FPM: A bollard, Wikipedia tells us, “is a sturdy, short, vertical post. The term originally referred to a post on a ship or quay used principally for mooring boats, but is now used, primarily in British English, to refer to posts installed to control road traffic and posts designed to prevent ram raiding and car ramming attacks.”
For a time I lived in a city, Amsterdam, where bollards numbering in the tens of thousands have been a feature of the urban landscape for generations. I didn’t know them as bollards, but rather by the local word, Amsterdammertjes. They’re all identical – brown and about hip-high and shaped rather like humongous dildos, which, given the city’s international image, is not entirely inappropriate. Each of them has a vertical row of three X’s on it. (They’re crosses, actually: Christian crosses, an allusion to Amsterdam’s coat of arms.)
Amsterdammertjes were originally intended to separate the sidewalk from the street and protect buildings from traffic; later they also helped prevent illegal parking. But since they date back to an era before contemporary jihadist terrorism, they aren’t nearly strong enough to forestall deliberate car or truck attacks, only accidents involving relatively light, slow-moving vehicles. They’re quaint relics, widely beloved – although for years now municipal authorities, presumably recognizing their inutility, have been gradually removing them. If developments elsewhere in the Western world are any indication, however, the Amsterdammertjes will likely soon be replaced by solider objects – dividers capable of repelling deadly truck assaults of the sort committed on Bastille Day 2016 in Nice and last Halloween in New York.
For the fact is that throughout the West, bollards – formidable ones – and other, usually less attractive such structures are steadily becoming ubiquitous, and, in the process, dramatically altering the faces of some of the world’s great cities. In Washington, D.C., they began to be installed on a serious scale almost immediately after 9/11. “The 5.5-mile ring of steel posts around the Capitol Building is one of the largest (and most uniform) of its kind in the world,” stated one report last summer. “The waist-high steel posts installed after 9/11 cost about $7,500 a pop, and reportedly can stop ‘an eight-ton truck barreling into them at 50 mph.’” MORE
The Bollardization of America is ongoing.
There ARE nice decorative ones out in front of
St Pat’s NYC…
#MAGA
#KAGA2020
The Imaginot Line
Groucho, bst line i read all day by farrrr. LOL
I never heard of this. I’ve only seen the local ones here since 911 and had no clue it was a tradition. maybe they should sculpt some of them just to be interesting. In fact i nominate barack as a lawn jockey
The (not so) hidden cost of multiculturalism.
if we made those barriers look like barriers with concertina wire on top, maybe then people would realize we are at war.
Prepping for the neverending “What Happened”(?) World Tour.
Anti-Raghead blockading devices
Put Guns in them so they can shoot Jihadi before he can say Al
This is a serious subject, but still…whenever I think of bollards I think of this old-ish and quite risqué advertising image: NSFW.
ID and just killem.
The flower hills are popping up also.
They actually started showing up at Federal buildings after the Murrah Federal Building was bombed by Timothy McVeigh.
I had jury duty in Minneapolis a few months after the bombing and they had just finished installing them around the building. They were (and still are) ugly things, but no one would be able to drive a truck filled with explosives anywhere near the building.
Edit: Dang, stupid Windows update must have erased my ID! – Claudia
Oh, here I am!
Muzlim hitchin posts.
Several of the Jewish schools in my area installed them after 9-11.
But talking to them individually, they didn’t seem all that concerned about anything Muslim. Some just shrugged.
Also to be seen outside all the stores in Florida for when the octogenarian and nonagenarian set confuse the brake and gas pedals
A few decades back these scum wouldn’t have the nerve to attempt an attack in the US. Now days the leftists have us hunkered down in our own cities and towns and telling us we’ll be ok if we don’t offend them.
This creeping stupidity has cost untold numbers of lives and is going to cost more until we deal with reality, both with the islamists and the left.
Groucho, a thousand thumbs up on that remark!!!!
Blast Barriers around the Eiffel Tower….The New Normal.
I don’t call them bollards, I call them the Pillars of Islam.
The 5.5-mile ring of steel posts around the Capitol Building. The waist-high steel posts installed after 9/11 cost about $7,500 a pop.
How many America hating Muslims could we have deported for that much money?
The FBI, when not trying to overthrow the lawfully elected Republican President, is monitoring 1000 Muslims for jihadi activities. How many deportation charter flights could be bought for the cost of those spy teams?
another good example of trying to cure the symptoms not the problem. Not enough of the enemy killed.
Allahu Akbarriers.
Never could understand why some enterprising Terrorist didn’t buy hisself a hard-hat and a clip-board, rent a truck, and “fix” the bollards with enough TNT to level a city.
But maybe the cops are onto that “city services” scam.
Come to think of it, one of those old “cannon-type” nukes would fit nicely into some of those bollards.
But the cops are probably onto that, too.
Gamma-ray detectors overhead, and all – like they did with that Korean ship in Syria some years ago.
izlamo delenda est …
Oh, shit, that’s me.
izlamo delenda est …
Thanks for the explanation of the xxx seen all over
Amsterdam. They appear outside the Red Light District and it’s very confusing! And why on earth are the pot shops called “coffee houses?”