Tag: safety_fetish

Toilet Safety Administration

i just learned from south park that tsa = toilet safety administration. now it all makes sense!

It’s not 1980 anymore

overheard: you are moving to the east village? one day you’ll get shot.
wat

Campus SWAT

moral panic leads to banana republic, unfailingly.

Any given middle school, high school, or college in America can expect to have exactly 1 homicide on its campus every 12 ka. So how long before the UNC-Charlotte SWAT team feels the need to justify its existence by expanding its mission? I predict they’re serving drug warrants and raiding frat houses within a year.

Children nonsense

The canonical think of the children nonsense legislation

Domestic indefinite detention

We are living in a banana republic.

New powers to use the military worldwide, even within the United States? Hasn’t anyone told the Senate that Osama bin Laden is dead, that the president is pulling all of the combat troops out of Iraq and trying to figure out how to get combat troops out of Afghanistan too? And American citizens and people picked up on American or Canadian or British streets being sent to military prisons indefinitely without even being charged with a crime. Really? Does anyone think this is a good idea? And why now?

MTA Entrances nonsense

what is the gain from closing subway entrances in a 24/7 system, like in nyc?

Border Bias

people underestimate the potential risk of a disaster to a target location when the disaster spreads from a different state, but not when it spreads from an equally distant location within the same state.

Super agents don’t exist

Members of the brilliant, highly trained, and dedicated team of elite professionals who work tirelessly behind the scenes to protect our nation and keep its citizens out of harm’s way announced Tuesday that they do not exist. Unfortunately, though, I’m not employed by the US government, I’m not working at all hours to foil terrorist plots, nor am I part of some secret network of sharp, capable agents, because no such network exists.

Air Marshal Effectiveness

the us are spending $200m per arrest. predictable result: next year will see huge numbers of people arrested and a back-slapping agency report how the cost / arrest has fallen drastically.

Absurd Time Covers

From William Randolph Hearst’s ginned up hysterical stories about marijuana to the “10-cent plague” comic book scare of the 1950s to The New York Times warning of “cocaine-crazed Negroes” raping white women across the Southern countryside, the media has always whipped up anxiety and increased readership via thinly sourced exposes of the next great threat to the American way of life. No publication has done a better job of scaring the crap out of post-baby boomer America than Time, the top-selling newsweekly that’s dropping subscribers like the mythical meth mouth drops teeth.