Vanity Fair article worth reading on the TSA

[philip964]

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/featu ... ity-201112" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

A very interesting article that repeats a lot of what we have said here.

The reporter made a fake boarding pass in photoshop and easily got thru security at the airport.

Equates the current system as banning people with red shirts cause the last terrorist wore one.

[philip964]

Boy you put Vanity Fair in the subject line and it dies a sudden death.

[terryg]

Fascinating read and from Vanity Fair no less - thank you.

I especially like:

To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.

(Emphasis mine)

and:

The only useful airport security measures since 9/11,” he says, “were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can’t break in, positive baggage matching”—ensuring that people can’t put luggage on planes, and then not board them —“and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater.

[stroo]

I have come to the conclusion, confirmed again by this article, that our political class is insane. Who would spend $1 trillion plus to say nothing of the cost of the inconvenience for travelers for no real return?

Of course that is no less insane than spending and committing to spend far more than you take in in revenues. Or using 10 year budgets to allow you to claim victory because you forecast cuts 10 years out.

It is just as crazy to judge candidates by what they say when their prior actions demonstrate just the opposite. But we as voters do that all the time.

Or refusing to teach right and wrong in schools.

We are just nuts as a society.

Sorry for the rant.

[surprise_i'm_armed]

stroo:

Don't get me started on the political class being clueless.

How about flying C-130's from the US to Iraq, full of pallet loads of cash from the Federal
Reserve Bank of NY, then handing the money out to warlords and various skeezers, with no
accountability, while schools, bridges, and highways in the US need fixing?

Have you noticed that now that US troops are out of Iraq, the Iraqi's are now starting to
kill each other at an increased pace?

Sheesh. :-(

SIA

[chasfm11]

I have come to the conclusion, confirmed again by this article, that our political class is insane. Who would spend $1 trillion plus to say nothing of the cost of the inconvenience for travelers for no real return?

Of course that is no less insane than spending and committing to spend far more than you take in in revenues. Or using 10 year budgets to allow you to claim victory because you forecast cuts 10 years out.

It is just as crazy to judge candidates by what they say when their prior actions demonstrate just the opposite. But we as voters do that all the time.

Or refusing to teach right and wrong in schools.

We are just nuts as a society.

Sorry for the rant.

Actually, they are all quite sane. The ruling class' mission is to subjugate the masses and they are doing fine, calculated job of it. I see little difference among Prince Harry, Queen Pelosi and King Obama and King John of England in the 1200s. Duke Bloomberg has to be in the mix somewhere.

The latest Michelle Malkin article on the effect of Queen Michele's school lunch program (enriching the SEIU and causing tons of food that the kids won't eat to be thrown away) is an awful lot like the fabled "let them eat cake" aristocracy in France. In that article, the directive by the Chicago schools that kids could not bring lunches from home and had to eat cafeteria food pretty much clinches the subjugation argument. I would have starved rather than to have eaten cafeteria food and that was before MO started tinkering with the menu.