by Justin La Grange
Terrorism on Northwest 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit: The Straw That Broke The Camel's Back For Profiling?
After the recent failed terror attack on NWA253 and the subsequent traveling nightmares that Sally Sue Alabama and Joe SixPack Kentucky will have to endure, it's time for us to get our letter write on to our Congresspersons and DHS Big Sis Napolitano to demand the institution of racial profiling at airport security checkpoints. Every hijacking, plane bombing, and terrorist attack has been committed by someone who fits into a profile, and instituting additional security screening via full body scanners for those people will save most of the other two million Americans who fly every day a lot of headaches.
Whether or not to institute more invasive secondary screening measures should be decided at two key points:
1. At purchase/check-in: A computer should determine whether or not a series of the following data points match the profile of a suspicious person: name analysis (maybe Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab perhaps?), age, sex, nationality, ethnicity, birthplace (foreigners from Nigeria, Egypt, Yemen, etc), type of ticket purchase (aka one way from Nigeria with cash), time of ticket purchase, a cross-reference with any malicious activity in US databases, and travel history (ala Ryan Bingham 10 million miler from Up In The Air is probably not gonna take down your plane). The computer should then use any potentially suspicious data points arising to mark the ticket as requiring additional screening.
2. At screening point: Let's be frank here, you know who is not going to blow up your plane. Granny Eunice flying from Nashville to Orlando on a ticket purchased six months ago is probably not gonna bomb your plane, yet the fools at the TSA give her a search to the vag while blowing a kiss to folks like Mutallab as they blow past TSA in the name of political correctness. This must end. If any of the aforementioned suspicious data points upon ticketing did not tip off extra screening, then simple judgment and common sense profiling based upon looks, behavior, accent, and -- for lack of a better word -- "Americanness" should be employed.
The folks that meet these extra-screening criteria can go through the 20-30% of checkpoints with full body scanners. If they don't like that, they can submit to an invasive screening patdown and strip search like we all have gotten. If an Arab-American is traveling a lot, he can get a CLEAR card. I got a full body scan in Salt Lake City and it's absolutely no big deal, but then again, we know I'm no stranger to showing off my delicates with zest.
But why, oh why, must two million Americans be subjected to these new onerous procedures when its obvious Joe American or Granny Smith aren't gonna be committing any acts of terror? We know who blows up planes, and it's better to be more invasive to those who fit the profile than to be needlessly invasive to everyone. Again, if you fit the profile, like maybe I do, but are a good honest American who travels a lot, get a CLEAR card.
2010 Academy Awards
I've only seen 50% of these movies, but from what I've compiled in reading reviews, etc, I'll put my money on these 10 movies being the next Best Picture nominees:
1. Inglorious Basterds
2. Up
3. Invictus
4. An Education
5. A Serious Man
6. The Hangover
7. Precious
8. Avatar
9. Up In The Air
10. The Lovely Bones
I subbed in Inglorious Basterds forNine because Nine just doesn't live up to the hype, ala it's no Chicago. Nine is a great movie, and I guess its incoherence can be purposeful ala channeling Fellini, but it just doesn't work for me, and I don't think it's gonna work for the academy either. But Daniel Day Lewis was great, and Penelope fired up...never mind. Kate Hudson was just a misplaced disaster.
Up is one of the best movies I've ever seen, by far -- it was just so well done and the story was so profound.
Dear Academy Awards, if you snub Clint Eastwood again I'm gonna be pissed. Gran Torino was by far one of the best movies last year, and Changeling was equally fantastic.
An Education was good -- a little too British for me, but I liked it. A Serious Man -- never count out the Coen brothers.
Despite being raunchy self-indulgent entertainment, The Hangover was an extremely well done movie -- kind of like what Seinfeld comedy was to good TV. The Academy too often ignores fine comedic works for a bunch of secular-progressive tearjerker nonsense.
As far as Precious is concerned, Mo'nique looks to give a powerful performance. I'm always up for a good flick where Mo'nique tells her 500 pound daughter to "get her ass down to the welfare". Unfortunately, I haven't seen it yet, but I hear it's pretty good.
Avatar and The Lovely Bones seem to be good bets in the more thriller/dramatic action category.
And of course, George Clooney gets his dumb ass in every year for something. I'm sorry to say however that I really liked Up In The Air, and I for a minute forgot that George Clooney was, well, George Clooney. The storylines and emotional premise were basic but powerful, and it's nice to see a story of the airline industry told in such a high profile fashion.
Perez Hilton Deserves to be Commended
Perez Hilton gets a lot of shit -- obviously -- for being an overdramatic Hollywood troll. However, I think he deserves to be commended for not being on the Glover/Clooney far-left and not being another moral relativist guttersnipe. He has always made his preference for Hillary Clinton clear, and has never been afraid to lash out against Barack Obama for his excess and hypocrisy when the braindead Hollywood left refused to do so. As a Cuban, he has roundly condemned Fidel Castro, spoken out about the damage and dispair Fidel's Communist/Socialist regime has created, and celebrated reports of his death. He has also taken to condemning scumbags that the moral relativist left has conveniently turned a blind eye to -- John Edwards, Bill Clinton, and Roman Polanski are rightly savaged, often via the "Icky Icky Poo" segment.
That being said, on a douchebag scale of 1-10, a 6 is always better than a 8. It's sad that someone has to get props solely because he is a douche but not a humongous, relative to his Hollywood colleagues. Perez, you're still a flamboyant retard and a casual know-nothing fashionable liberal, and your attack on Carrie Prejean was hypocritical and infantile.
Berkeley's Wild Emissions Hypocrisy
We all know that the idiots running Berkeley will lecture you about resource conservation and the horrible emissions your car upheavals upon the planet. What if it is the most violent hypocrisy you will ever encounter?
Let me explain using the predominant transportation staple, "the car".
Berkeley Urban Planning's efforts are supposed to be directed towards designing a "sustainable" footprint, however the design of Berkeley is anything but. If you've ever driven a car, you know its most efficient state is a constant cruise of 50 mph or so, where fuel consumption and emissions outputs are optimal. When you stop and start and stop and start, the extra energy/work required to accelerate the car from zero to your permitted speed burns a proportionately large amount of fuel and emissions relative to the low speed and distance you are covering for that fuel output. In other words, the energy/fuel you used to accelerate from 0-40 might be equivalent to the energy/fuel required to transport you at a constant speed of 75 mph. Hence the much revered "highway driving" versus "city driving".
So now that we've established that constant starting and stopping yields horrible fuel consumption and ghastly emissions, why is it that Berkeley Urban Planners have designed streets that make you stop every couple hundred feet with an obnoxious crosswalk (with Berkeley's infamous pedestrian Nazis) or a traffic light on every block (while limited to 25 mph in between)? It's literally stop start stop start, and as Berkeley drivers well know, it takes about 5 minutes or more to travel a mile in your car, spewing emissions and consuming copious amounts of limited gasoline resources on the way (and while a lot of Berkeley douchebags have Priuses, the vast majority of automobiles are standard gasoline powered). Where in contrast my much hated Republican bastion of Thousand Oaks allows me to travel about 4 miles in 5 minutes through major arteries with limited traffic lights and high 55 mph speeds, with lower emissions and lower use of precious natural resources. What irony.
Fortunately, I'm a huge SoCal automobile proponent who decides to put matters into my own hands and ignore the unfounded traffic laws of the most communist government in the Western Hemisphere. If pedestrians think they're going to interrupt my sweet cruise they have another thing coming -- they are greeted with my high speed and a warning honk informing them they better not get into that crosswalk.
Gym Episodes, Of Course
So on a good note, I was really pleased the other day when -- for the first time -- this meathead asked me to spot him doing 95 barbells on incline. You see, you just don't trust any squirrely fool when hundreds of pounds of weight could crush your thorax and lungs, which means you have to select another fit bro you in essence trust with your life. In fact, I was a little concerned that I would drop the weight or screw up, essentially ruining my first spotting invite. Fortunately, all went well. So despite my consistent trashing of meatheads, I was actually quite hypocritically pleased with being kind of invited into their meathead spotting club.
Speaking of trashing meatheads, oh boy! So there was this meathead -- not particularly an attractive person, in my opinion -- who was absolutely lusting after himself in the mirror the entire time. Flexing, posing, and just admiring himself with lust at every exercise. It was disgusting, and quite frankly, his big ass ego is just making him look kind of gay. To elaborate, I present one of my previous notes:
http://justinatcal.blogspot.com/2009/04/24-hour-bi-curious-fitness.html
Let me also take this opportunity to lash out at the idiot who spent 40 minutes at the decline press, using it as a lounge chair, curl station, and venue to look like an idiot.
Nat Hentoff on President Bush, President Obama, and the Hypocrisy on the Left
I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had. An example is ObamaCare, which is now embattled in the Senate. If that goes through the way Obama wants, we will have something very much like the British system. If the American people have their health care paid for by the government, depending on their age and their condition, they will be subject to a health commission just like in England which will decide if their lives are worth living much longer.
In terms of the Patriot Act, and all the other things he has pledged he would do, such as transparency in government, Obama has reneged on his promises. He pledged to end torture, but he has continued the CIA renditions where you kidnap people and send them to another country to be interrogated. Why is Obama doing that if he doesn't want torture anymore? Throughout Obama's career, he promised to limit the state secrets doctrine which the Bush-Cheney administration had abused enormously. The Bush administration would go into court on any kind of a case that they thought might embarrass them and would argue that it was a state secret and the case should not be continued. Obama is doing the same thing, even though he promised not to.
So in answer to your question, I am beginning to think that this guy is a phony. Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to. His only principle is his own aggrandizement. This is a very dangerous mindset for a president to have.
Nat Hentoff hit the nail on the head. The reason America now roundly dislikes President Obama is not because of any effective right wing machine -- it's because the supposed transparency and disposal of Chicago political machinations that Obama promised have not only not been delivered, but the promise completely reversed. Not only do Americans hate the healthcare bill because it is a big pork-laden entitlement that really does nothing to reform healthcare, but because it represents government at its worst, using bribes and non-transparent backroom deals that needlessly screw the taxpayer over to arm twist otherwise decent politicians that really don't want to vote for a flawed bill into voting for it. It's about Congress and President Obama ignoring every polling and verbal apparatus the American people have to tell them we don't want this pork-laden entitlement redistribution of wealth bill. And for those who say it is not a "socialist" bill, let me tell you a little about it: the creation of 70 new bureaucracies and the redistribution of taxpayer dollars to fund the growth of government required to "insure" 30 million people and hijack 16% of the economy through massive regulation is not only socialist, but can aptly be quasi-communist.
And while we're on the subject of transparency, the only area in which President Obama has been remotely transparent is in International Relations/Diplomacy, and that is with leadership of countries that sponsor terror. So how's the new fresh era of Obama diplomacy working out for you guys? All that "talking" and "diplomacy" towards Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez is really working wonders. Yeah. Uh huh. Right. It turns out Americans are no longer so bullish on Obama's pansy new ineffective era of international relations, another blunder any idiot could see from the get go.
[Do you consider Obama to be worse than George W. Bush?]
Oh, much worse. Bush essentially came in with very little qualifications for presidency, not only in terms of his background but he lacked a certain amount of curiosity, and he depended entirely too much on people like Rumsfeld, Cheney and others. Bush was led astray and we were led astray. However, I never thought that Bush himself was, in any sense, "evil." I am hesitant to say this about Obama. Obama is a bad man in terms of the Constitution. The irony is that Obama was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He would, most of all, know that what he is doing weakens the Constitution.
[Obama is not reversing the Bush policies as he promised. But even in light of this, many on the Left are very, very quiet about Obama. Why is that?]
I am an atheist, although I very much admire and have been influenced by many traditionally religious people. I say this because the Left has taken what passes for their principles as an absolute religion. They don't think anymore. They just react. When they have somebody like Obama whom they put into office, they believed in the religious sense and, of course, that is a large part of the reason for their silence on these issues. They are very hesitant to criticize Obama, but that is beginning to change. Even on the cable network MSNBC, some of the strongest proponents of Obama are now beginning to question, if I may use their words, their "deity."
[Is the so-called health commission that you referred to earlier what some people are referring to as death panels? Is that too strong a word?]
That term was used with hyperbole about the parts of the health care bill where doctors are mandated, if people are on Medicare and of a certain age or in serious physical condition, to counsel them on their end-of-life alternatives. I don't believe that was a death panel. It was done to get the Medicare doctors to not spend too much money on them. The death panel issue arose with Tom Daschle, who was originally going to be the Health Czar. Daschle became enamored with the British system and wrote a book about health care, which influenced President Obama.
The left mindlessly complains about people of faith being led around by the nose by a flying spaghetti monster, yet it turns out the left were the ones being led around by their own flying spaghetti monster. Myself and other conservatives have long warned about the deification of President Obama -- the stupidity of American youth and the American left/moderate-left in simply buying into, like dufuses, what any intelligent person could see as a shameless multifaceted spin PR job. The left was duped into Obama's moveon.org "keywords" while moderates were at the same time duped by Obama's moderate entreaties, newfound promised transparency, and political unification overtures. And ironically, both groups are wildly disappointed. And those who are not yet disappointed still have their lips comfortably sealed to their flying spaghetti monster's ass.
Image Source:
http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2009/12/27/alg_airport_security_checkpoint.jpg
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2dmduz8&s=5
http://a11news.com/images/perez-hilton-heidi-montag-heidiwood-clothing-launch.jpg
http://revdcars.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/prius_driver.gif
http://cdn.zeatle.com/upload/743fa0c6330545fcdce176bcd3644086.jpeg
Nat Hentoff article/background:
http://www.rutherford.org/Oldspeak/Articles/Interviews/oldspeak-Hentoff_2009.htmlby
