When they found public typos, Deck and Herson were careful to seek the permission of the signs’ owners to make the needed changes.
Around 60 percent took a defensive posture and declined any typo services, notably two people who threatened the pair when they were about to fix a sign on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. They were warned to “keep walking or they would make sure we didn’t walk again,” Deck said.
They also ran into trouble at the Grand Canyon where they were arrested for fixing bad grammar in an official sign. A federal judge fined them $3,000 and banned them from speaking publicly about fixing typos for a year, a period that expired in August 2009.
He’s got a car bomb. He puts the key in the ignition and turns it – the car blows up. He gets out. He opens the hood and makes a cursory inspection. He closes the hood and gets back in. He turns the key in the ignition. The car blows up. He gets out and slams the door shut disgustedly. He kicks the tire. He takes off his jacket and shimmies under the chassis. He pokes around. He slides back out and wipes the grease off his shirt. He puts his jacket back on. He gets in. He turns the key in the ignition. The car blows up, sending debris into the air and shattering windows for blocks. He gets out and says, Damn it! He calls a tow truck. He gives them his AAA membership number. They tow the car to an Exxon station. The mechanic gets in and turns the key in the ignition. The car explodes, demolishing the gas pumps, the red-and-blue Exxon logo high atop its pole bursting like a balloon on a string. The mechanic steps out. You got a car bomb, he says. The man rolls his eyes. I know that, he says.
Mark Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
In the past, I have wrung my hands in fear of what my countrymen will do if Islamic terrorists ever succeed in setting off a bunch of car bombs. While I still worry about that, I now worry less. It appears that the terrorists we’re facing at home these days are basically the Generation Veal of terrorists. “Yeah, Osama, I, like, forgot to read the bomb manual. And then I left some supplies at home. Can I, like, get some funding for another attempt? No? That’s, like so unfair. I mean, I tried and everything. Don’t I get credit for that? Not even partial credit?”
It has also emerged that the bomb could have been aimed at the creators of the controversial cartoon South Park.
Viacom, which makes the comedy show, has offices near where the bomb was found and defused in Times Square.
The show’s writers were threatened with reprisals last month over an episode mocking the prophet Mohammed.
***
Police Commissioner Mr Kelly dismissed suggestions the car bomb was an ‘amateurish’ device.
Mr Kelly said: ‘The intent of whoever did this to cause mayhem, create casualties.’
He added that the bomb was a reminder New York ‘is clearly a target of people who want to come here and do us harm’.
***
The bomb squad eventually used a robot to make the device safe.
‘We are very lucky,’ said New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. ‘We avoided what could have been a very deadly event.
‘Terrorists around the world who feel threatened by the freedoms that we have always focus on those symbols of freedoms and that is New York City.’
The square was opened to the public again yesterday. But there were fears of a 9/11-style sequence of attacks after another explosive device laid on a marathon route in Pittsburgh was found and defused.
I guess, if you consider a microwave containing ravioli “another explosive device” and blowing stuff up defusing it…
Mayor Michael Bloomberg claimed “We were very lucky. We avoided what could have been a very deadly event.”
For much of the evening, Midtown New York, from 43rd – 48th streets, was closed, heightening fear reported for hours on cable news shows, including statements by Bloomberg, Governor David Paterson, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, saying the bomb “appeared (to be) in the process of detonating, but it malfunctioned.”
Good luck or something else? We’ve seen this too often not to be suspicious. This one, like others, has all the earmarks of a false flag, more likely given its coverage and location in Times Square on Saturday night, followed by a May 2 video saying the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility.
Who could imagine they had a branch office in New York, and no one even noticed. At least that’s the impression from media disinformation, hyped to spread fear and prepare the public for what’s to come, perhaps something much worse.
In addition, like previous times, a suspect is already in custody, a Muslim, of course, as part of the anti-Islamic post-9/11 rage, and given how abusively he may be treated (including frightening threats of life in prison or the death penalty), perhaps will confess to anything or make it appear that he did so headlines can blare it.
A You Tube clip shot by an eyewitness near the Times Square car bomb incident on Saturday night highlights why many people who were caught up in the bomb scare thought that the police were running a drill at the time of the botched attack.
Eyewitnesses, including those who comment on the video on the You Tube page, are baffled as to why police chose to evacuate some locations and not others, as if certain buildings had been chosen to be evacuated beforehand while others were left alone.
Despite the fact that people were being told to leave McDonalds, police did not stop anyone from entering the theatre next door. In addition, the staff at McDonalds were not told to leave and remained in the restaurant.
“None of this made sense when the audience was let in to see West Side Story,” states the text in the video.
Faisal Shahzad, 30, has been charged over the attempted car bomb attack in New York last Saturday. Meanwhile, the Taliban has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Air Vice-Marshal Baharul Haq, Shahzad’s father and a retired Pakistani Air Force commander, said he was not aware of any links with terror groups. “This is at least what I know,” he said, to the Sun newspaper.
“We are liberal people.”
He added: “How can I appeal for his release if he is really involved in the terror plan? I need to see what happens and then I will contact the government. I do not know the truth. But I am not sure he is doing all this.”
To recap, this is the man who founded the group now emerging in connection with the botched Times Square bombing – a CIA and MI6 asset.
“Experts believe Jaish-e-Muhammad still benefits from links with Pakistan’s powerful government intelligence community. Some experts believe Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency facilitated the group’s formation,” states yesterday’s L.A. Times article.
As the vast majority of geopolitical analysts concur, the Pakistani ISI is virtually nothing more than a CIA outpost. The ISI does nothing without the Agency giving its approval. The CIA has paid millions of dollars to the ISI since 9/11, accounting for no less than a third of the ISI’s entire budget, despite the foreign spy agency’s notorious history of funding and arming terrorist groups like Jaish-e-Muhammad and despite the fact that it bankrolled the 9/11 hijackers.
Since the CIA has its fingerprints all over almost every Middle Eastern terror group, it’s unsurprising that an Agency connection to the Times Square bomber has come to light. We’ve never come across a terrorist who wasn’t trained, equipped, radicalized, entrapped, or provocateured by a western intelligence agency or a terror group controlled by a western intelligence agency.
Just about every profession has become more complicated in recent decades. The sheer volume of data and rules that must be grasped by a certified public accountant, for instance, has exploded, says Gary Giroux, a professor of accounting at Texas A.& M. The bible of the business is the portentously named “Original Pronouncements,” a book that at its heftiest a few years ago ran to roughly 10,000 pages.
A century ago, Mr. Giroux says, there were no accounting courses, let alone “Original Pronouncements,” because accountants were just guys who double-checked the math of corporations to ensure there wasn’t internal fraud. What happened?
Yep, it all makes sense once you identify the culprit (complexity itself being neutral) to which the examples Segal cites all point: control. Shit’s actually pretty simple – or, anyhow, straightforward – and the real head-scratcher here is simplicity itself. Might I recommend Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart’s The Collapse of Chaos?
The Democrats’ immigration-reform proposal (pdf) is 26 pages long. Pages 8 through 18 are devoted to “ending illegal employment through biometric employment verification.” I don’t think the Democrats are going to like me calling this a biometric national ID card, as they go to great lengths to say that it is not a national ID card, and make it “unlawful for any person, corporation; organization local, state, or federal law enforcement officer; local or state government; or any other entity to require or even ask an individual cardholder to produce their social security card for any purpose other than electronic verification of employment eligibility and verification of identity for Social Security Administration purposes.”
But it’s still a biometric national ID card.
***
The oddity of this strategy, of course, is that anti-immigration sentiments run highest among the same communities that are most opposed to national ID cards. Now, it’s also the case that if you’re going to support citizenship searches for people with Hispanic-looking shoes, it’s a bit odd to worry about an ID card to verify employment. But even so, without Republicans on the bill to give this strategy cover, it’ll be interesting to see whether the anti-immigrant right embraces the ID card as a way of staunching the flow of illegal immigrants or assails Democrats for trying to create a biometric police state.
I expect this Arizona shit will die by summer’s end, at the latest – Lord Obama and Calderón have decried it, and it’s so over-the-top and in-your-face all but the most bigoted caricatures of humanfolk/hardcore sociopaths grok its wrongness – the upshot of which I expect to be thisform of coercive obnoxiousness being increasingly pushed (and/or “rammed through”) as a progressive, utopian alternative.
Fie on your clunky, old-school police state tactics (40th anniversary of Kent State today, yo) and on your (inevitably buggy) shiny new control system too.
PIRACY is the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land. Somalia is a failed state and has the longest coastline in mainland Africa, so piracy flourishes nearby. The 20th-century French historian Fernand Braudel called piracy a “secondary form of war,” that, like insurgencies on land, tends to increase in the lulls between conflicts among great states or empires. With the Soviet Union and its client states in Africa no longer in existence, and American influence in the third world at an ebb, irregular warfare both on land and at sea has erupted, and will probably be with us until the rise of new empires or their equivalents.
