What Do You Think?

[Jojoking]

This article says pretty much what every level-headed American is thinking while being patted down and scanned while muslim passengers are passed over, thanks to political correctness.


Copied from:
http://infidelsarecool.com/2010/11/26/why-the-tsa-is-wasting-their-time-and-the-american-travelers/
also at
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-airline-security-doesnt-work.html

Why the TSA is wasting their time, and the American travelers’

by Kal El on November 26, 2010·

Why Airline Security Doesn’t Work

Three men go on a camping trip. On the way there they’re told by a park ranger to be careful because their campsite is located near some dangerous animals. What dangerous animals? The park ranger won’t say, because that would be profiling. “Just keep in mind”, he tells them, “that people who camped there in the past never made it back alive.”

As the sun goes down, they pick up their hunting rifles and stand watch for dangerous animals. But they don’t know what dangerous animals, they’re watching out for. And they don’t want to profile. So they keep watch for crickets as much as for bears, and for deer as much as for mountain lions. A rabbit, an owl or a bullfrog all equally frighten them out of their wits. They open fire on mosquitoes and stand watch against monstrous raccoons. By the end of the night, they can hardly see anything or react to danger. That morning, a pair of mountain lions stroll lazily into their camp and find them snoring away.

This little story illustrates why we can’t do things this way. Because it’s stupid and it’s suicidal. Human survival is based on recognizing threats, not on reacting to all stimuli because one of them might be threatening, but we don’t want to single it out and make it feel bad. If we actually did things that way, we’d all be dead by now.

There are three stages to coping with a threat. First you have to recognize the threat. Second, you have to formulate a plan for dealing with the threat. Third, you have to implement the plan.

So far we haven’t even made to the first stage. We haven’t recognized the threat. At the airline security level, we insist that the threat is completely random. Anyone at all could be a terrorist. There’s no specific ideology or countries that are sources of terrorism. Instead terrorism is like some sort of disease. Anyone at all could be a carrier. And so we have to watch out for everyone. All the time. And like those hunters, we’re either on alert all the time or we’re completely apathetic. We’re either security manic or security depressive. We go from letting everyone pass to strip searching everybody. There’s no rational approach to danger, because we don’t have a rational plan. We just go from 0 to 60 every time there’s a new threat.

Since we failed the first stage, we can’t move on to the second stage. We can’t recognize the threat, so every plan we formulate to deal with is doomed from the start. Instead of addressing a known threat, we go down a lot of blind alleys. Technology keeps getting abused as a shortcut in another episode of security theater, as new machines are bought and installed. But technology is ‘dumb’. Machines are a tool, not a plan. Like any tool, they can let us do more. But like all tools, they’re only as smart as the people using them. And the people using them are trained to be dumb.

[loosebelly]