Living in terror

By by Michael Petrou and Nicholas Köhler - Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 8:20 AM - 20 Comments

Reuters/ Newscom

New Yorkers were saved from possible carnage when a car bomb failed to explode in Times Square earlier this month. That was due, in part, to a familiar mix of factors that have minimized casualties from terrorism on American soil since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: luck, vigilance, and the bumbling incompetence of those who plotted the attempted assaults.

Minutes after a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder packed with propane canisters, fertilizer, gasoline, gunpowder and firecrackers was parked on the square, two street vendors noticed smoke wafting from the car and alerted nearby police. They closed surrounding streets to foot and vehicle traffic and evacuated nearby buildings.

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It takes effort to miss the trend here

By Paul Wells - Friday, January 15, 2010 at 10:45 AM - 66 Comments

“Consider this hypothetical,” Andrew Sullivan wrote in The Atlantic three years ago. “It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm . . . If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close.”

Yeah, not so much. In December 2009, a young Nigerian Muslim saw the new face of America, Barack Hussein Obama, on his television and kept sewing high explosive into his underwear. On Christmas Day, the man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, wore his stuffed shorts onto Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam, tried to detonate them over Detroit, and the rest is hysteria.

So it turns out that the mere sight of a black President with Muslims among his ancestors won’t stop a terrorist cold in his tracks. There was something almost sweet about the idea: maybe murderous hatred of the United States could be tipped back into something more benign, simply by showing George W. Bush and Dick Cheney the door. It would be excellent if it were true, but it isn’t. And that wasn’t the only myth that blew up when Abdulmutallab’s pants did.

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This Is Either Edgy, Or Stupid, Or Both

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 3:28 PM - 7 Comments

One thing I forgot to include in my weekend post — about why Unhappily Ever After has turned out to be the better of Kevin Connolly’s two shows — is this clip, which may be the closest thing this show had to an iconic moment (well, that and all the scenes of drunken audience members hooting at Nikki Cox), and sort of sums up why this crass, stupid, cheap (it was literally the lowest-budgeted scripted network show of its era) has gained a certain cult following. The hero talks to his imaginary friend about how to deal with his daughter’s unsuitable boyfriend, and they spend three minutes discussing the best solution: kill the boyfriend, and then kill six random strangers so that the police will look for a motiveless serial killer.

It is at once really dark and really stupid, but you’ve got to give them credit for doing a sequence you wouldn’t see on other comedies — on broadcast, HBO or any self-respecting network. There are some network TV shows that are the equivalent of Roger Corman movies: they have no money, they’re obviously ripped off from other projects, and they’re crass and exploitative, Continue…

The reckoning continues

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, April 24, 2009 at 1:09 PM - 24 Comments

Andrew Mitrovica traces the tale of Canada and the 9/11 terrorists.

Today, in the aftermath of Napolitano’s grating comments, Harper and some of his cabinet members who once condemned Canada as a “soft spot” for terror, have been busy instructing their man in Washington to disabuse the Obama administration of the notion that Canada was or remains a soft spot for terrorists.

In other words, Harper has mobilized the diplomatic and political machinery at his disposal to try to finally shatter a frustrating myth that senior members of his government once enthusiastically promoted.

al-Qaeda or al-Nader?

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, November 19, 2008 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

A little quiz that has been floating around the internet for the past few years serves up a series of quotations on the subject on industrialization, consumerism, and the despoliation of nature. The reader is then invited to guess which document each passage is taken from, Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance, or the Unabomber Manifesto.  All in fun. 

But today CNN is reporting that al-Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri has posted to the internet a short message attacking Barack Obama, saying ”in you and in Colin Powell, (Condoleezza) Rice and your likes, the words of Malcolm X (may Allah have mercy on him) concerning ‘House Negroes’ are confirmed.”

Wherever would he have learned such language? Perhaps he’s hired everyone’s favourite Green Independent, Ralph Nader, as a speechwriter. Time for a new quiz maybe: