Air Paranoia

And the bottom just wonkied up also.

But you know -- why would you wear a T-shirt depicting a bomb when you knew you were boarding a plane? Even joking about bombing has been enough to get people barred at security.

Sure, the reference is funny, but perhaps not at an airport. The problem is not just security but how others on the flight (as depicted in the original post) might respond.

Crumudgeonly note: Doesn't anyone wear a nice shirt with a collar on air flights anymore?

I just googled the phrases and went to the somewhat [url=http://allyourbase.planettribes.gamespy.com/index.shtml]official site[/url]. Funny as hell. My 17 year old son came out of the basement next to my office and I said "do you know about this?"

The look I got made me feel very old and very dumb indeed. Ah well.

Well that's strange, it was Cornhole, and now he's just 1337.

No this is not drug related!

Why does Proaxiom have 2 differect numbers and a wierd posting time in his dupe post?

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Originally posted by Catchfire:
Dress shirts are forbidden on transatlantic flights nowadays. Terrorists can hide explosives disguised as collar straigteners. Deadly.

All of your collars are belong to us.

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You are on the path to destruction. If we stop wearing dress shirts, the terrists have won.

Aacch!! Proaxiom's 1st post now quotes [i]1984[/i] and his 2nd post has [i]disappeared![/i]

All babblers who have posted on this thread, run for your lives! YOU ARE ON THE WAY TO DESTRUCTION!!!

Edited to add: And Babbler #31117 Cornhole has vanished...perhaps the universe is saved?

[ 23 August 2006: Message edited by: Catchfire ]

Sorry about that, folks. That was me playing with HTML in my post last night. I wasn't 'hacking' the thread in the conventional sense of the work (ie. intrusion). It was just a post with HTML in it.

I discovered you can do the following:
- By closing the table row of your post and then putting text, you can put text on the top of the thread above the OP
- By ending the post with an open HTML tag with an open attribute value, you can suppress the 'Edited by...' text that appears when you edit your post
- By closing the table row of your post and then putting another table row, you can forge a new post

For all of them, you can see what's going on if you know how to read HTML and read the original page source, rather on relying on the browser-rendered version.

This was just a stupid game, inspired when I felt like doing something amusing with an 'All your base' line, but after I went to bed last night I thought up something sinister to do with it.

What if my forged post had another Babbler's name on it, and contained something extremely offensive?

I wonder, if it was sufficiently bad, would a moderator ban that Babbler before he had a chance to proclaim his innocence?

I think the mods might want to consider disabling HTML for all the forums.

[url=http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71642-0.html?tw=wn_index_3]Refuse to be Terrorized![/url]

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On Aug. 16, two men were escorted off a plane headed for Manchester, England, because some passengers thought they looked either Asian or Middle Eastern, might have been talking Arabic, wore leather jackets, and looked at their watches -- and the passengers refused to fly with them on board.

The men were questioned for several hours and then released.

On Aug. 15, an entire airport terminal was evacuated because someone's cosmetics triggered a false positive for explosives. The same day, a Muslim man was removed from an airplane in Denver for reciting prayers. The Transportation Security Administration decided that the flight crew overreacted, but he still had to spend the night in Denver before flying home the next day.

The next day, a Port of Seattle terminal was evacuated because a couple of dogs gave a false alarm for explosives.

On Aug. 19, a plane made an emergency landing in Tampa, Florida, after the crew became suspicious because two of the lavatory doors were locked. The plane was searched, but nothing was found. Meanwhile, a man who tampered with a bathroom smoke detector on a flight to San Antonio was cleared of terrorism, but only after having his house searched.

On Aug. 16, a woman suffered a panic attack and became violent on a flight from London to Washington, so the plane was escorted to the Boston airport by fighter jets. "The woman was carrying hand cream and matches but was not a terrorist threat," said the TSA spokesman after the incident.

And on Aug. 18, a plane flying from London to Egypt made an emergency landing in Italy when someone found a bomb threat scrawled on an air sickness bag. Nothing was found on the plane, and no one knows how long the note was on board.
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The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.

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[url=http://torontosun.com/News/World/2006/08/25/pf-1775349.html]Terror fear baseless[/url]

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Haarlem, Netherlands (AP) –

Prosecutors said yesterday they found no evidence of a terrorist threat on a flight to India aboard an aircraft of Minneapolis-based Northwest Airlines that returned to Amsterdam. They said they were releasing all 12 passengers arrested after the emergency landing.

The men, all Indian nationals, had aroused suspicions on the flight to Mumbai because they had a large number of cellphones and other equipment and refused to follow the crew's instructions, prosecutors said.

Because of those actions by the passengers, the pilot radioed for help shortly after takeoff Wednesday, and the plane was escorted back to Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport by two Dutch fighter jets.

The 12 were arrested after the plane landed and held overnight at a detention centre at the airport.

"A thorough investigation of the cellphones in the plane found that the phones were not manipulated and no explosives were found on board the plane," said a statement from the prosecutor's office.

"From the statements of the suspects and the witnesses, no evidence could be brought forward that these men were about to commit an act of violence," the statement said.
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Nitin Patel of Boston, who sat behind the men, told the paper: "I don't know how close we were, but my gut tells me these people wanted to hijack the airplane."

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United Flight 686 from Chicago to LaGuardia was detained. The flight was scheduled to take off at 2:50 p.m. Friday.

A flight attendant notified the captain of the plane after a 13-year-old was overheard talking about a bomb.

The captain drove the plane to a secure part of the airport and investigated the incident. He could not resolve it.

The FBI and TSA were then called in to investigate.

The 13-year-old and the his mother were removed from the plane. FBI officials say the 13-year-old is autistic.

[url=http://cbs2chicago.com/local/local_story_237182532.html]Read the Story[/url]

[url=http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/8/26/05751/8111]Daily Kos[/url]

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Everyone reading this blog knows that Western Governments exploit fear for political ends.

Unfortunately, everyone buys into the fear when they're responding. Instead of reacting with incredulity to overhyped movie-plot threat scenarios, liberal commentators deny that Democrats are soft on security. "We can ignore the elephant in the room just as much, if not more, than Republicans can!" they shout, seemingly in unison. "We can be just as dumb as they can, maybe even dumber!"
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The GOP creates the fear, then both sides attempt to tell the electorate that they're better at managing it than the other. But why isn't there anybody standing on the rooftops shouting, "The fear is fraudulent! The threat is over-hyped! Stop it, you're behaving stupidly!"

If DHS, FEMA and TSA are so incompetent and underfunded, if the CIA has been gutted, if seaports are hopelessly insecure, if the USA has spent five years losing against Osama bin Laden at the world's biggest ever game of "Where's Waldo" in Afghanistan, how come the number of al'Qaeda attacks we've seen on US soil in the five years since 9/12 have been identical to the number of al'Qaeda attacks we've seen on US soil in the five years preceding 9/10? If the Government's response has been so abysmally hopeless, we should all be dying in droves, shouldn't we? But we're not. Why isn't anyone pointing this out?

As a society, we should be giving more critical analysis to the politics of fear. In a world where the destruction that could theoretically be wrought by 100 pretend terrorist plots is completely overwhelmed by the devastation imposed by one real-life hurricane, we really ought to be having a good hard look at our priorities.
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If we know that pre-boarding passenger screening can be bypassed by anyone with a car and enough time to drive out of town to a smaller airport, is it possible to mount any credible arguments to assert that we'd be any less secure if we did away with pre-boarding passenger screening altogether? Why do we single-out air travel in a world where every automobile owner has the explosive capacity of six sticks of dynamite stored in their gas tank? And if planes aren't being attacked and cars aren't being used as fuel/air explosives, what are we actually gaining from the massive expenditure on security we've been making, and the ridiculous excesses of fear which we've been stimulating?

These are important questions to answer, but they're not even going to be asked, let alone thought about, until reality-based politics starts to rise above the politics of fear.

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Some of the follow-upcomments are interesting, such as

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Since Sep 11 2001, the TSA has completely failed to catch a single terrorist, or prevent a single terrorist attack. And yet they've participated in countless millions of security failures every time they've singled-out someone with "SSSS" on their boarding pass for extra scrutiny.

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...the colossal idiocy of having people pour their "potentially explosive" liquids together in a big barrel. (Yeah, huh... if they were really explosive liquids, they'd just frickin' blow up when you did that, now wouldn't they?) ...
And like the diarist says, why the heck do you want to be on the plane with your bomb anyway? Wouldn't it be better to blow up a plane you're not on? Yeah. But Air Cargo screening is not in place.

You wanna know why it's not in place? Because noone sees the air cargo. We're doing some work with it, but it's slow. The companies complain. They don't want to spend money. And there's no visibility, no bang for your buck. The DHS top dipshits would love a better statistic -- XX% of cargo screened, yay! But Congress isn't pressing them on it because the people aren't pressing them because they don't know it exists. So they aren't dedicating much money or time to it.

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According to this scientific analysis, an additional 1,500 Americans died in highway crashes in the year following 9/11 due to increased highway traffic, presumably caused by fear of flying. [url=http://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-04/sfra-df041206.php]http://eure...

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Shortly after the September 11, 2001 airplane highjackings and crashes in the U.S., Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer observed that "Americans reduced their air travel...[and] a proportion of those who did not fly instead drove to their destination." An article published this week in Risk Analysis, Gigerenzer theorized that more miles-driven (especially on high-speed highways that are used for long distance travel) would probably lead to an increase in deaths from traffic accidents. That's the "indirect damage."

Indeed, U.S. consumers reduced their air travel by between 12 and 20% in the 3 months after 9/11. And, they increased their highway travel. ... post-9/11 traffic on high-speed highways was substantially greater than in previous years...The increases in miles-driven were accompanied by greater numbers of traffic deaths. In the year following 9/11, some 1,500 more Americans died on the highways than would have been expected, based on highway accidental death statistics from the previous 5 years.

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So around half as many people died through irrational preference of driving in the single year after 9/11 as died in the 9/11 tragedy itself.

Driving is around [url=http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/16237?&pri... times as risky as flying.

Flying on a major airline is much safer than driving. There were only 22 crash-related deaths on major U.S. commercial airlines in 2005, and 13 deaths in 2004 (not including small and/or private planes, which are not as safe). Many thousands die in car crashes every year. (There were 42,119 automotive fatalities in the USA in 2001.)

[ 27 August 2006: Message edited by: Paul Gross ]

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Originally posted by Jingles:
[b]Consider that the yearly death toll on the roads of the United States is around fifty thousand, and the maiming and injury toll much higher, you'd think they'd have color coded highway warnings. Almost as many Americans die every year from vehicles as died in Vietnam, but they're scared shitless of Pert Plus.[/b]

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Heart disease kills a million and a half Americans each year, and yet there are still line-ups at McDonald's. If the terrorists really wanted to kill large numbers of Americans, they'd start new fast food chains.

You can't pin this sort of thing on the American administration. It's human nature. We obsess about small (but dramatic) risks while we largely ignore many large (but commonplace) risks. Evolution built in a risk perception mechanism into our brains, but it's not designed for the risks in the modern world.

In the book [i]Freakonomics[/i], the authors point out that many parents are reluctant to let their children play at a friend's house if they know the friend's parents have a gun in the house. But there is no such reluctance for letting their offspring play at a friend's house where there's a pool...

And yet a swimming pool in the backyard is 100 times more likely to kill your child than a gun in the house.

We inherently suck at risk assessment.

quote:

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Originally posted by Proaxiom:
[b]You can't pin this sort of thing on the American administration. It's human nature.[/b]

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If you can see that it's bullshit, and I can see that it's bullshit, why do you excuse the USians for not seeing it?

Prisoners of human nature? I think not.

quote:

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Originally posted by Proaxiom:
[b]One characteristic of democracy, though, is that general human failings tend to manifest in its governments.[/b]

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I guess Cuba's lucky not to have that problem, eh?

quote:

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Originally posted by Proaxiom:
[b]If there's a system of government that doesn't have inherent problems, I have yet to hear about it.[/b]

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So it's not just [b]democracy[/b] that has this "inherent problem" of "general human failings" being manifested in its governments, as you said before - it's [b]all forms[/b] of government?

You are tying yourself into knots trying to justify your defence of the idiocy of the US administration.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence, clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
- H.L. Mencken, 1920

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil ... to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.
- General Douglas MacArthur, 1957

[url=http://www.counterpunch.org/marshall09192006.html]The Great Hair Gel and Toothpaste Scare[/url]

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There seems to have been a great increase in airplane scares lately, although none seem to have been actual terrorist incidences. The most notable of those that have actually crashed seems to have been caused by an understaffed control tower and a bad runway map.

Those who see the glass half full and have a never-ending supply of rose colored glasses will tell you that even though the new regulations seem silly, it's worth it if it makes us more secure. The rest of us, including the gate attendant at the airport who tells me she can't even bring her lip gloss to work anymore, are well aware that we are more likely to die from Appendicitis than exploding water bottles and are more inclined to think we have landed in some bizarre satire version of Scary Movie, the Ultimate Episode.

I really should know better than to publish this rant. Almost guarantees a body cavity search or a travel voucher on a rendition flight to an exotic location should I ever have the temerity to fly the friendly skies again. So if I drop out of sight, you'll likely find me catching the sun on the Cuban beach.

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CHICAGO ([url=http://www.dawn.com/2006/11/22/int4.htm]Reuters[/url]) - Muslim leaders expressed outrage on Tuesday after six imams were removed from a commercial airline flight in Minnesota for what they said was nothing more than trying to say evening prayers.

"They were treated like terrorists ... humiliated," said Abu Hannoud, civil rights director for the Arizona chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who said the men were taken off the US Airways flight in handcuffs.

He said the men were still trying to find a flight back to Phoenix where most are affiliated with a major mosque after the carrier refused them passage following the incident on Monday evening....

Patrick Hogan, spokesman for the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Airports Commission, said the airline asked airport police to remove the six men from the Minneapolis to Phoenix flight because their actions were "arousing some concerns" among both passengers and crew.

He said the men had been praying at the gate area but he did not know if they tried to pray once at their seats inside the plane.

He also said some witnesses reported the men were making anti-American statements involving the Iraq war, asked to change seats once inside the cabin, that one requested an extender to make his seat belt larger even though he did not appear to need it and that in general "there was some peculiar behavior."

Hogan said the men were questioned by local police, the FBI and federal security officials and released. Under normal procedures, he said, people taken off a flight under those circumstances would have been handcuffed, though he did not know if they were in this case.

[ 13 October 2007: Message edited by: M. Spector ]