h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/20/national/20flight.html?th

The nub and the gist of the whole brouhaha in a nutshell is that Sen. Teddy Kennedy was refused a ticket on at least three occasions by airline weasels because his name resembled one on a terrorist no-fly watch list.

In each case, airline executives overruled the drones at the desk and allowed the esteemed semi-monarch to fly, but it took weeks to get the Office of Homeland (Amerika, Uber Alles!) Security to settle the matter.

There's a joke in here, somewhere.

Maybe it's in the Millstone Kops way that Americans embrace the idea of "security" after the horse has left the barn.

A "no-fly" terrorist watch list. Risible in the extreme.
Like they're gonna do it again.
I think once was enough.

And then there is the old Hollywood movie canard (quack, quack!) about "If we become just like them, then they have won!"

Okay, then, the terrorists have won.
Everybody happy?

It's like another canard, the Nuremburg gag line,"I vas only followink orders, yah."

The airport charlies were only following orders before the 9/11 event, and now they is only following orders afterward, and none of it is worth a hill of beans.

On the Sunday of the Pearl Harbor incident, an alert spotter called his boss and said,"Um, I see planes, a lot of planes. It looks ominous." His commander said,"It's probably a training flight. Don't worry about it."
The Japanese Naval Air Force probably awarded that commander a yellow heart in absentia.
Then, within weeks, people were being trained all over America how to tell our aircraft from them other people's.
Not that that training did much good. There are several incidents on record of our anti-aircraft people and naval gunners downing our aircraft during WWII. Oops, sorry!

Not that aircraft need that much help falling from the sky.
They seem to do it of their own volition all the time.
They also seem to like to plow into buildings.
The number of flying incidents (or non-flying incidents) that took allied or axis lives during the late great unpleasantness will never be entirely known. "Training accidents" were a regular occurrence then and now.

Airliners have been taking a dive ever since they were first invented.
Hell, people were dying on glider flights before the first idiots decided to attach an engine to a glorified kite. Does the name Otto Lilienthal ring a bell?

Security concerns have existed since the first planes began to carry more than one passenger. I found an incident in 1964 where apparently a depressed ex-olympic contender took out extra insurance on himself and while enflighte decided to take a .357 revolver and remove the flight crew from the equation. 44 "souls" went down with this idiot.

1964. A whole world away from 2001.

An airplane is an aluminum-skinned sausage with meat packed inside.
Sorry, but it's true.
The moment a human being inserts itself into a fast-moving object, be it a bus or a train or a plane, or even a car driven by someone else, where it has no control over the motion or direction of said fast-movign object, that human being ceases to be a human and becomes, with the other packed-in material, meat.

The transit authorities and companies move meat. Unfortunately, it is alive, so they have to provide heat, cooling, toilets, food and other expensive amenities. If it were dead meat, all they would have to do is keep it cool and they could pack a lot more into the conveyance.

But, when you get on a fast-moving object, after you've paid the fine for traveling in that manner, you are nothing but a package taking up space until the object disgorges you at some point.

Now, the fact that one of the packages of living meat might choose to damage the conveyance by destroying it and it's cargo in route, is a major matter of concern to the conveyance companies because it not only means that they have lost an expensive bit of machinery, but also a trained individual to steer it, and some hopefully repeat customers. So, you would think that the conveyance companies would spend a bit of gelt on keeping their living meat transporters from being damaged and hire some responsible people to help in this endeavor, wouldn't you?
Well, they do. And then they don't think about it anymore, because, dear hearts and kind readers, they have, to use an earthy phrase, "covered their asses".
Once the "CYA" light comes on, they turn their attentions to more important matters, like fighting lawsuits from disgruntled meat and unhappy employees. They also have to deal with those pesky little creatures from the Government of the country they just happen to like doing business in who want them to pay attention to the maintenance schedules of their metal sausages and the "civil rights" of the meat.

"Security" to these people is just part of "PR", public relations, that chameleon (sp?) mechanism by which they convince the meat that it wants to be packed in a metal sausage and flung across the country at speeds that would make a cheetah vomit. "Security" is only a concern as long as it affects their "bottom line". When nobody really cares about it anymore, then things will go back to normal. In fact, they probably already have. A bunch of sycophants in ties and badges does not make a "security force", anymore than dressing up a class full of six year olds in fireman gear makes a Fire Fighting team.

As Senator Kennedy (paraphrasedly) asks,"If I'm having this much trouble, then what's it like for the hoi and polloi?"

My question is: What are the "enemy" doing with their intelligence, imagination and attention to detail while the scarecrows of democracy are deciding which kind of straw makes the best stuffing?

More truth in your short rant than I have read on the internet in a while.

Refreshing.


*wishes TR would write more*

In my journal?
I'm busy filling up the site with writing in postings and my columns and stuff. I have at least two entries in peer review right now and I've made contributions to at least two more that are in PR.

That's not counting my emails and my postings on other sites.
Me write constantly. Me talk a bit, too!

I will have a look around.
Between the site behaving badly and being offline more I have missed and other articles for months.

I have some fun reading waiting to do then.

Could lose the "waiting"

Oh? I thought it was a quaint turn of phrase.
I spend so much time reading the writings of quaint people half way around the world, I didn't even register it.