The long term radiation effects are unknown. The more you fly, the more you get.

"Privacy" be damned. If they get off on looking at my junk, when I am in the Security Queue, they are hard up for stimulation. I suspect, in any case, it would get real old, real quick.

[QUOTE=LaurV;483220]I fly frequently, and I always hear people complaining about check-up points in airports. People don't realize that such controls are for their own safety...[/QUOTE]
Look up "security theatre".

[QUOTE=kladner;483219]So you changed the subject. I'm entitled to reminisce.[/QUOTE]

Did I? I don't think the alert I posted the link to, is any more or less "Russia hysteria" than other things in the news. But then, I don't think the Russians' interference in the 2016 election is being put forward as an excuse for HRC losing the election. The fact that they interfered is bad enough. And as far as I'm concerned, to say that the Trump campaign colluded with that effort is nothing worse than belaboring the obvious.

OTOH, hackers being able to turn off your electricity at will -- if that doesn't bring the word "chaos" to mind, I don't know what would.

Noam Chomsky: The Next War in the Middle East Will Be the Worst One Yet
 

[url]http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/49137-noam-chomsky-the-next-war-in-the-middle-east-will-be-the-worst-one-yet[/url]
As if the situation were not already poised on the brink of catastrophe, Chomsky uses the expression, "very dangerous" repeatedly. As I value his analysis [U]very highly[/U], this is [U]very frightening.[/U]

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;483262]Did I? I don't think the alert I posted the link to, is any more or less "Russia hysteria" than other things in the news. But then, I don't think the Russians' interference in the 2016 election is being put forward as an excuse for HRC losing the election. The fact that they interfered is bad enough. And as far as I'm concerned, to say that the Trump campaign colluded with that effort is nothing worse than belaboring the obvious.

OTOH, hackers being able to turn off your electricity at will -- if that doesn't bring the word "chaos" to mind, I don't know what would.[/QUOTE]
OK. So I changed the subject to emphasize context. It remains true that DHS, starting with its very name, has been used to frighten people, and thereby manipulate them. The agency has become a tremendous threat to democratic values. Just the direction of ICE alone substantiates this.

[QUOTE=kladner;483276]It remains true that DHS, starting with its very name, has been used to frighten people, and thereby manipulate them. The agency has become a tremendous threat to democratic values. Just the direction of ICE alone substantiates this.[/QUOTE]
One aspect of the creation of the agency which has, apparently, long since passed from public attention, is [url=https://www.thenation.com/article/gutting-civil-service/]The Gutting of the Civil Service[/url].

If my spotty recollection of US history is accurate, it was Chester Arthur who did a lot to wreck the "spoils system" by (much to the surprise of many, since he was widely viewed as a party hack) instituting Civil Service. This is one reason he is considered to be a much better president than he had been expected to be. (I mean, once the unexpected circumstance of his [i]becoming[/i] president came to pass. This only happened because he succeeded to the office when James Garfield died, after being shot by a disappointed spoils system office seeker named Charles Guiteau, and the doctors made a mess of things.)

IMO, Dubya, in effect, restored the spoils system.

That is a fascinating piece of historical background. Thanks!
I agree, with regard to Shrub bringing back (more) patronage.

John Bolton Chairs an Actual “Fake News” Publisher Infamous for Spreading Anti-Muslim Hate
 

[URL]https://theintercept.com/2018/03/23/gatestone-institute-john-bolton-chairs-an-actual-fake-news-publisher-infamous-for-spreading-anti-muslim-hate/[/URL]
As if this creep was not scary enough.....
[QUOTE]Bolton wears many hats. He serves as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributor to Fox News, and controls a Super PAC that used money from the billionaire Mercer family to help elect congressional Republicans.

But one role that has received relatively little scrutiny is his work as [URL="https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/biography/John+R.+Bolton"]chair[/URL] of the Gatestone Institute, a nonprofit that focuses largely on publishing original commentary and news related to the supposed threat that Islam poses to Western society. He has served in that role [URL="https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3858/john-r-bolton-gatestone-institute-chairman"]since[/URL] 2013. (Bolton did not respond to an email seeking comment.)
A steady drum beat of vitriol is visible on the Gatestone website on almost any given day.

Just this week, the Gatestone Institute [URL="https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12066/germany-rape-crisis"]published[/URL] stories [URL="https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12049/britain-islamist-colony"]claiming[/URL] that the “mostly Muslim male migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East” in Germany are fueling a “migrant rape crisis” and that “Muslim mass-rape gangs” are transforming the United Kingdom into “an Islamist Colony.”
[/QUOTE][QUOTE]Take the [URL="http://an%20Islamist%20Colony"]story[/URL] this week about the migrant rape crisis in Germany. Penned by Gatestone “senior fellow” Soeren Kern, the piece lists recent rapes and sexual assaults in Berlin and other cities, [U]attributing all the crimes to Muslim immigrants even though the story simultaneously concedes elsewhere that the attackers’ identities have not been revealed by German police.[/U][/QUOTE]
One more link on Bolton's evil history.
[url]https://www.thedailybeast.com/ive-seen-john-bolton-up-close-yep-be-afraid?ref=home[/url]

[url=https://harpers.org/archive/2018/04/mobbed-up/]Mobbed Up: How America boosts the Afghan opium trade[/url] | Andrew Cockburn, Harpers

Note to anyone who sees the please-subscribe stuff at bottom of article's first page - I had no trouble viewing the remaining 5 pages simply by tacking on /2, ..., /6 to the url. (I didn't see actual clickable links for those in my FF rendition, and when I told NoScript to temporarily allow JS for the page all that produced was a really annoying "please subscribe for the low, low price of $45.99 per year" popup.)

[quote]There is a truism about Afghanistan that gets updated every year. Currently it runs: America has not been in Afghanistan for sixteen years; it has been in Afghanistan for one year, sixteen times. The complete lack of institutional memory may help to explain why the fervor of the anti-opium crusade keeps waxing and waning with policy shifts in Washington. The military, for example, had at first declined to play a major role — but then got on board after counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) had supposedly helped to best Al Qaeda in Iraq. Applying COIN thinking to Afghanistan, they concluded that Afghan farmers should be weaned from growing opium, thereby lessening Taliban influence. To that end, the military eradicated crops whenever possible and induced farmers to grow something legal and supposedly profitable, such as wheat (though this is normally a subsistence crop in the country). However, Richard Holbrooke, appointed by President Obama to oversee Afghan policy, soon surmised that eradicating crops on which farmers depended for a living was a poor way to win support, and got that stopped, at least for a while. He also questioned the assumption that the Taliban depended on narcotics for funding, brandishing CIA reports [b]that traced much of the group’s money back to our allies in the Gulf oil kingdoms[/b].
...
Afghans who find bombs landing on their heads may not necessarily understand that at least some of their plight is a byproduct of US military personnel practices, notably the competition-based system for promotions. “If you get violent,” the US officer quoted above explained to me, “if you call in an air strike, not only do you get a combat ribbon and possibly an award for valor, but it also makes your report a combat report. When you have multiple combat reports and others do not, you’re more competitive for promotion and assignment to prestigious billets.” So even though the best course of action might be nonviolent, the culture is predisposed toward violence. “When you suggest doing something else,” the officer told me, “guys will say, ‘You’re overthinking this. These people just need to be killed.’ ”

General Nicholson has said that the strategy endorsed by Trump last summer puts our side “on a path to win” in Afghanistan. He is at least the eighth senior American commander to pledge impending victory in those sixteen years of war. He will doubtless not be the last.[/quote]
Article is a litany of perverse incentivization and career upward-failers. And of course the MIC and MSM both love permawar, because it's great for business and making the careers of various useless eaters in and around the DC beltway bubble. For example, pair of warmongering headlines from today's Daily Bezos:

[url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trump-says-were-leaving-syria-like-very-soon-bad-idea/2018/03/31/e50bb7aa-3434-11e8-94fa-32d48460b955_story.html]Trump says we’re leaving Syria ‘like, very soon.’ Bad idea[/url] | Editorial Board, WaPo

[url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ominous-cracks-show-in-the-wests-united-front-against-russia/2018/03/30/aaa09d4a-338c-11e8-94fa-32d48460b955_story.html]Ominous cracks show in the West’s united front against Russia[/url] | WaPo

Amazon Web Services has a huge contract with the CIA, so there's one obvious economic incentive at work. The fact that the DC area with its plethora of massive government and private-contractor server farms and infrastructure to support them is a leading candidate for Amazon's HQ2 project is surely also no coincidence.

Let us also remember that the post-Soviet Taliban regime had greatly reduced, if not eliminated poppy farming. It has had an immense resurgence in the past 16 years. Well, whatayawant? We gotta fund the CIA somehow.

[QUOTE=kladner;484045]Let us also remember that the post-Soviet Taliban regime had greatly reduced, if not eliminated poppy farming. It has had an immense resurgence in the past 16 years. Well, whatayawant? We gotta fund the CIA somehow.[/QUOTE]

I especially found the description of the present-day meaninglessness of the term "Taliban" interesting, because the Western governments and MSM resolutely refuse to get that memo. Regarding last years bumper opium crop, even absent the CIA-as-major-narcotrafficker angle, the article had a great description of the kind of institutionalized stupidity underlying the repeated failures and even make-things-worse-ness of the US anti-opium efforts - "people need to make a living somehow", what a novel economic notion:
[quote]One spectacular example of making things worse can be found in the explosive growth in the 2017 Afghan opium harvest: an eye-catching 87 percent increase over 2016. It was this bumper crop that did much to bolster the American designation of the Taliban as a narco-insurgency and launch the subsequent targeting campaign. According to Mattis, enemy advances and crop growth were closely connected: “As the Taliban surged, we watched the poppy surge right along with it. There’s no surprise here — the intelligence community had warned us about this, so it’s exactly what we were told would happen.”

But why did Helmand farmers really grow so much more opium all of a sudden? In a supreme irony, the root cause would appear to be a multimillion-dollar effort by the United States and Britain to wean them away from opium. Agriculture in the region has traditionally been confined to areas irrigated by the Helmand River as it flows southwest from the Hindu Kush toward the Iranian border. But in the Fifties, Washington had fostered a large-scale irrigation project that produced more fertile land — along with tribal disputes over ownership that underlie much of today’s unrest and violence.

In recent decades, much of that land had been given over to opium. Beginning in 2008, the Americans and British began an ambitious project known as the Helmand Food Zone. The aim was to persuade farmers to shift from opium to wheat by means of inducements (seeds and fertilizer) and force (the prompt destruction of opium crops). Needless to say, the scheme was beset with problems, such as difficulties in seed distribution, which involved a major effort by overstretched British forces traveling over mine-strewn roads. Nevertheless, over most of the designated territory, amber waves of grain did begin to replace the poppy flowers. By 2012, the opium crop in the zone was one quarter of what it had been four years earlier. USAID alone had spent almost half a billion dollars in Helmand, but it did seem the project was working.

Opium, however, is a labor-intensive crop, while wheat is not. This meant that the farmers growing wheat had no need for the laborers and sharecroppers they had previously required. [b]No one had thought about what might happen to the men who had worked on the opium plantations and were now without a livelihood[/b]. For many, the solution was to move to the dry desert north of the Boghra Canal — built by the Americans in the Fifties — drill wells, and start planting opium. According to Mansfield, the population in that region went from almost zero in 2008 to 250,000 eight years later. Land was cheap to rent or buy, and planters were free of the unwelcome attentions of the US and Afghan government forces. Thus, as opium production declined in the Helmand Food Zone — to the delight of the project’s sponsors and supporters, such as Senator Dianne Feinstein — the desert began to bloom. By 2012, opium production in the newly worked land exceeded the amount by which it had declined in the Food Zone.[/quote]