The Exploding Underpants plot

[peteryoung]

Some interesting stats on the likelihood of trrrist activity on your US-bound flight (via nwhyte).

In summary, statistically I could make two round trips to Neptune before I could expect to encounter any airborne trrrism. Or indeed space pirates.

Regrettably, I am glad I will not be going near the US until at least mid-February, and even that will be too soon. It seems everyone except the TSA themselves understands that more security theatre is no defence – they even felt it necessary to respond to this XKCD cartoon:

Comments

[janetl.livejournal.com]

I've avoided reading up on the new "precautions", as I'm sure it will be too embarrassing. The snippets I've seen suggest that they will take special precautions 1 hour before landing. Because no one would set off a device 61 minutes before landing. Sigh. Nice to know how effective having a Watch List of half a million people is, too.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

One of the many comments over at the TSA blog was somewhat telling, in that the person (who was complaining about the complainers) said (cleaning up his grammar), "We're subjects of the government that's supposed to take care of us."

That one sentence sums up multiple problems with how Americans continue to blithely submit to continued erosion of our civil rights in the name of "safety." (Americans are not "subjects" of our government; the government's job is not supposed to be "to take care of us.") Alas, Americans like me who complain about it are sneered at as "helping the terrorists" or just stupid, since of course everyone in an Official Government Uniform is automatically right and you must always do what they tell you to do.

Unfortunately, I have to fly a fair bit (not as much as you! *laughs*) so I feel like I have to plaster a neutral expression on my face and do what they tell me to do, even though I know it's mostly meaningless. At least as meaningless as the scene I witnessed at SFO where they insisted that the 4-year-old girl go through the air-puffer machine although it made her hysterically frightened when they forcibly separated her from her mother. This is supposed to make us safer? Sigh.