1. It was a completely serious terrorist attack intended to and capable of taking down a large jet above a major American city, so 9/11 is vividly back in our consciousness.
2. But no one — other than the bomber — was seriously hurt, so we can discount it or play with it and be flippant or political in ways that we would avoid if there were specific and numerous victims.
3. There are lurid details: A man set his own pants on fire and did who-knows-what to his genitalia.
4. It's happening with a new President, so there is much potential for turning around the usual political arguments and making accusations of hypocrisy.
5. Ass-covering officials are saying mockable things like "The system worked."
6. There's a hero to laud. Yay, heroes. Yay, Army of Davids, etc. etc.
7. It was Christmas!
8. Obama's in Hawaii. He's trying to bask in the sun and the success — or seeming success — of the healthcare bill and now here's trouble. Attack him/defend him, etc. etc.
9. We haven't figured out yet what to call the suspect — whose actual name (Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab or Abdulmutallab) is hard to remember or even to figure out how to spell. The Pants Bomber? I used that in my post title because I saw that no one was saying that yet, and I thought it would do well in Google searches. The Christmas Day Bomber? Abdul-mutilate-a-balls?
10. See? It's funny and it's terrible — all at once. And then you can get outraged at the people who laugh or laugh at the people who don't laugh or analyze the trajectories of outrageous humor and the criticism thereof. The possibilities are endless.
ADDED:
11. The guy was privileged, rich, and well-educated.
12. His father ratted on him. Intra-family conflict. Is this extra-great evidence — even his own father turned him in? Or are you thinking: Is the government going to stop you from flying if your parents call up and say you're a radical? Discuss!
13. If the plane had exploded where the detonation was attempted, what would the parts of the plane have hit? Was there an attempt to hit specific sites on the ground? Which ones? How close was the targeting?
14. Coverage. Is mainstream media covering the right things? Is it giving cover to the Obama administration?
15. Can we get somebody fired? Come on, try. Blogswarm!
December 27, 2009
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«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 218 of 218Not anymore!
I am now going PC.
No profiling for my patients!
My male patients will get Pap smears, and the females will have their prostates checked.
And a Swedish grandma nearing 100 will be treated exactly the same as a 30 year old black male whose father died at 40 of an MI.
It's only fair.
And I vow to reject the old medical adage When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras. Now I will canvass for horses and zebras, as well as unicorns, heffalumps, and woozles.
Mass murder doesn't bring out the best in people. I feel more suspicious of and hostile to Moslem people today than I did before this event. In its way the attempted bombing was, therefore, a success. Civility is as fragile as the skin of an airliner..... This isn't a plea for us to be more tolerant of Moslems. This is a plea for Moslems to examine their own values and ponder why they are producing so many nihilists who can think of nothing better to do with their lives than murdering themselves and everyone in their vicinity. And please no crap about Israeli settlements and drones and colonialism. The Sunnis and the Shiites have been murdering each other at a brisk clip for centuries. There's something wrong within the Moslem community, like, for instance, the inability to note that there is something wrong wihin the Moslem community.
Chickenlittle wrote:
Ah, but that was the Draperian era...do you really think it would have sunk his boat?
First, LOVE the coinage. ;)
Secondly, oh yes.
Thirdly, if it were real. I have my strong doubts that this is as fake as Tara Reid's boobs. Look at the two bimbos jumping in the ocean. Women didn't have bodies shaped quite like that, and hairstyles, until the 70s. I understand the "jet set" are always different from the mainstream, but that's a generational body shift. The bimbo with the big boobs up top in the second deck looks more like the norm for the mid-50s.
This was the infamous cruise when Jacqueline Kennedy suffered her first stillbirth in 1956. Her husband couldn't be found for almost two weeks because he was precisely in the Cote d'Azur up to these shenanigans.
Cheers,
Victoria
former law student said...
Those who suggest focusing only on Muslims should realize that Air India Flight 182 was destroyed by Sikh separatists.
1. The Air India attack was by a religion that arose from Islam, considered a heresy by other Islamoids. And happened 25 years ago. Sort of like crying "what about Timothy McVeigh??(A CAIR trademark). Or abortion clinic bombers. The truth is that Islamoids have killed over 5 million people in the last 25 years, McVeigh accounted for 168 people, the Sikh bombing 228, and "right wing anti-abortion extremists" 7 people in the last 25 years.
2. Who exactly is talking about profiling ONLY Muslims? I think members of MS-13, the Crips, Bloods, Hells Angels should be profiled, too.
3. I think people from or who deliberately travelled to dangerous countries that are official or de facto enemies of the US should be largely banned from immigrating or even being here aside from monitored "cultural exchanges" like we did with Cubans and Soviets in the Cold War.
The list of dangerous countries is mostly of Islamoids - but not all Islamoid nations. We may wish to profile others - such as from lawless African lands, the Mexican & Jamaican gangs..The NORKs if they ever try getting their people inside the USA.
4. We should profile not just for terrorists - the actual enemy combatants - but any of a sympathetic ideology. The Mohammed Attas and Nidal Hasans are not the problem - they are simply manifestations of how an ideology virulently antipathetic to Western ways can radicalize individuals to seek to launch war against our people.
Fraud alert. Seems pretty photoshoppy to me.
For the era, yes. :)
Check out how big his head, even for his big Fitzgerald standards. It's clearly a superimposition of a previously taken photo.
First, LOVE the coinage. ;)
Ah, so sweet to hear. ;)
Fraud Alert
Yeah David, it has that "too busy all at once" montage look about it.
The Air India attack was by a religion that arose from Islam
Stop right there.
Dudes, consider your arguments against continued war in Afghanistan, namely that al-Qaeda is hardly to be found there.
Well, that's likely because our forces have been there for eight years. Wisely, al-Qaeda has moved on. And once we focus our attention on "Islamoids," other terrorists will take their places, or people who don't fit the profile will be used as terrorists' tools.
Civility is as fragile as the skin of an airliner.....
A strangely beautiful line.
Cheers,
Victoria
"Proponents of profiling seemed to be suggesting elderly Swedes would get some cursory level of examination, opening an avenue for terrorists to exploit. If profiling were merely added to the existing levels of screening, I would have no problem with it. But if screening was reduced for non-swarthy Arab types, I'm opposed."
It must be nice to live in a world with unlimited resources.
The rest of us have to live in the real world, where making sure the resources are focused on the areas most likely to be effective is a worthy goal.
BVD bomber?
Fruit of the boom?
The rest of us have to live in the real world, where making sure the resources are focused on the areas most likely to be effective is a worthy goal.
Fine, if you're willing to accept that a certain number of jetliners are going to be blown up, because Grandma Svensen figures she has little time left to live, and reminding the world of the plight of the Palestinians deserves her sacrifice.
fls zeros in on zebras that crochet.
The Cojones frito bomber was trying to commit testicular homicide.
What a tool
"if you're willing to accept that a certain number of jetliners are going to be blown up"
Willing to accept? Hardly.
Will there be, if we accept it or not? Unfortunately.
However, there would undoubtedly be fewer blown up under the direction I espouse (namely, changing our approach from throwing hundreds or thousands of bored union workers at weary travelers to spending the money funding spooks and intelligencesystems) than in the way you seem to be espousing- namely the same stuff that didn't work here, only moreso.
Grandma Svensen the kamikaze - you betcha. Umm, ok, if she does that, we'll just execute everyone in her family then. Affects her calculus, what? OK, next.
Or, heading off the problem, execute everyone who drones on about the plight of the Palestinians. Or some subset, say, whoever teaches it at school, or who talks about it with everyone they meet.
For "execute" you can always sub in some mixture of "imprison," "deport," "surveil," etc., or for a portmanteau word, "process."
And here's a bone to Cedarford - you can definitely process Jews who drone on about the plight of the Pals. (As long as we can likewise process Scotch-Irish or WASPs or Martians or whatever Cedarford is. Fair's fair.) Michael Lerner, pack your bags, dude.
But this is all BS because no Swedish granny is that stupid. 18-35 is a different story.
Meanwhile, I actually have the answer, if anyone wants to hear it. I say, I HAVE THE ANSWER.
Oh, actually, I have two answers.
The first, which is not the mega-genius idea but more gedanken, is - take that TIDE list and process everyone on it. That is, kill, imprison, deport, scrutinize, wiretap, stick on some Devil's Island, lobotomize, whatever.
Really, what harm? Aside from a sensitivity about the value of human life - what do you think the impact on GDP would be? Probably positive.
No, no, but the next one you're really like. The next one is THE ANSWER.
The answer: Voight-Kampff 2010!
Anybody remember Blade Runner? Or rather, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Everyone agrees the Israelis have the answer, if only you could scale it. Right? Find the man, not the bomb. But you need trained talented people. If not Special Forces caliber (and I don't know about that), surely at the level of experienced police or FBI agents.
We couldn't hire enough - they are needed to catch crooks, and besides would bankrupt us. We need some, but not as many as the Israelis use. So how to stretch them? Prescreening through MACHINE TESTING!
Yes! Everyone, man woman and child, passes through a booth and is asked a few questions. Whether it really uses V-K tech like pupillary reaction, or polygraph tech as used now for pulse, sweat, etc., the man, woman, child or hostage'd/Islamophilic Swedish granny, is asked a few questions and their reactions gauged.
Some for info, like Who packed your bags, Fucked any Arabs lately, Did you like Avatar, etc. Some for reaction value - show them nudes, pork-eating, capitalist activity, flags of several nations, etc. Some questions lead to secondary questions based on the answers.
This could be combined with MW radar; perhaps ultrasound; auscultation to detect blocked Gi tracts stuffed with boom.
All this to a greater or lesser degree, and correlate with their docs, passport, cash ticket, luggage, one-way ticketing, etc. Anyone who comes out shaky goes to the real profilers. But this is one in a hundred.
No? Perfect! Say what you want, watch old episodes of Sleeper Cell, but no one can point to me a case where everything was really looking normal and there was no tipoff.
Best part, nobody can accuse a machine of profiling. So when ninety percent of the V-K 2010 rejects are dangerous wogs (and the other 10% are white kids carrying a joint, or mid-level executives and athletes guilty over cheating on their wives), there is no kick coming.
Perfect!
TW: gisms. I'm having gisms over how perfect this is. Better, safer living through technology. You can even go back to normal life in the terminals, keep your shoes on, etc.
No?
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