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Edited on Mon Jul-24-06 11:56 AM by madeline_con
It was recently publicized that the Department of Homeland Security's list of possible terror targets in the U.S. includes the Apple and Pork Festival, the Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market, Old MacDonald's Petting Zoo, and the Amish Country Popcorn factory. Other, more obscure and more perplexing locations a terrorist might likely draw a bead on are Nix's Check Cashing, the Mall at Sears, the Ice Cream Parlor, the Tackle Shop, the Donut Shop, the Anti-Cruelty Society and the Bean Fest. There is also the mysterious "Beach at the End of a Street". These places don't really seem to be the most likely targets for terror. Convinced the administration had finally gone insane from the heady fumes of light sweet crude wafting above Middle Eastern oil fields, people shook their heads and went back to the sports page.
Ah yes, the Apple and Pork Festival with its "delightful aroma of smoked ham and spicy apple butter" floating on the breeze, where kids of all ages can enjoy everything from "face painting, and pony rides" to "river rat potatoes, and ever popular ham sandwiches". A slice of true Americana if ever there was one. President Bush, A True Man of the People, wants to protect the nice hometown voter base that put him in the White House, not to mention the barbeque. Dubya loves barbeque. What a stand-up guy! Don't bet the farm on it.
After mulling the situation over for a long time, maybe a minute, I decided I'd check into this. I was sure I could figure out at least some of the secret messages. Republicans are the proverbial bovine lumbering through Limoges, leaving muddy hoof prints and large chunks of fecal matter scattered about in their wake.
As it turns out, the list seems to be a compilation of places "whose criticality is not readily apparent," as the Inspector General of Homeland Security so eloquently put it. The good folks' reminder to "Wear your comfortable shoes" to the Apple and Pork Festival might actually mean you could find yourself running in terror - from a terror attack. It just happens that the event is held in beautiful Dewitt County, Illinois, a stone's throw from the Clinton nuclear power plant.
An aside here for word buffs. Being among those who loathe "normalcy" and its meteoric rise to acceptance in place of "normality", I felt an irresistible urge to check on "criticality" and its standing as a real word. Never having been at the top of my class where physics is concerned, let me just say I had a bit of a meltdown when I read that it means the particular point in a nuclear reaction when the reaction becomes self-sustaining. I don't know about you, but I get downright spooked when Republicans use weird code words that turn out to be bona fide.
It's not the voter base that's being protected. It's the energy base. An empire, especially one under attack, needs power. Nuclear power, hydroelectric power, and military installations have to be operational to keep even a skeleton crew going while our fearless leaders are hunkered down in undisclosed locations carrying on the business of meddling uninvited in world affairs. George Bush, of course, will be perfectly safe in Crawford. Only a bunker-buster could get through the tangle of uncleared brush at the ranch, and everyone knows how hard it would be to get one of those into a port or on an airplane or something in our post 9/11 world.
Here's a quick rundown of some of the "unusual or out-of-place" locales that no terrorist mastermind could ever crack the code for. Bear in mind that my results aren't necessarily carved in stone, but they're a start. Old MacDonald's Petting Zoo is in Huntsville, Al, near the Browns Ferry Plant. The Sweetwater Flea Market is near the Watts Bar nuclear facility.
The Amish Country Popcorn factory, a truly righteous attempt to shun modernity and mixing with the unwashed and unsaved, has store locations in 37 states. This could be collective secret code for a number of places or, because the company is headquartered in Berne, Indiana, it could be just the Bluffton Power Plant situated 13 miles away from all that freshly-popped corn that this cryptic utterance alludes to.
The "Mall at Sears" is in Anchorage, Alaska, at Elmendorf Air Force Base. At first, I thought a mall area near the Sears Tower sounded reasonable, having never been to Chicago, but just up Ship Creek from Elmendorf (you can't make up stuff like this) is ML&P, Municipal Light and Power, which serves the Anchorage area. The mall could also be the Air force Base itself. I never claimed to be an expert. But is the Sears Tower protected, you ask? The Anti-Cruelty Society is at 510 N. LaSalle in Chicago. Wacker Drive, where the Sears Tower is located, intersects LaSalle.
The Ice Cream Parlor. Lo and behold, the first item on a Google search is Moxley's Ice Cream Factory, which features Moxley's Ice Cream Parlors. Moxley is a golden retriever who likes ice cream so much, he opened a chain. His corporate offices are in Baltimore, which is served by Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant. The Bean Fest is held in Mountain View AR, farting distance from the Arkansas Nuclear Plant in Russellville. The Tackle Shop, "Montana's first fly shop" is in Ennis, Montana, near Polson, the home of the 177-megawatt Kerr Dam on the Flathead River.
What about the "Beach at End of a Street"? By transcribing the words, you get Street Beach, which could be "Bank Street Beach: located on Nantucket Sound near Harwichport center; at the end of Bank Street." Harwich is an international port that would warrant a bit of extra scrutiny in the case of another terror attack.
Could the Donut Shop be the 7th Avenue Donut Shop in Times Square, with that area's obvious potential as a target, combined with the fact that it's about 25 miles south of the Indian Point plant? Or Dunkin Donuts out of Quincy, in the Plymouth, Massachusetts area, powered by the Pilgrim nuclear plant? There are lots of donut shops and power plants to choose from.
Checking Nix Check Cashing, they "have 57 Nix Check Cashing branches conveniently located in Southern California." Well, that certainly narrows it down. There's Diablo Canyon, 12 miles from San Luis Obispo and San Onofre, 4 miles south of San Clemente. Naval Station San Diego probably has a Nix right on base. It's anyone's guess with the population density and potential for stirring up terror in southern California.
Kentucky and Nebraska each got a big piece of the Homeland Security pie. E.ON, a German energy conglomerate who also does business with Gazprom in Siberia, has a US branch, E.ON US. Louisville Gas & Electric Co. and Kentucky Utilities Co. are now owned by E.ON US. The Invensys Group, owned by the Williams Group, recently won a contract with Omaha Public Power District, which serves a 13 county area of about 5000 square miles in eastern Nebraska. They run an automated system of redundant controls to keep the natural gas flowing through more than 14,000 miles of Transco, Northwest, and Gulfstream pipelines partially owned by the Williams Group.
Quite a bit of noise was made about Indiana being targeted by the Homeland Security people as having 8,591 potential terror hotspots, while New York came up short with only 5,687. What gives in Indiana? It's, brace yourself, about oil. And natural gas, and the power in every sense of the word that they provide. East central Indiana was the site of the first giant oil field, a 100 million barrel monster that attracted a lot of attention. Gas was discoverd in the famous Trenton Field in 1876, and the boom was on. Indiana produced 2 1/2 million barrels of oil and about 520 million cubic feet of natural gas in 1997 alone. There are nine merchant power plants in Indiana. Seven provide wholesale power, while the others provide power to the Wabash Valley Power Association, Ohio's Dayton Power and Light, and PSI Energy.
Gulf Energy Management Company ("GEM"), a Harken subsidiary, has decided to move forward with Phase II of their Coalbed Methane Prospects in Indiana and Ohio, and begin pilot drilling. Even though the company's been beset by setbacks (they had some trouble locating necessary equipment, if you can imagine that), they expect to be drilling by the third quarter of 2006. Oil, George W. and terror just seem to go hand in hand, don't they?
© 2006 itsacrime.us
EDIT: Thanks to the sharp eye of Ghost in the Machine, I've corrected my original assumption that the Sweetwater Flea Market was served by the Sequoya facility.
Thanks, again! :hi:
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