Tag: Culture

The prestige of an M.I.T. degree just took a dive.

An MIT student wearing what turned out to be a fake bomb was arrested at gunpoint Friday at Logan International Airport and later claimed it was artwork, officials said.

Star Simpson, 19, had a computer circuit board and wiring in plain view over a black hooded sweat shirt she was wearing, said State Police Maj. Scott Pare, the commanding officer at the airport…

The battery-powered rectangular device had nine flashing lights, Pare said. Simpson also had Play-Doh in her hands, he said.

Man, what an idiot. Logan was the airport where two of the four 9/11 planes took off. I would think they’d be just a tad jumpy about things like this.

The trooper, joined by others with submachine guns, confronted her at a traffic island in front of the terminal.

“She was immediately told to stop, to raise her hands and not to make any movement, so we could observe all her movements to see if she was trying to trip any type of device,” Pare said. “Had she not followed the protocol, we might have used deadly force.”

Of course, had she been trying to ask a question at a John Kerry talk she would at least have been Tasered. So what was up?

“She said that it was a piece of art and she wanted to stand out on career day,” Pare said at a news conference. “She claims that it was just art, and that she was proud of the art and she wanted to display it.”

Simpson was charged with disturbing the peace and possessing a hoax device. A not guilty plea was entered for her at her arraignment Friday and she was released on $750 bail.

She was lucky again. Had she beaten up a fellow high school student in Jena, Louisiana her bail would have $90,000. If she were black, that is.

The voice-over’s pretty bad but something tells me most viewers of this pro-vegetarian ad, airing in Houston today, won’t notice.

Houston was recently ranked the sixth fattest city by Men’s Fitness magazine. For punishment, Houstonites must watch this ad, produced by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), at least two dozen times on Wednesday alone.

Back in 1992 a fellow traveler and I were on assignment for a travel magazine in Cairo, Egypt. We concocted a goofy experiment. We would stand back to back on a busy street, and one of us would holler, “Mohamed!” Then we’d count the number of men who turned to look. There were usually no fewer than a half-dozen. Pretty funny, huh?

Well, today you could conduct the same experiment in London or Amsterdam or Paris with similar results, say some pundits. They point to the rapid encroachment of Islam into Europe and the creation of a mysterious place fraught with danger called “Eurabia”:

Muhammad is the second most popular name for newborn boys in Britain, if you add together the various spellings. In the Seine-St-Denis suburb of Paris, Mohamed is number one. In the four biggest Dutch cities in 2005, either Mohamed or Mohammed came top.

Facts like these have led some pundits to forecast the Islamicisation of Europe – a future “Eurabia”. Bernard Lewis, a scholar of Islam, cited the immigration from Muslim countries and relatively high birth-rates of immigrants as trends that mean “Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population by the end of the twenty-first century at the latest.”

Not so, say others who study the issue. They argue that these are emotional assessments made based on biases and assumptions, not statistics:

Nominal Muslims — whether religious or not — account for 3 to 4 percent of the European Union’s total population of 493 million. Their percentage should rise, but far more modestly than the extreme predictions. That is chiefly because Muslims, both in Europe and the main “emigrating countries” of Turkey and north Africa, are having fewer babies.

“Nobody knows how many Muslims there are in Europe,” says Jytte Klausen, a professor of politics at Brandeis University who studies European Muslims. Few European states ask citizens about religious beliefs. Estimates based on national origins suggest that 16 million nominal Muslims live in the EU. There are about 5 million in France, 3.3 million in Germany and 1.5 million to 2 million in the U.K.

But isn’t it in the best interest of organizations whose job it is to convince us that there is a threat among us to exaggerate the numbers? If there’s a growing percentage of Muslims in the general population, it goes without saying that there’s a percentage of them who are bad eggs, who want to blow up our buses and subways, poison our water supplies, murder our women and children because Allah tells them to.

But actually:

The U.S. National Intelligence Council predicts there will be between 23 million and 38 million Muslims in the EU in 2025 — 5 to 8 percent of the population. But after 2025 the Muslim population should stop growing so quickly, given its falling birth-rate. In short, Islamicisation — let alone sharia law — is not a demographic prospect for Europe.

Too bad. I was kind of intrigued by the idea of vacationing in exotic Eurabia.

Calling all Mohameds!

Downtown Jacksonville’s Main St. Bridge

There’s a bunch of long, high bridges in Jacksonville. One local restaurant even takes its name from this fact, calling itself Seven Bridges after the biggest and most iconic structures.

But people in all the counties that line the banks of the St. Johns River, a broad, northern-flowing body of water, take bridge travel as a part of daily life. So it’s a little unsettling to know that some of our hundreds of bridges don’t pass muster. It’s even worse not to know which ones.

It’s for our own good, according to the Florida Department of Transportation.

…inspections have put a handful of state bridges in Northeast Florida in the same broad engineering category as that Minnesota bridge — “structurally deficient” — which means, under the state’s policy, it’s time for immediate action.

…[FDOT bridge inspection chief Keith] Campbell says the Florida Department of Transportation isn’t allowed to tell you how the bridges you drive across every day did on their most recent inspections. And he’s not allowed to say which ones flunked their tests.

Ironically, the state workers says their lips and records are sealed — for your safety.

“After the 9/11 events and with homeland security, all bridge records have become exempt as public documents,” Campbell said.

All bridge records? Including whether or not it’s safe to cross one?

The DOT cites a law, passed in 2002, which states “building plans, blueprints, schematic drawings, and diagrams” are off-limits to be released to the public.

But a local lawyer, Tad Delegate, said that the law isn’t specific enough.

“They’re certainly trying to protect the public,” he said. “I have no doubt about that, but I think they’re reading this too broadly and they’re not limiting themselves to the specific terms of the statute.”

He said there is no wording in the law that says inspection reports cannot be made public.

A local T.V. station has put in a formal request for the information, but so far the FDOT’s only reaction is to lawyer up.