Mid-July Mini-Reports

Time for some quick takes on items in the news over the past month or so. This may become a regular feature of the blog… who knows? We’ll take the stories chronologically.

Requires legislation to help incompetent parents.

#1. The June 18 edition of the Denver Post carries an article entitled “ Colorado proposes nation’s first legal limits on smartphones for children.” This is the initiative of one Tim Farnum, who noticed that his own “once energetic and outgoing boys became moody, quiet and reclusive. They never left their bedrooms, and when he tried to take away the phones, one of Farnum’s sons launched into a temper tantrum that the dad described as equivalent to the withdrawals of a crack addict.” Yeah, right. This is someone who had seen lots of folks struggling with narcotics withdrawal. Moron.

Anyway, since Farnum failed at parenting, proving himself incapable of saying no to his spawn, the only solution is… legislation! The proposal would prevent smartphone sales to anyone under 13, and would require providers to plow through a mountain of paperwork which would then have to be submitted to some state agency, which would—at taxpayer expense, of course—log everything to ensure compliance.

All this bill does is take authority away from parents who actually take the job seriously, and give it to the state. By the way, Farnum has now taken the smartphones away from his two sons, and with good results. He, being dumber than an anvil, no doubt believes this proves his point that smartphones should be kept away from kids. What it really demonstrates, of course, is that parents who acquiesce to every whim of their children tend not to be successful at raising healthy and well-adjusted children. But good parents ought to be able to decide whether their 12-year-old can have a smartphone… or if their 14-year-old shouldn’t. Farnum describes his politics as “fairly libertarian.” Curmie shudders at the prospect of someone Farnum would think of as an authoritarian jackass.

#2. The Transportation Safety Administration toyed with the idea of requiring books and magazines to be removed from carry-on bags in order to de-clutter bags, making security screenings more effective. This rationale was widely and probably rightfully regarded as nonsense by the public at large and especially by privacy rights advocates like the ACLU, who wrote a lengthy opinion on its website, recognizing the need for safety but arguing for the greater good of privacy. The good news is that whereas Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly proclaimed in May that he (N.B., yes, “he,” not “we,” or “TSA”) “might, and likely will,” expand employment of the new initiative beyond a handful of test cities, it now appears that either public outcry or a bout of common sense was sufficient to stall the program.

Academics (like Curmie) are particularly disturbed by the prospect of subjecting themselves to this level of intrusion into privacy.  Whether it’s the title. or the language of publication, or the subject matter (Curmie has read a whole lot of anti-capitalistic theory, for example), the risk of having one's reading material examined without a legitimate safety concern, and with a distinct possibility of unnecessary confrontation, disturbs a lot of folks, especially but by no means exclusively in the intelligentsia.  And the examiners—TSA agents—have neither the training nor the intellect to make appropriate decisions.

Note that the stated rationale for the added screening was that carry-on bags are now over-packed, thereby making it more difficult to determine what’s actually in them, because people want to avoid baggage fees, which apply on the first bag only to domestic flights. Meanwhile, the TSA is also contemplating banning laptops in the cabin only on all international flights. If anyone in Washington really believed that laptops are a threat, they’d be prohibited on all flights. If the problem is over-packed carry-ons, make airlines adopt the same baggage fees (which is to say, none) for domestic flights as are now common practice for international flights. The only plausible explanation is what we’ve known all along: TSA is as prying and meddlesome as it is incompetent (and that’s saying rather a lot), and John Kelly has little interest in civil liberties. He’s actually less unqualified than most Trump appointees, but he’s a military guy, not experienced in needing a rationale for his decisions, which he expects to be meekly obeyed. Civilians, especially academics, aren’t really good at that.

#3. From late June comes this story of an elderly Chinese woman who threw coins into a jet engine for good luck, delaying the Shanghai to Guangzhou flight by five hours, lest the attempt to ensure a safe slight lead directly to the opposite result. There’s really not much to say here except, well, wow.

#4. Speaking of stupid ideas, the Denver Post also reports this story about people who claim to be persecuted… for believing in a flat earth. You see, when these folks proclaim their… uh… faith, scientists and other heliocentric round-earthers call them stupid, for no other reason than that they’re, well, stupid. It turns out they even have a celebrity on board: NBA star Kyrie Irving. If ever you needed evidence of major universities’ wholesale abdication of education when there are sports dollars to be made, it’s Kyrie Irving: this idiot got into Duke! (Imagine yourself as an excellent but not quite excellent enough student who didn’t make the cut, while this cretin with a jump shot did.) Somehow Curmie suspects that no one at any university worthy of the name would have given him the time of day if he couldn’t play basketball better than virtually anyone else on the planet.

Seriously, the flat earthers are laughable… but also terrifying. They are not truth-seekers, nor independent thinkers, nor intellectual gadflies. They’re just garden variety morons who, like the snowflakes Curmie wrote about last time out, can do a lot of damage in sufficient numbers. This nation has already embarrassed itself on the world stage in terms of evolution and climate change. Further erosion of the most basic scientific truths cannot be condoned.

The Afghani delegation arrives in Washington, DC.

#5. Credit where it’s due: it appears that intervention by President Trump himself led to a reversal of a visa denial for young robotics team members. Two delegations, from Afghanistan and Gambia, were initially denied the short-term visas that would have allowed them to compete in the inaugural FIRST Global Challenge, currently underway in Washington, DC. The former group, an all-girls team from a country not exactly known for gender enlightenment, attracted more attention here, and this is where we’re hearing about presidential suasion being exercised. It’s unclear whether the President assisted the Gambians’ cause directly, but they, too, were allowed to enter the country after having their visa applications denied.

In neither case was the reason for the initial denial made clear: this is standard practice for the State Department under any administration. Whether it should be, of course, is another matter, and to an outside observer these cases seem particularly bizarre. It’s difficult to believe a bunch of high school kids are much of a threat to national security, but I suppose stranger things have happened. When the bans were first announced, many, including Curmie, feared that State was unilaterally extending the President’s travel ban beyond its original scope: Curmie even wrote that the “temporary” travel ban “sure [looks] like the thin edge of the wedge.” But he also described the SCOTUS ruling as a glass half full. It remains to be seen whether President Trump will craft policies that will allow appropriate access to this country irrespective of the applicant’s nationality. Frankly, I doubt it. But this episode has given Curmie at least a modicum of optimism.

Flying While Islamic Is the New Driving While Black

One of the sadder legacies of 9/11 is the legitimization of cowardice in the name of prudence. True, both political parties are trying to out-macho each other with respect to foreign policy, but when it comes down to real, day-to-day existence, Americans behave like the schoolyard bully confronted with an antagonist who doesn’t just meekly hand over his lunch money.

We’ll drive way too fast for the conditions, even after having one beer too many. We’ll eat crappy “food” with levels of saturated fat, sodium, and sugar so high that just talking about them can cause heart attacks. We’ll swagger around talking about how tough we are because “we” managed to capture or kill the likes of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden.

But ask us to get on a plane that might also be carrying someone named Mohammed or Abdul, and we’ll cheerfully relinquish all our Constitutional rights and meekly slink into the corner with our proverbial tail between our legs while some idiot with a TSA (which, contrary to popular opinion, does not, in fact, stand for “Terminally Stupid and Arrogant”) badge ostentatiously goes through the motions of “protecting the public.” The agency does this by invading our privacy, fondling us, proclaiming our toothpaste a potential weapon, and generally doing everything possible to instill a feeling of Exceeding Great Trepidation.

Trouble is, it’s all a charade. The system itself acknowledges that all the shoelessness and shampoo confiscations don’t mean anything: what else is a no-fly list, or a random (or not-so-random) search at the gate if not a tacit admission that any serious terrorist with an IQ above room temperature can get past the security screening without breaking a sweat? I’ve been saying this for years, of course. Here’s me in 2005:

The idea that someone who can pass through security can still remain a threat is in fact an admission that the security screenings don't work except as a cosmetic deterrent. It is difficult to go a month without the news that some test of security at some airport has demonstrated conclusively that the average TSA screener lacks the training, the intelligence, or the vigilance to actually thwart a real threat. We'd be better off hiring out of Central Casting: at least they'd look like they might be able to stop a terrorist. Of course, news reports that yet another fake bomb made it through security at a major American airport are slowly gravitating towards the back of the newspaper, because it no longer shocks us that airport security is intrusive and demeaning, but completely ineffective.

But we continue, as a nation, to pretend that the false security offered by TSA is “worth it” somehow. It is not.

Of course, our collective cravenness is really a manifestation of xenophobia more than anything else. Homeland Security and all its various permutations exist for the sole reason of feeding the populace’s quaking terror at The Other. Oh, sure, they’ll annoy the rest of us—virtually anyone who has travelled very much at all will have been subjected to some form of humiliation to distract the agents from what a pathetic job they have re-affirm the security of the nation. But it’s the spectre of actually sharing an airplane with (gasp!) a Muslim that can be counted on to legitimize the most outrageous over-reach of authority.

I remember flying home from a conference in New York several years ago. As it happened, I was seated immediately behind two men who clearly fit the profile of a “terrorist,” at least as conjured up in the fevered imaginings of a TSA agent: young, obviously middle-Eastern, male. One was bearded; the other had a thick mustache. I don’t recall their names, but they were stereotypically Arab: Ali and Farooq, or something like that. They were laughing about the difficulties they’d had in passing through security, based solely on the way they look. And, hearing them speak, I can assure you that the fear and trembling of the security folks was entirely visual: two more readily identifiable New York accents would be difficult to imagine.

But the latest victims of TSA over-reaction weren’t New Yorkers. They were students from the United Arab Emirates who were removed from a Charlotte-to-Washington flight and questioned for nearly five hours, embarrassing them (despite the fact that they had clearly not done anything to deserve this treatment) and—of course—inconveniencing every other passenger on that flight, not to mention the family, friends, and business associates of everyone who should have been in DC in time for dinner but didn’t arrive until close to midnight. And for what?

Well, according to WSOC-TV, U.S. Airways is calling it simply a “security issue” that led to the students’ being led from the plane and all their bags being re-screened. (Again, how about we screen them right the first time?) The story says that “passengers reported they heard the group talking about airplanes and the military while on board. Sources said that's when some passengers reported them.” It’s unclear exactly who initiated the process of removing the UAE students, but it appears to have been the airline, whose employees are perfectly well trained to distribute tiny packets of pretzels, but perhaps not to judge the severity or likelihood of a potential terrorist threat. Forgive me if I don’t choose to live my life based on the prognostications of the most wild-eyed, xenophobic paranoid in the room.

I do understand that a student named Yaqoob Al-Shamsi is probably a higher risk than a grandmother named Cindy Robinson would be. But there are literally hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world who pose precisely zero threat. A little acknowledgment of that would not come amiss. What is troubling here is that the Islamophobia of the more ignorant members of society will eventually create a self-fulfilling prophecy. This seems to be the lesson of Guantánamo, which has apparently more than once transformed petty nuisances into card-carrying Bad Guys. And if we keep down the present path, the next Hadef Al-Dhaheri won’t simply be upset that “they treated us different than the others”; he’ll want to do something about it. It’s a delicate balancing act, and we need someone with a little more sophistication in charge of the operation.