North Texas Nonconformist

An article from Jay Rosen about the terrible state of the Sunday current affairs shows and what could be done to fix them. Of course, as he himself admits on Twitter, it will most likely never happen...

The most recent attempt by a disturbed passenger to blow up a US commercial flight in the air, has, sadly but predictably, not led to any visionary or useful answer from the Federal Government branches responsible for air safety.
Instead, as Ed Brayton explains, the TSA and DHS are instead introducing yet more unbelievably stupid rules:

...several airlines released detailed information about the restrictions, saying that passengers on international flights coming to the United States will apparently have to remain in their seats for the last hour of a flight without any personal items on their laps. It was not clear how often the rule would affect domestic flights.

The rules are nothing more than a dumb-ass response to a single incident, and are symptomatic of what happens when officials disconnected from air travel and non-government reality are allowed to write regulations without proper oversight and submission to tough questions from elected representatives and the media.
Brayton hits two nails on the head:

TSA, on the other hand, equates hassle with safety. For all the crap they put us through, this guy still got some sort of explosive material on the plane from Amsterdam. He was stopped by law-abiding passengers. So TSA responds to all of this by . . . announcing plans to hassle law-abiding U.S. passengers even more.
If you're really cynical, you could make a good argument that they're really only interested in the appearance of safety. They've simply concluded that the more difficult they make your flight, the safer you'll feel. Never mind if any of the theatrics actually work.
On top of all of that, it's becoming more and more clear that this guy should never have been allowed on a plane in the first place. The government had been warned specifically about him by his father three months ago, who went to the US embassy and told them that he had gotten involved with jihadi groups in Yemen. We have a no fly list full of people who aren't terrorists, how did this guy not get on that list?

I want to see TSA and DHS officials brought in front of intelligent media (which means that if they invite the major networks means a largely empty room) and elected representatives and forced to defend this stupid response, and they should be informed that any answer along the lines of "cannot comment - national security" will result in ridicule and laughter from the interlocutors.
We need sensible, properly thought-through responses to security issues, not this moronic knee-jerk nonsense.
UPDATE - As Wendell Berry points out on Scholars and Rogues, this is the underlying cause of the mess we are currently in concerning airport and flight security:

What i don’t understand is the idea that Americans are entitled to perfect security. Here we are (and for the record, all the troops stationed everywhere in the world are you and i) crashing around the globe and blowing shit up, yet those of us in God’s country should face no threat. And for the most part, we don’t face any threat. Nobody’s bombed any of the weddings i’ve been to over the last few years. I’ve never thought, “I don’t think i should go downtown, because somebody might suicide bomb where i shop.” I’m convinced that the Canadians will launch their plan for world domination any day, by invading the social and evolutionary cul-de-sac of America where i live. But as of yet i have not had to contend with RCAF close air support in the neighborhood.
Still here we are, gripped by fear and willing to submit to whatever the organs say is necessary to protect us. Hunter S. Thompson used to say that we’re a nation of pigs. I disagree. (Unless he was being Orwellian.) The comparison is unfair to that noble and intelligent, barnyard beast. We’re a nation of five year-olds whose parents don’t say, “No, no, there’s no bogeyman in the closet because there’s no such thing as the bogeyman.” Our parents keep telling us that the bogeyman is real and he’s out to get us. He could be in any, or every, closet. In fact, he probably is in every closet!

UPDATE 2 - Lawyers, Guns and Money introduces the new Washington game of Terrorball.

..the place that is the home base of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. This Phoenix New Times article shows quite clearly the extent of the contempt that "Sheriff Joe" and his sycophantic cohorts appear to have for due process and any legal system official who dares (as they see it) to hold them to account. Truly scary stuff.
Of course, the really sad part of this is that Arpaio has been re-elected to his position by the local electors almost more times than I have had hot dinners, which, sadly, tends to play into the hands of those who propose intelligence tests for voters.
UPDATE - A summary of recent events here, throwing into sharp relief the reality that (as ever) Arizona political and justice system leadership, having failed to push back on Arpaio in the past, has now, by benign neglect, created a monster. Has nobody in leadership learned a damned thing from the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy?

In which Verizon and Yahoo are fighting an FOIA request for information about how much they charge to tap and pass customer data to the Federal Government.
This explains what happened next:

...before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.
Yahoo writes in its 12-page objection letter (.pdf), that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it "to 'shame' Yahoo! and other companies -- and to 'shock' their customers."
"Therefore, release of Yahoo!'s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology companies," the company writes.

Commenter Nomen Nescio helpfully provides you with a translation:

Therefore, release of Yahoo!'s information is reasonably likely to lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and security

"if people knew our reputation for protecting their privacy was wholly undeserved and false, we might lose that reputation."

no shit, sherlock. let me translate that complaint into even plainer english: "please, mr. judge your honor, don't make us tell the truth to our customers! they might quit being our customers if we had to be truthful to them!"

Apparently Sen. Chuck Schumer called a US Airways flight attendant "bitch" under his breath after being asked to shut off his cell phone at the start of a flight.
I suppose that one should not be too surprised at a politician using profanity. When Dick Cheney told Sen. Patrick Leahy to "go fuck yourself", he kind of lowered the bar for future political discourse.
However, what is more amusing is the response of Schumer's spokesperson when Schumer was busted:

Schumer's spokesman later apologized for the incident, say that the senator "made an off-the-cuff comment under his breath that he shouldn't have made, and he regrets it."

This is a classic example of a non-apology apology. Schumer should either have said "sorry" or said nothing. By issuing this statement, he merely comes across as a classic egotistical weasel.
Larry Bossidy, in one of his excellent books on leadership, explains that when he was the CEO of Allied Signal, he used to take candidates for leadership positions out to dinner, and see how they treated other people in the restaurant. If they were rude to the servers, then he did not want them in the corporation because they were not nice people. As my father once told me, good manners cost nothing. Chuck Schumer scores an Epic Fail on the Larry Bossidy scale for sure.

From time to time, Formula 1 teams have been bilked or short-changed by sponsors. The nature of F1, with its glamour, glitz and seemingly unbelievable sums of money, makes it an easy haven for swindlers and "characters" of all types.
This year's sponsorship scandal is The Sponsorship That Never Was. It centers around Brawn GP, who claim to have concluded a very large (130 million Euros) multi-year deal with the German corporation Henkel. Henkel has been a sponsor before - they bought space on the McLaren cars for a couple of years recently. However, they then left F1.
The deal was supposedly concluded in July 2009, at a time when Brawn GP was performing well on the racetrack (Jenson Button had won 6 races in the first part of the season) and the team was looking to parlay its on-track success to sign long-term deals to allow it to continue beyond the 2009 season, the budget for which came mostly from Honda.
However, it now seems that the sponsorship deal was not what some of the parties think it was. Henkel is now claiming that the people supposedly negotiating on its behalf were (a) not authorized to conclude a deal of this size without board-level approval, and (b) that key documents purporting to commit Henkel to the deal with Brawn GP contained the forged signature of the CEO of Henkel, making them invalid. On this basis, Henkel has commenced legal action in Germany to have the contract declared null and void.
This news has become public only after a 75% stake in Brawn GP was sold to Mercedes, which is renaming the team Mercedes Grand Prix.
There are several interesting aspects to the story. Firstly, given the vertical nature of decision-making in most German corporations, there is no way a decision of this kind, involving the expenditure of in excess of 30 million Euros a year, could have been taken without Supervisory Board and CEO approval by Henkel. If Brawn GP were presented with a letter supposedly signed by the CEO, this might have been convincing, but I would personally have wanted evidence that it represented the outcome of a Supervisory Board meeting.
I do not believe that Mercedes were ignorant of the issue prior to purchasing the majority stake in the Brawn team. The CEO of Mercedes and the CEO of Henkel apparently discussed the contract in September 2009, at which time Henkel advised Mercedes that as far as they were concerned, no such deal existed. Mercedes therefore knew about the issue before concluding the deal to buy the 75% stake in Brawn GP.
However, if this deal (which would, given current sponsorship rates in F1, have given Henkel a lot of car space - even title sponsor billing) does not exist, and Henkel can convince the courts in Germany that it is null and void, Mercedes GP and Mercedes-Benz has a large budgetary hole to fill in 2010 and beyond.
All of this explains the recent interest by Mercedes GP in hiring Michael Schumacher. If you have a 35 million Euro shortfall in your budget, what better way to plug it than by signing the most popular German sportsman of the last 40-50 years? Henkel might even be persuaded to stump up some cash in 2010 for space on a car with Michael Schumacher driving it. Signing Schumacher out of retirement is one of the few ways in which Mercedes could hope to bring large amounts of income to Mercedes GP. The sums of money involved in F1 are still too large for Mercedes to have a hope of finding one corporation with 35 million Euros not allocated for marketing spend in 2010. However, it is possible that 5 or 6 German corporations could be persuaded to stump up 4-5 million Euros each for a car driven by Michael Schumacher in 2010. Mercedes always wanted to have Schumacher drive for them in Formula 1, but their failure to lock him up contractually in the early 90's when he drove for them in sportscars allowed him to escape to Benetton and thence to Ferrari.
I therefore regard the affair as another example of the old adage "in Formula 1, just follow the money". Brawn GP looks to have been fooled into signing what turned out to be a non-existent deal with Henkel (the perpetrators of the deal from the Henkel side are now in deep water, with criminal charges for fraud and embezzlement likely), which leaves Mercedes with a large budgetary hole to fill for the next 2-3 years. What better way to fill it than by luring Michael Schumacher out of retirement?

Over at Ed Brayton's excellent blog "Dispatches From The Culture Wars", part of the indubitably excellent Scienceblogs aggregation, we find this discussion based on yet another report concerning the low reliability of eyewitness accounts of anything, but especially crimes. Having read an article about the crash of the DH-110 at the 1952 Farnborough Air Show, where virtually none of the eyewitness accounts were correct, I was already attuned to the fundamental issues with "live" accounts of events. There is a similar correlation with the Kennedy assassination, where numerous eye-witnesses provided a baffling array of contradictory accounts.
This topic is also explored in detail in the book "Mistakes Were Made, (but not by ME)", which is one of my favorite books of 2009. The book points out that the criminal justice system is deeply resistant to any attempts at reform, because the culture surrounding its practitioners is one of asserted infallibility, even in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary.