Mardin Amin faces three years in jail for “felony disorderly conduct” resulting from his attempt to carry a penis pump onto an airplane. He was traveling with his mother when a Department of Homeland Security officer noticed a strange object in his bag and asked him what it was. Not wanting his mom to know what he was packing, he leaned over and whispered “It’s a pump.” The DHS agent heard “It’s a bomb” and these days that’s enough to lock someone away.

I wonder how many years in jail I would get for reenacting my favorite scence from Spinal Tap.

When I read that someone had been prevented from boarding a plane because he was wearing a t-shirt with Arabic writing, I assumed it was a minor incident at small local airport involving a confused baggage screener.

I was wrong.

Raed Jarrar was waiting to board a plane at New York’s Kennedy Airport with a shirt that read “We will not be silent” in both English and Arabic. He was approached by both airline staff and government officials as he was having breakfast after he had cleared security. Jarrar was told that some passengers had complained about his shirt and that he would not be permitted on the flight while he was wearing it.

“We will not be silent” is apparently the slogan of an organization who opposes some of the Bush administration’s policies targeting Americans of Middle Eastern descent. I don’t know anything about this guy or his organization, but that’s not the point. This is pretty basic freedom of speech here.

Now, in a society that understands freedom of speech, those confused by the writing might have asked him what it means. Sure, there will always be nut-jobs who are freaked out by anything different, but when these people complain to the cops they should be told “It’s a free country” or perhaps the cop could ask the t-shirt wearer about the meaning and then reassure the nervous passenger who was frightened by the shirt.

Unfortunately, none of this happened. He was trying to make a statement that people did not want to hear, so was not permitted to travel.

I’ve always felt that freedom of speech, religion and association are profoundly unnatural concepts. They go against so much of human psychology. That is why such freedoms need to be not only indoctrinated into us at an early age, but encoded into clear, strictly enforced laws to prevent get-reactions like this.

An MSNBC poll showing 60% of readers consider the airline’s actions approprate is not a good sign for American freedom.

The ultimate irony is that these kinds of arbitrary restrictions and ad-hoc rules are always justified as necessary steps to “protect our freedom.”

You can read the whole exchange here if you like. Kind of interesting how the detective assumed Jarrar hated New York.

Responding to calls of increased ethnic diversity, the producers of Survivor just announced, the next season of Survivor will divide people into tribes by races. The island will contain Black, White, Latino and Asian tribes whose members will struggle with each other for dominance before trying to drive the other tribes off the island.

That’s certainly reality TV in the sense that the situation applies to many LA neighborhoods. I suppose this message of tolerance and inclusion is what America is most receptive to these days.

I just got back from spending a week or so in the US. I’m perfectly comfortable in either Japan or the US, but recently political news in the US has gotten strange. I simply can’t watch TV news there. It seems like the anchors are all very upset about something and are often practically yelling at the viewers. Real people simply do not talk that way.

Another gem was catching Ann Coulter on Leno complaining that the mainstream media was somehow preventing her from explaining the inaccuracies in the statements of the 9-11 widows. What struck me odd about this is that:

1. At no time did she actually mention any of these inaccuracies, she just complained that somehow she was being prevented from talking about them.
2. This woman has a syndicated column that appears in over 100 newspapers, is a regular commentator on Fox news, has the best-selling book in the US at the moment, and is appearing on the talk-show circuit complaining her views are suppressed by the mainstream media. Ann Coulter *is* the mainstream media.

It’s theater of the bizarre.

BusRadio, a Massachusetts-based start-up, has discovered a brief interval where children and not being marketed to; the bus ride to school. BusRadio installs their radios free of charge into the buses and then “provides advertiser’s [sic] with a unique and effective way to reach the highly sought after teen and tween market.”

I’m of two minds on this. The entrepreneur in me slaps myself on the forehead and says “Damn! I wish I’d thought of that.” The human being inside me wishes we could let kids be kids for a few more years before turning them into proper, well-behaved consumers.

Ah, those irrepressible, hopelessly repressed conservatives!

When Las Vega’s Pink Taco restaurant announced they opening a branch in Scottsdale, they encountered opposition because this name is supposedly slang for vagina. That much has been in the news, but two things struck me.

1. OK. I’m a man of world. I’ve been around. (nudge nudge, wink wink). I admit that the term “pink taco” could be slang for a vagina, but neither I nor any of my worldly friends, nor some rather creative and entertaining Google searching could find a single incidence of it actually being used in that way. It’s not slang, it’s classic Freudian projection.
2. There is no controversy here! This is not news! There were a total of four emails (three of then anonymous) received by the city council. Four emails, probably from the same person, does not a controversy make.

Next year they plan on opening a seafood restaurant called “The Bearded Clam”.

Sometimes I have to simply throw up my hands and admit that I don’t understand America anymore. For the second year in a row all major television networks have refused to run an ad by the United Church of Christ

I don’t get it. I mean I really don’t I wrote about the last ad a little more than a year ago. Both ads show gays and minorities being excluded from other churches and welcomed into theirs. Their tag line is “God doesn’t reject people. Neither do we.” and they seem to be a pleasant enough group of people.

Last year CBS and UPN explained frankly that since President Bush was pushing for a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage the UCC’s ad was inappropriate. This year the networks declined because other other, but unnamed, religions might find the ad offensive. The ads themselves are pretty funny and rather harmless.

It blows my mind. In this age of Jerry Springer, all of the networks are refusing to run paid ads because they consider a message of tolerance and inclusion to be too controversial for American society.

“There is no way that praying with nuns is gonna cause you asthma.” And then I prayed. And I said, “Lord, what’s wrong with her?” I just prayed silently. And the Lord said, “Ask about her sex life.”
— Pat Robertson

Really. I swear! I can’t make up stuff this good. You can read the full transcript here.

My friend (who happens to be a hot Japanese girl) told me of an unsettling experience she had when coming back from New York to Tokyo. She was clearing security when one of the TSA officers pulled her the to side to rifle through her belongings while asking her a few questions.

“So you are flying directly to Tokyo?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Do you live in Japan or here in New York?”

“I live in Japan.”

“So, how often do you come to New York?”

“A few times a year.”

“I see, and where do you usually stay when you are here?”

“Different hotels. It depends.”

“Well, you are very pretty. I’d like to see you next time you come to New York.”

My friend stood their speechless, until the brave defender of the homeland continued.

“Well, here’s my card. Be sure to call me next time you are in New York.”

Sheesh! It’s not just that it’s an embarrassingly lame pick-up attempt, it’s disgusting and appalling. While this TSA loser searches desperately for a woman who loves a man in uniform, Abdul Ammar Kaboom is walking past him with a bomb.

I have got to stop reading the news. Each mouse click is slowly undermining my faith in mankind.

A recent Gallup poll showed that 53% of all Americans believe that “God created man exactly how Bible describes it.” Interestingly, this is almost the same percentage of Americans that believe Saddam Husein had ties to Al Qaeda.

It would have been even more informative if Gallup has asked those 53% which version of Biblical creation they support since the Bible contains two contradictory versions. But no matter.

According to Gallup the rejection of evolution and acceptance of literal creationism was strongest among regular churchgoers, those lacking higher education and Republicans.

It gets more depressing every time I go back. I was checking out the social sciences section of a bookstore in Dallas and discovered a little turd called Do as I Say, Not as I Do.

The book is basically personal attacks on a dozen famous “liberals”, with one chapter per person.

I didn’t read the book so I have no idea whether what he writes is true or not. What is interesting about this book, however, is why people buy it. The author does not debunk or even explain the views of the people he attacks and I doubt those who purchase this book have any intention of reading any of the works of the people criticized here.

The only purpose of literature like this is to make the two minute hate easier.

I’m packing my spurs and heading to Dallas for a few days. I’ve been to Texas a number of times, but I have to admit that I’ve never quite felt at home there. It’s certainly not that Texans aren’t affable folk. In fact, Texans are extraordinarily, vocally and (by Asian standards) rather violently friendly.

The moment that defined Texas society for me happened about six years ago. I was having dinner with a few of my friends and some of their friends. When I mentioned that I had just flown in that morning from San Francisco one of our party blurted out

“San Francisco?! I hear there’s a lot of fags in San Francisco.”

An expectant few seconds passed until I realized they were waiting for my answer “Uh, yeah. Yeah there are.”

That seemed to satisfy everyone and the various conversation resumed.

Perhaps things have gotten better since then.

Recently I’ve been considering politics in terms of game theory, and an interesting idea occurred to me. The US Constitution was established with three branches of government each keeping the powers of the others in check. The system does not depend on altruism. All organizations naturally want to expand their power, and the law is set up so that an expansion of one branch’s power would result in a loss of another’s. It’s a pretty good system.

What this structure did not anticipate, however, is that over the past 50 years the traditional Executive/Legislative/Judicial and Federal/State power struggles have been replaced almost entirely by a Republican/Democrat power struggle. Examples of this can be seen everywhere from congress largely giving away its authority to declare war to the executive, to the party-line 2000 Supreme Court decision that ordered Florida to halt the ballot recount, to the current consensus that a Republican congress will not impeach Bush even for continued violations of federal law and judicial oversight regarding wiretaps.

The bad news is that game theory does not seem to indicate that a two-way Republican/Democrat power balance is stable. The most likely result is that one side wins completely and the game ends.

The other day, I was talking with some friends about the absurdity of the US No-Fly List. Simple statistics show how ridiculous the whole thing is.

Let’s use the following assumptions.

1. Government bureaucrats are 5x more accurate than random in creating a profile of the next airline terrorist. Actually, this is far too generous. Statistical profiling in other kinds of crime is not this good, and since there have been so few hijackings, it’s unlikely we will be able to build a better profile of hijackers than we are of say, drug users or armed robbers. The best profiles in these areas claim only about 2x or 3x random.

   In fact, considering that two Congressmen, a Senator, a 72-year-old nun and numerous children under five have already wound up on the list, 5x random is clearly ridiculous, but I want to show how poorly the list performs with even the most wildly optimistic assumptions.

2. There are 100 evil-doers that the police don’t know about lurking in American and planing to blow up airplanes. Again, I suspect this is a huge over-estimate.
3. The no-fly list has 80,000 names on it. No one knows the exact number, but this represents the upper range of what has been reported.
4. There are 300 million people in the United States.

Now, when a would-be terrorist tries to board a plane, what are the odds that his name is on the list? If the list were truly random, the chance would be

However, with the government’s improved profiling, the odds become 0.13%. In other words, even with our overly-optimistic assumptions, our future terrorist is 99.87% likely to be able to simply walk on the plane.

Let’s take a bit further. The odds of there being any future terrorists at all on the No-Fly List can be calculated as a simple binomial distribution

where

   n = The number of terrorists = 100
   p = probability that an individual terrorist is on the list = 0.0013

This equation reduces to n*p and we see that even using extremely optimistic assumptions there is only a 13% chance that the No-Fly List contains the name of even a single future terrorist.

There is a 87% chance that the list doesn’t contain even one terrorist!

But it gets worse still. Even if freedom-loving Americans are willing to give up some of their freedoms for a 0.13% increase in safety, the odds just aren’t that good.

For the No-Fly List to have any positive effect on our safety all of the following must be true:

1. The plot must involve purchasing a ticket.
2. The terrorist must buy the ticket using his real name.
3. Not only must this terrorist’s name be on the list (0.13% chance) but the name has to have been added after the last time this terrorist tried to board an airplane. Otherwise he would know he is on the no-fly list, and one of his buddies could take his place.
4. The plot must not be detected by any of the other safety measures in place. (Otherwise, it would not be the list that was responsible.)

These events are overwhelmingly improbable. Why are we wasting time and resources on something that is not only completely useless, but inconvenience tens of thousands of innocent Americans?

Back in Winchester I saw two Hummers with “Support Our Troops” stickers on the back. Something about that makes we just want to bitch-slap the driver. I can respect a 55 mpg Toyota Prius owner telling me to support the troops, but a 9mpg Hummer owner? Get real.

To make matters worse it turns out these stickers aren’t even stickers they are magnets. That way they won’t damage the finish and can be easily removed once supporting the troops is no longer fashionable.

The gas-guzzling Hummer with a “Support Our Troops” magnet on the back. I can’t think of a more apt metaphor for America’s view of the Iraq war.

This incredibly creepy and I don’t know exactly why.

A company called LifeGem will create an artificial diamond out of the remains of your dearly departed and mount it in a ring or a pendant so that “Love lives on”. Apparently some people find this appealing.

Ooooooookay. I mean, why not just wear a shrunken head around your neck?

Both sides have come out to play. On the same day I read about Rush Limbaugh interviewing Dick Cheney and on the next page was a piece about the stalled investigation into Rush’s drug use.

Rush’s few months at the posh detox center seems to have worked well for him and he’s back to his jolly, red-faced ranting self. I’m happy for him. Seriously, I’ve seen too many people who have had their lives messed up by their drug addictions. It’s not something you would wish on anyone.

Unfortunately, neither Rush or his listeners seem to have learned the lesson here. No, not “Just say no.” The real lesson.

Drug treatment works better then incarceration.

Sure, drugs can really mess up a kids life, but not nearly as bad as spending five years in jail can. No one in their right mind can claim that things would have worked out better for Rush if he had been sent to a state prison for five years under mandatory sentencing laws. The phrase “Squeal like a pig!” comes to mind.

Of course, reality can not penetrate the mindset of a fanatic — even when it is based on direct experience. What are the odds that Rush and his listeners will learn from his first-hand experience and begin advocating treatment programs as a less expensive and more effective alternative to incarceration?

Nah! Rush and his listeners will undoubtedly continue to demonize drug users and insist on stiffer and stuffer penalties for those caught with illegal drugs, and probably never even be aware of the contradiction.

The ACLU is suing the US Justice Department over the Patriot Act. No one knows exactly what the lawsuit is about because the Justice Department will not allow the ACLU’s filings to be publicly disclosed and has banned the ACLU from discussing the details. The portions of the filing that have been disclosed have been heavily redacted (blacked out as to be unreadable.)

Now, to me the whole idea that the government has the right to ban the disclosure of the public challenge from a non-governmental source to the constitutionality of federal law strikes me as profoundly anti-American. However, the Justice department has steadfastly insisted this secrecy is needed for reasons of National Security. (As is explaining exactly why they are a threat to national security.)

When the Justice Department tried to redact a quotation from a Supreme Count decision, however, that particular redaction was overtured. The passage in question was

“The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.”

Orwell and Vonnegut together could not have come up with something this absurd.

The government is abusing its power to classify information to classify information warning of the danger of government abusing its power to classify information.

More information here

I read an article the other day that talk about the fact that the US military has used over 1.8 billion rounds of small caliber ammunition in Iraq. It seems that domestic industry can’t keep up with demand and the US is turning to overseas suppliers. The article talked about the hollowing out of American industry and its threat to national security. OK, but one thing really jumped out at me.

1.8 billion freaking rounds!

Let’s look at this number a minute. US Army spokesmen estimate that there are 20,000 insurgents in Iraq. It’s harder to say how many insurgents have been killed. All sides play with these numbers far too much. So let’s say that 5,000 actual insurgents have been killed by the US military. How many of those were killed with small arms rather than bombs, artillery or missiles? I have no idea, so lets split the difference and say half or 2,500. This means it takes 720,000 rounds of ammunition to kill a single insurgent.

Looked at another way, since the standard 5.56 NATO round weighs 15.12 grams US forces have fired off more than 30,000 tons of small arms ammo, and it takes more than 12 tons of ammunition to bring down an insurgent. When we look at just the projectile weight — the part of the round that actually flys (presumably) in the direction of the target — it takes about three tons of flying metal to send an insurgent to meet his maker.

My new passport arrived recently. The visa pages have a watermark showing various state seals. Interestingly they altered the Great Seal of Virginia so it reads “The State of Virginia.”

You would think the US Department of State would know that Virginia is not a State but a Commonwealth.