When the rage comes....

I am having one of those days. Rant incoming, spell check and proofreading be damned!

One of those days where virtually all the news I read makes me apoplectic. I managed to avoid most news shows over the extended weekend, but I knew that would not last.

The media freak-out over the Detroit-Airport ("fire-crotch of death") incident, has been something to behold.

One question that the reporters and most pundits never ever even remotely address is, "How much of an inconvenience are we willing to sacrifice for the perception of safety?".

Because that is really the only important question. There is no such thing as perfect security. There is no perfect defense versus a group of individuals who seek to sow mayhem and are will sacrifice their own lives in the process.

The expectation that those who work in the security services (TSA, FBI, Fire dept, Police), have to deal with a startling and oppressive reality. No matter how successful they are on a daily basis in executing their chosen duties, it is the inevitable failure that shall be remembered.

War on Terror? You can not win a "war on terror", with bombs or scanning devices. You win by minimizing the animosity that others feel towards you, and even that is not a perfect solution. There will always be someone, somewhere who wishes you ill.

The simple truth is terrorists and their ilk will succeed in executing some of their plans. But do not forget that their goal is to foment terror. Watch the news and tell me that even though Mr. Abdulmutallab was foiled bringing down the plane, he did not succeed completely on the terror front.

Nate Silver does a wonderful job of presenting the relative statistics.

There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

Now this is not to belittle the events of 9/11 or any terrorist act, but is meant to show it in its proper context. A lot of what we do works. I actually applaud the President on his restraint. He was calm and in command of relevant facts. Wild histrionics are exactly what the terrorists want.

Something that we as a country have never really come to grips with (though the founders understood this), the price of an open society under the rule of Law is always paid in the blood of its members.

The TSA has a horrible job that they must do. Yet they get no appreciation for the thousands upon thousands of flights that they provide security for. This is not to say that glaring errors are not made and security protocols should not be updated and reviewed. It is merely to point out that the job being asked is one that requires perfect execution, yet will inevitably fail

There simply is no reliable defense versus a person willing to cram explosives up there ass or strap plastic explosives to their genitals or otherwise kill themselves in furtherance of their agenda.

We stop those we can. Make it hard for them to succeed. Those that get by we investigate how they did so and take appropriate steps, not the political theater, meant to make the public believe their elected officials are doing something.

Here is a nice dust-up between Spencer Ackerman and Pat Buchanan, illustrating what reasoned and rational response looks like (Ackerman), and what unhinged histrionics look like (Buchanan).

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This exchange is one I very much wish was repeated often (my emphasis added):

ACKERMAN: So you're arguing for torture but with a different euphemism for it?

BUCHANAN: No, I'm arguing for the fact that this is an enemy soldier who's about to try to commit a mass atrocity, and the idea that you're treating him like some guy that held up 7-11, it seems to me preposterous. We are in a war on terror and American citizens is a different thing.

ACKERMAN: Except for -- sorry, go ahead.

GUTHRIE: Go ahead, Spencer, respond to that.

ACKERMAN: Except for all of the hundreds of terrorists that we've convicted in Federal courts over the years. They were able to hold. They were able to incarcerate successfully and they were able to get information out of. I mean, the fact is is that al Qaeda is a dangerous and really important threat. But they're also not a super army of supermen with Muslim Heat Vision and so forth. It's ludicrous to think that we should inflate how dangerous they are because that's exactly what they want us to do.

Yes, lets not give the terrorist what they want, an over-inflated sense of import and the destruction of our free and law abiding society.

-Cheers