On June 8, 1949, George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published.
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Townhall: Staged Security
Expanding on thoughts from Friday, this weekend’s Common Sense entry at Townhall.com is more grist for the true security mill, and the case for doing away with the TSA.
Click on over; then come back here for links for further facts and opinion.
- ABC News: Undercover DHS Tests Find Widespread Security Failures
- The Atlantic: The TSA Doesn’t Work—and Never Has
- Cato Institute: “End the TSA,” by Chris Edwards
- NY Post: TSA screeners allow fed agent with fake bomb to pass through security at Newark Airport
- NY Post: ‘Fake bomb’ heat on TSA
- Denver NBC Channel 9-News: Undercover agents slip bombs past DIA screeners
- The Atlantic: TSA Spent $878 Million on Screening Program That Probably Doesn’t Work
- The Atlantic: The Things He Carried
On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee presented the “Lee Resolution” to the Continental Congress. The motion was seconded by John Adams, but was tabled for several weeks. The motion was finally passed on July 2, 1776.
During the 1916 Republican National Convention (June 7 – 10), Senator Warren G. Harding used the phrase “Founding Fathers” in his keynote address . . . and would go on using it in speeches thereafter. It caught on, referring to folks such as Thomas Jefferson and, yes, Richard Henry Lee, who orchestrated the American colonies’ break from England‘s monarchy.
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David Crockett
“I leave this rule for others when I’m dead
Be always sure you’re right — THEN GO AHEAD!”
David Crockett, personal motto.
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Video: Replace the TSA
John Stossel, on his terrific Fox Business show, explains how and why switching to private security in airports would be an improvement over the intrusive, prurient, incompetent, wasteful Transportation Security Administration.
As the show explains, airport participation with TSA security is optional: San Francisco has a private service instead, and Orlando contemplates opting for that right now.
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Philosophers
June 6 marks major life events of two eminent British philosophers, Jeremy Bentham’s death (1832) and Isaiah Berlin’s birth (1909). Bentham was known as a “philosophical radical” and a major influence on the British utilitarian tradition. He authored numerous books, including Defence of Usury and An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Berlin was best known for several brilliant essays, including the famous “Two Concepts of Liberty.”
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Samuel Adams
“It is not unfrequent to hear men declaim loudly upon liberty, who, if we may judge by the whole tenor of their actions, mean nothing else by it but their own liberty, — to oppress without control or the restraint of laws all who are poorer or weaker than themselves.”
Samuel Adams, from an essay in The Advertiser (1748).
Our suspicions have been proved: the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) doesn’t secure much of anything; it is mere “security theater.”
After revelations that TSA screeners failed to find weapons and other deadly contraband in 96 percent of tests, David A. Graham, writing for The Atlantic, asked “what kind of theater this is. . . . A period drama, satirizing the 2000s? Vaudeville farce?”
Easy answer: the genre is “statism.”
Statism is the worship of government, or the reliance upon government to do many more than a few tasks. It is very old.
The ancient states arose from conquest, developing as a way to milk the masses for the benefit of the few. That’s what states traditionally do: use force to move wealth from one group to another.
Along the way, the states did do some good. Amidst all their horrors.
But mostly rulers just leveraged myth and bluster to cover crimes.
In more recent times, in this great country, the idea arose that the state should be limited to a few necessary jobs, tightly controlled by the people so that government might actually defend rights, not abridge them.
But this revolutionary democratic-republican ideology did not alter the basic nature of reality, turning the sow’s purse of the conquerors’ art into the gold of the Public Interest.
Without our vigilance, government always reverts back to its roots.
The TSA is simply the latest myth-and-bluster-backed scam aiding the ludicrous notion that government is all-powerful . . . while providing only faux security. Get rid of it; let its people go. Then watch airlines come up with more effective, less intrusive, more passenger-friendly security systems.
Want theater? Try “vigilance theater.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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David Crockett
“We have the right as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.”
David Crockett, from a speech in the U.S. House of Representatives, as quoted in The Life of Colonel David Crockett (1884), by Edward Sylvester Ellis.
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Uncle Tom’s Cabin
On June 5, 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery serial, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, started its ten-month run in the National Era abolitionist newspaper.