CNN reports on the Vetters getting on a train in Charlotte, NC:
they noticed what appeared to be a uniformed Transportation Security Administration officer holding a leashed police dog. “He just loosened the leash on the dog, and the dog came over to check me out,” Vetter said. Standing on the platform above Vetter were three other officers who appeared to be wearing bullet-proof vests…The Vetters had encountered VIPR — special TSA Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response teams…
The program has 15 teams and is expanding to get access to 12 new teams…officers include plainclothes and uniformed team members — some of them armed — who arrive without telling passengers in advance. Officers in the joint operations then randomly ask travelers for permission to search their bags for explosives.
To prevent accusations of profiling, searchers choose a random number — eight for example — and then search the bags of every eighth passenger…local and federal authorities insist the searches are not mandatory. But passengers who refuse are not allowed on the train…
Police Chief Christopher Trucillo, who works regularly with VIPR teams, acknowledged that the search system isn’t perfect. Potential attackers carrying explosives who refuse searches are free to simply drive to the next station on the line and board there…
A high-profile example of VIPR’s growing pains, transit officials say, is a VIPR-assisted passenger screening a year ago at Amtrak’s station in Savannah, Georgia. Instead of screening passengers as they boarded trains — which is standard security procedure — officers were screening passengers as they were getting off trains. Security experts know that makes no sense
Let’s count the ways that this totally unnecessary government intrusion into citizens’ lives is offensive and ridiculous. It’s expensive, ineffective because of its randomness, clueless in that it searches people getting off trains, and inane because all a hypothetical bad guy would have to do is drive to the next station. But be warned: better not tweet anything about Marilyn Monroe — or else!
Leigh Van Bryan, 26, was handcuffed and kept under armed guard in a cell with Mexican drug dealers for 12 hours after landing in Los Angeles with pal Emily Bunting. The Department of Homeland Security flagged him as a potential threat when he posted an excited tweet to his pals about his forthcoming trip to Hollywood which read: ‘Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America’…Despite telling officials the term ‘destroy’ was British slang for ‘party’, they were held on suspicion of planning to ‘commit crimes’ and had their passports confiscated…
Leigh was also quizzed about another tweet which quoted hit US comedy Family Guy which read: ’3 weeks today, we’re totally in LA pissing people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up! Federal agents even searched his suitcase looking for spades and shovels, claiming Emily was planning to act as Leigh’s ‘look out’ while he raided Marilyn’s tomb.
Bar manager Leigh, from Coventry, and Emily, 24, from Birmingham, were then quizzed for five hours at LAX before they were handcuffed and put into a van with illegal immigrants and locked up overnight. They spent 12 hours in separate holding cells…’They asked why we wanted to destroy America and we tried to explain it meant to get trashed and party. ‘I almost burst out laughing when they asked me if I was going to be Leigh’s lookout while he dug up Marilyn Monroe.
Leigh’s charge sheet, alongside a police mug shot and finger print, added: ‘He had posted on his Tweeter website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe. ‘Also on his tweeter account Mr Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.’
Beck Laxton, 46, and partner Kieran Cooper, 44, have spent half the decade concealing the gender of their son, Sasha. “I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping,” Laxton said in an interview with the Cambridge News. “Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?…Sasha dresses in clothes he likes — be it a hand-me-downs from his sister or his brother. The big no-no’s are hyper-masculine outfits like skull-print shirts and cargo pants.
In one photo, sent to friends and family, Sasha’s dressed in a shiny pink girl’s swimsuit. “Children like sparkly things,” says Beck. “And if someone thought Sasha was a girl because he was wearing a pink swimming costume, then what effect would that have?”…
When Sasha turned five and headed to school, Laxton was forced to make her son’s sex public. That meant Sasha would have to get used to being a boy in the eyes of his peers. Still, his mom is intervening. While the school requires different uniforms for boys and girls, Sasha wears a girl’s blouse with his pants.
Makes us want to play matchmaker. Look, almost anything’s better to comment on than the drip, drip, drip of the primary season, or the appalling situation in Washington.
Fisker Automotive is recalling all 239 of its 2012 Karma luxury plug-in hybrid cars because of a fire hazard, according to a report filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Prices on the 2012 model start at $103,000…the problem was discovered on Dec. 16, when workers at the Valmet Automotive assembly plant in Finland noticed coolant dripping…fewer than 50 vehicles were in the hands of consumers.
Hmmm. Made in Finland. Costs $100K. Nobody buys them. Hybrid that gets only 20mpg. Sets itself on fire. What could the punchline be? Some kind of joke about the USSR? No, sadly, the joke’s on all of us.
A Czech national was nabbed in Argentina for trying to board a transatlantic flight with 247 live animals including poisonous snakes and endangered reptiles packed in a bulging suitcase, reports said Monday. The man identified as Karel Abelovsky, 51, was caught while trying to board a flight for Madrid when shocked baggage X-ray technicians and staff at the Iberia Airlines desk at Ezeiza Airport in greater Buenos Aires noticed “organic substances moving inside,” local media reported.
When they opened the bag, they found more than 200 reptiles and mollusks, among them nine species of poisonous snakes including South American pitvipers, packed in clear plastic containers. There were also 15 venomous vipers, including two yararas — which can measure up to 1.50 meters (five feet) — and several young boas.
A similarly dangerous situation developed in the USA, but fortunately the TSA seized the cupcake.
A woman who just flew back home from Las Vegas says an airport security officer confiscated her frosted cupcake because he thought the icing on it could be a security risk. Rebecca Hains said the Transportation Security Administration agent at McCarran International Airport took her cupcake Wednesday, telling her its frosting was enough like a gel to violate TSA restrictions on allowing liquids and gels onto flights to prevent them from being used as explosives. She said the agent told her the frosting was conforming to the jar it was inside.
Last Saturday, violent groups of Islamic-Salafi radicals burned the famous scientific institute established by Napoleon in Egypt after its first encounter with the West. Some historians consider it the start of modern times in the Middle East. The site, L’Institut d’Egypte, held some 200,000 original and rare books, exhibits, maps, archeological findings and studies from Egypt and the entire Middle East, based on the work of generations of western researchers. Most of the artifacts were lost forever, burned or looted…
In 1258, the Mongols burned the immense library in Baghdad known as the “House of Wisdom.” It held rare writings that have disappeared forever, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and the other cornerstones of Western civilization. All we know today is that these books existed, yet following the terrible fire in Baghdad they were burned forever. The Mongols sought to secure the same objective as Egypt’s Salafis: Erasing the past and keeping only their present.
Earlier this year: “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.” Yeah, right.
In Montana’s Finley Basin there are known tungsten deposits. An Australian company wanted to bring revenue and jobs to the state by developing the resource. While the property was successfully drilled and recognized by Union Carbide in the seventies, it is now about 200 yards inside a roadless study area. The Forest Service was willing to offer a conditional drilling permit. Among the conditions were these requirements:
– The drill sites must be cleared using hand tools,
– The drilling equipment and fuel must be transported to the site by a team of pack mules,
– The mules must be fed certified weed-free hay, and
– Drill site and trail reclamation must be done using hand tools.
The company gave up. How can America remain competitive in a global marketplace when we are required to use pick axes and mules? How does this help America’s heavy equipment manufacturers like Caterpillar?
Everyone involved in this decision-making process should be terminated 1/21/13. They can stand in the unemployment line with the FTC employees who spend their time investigating Chuck E. Cheese.
The Justice Department on Friday rejected South Carolina’s law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls, saying it makes it harder for minorities to cast ballots. It was the first voter ID law to be refused by the federal agency in nearly 20 years…”Minority registered voters were nearly 20 percent more likely to lack DMV-issued ID than white registered voters, and thus to be effectively disenfranchised,” Perez wrote, noting that the numbers could be even higher since the data submitted by the state doesn’t include inactive voters.
A federal judge in Charleston, South Carolina blocked Thursday parts of the state’s anti-illegal immigration law approved by the legislature last summer…The first section blocked makes it a felony to transport or conceal a person “with intent to further that person’s unlawful entry into the United States” or to help that person avoid apprehension.
Campaign 2012. Attacking the rule of law on transparently flimsy grounds, and with such brass too. Pretty much what we predicted a year ago. In a way it’s not surprising, but in a way it’s shocking to see how far this country has fallen and so fast. (Imagine the kind of hope and change in store for the country 2013-2017 if these low lifes get away with this next November.)
Final points: (a) the opposition party is MIA on these outrages; and (b) the media, the media — the lead stories of the day are about a $20 a week tax cut for 8 weeks, and morons fighting over who gets to buy a pair of sneakers. A million Americans died in the nation’s wars for this?
as the Founders knew, it is unwise to give people more powers than you would like them to use. There ought to be a law, I think, that in order to regulate something you have to have some understanding of it. And when people are saying things like, “This is just the rogue foreign Web sites” and “This only targets the bad actors” and “So you want universities to host illegal pirated versions of copyrighted content?,” it’s enough to make you claw out large fistfuls of your hair. No! No! Nobody is hosting anything.
This bill would require service providers to cut off access to entire Web sites where users are deemed to be engaging in copyright infringement, not take down stolen content they posted themselves. That’s already against the law. But no one seemed to be able to express this. When you have a signed letter from the engineers responsible for creating the Internet pointing out that this bill would jeopardize our cybersecurity, balkanize the Internet and create a climate of uncertainty that would stifle innovation, it seems odd to ignore it.
As a general rule, when the people saying that this will have a horrible, chilling impact on something are the ones who created that thing in the first place, and the people who are saying, “Oh, no, it’ll be fine, it only targets the bad actors” are members of the Motion Picture Association of America, it seems obvious whose opinion you should heed.
The bill has now been amended to exclude .com, .net, and .org and only target those darned foreigners, which of course illustrates just how idiotic the bill is. Pirate Bay, anyone? Our question is this: why, after the horrible overreach of government during the past three years, is there a potential majority in Congress to give even more power to the government? Have these people learned nothing at all?
Millionaire job creators are like unicorns. They are impossible to find and don’t exist.
Such wisdom, and from the same fellow who said that “there’s not a single shred of evidence” that over-regulating kills jobs. No wonder relations with the business community are what they are.
On second thought, at least he didn’t say this: “I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln — just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history.”
NTSB recommends full ban on use of cell phones while driving…Tuesday’s recommendation, if adopted by states, would outlaw non-emergency phone calls and texting by operators of every vehicle on the road. It would apply to hands-free as well as hand-held devices…Chairwoman Hersman said the ban may inconvenience motorists, but would save lives…The NTSB said cell phone laws alone would not solve the problem, but must be accompanied by aggressive educational campaigns
Ah, our federal government. Usurping the role of the states, mandating a totally inappropriate and petty one-size-fits-all non-solution that encourages lawbreaking, and building an unnecessary education bureaucracy. An apt metaphor for the idiocy of the last three years. No wonder pretty much everybody has had it up to here with Washington.
Coca-Cola’s traditional Christmas cans disappeared this year. Wes Pruden:
Coca-Cola…withdrew the red cans and replaced them with snow-white cans as antiseptic as a bedpan. The white cans are decorated with shadowy images of polar bears, commemorating Coke’s contribution of $3 million to the World Wildlife Fund’s campaign to “save the polar bears.”
Maybe next year Coke will have cans illustrated with a hockey stick and no Medieval Warm Period. That’ll wow ‘em. (In our view, doctoring the data to remove the MWP was necessary in the minds of the global warming fraudsters so that they could claim that recent warming was “unprecedented” and would require spending vast unnecessary sums, which BTW would benefit them economically and professionally.)
EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration…EU officials concluded that, following a three-year investigation, there was no evidence to prove the previously undisputed fact. Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict…
professors Dr Andreas Hahn and Dr Moritz Hagenmeyer…compiled what they assumed was an uncontroversial statement in order to test new laws which allow products to claim they can reduce the risk of disease, subject to EU approval. They applied for the right to state that “regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration” as well as preventing a decrease in performance.
However, last February, the European Food Standards Authority (EFSA) refused to approve the statement. A meeting of 21 scientists in Parma, Italy, concluded that reduced water content in the body was a symptom of dehydration and not something that drinking water could subsequently control.
Just how many millions of euros were spent on conferences in Parma and other things for a “three-year investigation” of whether water is wet? Niall Ferguson may well be right.
Plan EJ 2014, which is meant to mark the 20th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 12898 on environmental justice, is EPA’s overarching strategy for advancing environmental justice. It seeks to: 1. Protect the environment and health in overburdened communities.
2. Empower communities to take action to improve their health and environment.
3. Establish partnerships with local, state, tribal, and federal governments and organizations to achieve healthy and sustainable communities
In July 2010, EPA introduced Plan EJ 2014 as a concept for public comment and initiated the development of implementation plans. This product is the culmination of nearly a year’s effort by EPA programs and regions, as well as engagement with stakeholders, to develop nine implementation plans with the goals, strategies, deliverables, and milestones outlined herein.
Plan EJ 2014 has three major sections: Cross-Agency Focus Areas, Tools Development Areas, and Program Initiatives. The following summaries outline the implementation plans for Plan EJ 2014’s five cross-Agency Focus Areas and four Tools Development Areas
This is the sort of nonsense we’re spending taxpayer money on in these troubled times? Tellingly, the 181 page brochure on “environmental justice,” whatever that is, has quite a few pages with the legend “this page left intentionally blank” — so you can waste paper when printing the document. Everyone connected with this should be fired immediately. HT: PL
The US has enough smallpox vaccine to inoculate the entire population for three bucks a pop. But that’s not good enough. LAT:
the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work. Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world’s richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor. When Siga complained that contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services were resisting the company’s financial demands, senior officials replaced the government’s lead negotiator for the deal, interviews and documents show. When Siga was in danger of losing its grip on the contract a year ago, the officials blocked other firms from competing…
the government could draw on $1 billion worth of smallpox vaccine it already owns to inoculate the entire U.S. population and quickly treat people exposed to the virus. The vaccine, which costs the government $3 per dose, can reliably prevent death when given within four days of exposure. Siga’s drug, an antiviral pill called ST-246, would be used to treat people who were diagnosed with smallpox too late for the vaccine to help. Yet the new drug cannot be tested for effectiveness in people because of ethical constraints — and no one knows whether animal testing could prove it would work in humans.
Smallpox is lethal and nasty. When Edward Jenner created the smallpox vaccine by using cowpox, he arguably contributed to saving more lives than any single man in history, yet we have found no record of him receiving a $433 million contract.
You will recall that some years ago, people worried about a smallpox terrorist attack. The US government created a plan to deal with it, and an idiotic plan it was. A group a bad guys flying on Southwest for a week before they keeled over would render the government’s plan useless. They’d also render ST-246 useless. So this is another big waste of money. Far better and cheaper to encourage voluntary vaccinations, but apparently this is not being done. We are given to understand, however, that the government officials in charge of smallpox response have all been vaccinated. How nice for them.
Several decades ago, back when Ugly George roamed Manhattan, there was a homeless fellow whom we’d often see in the vicinity of Broadway and 57th Street. He had a shopping cart with a drum in it. He’d play the drum occasionally and ask for handouts. For some reason, he wore what appeared to be shoe polish on his head outlining the part of the scalp normally covered by hair. We hadn’t thought of him in a long time, but he seems to now have successors galore.
Of all these parts of Obama’s executive order, the loan forgiveness aspect will have the least impact. By moving the timeline from 25 to 20 years, it could be significant in the long run — but it won’t be felt for decades. Remember, 82% of the current student loan debt outstanding was accrued in just the past decade. So it will be at least another 10 years before any of those borrowers have hit the 20-year mark…The monthly impact of the president’s new effort for most Americans paying off college debt will be between $4 and $8
More sleight-of-hand for the innumerate and the gullible. BTW, if this is not a photoshop, this girl needs more than just financial help. (Glenn Reynolds has a simple plan to deal with the debt problem.)
