On Nov 3, 2006, at 1:18 PM, John Thornton wrote:
> His hotel is also heavily fortified with heavy military vehicles
> from the National Guard station along with dozens of large dump
> trucks forming a ring around the block where he is staying. This
> too is new. They didn't do this during his last visit nor during
> the VP's visit a few months ago. Has he become more worried about
> being attacked than he was only 2 years ago?
Security paranoia is off the charts. I visited someone at the Citicorp building the other day - they're x-raying bags. To get into CNN you have to pass two layers of security - Time Warner first, CNN upstairs. The Time Warner Center itself is surrounded with bomb barriers. Ditto that Jewish Community Center featured in the article about sexless marriages that Michael Hoover posted yesterday. The memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising - a flat stone in the sidewalk, essentially - in Riverside Park is surrounded by vehicle barriers. The main entrance to the Columbia campus now has a vehicle barrier. It takes a picture ID to get into the building where WBAI's studios are. Up Wall Street from the WBAI building is a maze of cops, barriers, fences, dump trucks - and now and then, cops armed with machine guns around the NYSE. It's all taken as normal, not signs of a society in trouble.
Doug