Tahrir Square, Zucotti Park, Times Square, and the world

good stuff...

Thousands of anti-Wall Street protesters rallied in New York City's Times Square Saturday, buoyed by a global day of demonstrations in support of their monthlong campaign against corporate greed.

Inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, protests Saturday started in Asia and rippled through Europe back to the United States and Canada. Protesters fed up with economic inequality took to the streets in cities from Washington, Boston and Chicago to Los Angeles, Miami and Toronto.

After weeks of intense media coverage, the size of the U.S. protests Saturday have been smaller than G20 meetings or political conventions have yielded in recent years. Such events often draw tens of thousands of demonstrators.

In New York, where the movement began when protesters set up camp in a Lower Manhattan park on Sept. 17, organizers said the protest grew to at least 5,000 people as they marched to Times Square from their makeshift outdoor headquarters.

"These protests are already making a difference,'' said Jordan Smith, 25, a former substance abuse counselor from San Francisco, who joined the New York protest. "The dialogue is now happening all over the world."

let's keep it going... this is certainly the most spirit-lifting thing that's happened in my lifetime...

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I must be prescient

this morning, i sent the following email to a friend...

is it beyond the realm of possibility to even imagine that, given just how incredibly profitable war, terrorism and massive surveillance are for a select few, that the u.s. policy of carrying out random predator drone attacks carried out by anonymous people sitting behind electronic consoles 10,000 miles away, attacks that seemingly come from nowhere and are entirely unpredictable, attacks that inevitably kill many innocent civilians on a daily basis, just might be intentionally provoking a terrorist response, thus insuring that there's no end to it...?

barely two hours later, i read the following in the new york post...

It was payback.

The Connecticut man charged yesterday with the botched Times Square car bombing confessed to trying to slaughter innocent people in retaliation for US drone attacks that wiped out the leadership of his beloved Taliban, The Post has learned.

"his beloved taliban"...? oh, puh-le-e-e-eze... give it a rest...

that was followed by this in wired, commenting on the post article...

The tabloid, relying on anonymous “law-enforcement sources,” says that Shahzad was an “eyewitness” to the unmanned “onslaught throughout the eight months he spent in Pakistan beginning last summer.”

In a video made prior to the attack, the Pakistani Taliban leader Qari Hussain Mehsud said “the attack is a revenge” for “the recent rain of drone attacks,” and for the slaying of extremist leaders in Iraq and Pakistan.

There have been an estimated 121 American drone strikes in Pakistan since early 2008. The death toll, by some calculations, is over 1,000 people. Counterinsurgency and counterterror experts have warned that the drone strikes risked creating more enemies than they offed.

can you even imagine what it would be like to live in constant fear of death raining out of the skies at any minute...? i know i can't...

right now, i'm listening to kids running around madly outside in full-bore sugar hype after downing soda and cake to celebrate my grandson's 11th birthday... what if, suddenly, they were taken out by a drone strike targeting our next-door neighbor who had been tagged as an al qaeda supporter...? how would i feel...? how would i react...? i wouldn't be just sitting around wringing my hands, i can tell you that much...

we blithely sit in our consumer-fueled, faux paradise and condemn people around the world for all sorts of things and the truth is, we don't have the slightest fucking idea what we're talking about...

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Here we go...

absolutely as predicted...

NYC officials push for dramatic expansion of electronic surveillance

New York officials say they could stop attacks like the attempted Times Square car bomb by expanding a controversial surveillance system so sensitive that it will pick up even suspicious behavior.

New York is already a heavily policed city, with 35,000 officers and a counterterrorism bureau -- the first of its kind in the country -- partnering the FBI.

But Saturday's failed terrorist bomb in the Times Square tourist hot spot has provided the authorities with a new argument for expanding a sometimes controversial security blanket of cameras, sensors and analytical software.

not all bets are sure things, but this one ain't one of 'em... i would have given the last hair on my already-balding pate that this headline would be following in lockstep with the times square incident as sure as night follows day...

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