Life, Liberty, and my pursuit of Happiness

Seen on Fark and I can't say it better myself:

Here's the problem with Al'Qaeda: It's hard to tell the difference between one of their plots and a drunken delusion.

Since 9/11, I remember these great terrorist attempts:

• A guy attempting to give himself the hotfoot on an airplane.
• A plan to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch.
• A plan to flood Wall Street by blowing up the Holland Tunnel and letting water run uphill.
• Some guys plotting to blow up planes with bombs made from hydrogen peroxide and Tang.
• Two guys who crashed a jeep into a security bollard at an airport and then ran around their car on fire until passers-by kicked their asses.
• A plan for a couple of guys to shoot up an Army base, because it's doubtful anyone on an Army base would have a gun to shoot back with.
• A plan to blow up JFK airport that hinged upon a belief that a fuel line set on fire would result in fuel bunkers blowing up Michael Bay style.
• Some guys with no money or bombs who wanted to blow up the Sears Tower, possibly by wishing at it.
• Jose Padilla, who was going to leave the gas on in an apartment building.

I really don't think these guys are thinking their cunning plans all the way through. In light of that, getting drunk on a plane and claiming to have a bomb really doesn't sound any stupider.

You know how baseball teams have "bat day," where the first 5,000 or so fans get a free bat? If the TSA really wanted to be helpful, that's what they'd do.

After you pass through a metal detector and baggage X-Ray (with any amount of liquids you like--NO Freedom Baggie requirement), the TSA agent hands you a bat.

At the other end of your destination, the TSA agent that just sits there watching people exit the secure area takes your bat. (This limits the number of bats we need to provide, so the program is "green." Folks go for that shiat nowadays.)

They'd probably have to make them a bit smaller than regulation size, you know? Maybe like Little-League or T-Ball size or something, so you can still swing it around in the close quarters of an airplane.

Now, unless the hijackers outnumber the passengers, anytime someone acts up, all the passengers go to work with their bats, and give the miscreant a wood shampoo.

It's like the NRA's claim that "an armed society is a polite society." A plane load of bat-wielding passengers is a plane that's not going to get hijacked.

When the terrorist says, "I have a bomb!" what you should really be hearing is,

"I have something built by a guy who downloaded some plans from the internet--well, it took a few tries because first he got Rickrolled, and poor Abdul accidentally looked at a 4chan link and went insane--and it was hard to translate some things like 'woot' and 'I can haz assplosion' into Arabic, but anyway this guy who used to drive taxis for a living followed them all and said it wasn't that hard even though he'd never held a soldering iron before, so if you all hang on a second while I re-wrap this electrical tape that keeps falling off the side here I'm going to try to reattach the battery to this paperclip, and then you'll all tremble before the might of Allah, unless it turns out that rubbing alcohol isn't a good substitute for nitroethane after all..."

and by that time the passengers ought to be giving him a wood shampoo anyway.

/My lack of terror, let me show you it.

This article appeared on Yahoo! Finance today (October 14th, 2008).  The CBS Early Show also did a brief segment on it.

THE NATIONALIZATION OF THE BANKS IS NOT OPTIONAL

See Bold Section Below!

Bush reveals new steps to steady banking industry

By Martin Crutsinger, AP Economics Writer

President Bush pledges to continue work to stabilize banking industry, US to buy bank shares WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush on Tuesday announced a $250 billion plan by the government to directly buy shares in the nation's leading banks, saying the drastic steps were "not intended to take over the free market but to preserve it."

Nine major banks will participate initally including all of the country's largest institutions. Some of the big banks had to be pressured to participate in the program by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who wanted healthy institutions that did not necessarily need capital from the government to go first as a way of removing any stigma that might be associated with banks getting bailouts.

Section 8 of the draft legislation released on Saturday reads, in its entirety:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

I have to admit that I know very little about what is going on right now with this whole mortgage thing (just out of college, not a homeowner, won't be for a while) but can someone explain to me how the hell this could have happened and who is to blame for this? I seem to recall somewhere in my history classes that after the crash of 1929 and everyone ran on the banks FDR forced banks to have open books so that government auditors could make sure that banks were making sound loans. If banks were found to be messing up then the government would either shut them down and give people their FDIC money, or take over the bank and start running it wisely. How is it that only NOW is the government figuring out that these loans were all terrible?