I may never fly anywhere again

When I first started going to visit my sister in North Carolina, I flew on 737 jets. Then American Airlines started flying smaller regional jets into Raleigh-Durham. Now you can't even get a regional jet into there; instead you get a prop plane that we now know after the Buffalo crash of 2009, is probably piloted by someone making less in salary than your average manager of a Dunkin' Donuts.

Last time I went, I flew USAir into Charlotte, rented a car, and then drove the 2-1/2 hours to Chapel Hill -- anything to fly an actual 737 jet piloted by a Real Pilot.

Except now those 737 jets may be suspect too:

Federal aviation authorities said on Monday that they would order airlines to inspect some early Boeing 737 models after Southwest Airlines found subsurface cracks in three aircraft during checks that were conducted after a five-foot hole ripped through the roof of a 737-300 jetliner on Friday.

The Federal Aviation Administration said that it would issue an emergency directive on Tuesday requiring inspections for fatigue damage. The action would initially apply to about 175 aircraft worldwide, 80 of which are registered in the United States, and mostly operated by Southwest Airlines.

“Safety is our No. 1 priority,” the Transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, said in a statement. “Last Friday’s incident was very serious and could result in additional action depending on the outcome of the investigation.”

The statement came shortly after Boeing said it was preparing a service bulletin that would recommend “lap-joint” inspections on certain 737-300’s as well as the 737-400 and 737-500 models.

Friday’s incident unfolded at nearly 35,000 feet with the sound of an explosion during a flight involving a 15-year-old Boeing 737-300 carrying 118 passengers from Phoenix to Sacramento. Some passengers reported feeling dizzy during the swift loss of cabin pressure. Oxygen masks were released and at least two people passed out as the pilot guided the plane to an emergency landing at Yuma Marine Corps Air Station in Arizona. No one was seriously injured.

The F.A.A. directive would require initial inspections using electromagnetic, or eddy-current, technology in specific areas of the aircraft fuselage on Boeing 737 aircraft in the -300, -400 and -500 series that have accumulated more than 30,000 flight cycles — one takeoff and one landing. It would then require repetitive inspections at regular intervals.

I already refuse to fly Southwest because I have no desire to be kicked off a plane and publicly humiliated for Flying While Wearing a Size 16. But what assurances do we have that USAir's, or any other airline's 737s are in any better condition?

Amtrak, here I come. Or perhaps even Greyhound.

Toner cartridges of mass destruction

So what's it going to be next?

When "the terrorists win", it won't be because they turned this nation into a smoking crater, or killed every American in the world. They will win because we died of complete and utter absurdity.

I wrote over the weekend about my experience in "alternative screening" at the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood airport. Getting on a plane has become an ordeal. I often carry two laptops when I fly -- my work laptop and a netbook for blogging and personal use. So for me to go through security requires at least three bins. Each laptop has to go separately, with nothing else in it. Then off comes the shoes. Then you get felt up or go through body scanners. And no matter how we react to whatever the last thing that Al-Qaeda has come up with, they always come up with something else.

Because explosive material was found in toner cartridges, toner and ink cartridges are now banned from overseas flights. As David Dayen says:

I can’t wait for the day terrorists try to put a bomb in a baby. Because then we won’t be allowed to bring a baby on the plane.

I've been saying for years that we go through all this reactive security theatre while people check their bags at the gate, where the bags go directly onto a plane, because the flight is so full that not everyone's wheelie suitcase is going to fit into the overhead compartment. Cargo coming into our ports is largely unscreened. And yet like sheep we allow unskilled TSA staff to zap us with x-rays "for our safety.

When you think about how we survived the Cuban Missile Crisis, which very well COULD have resulted in this country being turned into a crater, it's mind-boggling that we have been brought to our knees by boxcutters, shoes, underwear, and toner cartridges.

Security Theatre

As I write this I'm sitting at a Chili's in the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood airport in sunny Florida, waiting for a Continental flight that since I got here two hours early has already been delayed over an hour.

I wasn't quite prepared to have to deal with full-body scanners, since Terminal C at Newark doesn't have them yet. But since I get a mammogram and dental x-rays every year, administered by medically-trained professionals, I really don't want to get x-rayed by bored TSA staff, thank you very much. So I opted for "alternative screening."

It's clear that the TSA staff here doesn't deal with people like me very often -- short fat middle-aged Jewish ladies who refuse to follow conventional wisdom, and my decision to opt out of being essentially strip-searched in order to get on an airplane left them somewhat nonplussed. They read me the spiel, hoping I would change my mind. Other travelers looked at me curiously, perhaps thinking I'd been pulled aside for extra screening.

It took a while to get someone to do the pat-downfeel-up, but I have to admit that the process is highly impersonal, the screener tells you exactly what she's going to do, and if you treat her (or him, if you are male) like a human being, it is a far more civilized way to be screened than to have to put your arms behind your head and have someone who may or may not know what he's doing zap x-rays through you. Of course that being frisked by a stranger is preferable to a full-body scan tells you something about what air travel has become these days. It mostly just makes me wonder if the luggage being loaded into the cargo hold is scanned as thoroughly "for our safety" as the passengers are.

So here we are, nearly a decade after the 9/11 attacks, still scratching our heads trying to stay one step ahead of some highly resourceful people who find this level of reality so intolerable that they not only want to leave it, but take a few hundred people with them. And every time we take off our shoes, send our laptops through scanners being monitored by people who often don't seem to know what they're looking at, or undergo virtual strip searches, I have to wonder if a step ahead is really where we are.

It's surprising -- and appalling, actually -- to watch people blindly and unquestioningly go into these body scanners. When you get dental x-rays, the technician leaves the room. It's also appalling to think what risks the TSA staff incurs every day at work, because they don't get to leave the room, and the scanners are not enclosed. It may be easier to think of this here, where the TSA employees are largely pleasant and professional, unlike Newark, where they tend to be surly and largely inattentive.

UPDATED 11/10/10: The ACLU cites Jeffrey Golberg's account of HIS dealings with the TSA in the Atlantic, and also notes that the "safety" of the scanners is disputed.

Unsafe at any size

Last week I flew a US Airways 737 to Charlotte, NC even though I was headed to Chapel Hill. I didn't want to fly direct because the only airline flying direct to Raleigh-Durham from Newark was Continental Express through its regional affiliate, ExpressJet. After the January 2009 Buffalo crash of a Continental Express plane, after which we learned that pilots for regional airlines have less experience, work crushing schedules, and are paid peanuts, I didn't want to trust my life to one of these regionals.

Instead, I dealt with a too-fast approach and landing, a ridiculous line at the Avis/Budget rental car counter, and a cancelled return flight.

But at least the planes I were on did not spring holes at 31,000 feet:

It's harrowing enough when a commercial airliner mistakenly announces an emergency landing over water -- or, for that matter, when air passengers capture footage of an actual emergency landing on their cell phones. But passengers on a recent American Airlines flight from Miami to Boston experienced a much more vivid sense of airborne peril when a 2-foot hole opened up in the plane's fuselage about 30 minutes after takeoff.

The Boeing 757 was cruising at 31,000 feet Tuesday when the cabin began to decompress rapidly -- a "super-terrifying" experience, a passenger told WSVN-TV in Miami. The flight was carrying 154 passengers and six crew members.

But soon enough, the crew established emergency procedures: The passengers donned the oxygen masks that drop down when cabin pressure decreases, and the pilots were able to reverse the flight and land the damaged plane safely at Miami International Airport.

"The crew declared an emergency and made a normal landing. There were no injuries," American Airlines said in a rather terse statement. "The aircraft has been taken out of service."

Once the plane was on the ground, inspectors discovered the problem -- not that it was exactly easy to miss. A 2-foot-by-1-foot hole had opened just above the "A" of the logo near the plane's front left cabin door. Initial reports indicate that the plane probably took off with a smaller crack in the fuselage -- and that wind pressure caused it to expand after the jet's takeoff. However, investigators say that they have yet to isolate the precise cause of the hole. Both the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating.

As mistermix notes, we're told that being bombarded with radiation by semi-skilled TSA workers every time we get on a plane is necessary for our safety in the air, but we're also being told that businesses, including the airline industry, are so burdened with regulation we can't even institute the kind of regulations that would make airlines take unsafe planes out of service. After all, it's easier to just deal with the lawsuits if hundreds of people die because too-old planes or planes serviced by outsourced, non-FAA-certified mechanics, are not taken out of service when they are no longer safe. The airlines are allowed to do financial cost/benefit analysis with YOUR LIFE.

Tomorrow I'm getting on a plane. It's a 737. Hopefully it won't fall apart in midair. But show the above-lined article to your friends who are tempted to vote Teabag on Tuesday and tell them that this is what Teabag America is going to look like.

Because what's the lives of planeloads of people when weighed against airline profits?

Lately we've been thinking about the sleaziness of the oil industry and of an insurance industry that pockets huge profits while denying care to sick people. But when it comes to utter disregard for lives when it might interfere with profit, the airline industry is right up there.

This is an industry that WE bailed out after the 9/11 attacks -- before there was even a significant impact on its profits. And yet this industry regards the people it carries and the employees who operate its planes as completely expendable if their existence means a few less dollars in the pockets of its executives.

As I write this, Mr. Brilliant is on a plane crossing the Atlantic. In the next few weeks, I'll be taking a couple of planes myself. One one of my trips, I'm flying to a city two and a half-hours from my planned destination just to avoid the kind of regional carriers that fly ever-longer "short hops" these days. You know, the kind of regional carriers like Colgan Air, who pay their pilots less than an assistant manager at Hollisters. This is the kind of staffing the airlines would see system-wide if they could.

In the aftermath of the Colgan Air crash in Buffalo last year, Congress has passed legislation requiring that pilots have 1500 hours of flight experience in the type of plane they're required to fly. The airline industry is, of course, up in arms:

A Federal Aviation Administration advisory panel dominated by airlines, companies that employ pilots to fly corporate planes and university flight schools wants to reduce by two-thirds a requirement that airline co-pilots have a minimum of 1,500 hours of flying experience — the same experience threshold that captains must meet.

The key issue is money, according to officials familiar with the panel's deliberations. Airlines worry that if the FAA raises the threshold for co-pilots — also called first officers — from the current minimum of 250 hours, airlines will be forced to raise pilot salaries and benefits in order to attract more experienced fliers, the officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly.

Most airline pilots have far more experience than 1,500 hours. But industry analysts have forecast a pilot shortage if the economy starts to expand, which could create a premium for experience. The salaries of corporate and other private pilots are affected by airline salaries.

University flight schools are similarly concerned that if beginner pilots have to accrue 1,500 hours of flight experience before they can be hired by an airline, they'll skip expensive university training in favor of amassing flight time through per-hour instruction.

Using a provision in the new law that allows the FAA to give prospective pilots some credit for flight school training, the panel proposed allowing airlines to hire university-trained first officers with as little as 500 hours, according to a copy of the panel's recommendations.

The roles of airline captains and first officers have changed over the years. Today, both pilots are expected to be able to fly a plane equally well and to share duties.

The FAA formed the committee this summer just before Congress passed a far-reaching aviation safety bill, including the boost in required flight hours.

The law was prompted by a regional airline crash near Buffalo, N.Y., in February 2009 that killed 50 people. The flight's 24-year-old first officer earned about $16,000 in the year before the accident. She lived at home with her parents near Seattle but flew across the country in order to reach the airline's base in Newark, N.J., in time for the flight.

A National Transportation Safety Board investigation concluded the first officer and the flight's captain were probably suffering fatigue at the time of the accident. Neither had slept in a bed the night before — the first officer napped in a cockpit jump seat, the captain in a crew lounge where sleeping was discouraged. Pilots, particularly at regional airlines, often can't afford to live in the communities where they're based. Some share cheap apartments near their base so they can grab sleep before flights. Others simply nap wherever they can.

There are nights when I only get about five hours sleep. I can function one day with that little sleep, but by Day 2 I'm only barely functional, and probably shouldn't be driving. Imagine putting your life in the hands of a pilot making less than the guy driving the ice cream truck in your town (from an actual comment posted here) whose only sleep the last week is forty winks in a cockpit jump seat.

Flying a plane may require less actual effort than it did years ago -- when things go well. But when things don't go well, that's when you want someone who knows what he's doing at the controls, someone who's likely seen similar situations before and knows what to do; someone who's paid a fair salary under decent working conditions, who's awake and alert and experienced. I've been on a plane making an approach where the fog was so low that the lettering on the ground was just visible -- and the landing gear wasn't down yet. I've been on a plane making an approach in 50 mile an hour crosswinds. I've been on a plane caught in a downdraft flying over mountains in Jamaica. I've been on a plane flown by a tough little bantam rooster of a pilot with a Brooklyn accent who after telling us we were being diverted from Newark to Pittsburgh because there wasn't a gate at Newark, suddenly said there was a gate after all. I have no doubt that this guy made it very clear that he didn't have enough fuel to get to Pittsburgh.

Those are the kinds of pilots you want when things go wrong -- guys like Pilot Tough Guy, or Chesley Sullenberger, or the many men and women with thousands of hours of experience in all kinds of conditions who fly planes every day. Weekend Fun at the Flight School is no more a qualification to carry my life in your hands than volunteering at the local hospital qualifies you to do brain surgery.

There was a time when we believed as a nation that pay should reflect the value of the work. In today's race to the bottom for employees and race to the top for executives business climate, the lives of airline passengers and crew aren't worth a plug nickel to the airlines.

Fear Nation

I wonder: If the news about Park51 had broken in, say, February of LAST year, would it have become as big a story? I doubt it. With Jan Brewer showing the entire country just what "catch the immigrants" looks like in real life, Republicans needed a new scapegoat to keep Americans afraid enough to give them back the keys to the car -- and Park51 gives them the perfect scapegoat: Muslims. Even when the underwear bomber was apprehended we didn't see anything like this. There's been no new attack, no new threats, just the right whipping up a frenzy of anti-Muslim sentiment -- because it tends to work for them. Rachel went over the fearmongering in detail on last night's show (video to come shortly), but our status as a Nation of Fear didn't start with a community center planned in lower Manhattan. It's been going on for nine years, and as we head into the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I think we ought to take a look at ourselves and see just how much nineteen guys with box cutters succeeded in bringing a once-great nation to its knees, willing to sacrifice everything it stands for in order to achieve an illusion -- a delusion, if you will -- of safety.

The latest tactic in the whack-a-mole of anti-terrorism arose after the Attempted Underwear Bombing of 2009 in the form of full-body screening machines replacing the hodgepodge of metal detectors and pat-downs at airport security checkpoints. If you are going to fly out of many airports now, you must submit to a dose of radiation as a prerequisite -- or suffer the consequences:

f you somehow missed the hoopla, there are two types of machines being installed, which have raised concerns about privacy, health risks and even their effectiveness at catching terrorists. The more controversial “backscatter” devices project an X-ray beam onto the body, creating an image displayed on a monitor viewed by a T.S.A. employee in another room. The “millimeter wave” machines, which are considered less risky because they do not use X-rays, bounce electromagnetic waves off the body to produce a similar image.

Unlike metal detectors, these machines can detect objects made with other materials, like plastic and ceramic. But they can’t see anything hidden inside your body, or detect certain explosives.

[snip]

The T.S.A. claims that the machines have been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, the Commerce Department’s National Institute for Standards and Technology and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. But when I called these organizations to ask about their evaluations, I learned that they basically tested only one thing — whether the amount of radiation emitted meets guidelines established by the American National Standards Institute, a membership organization of companies and government agencies.

But guess who was on the committee that developed the guidelines for the X-ray scanners? Representatives from the companies that make the machines and the Department of Homeland Security, among others. In other words, the machines passed a test developed, in part, by the companies that manufacture them and the government agency that wants to use them.

[snip]

Mr. Kimball said passengers can choose not to go through the scanner and opt for the metal detector and a pat down instead, information that is also on the T.S.A.’s Web site. But the message travelers are getting at the airport isn’t that clear.

“It definitely didn’t feel optional at all,” said Drew Hjelm, an Army veteran who recently encountered the X-ray machine at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. After asking to go through the metal detector, being turned down and even speaking with a supervisor, he was given other choices.

“The officer said, either you go through the body scanner or you leave the airport or we’re going to call the police and they’re going to come and arrest you,” Mr. Hjelm said. “After I went through the body scanner, they still patted my pants down.”

Since other passengers have said they weren’t given a choice, or were subjected to an aggressive pat down if they declined to be X-rayed, the Electronic Privacy Information Center has created an online form for travelers to report problems.

The advocacy group has also filed a motion in court to suspend the body scanner program, saying that it violates the Fourth Amendment (and other statutes) by imposing search procedures that are more intrusive than the courts have allowed for routine screening.

So this is what flying is now -- exposure to radiation by machines that have only been tested by people with a vested interest, automatic suspicion if you refuse to expose yourself to such radiation, and abuse by TSA personnel.

All in the same of quote-safety-end-quote -- safety that is, like the principles we used to stand for, only an illusion.

Nine years ago, Osama Bin Laden succeeded to a degree he could not even imagine. So when you observe the anniversary of the attacks tomorrow, by all means mourn the dead. But also mourn something else that died that day -- our very nation.

(Oh, and just as an aside -- these machines would NOT have detected the explosives carried by the so-called "underwear bomber".)

What do increased efforts at security checkpoints matter when someone can just get on the plane at the gate?

This article to which I linked yesterday (and here's the link again) describes a witness who says that a "sharp-dressed man" accompanied Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab to the airport GATE, where he talked the GATE AGENT into letting Mutallab on the plane.

So my question is this: Did Mutallab even go through a security checkpoint at all? Did the "sharp-dressed man" have some kind of special clearance? With all the handwringing going on about airport security in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt, is it possible that the checkpoint system didn't fall apart; but rather, that Mutallab somehow never even went through it; that he had some sort of "special dispensation"?

Dutch authorities are investigating:

American lawyer Kurt Haskell, who was standing in line with his wife Lori on Christmas morning at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was with a man aged about 50 of Indian appearance in an expensive suit talking with a ticket agent.

Mr Haskell claims that the second man told the ticket agent Abdulmutallab was from Sudan and did not have a passport. The ticket agent then referred the men to her manager down the hall, and Mr Haskell did not see the suspect against until after the failed bombing attempt.

Michael Lind today asks what the hell we're paying the government for:

Whether under Republicans or Democrats, whether the threat is Hurricane Katrina or Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, America seems to be facing a general crisis of state incapacity. Money can be found by Democratic and Republican administrations alike to bail out campaign contributors on Wall Street, but not to repair our crumbling infrastructure.

The U.S. fought and won World War II in less time than it took to adequately protect U.S. soldiers against primitive weapons in Iraq. We are told that we have to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan indefinitely, because withdrawing would be admitting failure. Translation: We haven't won and are unlikely to win in the foreseeable future, if ever.

And now the narrowly averted Christmas massacre in the skies above Detroit. I don't think I'm overreacting when I say that if ever overreaction on the part of a citizenry has been justified, it is now. We the people deserve to be angry. It's not as though Abdulmutallab came up with a clever new tactic while our national security agencies were focused on the last tactic. He used more or less the same tactic as the "shoe bomber," Richard Reid, and nevertheless got through every layer of international and national security.

It's almost as though Osama bin Laden had been allowed through screening at Boston Logan, used a box cutter to hijack a jet, and would have crashed it but for the heroic intervention of other passengers defending themselves after their government failed to defend them.

Forget Democrats and Republicans for a minute. Every American should be asking the same questions: Why are we paying these people?

Our elected leaders and public servants can't do the hard stuff, and they can't do the easy stuff either. They can't provide universal, affordable healthcare, of the kind that all other advanced industrial societies have. They can't give us a system of banking that channels money from depositors to productive enterprises in our country, without being channeled into gambling with obscene profits skimmed off for the gambler-bankers. They can't win wars or avoid unwinnable ones. They can't even repair bridges and keep levees in operating condition, tasks mastered by the relatively primitive ancient Romans and ancient Chinese.

And now, after two invasions justified in the name of the "war on terror," the creation of a cumbersome Homeland Security bureaucracy and a Patriot Act, and countless studies, reports and hearings, it turns out that we Americans may have to defend ourselves against jihadists. First we were told ad nauseam that it was our job to identify possible terrorists in airports and bus terminals and train stations. What next? "Passengers are advised to be prepared to throw themselves if necessary on the flaming traveler next to them in the aircraft, in order to prevent a bomb from detonating. Please watch the demonstration by the flight attendants."

The reality as well as the perception of government incapacity threatens liberalism more than conservatism. After all, if public safety deteriorates, antisocial plutocrats can retreat into doormanned buildings and gated communities and hire their own private security forces, and rural conservatives can amass home arsenals. And if the costs of personal security reduce the room for taxes for public goods, well, then, so much the better, from the perspective of certain strains of anti-government conservatism.

In contrast, America's modest and inadequate system of social democracy rests on economic growth made possible by effective government provision of basic public goods. Economic growth in turn rests on physical security — the protection of citizens against criminals in their midst and hostile or law-breaking foreigners. Libertarians to the contrary, the indispensable preconditions for the free society are effective armed forces and police forces, be they citizen militias or professionals.

It's all well and good to look at airport security checkpoints, but it's beginning to sound as if Mutallab had one heck of a lot of help getting on that plane; help that may not even have involved lapses in airport security. But Lind's article is interesting in that it posits a world in which government is ineffective and we end up with paramilitary forces and gun nuts -- exactly the kind of world that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, the teabaggers, and Dick Cheney regard as their utopian vision.

As I said last night, my tinfoil is tingling. Stay tuned.

I really don't need this a week before going to Germany: random musings

Yes, folks, Your Humble Blogger will be only sporadically posting between June 20 and January 3. I am headed to the Rhineland, where I will lead a project team of people who know a lot more of what they're doing than I do. I must say that my employer does want to make its employees comfortable on a trip like this. Most companies these days, if you're not a top executive, would put you on a hang-glider and blow, then if you get to your destination, put you up at a youth hostel. But I will be at a nice hotel that claims to have wireless internet access, albeit at 22 euros per day. So unless I can hang two laptops off the same connection, in which case I may be able to post nightly (which would mean afternoon Eastern Time), posting will be sporadic for those two weeks. I'm sure my loyal compatriots, and perhaps a few surprise guests, will pick up the slack. But yes, I'm bound for my first trip to Europe, even if it is for work.

Cologne sounds like a fun town; too bad I'll be returning home on the day the biggest reggae and world music festival in Europe starts, and I'll miss the Cologne festivities of Gay Pride month. But there's the cathedral, and apparently there is a zoo and a botanical garden, and I will have a weekend there in which hopefully I won't have to spend ALL my time working.

But I am a nervous flier under the best of circumstances, and being someone who is, I'm ashamed to admit, less well-traveled than George W. Bush at this point, I needed the crash of a major European airline's jet like I needed a second navel. And to make matters worse, John Aravosis has noted a couple of peculiarities about Air France #447 passengers that just make me want to don my tinfoil chapeau right now, then pop a Benedryl and drink a glass of wine the minute I get on board and conk out rather than freak out:

• Two names on the passenger list are also on highly-classified documents listing the names of radical Muslims considered a threat to the French Republic. I'm skeptical of this one. Remember when four of the supposed 9/11 hijackers turned up alive? First of all, names are often the same. The head of my department on my former job was hassled every time he flew because his name -- a common one -- was on a watch list. Second of all, this is the kind of claim that could be very self-serving on the part of a government already taking heat for setting up a military base in the Middle East. And the documents are conveniently classified. Still, file this away under "odd."


• Then, it seems that two prominent figures in the fight against the illegal arms trade and drug trafficking were on the flight. This starts to seem like a highly unlikely "two-fer," unless you want to subscribe to the Grand Unifying Theory of Criminal Villains and think that everything bad in the world is related. The problem with this, even for a sometime tinfoiler like me, is that if you keep up like this, you either end up like James Von Brunn, blaming the Jews for everything, or you end up like Alex Jones, muttering about the Trilateral Commission and the Bavarian Illuminati. Readers of this blog know that while I have my own tinfoilish theories about the 9/11 attacks, they extend solely to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's cold, cost-benefit ratios being calculated as to whether losing a few planes would be worth the opportunity to invade Iraq.
• 
  
• Then there's the woman who just missed getting on the flight who died in a car accident this week. Now this one just falls under "Some people have no luck at all."
  

If everyone is connected to everyone else by only six people, these coincidences are easy to explain. They're creepy, and perhaps it's just that I'm going to be getting on a flight to Europe in a week and don't have the luxury of going down that road, but I'm not convinced they mean anything.

But when right before Barack Obama made his Cairo speech and Osama Bin Laden released one of his "booga-booga" tapes right beforehand, it sounded like a plaintive cry for attention from someone realizing that perhaps his influence was waning now that his best recruiting tool was no longer on the world scene. Today the Iranians go to the polls. If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad loses this election, as he may very well, on the heels of the Lebanese election earlier this month, it will be a sign that the carrot works far better than the stick, and that the Middle East just might be rethinking its relationship with the west.

Last night I was on the phone with my mother, talking about single-payer health care and why "socialism" was still such a hot word. I opined that perhaps everyone whose fear button was pushed during the Cold War will have to die off, or at the very least, leave the corridors of Washington, before the knee-jerk response to the idea that the government perhaps ought to provide certain things that are NECESSARY, rather than leaving it up to people wearing headsets in cubicles at for-profit, publicly-held corporations to decide what care you get, is abject, pants-crapping terror. Watching the young people of Iran on the NBC special on Iran last Sunday getting involved in the future of their country, I had the same sense that change is coming there too, but it may take another generation of people without the baggage of the Shah, and the U.S. embassy hostage crisis, to do it.

Perhaps this is why neocon Daniel Pipes and his warmongering compatriots WANT Ahmadinejad to be re-elected. Becuase fear is a powerful tool. Without fear, what do the neocons have?

So next Saturday, I'll get on that plane loaded up on Benadryl and forget all about fear. Mr. Brilliant will mind the home front, and other folks will mind the blog front, and just maybe I'll be able to post some photos from the ancient city on the Rhine.

Why are authorities so sure it wasn't terrorism?

An Air France jetliner with over 200 people on board drops off of radar somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean during thunderstorms through which two Lufthansa jets had passed without incidents a half-hour earlier. For a full day, no one has any idea what happened. Nervous fliers all over America for whom this is their worst nightmare make the obligatory jokes about "the Island".

Over the next few days, attention is focused on weather conditions in the area, despite the safe passage of at least two other jets through the same storm not long before. Everyone hates flying in thunderstorms for just this reason -- the sometimes violent turbulence makes us feel as if the plane is going to break apart in midair, which investigators now think is what happened to Air france #447. But as journalist and former airline pilot Patrick Smith points out, the industry and its crews can no longer say that there is ZERO chance of weather causing a plane to crash all by itself. The chance may be infinitesimal, but it is not zero.

But can we be absolutely sure? Perhaps it's a function of no longer having George W. Bush and Dick Cheney whipping people into a frenzy o'fear 24 x 7 (though it isn't for lack of trying on Cheney's part), but the quick dismissal of sabotage when a plane very likely breaks up in midair seems odd. Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim told reporters that the presence of a 12-mile oil slick "could" defuse (heh) the possibility of midair explosion. That would seem to be relatively compelling evidence against sabotage, but there is one little nagging thing that makes me wonder: It seems that France just opened up a military base in Abu Dhabi less than two weeks ago. And we know just how much Al Qaeda and related groups love having Western military bases in Middle Eastern countries.

A connection between the two seems unlikely, but to rule it out entirely this quickly seems strange.

And yet something ELSE the Bush Administration has screwed up

After George W. Bush turns over the keys on January 20 after holding an eight-year-long kegger and wrecking the joint, some far more intrepid soul than I will have to put together a compendium of everything this man has botched during his eight years in office.

I heard about this on Errol Louis' radio show here in New York yesterday and while I wish I could say I couldn't believe it, given this Administration's track record, it just seemed like more par for the course:

Shawn Nguyen bragged that he could sneak anything past airport security using his top-secret clearance as a federal air marshal. And for months, he smuggled cocaine and drug money onto flights across the country, boasting to an FBI informant that he was "the man with the golden badge."

Michael McGowan used his position as an air marshal to lure a young boy to his hotel room, where he showed him child porn, took pictures of him naked and sexually abused him.

And when Brian "Cooter" Phelps wanted his ex-wife to disappear, he called a fellow air marshal and tried to hire a hit man nicknamed "the Crucifixer."

Since 9/11, more than three dozen federal air marshals have been charged with crimes, and hundreds more have been accused of misconduct, an investigation by ProPublica has found. Cases range from drunken driving and domestic violence to aiding a human trafficking ring and trying to smuggle explosives from Afghanistan.

The Federal Air Marshal Service presents the image of an elite undercover force charged with making split-second decisions that could mean the difference between stopping a terrorist and shooting an innocent passenger.

But an examination of police reports, court records, government reports, memos and e-mails shows that 18 air marshals have been charged with felonies, including at least three who were hired despite prior criminal records or being fired from law enforcement jobs. A fourth air marshal was hired while under FBI investigation. Another stayed on the job despite alarming a flight attendant with his behavior.

If you think that having federal air marshals on flights is keeping you safe from terrorst hijackings, you'd better go read the whole thing and guess again.

From the "Figure That Out All By Yourself, Einstein?" file

The head of my current (until August 29 or I find another job, which ever comes first) department has been on a terrorist watch list for years. Every time he flies, he has to go through extra screening. He has a common name; not "John Smith", but something close to it. I believe he may have just been removed after years of trying, but for someone who travels a great deal on business to have to deal with this every time he flies is more than a mere inconvenience.

The TSA has only just now awakened to this fact that perfectly innocent people are being detained and set aside for extra screening because they have the same name as someone else, in much the same way that thousands of Florida voters were disenfranchised in 2000 because they had the misfortune of having the same name as someone who had committed a crime:

"Some airlines have elected not to do what we would like to see them do, which is take care of the innocent passengers and not inconvenience them," said TSA administrator Kip Hawley.

He told the House Aviation Safety subcommittee that airlines have not made the investment needed for pre-screening passenger name lists.

[snip]

While government auditors have put the total number of names on the government's terror watch list at 400,000, TSA officials say its list of people designated for enhanced screening or prohibited from flying contains about 50,000. Of them, Hawley said, "a very small percentage" are U.S. citizens.

A very small percentage? How likely is it that I, just one blogger, just happen to work with one of them? The TSA is just not credible about this.

But you still can't bring a bottle of shampoo on board

Last summer Mr. Brilliant and I went to Jamaica. Thanks to Harmon stores, which greet you upon entry with the world's largest assortment of teeny-tiny containers of everything you might need, we each had our little one-quart bag full of such teeny-tiny bottles, ready for inspection. It wasn't until after we'd gone through the checkpoint that I realized that one of the bottles I'd put in my one-quart plastic bag was a four-ounce bottle of Oil of Olay lotion. And I'd gotten through security.

So much for these ridiculous procedures we're going through at airports. Do they even really look at these things?

While they're pulling aside old ladies and asking them if they know Osama Bin Laden, it's still easy to smuggle bomb-making parts aboard planes:

Undercover investigators carried all the bomb components needed to cause "severe damage" to airliners and passengers through U.S. airport screening checkpoints several times this year, despite security measures adopted in August 2006 to stop such explosive devices, according to a new government report.

Agents were able to smuggle aboard a detonator, liquid explosives and liquid incendiary components costing less than $150, even though screening officers in most cases appeared to follow proper procedures and use appropriate screening technology, according to an unclassified version of a report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress's audit arm.

The report concludes that the Transportation Security Administration needs to adopt even more stringent security measures, despite "a significant challenge in balancing security concerns with efficient passenger movement."

The report provoked sharp criticism of the TSA from members of Congress just days before the start of an expected record Thanksgiving holiday travel week. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which requested the investigation, plans a hearing on the subject this morning.

"These findings are mind-boggling," said the committee chairman, Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.). "In spite of billions of dollars and the six years TSA has had to deploy new technology and procedures, our airlines remain vulnerable. This is unacceptable. The American public deserves better."

Two years ago, TSA officials said they needed more time, more resources and better technology to provide adequate security, Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), the panel's ranking Republican and former chairman, said in a written statement. "Unfortunately . . . TSA still cannot consistently detect or prevent prohibited items from being carried onto aircraft."

Six years after the 9/11 attacks, we are $1.5 trillion poorer, we are embroiled in war without end in the Middle East, Osama Bin Laden is still out there, you can still smuggle deadly items on board aircraft, and Tom Tancredo is out there saying that if you don't vote for him, you'll die in a terrorist attack, presumably enacted by Mexicans of Mass Destruction.

And we're supposed to believe that Republicans are the people who'll keep Americans safe?

But at least no one will bring Shampoo of Mass Destruction on a plane

You are more likely to be killed in a midair collision than by terrorists while flying -- but rather than do something about it, let's just play "Hide the Report":

Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized.

NASA gathered the information under an $8.5 million safety project, through telephone interviews with roughly 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly four years. Since ending the interviews at the beginning of 2005 and shutting down the project completely more than one year ago, the space agency has refused to divulge the results publicly.

Just last week, NASA ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge all related data from its computers.

[snip]

Among other results, the pilots reported at least twice as many bird strikes, near mid-air collisions and runway incursions as other government monitoring systems show, according to a person familiar with the results who was not authorized to discuss them publicly.

The survey also revealed higher-than-expected numbers of pilots who experienced "in-close approach changes" — potentially dangerous, last-minute instructions to alter landing plans.

So why hide this report? Here's why:

A senior NASA official, associate administrator Thomas S. Luedtke, said revealing the findings could damage the public's confidence in airlines and affect airline profits.

And after all, what's a few hundred people when compared against airline profits?

Just in case you didn't already know for whom this country is being run.