 are you really safer now
Per Mike Hunt:
>Doesn't this make the ID check even more worthless?
"Worthless" is a stronger word than I'd use... but I'm on board with at least
some of the spirit of that observation.
Personally, I don't think a 9/11 type of incident with conscious crew and
passengers can ever happen again and that efforts to prevent another one
executed in the same style are a waste of time and money.
Reason: 9/11 was predicated on both the system and the people thinking in terms
of perpetrators wanting to live instead of desiring to die. Now neither the
system nor the people in it are under that misapprehension.
The bad guys have had their shot and now everybody knows. It was what?... 45
minutes? between the twin towers and the people aboard the plane headed for
Washington catching on to what was really going down. Once they knew, it was
all over for the hijackers' mission.
One reason I wouldn't use "worthless" is that once Reid did his shoe thing it
seems more than just plausible that some other disturbed person could be
expected to try to emulate him. If somebody's a bureocrat in charge of airline
safety he's really got no choice but to start checking shoes.
But I wonder where that sort of reactive policy is headed. What happens once
we find the first bra bomber? What then? FedEx the bags and fly naked? What
about explosives hidden in the lower GI tract?
To continue this little rant on a tangent:
How many people die from the flu every year? 10,000? 20,000? Somewhere I
read that fully *half* of those deaths are preventable by making flu vaccine
available to everybody. But it isn't. Wasn't last year. Wasn't the year
before... and wasn't this year.... and probably won't be next year.
10 years of flu seasons... 5,000 or 10,000 fully-preventable deaths? Not only
that, but every expert I've heard/read so far agrees that it's not a matter of
*if* we are going to have another pandemic on the scale of the 1918 one, but
simply *when*.
Next to currently-preventable flu deaths and the millions upon millions of US
deaths tb expected in the next pandemic, a few hundred airline passengers now
and then seems to pale in comparison
Yet look where the big money is going.
--
PeteCresswell
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