The darker side of flash mobs

I'm carefully not mentioning this to Roy, whose dystopian vision of urban life would be confirmed by it. And I have to say that rural life is looking better.

Philadelphia police make first flash mob arrest

Excerpt from the article:

Philadelphia police yesterday made their first arrest in the beating of a man during a rampage on South Street two weekends ago.

Stephen Lyde, 21, was arrested at his residence on the 5400 block of Sansom Street in West Philadelphia at 11:30 a.m., said Capt. Laurence Nodiff, commanding officer of South Detectives.

Many of the people who went to South and Broad Streets on the evening of May 30 appear to have been responding to text messages and online social networking sites, creating a type of spontaneous gathering known as a "flash mob."

Nodiff said Lyde was not tracked down through the Internet. Detectives expect to make more arrests soon.

The victim, who police say is 54, was riding his bicycle home from his job at the Wistar Institute in University City around 11:30 p.m. when he was confronted by eight males at Broad and South, Nodiff said.

"They brutally and viciously beat him to the ground, to unconsciousness," Nodiff said.

Broad and South is six blocks east and four blocks north of me. Another of the incidents was at Broad and Christian, just six blocks east of me. Roy and I walked to Broad and Christian to enjoy the spontaneous celebrations of the Phillies victory last fall. I don't know as I'd want to do that again.

I followed eyewitness accounts of the flash mob on Phillyblog -- a whole lot of "holy s---t, there are thousands of rowdy people on our street." Early reports expressed relief that no one was seriously hurt. Well, maybe not so much. Apparently, it wasn't until a few days after this incident that the police connected it to the flash mob.

Why is "angry white man" article illustrated with a black man?

And other conundra about this piece from the Associated Press:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090613/ap_on_go_ot/us_lone_wolf_terrorists

It starts out pointing out the dangers of the lone wolf terrorist and the difficulty of predicting when one of them will snap.

It's illustrated by a photo the young black man who shot up the recruiting station.

But then the rest of the article -- about three quarters of it -- is about the "angry white man." So why illustrate the story with the angry black man? And, if the writer includes the case of the recruiting station shootings in the lede, how come there is not one word about the way some young men doing jail time are recruited to Islam and radicalized while incarcerated?

Something very strange is going on here.

Obama wants to bulldoze my city!

Jeez, I hope someone drives a stake through the heart of this particular plan. One of the cities facing the Obama wrecking ball, according to this article, is Philadelphia.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/5516536/US-cities-may-have-to-be-bulldozed-in-order-to-survive.html