Happy Thanksgiving!
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| Courtesy of nirmaltv.com |
Quote of the Day
It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
Will Durant
What Line Do You Draw On Homeland Security?
If You Say 'Blank Check': WRONG ANSWER!
I still wonder years after the fact about some of the things I had to do at the Navy school for our nuclear sub program. NCO's and officers were taught in separate programs. These were highly structured classes in the sense, for example, that what I taught in enlisted math one day could be applied in a reactor principles class later the same day. Similarly, if I was ill and couldn't teach one day, a substitute could seamlessly fill in not knowing what material I went over the previous day, and the next day I would pick up exactly where the substitute left off.
The material, for someone with two math degrees and whom had served as a teaching assistant with responsibility for a couple of problem-solving class sections, was routine, but that wasn't enough for the Navy: before one was allowed to teach, one had to first go through a certification lecture in front of the commanding officer in charge of the relevant (NCO or officer) program. There were various things done in training for the certification lecture (including auditing sample target classes).
[As an aside, some of the instructors in the classes I audited were clueless as to what was going on in the back of class. One day I was at the back of class of this one colleague; somehow he didn't hear these 3 guys doing impressions of the Three Stooges, complete with whoops. slap waving off the tops of their heads and hopping their desks around, exchanging locations. Unfortunately for them, my boss came by to whisk me to another activity and caught them.]
We also had to pass certain exams (with higher scores but without the benefit of attending classes), e.g., reactor principles. I think I was told that the material being covered had actually been publicly available through various academic journals and wasn't really secret; I think it was a way of disciplining oneself if and when we or the students got access to privileged materials. But even my study notes had to be stamped confidential, and I wasn't allowed to bring my notes home, say, to study for relevant exams. (In fact, we got screened on the way out--including our notebooks to see if we were leaving the facility with anything stamped "confidential".)
The point is--as an instructor, I really didn't have access to sensitive material, and I've always had a strong sense of professional ethics over and beyond my military vows and commitments. Still, not being able to study at home was a major inconvenience. I followed the rules, but I watched the guys screening materials on leaving at the end of the business day, and it would have been fairly easy to work around the searches. (For obvious reasons, I won't go into specifics.) So a couple of takeaways from this simple example: (1) the Navy was spending a lot of resources enforcing security that wasn't very productive and (2) whatever scheme you set up, there's usually a workaround, and that's not even taking into account that human performance can vary over natural conditions (e.g., I'm tired or distracted), there are false positives (even on an innocuous level, I can't tell you how many times I've been pulled over at airport security based strictly on my ordinary belt buckle getting flagged) or mistakes made (say, for example, under conditions of long lines and the pressure of approaching flight times). Any student of human performance engineering realizes even experts make mistakes--but at a very low consistent rate.
When you take into account some $80B have been spent on safety over the past decade--and, of course, bureaucrats, looking to rationalize their existence, will point to successes in terms of, say, a few dozen people arrested and/or weapons confiscated (but the devil is in the details) Here's the point: we know the system is being periodically audited, and a significant percentage of test passengers are getting past without being flagged (worse at some airports than others); we also know occasionally weapons have been found left behind on planes (e.g., a federal agent whom forgot his weapon on the plane?)
Occasionally planes crash over and beyond acts of terrorism; if you look at the relative frequency of fatalities, say, from driving a car in a bad neighborhood, or under very bad weather conditions (say, icy roads), or when the other driver is overly tired, distracted (say, an argument with a spouse or using his cellphone), intoxicated or under the influence of recreational drugs or suffers from a physical event (e.g., a heart attack, a seizure, etc.) or vehicle condition, we are probably safer in the air with all the risks people worry about (besides terrorism: weather conditions, pilot health condition, etc.)
How could we mitigate the issues of auto safety? Obviously more public safety patrolling/checkpoints, more aggressive high-tech monitoring of traffic (cameras, helicopters, satellites, etc.), vehicle technology that can monitor for unsafe operation. The question is--what constitutes a reasonable trade-off? My first job as an IT professional was as a programmer/analyst in the property-casualty division of a highly-regarded insurance company. One of my colleagues was driving a huge Cadillac as a time that gas prices were up. He explained if we studies fatality statistics on the road, we would never settle for anything less than a full-size car. But there are other factors/trade-offs--like gas, parking, performance, styling, etc.
To any mother whose only child was killed in a terrorist attack or by a drunk driver, no amount of government intervention will ever be enough. What I can say, with absolute certainty, is that the huge investment in airline safety via the TSA and other bureaucracy is disproportionate to the risks involved relative to other contexts--as experts note in the embedded video below, this would be like the cost one would undertake if we had four Times Square incidents daily. The cost to our economy is staggering: what if these excess costs, ultimately born by travelers and/or taxpayers, were spent or invested elsewhere in our economy? Do we really need federal employees engaging in legally sanctioned touching of or near private areas? Traumatizing small children or elderly people, or families going on summer vacation to Disney World? Treating fellow Americans as potential terrorists is unreasonable: it is based on paranoia, not legitimate safety concern.
There are more inexpensive ways of controlling for airline safety, something that the government did not learn from the shoe bomber (Richard Reid): observant fellow passengers. If the government is going to confiscate our money for airline safety, I would prefer to see a much smaller amount primarily spent on educating the travelers for suspicious behavior and how to report it; I also think the airline has an accountability for all sorts of safety concerns and there is some moral hazard here by responsibility being shifted to the government.
Let me throw a minor idea out there, just to make a point: maybe instead of having safety officials trying to look for contraband under a statuesque young woman's clothes, there would be hidden cameras on airline flights to monitor or filter for unusual behavior--or passengers agreed to only access certain carry-on items while on board (say, reading materials, medicine, computers, audio devices, or food) In other words, shift from the presence of materials to the access of materials.
Governor Perry and Others on Foreign Aid
Let me say first of all, as a libertarian conservative, I don't like potentially corrupting relationships using taxpayer money; I don't like entangling relationships and want to see better transparency of costs (with a diplomatic sensitivity to unwise public disclosure).
I have a conservative's distrust of radical change and the law of unintended consequences. For example, I don't like the sum of our relationship to Pakistan to be defined by its nuclear arsenal and/or some suspected radical sympathizers in the ISI. I would much prefer the discussion with Pakistan to focus on economic liberty, with Pakistan ranking very low on the 2011 index of economic freedom. Encouraging the development of Pakistan's economy and a thriving middle class are in the long-term interests of regional stability.
Rhetoric by GOP candidates paying lip service to red meat positions, vowing to take a hard line against Pakistan's leadership, is just as irresponsible as Obama's whack-a-mole drone attacks and the way that the UBL action undermined our allies in the Pakistan leadership, causing loss of face. The last thing I would expect from the GOP candidates is some vague approval of Obama's policy--or a misguided attempt to counterproductively take an even harder line.
Do I regret the UBL operation? Of course not. President George W. Bush made it clear back in 2001 that any government protecting UBL would bear responsibility. But let's just say I would have found some way to get Pakistani soldiers on the mission, with at least one of the helicopters captained by a high-ranking Pakistani military officer, and I would have also found a way to have the Pakistani President or military chief present at the announcement. (I'm sure Obama apologists would proceed to list 101 reasons how that wasn't realistic...)
Musical Interlude: Nostalgic/Instrumental Christmas
Scott D. Davis, "Carol of the Bells". I heard this track for the first time while listening to my Pandora.com Christmas channel the other day...
