WASHINGTON, D.C. — Federal Emergency Management Agency rescue and USAID workers who helped with the recover efforts following the earthquake Jan. 12 in Haiti, listen as President Barack Obama thanks them for their service during a Rose Garden ceremony March 10. (Chuck Kennedy/White House)

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On the lookout for acute social trends? Look no further than the current ominous results of 50 years of American social engineering.

Are you a mid-forties Pennsylvania housewife, low on romance? Online dating not netting you Mr. Wonderful? Career options limited? Retirement a fantasy? Hope and change not panning out? What’s a girl to do when even Oprah can’t stop eating with a billion bucks in the bank?

Well, girlfriend, it’s time to grab your mouse and go Jihad. Who says you don’t have options? Do you have an American passport? If you do, you’re the “belle of the ball” in Yemen! (Pronounced, Yeah, men!)

Just ask Colleen LaRose, aka Fatima LaRose, aka Jihad Jane. LaRose found it ALL on the Internet. She told the boys she was up for Jihad, would raise money and kill cartoonists, and the marriage proposals began rolling in.

LaRose got “burqad out,” started raising money and organizing a team of men and women terrorists to plan murder and mayhem. She had an assignment, a raison d’être, to go to Sweden with her new pals and kill Lars Vilks, the hapless cartoonist who published a cartoon of Muhammad and now lives in constant fear for his life.

Through the wonder of the Internet, LaRose began posting on YouTube in June 2008 as Jihad Jane and, by March 2009, received her marching orders and was jetting off to Europe in August for her rendezvous with Lars.

Adam Gadahn grabbed his mouse and changed his life, too. After years of moping around college classrooms and sponging off his grandparents, Gadahn found Jihad. In the blink of an eye, he went from a Death Metal loser with no prospects to Azzam the Amerikan. All it took was an American passport and the promise to harm the homeland that had not met his expectations.

Gadahn now has a promising career in PR with al-Qaeda, has a $1 million price on his head and went from no dates to multiple wives.

Through the power of the Internet and the phenomenon of social networking, it is now possible to create an online persona that is way more exciting than a real life.

Americans of pre-Internet generations were content with the basics: a job, plenty to eat, a place to live, a dinner out on special occasions, three channels, a week of vacation and a movie now and then.

Now, more and more Americans are grabbing the mouse and changing their lives. In fact, so many have found Jihad on the Web that the government has no idea how many of the country’s mal-content neighbors, friends and co-workers currently are being trained to find meaning in their lives by ending others’.

In a time when G.I. Joe has become Jihad Jane and Campus Spirit Barbie is now Azzam the Amerikan, many of our neighbors, due to hopelessness, a popular culture of self-loathing and an economic future of uncontrolled variables, are selling their souls to terrorists.

Those not taking to such extremes, on the other hand, had better embrace the imperfect promise of America, appreciate what we have and remember the words of Aesop who said, “The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts.”

AT SEA — Sailors aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower hoist a rigid-hull inflatable boat out of the water after a man overboard drill March 8. (Bradley Evans/DVIDS)

Cardow, The Ottawa Citizen/caglecartoons.com

Build the bunkers and head for cover. Reports indicate that several Middle Eastern countries have plans to push the envelope and “go nuclear.”

Israel, Syria, Jordan and Egypt are just a sampling of countries from the Middle East that have plans to build the ultimate weapon. Several of the countries will build nuclear facilities for “energy,” a clever ruse used by the Iranians for months, and other countries say nuclear power is better for the environment. (Al Gore must be ecstatic.)

The rest of the world and the Middle East is watching and waiting for Iran to build a nuclear weapon without any negative sanctions from the United Nations—all talk and no action.

This “me too” philosophy will have dire consequences for the state of affairs in world politics. If Iran cannot be negotiated with now, how bad will they be once they have a bomb? It has long been rumored that Israel already is a nuclear-power country, but may have been using disinformation to keep their enemies at bay.

Syria, however, is looking to level the playing field.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Syria a few weeks ago may have been more than a friendly visit, as both countries have had a long-standing relationship. The visit may have in fact sowed the seeds and muddied the political landscape for the United States. Syria is planning to move ahead on their nuclear program, more than likely with Iran’s blessing and help.

Any way someone looks at the nuclear situation in the region, the track record of failed nations and rouge regimes in the Middle East is staggering.

It is no secret that both Iran and Syria are two of the biggest sponsors of terrorism in the world, as their love child, Hezbollah, reveals.

Ironically, Hezbollah had killed more Americans pre-Sept. 11, 2001, than any other terrorist group in the world. Their penchant for suicide bombings make them a force to be reckoned with and, if they have a bomb, President Barack Obama no longer can wait out regime change in Iran.

Obama must pressure the United Nations for real sanctions with teeth that make Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons or any country for that matter, a Pyrrhic victory.

If not, military action is a possibility—and maybe the makings of World War III.

To that, it’s said, “Sic vis pacem, para bellum.” (If you wish for peace, prepare for war.)

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate addresses the members of the National Emergency Management Association March 8 during its mid-year conference. (Bill Koplitz/FEMA)

Adam Gadahn has been reported captured and not captured by every wire service on the planet. Gadahn is the grandson of a prominent Jewish urologist, raised in California, death metal devotee and current public relations flack for the Osama drama video production company.

But why is it that no one agency said they really caught him?

Look no further than another disgruntled child of affluence, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, aka the Christmas Day underwear bomber. Following this incident, authorities were able to question him for 50 minutes before Eric Holder and company swept in to save the American Constitution by mirandizing this clown.

Once Abdulmutallab lawyered up, we were assured by the Department of Justice that he (facilitated by his defense attorney) just gushed valuable and incriminated information.

As a result, any hard-working intelligence officer who may need more than 50 minutes of “sharing time” with enemies of the state, just couldn’t seem to officially identify who had been caught.

Reports out of Pakistan now are saying the man in custody is Abu Yahya Mjadin Adam, though no other details out of Islamabad are being discussed.

One thing is certain, though, while our “bought for billions” friends in Pakistan are questioning whoever has been detained, it may be a painful interval before the DOJ can rescue us from “old school” interrogation techniques that may provide names, places, dates, plans and specific times, but are frowned upon in Oslo.

Gadahn is only the tip of the iceberg. A new report prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has disclosed that as many as three dozen Americans, recently released from jail where they all became budding linguists and could not wait to travel to Yemen to study the Arabic language, have gone missing.

Another group of ten preceded them and found language studies so enthralling that they all married Yemeni girls and have disappeared from the prying eyes of the Great Satan in order to master all of the difficult Yemeni idioms.

The Chairman of  the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said in reference to al-Qaeda, “The group seeks to recruit American citizens to carry out terrorist attacks in the United States. These Americans are not necessarily of Arab or South Asian descent; they include individuals who converted to Islam in prison or elsewhere and were radicalized.”

The Obama Administration has stated that they have no idea how many Americans have traveled to the Middle East for cultural studies, disappeared from view, still hold legal passports and may present a difficult to discern, blond-haired and blue-eyed threat as returning terrorists. They fear that the total number is “great.” Great?

There is something fearfully wrong with our culture when young American men cannot find a group to identify with, until they become so angry and disenfranchised that they can only find meaning in murder disguised as a noble cause.

Whether it is Columbine or al-Qaeda, Virginia Tech or Fort Hood, the lines have become so blurred for these folks that they are ripe for the picking when any group decides to harvest them with the promise of meaning, belonging, adventure and the chance to deliver the sword of retribution for all of the pain they could not process productively.

Through the yawning maw of the Internet, young men who have not found a social network to plug into can find a home through reading Jihad Recollections magazine, a snazzy, upscale webzine published in North Carolina and full of “Osama Wants You” vitriol for the angry young man.

Or, if one is contemplating studying language arts in Yemen, this al-Qaeda training manual will serve as a good primer in preparation for your trip abroad: FAS.

Abdulmutallab went to Yemen for Arabic language studies. The fact that he already was fluent was not a cause for suspicion? He may have been memorizing idioms with many of these American converts when he was there—right before his Christmas trip to Detroit.  They all may have been in underwear class together. He and his defense attorney have probably shared everything he knows about the Idiomatic Institute for Infidels in Yemen. We may never know the many things he could tell us about these American terrorists and their homecoming plans.

The one bright spot over the past 48 hours, however, has been the outspoken voice of American Muslim leaders in Los Angeles and Detroit, speaking out against Gadahn and his most recent video message encouraging Muslims serving in the U.S. military to follow the example of Maj. Nidal Hassan, the alleged Fort Hood shooter, and come up with creative ways to murder their fellow soldiers in the name of Allah.

These folks have found value in America as an imperfect place of promise, where their dreams of a better life can be realized through hard work and outspoken support for all of the freedoms we hold so dear.

In the mean time, common sense being incredibly uncommon these days, one is left to be his or her own first line of defense. Every single incident of domestic terror has had plenty of up-front clues that nobody nearby thought to mention.

“Seemed like a nice enough guy” won’t cut it anymore. People must pay attention and speak up when things they observe do not make sense. If someone has a blond-haired, blue-eyed cousin with a sudden passion to speak Arabic, fine. If he has been attending a local mosque, great. If he has been working out twice a day and making pipe bombs in the garage, that’s the first clue.

YOKOSUKA, Japan — Sailors from Air Department aboard the aircraft carrier USS George Washington practice hose handling techniques and aircraft fire procedures during a general quarters drill. (John Hageman/DVIDS)

NEW YORK — Students at Metropolitan College of New York listen to first responder stories of Haiti as part of a lecture series on lessons learned from the now-displaced country. (The Klaxon/staff photo)

AT SEA — Seaman Ruben Martinez and Petty Officer Timothy Landry and Joshua Crumrine use a Naval Firefighting Thermal Imager to asses a simulated casualty during a main space fire drill. (Daniel Viramontes/DVIDS)