So, a bomb went off in Times Square this morning, blowing out the door of the Armed Forces Recruiting Station – certainly an iconic target. Fortunately, no one was injured.

Unlike flour in a parking lot, blinky lights on highway overpasses, or a house full of weird art supplies, a bomb going off in Times Square seems to be a very clear-cut case of domestic terrorism, right?

Wrong. We live in Bizzaro World.

Here’s the response from the White House this morning, reported by Bloomberg News:

The federal Homeland Security Department has been in contact with New York officials, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters today. She said that while it’s too early to determine exactly what happened, it doesn’t appear to be terrorism-related.

Yes. We know what terrorism looks like:

Poster in Britain in 1939, when London was menaced by the might of the German military:

Poster in Britain in 2008, when London is menaced by “terrorists”:

The Brits may, at long last, have lost their resistance to fascism; but at least they’ve managed to preserve their design sensibility!

h/t: BoingBoing

(The images are linked to, respectively, a shop that sells t-shirts of King George VI’s message to the British people, and to the Metropolitan Police’s Counter-Terrorism Advertising Campaign, which has even more creepy posters.)

Update: OK, I can’t resist including this remix of the poster:

 

 Absolutely classic. Bush is in the White House, meeting with Lt. General Ray Odierno, and is trying to thank him for his service in Iraq:

I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who were trying to defeat us in Iraq.

Watch the video. Then, weep for your country.

When official spokesmen accuse a Nobel Prize-winning economist of cowardice, you know that a direct hit has been scored.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/03/04/trillion_dollar_war

In case you’re flummoxed with how to spend all those extra minutes, hours, and (let’s face it) days, I present for your diversion: Passive Aggressive Notes, the blog. I’ve linked you to a particularly recursive favorite.

Finally, a “blog” for “us”: The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks!!!

As someone who used to work for an employer who used quotation marks for emphasis, I can only say, that this blog is “long” overdue!

SF artist/designer/researcher, Aaron Koblin, “playfully turns lots of data into lots of information”. Here Aaron visualizes actual FAA flight data to create some stunning images.

Be sure to check out his animation of US flight patterns over the course of the day.His original project website from his work at UCLA can be found here.

(This post is dedicated to resident noise traffic controller, Steve)

Simply beautiful…

Imperial ambition, degraded by corruption and undermined by incompetence? It can only be Bush Administration foreign policy:

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

As they say on the internets, read the whole thing.

A few of the designers working on my film contributed pieces for this new show at the NYC MOMA. Some really beautiful visualizations and imagery. Worth the somewhat long load time.

The show’s own description:

Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, space, matter, and identity. Individuals cope daily with a multitude of changes in scale and pace—working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, and being inundated with information. Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of intelligence, but today’s instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration. Design and the Elastic Mind explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations. The exhibition highlights designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history—changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior—and translate them into objects that people can actually understand and use. This Web site presents over three hundred of these works, including fifty projects that are not featured in the gallery exhibition.

I hope to make it to NYC to see the show before it leaves the MOMA. Just ordered the catalog from the MOMA website. It looks gorgeous as well.