If successful, the Portland bomb plot would have killed a record number of hipsters. Now the young and ironically detached are assessing what really matters in life: wifi.
Does Hell Have Wifi?
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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Sigh, I count hipsters as my friends. I take it these gentle-folk do not appeal to your sensibilities Ted?
I don’t think hipsters would be the kind of people to show up to a tree lighting.
Plus the plot was closely monitored from the beginning and the bomb was a fake, so “if successful” is a big “if.”
http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/11/27/oregon.bomb.plot/index.html?hpt=T2
Albert, there is also the little problem of having government informers instigating silly little plots along.
What I wanted to mention to you guys was an appeal to please not be massively pessimistic:
Matt Taibbi Recently Gave An Interview To Alternet and he said about the folks on Wall Street, who should by all accounts be the most motivated and intelligent people around:
I lived in Russia for ten years, and one of the things that attracts me to this Wall Street story was that it reminded me of what I had seen in Russia. In the former Soviet Union, I saw this incredible pessimism. There was no belief in the future because there was so much instability that people who had the ability to take anything, steal anything were doing it. They wanted to get the money and get out of the country as quickly as possible. That’s how I see the financial services industry in America with the mortgage scam. It was the “let’s get what all we can right now before it all blows up” mindset that you see in a third world country.
Ted I know you just wrote a book on the overthrowing the United States, but I appeal to you and your readers not to give in to this kind of thrid world pessimism.
I guess they have to have some evidence to prove that they were going to actually go through with it before they arrest them. But you are right that they don’t have to help them instigate it along, it makes skeptics think that there was really no plot after all. I remember there was something similar a few years ago during Bush, there was that Liberty City “plot” that turned up to be a lot of smoke and Bush tried to claim that he stopped a terrorist attack.
What’s up with that new arithmetic feature??? 13+4??? Wow, that’s one way to keep trolls out!
TLW. I embrace pessimism and futility as a matter of principle. “It’s hopeless” is an incredibly liberating ethic to live by. The looting of America is just another black comedy in the final analysis, which nobody is going to be around to read.
Ted, I think you forgot the quotes around “plot.” For all I know, this patsy was, as usual, goaded by the Stasi, I mean, the FBI, and in due time, reaped for media exposure.
I was thinking the same thing Aggie, we might free ourselves from stupid trolls. 🙂
The official story, if true, logically requires that (a) there never actually was any “Portland bomb plot” to begin with, and (b) the cabal behind the “plot” was FBI agents plus one patsy to take the fall. The FBI, for some reason, seems to have decided that the Oregon State Police and the Portland Police Bureau didn’t need to know that a major mass-murder conspiracy was (ostensibly) underway.
Perhaps it’s all a huge, entirely unconnected coincidence that this happened just days before the Portland City Council was due to meet in order to decide whether to bring Portland back into the JTTF. In 2005, Portland became the only city of its size to opt out, with the then-mayor citing major concerns about accountability and local control.