PAgent’s Progress
Let’s try ‘Israelification’ instead of Humiliation
With all the furor over the new TSA procedures (what a choice: let someone touch your junk, or let someone ogle your junk), why don’t we look at how Israel handles airport security?
Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel’s largest hub, Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?
“The first thing you do is to look at who is coming into your airport,” said Sela.
The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?
“Two benign questions. The questions aren’t important. The way people act when they answer them is,” Sela said.
Does it work? The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.
Read The ‘Israelification’ of airports: High security, little bother
Thank Goodness We’re Finally Entering an Era of Civil Discourse
“How my G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy”
Depressing WSJ article on David Stockman, Reagan insider:
Yes, Stockman is equally damning of the Democrats’ Keynesian policies. But what this indictment by a party insider — someone so close to the development of the Reaganomics ideology — says about America, helps all of us better understand how America’s toxic partisan-politics “holy war” is destroying not just the economy and capitalism, but the America dream. And unless this war stops soon, both parties will succeed in their collective death wish.
Stockman’s thesis is that the GOP’s policy doctrines have caused “four great deformations of the national economy” that will prevent a conventional recovery from the recession, but lead to “a long hangover of debt liquidation and downsizing.”
So, What Could Be WORSE Than the BP oil spill?
Time for some Friday fear-mongering.
There are folks out there that think the BP drill site is located over a massive underground reservoir of trapped methane. If that methane should erupt, the resulting disaster would make the actual oil spill a tiny footnote.
A massive release of methane would, first of all, kill everyone that’s on a boat anywhere near the drill site. Death would not come by suffocation, but as the bubbling gas reduced the density of the water to nearly nothing, everything on the surface would immediately sink like a stone.
Second, if the massive release of methane ignited, it would result in an explosion of biblical proportions and a supersonic tsunami moving 400-600 mph. Florida would be erased and the other Gulf states would be flattened. The loss of life would be nearly inconceivable.
THEN, if the cold water of the Gulf flooded into the now empty superheated cavity left in the deep crust, it would flash vaporize creating yet another massive tsunami.
Makes a few tar balls seem almost quaint, doesn’t it? Let’s hope this is ONLY fear-mongering.
Sources: David DeGraw, Associated Press, and Huffington Post, among others
Now THAT’S a Product Endorsement
Are you in the market for a waterproof digital camera case? Then you should find out what kind of case Royal Dutch Navy sergeant Dick de Bruin was using when he lost his camera in the ocean near Aruba. The camera was recovered six months later and 1000 miles away, in perfect condition even after surviving a sea turtle attack.
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