Terror and Trump and the exploding pizza man

Here we are, halfway through Sunday, and the terrorist apocalypse has not yet occurred -- although there is much fear and trembling: See here and here and here.

So why am I asking you, on this day, to view a documentary (embedded above) about the well-known "exploding pizza man" case? Because a thought occurred to me: How do we know that a terrorist wearing an explosive-laden vest has donned that garment of his or her own accord? Explosives can be detonated by remote control; the technology is neither expensive nor unusual. So how do we know that the person wearing the vest is acting under his or her own volition?

If I were really, really paranoid, I might go so far as to suggest that the pizza man case is best explained as a proof of concept operation. Robbery does not seem to have been the actual motive, since the crime could never have succeeded. (It seems that the mastermind of the operation was an unhinged woman with delusions of superiority.)

Cheering in NJ. Trump has made a startling claim...

"I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down, and I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down,” he said.

While there were images of people cheering the towers’ collapse in parts of the Middle East, there is no record of such celebrations in New Jersey. There were some Internet rumors of Muslims celebrating the towers’ fall in Paterson, New Jersey, but those rumors were discounted by local police at the time.

There was cheering in New Jersey on that day, but the people involved were those of whom we must never speak. (All attempts to debunk that event and to diminish its importance have been, in my view, unpersuasive and strained.)

By the way: A lot of people don't know that Dominik Suter, the guy who ran that moving company, kept an apartment in Los Angeles -- Sherman Oaks, if memory serves. I drove by the address one night. A rather posh place -- "south of the Boulevard," as we say in the San Fernando Valley. Suter was, in essence, a low-level crook: He ran one of those scammy moving companies that ripped off customers with seeming impunity. Kind of odd for a guy like that to keep up the rent on a pricey second home on the other side of the country, don't you think?

(No, dear readers, you may not discuss 9/11 here -- no matter who you are, and no matter what your perspective. If you try to do so, I will delete your comment mercilessly. Yes, I realize that I am being unfair -- but I have no choice: What happened to this blog in 2006 left a lasting scar. I will never change my stance, I will never respond to your inquiries, and I don't have to justify my decisions to anyone. Dig or split.)

I wonder: Is Trump intentionally making an oblique reference to Suter & co.?