One is prompted to ask what the hell y’all are good for then
TSA says finding bombs is hard and that’s why an undercover agent got an IED in his pants through security.
“It’s not like they’re using a cartoonish bundle of dynamite with an alarm clock strapped to it,” Bob Burns of the TSA Blog Team posted on the agency’s Web site.
“The items are extremely hard to spot.”
Um… isn’t that the point of the TSA? To spot those hard to spot items? The stated reason behind the body scanners and the invasive pat downs and and the metal detectors and having to practically disrobe at checkin and the harassment of toddlers and the disabled? Is that it’s hard to spot those things? And isn’t there ostensibly training done for new TSA hires to make sure they are capable of spotting non-Wile. E. Coyote, Super-Genius bombs? A kindergartener could spot one of those. If you all aren’t any better than that, aren’t you unnecessary? Oh, never mind. I know that answer.
Via Veeshir at Doubleplusundead where he brings the funny and the endy. Mostly the endy and the anger-y but sometimes the funny.
where he brings the funny and the endy. Mostly the endy and the anger-y but sometimes the funny.
I knew it, I’m becoming an OUTRAGE!!!!!! monger.
Sigh.
That’s what comes of paying too much attention and not using enough denial.
Lots of denial. That is what is called for. That and lots of ammo.
[...] One is prompted to a… on Round the Tubes: Oyster Herpes… [...]
I just realized, you didn’t link to the post with the TSA article, was that on purpose?
No, that was not on purpose, thanks for pointing it out. I spend most of my evenings lately browsing the links in your posts and I must have just been on the wrong one when I copied the link. :)
I spend most of my evenings lately browsing the links in your posts
Wait, you click the links?
Crap, now I’m going to have to actually link to stories that I’m talking about.
I figured nobody clicked them so I just made stuff up.
As long as you keep the links entertaining, I won’t tell anyone else.
Veeshir has links? Who knew? I can barely stand to read his stuff so I never stop to look. ;)
I cannot see how the TSA is really serving a purpose. Ok, the bad guys got away with their plane-into-buildings joke once, but they won’t do it again because the rest of us know that they need an ass kicking and right now.
At what point does the argument about saving just one life fail and the cost in terms of freedom far outweigh the vanishingly small odds of a terrorist being on any one plane?
The terrorists have definitely won the Slapfest on Terror. Behind every piece of luggage lurks a jihadi with explosive diapers. And we spend BILLIONS looking for them.
We spend billions and harass old grandmas and babies because some segments of the population need to be reassured that they are totally safe and bubble wrapped. So despite the fact that the security measures we are allowed to use by the PC police will never prevent anything except by happenstance, having that stuff in place allows them to lie to themselves that people out there aren’t trying to kill them for a reason they have zero control over.
And for that reason, for those people, we will never reach a point that the cost in freedom is too high. It will take the rest of us dragging them kicking and screaming into freedom to make it end.
In no way, shape,fashion or form has the TSA done anything to change my assessment of it: Thugs Standing Around performing very poor Security Kabuki. Thugs Standing Around is a full employment program for stupid bullies with delusions of importance. It demonstrates daily a toxic combo of the (cheese grater memory influenced) quote from (IIRC) a GBS play, “When a stupid man does something he knows is wrong, he always claims it is his duty,” and the worst possible outcome of Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html.