Effficiency

This follows on the heels of Og’s post on the TSA.  The TSA has a hard as you can get job to do, and they hire the flotsam and jetsam to do it.  I was part of the base security detail during Desert Storm, and it was a son of a gun trying to catch the ruses they set to check us, as well as work within the stupid rules they set (you can open hoods, you can’t open hoods, you had no rounds in your weapons, etc.) that hobbled you so much that you had no option but to stand and watch the show if anything did go down.

But still, the French and British can get able citizens to cover their airports, and the Israelis have done most remarkably of any country, since its experience with Entebbee.  We need a TSA, or even a DHS, when we already have the FBI, Secret Service, and Federal Marshals, professionally trained and ready for the mission of homeland security?

No, the TSA isn’t an example of usual government FUBARosity.  When I was in basic and got my initial issue, all the guys had to do was look at me for a few seconds to decide what sized BDU’s and boots to throw at me.  They had their job down pat.  Since Indiana took the motor vehicle bureaus out of the political sphere and made the BMV a real live department, it has for me been a model of efficiency even if the rules they’re given by the feds for clean air standards has gotten them looking like the bad guys in that.  Crappy service isn’t any more automatic because it’s a government job anymore than it’s automatic to be customer oriented because it’s private – witness your cable company.

It’s just that when you get anyone in a position of getting people through the chute, when you either get the ignorant ghetto folk involved or people with a desire to bully, all you do is plug the chute and make everyone miserable.  Like Og said, giving them flak just brings a heap of their crap onto you.  You don’t argue with the cop on the side of the road while getting the ticket, you do it in the courtroom.

But what do you do when these gang bangers steal the people blind, and there’s no recourse?  Think the experience of a few people who I know are the exception, and anecdotes aren’t data?  Look here and here, here and here.  Now consider all the people who just let it go and didn’t call a reporter, and you have a picture of the TSA.  You may as well just give the job over to the Romani and be done with it.

In third world banana republics, the police are thieves with badges.  And when backwoods sheriffs set speed traps and inner city cops shake down businesses for protection, the rest of the country can say hey, it’s those people, not all of us.  But the TSA is all of us, for it’s all of us who let the neck tattooed and three inch fingernailed shuckers and jivers be the TSA, and not the bathed nor the more urbane and professional among us.  Other countries more socialistic and less rich than we can get a degree of common sense out of their security people, enough to make the experience of the chute a lot less of a freak show and a lot more efficient and well done.  The FBI requires a college degree for application, and even the army requires either a high school degree or at least enough towards it so one can get the GED while in service.  To be in the British foreign service when they had their empire was the job for which the best and brightest would give their eye teeth.  To whom do you successfully complain when the agency with no oversight, or even the thought of an internal affairs system, needs policing it own self?

Filed under: common stupidity

Best Cinema Speeches

To steal a feature from HB, here’s my Friday Five.  Five of the best speeches in the movies.  Not simply monologues to one’s self, or narrated by the teller, or said to one person.  Speeches intended to influence groups who the character needs to get into action in order to succeed.

Patton
No list can begin on any other speech than the one Patton delivered to the Third Army, which became the introduction to the biographical movie about his World War II activity:

Glengarry Glen Ross
What George Washington said about government can be equally applied to business, “Government is not eloquence, it is not reason, it is force.  Like fire, it can be a terrible servant and a fearsome master.”

Network
The original Angry White Man, predating conservative talk radio by 20 years, running at the same time as Gordon Sinclair’s “A Canadian’s Opinion“  speech.

Henry V
Kenneth Branagh.  Shakespeare.  And they say English is the duller, more banal of the European languages, that it has no capacity of beauty or the turn of prose like the Romance languages do. Branagh kept up this level of intensity all through this epic, and is assuredly one of the greatest actors alive.

Animal House
Bluto Butarski gets Delta House to not take Double Secret Probation lying down:

So let me know which ones I left off, so that I know someone reads this damn blog.

Filed under: observations

Libraries

This blog post from WordPress’ main page made me cringe.  A Wall Street Journal article about the death of the library; actually, the reduction of the library to a librarian free public book locker.

WSJ Article Photo

As you can see, the library will in the future have all the warmth, comfort, and smell of a bus stop storage locker.

The public library is a distinctly American invention.  Benjamin Franklin founded the first somewhat public one, a co-op whose fees paid for the maintenance of the co-op’s library, employees, and book stock.  The first taxpayer funded one came in 1833. [both facts from the WSJ article]

What is a library for?  Just a book depository from which to borrow?  If so, then this is the logical progression.  But think of your library experience.  You went in and looked for a book on a subject.  You went to the section which contains it, then browsed the surrounding books on that subject, and maybe get a supplementary book, or a better one than the one you thought you wanted.  Or you got to look up newspaper articles from an event in the past on microfiche.  I did that once for a family story from 1923.  Or see a back issue of a magazine that had the article you needed, but you lost your copy, or heard about the article after it went off of the sales rack.  Or you went to the book sale room to find a reference book in one of your interests that you could pick up for a buck.

No visit is linear.  But libraries must be losing attendance, and to this I say do what the book stores do – throw in a coffee house, and have some open mic nights and such.  But don’t do without the book.  I don’t say that as a luddite who just does not like changing format (as in, “I ditched my vinyl to get CD’s, and damn it if you expect me to put it all on the iPod now”), but as someone who thinks that putting our culture’s knowledge, its facts, its data, and its wisdom on electronic media is as stupid as letting Social Security be invested in the stock market, or spending $700B on a false recovery.

Media that can be wiped out with an enemy’s EMP (electromagnetic pulse).

Maybe someday we will have a storage media that can replace the endurance of the book.  But as long as we have hard drives, flash drives, and other media that lose vast quantities of stuff with a pfft, we need the printed book.  And I don’t know about you, but I’d have a hard time visiting a library like this one at the U of Amsterdam:

University of Amsterdam Library

I’d rather visit this one, the Morgan Library in New York City:

Morgan Library, New York City

But no matter what the world does, I can always still have myself a library shelf combo in the corner of a room, then put a high-backed leather chair and pedestal standing globe there, and sit there reading something good like a country squire, or the petite nobility that allegedly is in my family’s Austro-Hungarian past.

My Damn Library

Chalk it all up to watching Commander McBragg on Bullwinkle as a formative child.

Commander McBragg

Filed under: observations