Just a TSA thought

What is to stop a terrorist from blowing himself up while he is waiting in the airport security line? Usually there are lots of people around and it would mock the airport security.

TSA Gone Wild!

One poor man has his urostomy bag ripped off his body leaving him covered in urine.

Another lady has her blouse pulled down exposing her breasts to the entire screening area.

You could be arrested for refusing to submit to either scan once you enter the screening area.

And one lady mocks the TSA by stripping down to some transparent underwear... and films it!

An Analogy

Let's say you have a race out in the ocean where the first swimmer to get to the shore gets a new car.

There are a few amateurs and a guy named Peter who has been training for the race for months. Peter is a real go-getter who is really determined and goes after things that he wants. The amateurs, fearing that Peter will have the upper-hand, lobby the race organizers to have Peter penalized. So the race organizers organize a meeting and agree that if they let Peter race unpenalized, they will just be 'giving' the car to him. So they decide that they are going to attach some additional weights to his legs to make the race "fair."

A gun fires into the air and the race begins. The swimmers start splashing and kicking, chugging towards the shore. Peter starts lagging behind the other swimmers due to his exhaustion from the extra weight burden that was placed on him. George, one of the event organizers, fearing Peter will drown decides to give this guy a break. He speeds a powerboat out to remove one of the weights, but leave the other one on so that Peter doesn't have some 'unfair advantage.' The race continues. So at this point do we expect Peter to suddenly run across the water and beat everybody to the finish line because one of the weights was removed? No, of course not. And let's not forget that he still has a weight attached to him.

But the amateurs, looking back because they heard the speedboat racing to Peter, start complaining about Peter being given a break. "Now they are just giving him the car," complains one of the amateurs, "it is so unfair!" But the race continues and Peter starts cutting down the distance between himself and the other racers; His hard preparation is paying off, but he is still quite tired from the extra burden that had been placed on him earlier in the race. He swims past Paul, who is a couch potato and didn't think it was worth any additional effort to prepare for the race.

So Nancy and Barrack, two of the other event organizers, start debating if they should put the other weight back on. Barrack convinces everyone that Peter should have a rope attached in order to tow Paul behind him to make things "more fair" for Paul. "We need to spread the ability around," he says.

Welcome to America.

Obama Understands.

Obama Says Understands Ire Over Airport Screenings?

He's the one that paid for them in his budget!!

"Obama's budget for next year calls for $371 million for 500 more body scanners..."

Naked Body Scanners

So unless you haven't flown on an airplane over the last several years, you are probably aware of new scanning devices that air travelers are subjected to. These devices pummel your body with X-rays which allows an image of your body to be shown to a TSA screener. Critics have likened it to a "virtual strip search" because high resolution images of your most intimate details are exposed. However, I am even highly suspicious of the quality of the images hand released to the press. Usually they provide a tiny 2 inch square on your screen with key zones blurred out. I am quite sure that the resolution is much higher on the TSA's screen.

If one is not comfortable with the naked body scanner, one can opt out for a hand screening instead. Previously, they would pat you down and only touch your buttocks with the back of their hand. The TSA, however, under a guise of "increased security" and instituted an "enhanced pat down" which is a little more invasive and demeaning. Now they use their palms and fingers on the buttocks and groin. Of course, the real reason for this "enhanced" procedure is to make the hand pat down alternative to the naked body scanner much less pleasant. They want travelers to acquiesce to the naked body scan. The TSA claims that only 1% opt out of the scanner, but I am highly suspicious of this number and think they are understating it. They are invoking network effect thinking where if they can convince the public that "everybody else is fine with it" then the rest of the public will accept it as well. The government wants make this scanning device acceptable over time and eventually make it mandatory where one does not have an opt out option.

So whats wrong with the naked body scanners? Aside from the discomfort of knowing that someone is looking at a picture of your naked body and that it may be stored for later viewing, and because TSA screeners are so professional that they will taunt a coworker about the size of his penis after he submitted to scan, or laugh about exposing a traveler's breasts to the entire screening area, there's also the issue of having x-rays beamed at your body. Now of course, the TSA and some research puppets have claimed that it is super safe and that you would have to get 1000 dental x-rays to get the same amount of radiation. Really? It would be more effective to use a more believeable number of say 10 dental x-rays, because I am not buying the 1000 number. And of course, what else are they going to say? Dr. Brenner, head of Columbia University’s Centre for Radiological Research, says that the radiation dose is actually 20 times higher than the official estimate. Other radiological scientists have also called for an independent review because they are concerned with the safety of these machines. They also mention that because the 'safe level' metric that the government uses involves the volume of the entire body as opposed to just the skin, the radiation safety level is understated. Either way, all it takes is a single X-ray to damage DNA which has the potential to cause cancer many years later, and you are having a machine blast your entire body with them.

And this is an early stage device. Time and time again history is looked back upon and mistakes of was considered harmless or good for you which later turned out to be harmful
(remember when smoking was claimed to be good for you? Or drugs that have been given FDA approval, but later were found to cause problems, such as Vioxx). One scientist has estimated that you end up with the same risk of dying of cancer from one of these machines as getting killed by a terrorist.

Then there's the issue that some variants of these machines, like the millimeter-wave scanner, might not even be that effective at exposing certain types of threats. "Material [that] is low density, such as powder, liquid or thin plastic – as well as the passenger's clothing – the millimetre waves pass through and the object is not shown on screen."

The sheeple and naysayers will quip, "Well, if you have nothing to hide..." But this is always a superbly weak argument as it is equivalent to the Ad Ignorantiam logical fallacy. And these scanners encroach on an individual's privacy and freedom to not be seen naked or be subjected to an experience they consider humiliating. Let's not forget how Ben Franklin stated (paraphrasing here) that those willing to sacrifice liberty in exchange for security deserve neither and will lose both.

These devices only give an illusion of additional security, as the naysayers are certainly missing one critical fact: If a terrorist is willing to kill himself to kill others, what is to stop him from placing a stick of dynamite up his ass? What will be next, proctology exams before boarding flights?

A good read by Arthur Laffer, the economist of the "Laffer Curve."

Deficit Commission

There is a proposal out by Obama's deficit reduction commission. From what I have read, it sounds pretty outstanding. A lot of government spending waste is reduced, entitlements are pared back, and tax rates are dropped while simultaneously dropping deductions. But as you read the article you will see why it will never happen: too many vested interests that will fight nearly every aspect of the proposal! These groups are so myopic that real change such as this will never occur in this country. If everyone would work together and look at the big picture, this proposal would have the potential to have a real lasting positive impact on this country. I seriously hope the commission members put this to congress and they vote for it.

Washington's Income Tax Smackdown

It looks like Washington voters aren't so stupid after all. They voted against a proposed state income tax on the 'rich' that would inevitably be applied to the middle class after a few years of acceptance. Congratulations!

Book: Investing Revolutionaries

I recently finished a book mostly themed around stock investing. It is more of an introductory book on why you shouldn't time the market and should stick to broad index funds, so if you have read dozens of investing books like I have, you probably won't get anything new out of it. But overall the book is a decent read. However, in one of the intro chapters, there was some interesting economic insights and I feel I should share some of it:

[Edward C.] Prescott [a 2004 Noble prize winner] visited with us on The Investing Revolution in 2007 to discuss the topic. Here’s a startling fact: Based on labor market statistics from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), American workers aged 15 to 64 work 50% more than French workers. Comparisons between Americans and Germans or Italians are similar. What’s going on here? What can possibly account for these large differences in the hours people work? It turns out that the answer is not related to cultural differences or institutional factors like unemployment benefits. Rather, “marginal tax rates explain virtually all of this difference,” says Prescott. He goes on to say, “I’ve made this point about tax rates before, but it bears repeating because it reflects a fundamental economic insight that gets to the heart of policymaking: People respond to incentives. You don’t make economic policy for nations; you make it for people. And it’s the responses of those people, when aggregated, that give us those data that we all love to analyze.

In fact, the current marginal income tax rate in the United States shown in Figure 1-1 rewards dual-income households more than it did in the 1970s when the average tax rate doubled when a spouse joined the workforce. Now that more people are working, there is a greater need for labor to do some of the things people often don’t have time to do for themselves—like provide child care, prepare meals, clean the house, and run errands. Prescott goes on to say, “The bottom line is that a thorough analysis of historical data in the United States and Europe indicates that, given similar incentives, people make similar choices about labor and leisure. Free European workers from their tax bondage and you will see an increase in gross domestic product. The same holds true for Americans and Europeans who live and work in America.”

When I first came to this country in the late 1970s, a sort of ethos had been set by John F. Kennedy, who had said earlier that if you’re young, if you’re idealistic, and if you care, join the Peace Corps. Become a public servant. So the idea was that if you work for yourself or if you’re an entrepreneur or an investor, well, you’re kind of a greedy, selfish guy, but if you go work for the Department of Education, you’re a noble person putting the public good ahead of your own.

“Reagan challenged all that, and he said, it’s not the public servant—who would be called, by the way, the bureaucrat—but rather the entrepreneur who is the embodiment of the American dream. And so Reagan was pushing for a cultural shift. And I think we’ve seen that. We’ve seen a cultural shift in America today, so more parents today would probably like their kids to be like Bill Gates rather than, say, Bill Clinton. And that’s going beyond politics. So when I look back at Reaganism, most people would focus on the Cold War and so on, but I think Reagan also produced
an economic and a sort of cultural shift in the United States.”

And politics takes advantage of that, the prejudice against the rich guy, the successful guy, the entrepreneur. The basic idea is that they must be succeeding at the expense of everybody or they must be succeeding by finagling their way to success, and I think ultimately entrepreneurs are in some ways always on the defensive against this kind of thing.”

I keep hearing people say, ‘The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.’ But when I actually looked at American living standards over the past generation—let’s say from World War II, or even from 1980—what you see is that the rich get richer, and the poor also get richer, although not at the same pace. So, yes, inequality does rise, but it’s rising because more people from the middle class are moving up.

An academically themed article about the Tea Party. An interesting read for those who have an attention span longer than a garden slug's.