Stu Bykofsky's TSA Math

Stu Bykofsky does the math:

Since Nov. 19, when TSA began counting complaints about screening, it registered a little more than 1,000. During the same period, TSA screened 22 million passengers, I was told by TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis. Do the math and tell me this is a major issue.

This seems a little misleading to me. I had my own unpleasant encounter with a TSA screener last year -- documented in the pages of Philadelphia Weekly -- and skipped reporting the dude to his supervisor because I had a plane to catch. I've got to wonder if complaints about TSA abuses don't reflect any number of similar schedule-driven decisions by other passengers.

And in any case, the real debate isn't about abusive TSA screeners. It's about the procedures the TSA applies to passengers in the normal course of things. The bodyscanners and junk patdowns might not generate a ton of official complaints, because they're part of the normal procedure and everybody knows that. That also makes them far more irritating--and threatening to the country's overall sense of liberty and freedom of movement--than the occasional rogue agent.

The Ben and Joel Podcast: Daniel Okrent on Prohibition

Daniel Okrent, the author of "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition" joins the podcast to talk about the book -- and about his stint as the first "public editor" of the New York Times. He'll speak at the National Constitution Center on Monday night in Philadelphia; see the center's website for details.

via blog.infinitemonkeysblog.com

Just a reminder. Click on the Infinite Monkeys link above and you can listen to Ben Boychuk and I interview Okrent about his book.

Deep grammatical thought of the night

My first editor once told me that if I was going to use a comma, I could probably use a period. It's been a long time since I thought about that — obviously, if you read my stuff. It occurs to me that if he saw my writing now, he might say the same thing about my use of semicolons.

La vie en rose

Tonight's Pandora selection:

Wikileaks has all the right enemies. Right?

Mr. Assange doesn't mail bombs, but his actions have life-threatening consequences. Consider the case of a 75-year-old dentist in Los Angeles, Hossein Vahedi. According to one of the confidential cables released by WikiLeaks, Dr. Vahedi, a U.S. citizen, returned to Iran in 2008 to visit his parents' graves. Authorities confiscated his passport because his sons worked as concert promoters for Persian pop singers in the U.S. who had criticized the theocracy.

The cable reported that Dr. Vahedi decided to escape by horseback over the mountains of western Iran and into Turkey. He trained by hiking the hills above Tehran. He took extra heart medication. But when he fell off his horse, he was injured and nearly froze. When he made it to Turkey, the U.S. Embassy intervened to stop him being sent back to Iran.

"This is very bad for my family," Dr. Vahedi told the New York Daily News on being told about the leak of the cable naming him and describing his exploits. Tehran has a new excuse to target his relatives in Iran. "How could this be printed?"

via online.wsj.com

Part of the problem -- for me, at least -- of our political tribalism is that I've been very often tempted to defend the Wikileaks revelations based on the fact that they're making all the right people (like Sarah Palin, National Review and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, above) very, very angry. It's very, very difficult not to take some satisfaction in that.

So honesty compels me to acknowledge that there is not unvarnished good in the Wikileaks disclosures. I'm not certain if the damage will merely be to the American government's internal information-sharing systems, or if it will be broad enough to cause pain, suffering and death for people around the world. I hope the latter, at least, doesn't happen. It might. And those of us who are biased towards letting information be free should acknowledge that such freedom isn't always entirely without consequence.

Still, on balance, I'm happier seeing the information out in the public than locked behind closed doors. And it's difficult to take seriously people who wring their hands about the "collateral damage" caused by Julian Assange when so many of them are the same folks who root on needless American military actions that are far more costly in terms of innocent foreign lives. Collateral damage is apparently only *really* bad when the bad guys cause it.

Family no-computer time

We're attempting to spend an hour or two of computer-free time with our son every night -- reading, playing, singing songs and other activities, sometimes together and sometimes each doing our own thing. I broke the rule by using my iPhone to get a picture of it.

Jayson Werth agrees to the Nationals?

Right fielder Jayson Werth has agreed to a $126 million, seven-year contract with the Washington Nationals.

via sports.espn.go.com

Yikes. As a budding Phillies fan, I hate to see his grit and beard leave town. On the other hand: the Nationals? Kinda makes you wonder about his passion for winning, doesn't it?