'Ask the Pilot' nails the hysteria at JFK

Post #320,436 by Ashton 1/22/10 3:03:03 PM Reply	'Ask the Pilot' nails the hysteria at JFK http://www.salon.com...source=newsletter ... Here in this proclaimed new "age of terrorism," we act as if the clock began ticking on Sept. 11, 2001. In truth we've been dealing with this stuff for decades. Not only in the 1980s, but throughout the '60s and '70s as well. Acts of piracy and sabotage are far fewer today. Imagine the Karachi attack happening tomorrow. Imagine TWA 847 happening tomorrow. Imagine six successful terror attacks against commercial aviation in a five-year span. The airline industry would be paralyzed, the populace frozen in abject fear. It would be a catastrophe of epic proportion Â of wall-to-wall coverage and, dare I suggest, the summary surrender of important civil liberties. What is it about us, as a nation, that has made us so unable to remember, and unable to cope? Then throw in the corruption, "finance" run by ex-Vegas dealers and Ponzi artists, the SCOTUS and ... what was that name for an unbreakable alliance between govt. and industry? fascilism or something. Canada beckons ... at least you don't have to fly to get there. And it doesn't seem to be (excessively) populated with mewling infants. Also, they speak authentic English, or French, as the case may be.
Post #320,440 by Ashton 1/22/10 4:44:28 PM Reply	Greenwald upscales to the Fear Card, other gullibles' bait http://www.salon.com...source=newsletter . . . John Adams, in his 1776 Thoughts on Government, put it this way: Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.
Post #320,441 by boxley 1/22/10 4:49:25 PM Reply	yup, nailed it If we torture the data long enough, it will confess. (Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, 1991)
Post #320,448 by mhuber 1/22/10 10:21:21 PM Reply	Remember the USSR? Now, that was an Enemy! Real live nukes, in production, storage, and armed. Not maybe someday. Thousands of those nukes, not one or two maybe someday. Yeah, there was fear, but not perpetual panic. Maybe they didn't hate us with the same passion as these box-cutter armed losers, but I've talked to a few of them since and they didn't like us (Or more accurately, the propaganda version of us. Did you know we were planning to invade Russia and enslave them?) very much either. Ready to die for the cause is ready to die for the cause. And a substantial number of them were just that. I suspect there were more loyal-to-death Soviets than there are Jihadists-to-the-death. And speaking from my Irish Catholic heritage (nobody in my family ever approved of or supported the IRA or anything similar, but profiling is fashionable these days) those Jihadists are fokin pansies. Volunteer driven car bombs, sheesh. Suicide so you don't have to keep fighting. Oh, yeah, our guys knew you go to hell for being a terrorist and did it anyway. These are scary times only because all times are scary times. These are probably the least scary times ever, in terms of enemies. In terms of being our own enemy, I'm terrified and I'm right. But I digress. I started this to complain about Ashton insulting Ponzi schemers and Vegas types. You think the kind of crap that's been going on on would fly in Vegas? Bernie Madoff at least made his numbers sort of plausible. More reality in his fictional investments than the average mortgage derivative.

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