Re: Shuttle Ops in a Post-9/11 world
- From: Terrell Miller <millerto@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 07 May 2005 10:59:23 -0400
Craig Fink wrote:
Photo op, the subject of the picture isn't the astronauts.
We're spending a lot of money to give us the illusion of security, when the reality is that many of the measures put in place after 9/11 won't do much to stop terrorism.
bingo. The vast majority of "security" measures are just PR fluff, they don't do anything to make us safer.
Why is this? Because making a Big Gesture is a lot cheaper and generates a lot more warm fuzzy feelings for the organization than actually taking the steps needed to solve the problem *and keep taking those steps, day in and day out*.
More than just money, we're losing the war by giving up our freedoms. Losing the very thing we've fought so hard for over the last couple of centuries.
funny, you mention a paradigm shift about the way to handle a hijacking...but you completely ignore the other paradigm shift that happened after 9/11: the shift that means that if the Bad Guys are using our freedoms against us, we're better off scaling those freedoms back a bit.
Guess one chooses to honor the paradigm shifts that one personally agrees with, eh?
It doesn't make me feel any safer to see little old ladies taking off their shoes and giving up their fingernail clippers to get on an airplane.
okay Craig, tell me what a genuine terrorist looks like. How do you spot one before they can do their hideous deeds?
On 9/11 we had a paradigm shift, about what a hijacking is all about.
<snip>
To me, the tactic of using aircraft as weapons only worked because it was
not in the conscious realm of possibilities.
Sure it was, among other things it was the central plot point of at least two bestselling technothrillers (Clancy's "Debt of Honor" and Dale Brown's "Storming Heaven"). The ways the aircraft were used in those books was different in important ways from what actually happened (and the reality was so much worse and horrific than what was depicted in the books that the technothriller genre became obsolete overnight), but the basic concept was well known. The term "poor man's cruise missile" had been in widespread use for at least two decades before 9/11.
The 9/11 attack was indeed in the conscious realm of possibilities (my first thought when I heard about the second tower being hit was 'well it finally happened'), but it was not in the conscious realm of *feasibility*.
In short, everybody knew it was possible, tehre was just no reason to think it would happen in any particular place at any particular time.
-- Terrell Miller millerto@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Every gardener knows nature's random cruelty" -Paul Simon RE: George Harrison .
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