Snapshots n Broomsticks

Social anthropology is best expressed in journalese. A cardboard and spit model by Hirschhorn casually captures the compartmentalized cubical mindset of our time in the information swamp.

Our national pastime of brutality and teamwork is no stranger to South Florida. A solitary American Modern cast concrete sculpture guards a playing field at a local public school near Kendall.

Winning Wynwood. Another excellent street art mural (formerly known as graffiti) adorns an otherwise blighted wall. Go Heat! is an ironic mantra for summer in the swamp.

Elevator Going Sideways. Lovable droid Dr. Milagros Bello is looking for curators to embellish another polished arts institution dedicated to contemporary art. Whatever that is.

Yes ! In Their Front Yard. A very swampy display of bronzed individuality on a private residence in North Beach. Kinda Dali meets Harry Potter.

Arrested Development. An unfinished condominium tower construction stands empty 3 years and counting, most likely from bankruptcy.

Shade is for Quitters. A newly installed retro design shelter-free bus bench sits blasted by August microwaves in Bal Harbor. The new 2 seater replaced a common urban rider-friendly s bench and shade structure but alas that modern design proved fatal. The town's persistent quest for street beautification has become a cycle of tax n spend. For what?

Good Day of Fishing. 8:00 AM The boys and their toys set up to for the daily entrapment of unsuspecting, though certainly neurotic, motorists on Sunny Isles. At $250. bucks per sucker, their quota is complete by 10 AM, just in time to load up at the donut shop, lay low till 3:00PM when the extortion racket begins anew.

Potential Pedal Power. A rack of pricy euro generic gps bikes sit idle on South Beach, rusting faster than you can say Critical Mass.

SOBE is truly underwater. Yet it is a comfort for old-timers to see the Off-season return to what it was before the boom, a place for locals. For tourists who come here in the middle of summer there are places like Prime One or Delano for them to crowd together get fleeced and pretend resort-town is hoppin' hip worth it.

The naked truth is, Miami the city has grown exponentially flat yet the beaches remain indisputably the best thing about the swamp.

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A Christmas Wish

"Everythin­g secret degenerate­s, even the administra­­tion of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity. ­" - Lord Acton

Stop Endless War

"We've killed well over a million people. We've orphaned and displaced five times that number at least. And here in our own country, we've managed to throw millions of people of out work and out of their homes," Ferner told reporters at a press conference Wednesday. "There is a connection there. That connection is the true cost of war."

Demand PEACE On EARTH Now

... the Government now watches much of the citizenry behind a fully opaque one-way mirror -- that the dangers should be obvious. And this is all supposed to be the other way around: it's government officials who are supposed to operate out in the open, while ordinary citizens are entitled to privacy.

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belated 9/11

“The greatest enemy of the truth is not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic.”
John F. Kennedy

The Architects

Most of what I know about the events of September 11, 2001 was gleaned from Google. There is an ever growing amount of information but not a kernel of closure. Looking back there is one thing I knew the moment we all saw the World Trade Center collapse live on teevee. Those towers were brought down by more than just airplanes. Nearly one month after, on my first visit to ground zero, a stench hung in the air of the entire lower Manhattan. The autumn breeze was a toxic assault on every olfactory downwind. The place reeked of the pulverized remains of the pillars of privilege mashed with the contents of 107 stories reduced to a pile in a hole in the middle of new amsterdam.



All You People

The official story of 9/11 is a glossy photoshop composite cropped just so as to keep whatever is beyond the frame out of sight. People who buy the official story rather than the panorama of a spectral reality do so for their own sanity's sake. The cold forensic facts outside the frame may drive them batshit crazy. This is one case where the truth is more fantastic than most can imagine.



Hey, its Legal

In the days leading to September 11, if you follow the money, there is no pot of gold, there is olny put options and obfuscation. If a plane had crashed into Wall Street, the level of outrage would have been a resounding sigh of relief. Do a google, follow the shekels and there you will find nothing as all the paperwork was shredded into the pulp of fiction.




Lucky Seven

Takes a 50 story pile of good luck to hide the smoking gun in plain sight.
Building # 7 has a history of housing a shadowy host of tenants and oblique bureaucracies and opaque operations. Nondescript and shrouded by the flash of the shimmering twin towers at the World Trade Center, building 7 was made more than expendable, it had to come down, it was the pantry in a house of cards still standing. Today on the internet anyone can read about the irregularities of its implosion. We wooble, you decide.



Nothing to See Here

Was the rush to find closure for the survivors a convenient smoke screen for the quick disposal of forensic evidence from the crime scene of the decade?
The big sift was in high gear, complete in less than 10 months.


Fresh Kills Land Fill Staten Island, NY

Recovered
• 4,257 pieces of human remains
• 54,000 personal effects—95% belonging to survivors, including 610 pieces of jewelry
• $76,318.47 found loose in the fields
• 6 kilograms of narcotics
• 4,000 photos—found and delivered to Kodak Laboratories and NFL Films to be decontaminated and restored
• 1,358 destroyed vehicles processed: 102 pieces of fire apparatus, 61 police department vehicles, and 1,195 personal automobiles
• Hundreds of airplane fragments
• Several pieces of Auguste Rodin sculptures from the offices of the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald
• Thousands of rounds of unexploded ammunition
  

EYE eye eye

Sci Fi writers past would conjure up wild version of a future world where leering cameras hung everywhere in your waking days and crawled up our brain in while asleep. The new world order with its affection for surveillance is a major league global pain in the identity.
Bad enough most earthlings gotta be dirt poor, now they want to watch @#$%^!




Lucky Charms
A mind is a terrible thing to turn into a killing machine.




Friendly Fire For Hire

It defies dignified comprehension to try or make sense of the madness that would intentionally set out to fabricate an enemy where there is non. Is it possible that given unlimited resources and demented persuasions humans are capable of such sinister intent or are those blunderers just that stupid. Is al Qaeda no longer just a database in a classified computer.

In the 1980s, one program undertaken by the United States was to finance Mujahideen propaganda in textbooks for Afghan schools. The US gave the Mujahideen $43 million in “non-lethal” aid for the textbook project alone, which was given by USAID: “The U.S. Agency for International Development, [USAID] coordinated its work with the CIA, which ran the weapons program,” and “The U.S. government told the AID to let the Afghan war chiefs decide the school curriculum and the content of the textbooks.”



Krypto the Celebrity

The textbooks were “filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings,” and “were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines.” Even since the covert war of the 1980s, the textbooks “have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books.” The books were developed through a USAID grant to the “University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies,” and when the books were smuggled into Afghanistan through regional military leaders, “Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines.” USAID stopped this funding in 1994.[65]



What is more believable,

Helen Lawson or the official 9/11 story?

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Smile, you're on Red Light Camera

Uncle Samuel Wants Your Wallet

Thanks to a new law in Arizona, people that look like mexicans or any other illegal immigrant stereotype can now be hassled in public, hauled of for further humiliation. Folks across the nation are weighing in on both sides of a complex issue, of finding a balance between tough policy and civil liberties. With the tsunami of people lured to america with the prospect of more stuff, folks have some legitimate concerns.



What in Tarnation@#$%&*!

Here in the swamp and in cities nationwide, there is a growing threat of a new kind of illegal alien trickling into our neighborhoods in an oily slick of dirty tricks.

Red-Light Cameras are invading our byways and highways.




Tic, Tax, Tons of Cake

Thanks to a shoddy new law secretly crafted by your state reps and signed by govnr Cripst, town officials across the Florida can now use foreign cameras and private technologies to further trap and snarl the motoring public. Some places like Aventura and North Bay Village already have the robust surveillance gadgets installed, they did not wait for the law that sanctions this insidious invasion of privacy and the illegitimate issuance of excessive fines. Our elected officials in Tallahassee got up to speed and have given the green-light. They are now complicit in the extorting of the public to create an obscene revenue stream that evaporates into pockets quicker than they can collect it. People pay but the real cost of this new shakedown that is being played out across the nation is a diminished quality of life for the majority.




Get the Red Out

Little is heard or read on the MSM of this impending doom. No one is concerned until it is them on the receiving end of this new schtick. Big Brother knows the motoring public has no unified voice.

You may have guessed by now that I got a "ticket" in the mail.
So I did a little surfing and found some glaring inconsistencies in the logic that attempt to justify the use Red Light Cameras.



Cross-hairs On the Crossroads

A review of preliminary collision data supplied by the city of Corpus Christi, Texas shows that the installation of red light cameras has done nothing to improve safety. Overall, the accident situation worsened at photo-enforced intersections at a time when decreased traffic levels have brought accident rates nationwide to an all-time low. The total number of accidents in Corpus Christi increased 14 percent, from 310 incidents to 353, at nine locations where automated ticketing machines were stationed. Contrary to the claim that red light cameras reduce the severity of collisions, the number of accidents involving injuries increased 28 percent from 140 to 179. Rear end collisions also increased by nearly a third from 160 to 208.



Need for Greed

...But calculations show that the cameras would bring $39.3 million into the revenue stream in the first year and up to $160.5 million by 2013-14. "I believe this is nothing more than a revenue grab," Rep. Robert Schenck, R-Springhill, said on the House floor. "The government has an insatiable appetite for our people's hard-earned money. This is the biggest, biggest intrusion of government into our lives. What's next?" The bill would put an end to municipalities splitting the fines with camera vendors. It also would require cities and counties to post signs at intersections with cameras, notifying drivers that they could be nabbed via camera for running a red light. The bill also ensures that drivers who turn right on red "in a careful and prudent manner" could not be ticketed.



What Do They Take Us For...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Red light cameras will be fully legal in Florida on July 1. Gov. Charlie Crist on Thursday signed a new law authorizing the cameras as enforcement devices despite opposition from AAA. Lawmakers for several years had rejected the legislation. Opponents argued the cameras would violate privacy rights and individual liberties as well as being a "revenue grab." The bill includes a $158 fine that would be assessed against owners of vehicles caught on camera running red lights. Of that amount, $75 would go to local governments. The rest would go to the state, which must use $10 for health care and give $3 to the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis for brain and spinal cord research. AAA contended that too little of the money will go to health care and too much to general government spending. The state is expected to receive $29 million in the first year, jumping to nearly $95 million in 2013-14. Local governments would net $10 million the first year and nearly $66 million in 2013-14, according to state economists.




Right Of Way

Florida Court Rules Red Light Cameras Illegal

A Miami-Dade County Circuit Court judge has ruled that red light cameras may not be legally used to issue traffic citations in the state of Florida. Judge Gerald Bagley yesterday dismissed charges against motorist Richard Masone who had received a red light camera ticket in the mail from American Traffic Solutions (ATS). The company operates the program on behalf of the city of Aventura...



What's Next for Red Light Cameras... your bedroom perhaps?


This problem has nothing to do with traffic safety and everything to do with robbing the public.
I say keep the blasted cameras to catch the real light runners, not to make a mint by ticketing the drivers making harmless right turns with caution.
To save lives at intersections simply program the lights so the amber is timed to cause a pause of traffic from both directions.


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your weekly parking ticket neurosis

.... just doing my job.

If there is anything more trivial and annoying than your weekly $18 dollar parking ticket, it is the people that issue them. Sneaky, relentless and with our money, the MiamiParkingAuthirity is re-designing our town street-level quality of life, one sign at a time... and visual pollution is the least of our Orwellian quandry.
In the more effervescent neighborhoods there is basically no free parking and the old-fashioned parking meters (one-turn-bandits) are not retired, they are installed where there once was none, in the marginal periphery, in 'no-mans-land' bordering residential streets .
Their relentless greed and heartless practice is fueled by dreams of a revenue stream wider than the everglades. On a quite unassuming alley in the design district I used to have a loading-zone sign in front of my studio that was replaced by another one of those gawd forsaken meter sentry contraptions.

Wassup with all that? Is MPA private-for-profit (just like MDX)?
Local businesses and residents are on the ground doing the heavy lifting, working against a tsunami of increasing cost-of-living demands to keep our city afloat. We do not need:
parasite |ˈparəˌsīt| noun an organism that lives in or on another organism (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the host's expense. • derogatory a person who habitually relies on or exploits others and gives nothing in return.

If all that money collected went to something good, say directly to our ailing schools, or community outreach, to identify and offer real help to neglected children, isolated elderly and neighborhoods problems, then maybe it would not be so bad, but it all just goes down the bureaucratic money-hole in buckets.


It's our car's world now.

Place Frog in Water, Simmer till Done

Remember 2001 when the new Total Information Awareness Office flopped because it was set up to rely on regular people to step-up and join the snitch club? No one stepped up to the plate but a few crazies. Well it appears that plan B is working out very nicely. With the help of corporateism we now have INFRAGARD to keep a watch on us ay.

“Exclusive! The FBI Deputizes Business” Matthew Rothschild

More than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to collect information on individuals. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public, and at times before elected officials. In return they provide information to the government. The ACLU warns, “There is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate TIPS program, turning private-sector corporations—some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers—into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI.” Aside from information sharing, members are expected to assist the government when martial law is declared. “They’re very much looped into our readiness capability,” says DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa. According to more than one interviewed member they have permission to shoot to kill in the event of martial law without fear of prosecution. As of late January 2008, InfraGard had 23,682 members, according to its website, www.infragard.net, which adds that, “350 of our nation’s Fortune 500 have representatives in InfraGard.”

My emphasis in red.
I like safety as much as the next person, but this is looking more like "comunismo con comida" with each day.
If you have any secrets, this would be a good time to get rid of them.

UPDATE: Today in the NYTimes:

As Prices Rise, Crime Tipsters Work Overtime
...“Crime doesn’t pay but we do,” say the mobile billboards cruising Jacksonville, Fla. A poster in Jackson, Tenn., draws a neat equation: “Ring Ring + Bling Bling = Cha-Ching.” The bling, in this case, is a pair of handcuffs.....
For tips that bring results, programs in most places pay $50 to $1,000, with some jurisdictions giving bonuses for help solving the most serious crimes, or an extra “gun bounty” if a weapon is recovered...

“We have people out there that, realistically, this could be their job,” ...

Props for: marginalrevolution.com