Just finished celebrating a birthday. Fortunately, it was rather less depressing than last year's, though the recruiter's consoling comment that "everything happens for a reason" did end up looking damn near clairvoyant over the next 12 months - basic training has nothing on this. Still separated from my wife by circumstances and a continent, though she will be getting on an airplane at some point to be with us again. Airport idiocy, here we come.
Which neatly bridges 2 things much on my mind lately. One personal, and deliberately somewhat cryptic. The other (TSA) very public, and a source of more than considerable irritation to many of us. That irritation is boiling over into widespread anger at invasive, quasi police-state "security theater" that keeps no-one safer. As my friend Jack Wheeler puts it:
"After traveling around the world - and through airport security in 18 countries - over the past few months, then returning to the US, I can confirm that no country I know of on earth has airport security as stupid, obnoxious, and intrusive as the US. And yes, that includes North Korea."
The grains of irritation have been piling up for quite some time, and like any sand hill, you can never be sure when the system reaches its "critical state" and suddenly begins to give way. Eventually, however, it will - and when it does, things happen fast. That anger may have found its critical state flashpoints at last...
"LSU Sociology Professor Edward Shihadeh and Ph.D. candidate Raymond Barranco have published a study titled "Latino Employment and Black Violence: The Unintended Consequence of U.S. Immigration Policy," in the March 2010 issue of Social Forces, the field's preeminent journal.
The study confirms that Latino immigration and dominance of low skill jobs have displaced blacks from low-skill labor markets, which in turn led to more violence in urban black communities. According to their analysis, this is traceable to U.S. immigration policies over the last several decades."
Part of this is simply intuitive, especially if you live in California. There are curveballs in the research conclusions, however, which point to an unexpected linkage mechanism and unintended policy consequences. It doesn't really slot left or right. Which makes it pretty interesting as a starting point for debate.
The lameness of airport security in the USA - or security theater, as it should be called - is difficult to properly express. It will end when people consistently demand better - and not one second of useless inconvenience before.
Before I forget, and for future reference, here's a fine post about the contrasting way the Israelis do it. With far less inconvenience, and a better security record.
The guy's a Berkeley humanities (now there's an oxymoron for you) professor, but he does bring up an interesting parallel:
"This spring in El Paso, after a talk I gave on the Indian raids and the U.S.-Mexican War, a man in the back row raised his hand. "Do you see any similarities between the borderland violence you've just described for the 1830s and 1840s and the current drug war?" The energy in the room changed immediately.
More than any other American city, El Paso has borne witness to the tragedy of Mexico's raging drug war...."
He has his own thoughts, and they're not as barking mad as you'd expect. But I suspect the wars also has lessons to teach that he hasn't considered.
As some of you may have heard, AT&T had its fiber optic cable around San Jose cut in several places, resulting in disrupted service to several counties that included cell phones and 911. Police and firefighters called up extra manpower and significantly increased street patrols, to improve the odds that if someone was in trouble, help would be nearby.
The reward is now raised to $250,000 for information leading to the arrest of the perp - and it's 100% clear this was sabotage:
Captioned:
18 hours ago: U.S. Army soldiers from Ft. Rucker patrol the downtown area of Samson, Alabama after a shooting spree March 10, 2009. At least 10 people including the suspected gunman and his mother were killed in the shooting spree and car chase in southern Alabama on Tuesday, authorities said.It's kind of weird to me that the local LEO's didn't call for reinforcements (I assume they are neck-deep in investigating the horrible crime) from neighboring counties under mutual aid. Any thoughts of the non-black helicopter kind?
As ought to be reasonable to assume given my pseudonym, I support widening the ability of law-abiding, noncriminal Americans (actually Britons and Canadians as well) to own and possess arms for both self-defense and recreation. I didn't write much about Heller, because as a non-lawyer there wasn't much I could usefully add to the dialog.
But post-Heller, we're seeing interesting regulatory and legal challenges to the prevailing "no-guns no-way" stance, and there are useful things that folks like us can do.
The National Parks Service has extended their comment period on a proposed rule change that would make bringing guns into national parks legal; that's a good idea on so many levels, I'm not sure where to begin - between predatory animals and predatory humans, and a thin-stretched population of park rangers I think it's highly responsible to be prepared to protect yourself and your family and friends.
A recent DID article explained the differences between the smaller MQ-1 Predator and MC-1 Sky Warrior UAVs, and their more advanced cousin the MQ-9 Reaper hunter-killer that can fly at 50,000 feet. As we noted at the time, however, the MQ-9 is also the basis for other UAVs, some of which are used for research. One is NASA's Ikhana unmanned research aircraft (pron. ee-kah-nah, Choctaw language, means "intelligent").
NASA has also been intelligent, running wildfire related exercises and missions since August. Ikhana flew over several of the Southern California wildfires Wednesday, Oct 24/07, using its payload capacity to carry a special thermal-infrared imaging equipment that can look right through smoke and haze and record high-quality imagery of key hot spots. The imagery is processed on board, downlinked, and overlaid on Google Earth maps at NASA Ames Research Center in Northern California, Then it's made available by the National Interagency Fire Center to incident commanders in the field to aid them in allocating their fire-fighting resources.
Each flight is being coordinated with the FAA, to allow the remotely piloted aircraft to fly within the national airspace while maintaining separation from other aircraft. The missions are controlled by pilots remotely from a ground control station at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, CA. The above 3-D image was taken at 10:21 a.m. PDT over the Harris Fire in San Diego County, looking west. The hot spots (in yellow) are concentrated on the ridgeline in the left center of the photo.
Nice work, NASA. More MQ-9 Ikhana images can be found via this NASA page, or you can look at Ikhana's page of past photos, which includes one detailing its wildfire sensor package.
This is maybe the fourth post I've done on the Plame thing. In the first I pointed out that being less than candid about something like this was stupid on the part of the White House.
In the second, I made basically the same point.
First it was the strange event with the truck at the port of Miami yesterday which ultimately has been dismissed as a "misunderstanding". Then today it was a cargo container at the same port, destined for a cruise ship, that tested positive for C4 6 times but has now been declared non-threatening.
Now al Watan reports that these are only 2 of several disturbing incidents in the last few days. Via Counterterrorism Blog:there have been a number of thefts of airport vehicles in US airports in the past few days including an United Air car on Chicago O'Hare's airport. Also attempts were made in the Buffalo airport to steal authorized vehicles, and supposedly airport authorities around the country have noticed strange people watching restricted areas in airports.
Misunderstandings and false positives on chem tests do occur. But so do probes of our security and -- as we've seen -- plans for terror attacks in the US. It's going to be a tumultuous year.
I have posted, at Grim's Hall, a piece on the importance of wearing arms. On 9/11, especially, it is a topic to which I think we should turn our minds.
