--Jon
In the future please limit your comments to topics relevant to the ongoing tech bubble and attendant charlatanism.
ps My favorite part of not flying has been discovering Kansas City BBQ joints. I stop each way between IL and CA. Yum. Silver lining, right?
But really, it's kind of hard to go wrong in KC.
Keep on fighting the good fight man.
I always joked that it could mean the "one who turns things around" or "the paragon of shifty people."
I assume the tie to autism comes from the idea that it's turning within oneself?
And there are other things to enjoy, such as outdoors thermal pools. You could strike up a conversation about the language with local people in a "hot pot" (heitur pottur), as we call the outdoors jacuzzies. :)
Can you elaborate on what you mean?
If I read this right, there is a suggestion that the US authorities deliberately put a terrorist on a plane with a bomb for propaganda purposes?
But I think you'll be more effective against the body scanners if you drop the right-wing crankery at the end. The fear-mongering about terrorists isn't helpful. If they want to pull something off, they will, whatever kind of detector we're using. "Placing us all in danger" is Fox News rhetoric.
The fact that these scanners were a mistake doesn't imply that we should necessarily privatize the TSA. It needs a huge amount of reform. But there's no evidence that privatization wouldn't lead to the same kind of risk-taking and incentive problems that we've seen come to such spectacular fruition in the financial sector.
As things stand now, we have a clumsy system and there hasn't been a major attack since 9/11. Focus on the ineffectiveness, and the invasion of privacy, not on making people scared or promoting bankrupt ideas about replacing the government with free enterprise.
Around the same time as the TSA was created, the government became the insurer of last resort for terrorism related claims over $1B. This was to avoid the inevitable consequence -- in order to be able to buy insurance against terrorism, airlines would have had to prove to the insurance company that they had reasonable security measures. This would mean a 15-20 minute screening for each passenger, etc. In other words, air travel as we know it would have ended.
The simple alternative? Let the government hire the workers and "outsource" the security duty from the private airports and airlines. Nobody is going to successfully sue the government for allowing an attack to occur, and now that it's outside the scope of responsibility of the airlines, the insurance companies are willing to insure against the remaining risk. The $1B ceiling was basically a handout to the insurance industry offered in exchange for bearing a lot of extra risk for free while the government got its act together post 9/11.
If airport screeners were private firms, then even if the insurance industry didn't force quality screening to occur, there would be public demand for it once reports of weapons being successfully brought through. In today's world, it's a crime to even try to bring a fake/harmless weapon through, so the public is essentially forbidden from independently auditing the screeners.
The blogger is playing it safe by using a metal case, but that only tests the metal/object detection capabilities and doesn't test for successful detection of any of the other potentially dangerous items (which are also likely to be easy to smuggle through).
The privacy issue is interesting, but I don't think it has much to do with the initial creation of the TSA. The main goal at the time the TSA was created was to create the appearance that leaders had things under control and to prevent disruptions caused by knee-jerk reactions (spiking market prices, etc.). In reality these would not likely have lasted long w/o government intervention, but they are the kinds of things that planners fear most.
Remember, this guy has been fighting long before this vulnerability was publicly known.
Thank you for your hard work.
Stay tuned during the RNC and DNC conventions this year to watch why it's too late as congress has voted hundreds of millions of dollars for their own security budgets during the conventions so that protesters can be surpressed as quickly and quietly as possible.
We'll never have more rights than we have right now, it's all downhill.
I really dislike this rhetoric. There has always been a certain levels of "bad" in the world that swing like the pendulum. It's not constantly descending into oblivion. Try to see the good in the world.
I don't see it as a case where there is no hope however. Read all three opinions in United States v. Antoin Jones (the GPS surveillance case). Not only did the Supreme Court unanimously buck previous cases to say that this was a 4th Am search, but a clear majority (the Alito and Sotomayor opinions, remember Alito was joined by Breyer, Kagan, and Ginsberg) expressed concern about the rise of a surveillance state. We may be getting to the point where the court is starting to push back big time.
We do fix some stuff eventually.
http://www.amazon.com/FDR-Goes-War-Executive-Restricted/dp/1...
That's how it works.
Kidding; I've gotten the SSSS before. No fun at all.
javascript:document.body.contentEditable ='true'; document.designMode ='on'; void 0The real way to fix is to make sure you, the voting public, is more informed, and stop voting in parties that have vested interest. Use the democracy your forefathers died to get you properly. I hear 1/4 of the people in the US don't even vote!
At a minimum his name will now show up on the no-fly list for the rest of his life. If he realized this, I am in awe.