Flying looks about to get a whole lot... er, similar

Great news! You can go on holiday and take liquids with you. Medicines, baby milk, drinks bought away from the airport at considerable less than ludicrous prices, all will soon be allowed through the ring-piece of steel at international airports in Australia, and no doubt other nations.

International travellers will no longer have water bottles, perfumes and other liquids confiscated as they board planes under a radical overhaul of airport security.

Radical overhaul. Sounds good, sounds like it could be what's been needed for a while now.

The easing of restrictions will begin next year as Australia's international airports begin rolling out new explosive detection equipment.

Ah. Now it just sounds like another machine to queue up for.

The shake-up, to be announced by the federal government today, also promises to cut waiting times for passengers by easing bottlenecks at security gates.

Er, but if we've got one more machine to queue up for how's that going to cut times?

The new technology, which has been trialled at Sydney airport, would enable authorities to detect the smallest trace of explosives in liquids.

Okay, and what happens if someone decides to take a pint of the stuff into the queue for the machine and detonate it before they get there? In the queue. You know, attacking the people in the fucking queue instead of screwing around with the impossible task of getting it on a plane. Well, sort of impossible.

• January 7th 2011, undercover French journalists are reported to have smuggled a dismantled 9mm pistol through security at two French airports and were able to assemble the gun in the toilets on the plane.
• February 21st 2011, in the US a female undercover TSA agent is reported to have carried a handgun through Dallas/Fort Worth airport body scanners in multiple tests by hiding it in her knickers.
[...]
• June 13th 2011, it is reported that 30 staff at Honolulu International Airport are fired for not having screened luggage properly.

Still, long as somebody has got a nice big market for their feel good bomb sniffing machines and governments can carry on acting as if they're doing something, eh?

"It will make air travel easier and less stressful for passengers as well as free airport security staff to better focus on their core screening responsibilities without the distraction of having to confiscate items from people's bags," [Federal Transport Minister Anthony Albanese] said.
"While preventing acts of terrorism remains our number one priority, we're also determined to minimise the disruption and inconvenience experienced by passengers as they transit throughout major airports, including by deploying the latest technologies."

Sorry, Tony, but if you're really serious about that I still think you should be looking at how the Israelis do things. In the meantime one more bloody thing to queue up for having already queued for check-in, the X-ray, the metal detector and the bollock baking body scanner and/or professional groper does not tempt me back into flying anywhere except as a last resort.

Situation Vacant

Wanted: Western Security Theatre requires dramatic lunatic for role of Emmanuel Goldstein in our long running farce Oh Fuck, The Fucking Fuckers Are Fucking Everywhere after the recent replacement for our retired long term Goldstein lacked the hoped for durability. Package including times of performance will be largely up to the successful applicant, as will be much of the script. Window licking experience and own wardrobe, including head underpants if desired, is absolutely essential. Apply through usual agencies.

Of course, it could all be bollocks. It wasn't long ago the media seemed sure he was kipping on the sofa in Hugo Chavez's pool room.

Intervals at the security theatre

If we have to have security theatre it'd be a nice idea to have intervals, wouldn't it? Not only could you have a break, stretch your legs a bit, browse the programmes and maybe get a glass of wine or something, but you could also look forward to the second act not being exactly the fucking same as the first. And that's where the analogy falls apart because with security theatre you actually have to have the first act all over again even if it's just because someone fluffed a couple of lines.

Flights from Sydney Airport's domestic terminal have been delayed after a security breach.
Two people reportedly entered a secure area of the Qantas-managed T3 domestic terminal without being properly screened this morning.
Passengers report that planes have been grounded and the terminal closed, with thousands having to be re-screened.
"Two passengers enter secure area in Sydney Airport (domestic) causing all passengers to be rescreened. Will be mass delays," one passenger tweeted.
Another passenger said on Twitter: "Entire Sydney Airport terminal has been evacuated due to a security breach. Looks like I'm not getting home today."

And people ask me why I avoid flying if at all possible. You have to queue up to be questioned, then x-rayed and finally scanned and fondled, all of which means passengers are sometimes being told to arrive three hours before departure (I was the last time I flew out of London Heathrow), and then you have to do it all over again if the daft sods lose track and accidentally let someone in without having first questioned, x-rayed, scanned and fondled them.

If the person who wasn't scanned doesn't own up then the whole terminal - and I do
mean the whole terminal - will have to do it all over again. I can wait all day.

Not only has this now happened four times that I know of in Aussie airports - once here in Melbourne, once in Brisbane and twice in Sydney - and caused big delays and inconvenience each time, but the media have failed to ask what seems to me to be the big questions. If people have slipped through security and got airside four times that we know of, but were eventually checked along with everyone else's recheck, then how do we know it hasn't happened a few more times without it being noticed and there being rechecks? And if so, what the hell's the point in all the security theatre anyway? Because it doesn't sound like it's actually keeping the place all that secure. It's not like it's just Aussie airports either, because as I noted a couple of weeks ago undercover journalists managed to smuggle a dismantled gun onto flights from two French airports (and just to prove the point they then took it into the toilet and mantled it) while in the US an undercover federal agent got through security on multiple occasions with her gun in her knickers. So I repeat, what is the point in security theatre that's intrusive, costly, inconvenient and can't even guarantee our security anyway? Can't we just go and see a different play?

If security be the food of air travel, play on;
Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

Well, it's worked for me, which is why my appetite for flying is roughly zero. At the risk of repeating myself, when I get treated like a paying customer again I'll happily fly, but as long as I'm treated like a suspect by security that we can see doesn't bloody work I won't unless I really have to.

What did I say?

In the post a few hours back (actually written Friday evening) I mentioned that we in the west seem to get hung up on dates and anniversaries of major events, and if those events are a disaster inflicted deliberately we think that the enemy responsible is likely to do it again on the same date. Quite why he'd want to do that rather than pick another day at random or simply go when he's ready is rarely addressed, and I can't help feeling that it might be a western thing anyway. Remember the Alamo! Pearl Harbour! 9/11! So I'm not surprised to read this:

The US has warned of a "specific, credible threat" ahead of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, possibly in New York or Washington DC.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the threat was "uncorroborated", but security would be boosted at bridges, tunnels and on public transport.

That the 9/11 hijackers chose September 11th rather than February 26th, the anniversary of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, is something else that doesn't get mentioned much. In fact the only case I can think of offhand in which an anniversary figured was the Oklahoma City bombing carried out by Timothy McVeigh, who chose the second anniversary of Waco to carry out his attack. And since McVeigh wasn't responsible for Waco but as he saw it was attacking in response to Waco I'm not sure that really counts. If September 11th marked some date in which the US or the west had done something specific to piss off Alky-Aida then perhaps there'd be a reason for them to mark that down in their calendars as getting-killed-for-the-cause day, but otherwise...

I dunno, maybe there really is a genuine cause for concern, but it seems to me that Alky-Aida could just as easily make a few noises about the tenth anniversary as a shit stir and then go back to milking the goat. Or it could just as easily be confirmation bias and we're twitching at shadows because we've half convinced ourselves that the people who attacked ten years ago attach some special significance to that date. I'll eat my words if anything does happen - and I mean more than some wide-eyed teenager with a milk bottle full of petrol damaging a police station or something - but I reckon any particular day is no less likely than any other. And no more likely either.

Remembering those important dates

Tomorrow marks a date we'll all be expected to remember. The papers will be full of it, it'll be mentioned on every news and current affairs show, the blogosphere will no doubt add its contribution (and in a way this post is a part of that) and the never-mind-liberty-give-me-security-or-at-least-the-illusion-of-it paranoia brigade will spend the whole day shitting themselves in case the alky-aida bogeyman blows something up. And on that point, look, if the alky-aida bogeyman can blow something up tomorrow I don't doubt that he will, but I doubt he'll be hung up on anniversaries and special dates like most of the west seems to be. He'll be just as happy to blow something up a fortnight next Tuesday or this time next month. Or a fortnight last Tuesday or this time last month. Whatever suits him, really.

Bin Laden is dead but he's still fighting

No, he's not a zombie, but we're still spending ridiculous sums of money fighting the war on a vague sense of unease and it's clear from statements made by Obama, Cameramong and others in the last day and a half that finally having slotted Bin Laden doesn't mean bringing back soldiers or winding down on the security theatre. If anything, they tell us, it means the opposite because of the desire of the wild-eyed religioloons to avenge Bin Laden's death, itself an act of vengeance for 9/11 which in turn, according to some of the loons, was an act of revenge for occupation of Muslim lands, itself a reaction to one lot invading another lot and the constant threat of almost everyone there to wipe Israel off the map or words to that effect.

Now I'm not going to go all bleeding heart on you and say things like an eye for an eye means we all end up blind. There may be something in that but while thinking about this latest concern over possible revenge of revenge of revenge something quite different occurred to me. As I mentioned the other day, our act of revenge has cost well over a trillion dollars, taken nearly a decade and indirectly cost the lives of more than twice as many as were killed in the atrocity we've been trying to avenge. Some might say that turning fewer than 3,000 dead into more than 9,000 is, in hindsight, a good enough reason to stop, but it's not the only one. Look again at the money - more than $300 million a day.

This isn't about putting a dollar value on the lives of those who died on September 11th 2001 because it can't be done and would be distasteful even to try. However, revenge cannot come at any price for one very simple reason. Each act of terrorism or even the threat of it is relatively cheap, but if each act of revenge is even a tenth as costly as getting Bin Liner has proven to be then before long we in the West, the 'free' countries, will bankrupt ourselves. And the horrible thought that occurred to me last night was this: maybe that was the plan all along.

Seriously, have a think about it. Did the West beat the Soviet Union in a gunfight? No, it just outspent it. Various things made this possible, not least of which was free(ish) markets and an absence of five year plans made it easier to make the money, and of course there were other things besides the Soviet economy involved, but they were provoked into spending more than they should faster than they should have. Bin Laden, whatever else he was, wasn't stupid. Couldn't it have occurred to the bastard to try the same thing with us, to wound pride cheaply but deeply in the hope of an expensive and drawn out response? I'm not the only one to think so (from the Ludwig von Mises blog):

Mises wrote, “No foreign aggressor can destroy capitalist civilization if it does not destroy itself.” [implying] that the sole way a foreign aggressor can contribute toward capitalist civilization’s destruction is to goad it into destroying itself.

That was what Osama Bin Laden was trying to do all along. And the war party (along with its enablers at the Fed) has been playing right into his hands. Even now that Bin Laden is dead, they have given every indication that they will continue to do so.

From the Washington Post:

Did Osama bin Laden win? No. Did he succeed? Well, America is still standing, and he isn’t. So why, when I called Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism expert who specializes in al-Qaeda, did he tell me that “bin Laden has been enormously successful”? There’s no caliphate. There’s no sweeping sharia law. Didn’t we win this one in a clean knockout?

Apparently not. Bin Laden, according to Gartenstein-Ross, had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against. What he really wanted to do — and, more to the point, what he thought he could do — was bankrupt the United States of America. [...]

The campaign taught bin Laden a lot. For one thing, superpowers fall because their economies crumble, not because they’re beaten on the battlefield. For another, superpowers are so allergic to losing that they’ll bankrupt themselves trying to conquer a mass of rocks and sand. This was bin Laden’s plan for the United States, too.

On Monday I said that despite everything, especially despite being dead, Bin Laden was technically still ahead on points, though when I said it I was really only thinking how he managed to hurt our liberty just by tempting our governments to take it away from us and - oh, the irony - keep it locked up for safety. Now I wonder if he isn't even further ahead than I'd thought. I suppose the answer depends on for how much longer the US can and wants to carry on spending 300 million dollars a day.

And from the Mash...

THE death of Osama Bin Laden is a temporary glitch, purveyors of top quality fear have insisted.

The world's leading fright-mongers said the Tom Clancy death of the world's craziest scary-bogey man would focus the industry on developing a new state-of-the-art nightmare, probably with giant, razor-sharp tusks and eyes the colour of Satan's droppings.

Tom Logan, booga-booga-booga analyst at Donnelly-McPartlin, said the US government's decision to ethnically cleanse the underside of the Western world's bed was a surprise change of tactics.

He added: "If America keeps making the monsters go away like this then eventually someone might start to ask why they still need so many anti-monster guns.

"And at that point the house of cards begins to look a tad shaky."

Gold. Do go read the rest.

Questions, questions redux

And now the lily is being de-gilded. Contrary to what was being reported earlier it now turns out that Bin Breathing did not use his wife as a human shield and being apparently unarmed nor did he return fire. I appreciate that this is still soon after the raid in which he was killed that the ink labelling his DNA test has barely had time to dry and that details can easily be misreported at this early stage, but it's a pretty big detail to get wrong, isn't it?

I'd bet the guys who actually dropped the bastard knew perfectly well which of those was closest to what actually happened and the info from their first hand reports is now starting to come out and contradict the earlier stuff. The whole cowardly hiding behind others while fighting to the death thing was just too like the story that Hollywood would have told. Embellishment, perhaps not deliberate, added by someone who wanted to believe it happened that way? Who knows, but it sounded a bit too comic book villain to be reliable enough for the papers to jump all over right away.

Questions, questions - UPDATED

Right, so a guy who's evaded capture for nearly ten years is finally tracked down and killed by a US special forces team the existence of which the US government refuses to confirm, and which manages to identify the body by means of a DNA test (oh boy, Jeremy Kyle must be rueing the lost opportunity there) conducted at a speed that must have every police department in the world salivating in envy, before promptly weighting the body down and chucking it overboard at a so far undisclosed location. I'm not saying that that it couldn't or didn't happen that way - I'm not a 'truther' and use only moderate amounts of tinfoil - but it's not exactly the most convincing narrative, is it? It's sure as hell not going to convince anyone who thinks there was any more to the September 11th attacks than crashing aircraft and incompetence.

Meanwhile, the von Mises blog proves the point I made yesterday, that this will almost certainly mean no increase in liberty for citizens in 'free' nations and if anything may well mean even less (quoting en bloc):

Via ESPN Chicago:

CHICAGO — In the aftermath of the death of Osama bin Laden, the Chicago Bulls will use metal detectors to screen all patrons entering the United Center before Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinal against the Atlanta Hawks on Monday.

I’m sure this is just a temporary security measure until we apprehend bin Laden. Wait a minute…

Quite. We have always been at war with Eastasia terror, or at least we soon will have.

UPDATE - and shooting back while using his wife as a human shield too. Again, I'm not saying it didn't happen that way, but doesn't it sound to anyone else like these preconceptions - cowardice, misogyny and, somewhat strangely for a coward, a willingness to fight to the death - are gilding the lily just a bit?

Come fly the unfriendly sky

What have we come to when a government that likes to think of itself as the leader of the free world has its airport security drones conducting physical searches of children?

"I'm sorry mummy. I don't know what I did wrong."

You don't even need to be a parent to feel that one like a punch to the guts. How do you explain it to a child? How do you explain that they haven't done anything wrong but that the airport staff have been instructed to think they might have? How do you tell them that their own government, in its paranoia and fear of not only them out there but also those that might be them in here, has granted itself the presumption of guilt and the power to invade their personal space? How do say that this may happen every time they fly and that they have no rights in the matter, none at all? How do you explain that despite the embarrassment, shame or discomfort they may feel while being searched they have no grounds for complaint because 'the agent followed proper procedures'? Or that the way things are going there will soon be a generation that has grown up to believe this is normal and who will not make much objection when its suggested that the same thing be done at railway and bus stations? How do you tell them that they should say 'no' when you yourself are unable to?

Except, of course, you can say 'no'. You can say it simply by not going anywhere staffed by people who have been directed to think of you a a suspect to be checked, interrogated and searched. You can say it by refusing to fly anywhere unless absolutely essential, as the Drexels are now considering.

The family has changed plans for an upcoming trip: they'll be driving instead of flying.

Which is what I'd encourage everybody to do rather than meekly submit. Drive, get the train, sail, video-conference - do absolutely anything but get on a fucking plane unless there really is no alternative. And I really mean no alternative. Don't just look at the map and think that places are a long way apart so you have to fly and put up with all the crap that involves these days. Plan ahead and work out how much time is needed to go by other means, and then balance that against the aggro of flying. Sure, if I had to go to Brisbane tomorrow I'd fly, and if I had to go to New Zealand there's not much option when there's more than 2,000km of sea to cross, but if I had to be in Brisbane in a month's time I'd consider taking 3 days extra to drive there and if I needed a face-to-face on the other side of an ocean I'd loo at doing it with Skype. Anything, anything at all, to get out of the purgatory-like experience of spending time in an airport queueing up and being questioned and queueing up again and being scanned and queueing up again and being patted down, all in the knowledge, as shown by the events in Moscow back in January, that none of this makes you safe if someone has thought about bombing the security queues instead of an aircraft.

And it's saddest of all to see the Americans putting themselves through this. I rather like the bits of America I've seen - and of course like Australia the place is big enough that it should have something that appeals to nearly everybody - and I have a lot of time for Americans in general. More than two hundred years ago they went further than anyone before or since in their efforts for individual liberty, and that so many still revere the document that was written to guarantee their freedoms and is still is their highest law is something I really admire them for. But what a shame it is their government no longer pays more than lip service to it, toeing the line rather than the ideal and spirit, and spinning the idea that such egregiously intrusive measures - physically searching toddlers, for example - are needed to keep Americans safe, in spite of the fact that even Israel, surrounded by people who want it destroyed, doesn't bother with all that unnecessary and pointless crap. Despite my admiration for America and its people these days, thanks to their governments, I'm simply not willing to go there anymore.

The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave has become the land of the sheep and the home of the slave, and in a way gave away the easy victory over terrorism by changing its values and way of life in favour of a climate of fear, suspicion and never ending checks and screening. And the men responsible for it? Well, here's one of them.

I can't imagine how to explain that to a six year old child either.

Leader of the free world still going the wrong way

I feel for the Americans, I really do. They probably are still the most free people in the world or are at least among them, but I don't think they're as free as they were not even ten years ago. And I don't think they're getting any freer thanks to their current crop of pollies.

The US Senate has voted to extend controversial surveillance powers granted by the Patriot Act law, put in place after the 9/11 attacks.
By a vote of 86-12, the Senate approved a 90-day extension of wiretaps, access to business records and surveillance of terror suspects.
The move came one day after the House of Representatives voted to extend the provisions until 8 December.

Super. Must be wonderful to be a freedom loving American and see that by way of making it up to those who envy you for it your country is gradually becoming the land of the sheep and the home of the slave. Still, Super-Barack will save you, eh? Unlike that horrible Republican President you had the Obamessiah is a nice Democrat. A liberal, a word which comes from liberty. I know you guys like liberty - I've seen the statue myself, although they weren't allowing anyone up it. The war on tourism, someone said. Or something like that. Anyway, the point is that your new(ish) President will step in and... er, do nothing?

The White House backed the bill, but would have favoured a longer extension.

"Change you can believe in" seems to mean more or less fuck all change, and I personally I already believed that was likely way back in the middle of 2008. As in Britain and Australia I'm convinced that to get change that's actually meaningful they really need to stop voting for the usual suspects.

Was it something I said?

I don't generally go in for looking too much at my visitor stats, being the fragile soul I am and unsure if my delicate ego can take it if neither of my readers show up one day (hi, Mum). But as I mentioned earlier I have looked today just out of long dormant curiosity about what search terms people have been using, and while they were a bit boring by comparison with some of the lunacy that takes people to some other blogs I did notice that I've had an awful lot of visitors in the past 24 hours. Much of it is from the US and it's mostly going to one F-bomb strewn post about the increasing levels of airport security theatre in general and those bloody airport body scanners in particular.

I'd like to expand on that earlier post a little by telling you about the moment when for me airport security jumped the shark so hugely that there was room for several full grown Megalodons tucking into an eight course whale banquet underneath. This was at London's Heathrow airport in early 2003, just a few month after someone shot at (and missed, thankfully) an Israeli airliner with surface to air missiles as it left Mombasa airport in Kenya for Tel Aviv.

... it was the missile attack at the Mombasa airport that sent shivers around the world, even though the stingers missed the Tel Aviv-bound plane with 271 people aboard.
Israeli Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it "a very serious escalation of international terrorism."
"Today, they're firing the missiles at Israeli planes. Tomorrow, they'll fire missiles at American planes," he said.

Whether it was some concrete intelligence or whether it was just a feeling in Britain that if it could be American planes then it could as easily be British too, and so began what seemed to me to be the most high profile but completely fucking pointless security operation at Heathrow airport. From the BBC:

The deployments of troops at Heathrow Airport has once again highlighted the danger to airliners from shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles in the hands of terrorists.

Although there has been no confirmation of the specific threat to UK airports, speculation is rampant that the current state of alert has been sparked by fear of a missile attack.

The Daily Mail:

Meanwhile, a heavy military presence was in place at Heathrow as London remained on a heightened level of security alert amid fears of a possible terrorist attack.
Scotland Yard has refused to reveal the substance of the threat but terror experts said it pointed to a possible missile attack on a plane similar to the one carried out by al Qaeda terrorists in Kenya last year.

The Indie:

The plan seems to have been to fire a shoulder-held anti-aircraft missile at a commercial airliner taking off from Heathrow. Members of al-Qa'ida are known to possess the Russian-built Strela-2 missile, better known as the SAM-7, which has a height range of 3,000 feet. They have used the weapon before in attempted attacks, most recently when two missiles were fired at an Israeli charter aircraft taking off from Mombasa airport in Kenya last November. The Strela-2 can be fired from more than three kilometres away. It was also possible that they had obtained a Stinger air-to-surface missile made in America, which is even more powerful.

The Teletubbygraph:

A suspected Islamist plot to fire a missile at an airliner prompted the largest security operation at Heathrow for a decade yesterday.
Tony Blair personally authorised the use of 450 troops, with armoured vehicles, to back up more than 1,300 police officers.
Soldiers from the 1st Bn Grenadier Guards and Household Cavalry, carrying semi-automatic weapons, patrolled the terminals and the 17-mile perimeter road.
...
Al-Qa'eda is believed to have a stock of shoulder-launched surface-to-air (SAM) missiles, some capable of reaching targets at a height of 10,000ft and up to five miles away.

Assuming that they'd want to shoot at aircraft landing or taking off, five miles from Heathrow's runways means attackers would have something like the red area in which to shoot from, possibly a bit more or a bit less depending on how quickly planes departing or arriving at the airport pass in or out of that 10,000 foot ceiling. So potentially all of Staines and Ashford would need watching, plus the outskirts of Windsor

Click to enlarge - 

Egham, and Slough. And then there's all of Hounslow and Isleworth too. And all those fields and roads and so on. Whether they'd want to attack from a rural location where they'd hope to remain unseen or an urban area where they might hope to disperse or near a main road for a fast escape, there's a lot of choice.

So what protection did Heathrow get to deal with this threat and cover the 150 or so square miles it might come from?

... 450 soldiers at Heathrow, using armoured Scimitar and Spartan reconnaissance vehicles, were deployed throughout the airport from dawn as the first of the day's 150,000 passengers began checking in.

So about three soldiers per square mile if they were evenly spread, but since they were all hanging around the fucking airport the real average beyond the airport itself must have been close to zero.

Click images for links to Life originals

And excuse my layman's ignorance but what the fuck were they going to do there? Seriously? The Scimitar is an armoured reconnaissance vehicle with a 30mm cannon firing a variety of ammunition up to 4,000 metres and a 7.62mm coaxial machine gun in case you only need to make something lightly dead. While I'd be very reluctant to get on the wrong end of either of them I highly doubt that they've been used to shoot down many surface to air missiles, particularly if launched from a site and at a target beyond the 4,000 metre range of the Scimitar's main weapon. So as far as I can see deploying troops in Scimitars was, to quote Malcolm Tucker, as much use as a marzipan dildo. The Spartan, being an armoured personnel carrier with just the machine gun, wasn't even that useful.

So I ask again: what the fuck were the troops and armour for? Had the worst happened and some young lads with full balls and empty heads, too hopeful of getting laid in the next world to settle down and enjoy this one, actually got hold of a couple of Stingers and downed a plane - because the troops didn't seem to have anything that would have stopped it - what exactly were they going to do? Presumably they could use their vehicles' speed across country to close within range of the wreckage and... er... look at it for a bit until the fire brigade showed up and began hosing down the burning debris. Perhaps you might be thinking that there was an unaired possibility of a car attack like the one at Glasgow airport in 2007, but if so I still don't see what good they'd be. Let me put it like this: hands up anyone who likes the idea of machine gun fire and 30mm cannon shells flying around one of the world's busiest airports.

Anyone? Anyone at all?

No, thought not.

So it seems to me that their purpose was never to be an effective counter to possible missile fire but to be seen, to make the threat seem credible, to make people think it was being taken seriously if the Army was being deployed, and to give everyone the illusion of being safer.* And look, who knows? Maybe there was a lot of other stuff going on with the police, Special Branch, MI5 etc behind the scenes to make sure a missile wouldn't be launched in the first place. That seems likely to me but it certainly wouldn't require the support of 450 soldiers in light tanks hanging around outside the terminals who weren't equipped for doing much in the event of an attack but standing guard while someone else swept up the fucking wreckage unless, by some miracle, a spectacularly stupid terrorist chose to set up to fire a SAM within range of a 30mm and without any innocent civilians in the way.

So that was when and where I stopped taking it seriously, and I've looked at it all with a critical eye ever since. As a practical matter I don't worry about flying because the odds are really very good for each individual passenger, but I'd feel absolutely no safer as a result of all this crap we're put through before we're allowed to fly and certainly not from seeing troops equipped for battle with Soviet patrols blocking the entrance to the fucking car park. As I keep saying, the Israelis don't bother with this bullshit and they're surrounded by people who want them dead. More to the point, I object to being treated like a suspect when there is no earthly reason I should be. I doubt I look or act like a loony bomber and I imagine the only profile I fit is that of an annoyed bastard who objects to having to turn up so early for an international flight because of all the fucking security procedures that it's fast becoming possible to spend more time in the fucking airports at either end than in the fucking air between them.

And here's a thought - almost certainly neither do you! And if we don't then why the fuck are we having to pay for the privilege of being treated this way?

Well, I won't. Flying doesn't scare me but it does bore me, and these days it also offends me. For that they should be paying me to get on the fucking plane! Until something changes I simply won't fly unless circumstances absolutely force me to. This is a bloody big country and that choice sometimes means either a long drive or bus ride or a slightly faster but very expensive train journey, and obviously all international trips would mean a very long swim. So the bastards know they'll get me on a plane now and then - for my last trip to Perth I didn't have time to go overland and had to grit my teeth through the bullshit, especially when I forgot about shoe checks and showed up in hiking boots - but if at all possible I'll drive straight past the airport, window down, arm extended and middle finger raised to the unfriendly skies.

And I recommend it to anyone.

Edited to add: link fixed. Thanks for the heads up to Sadbutmadlad.



* And maybe, just maybe, to build the foundations for people to accept far more expensive and intrusive security theatre later.

Missing the point.

I suppose the effort should be acknowledged, and no doubt it'll be more than enough of a concession for some people, but scanners which show a gingerbread style line drawing instead of some false colour image of me with my dick waving around is not going to tempt me to fly again.

The US Transportation Security Administration yesterday began rolling out new airport scanner software that produces less revealing images of travellers.

The new software "enhances privacy by eliminating passenger-specific images and instead auto-detects potential threat items and indicates their location on a generic outline of a person," the TSA said.

What the fuck are you smiling about?

Now I do realise that many people do have a nudity taboo and many others have reason to be less than proud of their bodies, and so this is the principle concern for a lot of people. However, I feel I must explain something both to those people and to those involved in installing all this security theatre in airports:

We are not all fucking terrorists, you fucking bell-ends.

There is no practical purpose served by authoritarian cockweasels spending vast sums on questionable technology to be used on overwhelmingly innocent people, especially when the fuckknuckles then ignore the possibility of a bomb going off in the fucking queues they themselves have fucking created with this shite.*

I don't stay away because you want to look at my knob in a scanner. I don't even stay away because of the possible health risks of the scanners or because you'll want to cop a feel if I refuse to be scanned. I stay away because I am not a fucking terrorist and there is absolutely cube root of fuck all evidence for any fucker to believe otherwise, so I refuse to be treated like a fucking suspect by humourless apes with polyester uniforms and 200 word vocabularies. If I don't need to be on the other side of an ocean or continent in a hurry badly enough to make it worth my while putting up with hours of interminable queueing for securiteee - to have my shoes X-rayed and my luggage X-rayed and my pockets checked and my mouthwash sniffed and my drinks bottle measured and any harmless everyday objects, obvious toys or tee shirts with intimidating if unintelligible writing confiscated for some fuck to take home later, and finally to be made to stand in a giant open ended fucking microwave and have my bollocks warmed for little or no fucking benefit - if it's not important enough to go through all that then, to be blunt, I'm not fucking going. Especially when it's all so fucking unnecessary.

So turning me into a gingerbread man on the fucking monitor is not going to tempt me back. You'll see me when you fucking learn how to treat me as a paying customer again, you cunts.

Fuck. You. All.


* Yes, I know that the Moscow bomb went off in arrivals. That doesn't change the point that the possibility of one going off in the queue for one of the various new security measures is still there.

Does this surprise anyone?

Click for linky

A police officer stationed at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport in the US was suspended last Thursday for taking home more than 1000 knives, nail clippers, scissors and other items confiscated from passengers during security procedures, authorities said.

Who could possibly have thought that would happen?

More theatre or being practical?

While the MSM are short stroking themselves into an offence seeking orgasmathon over what a couple of old soccer players said about a female match official (about which I'll probably blog tomorrow) they're missing the opportunity to tell us how important it is in the wake of the Moscow airport bomb that airport security must be made even more ludicrous. They could have been pushing metal detectors in the car parks, fluoroscopes at check in, and the formation of orderly queues to see somebody with a vocabulary of under 100 words in his head and a speculum in his hand, just on the off chance that one or more of your body cavities are rigged to explode.* Frankly we should be grateful to Andy Gray and the other one whose name I forget for providing the perfect distraction. It's also gratifying to see that behind the security theatre there appears to be people ready to make a very hard decision if it came to it.

A man has been arrested after an Etihad Airways flight travelling from Abu Dhabi to London's Heathrow Airport was redirected when a passenger began making threats.

Two Royal Air Force Typhoon jets were scrambled to accompany the plane as it landed at Stansted Airport, north of London, about noon (UK time) on Monday.

Diverted north to Stansted and a fighter escort? Hmm. Looking at Google Earth and drawing a line (handily these are always Great Circles in Google Earth) from Abu Dhabi to Heathrow, which is apparently where Etihad flys into, I see they get very close to London, and I can well remember sitting in traffic on the A30 just by the airport perimeter and seeing the lights of three or four planes lined up to the east - over south London. Draw the line to Stansted instead and not only do you find it going well to the north of London but also over a much longer section of the English Channel. In other words if you really feel the need to shoot it down you keep it further from the capital and have nearly three times as much water into which to drop it.

Now maybe I'm reading more into things than there really is and going to Stansted is just to annoy the other passengers and because the nearest police station has the cells in the basement and those stairs, oooh, you wouldn't believe the number of times I've nearly come a cropper on them, I'd hate to think what it's like for someone wearing handcuffs, haha. But being terribly cold blooded and practical about it you'd hope that there is a plan of action in place in case someone does manage to take over an airliner and point it at prominent London landmark - David Cameron's forehead, for example.** Because if that's the plan then everybody aboard is dead anyway. They might be breathing and talking and wondering what's going on but their cards would already have been well and truly marked.

Obviously nobody wants to have to shoot down a passenger aircraft, and not least because at the moment the RAF would probably be forced to bounce a cheque for the fucking missile. Hopefully it never happens, but I'm glad that someone appears to have given it some consideration. That's awful but sensible. Now whoever it is, can someone get him to think long and hard about Domodedovo and look at the potential for casualties a similar attack would have in the shoe checking and gonad fondling queues in Heathrow.



* More than normal.
** Or possibly a high value target instead.

If only.

This kind of attitude to security theatre could actually get me flying again.

Awesome Airlines is the first air service provider that caters for those of us who aren't stupid fucks. Are you tired of showing up at the airport an hour early so someone has time to give you a handjob and paw through your luggage? We are.

...

TSA agents couldn't find happiness if Megan Fox's vagina piercings set off their metal detector and they couldn't find a terrorist if they opened a car bomb store.

Vintage Cracked! Go read the whole thing.

Protecting the Land of the Free...

... from children.

A nine-year-old boy's dream trip to Disney World was ruined when US immigration officials ruled he was a threat.
Civil servants Kathy and Edward Francis planned to surprise their grandson Micah Strachan with the holiday of a lifetime to Florida in February.
...
But this week US Embassy officials denied the schoolboy a visa to enter the US.
They said there was a risk he would not leave the US at the end of his holiday and refused his application under Section 214 (b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

English, motherfuckers. Do you speak it?

... the US Embassy's rejection letter to Micah said: "Because you either did not demonstrate strong ties outside the United States or were not able to demonstrate that your intended activities in the US would be consistent with the visa status, you are ineligible."

Look, he's a nine year old who wants to go see a six foot rat, and while I can understand there might be some confusion over the issue of his holding an RSA passport when he's lived in Britain his whole life, I repeat: he's nine. Just ignore the fact that he doesn't pronounce it "Suth Efrica" and doesn't look like this:

What the hell do you think he's going to do? Lose the olds at the airport before hijacking a Bob The Builder ride-on toy to the nearest state line and going underground? Seriously, fellas, you are not protecting anything, least of all your reputations, when you deny a child entry to visit a tourist resort for, well, children and claim it's because you don't understand why he wants to come. I mean what next, kicking American children off planes? Oh, hang on, that's actually happened, hasn't it?

:Sigh:   Okay, read carefully now.

tourist |ˈtoŏrist|
noun
1 a person who is traveling or visiting a place for pleasure : the pyramids have drawn tourists to Egypt.
2 short for tourist class .
verb [ intrans. ] rare
travel as a tourist : American families touristing abroad.

terrorist |ˈterərist|
noun
a person who uses terrorism in the pursuit of political aims.

Got it?

And poor little Micah? Well, he's got a rich and (in)famous ally speaking up for him.

Tessa Jowell, Labour MP for Dulwich and West Norwood, said: "I was very concerned to learn about the situation facing my constituents and of course understand the distress the decision has caused.
"I have asked the American authorities to look again at this and very much hope they will feel able to reconsider their decision."

Unfortunately I suspect the American authorities will take sit up and take notice of this for a maximum of zero seconds since she's also no longer in government and as useful as one of these.

My advice, Micah, for what it's worth? The Yanks, or at least their immigration service. don't want you or your grandparents' money so vote with your feet. Go to Euro-Disney instead.

So, who wants a holiday in America this year?

Via reason.com.

Security Theatre.

Two non surprises over airport security recently. First is that the new body scanners are going to be inflicted on us here in Australia as well as the rest of the free-for-a-given-value-of-'free' world that is governed by knee jerk politics and poll obsessed fuckwits. Second, the first claims of abuse of the system and the copying and circulation of images have already emerged.



Now maybe this is bullshit and it's just a bit of self publicity on the part of Shah Rukh Khan, and to be fair it is being denied by BAA. But on the other hand any staff that did do what's been claimed are hardly likely to have circulated it round the whole company. Even if they had done so in my tin foil hat moments I might well be prepared to believe that they might have been taken aside somewhere and told that it was all very embarrassing for the company and the government, and that their ongoing employment would therefore be tied closely to their continuing silence on the matter.

As I said not so long ago, far from helping win the fight against religious headcases all this security theatre is handing them a major fucking victory.

... why is the UK even bothering to carry on fighting in the 'Stan? Why, when the chickenshits in charge have already let terrorists score so many victories? Attacked supposedly for our decadent, western, freedom loving ways the whole fucking west responds by restricting the freedom of its citizens. Thanks to knowing which buttons to press a few headjobs have ensured that getting on a plane is now a colossal pain in the arse and that you can't take a photograph without attracting the attention of some overbearing, gum chewing, busybody, bullying cocksocket who makes Constable Savage look reasonable.
...
What the fuck happened over the last ten years? When did we become such softcocks? When did we let other people decide for us whether it's safe to go somewhere? Why do so many of us roll over so meekly and allow our fucking governments - the cunts that are supposed to be elected to make sure what we say gets done (yes, ahahahahahahahahaha, I know, ahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha) - to hand the win to religious nutters because there might be yet another one prepared to set his underpants on fire?
...
The bottom line is that by changing our lives so much for the terrorist threat we lose and they win.

And I still stand by that now. This is a step backwards for freedom and therefore a massive own goal. At this point I'd be inclined to say harden the fuck up, but as I discovered via Obo not long after I wrote those words it's not even fucking necessary. If the Israelis don't have to put up with all this shit and three hours of fucking security checks at the airport - yes, the Israelis DON'T go through all this* - then there's no plausible reason why the rest of us should have to either.

"Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don't take s--- from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for – not for hours – but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, `We're not going to do this. You're going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport.'"

And they did.

Living with the threat of terrorism - compare and contrast.

Just about every country in the western world is a potential target these days. Fact of life. Just about every citizen has a small, and we're talking incredibly small, risk of being killed or harmed by hate fuelled religious maniacs. Also a fact of life. But for Eurpoeans old enough to remember any of the 70s and 80s this isn't entirely new. The Baader-Meinhof group and the Red Brigade and all the other middle class uni educated fucknuts who went around killing people to set them free or whatever, plus the occasional bit of fighting from the Middle East spilling over and posing a risk that Europeans could caught up in the crossfire. Similarly in Britain we had the IRA and the other republican terror groups, and for several Christmases in a row people living in the London area would think of an IRA bomb in terms of 'when' rather than 'if'. For all the causes may have been different and the bombers intended to get away to bomb again another day rather than blow themselves to tiny scraps* but the bottom line is that the threat of terrorism, even of Muslim terrorists, isn't new. Yet, as I mentioned a few days ago, we've gone from being sufficiently blasé about it that we carried on our lives more or less as normal to allowing that tiny, tiny risk to influence nearly every decision or activity. We've now reached the stage where, because a man tried to 'attack the west' by means of extreme fart lighting, we're going to be treated even more like cattle whenever we fly anywhere.

I remember the first time I flew anywhere. It was to Italy and I was eight years old and very, very excited. I probably wore my poor parents' ears half off with non stop questions about what it was like to fly through a cloud, and asking Dad if he could ask if I could see the cockpit. And I did. I was allowed to stand just outside the door for a few minutes to gape in astonishment at all the dials and switches and wonder how the hell anyone could possibly make sense of it all - I was expecting something like a slightly more complex version of the dashboard in the family Ford Cortina. Try asking that now for your eight year old and see where you get. No, you plug them into the in flight entertainment system and order a glass of Pinot before doing the same thing yourself. And now, according to Dick Puddlecote's comment, because of the man with the flammable crotch if you feel the need to go and release the products of that Pinot too close to landing time you'll now be told to hold it in. Presumably allowances will be made for people with medical conditions who are on diuretics, though I wouldn't be surprised if this meant handing you a jubilee clip. You'll have to tighten it up with your fingernails though, because there's no way they'll let you have a screwdriver.