoke is on TV) and then bombed a trolley bus.  Thirty or forty people dead.  These atrocities occured in "Volgograd" , "400 miles south and east of Moscow". 
   It wasn't until the next day that one newsie finally figured out that Volgograd is better known in the West by it's Word War II name, Stalingrad.  The newsie vaguely mentioned that a battle had been fought there. 
  The newsie didn't mention that the battle of Stalingrad was a turning point in World War II.  It was the first time the Russians managed to beat the Germans in a big standup fight.  Before Stalingrad, the Germans beat the Russians every time.  That turned around after Stalingrad and the Russians beat the Germans every time. The Russian victory at Stalingrad was crushing, they surrounded the German army and took them all captive.  Germany lost 250,000 men at Stalingrad.  The movie "Enemy at the Gates" was about the battle of Stalingrad.
  You would think that after such a legendary victory in the Great Patriotic War, the city would still be known as Stalingrad.  But, when "deStalinization" happened under Khrushchev in the late 1950's, part of "deStalinization" involved taking Stalin's name off his city on the Volga.