A longtime friend of this blog writes re Keith Ellison’s recent op-ed in the MinnPost:
“Long airport-security lines are a symptom of Congress’ budget-cutting mantra” [1]
Hmm. Doesn’t look right.
“Long airport-security lines are a symptom of Arabs hijacking aircraft and blowing them up”
There. Fixed.
Well, mostly.
Terrorist attack led to concern for security, which led to government seeing a new opportunity for graft, which led to a permanent bureaucracy which does little to secure air travel but very much does want to get paid, and paid well.
There. Now we’re all ship-shape.
Somehow, it seems necessary to remind that the shoe bomber actually got past that security and got on the plane. Since then, the TSA has checked literally billions of shoes and not prevented a repeat. Then, remember that the shampoo bomber actually got on the plane, and since then TSA has forced millions of us to go without shampoo on long flights and forced us to put our essential liquids into little plastic baggies, and have not found a single problem. Heck, you can’t even take a bottle of water on the plane unless you pay $2 for it after clearing security. OK, so then we note that the underwear bomber actually got on the plane, and since then TSA has been very curious about what’s in our underwear, including crotch-grabbing and taking pictures, and once again, have found nothing since. I hate to think what the first “backside bomber” will create, since the lines are too long and the intrusions on privacy and dignity long ago exceeded any justification based on results. MAYBE if all of this was making us safer, it would be tolerable, but it is demonstrably NOT. But as usual, big government manages to exceed its “core competency” at every turn. Seems to me the terrorists have won.
Gosh, it’s as if taxpayers, and not airline travelers, are paying the cost for screening, and hence the market signals to get adequate staffing and training are simply not there.
Oh.
On a related note, I did a back of the envelope calculation of what it would cost for our country to go to an Israeli style screening–grandmothers named Larsen to the right, anyone named Ahmed with a one way ticket to the left–and it wouldn’t cost any more than what we’ve got today.
And on another related note, Fox reports that the TSA has collected a record number of guns at checkpoints–looks like the McDonald’s rejects they’re hiring are finally figuring out what a gun looks like on an X ray. Let’s just say that the schools of radiology aren’t beating down the doors to hire TSA agents away, to put it mildly.
Last summer, a friend and his wife came down from Cali for a visit. Going through security for the flight home, my buddy’s $3,500 wrist watch disappeared out of the little bowl we put loose change & ect. into. There were two TSA “Agents” working the line. After raising a ruckus, they insisted he check his wife’s purse…and there it was. It was obvious they were working as a team.
Two days later, I was going through the same security and spotted Mutt & Jeff. As I conspicuously deposited my watch into the bowl, I informed them it wasn’t worth more than $200…they both turned pale as hell.
This kind of crap happens All. The. Time.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tsa+agent+arrested+theft
1/2 of the “agents” securing our air travel couldn’t be successful deep fry managers at McD’s.
Thank George Bush for creating this bureaucratic mess.
Don’t worry, Keith. The TSA vows to become mission-focused and committed to excellence: https://www.tsa.gov/news/testimony/2016/03/01/hearing-fy17-budget-request-transportation-security-administration
Clearly, previous TSA administrators were not mission-focused and remained woefully uncommitted to excellence.
B**lSH*T!
(thanks, Bento, “mission-focused” and “committed to excellence” were the missing squares for my buzzword bingo card!)
Seriously, when people are using that many buzzwords, one thing they are NOT doing is taking a serious look at the system to see why it does not work.
BB, they’re unionized and Civil Service. If you’re looking for qualifiers that mean you’re not focused on providing quality service, applying either of those two terms is a death sentence. But when you combine them …
Wasn’t one of the reasons that there aren’t enough people able to get past the initial screen to be TSA agents? Funny thing is that the indifferent clerk wearing the hijab who takes my $3.75 for $1.50 bottle of water likely has more access to ‘sensitive’ areas of MSP than any TSA agent does.
I’m also wondering – are we getting the treatment Chris Christie or at least his staff gave the disloyal mayors of Northern NJ? What did Senator Stewart Smalley and/or Senator Vanilla Fluff do to warrant a work slowdown? Or maybe the Feds, always a little slow on current events, thought Bachmann was still in office and decided to punish her constituents (or at least a small portion of them)? Think if I slapped a Wellstone! bumper sticker on my carry-on or had an Dim-Bulb Betty McCollum button on I’d get a free pass to the express check lane?
This topic is causing more questions than answers.
I should add that the indifferent atheist who handles my luggage as well as fundy snakehandler who pumps the waste hold on the 737 I’ve boarded has much more access than the TSA agent who figures working at the airport beats cleaning the genderless bathrooms at the Richfield Target.
(Uh-oh, better put up another comment explaining away the genderless bathroom crack.)
Seflores, the snake handlers are pentacostals and charismatics, not fundamentalists, strictly speaking. :^)
Nerdbert: true, but it’s worth noting that Deming didn’t give Ford the excuse of unions. He simply blamed the executives, according to legend at least, for 85% of their quality problems. Most quality engineers I know set the percentage at 95%.
(in other words, not helpful, but not #1 on the Pareto)
BB, Deming blamed execs for 100%. His mantra was, “Quality starts at the top”. And he was not wrong. At the height of Deming’s popularity he was invited to speak at the company I worked for when I lived in the Twin Cities. The CEO of the company introduced him to the filled auditorium… and left. Deming was furious! He railed and berated the management for 20 minutes… and left. Point was made.
I am seriously jealous, JPA. :^)