BilmBlog500

So it's been an interesting last ten days or so! For the first ten years of JABberwocky, I worked alone in my apartment, it's never given me cabin fever the way being forced to stay in my apartment by weather does.  It's not just a recent thing with Irene last year or Sandy this year, I remember an MLK day many years ago when there was an ice storm sort of thing and the sidewalks were too dangerous.  But Sandy might have been the worst of it, in part because of the subway flooding.  All the years I was working alone, I would go to the Post Office because I had to do it, I could stop at the library to read the paper, I did my own messenger work for a good chunk of that time and could go out laden with manuscripts and enjoy some fresh air and exercise.  But with Sandy, the office was closed last Monday and Tuesday, the subways weren't running, it was hard to do much of anything social, and there wasn't any choice.  And I had power!  Many of my Scrabble friend...

There is an adage that says "just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should.". For most of the past ten years my general belief is that this is something that Osama bin Laden should have heeded. I think Al Qaeda could've done serious damage to the US military and to US interests, the death of a thousand cuts with dozens of operations like the USS Cole or the Dar es Salaam embassy bombing, and people in the US just wouldn't have cared very much or for very long.  Militarily, 9/11 was a mistake. Bin Laden became a marked man. His organization was tossed from it's safe haven in Afghanistan. Countless leaders of the organization have been killed. Neither 9/11 nor 7/7 nor 3/11 have led to the death of NYC or London or Madrid. People still work in tall buildings and ride the Tube and commute to work. However, part of bin Laden's calculus was different, and while I believe 9/11 was a military mistake NY Al Qaeda, the organization has had immense s...

Oh, the nuclear power industry. We tried scrubbing, we tried soaking, and still we have ring around the collar. The interesting thing from a risk management standpoint is that the old-fangled coal and gas plants kill people bit by bit from their emissions and the costs of getting the coal or the gas out of the ground. Over the course of 20 years, do we lose more people 22 in this coal mine disaster and another 6 there vs. how many might die from radiation exposure as a result of the Japanese disasters? It's impossible to tally all that up, especially when you add in the externalities of emissions, etc. But we do know that these occasional nuclear power disasters are very big and very noticeable and very disastrous. Hence, there is a perfectly good argument to make that nuclear is still an important and necessary part of our energy portfolio moving forward. I don't want to be the person who tries to make that argument with a straight face, even though it is there and legi...

Updated twice, final 4:07 EST. The New York Times Week in Review section reprinted this Pat Bagley cartoon from the Salt Lake Tribune, which is one of the few comparisons in the TSA debate that I don't find utterly false. In fact, I find it rather funny. In the midst of all of its columnists telling us to take our pats and shut up, their Sunday Outlook section has a column by Jeffrey Rosen that dares to flat-out call the current regime unconstitutional. And Rosen is not a hypocritical Republican, he's not some immature person for Ruth Marcus to yell at, he's a long-time legal affairs writer, a professor at George Washington School of Law, legal affairs editor for The New Republic, often published in the Times as well, check out his GW bio here . Click here to find the 2nd quarter earnings release from Barnes & Noble. Same store sales were down a relatively modest 3.3%, loss was $12.6M, with the expectation that the lion and lamb will lie next to one another and s...

My client Jim C. Hines has a new post on TSA policies and procedures here http://www.jimchines.com/2010/11/responding-to-the-tsa/ which I highly recommend. It has links to an ACLU petition, to the e-mail address to contact the TSA with your thoughts, links to a round-up of approving "shut up and take your body scan" editorials, and much, much more. I'm getting more involved with this than with just about anything else. I've dashed off letters to the NY Times, which suggested in an editorial last week that profiling was a civil liberties issue that was to be avoided by subjecting all of us to full body screening. Um, isn't that a civil liberties issue as well? I've been very clear that I don't consider profiling to be a solution because terrorists are adaptive. Please see the film The Battle for Algiers, if you want to advocate profiling. I've dashed off an e-mail to Ruth Marcus, who suggested in a Washington Post op-ed column that it was immature...

OK, so to set the record on this straight, the TSA Director said at a senate hearing on Wednesday 17 November that they haven't done a good job of communicating that children under 12 are exempt from the "enhanced patdown." So aren't we all happy and comfortable now. To know that our young children can only be subjected to the regular patdown! And, really, who doesn't mind having their 14 year old daughter felt up the thighs and buttocks. If this is the security regime we have, then we do have to give people of all ages an equal opportunity to be subjected to it. The problem is that we have a security regime that routinely subjects people of any age to this. Benjamin Franklin may not actually have said “They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security” but whomever said it, says it right.

So there's this ad by Lindor, the people that make those wonderful little truffle balls that you can buy at the Borders checkouts, or with a $2.50 coupon in the latest Costco coupon book. You've got that Roger Federer guy going through airport security, and the people at the x-ray machine see that his carry-on is full of balls. "Hey, look at this, he's a tennis player" says blue-uniformed TSA person #1 to TSA person #2. Then they open the bag and see that it isn't tennis balls, but rather a big full of those delightful little Lindor truffle balls, while Roger Federer says " Swiss tennis player." Because it's swiss chocolate, get it. And then the TSA people say they're going to have to confiscate the bag, and Roger says "you've got to be kidding me," and the commercial ends with a freeze frame shot of the two TSA people looking very very serious about needing to confiscate that bag. I find this funny. I don't find much ...

one man's adventures with TSA... http://johnnyedge.blogspot.com/2010/11/these-events-took-place-roughly-between.html here the NY Times travel writer Joe Sharkey talks about his fun-filled pat-down experience... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/business/02road.html? and the Washington Post tells us there is starting to be some backlash against the patdown regime... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/12/AR2010111206580.html I'm getting genuinely frightened about this. I'm not sure I want to fly anywhere any more. I got a token patdown coming back through SFO in September for no particular reason, it looked like they were just having some fun where every second or third passenger at this checkpoint was getting one for one or another reason, in my case it was because I had cargo pants with extra pockets. It's a demeaning and degrading thing. The TSA isn't the SS, but it's still worrisome that the US is now proving that you can pay peop...

Wikipedia defines collective punishment as " the punishment of a group of people as a result of the behaviour of one or more other individuals or groups. " Which is the easy part. Because in some circumstances, collective punishment is a routine part of life. In football practice or boot camp, when everyone has to run suicides or do push-ups because another member of the group screwed up. And in other circumstances, it's a crime. Like if Israel demolishes a home because one member of the family committed a suicide bombing. And so where do we put the recent United States TSA directive that " every individual flying into the U.S. from anywhere in the world traveling from or through nations that are state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest will be required to go through enhanced screening. " To me, it's another tragic and bad example of a security system that's rotten to the core, which I've been big on ranting about the past ...

David Brooks in the NY Times had a column on Friday about reactions to Qaeda Underpants that I also think is worth reading. And another thought on what he calls (as have others) "Security Theatre." As best as I know, we don't have a good track record for unraveling plots against air transportation by catching bad guys going thru security checkpoints. I say "best as I know" because I want to recognize the possibility that we've done so but that it's been put under lock and key and kept under wraps to protect intelligence sources or an ongoing investigation or something like that. I kind of doubt it; it's hard to keep that kind of thing wrapped up, and too tempting to leak for political points, but it's possible. But 9/11, the shoe bomber, Qaeda Underpants, let's forget about Lockerbie because that was so long ago when the Theatre was much shorter than it is today, it seems like the bad guys have a good track record for getting on board th...

A Layered Security System. No single security measure is foolproof. Accordingly, the TSA must have multiple layers of security in place to defeat the more plausible and dangerous forms of attack against public transportation. Recommendation: Improved use of "no-fly" and "automatic selectee" lists should not be delayed while the argument about a successor to CAPPS continues. Recommendation: The TSA and the Congress must give priority attention to improving the ability of screening checkpoints to detect explosives on passengers. Those are quotes from the 2004 report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. And as a quick alternative reading recommendation... Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post isn't one of my must-read columnist but her column's (you may need to register at the site) about as good as any I've read in discussing last week's airplane incident. Now, security and I have a kind of ambiguous relationship. ...