I really hate how 9/11 legitimized all sorts of paranoid dipshittery. It’s embarrassing enough that the people who make the rules think bringing a bottle of water to the airport is a security risk, but now it seems that it’s a crime to inadvertently frighten a bunch of fools :
Boston police say they have made in arrest in connection to the suspicious device scare that turned out to be a marketing ploy for a television cartoon. The Peter Berdvosky was arrested in Arlington Wednesday night and charged under a recently enacted statute making it a crime to place a hoax device that results in panic.
The scare forced bomb units to scramble across Boston all day. The “devices” were actually magnetic lights which resemble a character on the show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force”, on Turner Broadcasting’s Cartoon Network.
. . .
The suspicious device reports forced the temporary shutdowns of Interstate 93 out of the city, a key inbound roadway, a bridge between Boston and Cambridge, and a portion of the Charles River but were quickly determined not to be explosive.“It’s a hoax — and it’s not funny,” Gov. Deval Patrick said.
With all the loaded language, you’d almost think this guy did something wrong. After all, this “device” was a “hoax” that “forced” the Keystone Cops to chase each other in circles while waving their tiny baseball bats at each other. Throw this guy in jail because we all know this kind of panic isn’t the fault of the people who overract to anything they consider weird.
Here’s what the “devices” looked like that caused everyone in Boston to pee themselves :
If they can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a Lite-Brite giving the finger, then we’re all screwed. God forbid these guys ever find an LED clock counting backwards, they’d have to declare martial law. After all, everyone knows that terrorists always go to the extra trouble of installing a visible timer into their explosive devices to ramp up the tension.