Saturday, October 09, 2004
"Stand by for an announcement"
On my way back from WFMU in Jersey City, Newark Penn Station to catch the 8:26, trains just stopped running period, frozen "all aboard" for the Trenton local & "15 minutes late" for the Long Branch, more & more crowded on the platform, nearly an hour passed & the only announcement was "stand by for an announcement." But I gathered from an off-duty conductor that an overhead wire was down in New York ... three times in six weeks just when I've been been a passenger. Also, the PATH was arriving in Newark on a different platform. In our strange times I prefer to think these are National Security experiments in redirecting travelers. Well, I simply redirected myself on to a diesel-powered Raritan Valley Line train, got off at Union/Kean University, & rode my little bike home in about the same amount of time it would take me to walk from Elizabeth station. For all I know, all those other hundreds of people are still stranded in Newark.
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Unnecessary National Security Scare of the Week: AMERICAN SCHOOL PLANS FOUND ON IRAQ COMPUTER DISK. Turns out it had nothing to do with "terrorists." Anyway, it's impossible to keep all school, hotel & hospital floor plans & schedules off the internet. Sometimes they are necessary for our public information & safety. Also, one can often figure out the room configuration of schools from outside the building. Yes, the Russian school hostage tragedy scared the bejesus out of us all. But this kind of security has to happen at the national level, at our borders & airports, & internally at the institutions themselves. & the greatest danger inside schools is the violence - battery & rape - committed by sociopathic students.
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"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
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Unnecessary National Security Scare of the Week: AMERICAN SCHOOL PLANS FOUND ON IRAQ COMPUTER DISK. Turns out it had nothing to do with "terrorists." Anyway, it's impossible to keep all school, hotel & hospital floor plans & schedules off the internet. Sometimes they are necessary for our public information & safety. Also, one can often figure out the room configuration of schools from outside the building. Yes, the Russian school hostage tragedy scared the bejesus out of us all. But this kind of security has to happen at the national level, at our borders & airports, & internally at the institutions themselves. & the greatest danger inside schools is the violence - battery & rape - committed by sociopathic students.
Add YOUR comments here
