From: Christian Weisgerber (naddy@mips.inka.de)
Date: Sun Mar 09 2003 - 18:56:29 MST
spike66 <spike66@attbi.com> wrote:
> Canada is also a special case. Everyone loves Canadians.
That is the American stereotype. I also wonder whether French
Canadians are included there. In the rest of the world, Canadians
probably pass as "just like Americans, but civilized".
> Currently Americans are a grave danger to all
> bystanders wherever they travel. There are a
> number of extremists who will murder 100 innocents
> in case there is even one American present, such
> as was the case in the Bali nightclub bombing.
I think this aspect of the Bali bombing was simply an accident.
They wanted to kill Americans, but either misjudged their presence
there or simply mistook Australians for Americans. Most people who
learn English as a foreign language can't trace English accents to
the country of origin.
Americans as a target of terrorism isn't a particularly new phenomenon,
though.
Have I already mentioned the stealth license plates used by the
American troops in Germany? They used to have distinctive American
military license plates on their private cars, but eventually
somebody seems to have realized that this amounts to painting a
huge crosshairs on them.
One day I was driving through Ramstein and started noticing something.
There were an awful lot of cars with license plates starting with
HK. Now, I had no idea whether some nearby community issued these
(German license plates start with a letter code that identifies the
issuing county), but I noticed that far too many of these cars were
of American make, or if of European make still had the lights wired
up American style, and were occupied by people who just looked like
Americans. Something fishy was going on there.
Eventually, I read in the newspaper that the American forces had
started issuing stealth license plates that largely look like German
ones, but with the otherwise unassigned initial codes AD and AF.
I can add HK to that list. Also, in place of the little D/EU logo
they have the NATO one, but that's hard to see from a distance.
The basic idea had some merit, but the implementation is pretty
silly. The big crosshairs is still there.
-- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de
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