Stoss Blog

As we all know by now on Christmas day a man attempted to detonate an explosive on a flight as it was descending into Detroit. The media reported this almost immediately as a “terrorist attack”.

There was a Republican senator on CNN this week denouncing Obama because “…he took 3 days to respond to the attempted terrorist attack,” and “…was too busy with the war in Iraq and pushing his Healthcare agenda to care about airport security”.

Of course he fucking was! The American people elected him because that’s what he’d said he’d do!  Airport security is not a political issue. Blaming Obama for a bomber boarding a plane in Amsterdam is like blaming the Queen because Royal Mail lost your package. A government owned agency failed here, not the leader of the government.

I promise you if Obama was told “Hey, man… Some Nigerian guy is gonna board an airplane in Holland with a bomb in his underpants,” he would have called someone and said “Yo, can you figure out how to stop that from, you know, like, happening?”.

Also on CNN they had a former head of the 9/11 commision on who commented that Obama was reluctant to use the word terrorism and therefore was undermining the event. I don’t care if the attacker is on a terrorist mission or a deranged girl scout who was driven to commit mass murder because of an unfortunate cookie selling incident: If a plane blows up it is a failure of the security preventing that from happening, which is exactly what Obama said it was.

World leaders don’t have a red S on their chests and fly around at night saving damsels in distress, they are human, and if you think world leaders know everything about their countries like some sort of human-embodied-omnipotent being, then your sadly mistaken. It’s just like the fiasco of the environmental conference in Denmark. Sending Stephen Harper to an environmental convention is as useful as sending Andy Dick to a vagina convention. Neither know anything about the subject, except what they are told by their peers. Let people who know science sort out the environment issues and make a global recommendation. You wouldn’t hire the CEO of Canadian Tire to fix your car right? You’d hire the mechanics who he employs to do it, because they are the experts.

All of this is to use the media to enhance public perception, because in the end that’s what wins elections, and the Obamas/Harpers/Browns of the world all want to keep their pay cheques. Harper has to flash his smile in Denmark so that when the opposition puts their foot in their mouth for the millionth time of this parliament he can say “Well, I care about the environment, see? I saved my boarding pass!” And in the same way, even if you’ve never flown and have zero intention on doing so, having you PM or President stand up and say, “I am doing everything I can to protect you,” (whether from scary Nigerians or that pesky global warming) makes it desirable to vote for them.

The truth is, flying affects a fractionally small proportion of the population. It’s the media that portrays this as an issue of the masses and politicizes it. Restricting people from having liquids because someone once wanted to use a liquid for evil on a flight makes as much sense as making condoms out of steel because one in a few hundred break. (For more on this I suggest this article)

I am not going to die because a newly-wed couple wants to fly to the Dominican on their honeymoon, and you aren’t going to die because someone who happened to be born in Yemen is on your flight. We’re going to die because people die. I know we loving playing God, but in the end we all die. Whether a nutjob blows us up, or we have a heart attack after eating the large fries at TGIF, we will die. And for the record nutjobs come from everywhere, not just the 14 nations now on a permanent ‘frisk list’ by US order.

Flying is safe, don’t let a hypochondriac set of politicians and a fear mongering  news network who couldn’t fill a day with 30 minutes of actual news change your mind about that.