Nobrainer’s Think Tank

As you may have heard, around Christmas time, one more Muslim with a death wish tried, unsuccessfully, to blow an American airliner. To me, it was not news that someone had managed to outsmart the TSA and get explosives onto an airplane. I was, however, a bit bothered by the fact that they failed the “When somebody’s daddy turns him in and THEN he pays cash, has no luggage or passport for an international flight: you PAY F*CKING ATTENTION!!!!” test.

Fortunately Christopher Hitchens provides some commentary that I’m sure, sadly, will never make it to the people who could afford to read it.

Why do we fail to detect or defeat the guilty, and why do we do so well at collective punishment of the innocent? The answer to the first question is: Because we can’t—or won’t. The answer to the second question is: Because we can.

This is our government in action. It promises to do that which it cannot, and then goes to great lengths to do what it can because it has to do something even though that something accomplishes nothing. This is a George W. Bush line of thinking that has failed… yet it is the exact same kind of logic that today’s Democrats are using as justification for Obamacare2009!

Hitchens continues

The fault here is not just with our endlessly incompetent security services, who give the benefit of the doubt to people who should have been arrested long ago or at least had their visas and travel rights revoked. It is also with a public opinion that sheepishly bleats to be made to “feel safe.” The demand to satisfy that sad illusion can be met with relative ease if you pay enough people to stand around and stare significantly at the citizens’ toothpaste. My impression as a frequent traveler is that intelligent Americans fail to protest at this inanity in case it is they who attract attention and end up on a no-fly list instead. Perfect.

Hitchens goes further still and hits a question I discussed last night when I was waiting for my bags in Baltimore and was startled to hear that the threat level was orange. Still.

It was reported over the weekend that in the aftermath of the Detroit fiasco, no official decision was made about whether to raise the designated “threat level” from orange. Orange! Could this possibly be because it would be panicky and ridiculous to change it to red and really, really absurd to lower it to yellow? But isn’t it just as preposterous (and revealing), immediately after a known Muslim extremist has waltzed through every flimsy barrier, to leave it just where it was the day before?

Like I said in the intro, I never expected the TSA to have a perfect record going into perpetuity. But I figured that they’d get beat in the direction they were looking. In this crotch bomber episode, Al Qaeda took a look at the TSA playbook, apparently decided that the TSA wasn’t even capable of following their own basic guidelines, and didn’t even bother with real trickery or misdirection. Which begs the question, who the fuck does that?

Seriously.

Are they that stupid? Not that I pay super close attention, but the serious airline bombings are a little bit few and far between. Presumably they want to make the most of their opportunities. So why would they take the risk of putting a bomb on such an obvious candidate?

Are they that bold? Are they that confident in their ability to get explosives onto airplanes that they didn’t think twice about putting their bomb on that guy? If so, it suggests to me that their point was more about showing off the obvious security flaws and causing a security crisis rather than bring down an airliner. Because if they can confidently get bombs on planes, it seems like they would want to bomb many planes at once. So they succeeded in flaunting security. But I would think that a terrorist organization would be more interested in blowing up a whole bunch of stuff rather than pointing out the breachable flaws in security. Which brings me back to asking, are they that stupid?

[Via Overlawyered]

In the past I’ve argued that even if we become “energy independent”, we’ll still import made things from foreign energy, meaning that we won’t truly be energy independent, that the only way to become “energy independent” is to remove all real meaning from the phrase. The other side of this is that alternatives may require that we become strongly dependent on other things found in other countries that may not like us. In other words, we’d be gaining independence by gaining dependence. Seems a bit silly, don’t you think?

It is silly. And it is real.

Some of the greenest technologies of the age, from electric cars to efficient light bulbs to very large wind turbines, are made possible by an unusual group of elements called rare earths. The world’s dependence on these substances is rising fast.

Just one problem: These elements come almost entirely from China, from some of the most environmentally damaging mines in the country, in an industry dominated by criminal gangs…

There are 17 rare-earth elements — some of which, despite the name, are not particularly rare — but two heavy rare earths, dysprosium and terbium, are in especially short supply, mainly because they have emerged as the miracle ingredients of green energy products. Tiny quantities of dysprosium can make magnets in electric motors lighter by 90 percent, while terbium can help cut the electricity usage of lights by 80 percent. Dysprosium prices have climbed nearly sevenfold since 2003, to $53 a pound. Terbium prices quadrupled from 2003 to 2008, peaking at $407 a pound, before slumping in the global economic crisis to $205 a pound.

China mines more than 99 percent of the world’s dysprosium and terbium.

Be careful sledding!

I was just reading the details (as if anyone really knows what they are) about the new health care payment scheme. It’s the kind of legislation I expect from third graders. And no that isn’t a compliment.

It seems one of the stupidest proposals made it into both House and Senate versions. The “individual mandate” as it’s called, requires you to have insurance or pay a fine. The fine is much less than the cost of insurance. And, you can’t be denied coverage based on a pre-existing condition. Do you see this gaping problem that made it through both houses? You do? Congratulations, you’re smarter than a 3rd grader.

Rational people will pay the fine. That will serve as a force to increase the number of uninsured (which is against the whole point of all this new crap). It will also reduce the money going to the insurance companies who will have to focus on ever-increasingly-risky-customers, which can only lead to insurance premiums going… UP! Jolly, sounds like a wonderful reform.

As I sat around reading Bill Bryson’s In A Sunburned Country, I ran across a passage that largely describes my Christmas vacation, except that I’m not riding a train through the middle of Australia:

With all your needs attended to and no real decisions to make, you soon find yourself wholly absorbed with the few tiny matters that are actually at your discretion–whether to have your morning shower now or in a while, whether to get up form your chair and pour yourself another complimentary cup of tea or be a devil and have a bottle of Victoria Bitter, whether to stroll back to your cabin for the book you forgot or just stand and watch the landscape for emus and kangaroos. If this sounds like a living death, don’t be misled. I was having the time of my life. There is something wonderfully lulling about being stuck for a long spell on a train. it was like being given a preview of what it will be like to be in your eighties. All those things eighty-year-olds appear to enjoy–staring vacantly out windows, dozing in a chair, boring the pants off anyone foolish enough to sit beside them–took on a special treasured meaning for me. This was the life!

Last the underdog Oregon State Beavers took on the BYU, uh, somethings in the Las Vegas Bowl. If you didn’t watch, you really didn’t miss anything. Billed as the only non-BCS bowl featuring top-20 teams, viewers were treated to seeing a disciplined BYU team destroy an Oregon State team that seemed to have never made it to Nevada. In other words, they shit the bed. Sadly, this is about what I expect to see Clemson do in the Music City Bowl (even though in Clemson’s case they’re favored to win by about 7 points).