Quotulatiousness

June 16, 2011

Horwitz: Yes, it is a police state

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:18

It’s been a long time since 9/11, and the biggest losses have been in civil liberties:

As regular readers know, I’m not one for hyperbole, so perhaps some are thinking that my title is ironic. Nope, I mean it. An accumulation of events in recent months leads me to no other conclusion than that we are in fact living in a police state in the good old US of A.

The list of reasons is fairly long, but we can certainly start with our favorite gropers at the TSA. In my ideal world, airline safety would be the responsibility of those with the most directly to lose financially from doing it poorly: the airlines and the airports. But even in a world where government has taken on that responsibility, we should be protected by the Fourth Amendment against “unreasonable” searches. It’s one thing to walk through the standard metal detector, which seems reasonable, but when we are expected to pose virtually nude in a submissive position for government agents, and when refusing to do so earns you a feel-up that would count as sexual battery in most states, that is something else entirely.

If I had told you 20 years ago that in 2011 this is what would happen every day to thousands of travelers — including toddlers and the handicapped — at U.S. airports, you would not have believed me. And on top of everything else, it doesn’t work! It’s mere “security theatre.” When residents of the United States have a legitimate fear of being sexually abused by agents of the State when engaging in peaceful air travel, we live in a police state.

June 5, 2011

Brendan O’Neill goes whale watching

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:43

Where our hero gets a thrilling ride he didn’t expect, but finally gets a bit of revenge:

 It’s the hippyish family of three from Norfolk that I feel sorry for. There they were at the Old Harbour in Reykjavik, their multicoloured fleeces zipped up to the chin to protect them from a light but Arctic breeze, talking gaily about going to ‘meet the whales’. I’m sure one of them had even used the word ‘commune’, as a verb, it being fashionable now to believe that humans can make a spiritual, spine-tingling connection with whales and dolphins.

Yet little did this excitable unit know that within the hour they’d be clinging to any bit of the boat’s infrastructure they could find, as we got tossed around by a pissed-off Poseidon, minke whales mocking us with their mighty tails for daring to enter into their cruel and alien world.

Admittedly it was our own fault. The woman at the whale-watching office at the harbour had warned us that the weather was unpredictable. ‘We might not go out today,’ she said, in that wonderfully weird accent that Icelandic people speak English in: part-Viking, part-Scouse. ‘It’s looking a bit patchy,’ she explained.

Now, in a country famous for its angry climate, for its spewing geysers, for having the word ‘Ice’ in its name, where tourists can buy T-shirts that say ‘Lost in Iceland’ on the front and ‘Is anybody out there?’ on the back, and where they have actually made a horror film called Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre, you might think that we would have taken more seriously this native harbour woman’s warning of ‘patchiness’ at sea. But no. So determined were we to see the whales that, in a mish-mash of European accents, we all said: ‘Let’s go! We don’t mind if it’s a little rough.’ They would make for brilliant famous last words.

April 18, 2011

Oh, stop worrying: everything is going according to the plan!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:02

Julian Sanchez notes a fascinating parallel:

Batman’s archnemesis the Joker — played memorably by Heath Ledger in 2008′s blockbuster The Dark Knight — might seem like an improbable font of political wisdom, but it’s lately occurred to me that one of his more memorable lines from the film is surprisingly relevant to our national security policy:

You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go “according to plan.” Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all “part of the plan.”

There are, one hopes, limits. The latest in a string of videos from airport security to provoke online outrage shows a six-year-old girl being subjected to an invasive Transportation Security Administration patdown — including an agent feeling around in the waistband of the girl’s pants. I’m somewhat reassured that people don’t appear to be greatly mollified by TSA’s response:

A video taken of one of our officers patting down a six year-old has attracted quite a bit of attention. Some folks are asking if the proper procedures were followed. Yes. TSA has reviewed the incident and the security officer in the video followed the current standard operating procedures.

While I suppose it would be disturbing if individual agents were just improvising groping protocol on the fly (so to speak), the response suggests that TSA thinks our concerns should be assuaged once we’ve been reassured that everything is being done by the book — even if the book is horrifying. But in a sense, that’s the underlying idea behind all security theater: Show people that there’s a Plan, that procedures are in place, whether or not there’s any good evidence that the Plan actually makes us safer.

April 7, 2011

Wil Wheaton gets the “special” treatment from the TSA

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

The TSA just got another rave review from a traveller who got the full treatment and didn’t like it:

Yesterday, I was touched — in my opinion, inappropriately — by a TSA agent at LAX.

I’m not going to talk about it in detail until I can speak with an attorney, but I’ve spent much of the last 24 hours replaying it over and over in my mind, and though some of the initial outrage has faded, I still feel sick and angry when I think about it.

What I want to say today is this: I believe that the choice we are currently given by the American government when we need to fly is morally wrong, unconstitutional, and does nothing to enhance passenger safety.

I further believe that when I choose to fly, I should not be forced to choose between submitting myself to a virtually-nude scan (and exposing myself to uncertain health risks due to radiation exposure), or enduring an aggressive, invasive patdown where a stranger puts his hands in my pants, and makes any contact at all with my genitals.

When I left the security screening yesterday, I didn’t feel safe. I felt violated, humiliated, assaulted, and angry. I felt like I never wanted to fly again. I was so furious and upset, my hands shook for quite some time after the ordeal was over. I felt sick to my stomach for hours.

This is wrong. Nobody should have to feel this way, just so we can get on an airplane. We have fundamental human and constitutional rights in America, and among those rights is a reasonable expectation of personal privacy, and freedom from unreasonable searches. I can not believe that the TSA and its supporters believe that what they are doing is reasonable and appropriate. Nobody should have to choose between a virtually-nude body scan or an aggressive, invasive patdown where a stranger puts his or her hands inside your pants and makes any contact at all with your genitals or breasts as a condition of flying.

H/T to occasional commenter “Da Wife” for the link.

April 5, 2011

China’s High Speed Railways: not for the masses

Filed under: China, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Reports of corruption among top officials and soaring costs for China’s HSR network:

. . . question-marks have been raised over these plans after the sacking in February of Liu Zhijun, the minister responsible for building the high-speed network. He was accused of skimming off as much as 1 billion yuan ($152m) in bribes and of keeping as many as 18 mistresses. Zhang Shuguang, another top official in the railways ministry, was later dismissed for corruption. Separately, on March 23rd, state auditors reported that $28m had been embezzled from the 1,300km high-speed line between Beijing and Shanghai, the highest-profile of China’s many rail projects.

Public support for high-speed trains is muted. The trains may reach 350km per hour but fares are proportionately eye-watering. That is all right for well-heeled travellers, happy to have an alternative to flying. But tens of millions of poor migrants who work far afield and flock home for the Chinese new year are being priced out the rail market and have to go by bus (the number of bus journeys is soaring).

The sacking of top officials may be the result merely of one of China’s periodic anti-corruption campaigns. Or it may be the upshot of a high-level factional or personal battle, in which corruption charges are often a favourite weapon. If so, the dismissals would not necessarily affect railway development.

March 26, 2011

Cheap flights (with subtitles)

Filed under: Britain, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:00

H/T to Roger Henry for the link.

March 17, 2011

Steam narrowboat

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

H/T to Eric Kirkland, who noted:

Please note the compulsory requisites for ‘proper’ canal cruising:
1) The flat cap
2) The grey beard
3) The mucky overalls
4) Bloomin’ great boots
Prior to the current ‘Elf and Safety regime there would also be
5) Roll ups permanently attached to the lower lip or a blazing briar full of Ogdens’ Flake

February 22, 2011

A tale for our times

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:25

Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent along this link:

A modern Romance novel
He grasped me firmly but gently just above my elbow and guided me into a room, his room. Then he quietly shut the door and we were alone. He approached me soundlessly, from behind, and spoke in a low, reassuring voice close to my ear. “Just relax.”

Read the whole thing.

February 16, 2011

Damned good reasons for Canadians to fly from US airports instead of Canadian airports

Filed under: Cancon, Economics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 17:16

An article at the National Post talks about the rising number of Canadians who drive to US airports. After a recent experiment, I can understand why.

Last weekend, I had a notion to go to Boston for the coming long weekend. I checked the Porter Airlines website. Multiple flights from Toronto Island airport to Boston, great! So I started the booking process. Two people, flying from YTZ to BOS, return trip . . . how freaking much????

Because I wasn’t booking more than two weeks in advance, the flights were going to cost $800+. That’d be bad enough, but that’s per person. One way. But the return flight was cheaper: a doddle at “only” about $690. So about $3,000 not counting taxes, fees, and surcharges.

American Airlines, if I booked right now could get us to Boston from Buffalo for $246 each. Return flight at the same price, or cheaper ($181 each) if we used JetBlue.

So, for the added hassle of driving to Buffalo (and the border crossing, of course), I’d save nearly $2,000 on this little jaunt. If that’s at all representative, then it’s amazing that Canadian airlines are able to hang on to as much of the business as they currently do.

February 5, 2011

Unlike most media pundits, he’s actually been to Egypt

Filed under: Middle East — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:09

I’m referring to Victor, who was in Egypt just under two years ago, and recounts some of his experiences then:

This is where all my feelings for Egypt go downhill. We visit a Mosque first thing, we arrive between prayer, but honestly, you wouldn’t know it. We’re trying to move with the crowd, when suddenly a woman steps between my girlfriend and I (not current girlfriend), and smacks her before running off. Both a bit disturbed by this, we talk to our tour guide, who acts awkwardly, and apologizes to us. Once in the mosque, we are sort of at a loss for what to do with ourselves. It’s a beautiful place, but positively hostile; we’re glared at everywhere we go.

Leaving the Mosque, we head to the Pyramids, those claustrophobic (Me!) get to wait outside while everyone else goes in. Apparently it was dark, hot, smelly, and genuinely unenjoyable, so I’m just as glad I saw from the outside. Crossing a bit of a sand plane between the Pyramids and the Sphinx, however, a friend of mine was accosted by a man with a camel. He made the mistake of shaking this guy’s hand, and was suddenly wisked onto the camel, and they began to ride off. My friend jumped down and ran back after about 50 feet, but yeah, not great. Sphinx was sketchy as all hell, people constantly eyeing us, watching where we moved, etc. One small boy, egged on by an older man, followed closely behind us, and made several attempts to get into people’s pockets. We were all so flustered, I’m not sure anyone enjoyed the Sphinx.

After the Sphinx, we were moved to another location, where we were to have our camel rides. Cool, not a lot can go wrong on a camel ride that was arranged and paid for, right? The first group went out and came back without a hitch, so my group boarded, and our camels began their galumphing walk around the block. [. . .] two girls from the tour group are missing, and they went out on the same Camel ride that I did. [. . .] I witness some boys trying to torture a dog while sitting on the bus, and want to go smack them about. Then a police officer does my wishes for me himself, waving his bully club at them and letting the dog down. The girls appear around a corner, scrambling back on foot, relating that their camel drivers dropped back from the rest of the group and took a different rout from the rest, and when they got too far, the two of them jumped down and hauled back.

[. . .]

The author of the book talks about how resourceful and friendly the Egyptians are, and how nicely they treat foreigners, I saw none of that, to be honest, more a willingness to take advantage, or play on Westerner’s emotions. I won’t go back to Egypt, it was my worst travelling experience.

The joys of tourism . . .

February 1, 2011

A nasty bureaucratic trick

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Bureaucracy, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent along this link describing it as a “creative solution”:

An immigration officer tried to rid himself of his wife by adding her name to a list of terrorist suspects.

He used his access to security databases to include his wife on a watch list of people banned from boarding flights into Britain because their presence in the country is ‘not conducive to the public good’.

As a result the woman was unable for three years to return from Pakistan after travelling to the county to visit family.

The tampering went undetected until the immigration officer was selected for promotion and his wife name was found on the suspects’ list during a vetting inquiry.

The Home Office confirmed today that the officer has been sacked for gross misconduct.

Because these lists are easy to get added to, but nearly impossible to get removed from (and there’s little chance you get told why you’re on the list — or even if you’re on it), this little trick could have continued indefinitely until the perpetrator had to go through security screening for a higher position.

January 27, 2011

New entrant into the “Security Theatre Kabuki Hall of Fame”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:54

Step forward, our first inductee for 2011, Gatwick Airport security staff:

Airport officials ordered a holidaymaker carrying a toy soldier onto a plane to remove its three-inch gun — because it was a safety threat.

Ken Lloyd was stunned when he was told he could not go on the plane with the nine-inch model soldier because it was carrying a ‘firearm’.

The Canadian tourist and his wife had bought the toy, which holds a replica SA80 rifle, during a visit to the Royal Signals Museum at Blandford Camp in Dorset.

Well caught, security super-heroes! Here’s the vicious piece of deadly weaponry they bravely prevented from being smuggled aboard the plane:

December 23, 2010

QotD: Welcome to New England

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:31

In New England in December the cold does not come in on little cat feet. Instead some mountain god of the great north woods throws open the door to Canada late one night. When you step out the next morning your scrotum promptly goes into hibernation somewhere around your arm pit. The cold gets hammered down tight. And it stays that way. Until, oh, somewhere in the middle of March.

I’d come to New England after many years away and, in Seattle, thought I’d packed well for the trip. I’d made a point to bring my very warm Seattle jacket. I stepped outside into the New England winter this morning and between the door and the car I knew, based on testicle retraction velocity, that my coat had nothing to say to this winter. I might as well have packed and dressed in a Speedo. At least I would have been rapidly arrested and taken to a warm jail cell until my need for medication could be determined.

Gerard Vanderleun, “The Gift of the WalMagi”, American Digest, 2010-12-23

December 21, 2010

Do not attempt to change planes in Bombay

Filed under: Bureaucracy, India — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:45

India is a rising economic power in the world, but it still has lots and lots of problems. Sean had to change planes in Bombay. It wasn’t a pleasant experience:

It wasn’t just one person who’d fucked up. This was no single, lone fuck-up cascading through the nooks and crannies of a complex system, like a butterfly causes a hurricane; everybody who touched my life that day, apart from, thankfully, the pilot and the airframe maintenance crew and my rickshaw driver, was busy fucking up in one way or another, sometimes spectacularly so. The guy who had all that time to anticipate the Diwali crush and thousands of rebookings fucked up. The guy who’d arranged the airport signs fucked up. So did the guy who cleaned the floors. The women representing Air India and India Air were a pair of fucknuts; the baggage handlers were probably already pretty fucked up before they even got to work, which of course fucked things up even worse. And the guy who designed the airport had, at some point well in the past, fucked up pretty royally. Even my taxi driver was a complete fuckup. The president of Air India? That guy’s totally fucked in the head. What was most remarkable about it, though, is that despite things being so thoroughly fucked, I did eventually get where I was going. With my western eye, all I could see was disaster, chaos, and impossibility; what I couldn’t see, until a good samaritan made it clear, is that there was in fact a solution. I’d been told that this is a common thing in India, that life there can be a series of 11th-hour miracles.

And all this, at the freakin’ airport. If there was going to be more of the same in India, I’d better get used to it — and learn to navigate it better — before I tried to ride my scooter from one end of the country to the other.

H/T to Damian Penny for the link.

December 9, 2010

A step closer to private space travel

Filed under: Space, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

SpaceX’s Dragon capsule was successfully launched into orbit:

Judging by the excited faces of SpaceX employees after the live webcast, everything went perfectly. Dragon, the world’s first orbital space capsule built by the private sector, will now orbit the planet a few times over the next couple of hours before splashing down in the Pacific.

It is a small but significant milestone. The unmanned demonstration mission wants to prove that Dragon is able to deliver crew and cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). The reason for all the excitement is that the working capsule really points the world firmly in the direction of greater involvement by the private sector in providing trips to space. More competition means lower prices. Lower prices mean better access. After the retirement of the shuttle, Dragon would be able to deliver crew and cargo to the ISS on top of a Falcon 9 rocket.

Here’s hoping that NASA won’t succeed in choking off/crowding out other private launch efforts.

More information (including some graphics) at the BBC website.

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