The Fury of Me

T.S.Ahhhh Shut the Hell Up

I'm starting to get sick of hearing everyone whine about the new TSA security standards.  Everyone pissed and moaned when the big johnson bomber lit his no fly zone on fire and declared that Obama loves the terrorists, but then when TSA does something to make sure people don't have a plastic explosive penis they crap their pants.  Get over it.  Hey whiny fat lady, you don't have to worry. Nobody is jerking it to your gray naked picture in the search room. You're gross looking.

Instead of filming his daughter getting a pat down, maybe this genius should have calmed his daughter down or gotten her to put her stupid teddy bear on the belt to be scanned. (By the way, great work SFGATE.com. You are seriously the worst newspaper I've ever read.)  This all started because of the Patriot Act, which plenty of people didn't seem to have a problem with when it passed, but ultimately this is a stupid battle that is getting way too much attention.  If you're worried about your civil liberties there are more significant wars to wage.  If TSA, which I hate as much as the next guy, wants a picture of my junk, go for it.  If a girl can't handle going through security without freaking out, don't take her on a damn plane.  She's clearly too unstable to handle traveling.

Either way, get a grip people. The end of the story is that you don't have to fly. So you're going to lose this argument.  I would trade off being able to carry on my regular sized body for body scans.  And you can opt for a pat down anyway so big freaking deal.  In the end, I think it's reasonable to be curious if you can't scan a teddy bear. I've seen Collateral Damage. I know what they can hide in toys.

The bottom line is that there is no way to make flying 100% safe. It's not freaking possible. So as soon as reality-resistant Americans can get their tiny heads around that, maybe we can have the TSA lighten up.  But as long as people keep screaming and bitching about every tiny thing that goes wrong as far as security is concerned, you should not be reality-resistant yourself and accept that this means tighter, more intrusive security measures.  Like I said before, if this crosses one civil liberty line too many for you, then take one of our amazing, super slow speed trains, or don't be like dumb-ass Palo Alto and approve local infrastructure improvements.

Nicholas Kristof

I recently watched the HBO documentary "Reporter" about Nicholas Kristof's attempts to bring the human tragedies occurring around the world into the minds of Americans.  He travels to the worst places in the world (Sudan, Congo, Afghanistan, etc.) and interviews, documents and photographs the lives of others amid war, disease, and strife. 

I would recommend this film to just about everyone. Kristof goes to places that are incredibly dangerous and interview warlords and victims. I used to only read his articles occasionally because they became repetitive, but in the documentary he explains that he does that because Americans need to understand that these are dailyoccurrences for people in other parts of the world.  He also explains that to a person the more people involved in a certain event the more tolerant of the suffering they are.  It's only horrible if it happens to one person.  To paraphrase Stalin, when one man dies it's a tragedy. When millions die, it's a statistic.  Unfortunately, there is a lot of truth to that.  Millions of people have died silently in the Congo due by war still raging between the Hutus and Tutsis.  Rape, starvation, murder, and disease are an everyday thing.  

In Kristof's column today in the New York Times, he talks about how much money we are spending on cruise missiles and weapons when we could be building schools and educating everyone in Afghanistan for less money.  When we first invaded Afghanistan, I remember discussing it with one of my high school teachers and he said instead of weapons and food, we should be airlifting in tractors and farming equipment so that they could grow crops other than poppies.  Similarly, we should be educating the Afghanis instead of bribing them and fighting them.  That way we have the moral high ground. Right now, in the eyes of the every day person in Afghanistan, we are no better than the Taliban.