Hey now!
Last week some Nigerian fucker tried to blow up a plane in Detroit.
He didn't get the explosion he was looking for the first time around and instead only lit his pants on fire.
Now, this guy decided for some reason that it was best to blow up the plane not from the bathroom but from like row 15, seat A - thus drawing the attention of his fellow passengers who jumped on him and stopped him from getting a do-over.
This is now, including the shoe bomber, the second gie that tried to blow himself up with explosive chemicals they smuggled onto airplanes.
Had either succeeded, people would be going nuts but since they didn't we're all take a very blase' attitude toward this shit.
I'd put this in the 'shit we need to deal with right away category' and the thing is we have a way to deal with it.
Full Body Scan machines are essentially an x-ray through your clothes that can detect things like, oh-I-don't-know, explosive being smuggled onto a plane in order to kill everyone on board.
Yet, it seems these haven't been deployed in all airports because they are, one - too expensive and, two - too invasive.
First, I will respond to those who complain that it would be too expensive. We are spending trillions of dollars to invade foreign countries to kill mad people and build democracies all in the name of stopping Islamic terrorists from blowing up planes. This would be maybe a couple hundred million dollars. Sounds pretty cost effective to me.
Second, to you, the ACLU and privacy worriers who are concerned about full body scans cramping their style. Fucking blow me. Stop bitching. You know what I'd consider invasive? Being blown to pieces landing at Liberty International Airport.
Yeah, so someone you will never know will see you naked but they'll also see the explosive that terrorist is going to use to kill you.
I'm OK with that trade.
3 comments:
Relax, calm down and don't break the full-body screens...
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/odds-of-airborne-terror.html
"There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning."
Those are great stats and all but:
1. Bodyscans would act as a deterent.
2. I know I would hate to be one of those flights where there is a situation.
Because I'm tired, I'm just going to cut and paste from someone who posted right after that paragraph you are quoting:
While I agree that the TSA is becoming over-zealous in their screenings, what your statistics are lacking is the correlation.
Sure there have only been 6 attacks which breaks down to a tiny fraction of days of airborne flight, but how much of this is attributed to the increased security? What we don't have is a control group of flights with no security. Would there have only been 6 attempts with less security, if so then TSA is not justified, if there would have been more attempts, then we need to re-evaluate the AMOUNT of security needed to make a trade-off.
To say "one incident per 3,105 years airborne" is fine, but we are missing any correlation or causation from the security measures. Maybe the "tens of thousands of flights have been incident free" because of the restrictions? We'll never know.
However, that being said, why don't we just get a boat load of bomb sniffing dogs? I was at the train station today and they had a couple of those. Just a thought.
In addition, I hate to get all librarian here, but what's the source you're quoting? The website is nothing more than a blog. Sure he quotes the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, but the link he provides takes you to raw data, so these figures are numbers he created on his own. What's the method behind his math?
Quote me something from a reliable source (eg NY Times, Washington Post, etc.) and your argument will have more substance.
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