UPDATE2: According to ABC News² one of the two previously suspicious appearing individuals identified below has talked to police claiming his innocence.

UPDATE1: According to InfoWars³ the two likely Navy SEALs might be private security from Craft International⁴.

Apparent Seal Team Members

InfoWars ⁵ showed its awesomeness yet again by collecting key photographs with basic analysis of the Boston Marathon Bombing. From these pictures we can draw a few conclusions, with the caveat that who knows if the analysis is accurate.

1. Navy SEALs were deployed for security

In the image from InfoWars it appears that two Navy SEALs are providing security near the finish line. The conclusion is based on the BDU-style dress of the individuals, the fact that both are dressed alike, and that one of the persons wears a hat with the SEAL Team logo.

Assuming that the analysis is accurate, it begs the question why SEALs were present. Perhaps they deploy to all similar events. It’s also possible that Boston had some reason to be concerned, perhaps for the same reason that the New York City Marathon was cancelled last year.

2. There Seem To Be Two Obvious Suspects (OR NOT — See the UPDATE above)

Infowars saved everyone some time by finding the two individuals who showed up, looked like they didn’t belong, and one of whom showed up at the finish line with a backpack, and apparently left without it.

It’s probably no coincidence that the backpack, the jacket, and the hat match the FBI description of the individual that they have identified in a store video dropping off the backpack.

InfoWars Identifies Terrorists?

Suspected Terrorists With Heavy Bags

What makes the match more likely is the fact that the explosive devices must have been heavy, on the order of 20-30 pounds, due to the pressure cooker body that was used as the vessel, and shrapnel within. This would make a bag with the device appear heavy. As it happens, the two individuals identified by InfoWars carry bags that seem unusually heavy.

In the picture it’s also obvious that the heavy item in the backpack is relatively large, with an odd shape, and is similar to what a pressure cooker body with the handle removed might look like in a backpack of similar size.

Finally, it just happens that the two individuals have middle Eastern features. Coincidence? We will likely know when the FBI makes some announcements.

In the meantime, you are free to draw your own conclusions. Also be sure to check out the InfoWars article which made the disclosures in the first place.⁶

© 2013, Pontificus. All rights reserved.

© 2013, Pontificus. All rights reserved.

Which one should be banned?

The following gem was in the discussion thread to a DailyMail article about gun control protests on January 19, 2013.¹

Want to stop gun violence? Don’t arm Democrats: Ft Hood Shooter – Registered Democrat. Columbine – both families were progressive liberal Democrats. Virginia Tech Shooter – Registered Democrat – Wrote hate mail to Bush. Connecticut School Shooter – Registered Democrat; hated Christians. Colorado Theater Shooter – progressive liberal Democrat; staff worker for the Obama campaign; Occupy Wall Street!

- John , Quincy, United States, 20/1/2013 16:11

© 2013, Pontificus. All rights reserved.

© 2012, Pontificus. All rights reserved.

© 2011, Pontificus. All rights reserved.

No HP TouchPads in Denver¹

Can this be real? If you use a HP TouchPad in Denver, the product warranty will be blown.

That is the conclusion we drew reading the TouchPad product specification in conjunction with the fine print from the limited warranty.

The “Environmental Requirements“² for the HP TouchPad state:

“Altitude (unpressurized) Operating 0 to 5,000 ft (0 to 1,524 m)”

The 1-Year HP Web OS Limited Warranty³ in turn states:

“EXCLUSIONS: This Limited Warranty does not apply … (2) to damage caused by … any other cause beyond the range of the intended use.“

This seems to imply that places like Denver are off limits to HP TouchPad users. Salt Lake City, Reno and other similar cities are marginal. Not to speak of almost every respectable ski resort around the globe, or the cabins of most commercial aircraft (that have effective cabin altitudes above 5,000 ft in cruise.)

What were they thinking??

Maybe they should rehire some of the people they let go.

© 2011, Pontificus. All rights reserved.

The Obama GrabTM

Everyone surely knows the whole body naked-scanning machines that TSA rushed into service at airports around the country immediately after the mid-term elections. These days they are impossible to miss while traveling.

If one were to wonder if safety was forgotten in the rush to field the machines as quickly as possible, here’s some food for thought:

• Boston TSA employees seem to be experiencing a higher than average rate of skin cancer¹
• FDA has not tested the full body scanners for safety²
• NIST has not tested the full body scanners for safety³
• additional action was recommended by the Johns Hopkins University to avoid exceeding the general public dose recommendation of 100 mrem per year⁴
• the units have areas where beam overshoot will expose bystanders to repeated doses; protective shields were recommended, but seem to not have been implemented⁵
• the systems were never studied for their cancer inducing properties using standard methods such as mutant mice⁶
• the often quoted comparison between cosmic background radiation received during flight and the scanning machines is inaccurate, because the energy levels of the radiation are orders of magnitude different⁷
• the dose estimations are likely to be inaccurate (too low), because the energy levels used concentrate more of the radiation in and near the skin, causing localized doses much higher than the “full body average”⁸

To be fair, the FDA responded to some of these issues⁹. Strangely, in the lengthy response nowhere does the FDA state that it studied the systems itself, or that the FDA has determined the systems to be safe. The response made reference to third party safety studies, but not only were these studies not performed on behalf of the FDA on the systems themselves, some of them pointed out issues that had not been addressed by the TSA¹⁰.

Further, a key study made by JHU was heavily redacted, making independent verification impossible. Not to mention that the characterization of the third party evaluations was at best questionable, as the FDA claimed NIST had provided “safety data”, when NIST states that it didn’t test the units for safety¹¹.

And last but not least, in a response to the FDA, it seems that the JHU report was inconsistent and in fact implies that the primary radiation was measured in a manner that provided a lower than actual reading¹².

Perhaps we should all just drive a car or resign ourselves to the Obama Grab^TM until we can all vote out the Dear Leader and his gang that brought us this multi-billion dollar skin cancer experiment.

© 2011, Pontificus. All rights reserved.

Time for a new theory, or in this case fairy tale, Church of Man Made Global Warming folks. I bet Prince Charles feels pretty stupid right now, or should anyway. And algoracle still laughs all the way to the bank. There sure are plenty of suckers out there.

© 2011, Pontificus. All rights reserved.

© 2010, Pontificus. All rights reserved.

© 2010, Pontificus. All rights reserved.