BOSTON STRONG: A Celebration of the Police State

"It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable".

- Eric Hoffer

On April 19, 2013 the police state came to Boston. Days after the heinous act of cruelty and desperation that was the Boston Marathon bombing, where two homemade pressure cooker bombs packed with shrapnel were detonated at the finish line the order was given and the paramilitary police squads were sent into the streets in search of one 19 year old punk. Injury was followed by insult as a portion of the city was placed under an undeclared state of martial law in a preview of what in the future will become commonplace in The Homeland as conditions continue to deteriorate. The alleged perpetrators, two brothers of Chechen descent, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were rapidly identified by security camera videos taken just prior to the explosions and in a subsequent gunfight with police the elder brother Tamerlan was killed. This precipitated the lockdown and manhunt that while cleaned up and sanitized by the popular slogan "Boston Strong" to present a show of unity in the aftermath of tragedy was as much an outrage and affront to local dignity and pride as the bombings themselves. A populace that fancies itself as scrappy fighters ready to throw down over any perceived slight or indignity were driven into a state of fear and cowardice where disobedience would be dealt with at the end of a government gun.

Heavily armed, militarized and amped up thugs clad in that now so familiar black Kevlar and using armored vehicles more befitting of an actual war zone patrolled the streets and conducted warrantless searches on terrified residents who were ordered to stay in their homes. It was an astounding display of just how far that we have now been dragged down the path to full blown fascism and despite the criminality and horror of the bombing it did not merit such a huge and costly response. Perhaps it was just revenge and bloodlust but more likely it was an excuse for a live drill for the imposition of martial law. The national media ate it all up too, it was like a real life episode of The Running Man and despite the overwhelming display of government police power young Tsarnaev was found cowering in a covered boat by its owner in his own backyard. Just as those events of September 11, 2001 set into motion a series of actions that led to two ruinous and costly (or lucrative) wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, the evisceration of American civil liberties, the unleashing of an out of control surveillance apparatus that has no accountability, the codifying of torture, a terminally damaged political system and a myriad of other indignities so too did Black Friday, April 19, 2013. It was a day when the Rubicon was crossed in Boston with the live rollout of martial law in America and the realization of Captain Bryant's implied threat to Deckard in the sci-fi classic Blade Runner that "if you're not cop you're little people".

Any shame or even questioning of the paramilitary lockdown was washed away by the healing power of "Boston Strong" which was simultaneously a balm for a city's wounds, a unifying cause as that which existed after 9/11 and a marketing opportunity. It was all things to all people and I excerpt the following from the Wikipedia page:

In the hours after the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, 2013, the slogan "Boston Strong" appeared as a highly popular hashtag on Twitter and rapidly spread around the world. An expression of Boston's unity after the bombings, the slogan showed up on T-shirts and other products, and was emblazoned on the "Green Monster" wall at Boston's Fenway Park. The Boston Bruins displayed the slogan on their helmets at their game two days after the bombings, and at the first baseball game in Fenway Park after the bombings, the stadium announcer told the crowd: "We are one. We are strong. We are Boston. We are Boston strong."

On April 17, two days after the bombings, a T-shirt vendor and another private individual submitted separate trademark registration applications to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, seeking to obtain ownership of the "Boston Strong" slogan for use on commercial products. One of the applicants said he wanted the trademark in order to prevent people from outside the Boston area from benefiting from it. A trademark attorney was quoted in the Huffington Post as predicting that the government office would deny the registration on the grounds that the slogan was already in the public domain and could not be linked to any specific entity.

The Boston Red Sox baseball team adopted it and rode that warhorse all of the way to a World Series title, after the game there were pilgrimages made by fans to the Boston Marathon finish line to kiss the street. One wonders that with all of the hype and emotion invested that if the Red Sox had lost the series would that have meant that the "terrorists" had won? It was more of the same eerie strangeness of the 21st century and any heretic who dared to question it as HBO's Bill Maher did when he said:  "You know again it was a bad day. Three people died that's terrible, more were maimed that's horrible, but unfortunately that happens every day in car accidents and everything else. I mean your city was not leveled by Godzilla". The comedian was immediately denounced  by Boston Mayor Tom Menino who hissed that the comments were "irresponsible" - as if unleashing thousands of heavily armed paramilitary forces on the citizenry wasn't.

This past week marked the anniversary of both the bombing as well as the de-facto declaration of martial law, tomorrow on Monday it will be the first race after the latest version of 'the day when everything changed' The media propaganda blitzkrieg has been unrelenting as the commemoration of "Boston Strong" and testimonials to the perseverance of the victims whose limbs were shredded (and tributes to the three who died) has reached the saturation point with the final orgy of crass exploitation likely coming on Monday when this year's race will occur. I don't even live in Boston and have been bludgeoned by it, the entire national media is in on the action including the magazine Sports Illustrated  that has capitalized on the bombing and all sports aspects related to juice their sales. But nowhere is the decidedly un-American police takeover of a portion of a major city questioned nor even mentioned aside from the passing reference to the heroic pursuit of the hunted -- it has been relegated to the same memory hole where facts that are inconvenient to the metastasizing police state are chucked into.

Not quite approaching the level of local animosity and hate directed at Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is that being directed at a 25 year old man named whose idea of humor - from the account given by a story in The Boston Herald a possible act of political protest - was to place a fake "bomb" in a backpack at the finish line. According to the Boston Herald story "Man in custody following bomb scare at marathon finish line":

A man dressed all in black and chanting "Boston Strong! Boston Strong!" lugged a backpack near the marathon finish line last night - just as a bus with two-bombing survivors arrived - in a scary security breach that's raising concerns just days before Monday's race.

The suspect - identified by a law enforcement source as Kevin Edson - was arrested at about 6:50 p.m. as a bus carrying J.P. and Paul Norden - who both lost their right legs in last year's bombings - pulled up at the end of a walking relay to raise money for prosthetics.

"It was alarming. It was crazy." said Peter Brown, the uncle of the Stoneham brothers. "It was some whack job. Boston's got to do their job. It happened right after we about finished our walk. The cops grabbed him, but I'm pissed."

An eyewitness told the Herald he saw the suspect walking right down the middlt of Boylston Street barefood and shrouded in a black veil, black hat and wrapped in a black body suit, chanting, "Boston Strong! Boston Strong".

"It was something right ouf of a movie." said the witness, Matthew VanWinkle. "It was surreal-looking, to see this guy walking right down the middle of Boylston Street"

Not as "surreal" as the scene will be if there is another security breach come Monday after the outpouring of gut-wrenching patriotic hogwash and there is another real bomb or two that go off. If that happens (and we all better hope that it doesn't) then the scene will truly be like "something right out of a movie", an updated version of Red Dawn where the brute force of an occupying power crushes the locals or more appropriately a documentary about the Nazi invasion of Poland.

Mr. Edson is being held on $100,000 bail by the local authorities on charges of possession of use of a hoax device and making a false bomb threat but could be more appropriately charged with daring to defile the "Boston Strong" mythology in such a blatant and act so as to mock the unified city narrative that is a facade for the shame and cowardice of having been kicked around and bullied by the cops. Edson faces up to 20 years in the for-profit prison system and is surely being worked over by the pigs for his recalcitrance and failure to respect the ongoing ritual, once in prison he will likely be anally raped which is exactly what has happened to Americans since the phony and profitable war on terror was allowed to trump the Constitution.

Among those seeking to exploit the anniversary of the bombings for their own purposes included Vice President Joseph Biden who appeared at a ceremony on Tuesday. According to a CNN story Biden said to the crowd and media audience that:

"You have become the face of America's resolve for the whole world to see," Biden said, adding that people all around the world know the pride, courage, and resolve of Bostonians. "That's why the twisted, cowardly terrorists who acted here and in other places do what they do. They try to instill fear so that we will jettison what we value the most and what the world most values about us: an open society, our system of justice, our freedom of religion; our access to opportunity, the free flow of information and ideas."

 The terrorists, Biden said, "wanted to make America afraid so that maybe, maybe, we'd begin to change our ways. That's the objective -- the very soul of who we are. They figured if they instill enough fear, we will change. And it infuriates them that we refuse to bend, refuse to change, refuse to yield to fear.

"You are Boston strong. But America is strong. ... That's what makes us so proud of this city and this state. What makes me so proud to be an American is that we have never, ever yielded to fear. Never."

While it wasn't exactly George W. Bush standing on the smoldering debris of the World Trade Center with a bullhorn the point was made that under the existing poisoned and compromised political class of The Homeland that the police state which was birthed on that day is here to stay. Biden though is full of crap because FEAR is exactly what Americans yielded to after that pristine New York Tuesday morning back in 2001 that turned into a horror show. Joe Biden is a pathetically bad liar though because yielding to fear is exactly what Americans did after that day. 

FEAR allowed for the rollback of civil liberties.

FEAR provided the basis for an illegal invasion of Iraq, a country that did not threaten America.

FEAR unleashed the fully militarized police state on America, as seen in action in Beantown last year two days after the bombing as thousands of black clad paramilitary types ransacked neighborhoods to hunt down one punk.

FEAR provided the excuse for the NSA and it's private and foreign collaborators to usurp the Constitution and to conduct massive data-mining and warrantless surveillance on millions of law abiding citizens.

FEAR allowed for the redirection of trillions of taxpayer dollars into a monstrous surveillance machine, a Top Secret America that became a Surveillance State Gomorrah and continues to grow daily. 

FEAR allowed the Bush administration to turn the USA into a torture state and Obama is still covering up conduct that was so over the line that it rivaled that of Nazi war criminals hanged at Nuremberg.

I could continue but I don't have the time nor is there sufficient space...

Biden also paid tribute to the arrogant form of American imperialism that currently has the world on the brink of a war to end all wars thanks to the hubris, moral rot and bloodlust that permeates from the administration which he is a member of.  The applause line that "We are America, we own the finish line"  is ironically appropriate in more ways than one, the real finish line is coming as the Empire is on a collision course with nuclear power Russia as well as economic power that is China, both of whom our neocon infested policy establishment is hellbent at confronting.

The reference to the "finish line" is also fitting that after the triumphant World Series win there was that aforementioned group of revelers who actually showed up at that exact same finish line to kiss the street - they had better get used to doing exactly that if and when the martial law drill conducted last year goes live for good.

FEAR has a twin brother named SHAME and Americans should be ashamed of ourselves for allowing charlatans the likes of Biden and his ilk to have exploited the former without any semblance of the latter.

Biden Shamelessly Exploits Boston Marathon Bombing Tribute

Tuesday, on the one year anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing allegedly to be the work of two lone wolf Muslim “terrorists”, both of whom managed to slip through the NSA’s “collect it all” net of total national surveillance was either commemorated or celebrated, probably a combination of both across the fruited plain of The Homeland. The incident, a heinous criminal act consisting of the planting of two shrapnel filled pressure cooker bombs at the finish line permanently altered forever the livesof hundreds of innocent people, a good number of who lost limbs was allegedly perpetrated by two young Muslim men the Tsarnaev brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan. The older brother,Tamerlan who had a mysterious background that seems to have included trips abroad and possible involvement in acts of violence domestically was killed in a shootout. The younger Dzokhar was the target of what was the rollout of a state of martial law and went on to gain national infamy when a flattering picture of him adorned the cover of Rolling Stone magazine – not to bother with the hypocrisy that a similar picture was published in the establishment New York Times and other papers without similar ginned up outrage.

Vice President Joe Biden, still a potential 2016 Democratic party presidential contender until the unstoppable juggernaut that is Hillary Clinton formally announces that she is running (if she is) showed up in Beantown on Tuesday to like the state-corporate media milk the anniversary of the tragedy for all that it was worth. In a soaring and often inspirational speech at the tribute Biden mixed platitudes and Tony Robbins style motivational with the standard demagoguery of the post September 11, 2001 permanent warfare state. The media prepped the masses with the constant reminder that the 3 actual deaths and 264 injured was the WORST TERRORIST ATTACK ON AMERICAN SOIL SINCE 9/11 and the Vice President seized upon that to hammer home his message of hope and American exceptionalism all nice and tightly bound up and then dipped in a coating of pure bullshit to keep it together.

The city of Boston, unified in grief, outrage and I would imagine a good deal of shame after their neighborhoods were swarmed by legions of black clad paramilitary police forces conducting house to house searches at gun point in what for all intents and purposes looked like martial law. The nifty bumper sticker slogan “Boston Strong” was rolled out in the aftermath of the bombing and it was seized upon by locals, the national baseball league Red Sox who used it as a motivator for their World Series run and most of ally by self-serving authoritarian types to push for their police state as well as to use for cheap politics.

Vice President Joseph Biden was one of them. According to a Reuters story Biden thundered:

"We refuse to bend, refuse to change, refuse to yield to fear"... "that is what makes us so proud of this city and this state, what makes me be so proud to be an American. It's that we have never, ever yielded to fear. Never"

While it wasn't exactly George W. Bush standing on the smoldering debris of the World Trade Center the point was made that under the existing poisoned and compromised political class that The Homeland that was birthed on 'the day that everything changed' is here to stay. Biden though is full of crap because FEAR is exactly what Americans yielded to after that pristine Tuesday morning back in 2001  turned into a horror show.  Biden is a liar though because yielding to fear is exactly what Americans did after that day. 

FEAR allowed for the rollback of civil liberties

FEAR provided the basis for an illegal invasion of Iraq, a country that did not threaten America

FEAR unleashed the fully militarized police state on America, as seen in action in Beantown last year two days after the bombing as thousands of black clad paramilitary types ransacked neighborhoods to hunt down one punk. 

FEAR provided the excuse for the NSA and it's private and foreign collaborators to usurp the Constitution and to conduct massive data-mining and warrantless surveillance on millions of law abiding citizens.

FEAR allowed for the redirection of trillions of taxpayer dollars into a monstrous surveillance machine, a Top Secret America that became a Surveillance State Gomorrah and continues to grow daily. 

FEAR allowed the Bush administration to turn the USA into a torture state and Obama is still covering up conduct that was so over the line that it rivaled that of Nazi war criminals hanged at Nuremberg. 

I could continue but I don't have the time...

 Biden also paid tribute to the arrogant form of American imperialism that currently has the world on the brink of a war to end all wars thanks to the hubris, moral rot and bloodlust that permeates from the administration which he is a member of.  The applause line that "We are America, we own the finish line" is ironically appropriate in more ways than one, the real finish line is coming as the Empire is on a collision course with nuclear power Russia as well as economic power that is China, both of whom our neocon infested policy establishment is hellbent at confronting.

The reference to the "finish line" is also fitting for Boston in that after the triumphant World Series win of the Red Sox who rode "Boston Strong" like a gravy train there was a pilgrimage of revelers who actually showed up at that exact same finish line to kiss the street - they had better get used to doing exactly that if and when the martial law drill conducted last year goes live.

FEAR has a twin brother named SHAME and Americans should be ashamed of ourselves for allowing charlatans the likes of Biden and his ilk to have exploited the former without any semblance of the latter. 

Blood Vengeance for Beantown

The Feds, particularly the Department of Justice have officially announced their intent to kill Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev which will likely provide an extra boost to alcohol sales in Beantown this Super Bowl weekend. Attorney General Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s top hatchet man released the news on Thursday that the U.S. government was seeking to exact the ultimate revenge even if the state in which the crime was committed does not allow the death penalty. Now before I even get into this at length I want emphasize that I am in no way defending the vicious little punk nor his dead brother for this heartless criminal act. They do however remain as suspects and as a result have yet to have their due guilt affirmed by a court of law which don’t seem to matter very much anymore in The Homeland.  What is troubling at a far deeper level than the heinous acts perpetrated upon innocent men, women and children last April 15^th at a sporting event that is of no small degree of public pride for the city of Boston is the manner in which that wanton act of barbarity became a symbol in the aftermath. That April 15th is Patriot's Day in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts while September 11th post-2001 has been at least somewhat officially tabbed as Patriot Day - in the phony war on terror it is important that the state be able to assign symbolic importance to such dates as they wage their real war against the Constitution.

The bombings proved a very fortuitous event for the police state as it became a live drill for how to impose a state of de facto martial law upon a portion of a major American city. Paramilitary shock troops roamed the streets backed up by military grade hardware and technology all justified on the basis of chasing down one young punk, the word overkill is not sufficient to describe the response of the authorities as they hunted down Tsarnaev. The paramilitary forces engaged in warrantless and unconstitutional house to house searches, more often than not welcomed by cowardly residents. The fact that they had no real choice than to allow the state sanctioned home invasions is terrifying and had the least bit of resistance been put up, given the level of bloodlust unleashed  by that monstrously criminal act the person who would have done so would not be alive today.

It was a despicable  act and permanently altered the lives of hundreds but Tsarnaev has not even been found guilty yet, the trial has yet to occur. This latest iteration of The Homeland is one more area where the government is unchaining itself from the Constitution, death has already been preordained by the state. Tsarnaev will at least get a trial albeit one in a kangaroo court carried out with maximum assistance from the state-corporate media and while it won’t be O.J. Simpson it will be every bit the circus in its own right. Similar rights to due process, no matter how stacked that the deck will be against the defendant were not extended to the victims of Obama’s extrajudicial killings by drone, the American citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16 year old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki nor will they be for Edward Snowden.

Holder's announcement of the death penalty for Tsarnaev is all about symbolism, the city of Boston passed the test as the successful Guinea pigs in the grand experiment of American fascism. Not only did they acquiesce to the black clad goon squads while they were in hot pursuit of their vastly outnumbered prey but in a perverse reaction that defies the history of the city itself, which prides itself on Revolutionary War legends not only rolled over but actually fucking celebrated the violation of their Constitutional rights. Boston Strong became the central organizing maxim in the aftermath of the city being raped by the fascist police state. Hell, the Boston Red Sox baseball team, seeing great opportunity to seize upon a motivational theme for the great post-Bobby Valentine crusade glommed onto the sick exploitation of the bombings in their crusade that ultimately resulted in a World Series win. Red Sox players, once and forever proving that highly paid professional athletes should just shut the hell up and stay out of politics freely used the terrorist attacks for their own self-promotion and the state media eagerly played along with it. When the last out of the decisive game six had been registered and the hardware ensured drunken BoSox fans made their very own pilgrimage to their Mecca, the finish line of the Boston Marathon to kiss the street.

The announcement that the Feds have already predetermined that the suspect will be put to death is just the latest road sign that we have whipped past upon the highway to hell, careening towards the imminent collapse and the subsequent headfirst plunge into the abyss. 

The Police State Isn't Coming, It's Already Here

“It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable”.

- Eric Hoffer

Not that I care very much for John Rutherford of the Whitehead Institute, a notorious right-wing think tank but as the old adage goes – even a broken clock is right twice a day. In his latest piece entitled ” ‘Boston Strong’: Marching in Lockstep with the Police State. Rutherford, who backed that ugly tramp Paula Jones in her lawsuit against the horndog in chief Bill Clinton cuts through the flag-swaddled dreck to call a spade a spade. Boston was placed under MARTIAL LAW last Friday, a day that will prove to be as dark as any in this nation’s history when all is said and done with. The Rubicon was officially crossed on April 19, 2013 and the only thing that is more disturbing than the massive show of paramilitary power in Beantown is the degree that it has been accepted, just another feature of “The New Normal”. 

I will now excerpt from Whitehead’s piece  -

 

Whatever the threat to so-called security—whether it’s rumored weapons of mass destruction, school shootings, or alleged acts of terrorism—it doesn’t take much for the American people to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, even if it means submitting to martial law, having their homes searched, and being stripped of one’s constitutional rights at a moment’s notice.

As journalist Andrew O’Hehir observes in Salon:

In America after 9/11, we made a deal with the devil, or with Dick Cheney, which is much the same thing. We agreed to give up most of our enumerated rights and civil liberties (except for the sacrosanct Second Amendment, of course) in exchange for a lot of hyper-patriotic tough talk, the promise of “security” and the freedom to go on sitting on our asses and consuming whatever the hell we wanted to. Don’t look the other way and tell me that you signed a petition or voted for John Kerry or whatever. The fact is that whatever dignified private opinions you and I may hold, we did not do enough to stop it, and our constitutional rights are now deemed to be partial or provisional rather than absolute, do not necessarily apply to everyone, and can be revoked by the government at any time.

Particularly disheartening is the fact that Americans, consumed with the need for vengeance, seem even less concerned about protecting the rights of others, especially if those “others” happen to be of a different skin color or nationality. The public response to the manhunt, capture and subsequent treatment of brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is merely the latest example of America’s xenophobic mindset, which was also a driving force behind the roundup and detention of hundreds of Arab, South Asian and Muslim men following 9/11, internment camps that housed more than 18,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II, and the arrest and deportation of thousands of “radical” noncitizens during America’s first Red Scare.

To be a Muslim in America today it to be “Juden” in 1930’s era Germany, already the persecution machine is ramping up. It may not exactly be September 11,  2001 but it’ll do.

It is astonishing to witness the degree that unquestioning American lemmings so easily acquiesce to the rapidly tightening of the iron fist of state. This is what happens when a society is conditioned to live in fear. There was a time not so long ago where being forced to take off one’s shoes at an airport and being aggressively frisked by government goons would have elicited outrage. This is no longer the land in which we dwell, the sate and those who profit from it have seized on the September 11^th 2001 events to justify any and all foreign aggression and the stripping of rights here at home. No perceived offense is too small to add more paramiltary equipment and training to local police forces, already augmented by the Homeland Security Gestapo. The bad assed bogeyman Osama bin Laden may now be sleeping with the fishes but leave it to the Neocon embeds, Dick Cheney’s stay behind network and the ever complicit state media to ensure that there will be new arch villians and “monsters” to arm the police against, now it is the brothers Tsarnaev who serve as our Emanuel Goldstein. As I sit here sipping my morning cup o’ joe there are forces desperately looking for any sort of ginned up linkage between the Chechens who set off their dastardly shrapnel bomb at the Boston Marathon and overseas groups, like the Manichean devil Al Qaeda. It is very, very essential for the America that we now exist in to keep the already cowardly public in a state of constant fear. I recall a book that I once read entitled American Terminator that examined the role of Hollywood movies as an essential propaganda tool for shaping and reinforcing the basis for a mythical American exceptionalism and its desire for empire. The following passage is from that book which I strongly recommend to everybody with an interest in just how celluloid serves as a delivery device that is very useful in the indoctrination process.

Fear is essential: ‘Be afraid, be very afraid’ is the American condition.

To live in America is to be beset by fear, anxiety and insecurity, to be surrounded by potential harm, enemies and evil intent. And the wolf is always at the door. A nation of optimists is the more usual self-representation of America. Repetitively, Hollywood films conclude with a resolution, a rescue, and the winners ride off into the sunset or snuggle into a warm embrace that reassures us they will live happily ever after. The formulaic ending, however, is necessary because the plot, the narrative, is founded on and propelled by fear and anxiety, the dark essential underpinning of the American condition. For America fear is an original, natural condition, the inescapable birth rite (and birth right), the inherited condition of a fragile existence that must constantly be defended. Without fear there is no America; constant recourse to fear is the motivating force that determines its actions and reactions.

That was until 9/11 and the brain freezing FEAR of potential terrorism in the USA became the ultimate talisman of the state.  Herman Goering had it absolutely correct when he famously said:

“Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country”

And as Whitehead puts it

As the events in Boston have made clear, it does indeed work the same in every country. The same propaganda and police state tactics that worked for Adolf Hitler 80 years ago continue to be employed with great success in a post-9/11 America.

And the public of course always buys it, quivering, sniveling, pissing in their pants and practically screaming “please….take my freedom away”. Already, the Boston lockdown has provided cover for the TSA (an un-American entity that should be shredded into a million pieces and cast to the winds so counter to the concept of freedom that it is) to revoke the recently granted permission to carry miniature pocket knives onto airplanes. Really, just how fucking stupid are Americans if they believe that something so small as this can be used to actually highjack a plane? Americans watch too much television and too many movies, a decade and a half ago if a potential hijacker would have pulled out a mini-swiss army knife he would have been laughed off the plane. But the official state conspiracy theory of September 11, 2001 has become gospel that a group of losers who were allegedly well enough trained to take over jet airplanes with nothing but a box cutter and then to utilize their simulator flight training to pull off precision military daredevil piloting that even the most crackerjack pilots in the world would have trouble with has worked. It has worked out so well that any questioning of said official conspiracy theory is treated as a great apostasy and will have one immediately shunned by those whose worldview has been shaped by such lurid dramas as “Homeland” and “24”, but I am not going to go there this morning.

My oh my how the black vans will roll…