Tag: JFK

NYPD Copper, Combat Vet, Muslim – detained at JFK Airport

Leave a comment


Officer Ali at home in Brooklyn — Karsten Moran/New York Times

❝ Syed Ali is an American citizen, an officer in the New York Police Department, a combat veteran and a major in the United States Army Reserve. But none of that made a difference at passport control last month when he arrived at Kennedy Airport on an evening flight from Istanbul.

❝ After landing, Officer Ali was led from passport control to a holding area for what Customs and Border Protection refers to as secondary screening. But instead of a quick check to confirm his identity, Officer Ali said, he was held for hours, past midnight. When he asked, after more than an hour of waiting, whether it would take much longer, an officer threatened to incarcerate him…

“I feel like my rights were violated,” Officer Ali said in an interview, still sounding a little shaken. “Are you telling me that every guy with the last name Ali is a terrorist? Are you telling me every guy with brown skin coming in from overseas is a terrorist?”

❝ Officer Ali’s trip was part of a vacation to decompress after a two-year military deployment to Kuwait, where he had served in Operation Inherent Resolve, the mission to combat the Islamic State. In September, he is scheduled to return to his regular job with the Police Department, where he most recently worked in the transit unit.

Officer Ali is one of a number of Muslim Americans who have complained that since the start of the Trump administration they have been subjected to additional scrutiny when returning from abroad, facing hours in airport custody and what they described as hostile questioning…

❝ Officer Ali said his feeling of powerlessness in airport custody “was one of the lowest points in my life.”

“I’ve dedicated my life to public service,” he said. “I want my country to treat me fairly, too.”

Yup, tell me about “post-racial” America, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. We have a government run by sniveling chickenhawks like Trump, racist weasels like Jeff Sessions. It ain’t new. It ain’t getting old in a country where elections are managed by money and an electoral college that has little to do with democracy.

I’ve confronted crap like this my whole life and I’m native-born and white. The ignorant bigots I rejected in the 1950’s are back as strong as ever. Republicans roll over and stick their hind feet in the air out of something they call Party Loyalty – and ignore any loyalty to the Constitution of the United States and all the bits and pieces added trying keep our legal system within a couple decades of modern society.

Officer Ali faced the scumbag ideology that’s always been part of this country. The scum just has a better chance to surface when idjits elect a scumsucker to live in the White House.

The CIA told apartheid South Africa coppers where to find and arrest Nelson Mandela in 1962

2 Comments

❝ Nelson Mandela’s arrest in 1962 came as a result of a tip-off from an agent of the US Central Intelligence Agency…

The revelations, made in the Sunday Times newspaper, are based on an interview with ex-CIA agent Donald Rickard shortly before he died.

❝ Mandela served 27 years in jail for resisting white minority rule before being released in 1990.

He was subsequently elected as South Africa’s first black president…

❝ Rumours have circulated for years that the CIA trailed Mandela but the agency resisted previous attempts to shine a light on its alleged involvement in his arrest. Rickard’s admission will bring renewed pressure to declassify documents from the time…

❝ ANC national spokesperson Zizi Kodwa said: “That revelation confirms what we have always known, that they are working against [us], even today.

Mandela, president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999, was on a US terror watch list until 2008.

Before that, along with other former ANC leaders, he was only able to visit the US with special permission from the secretary of state, because the ANC had been designated a terrorist organisation by the former apartheid government…

President Ronald Reagan had originally placed the ANC on the list in the 1980s.

It doesn’t take a 19th Century paranoid like Reagan to enforce and support racist global policies. You don’t even need one of the Dulles brothers working their dead butt off to aid failing colonial regimes. In case you don’t remember – or know enough history – the CIA was operating in 1962 under the guidance of a liberal Democrat, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Creationists get knickers in a bunch over JFK and Carnival Cruise Lines advert

1 Comment

It’s that special time of the year. The Super Bowl is over, we are still reeling (or happy, if you’re into that sort of thing) over the Worst Play Call In History, and wingnuts have now had a couple days to decide which of the commercials were the evilest and demonic-est of them all.

Ken Ham, that creationist nutbag who debated Bill Nye The Science Guy last year, and who is pretty sure that all nonexistent aliens burn in hell, has made his decision, and the winner of this year’s post-Super Bowl Two Minutes Hate will be Carnival Cruise Lines, who had the utter gall to make a commercial that featured a nice quote from John F. Kennedy, about how we all love the ocean because we used to live there before we lost our gills during Evil-lution. Here is that Kennedy quote, for your handy reference:

“I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it’s because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it’s because we all came from the sea — and it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea — whether it is to sail or to watch it — we are going back from whence we came.”

Uh, sorry, John F. Kennedy and fancy boat company, but Ken Ham…responded on his Answers In Genesis website:

Don’t you just feel this “personal connection?” After all, your ancestor came out of the sea and evolved by natural processes to produce you. Blah, blah, blah. RTFA if you think you’re missing anything. They quote whole chunks of this crap and even include the attack upon Neil Degrasse Tyson, to round it up.

So, of course, because Fundamentalist Christian dinguses are all convinced that everyone secretly believes as they do, and because they think they represent the mainstream of their own religion, a few of them took to the Twitter (also created by God, duh) to express their displeasure at the newfound atheism of Carnival Cruise Lines. If you watched the ad above and listened to those words from JFK and you’re not getting how any of that implies that Carnival Cruise lines is an atheist god-hater, that’s because you are not a dumb creationist jackhole like this guy…

Anyway, so John F. Kennedy and a fleet of unsaved boats are the devil, Goddidit, the end.

Once again, fundamentalist True Believers prove to be funnier than most of the commercials on Super Bowl Sunday.

Oh, and BTW, the commercial got it wrong because JFK got it wrong, We’re 0.9% salt, the ocean is 3.5%…

Granny busted trying to smuggle heroin, cocaine in her wheelchair

Leave a comment

A granny in a suspicious wheelchair was pulled over in Kennedy Airport by Customs inspectors who blocked her lame attempt to smuggle heroin and cocaine in the country…

Fior Daliza Garcia rolled off JetBlue flight No. 838 from the Dominican Republic on Wednesday and immediately caught the attention of the federal officers.

Garcia, 58, appeared nervous to Customs and Border Protection inspectors who also noted that her wheelchair appeared to be “freshly painted,” according to a complaint filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.

She was escorted to a private room and transferred to another wheelchair. Her two suitcases appeared to be clean, so the inspectors focused on the wheelchair.

“During the subsequent search, CBP officers lifted (Garcia’s) wheelchair and noticed that it was unusually heavy and flimsy,” U.S. Homeland Security special agent Edward Romeo stated in the complaint.

Sure enough, the officers found a quantity of heroin and cocaine stashed in the “body” of the wheelchair.

Garcia, a grandmother from Boston, confessed that she was going to be paid $12,000 for smuggling the drugs here from the Dominican Republic…

She could buy a new wheelchair for every day of the week and then some – with that payoff. Now she’s stuck with prison-quality wheels.

American Airlines finds Jack the Cat at JFK

2 Comments

The cat that vanished in baggage claim at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and whose plight became an online sensation has been found after being missing for two months.

“American Airlines is happy to announce that Jack the Cat has been found safe and well at JFK airport,” the carrier wrote in a post on the “Jack the Cat is Lost in AA Baggage at JFK” Facebook page Tuesday evening.

“Jack was found in the customs room and was immediately taken by team members to a local veterinarian. The vet has advised that Jack is doing well at present.”

The airline plans to fly the cat to California to be reunited with his owner, Karen Pascoe.

The saga started on August 25, when Pascoe was flying from New York to San Francisco with Jack and a second cat as part of a job relocation. But Jack escaped his kennel and was last seen at JFK’s inbound baggage claim…

When a search failed to turn up Jack after a few days, Pascoe became frustrated with American Airlines and started the Facebook page “to help us put pressure on AA to step up their efforts.” She also urged fliers to “do whatever they can do to keep their animals out of cargo.”

American even hired a pet detective and issued a pet Amber alert in hopes of locating the feline. I’m not quite certain how a pet Amber alert functions – but, I am glad they found Jack.

If it smells like chicken will it taste like chicken?

Leave a comment


Could have been worse!

A bird drawn into the engine of a plane taking off in New York made the cabin smell like chicken was being cooked, passengers said.

JetBlue Flight 757 to Aruba, with 109 people aboard, returned to John F. Kennedy International Airport and landed safely at 12:30 p.m. Saturday…

“Suddenly the plane smelled like chicken,” said passenger Gina Vicinanza. “I thought, ‘Wow! They have hot food on this plane…’ ”

At least 13 bird encounters with planes have occurred at the airport this year

I love barbecue; but, there are limits. I really prefer grilling over natural chunk charcoal over whirling my food with Jet A 1.

Airport contraband describes illicit American desires

2 Comments


Counterfeit BMW hood ornaments

There were containers filled with Botox-making ingredients, fake Louis Vuitton handbags and dead guinea pigs. There were animal parts, cigars and steroids. Viagra from China and GBL, the date-rape drug, freshly arrived from Europe.

This is a glimpse into the underworld of illicit commodities trying to get through federal inspection sites at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, the busiest international air passenger gateway to the United States.

And it was at JFK that Taryn Simon, an internationally renowned photographer, spent five days and nights in 2009 sleeping on an air mattress, documenting this ordinary deluge of bizarre goods into a major port of cargo and passenger entry into the U.S., an Ellis Island of sorts for illegal commodities…

The result is “Contraband,” a 1075-photographic series that will be exhibited in New York and Beverly Hills, California. A 500-page book with the same title is coming out soon.

Simon says cataloguing what is banned and unseen is a way to understand American identity through what we are allowed to consume and what we are not.

“You confront American desire through the endless counterfeit goods that traffic through customs, said Simon.

“There’s a numbing repetition to its mainstays — Louis Vuitton bags, Nike sneakers, counterfeit gold, counterfeit Viagra, illegal steroids. The photographs collectively build a portrait of escape and consumerism while revealing a new world of black market production that threatens American business interests,” she said.

Ah, yes, the underbelly not only of what’s allowed – and therefore what isn’t; but, a chance to reflect, perhaps, on how those decisions are arrived at.

Most of these reflect trademarks, copyrights, health and safety rules. Some – like cigars – are dedicated to the politics of American foreign policy.

Rare photo shows Marilyn Monroe with JFK, RFK

7 Comments

Marilyn Monroe’s sultry rendition of “Happy Birthday” sung for President John F. Kennedy’s 45th birthday celebration marked the actress’ last major public appearance before her mysterious death in August 1962.

Tuesday, which would have been Monroe’s 84th birthday, marks the public debut of a rare image of Monroe with Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy together after the May 19, 1962, party.

The black-and-white photo, taken by White House photographer Cecil Stoughton, showed Monroe still wearing the infamously tight-fitting, sheer rhinestone-studded dress she wore when singing earlier at Madison Square Garden.

“There is no other known photo of Bobby [Kennedy] with Marilyn or JFK with Marilyn, and it’s not because they were never photographed together,” said filmmaker Keya Morgan, who now owns the only original prints of it. “In fact, they were photographed together many times, but the Secret Service and the FBI confiscated every single photograph.”

Stoughton, who sold the prints to Morgan a year before his death in 2008, told him agents missed one negative in their search, he said.

“The Secret Service came in when he was developing the negatives and basically confiscated all the ones of Jack, Bobby with Marilyn,” Morgan said. “The only one that survived is the one that was in the dryer.”

Stoughton…told Morgan the story behind the first lady’s refusal to attend her husband’s birthday gala.

“He’s the one who told Jackie that Marilyn was going to be at the celebration, and her exact words were ‘Screw Jack,’ and she left the room and she did not go to the famous celebration,” Morgan said.

Presidents used to have the sort of privacy that facilitated all kinds of low-life behavior -equalled only by the ethics and behavior of Congress. Then – and now.

Erykah Badu strips at JFK assassination site

2 Comments


The link is usually blocked by copyright holders = UMG

Erykah Badu shed her clothes as she walked along a Dallas, Texas, sidewalk until she was nude and then fell near where President Kennedy was assassinated.

The result was a controversial video, released Saturday, for her song “Window Seat,” which Badu said was “shot guerrilla style” with no crew and in one take March 17. Children could be seen nearby as Badu stripped in Dealey Plaza, a popular tourist spot since Kennedy’s 1963 assassination…

She tweeted that “there were children there. i prayed they wouldnt b traumatized.”

The R&B singer said she was making a statement against “groupthink,” which she tweeted was an “unwritten rule” that “i will not express my true opinion if it opposes those i love and fear…”

The video opens with a November 22, 1963, radio broadcast describing Kennedy’s motorcade turning onto Elm Street seconds before fatal shots were fired…

As she reached the spot where Kennedy was first struck by a bullet, the crackle of a gunshot is heard and Badu’s head snaps back and she falls to the ground as if dead.

Brave, foolhardy. Not my kind of social and musical experiment – but, rock on, lady!