CBS News proudly reports that 4 out of 5 Americans are okay with the invasive searches by TSA. So therefore, there is really no problem.
Let me try and explain this.
If I am right, I am willing to stand alone.
If the entire world is of one opinion and I have another.
If I believe I am right.
I will stand alone.
As for this ridiculous poll – I would like to see a poll done of those actually flying on planes.
I would like to see a poll of those searched.
I would like to see a poll of the experts in the field.
In short, I would like to see a poll of those who know something about the issue and are not driven by the cold, naked fear so continually preached by the drones of this administration and this Congress.
A frightened public is a docile public, manipulatable in any way. A nation of chickens can be plucked at will.
An America that can only see as far as possible danger is a nation without vision, without courage and without an historical mission.
A “city on a hill” cannot be hidden. Well, we’re trying.
What’s the current vision of our besotted leadership – “the bunker under the hill,” perhaps “the frightened cattle bunched in a barn, the sheep shorn by our valiant Congressmen. Is that us?
Does Osama bin Laden rise in the morning in fear of this America? Or does he laugh at the frightened nation we’ve become?
Are the Americans who freed themselves from oppressive rule, the Americans who went forth and settled a wilderness, the Americans who took their courage to heart to fight against the Nazis and Japanese Imperialists, those who fought a cold war for fifty some years; are they looking down on us with respect?
Would they tolerate for a minute, for moment, for a milisecond, a wretched excuse for a Congressman proclaim that twenty thousand bandits hidden in caves are more dangerous than Hitler and his minions. That by the way would be 50,000 tanks, 12, 000 aircraft, 240 divisions and domination of roughly 85% of Europe. Who listens to that kind of obnoxious fool? Apparently most Americans. Just great.
Land of the free or land of the hopelessly frightened. The light of the world or the dim bulbs of a population hiding in back rooms with a years supply of canned goods. A nation so doubtful of its future that the purchase of gold in case of economic collapse is surging.
I have a video explaining how the HAMP program works for consumers. You will see that it is brutal. The main reason it is brutal is the banks do not have to negotiate in good faith. They can simply decide not to agree. The treasury led by our indomitable Phillis Caldwell (twenty years in the banking industry) hasn’t even set up guidelines for the banks to pay back the money they took from the government. So, if the bank voluntarily offered to give the money back, they wouldn’t know how to do it. By the way, it’s almost two years and they still haven’t got the rules in place. Nevertheless, I think their priorities are right where they want them, Consumers second (dead last) and banks first.
Still, Treasury has not yet punished these banks in any significant way. “To date we have not gone back to take back incentives that have already been paid, but we have pursued many of the non-monetary remedies, including further actions and evaluations, and re-evaluations,” Caldwell told Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), chair of the subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity, after Waters repeatedly asked her if she had “levied any penalties or sanctions.” Even in the midst of a growing controversy over allegedly fraudulent foreclosure paperwork, Treasury has not imposed any penalties on banks.
The difference between how the banks are regulated under HAMP as opposed to how the homeowner is regulated is staggering. The HAMP program simply has no rules for recovering federal money paid to banks who refuse to cooperate. On the other hand, the banks can mercilessly stack fees on the homeowner and foreclose on his home after the trial period. Essentially a bank makes money both by getting federal funds from the program and then forcing the homeowner into foreclosure.
What if you could walk through that airport body scanner, pause for the camera, and know that your naked image would never be pored over by human eyes? If it was software, not TSA screeners, who searched you and other passengers for possible explosives?
That’s the vision of Transportation Security Administration head John Pistole. At a Senate hearing yesterday, Georgia Republican Johnny Isakson conjured this future and suggested to Pisole, “It looks like technology can be a solution to the privacy issue.” Pistole responded, “I think so, I’m very hopeful in that regard.”
The lead two paragraphs from an Atlantic Monthly story written by Alexis Madrigal. Mr. Madrigal them goes on to explain why this is probably never going to happen.
While vendors like L-3 and Rapiscan are actively trying to come up with a magic technological solution for the TSA, independent experts on body scanning technology and automated threat detection aren’t nearly as optimistic as the TSA head. Setting aside the question of how much real safety would be afforded by body scanners that use algorithms to detect artfully hidden explosives under someone’s clothes (I’ll leave it to our big guns to debate that point), there are fundamental problems that may make it very difficult to deploy them.
This is an excellent description of how the technology used in scanning works. I heartily recommend it.
There is no magic bullet.
Currently our actions are terrorist driven. Have one terrorist hide an explosive near his genitals and suddenly millions of Americans are having the genitals groped by the unfriendly hand of the government.
Tell me, what are we going to do if a terrorist hides the explosive more internally? Do you really want to meet your friendly TSA employee while he’s putting on the rubber gloves?
The federal government has opened criminal investigations into approximately 50 executives and directors of U.S. banks that have collapsed during the financial crisis.
Deputy Inspector General Fred Gibson said Wednesday the inspector general’s office at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has been probing the role of the executives in bank failures around the country.
The criminal investigations are separate from civil lawsuits approved by the FDIC’s board against some 80 bank executives, employees and directors. The FDIC is seeking to recoup about $2 billion in bank losses that the regulator says were the result of negligence or misconduct by executives or directors.
The FDIC has shut down or seized 311 banks since January 2008 at a cost of around $77 billion. The criminal probes were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.
2008!! What was the hurry? They waited two full years and suddenly woke up morning and thought, “Hey, these banks collapsed. I wonder if something could be wrong?”
Whenever a bank collapses, some alarm bells should go off.
Let me give them some advice, when 100 banks fail, criminality is likely. No, that number is not 311, it’s 100. If you wait until the number is 311, you might appear to be foolish or unwilling to prosecute bank fraud.
A Florida woman claims a debt collector went far beyond the usual phone calls in an attempt to recoup $362 for an unpaid car loan by sending her messages on Facebook — and by telling family on the social networking site to have her call the agency.
Melanie Beacham, who is suing the debt collection agency Mark One LLC in a Florida court, said she never expected to hear from a collection agency on Facebook, which she used to talk to loved ones and post the occasional photo or funny status update.
“I was shocked when I found out these collectors used Facebook to contact my family because they knew exactly where I was,” Beacham, 34, told The Associated Press in an e-mail on Thursday. “I’m angry they caused me so much embarrassment with my family.”
When will it stop? It probably will not. Now, that they have established that they can humiliate people, they’ve struck gold.
The federal government is the only power who can defend us from this kind of abuse. Without 50 state authority, any legislation at the state level is hit or miss.
But the federal government is a protector of large companies in almost all cases. It is little inclined to act in the public’s behalf and barely representative of the people.
You can see from the current controversy over airport scanners how little concerned they get over a public problem. An industry problem causes them to jump to attention and perform. A financial industry problem has them barking like a trained seal.
If they don’t have the brains to change course when they are obviously wrong. Yes, it’s time to become a relic of history, a monument to fear, stupidity and official indifference.
In a climate of Internet campaigns to shun airport pat-downs and veteran pilots suing over their treatment by government screeners, some airports are considering another way to show dissatisfaction: Ditching TSA agents altogether.
Federal law allows airports to opt for screeners from the private sector instead. The push is being led by a powerful Florida congressman who’s a longtime critic of the Transportation Security Administration and counts among his campaign contributors some of the companies who might take the TSA’s place.
Furor over airline passenger checks has grown as more airports have installed scanners that produce digital images of the body’s contours, and the anger intensified when TSA added a more intrusive style of pat-down recently for those who opt out of the full-body scans. Some travelers are using the Internet to organize protests aimed at the busy travel days next week surrounding Thanksgiving.
Let’s stop routine doses of radiation.
Let’s stop the pointless groping of our genitals.
Let’s stop the pretensions of serving the public while instead encouraging a climate of fear to induce compliance.
The TSA is there to serve the public not to hold us in contempt, not to treat us like hardened criminals in a maximum security prison. (The only thing they are missing is body cavity searches.)
I could have ripped up these counterfeit boarding passes in the privacy of a toilet stall, but I chose not to, partly because this was the renowned Senator Larry Craig Memorial Wide-Stance Bathroom, and since the commencement of the Global War on Terror this particular bathroom has been patrolled by security officials trying to protect it from gay sex, and partly because I wanted to see whether my fellow passengers would report me to the TSA for acting suspiciously in a public bathroom. No one did, thus thwarting, yet again, my plans to get arrested, or at least be the recipient of a thorough sweating by the FBI, for dubious behavior in a large American airport. Suspicious that the measures put in place after the attacks of September 11 to prevent further such attacks are almost entirely for show—security theater is the term of art—I have for some time now been testing, in modest ways, their effectiveness. Because the TSA’s security regimen seems to be mainly thing-based—most of its 44,500 airport officers are assigned to truffle through carry-on bags for things like guns, bombs, three-ounce tubes of anthrax, Crest toothpaste, nail clippers, Snapple, and so on—I focused my efforts on bringing bad things through security in many different airports, primarily my home airport, Washington’s Reagan National, the one situated approximately 17 feet from the Pentagon, but also in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Chicago, and at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport (which is where I came closest to arousing at least a modest level of suspicion, receiving a symbolic pat-down—all frisks that avoid the sensitive regions are by definition symbolic—and one question about the presence of a Leatherman Multi-Tool in my pocket; said Leatherman was confiscated and is now, I hope, living with the loving family of a TSA employee). And because I have a fair amount of experience reporting on terrorists, and because terrorist groups produce large quantities of branded knickknacks, I’ve amassed an inspiring collection of al-Qaeda T-shirts, Islamic Jihad flags, Hezbollah videotapes, and inflatable Yasir Arafat dolls (really). All these things I’ve carried with me through airports across the country. I’ve also carried, at various times: pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, dust masks, lengths of rope, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, eight-ounce tubes of toothpaste (in my front pocket), bottles of Fiji Water (which is foreign), and, of course, box cutters. I was selected for secondary screening four times—out of dozens of passages through security checkpoints—during this extended experiment. At one screening, I was relieved of a pair of nail clippers; during another, a can of shaving cream.
This paragraph is from Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic Monthly article, The Things He Carried.
I have been hammering the TSA for the last couple of days but my purpose is to get you, my kind readers, to become aware of the trampling of your rights. I want you to complain.
One of the things the TSA said in their defense was that out of the millions of passengers only 110,000 had complained. Those numbers were ineffective in persuading me there wasn’t much of a problem. However, think of the people commenting on these things for the various round the clock news networks and you see the problem. Beltway pundits love this kind of drama. They find these kinds of arguments persuasive. They’d suggest each boarding passenger be seeded with radioactive tracers if it could make them sound more ominous in their warnings against terrorism.
Complain! Raise hell!
Annoy people. Anger them. Be unreasonable.
Surely being nude scanned by a heavy magnetic pulse machine and then possibly groped ought to get you at least unhappy?
Don’t let people do this stuff to you. Don’t let anybody do this to you. This is supposed to be your government, not somebody else, your government.
If they want to do these things, they need to justify them. I want to see some numbers. How many terrorists have been apprehended (zero thus far) during a search? How many people have been invasively searched while they weren’t catching any terrorists?
We begin our internet journey with a site called “The Bioscope, Reporting on the World of Early and Silent Cinema.” I am a big movie buff myself. However he starts out his latest post discussing the Japanese pre war cinema. I know a little but I’m clearly not in his league on that topic. What caught my attention was the mention of the film, Wings. This is the first Academy Award winning film and it is still a masterpiece.
And so to the finale, perhaps even a climax; the full live orchestral presentation of William Wellman’s Wings (USA 1927), featuring the Photoplay print, and the Orchestra Mitteleuropea conducted by Mark Fitz-Gerald playing the Carl Davis score. It’s one of his finest, I think, that great March as the main theme, some nice leitmotifs reappearing throughout as appropriate … very effective.
And, what with all the sound effects of the battle sequences having to come from the orchestra, I would imagine a nightmare to play. Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, they nailed it. It’s a powerful film – not just the legendary flying sequences, or the breathtaking battlefront climax … but the subtle underplaying of emotions, too … sometimes Clara and Buddy go slightly over but Arlen, and particularly Henry B. Walthall convey the suppressed emotion just beneath the surface to great effect.
But it is famous for those war sequences, and deservedly so; on the big screen you get to see so much more of it; on a small screen you don’t see the aircraft growing from the smallest dot to ambush the pontoon bridge, or the staff car … you don’t quite see the battlefield extending right to the horizons … and you’re involved, you’re in the air, or in the mud, with them. And did the shot of the white crosses covering the whole landscape inform the similar shot in Attenborough’s Oh! What A Lovely War? I would just hesitate from calling it the perfect WW1 film; for that we would need a little more Gary Cooper, a little less El Brendel, a good deal fewer animated bubbles in Paris … with the latter, a nice idea that was way overused … actually, that applies to El too. And I struggle to quite see how anyone with Clara living next door would pursue the rather more watery charms of Jobyna Ralston. However much an advantage being from The City conferred. But this is nitpicking; you sit back, let the film and the orchestra take you to a time past; either WWI, or the days in the twenties when such presentations were daily occurrences in the larger cities …
Here is the actual film. If you want to begin a good film education, this is an excellent film to begin with.
We now travel to the world of a journalist in training. The web site is Newshookperez’s Blog.
The fall season is definitely here with the beautiful colors, crunchy leaves under your feet and, oh wait, elections. Signs line the edges of the road boasting who has the better standing and what name you should mark on the ballot come voting day. I cannot help but to think how boring and unimaginative politics really are; however, today in class, I was pushed back in my seat and forced to quiet myself.
For me, the problem comes in with thinking journalism is the cliché job; writing in a cramped cubical for a newspaper, or sitting behind a desk in front of a camera reading the daily headlines. As close minded as it may sound, especially coming from a journalist, I have just never been a fan of politics; ever.
Interesting stuff, but the author doesn’t have that much up yet, but that may change. If the development of a new journalist is interesting, you might want to have a look.
One of the Pioneers of Textile industry in India, Dr Rajaram Jaipuria, proudly anounced recently his autobiography “Textile Legend Unravels” which can be called as an ideal textbook for todays young entrepreneurs. Also, the simple description of commercial complexities, with add of humour and satire makes the book equally interesting for common readers.
Mr Jaipuria’s life-story is not just a story of father, mother, son and their dog, rather it is a review of the industrial development in India, transforming through technological renovations; glances over administrative controls, laws and envy and unequal competition, which not only Jaipurias, but all Indian industrialists went through in British era. While describing business developments the writer includes some of very big events of Indian political history in such a diplomatic and honest manner that saves him from any political controversy.
The gentleman has worked as a private tutor while attending college. The blog discloses little else about him. (I wish he would fill out the “about” segment of the blog.) Nevertheless, he’s thoughtful and well education. I like his style of writing. Of course, he isn’t as full of indignation as I am, but then again, who is?
“EFL Triple Action by Guillermo LopezOssa” is our next stop. He discusses business issues. His current post details the six ways we want to be treated in a business relationship based on John Maxwell teachings on leadership.
Charles Kettering said, “There is a great difference between knowing and understanding. You can know a lot about something and not really understand it.” Likewise, we can know a lot about a person and still not really understand them or why they do what they do.
But the desire to be understood is so strong that many disagreements can be resolved simply when one party (or both) gets the sense that they’ve been understood.
Understanding others means extending yourself and meeting them where they are. You must put the burden of connecting on yourself, not on them.
CBS News proudly reports that 4 out of 5 Americans are okay with the invasive searches by TSA. So therefore, there is really no problem.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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