Flogging, I think.
By Moe Lane Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (12) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Sounds like about the right punishment for this sort of thing:
Police have arrested two college students for placing five fake bombs around the city's subway system as a hoax.
Officials said none of the packages – including backpacks, duffel bags, and a plastic tube used to transport documents – contained hazardous material. Robert Barrett, 21, of Angola, N.Y., and Jaime Davis, 21, of Allentown, Pa., were each charged with five counts of placing a false bomb, police said.
Read on . . .
Via Captain Ed. It's at times like this that I wish for the stocks. On the other hand, if we still had them I'd have probably spent my own time in them; on the gripping hand, I've never done anything that combined callousness, cynicism and sheer boneheaded stupidity like this did... so, yeah, it's at times like this that I wish for the stocks.
Lastly, this is the best part:
Those familiar with the investigation said the Pratt Institute students deposited bags marked with the words "If you see something, say something" in order to mock the subway system's antiterror initiatives.
Their plot consisted of placing the hoax bags around the city, photographing them, and then submitting the snapshots as part of an art project aimed at proving the city's inability to detect terror plots.
...which they no doubt fondly believed up until the very moment that the cops dropped by and invited them to do a perp walk. Note, oh ye 'sophisticates': the NYPD (and NYFD) are the people who run towards terrorist attacks, not away from them. They've got the memorials, plaques and graves to prove it.
So try not to urinate on them like this.
They should have to pay the costs associated with dispatching police and fire to the sites of the "bombs". The costs of any lost business due to having to stop trains or close off areas around the packages, and the costs of investigating who did the act.
If they pay the costs, they won't think it's funny. If they consider it "art" then they can put that down as the price of their artistry.
_______________________________
If "pro" is the opposite of "con", what is the opposite of "progress"?
I agree with you about paying the costs. Ironically, though, their arrest will probably make the "art" so much more valuable.
If they ever get it back from the evidence locker I would not be surprised to see it at the Guggenheim down the road. Pratt is a great art school, but its obviously full art students and this sounds unsurprising for a project idea.
I wonder what grade they got. Hopefully they may learn the lesson that what might seem clever in theory isnt so much in practice. There IS a good lesson there if they want to find it.
Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them. -Ronald Reagan
Alas, they'll probably get off with a slap on the wrists.
(BTW, was highly amused at the "gripping hand" reference... :-)
I have advocated for bringing back the stocks for years, so I'm with Captain Ed. All I could think when reading this was of my Grandfather, a gentlemen's gentleman and avid Republican (he made me swear when I was 16 to vote for Repubs) and how he would be rolling over in his grave. He was a Pratt graduate in Electrical Engineering back at the turn of the century. He left the East Coast in 1910 for the San Francisco Bay area where he headed up the team designing the first electric railway between Palo Alto and Oakland. He loved his adopted city and my Mother used to say that she was so happy he never lived to see the Haight-Asbury hippie movement and subsequent radical uprisings at Berkeley since both my Mother and her brother were Berkeley grads. He died on election day from a stroke. On the way to the hospital in his last hours, he made the ambulance driver stop at the polls and they brought his ballot out to the gurney, where he voted for the last time.
Sara (Squiggler)
"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill
"During my lifetime, most of the problems the world has faced have come from mainland Europe, and the solutions from outside it." - Thatcher
Would be to sentence them to death, put a gun to their heads, and pull the trigger - with the chamber empty.
After they finished cleaning the contents of their bowels off their shoes, they would figure out why fake bombs are not funny.
"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill
I wonder what Babs Striesand has to say about this? After all, "It's the artist's duty to provoke..." and all that.
Members of the Hollywood community should not be apologetic, but proud -- proud to have provoked conversations, proud to have challenged ignorance and proud to have helped shape our history for the better.
-- Barbra Streisand
Maybe the city should ask Babs to pay the bills after all her work encouraging young artists like these.
We still have some in England, though they are no longer used. Would we be allowed to throw bricks?
Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net
But I think some "Nuremburg-style trials" would be in order for these boys, whose fathers probably wish were "bastards".
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Evil men hide from the truth, but good men stand upon it.