Security theater, Lady Min, but designed to impress the 1% and keep the 99% in ‘their place’. The security is a good deal more disruptive than any demonstrations, regular crime gets ignored for the duration. Another reason not to hold these events in cities, but exile them to empty islands.
I thought holding the economic meeting at a military base [Camp David is a Marine installation] and holding the military meeting in a center of commerce was more than a bit strange, but that is the effect of the staging for performances of Security Theater™ in the US.
]]>The city did a great job of scaring the $hit out of everyone and that’s just the way they wanted it. Police outnumbered protesters most of the time.
Large noisy helicopters were flying low over my residential area. These were not the little traffic copters. I looked up and saw four Chinooks and thought we were being invaded.
]]>As you say, Molotov cocktails in the absence of cobbles are not useful because the vertical surfaces hard enough to break relatively thick wine and beer bottles typically are fireproof. Throw it against a stone-clad building or the metal side of a police car? Get real! And throw it *under* the police car in hopes of catching the police car on fire, and all that happens is that it skitters across the pavement and fizzles out harmlessly in the gutter on the other side, since there are no cobbles to “catch” it and make it shatter. Thus why the Black Bloc doesn’t use them…
]]>Most leftist radicals in the US know enough not to carry incriminating materials on their persons, nor store them in their houses. They tend to use whatever is available at the protest – stones, bottles. When they set fires, they use debris and just light it.
Petrol has a readily identifiable odor that is difficult to get rid of, as anyone who has ever had a petrol can spill in their boot knows, so it would be really stupid to go to a demonstration smelling like a service station. Even the ‘Black Bloc-heads’ are smarter than that.
]]>Yeah, Badtux, it is really hard to get Federal enforcement when the Feds are coordinating this crap.
My Mother watches WGN out of Chicago, and they had no mention of any of this on their noon news show, so no one locally is paying any attention to it. This is all for national consumption.
It is more amateur theatrics to acclimate people to having their civil rights stolen.
]]>– Badtux the “Is it paranoia if we really ARE living in a police state?” Penguin
]]>Police chose as “bomb-making materials” things that practically any household in America would have. The warrantless search seems less for the element of surprise than for the avoidance of having to convince a judge. Judge:
You’re gonna bust these guys for making WHAT? using WHAT? Get outta here! Come back when you have some real probable cause!
Hence… no judge, no warrant, no true authorization for the search that “found” the “bomb-making” materials. Hence… no bomb. No plot. No shit, Sherlock!
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