TSA Backlash Week: OK, Smart Guy, What Do We Do Then?

Mother Jones' Nick Baumann talks to security experts about how to make flying safe without making security procedures so damned invasive: "All three experts favor scrapping most of the security measures that people hate—and not necessarily replacing them with anything. Ideally, the money that was saved wouldn't be spent on airport security at all: it would be spent on trying to stop terrorists before they got to the airport. That means better-funding law enforcement and intelligence."

A couple of suggestions in Baumann's piece -- which, really, read the whole thing -- caught my attention. One is that airport lines actually need to move much more quickly, because those stagnant queues are themselves a pretty good target for an airport attack. The other is to introduce truly randomized screening of passengers:

That means that while the majority of passengers wouldn't face the invasive security checks they face now, every passenger would face the risk of a thorough search. Terrorists can't avoid or plan for truly random enhanced searches, like they can with protocol-, background-, and profiling-based searches. You don't want terrorists to be able to plan their way around your security. You want them to have to get lucky.

That's probably not as race-based as Charles Krauthammer would prefer, but still.

The Best Health Care In The World

Not here:

"Britain's health service makes it the only one of 11 leading industrialised nations where wealth does not determine access to care – providing the most widely accessible treatments at low cost among rich nations, a study has found.

The survey, by US health thinktank the Commonwealth Fund, showed that while a third of American adults 'went without recommended care, did not see a doctor when sick, or failed to fill prescriptions because of costs', this figure was only 6% in the UK and 5% in Holland."

David Brooks Knows The Internet Happened, Right?

David Brooks laments the loss of the American middle-brow, and the resulting demise of Newsweek and other magazines that could show the rubes in flyover country how to aspire to New Yorkiness.. But he completely and utterly misdiagnoses what went wrong:

These magazines also inflamed a million imaginations. Smart boys and girls got a glimpse of a wider world. The implication was that their current lives were insufficient, but they could read about John Foster Dulles or Georgia O’Keeffe and gain access to a higher realm that they might someday join.

About a generation ago, this earnest self-improvement ethic came under attack. People no longer believed that there was such a thing as a common culture that all educated Americans should study and know. The new ethos valued hipness, not class.

Moreover, the self-esteem hurricanes blew across the landscape. You don’t have to read or listen to boring stuff to possess character. You are wonderful just the way you are.

I won't deny the influence of the cults of hipsterdom and self esteem here, but Brooks is being remarkably obtuse. They're not the reason that smart boys and girls don't read Newsweek anymore. (Believe it or not, I had my own subscription when I was in high school, waaaaaay back in the 1980s.) What happened is that the Internet happened. I've written about this a million times.

Want to know about politics? Well, a smart kid can read Brooks' own New York Times online, every day, the way I never could in the 1980s. Want to learn about or listen to opera? (Brooks laments that Albuquerque kids no longer get much national opera coverage.) You can watch the best opera in the world live on the Metropolitan Opera's website. Want to know more about literature, avant garde dance, indie bands, politics, foreign affairs, fashion? There's no end to the possibilities! Brooks is wrong to suggest there's no audience for this stuff anymore, even if he's right that it's fragmented. The truth is that more people have more access to the high- and middle-brow culture than ever did during his Golden Age. Newsweek hasn't suffered because people stopped caring about self-improvement. It suffered because there were faster, better, more direct ways to do it. Brooks sometimes sounds like a doctor who only knows how to diagnose one disease; it doesn't matter at all what the symptoms actually are.

U.S. Deploying Tanks in Afghanistan

It's true that, as part of counterinsurgency, you still have to kill the enemy. And it's furthermore true that Pete Mansoor, the first director of the counterinsurgency center at Fort Leavenworth -- back when it was run by Gen. Petraeus -- came from the armored brigades. I got to interview him during that period and asked him how tanks could make a good counterinsurgency tool: it struck me as counterintuitive. I don't recall his answer, but it must not've struck me as terribly convincing. (It was otherwise a great and enlightening conversation. Mansoor, as history has already recorded, is pretty smart.)

You fight a war with the tools you have, I suppose. But U.S. forces have eased up on long-range bombing from the air in Afghanistan because it too easily can kill innocents instead of the targeted insurgents. I guess I'm skeptical that a tool that allows you too hit targets a mile away will be a significant improvement on that.

TSA Backlash Week: An Excuse For Racial Profiling?

If Charles Krauthammer has his way:

"We pretend that we go through this nonsense as a small price paid to ensure the safety of air travel. Rubbish. This has nothing to do with safety - 95 percent of these inspections, searches, shoe removals and pat-downs are ridiculously unnecessary. The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling - when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches."

TSA screening is a bad, ineffective policy. Racial profiling would be, too. Instead of alienating everybody with invasive measures, let's just alienate the brown people! And without actually improving our security! Forbes' Abigail Esman:

According to a recent report by the Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Preparedness Group, statistically speaking, the one most likely to be a Muslim terrorist is the sandy-haired guy in jeans. In fact, according to the report, the majority of Muslim jihadists in America are white and born in the USA (21%) – the one exception being Somali immigrants, who top the list at 31%.

That fact explains such figures as Colleen LaRose, aka “Jihad Jane,” and Daniel Patrick Boyd, the North Carolina drywall contractor indicted in 2009 on charges of training others to wage jihad.

Terrorist ideology is just that: an idea. It's not genetic, can't be seen in the color of a person's skin or the length of their beard. TSA Backlash Week has a good reason for existing, but the answer to the problem isn't to shove it off onto foreigners and minorities.

Leaving The Middle Class For Poverty

A very depressing article:

"The Census Bureau recently reported that the poverty rate in the United States rose to 14.3 percent last year, the highest level in more than 50 years.

Texas and Florida saw the most people fall below the line. In Florida alone, 323,000 people became newly poor last year, bringing the state's poverty total to 2.7 million.

The numbers tell another tale as well: Nationwide, in black households such as Walker's, income plunged an average of 4.4 percent in 2009, almost three times the drop among whites. The number of blacks living below the official poverty line - $21,756 for a family of four - increased by 7 percent in just one year."

Public Won't Be Silenced At Philly City Council Meetings

I've not covered City Council in Philadelphia, but I have elsewhere, and I can tell you that public comment sessions can be a mix of the provocative and tedious. Still, I've got to think thatthis is good news for Philly governance: "The state Supreme Court, in a 4-3 ruling made public yesterday, says Council has been violating the state's Sunshine Act by refusing to allow people to comment on legislation during Thursday's weekly sessions. Council argued that allowing people to comment in committee hearings before legislation is considered by the full Council was adequate."

I don't know that this will lead to any improvements around town. And some of the council members do a pretty good job of listening to their constituents, from what I can tell. But I don't have a problem reminding everybody that it's our government, not theirs.