" I have no idea what you’re even trying to smuggle past security because liquid is merely ‘a state of matter’ and thus is not inherently dangerous."
please tell me that you are not attempting to have a conversation about air-travel security without being aware of the basic facts regarding threats to air travel
1) a criticism of "you're not strict enough to actually find all the things" is not an argument against attempting to find all the things.
2) the things the TSA actually does effectively filter for - articles hidden in shoes, liquids in quantity - actually could substantially affect an aircraft in a term short enough to be relevant.
3) the things they don't effectively filter for are addressed by other measures.
*shrug* if your worry is that the security crew is not sufficiently picky and intrusive, well, there's a response to that!
"but it doesn't do anything, it doesn't do anything"
Sure it does! For one thing, if Richard Reid had put his homemade dynamite in a plastic bag he'd have been successful. And for another, it doesn't take all that much bleach-and-Windex to fill a plane with chlorine gas. As for knives and poky-tools, maybe the reason they don't care as much about those is just what was pointed out earlier--that locking the cockpit door leaves you completely protected from such items, at least for the time it would take to call in an emergency.
Sure but I don't see how that is something better addressed by putting a full structure (and budget) for "emergency education provision" in Department Of Education versus making it part of FEMA's remit (and having FEMA call in Education for support, and FEMA paying for that to happen.)
"[T]he Department of Education has emergency funds to allocate to education in disaster areas..."
...which raises the immediate question of "why is this something the Department of Education is expected to do instead of FEMA?"
Like, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that FEMA had a working relationship with Education specifically for that situation, but I am rather questioning the need for Education to have its own budget for "emergency education in disaster areas".
Although you're right that the Department Of Education Emergency Disaster Department does serve a useful purpose; it provides a full multi-level management structure that needs to be filled and it can accept college graduates with non-technical degrees, neither of which we can depend on private industry to do these days.
2 weeks ago
"the federal bureaucracy decided to solve the problem by creating more federal bureaucracy. "
They had plenty of bureaucracy that was perfectly capable of finding the guys in question, but A) that would involve collection of intelligence against persons legally residing in the United States, and the 90s were a time when we decided that sort of thing had extremely serious privacy concerns and should be curtailed unless there was a clear-and-present-danger situation; and B) Clinton didn't want anyone looking too hard into where he was putting his wiener and felt that knackering the NSA's practice of tipping the FBI was a good way to address that.
So for a variety of reasons we couldn't just go back to the way it used to be, which is why we needed a new outfit to handle it.
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" I have no idea what you’re even trying to smuggle past security because liquid is merely ‘a state of matter’ and thus is not inherently dangerous."
please tell me that you are not attempting to have a conversation about air-travel security without being aware of the basic facts regarding threats to air travel
1) a criticism of "you're not strict enough to actually find all the things" is not an argument against attempting to find all the things.
2) the things the TSA actually does effectively filter for - articles hidden in shoes, liquids in quantity - actually could substantially affect an aircraft in a term short enough to be relevant.
3) the things they don't effectively filter for are addressed by other measures.
*shrug* if your worry is that the security crew is not sufficiently picky and intrusive, well, there's a response to that!
"but it doesn't do anything, it doesn't do anything"
Sure it does! For one thing, if Richard Reid had put his homemade dynamite in a plastic bag he'd have been successful. And for another, it doesn't take all that much bleach-and-Windex to fill a plane with chlorine gas. As for knives and poky-tools, maybe the reason they don't care as much about those is just what was pointed out earlier--that locking the cockpit door leaves you completely protected from such items, at least for the time it would take to call in an emergency.
Sure but I don't see how that is something better addressed by putting a full structure (and budget) for "emergency education provision" in Department Of Education versus making it part of FEMA's remit (and having FEMA call in Education for support, and FEMA paying for that to happen.)
I don't see how it gets to be any less of an expensive regulations minefield if it's coming from the Department of Education instead of FEMA, though.
"[T]he Department of Education has emergency funds to allocate to education in disaster areas..."
...which raises the immediate question of "why is this something the Department of Education is expected to do instead of FEMA?"
Like, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that FEMA had a working relationship with Education specifically for that situation, but I am rather questioning the need for Education to have its own budget for "emergency education in disaster areas".
Although you're right that the Department Of Education Emergency Disaster Department does serve a useful purpose; it provides a full multi-level management structure that needs to be filled and it can accept college graduates with non-technical degrees, neither of which we can depend on private industry to do these days.
"the federal bureaucracy decided to solve the problem by creating more federal bureaucracy. "
They had plenty of bureaucracy that was perfectly capable of finding the guys in question, but A) that would involve collection of intelligence against persons legally residing in the United States, and the 90s were a time when we decided that sort of thing had extremely serious privacy concerns and should be curtailed unless there was a clear-and-present-danger situation; and B) Clinton didn't want anyone looking too hard into where he was putting his wiener and felt that knackering the NSA's practice of tipping the FBI was a good way to address that.
So for a variety of reasons we couldn't just go back to the way it used to be, which is why we needed a new outfit to handle it.