About Federal charlatans...

I've said it before, I'll say it again:

http://coldservings.livejournal.com/40643.html

(Yes, it's a "Godwin". I still stand by it.)

July is soon. If you're going to make noise, start shouting loudly and eloquently right now. There are probably a lot of gifted and powerful fliers who'd join you if they knew it was happening.

To be honest, I expected there to be a sh*t-list. Who empowers a gang of thugs and asks them to tie their hands when there is nothing to make them do so?

And what do you think will happen when Obamacare is implemented, and treatment approval will have government oversight? There isn't much point to being power hungry if you aren't going to use it.

I knew a guy that actually went to Israel in '73 to help them fight the war.

He gets coded "SSSSS" on the boarding pass by the fed check, every time he flies.

If you still have your boarding passes, check in the lower right for a code. And if you have old ones, see if it changed between the time you flew before and after you and thugella met.

Of course there is a shit list. I am on the IRS's, we get audited yearly without fail. I dno't even know how we got on there. You, though, we know why.

But I'm thinking, if you got the snarl on video next time (wishful thinking) you might have standing for legal action.

In the meantime, keep posting these asshats names.

> In the meantime, keep posting these asshats
> names.

This is not legal advice. I am not a lawyer. It's not even friendly advice... I'm not very friendly. But M4's idea has a lot to recommend it!

There's been a explosion of security employment in America over the last ten years. Please note: This does NOT mean you're any safer than you were before you started paying their salaries.

All of these assholes seem to have the presumption that they can drift facelessly back into their private lives at the end of their shifts, and bitch about the government's incompetence like the rest of us. But with a very few exceptions, this is not how things worked during the first two hundred years of our lives. You know who the cops were and you knew who the soldiers were.

Why shouldn't TSA personnel be identified for the public, even those who don't molest advice columnists? Why shouldn't they feel what their work means to the community in the rest of their lives?

We honor soldiers routinely. Some of us are eager to give cops the benefit of the doubt. Don't TSA agents have that same fate?

      (Thinking out loud here... Please discuss.)

Your writing on this issue would be a lot stronger if you would get rid of all the name dropping, and quit mentioning your dying/dead friend Cathy Seipp.

I'm sorry you lost a friend, and glad you took care of her, but most people of any age have gone through that and don't mention it in any and all conversations.

Just be a good person. Quietly. Don't constantly seek recognition...it negates every nice thing you've ever done.

I enjoy reading about how she took care of her friend. I liked reading Cathy Seipp when she was alive. If anything, I wish she'd write more about her. I gather you were not a fan of Cathy Seipp, and would rather the name just fade into obscurity, much like yours will when you die.

Oh, and Cathy Seipp. Did I mention Cathy Seipp was a talented writer? That Amy was a friend of hers? That I enjoy when she writes about her friend Cathy Seipp?

Lastly, Cathy Seipp. We need to mention her name more often around here. Especially if it annoys you.

Cathy Seipp.

Maybe I'm having some sort of brain fart that's preventing me from connecting the dots, so bear with me.

Assuming there's a shit list (I'm not doubting it per se, as for years I was "randomly" selected for extra searches, most likely due to the fact that a former friend became a meth-head criminal and used my name as her alias during several arrests. My checked luggage would even mysteriously vanish and reappear hours or days later. Everytime I flew.).

What I don't understand, is the benefit they get from searching you everytime you fly? From your blogs, I get the impression that you create quite a scene whenever it happens. This means everytime they search you, more and more of the public is exposed to a person who is actively fighting for her rights and the rights of her fellow countrymen. So even with the repeated satisfaction of patting you down, doesn't this really backfire on them in a way? If I wanted to enforce compliance, I think I'd do everything in my power to keep the loudmouths quiet. Searching them makes them whimper, and not searching them sends them through without a scene.

What am I missing here?

What am I missing here?

The fact that its not about benifiting the TSA, its about subjegating the public

Hey snoo snoo look up look way up. See the header and the words

amy alkon, syndicated advice columnist, journalist, author and blogger

Nice fucking hint - it is her site. She can damn well do what she wants to do with it.

Yes some topic do get brought up again and again. Do not like it go somewhere else.

I can understand some lists and using history for security purposes. Yet at some point those lists become malicious even against logic.

The new black list, those that speak up against the regime. Now shut up and be a good citizen.

"This means everytime they search you, more and more of the public is exposed to a person who is actively fighting for her rights and the rights of her fellow countrymen."

Congressman Pete Stark, 2010: "The Federal Government can do most anything in this country." He meant it seriously. And that is an attitude that prevails in an increasing percentage of all authority across the spectrum.

What I'm trying to say is, even if there is no new major downturn in the political climate, even if things 'only' continue down the path already paved for another few years, any efforts to regain freedom will soon be too little too late.

The 'powers-that-be' may be counting on it being already too late. I guess we'll see.

> Oh, and Cathy Seipp. Did I mention Cathy Seipp
> was a talented writer? That Amy was a friend
> of hers? That I enjoy when she writes about her
> friend Cathy Seipp?

Y'know, first of all, (if I understand correctly, and who knows if I do,) Seipp's influence was perhaps the most pivotal of AA's career, beyond school and the usual formative things. I have a couple guys like that, but the risks they encouraged were not so great, though the rewards have been spectacular. They thrive... I saw one over the weekend. But if they were gone I'd talk about them a LOT. Amy's had other friends she talks about a lot but of whom we (I?) know nothing... So what? People do that.

I mean, I know what you guys are getting at:

> Don't constantly seek recognition...it
> negates every nice thing you've ever done.

I grok, as you hepcats like to say:

In the past, Spielberg was a pell-mell philanthropist, and he was eager to have his name prominently attached to his gifts. These days, he is far more circumspect. ''A rabbi sat me down,'' he explains, ''and told me, 'You know, if you put your name on everything, it goes unrecognized by God.' I said, 'Really?' So over the last 10 years, 80 percent of what I give is anonymous and the other 20 percent is only where my name can help attract other moneys.''

> don't mention it in any and all conversations.

That's a really, really disproportionate reading, no matter how many mentions there have been.

First, it betrays a nearly obsessive, note-taking, Cliff-notes-reading approach to this blog. (Even to Yerz Troolee. M'kay? Look who's talkin'.)

Second, all writers have things they think about a lot. A couple of weeks ago, some Twitter snipers went after the NY Post's Amy Peyser for her almost pathological reliance on jokes about prison rape; It was not pretty. George Will writes too often of William of Orange; it is not interesting. Memories of a flesh-and-blood friend, especially one with such a famously demanding and sculpted personality, are hardly a torment.

Third, and this maybe part of the second, Seipp was at concentric center of the 9/11-era explosion of blogging in Los Angeles. Blogs themselves have splintered and clustered in a lot of ways since then, but these fora in this city in those times were more dynamic than anything I've seen in telecommunication across a lifetime, and that includes my career... And I've worked for some size-hyooge and smokin'-hot networks. Part of it was probably a Hollywood influence of savvy and ambition, and part of it probably came from the strength of the talents themselves, luckily assembled here.

But a friend who was part of that would probably burn into one's soul pretty deeply.

Eighth (or whatever) and lastly, we are not actually aquainted here. It's a blog, not a soul, and in neither case a solicitation for that kind of correction. No matter how intensely, often or persistently we read each other's words, and no matter how much pleasure we take in deploying our darling insights and kibble-fed grievances, no matter how much we like to think we've identified patterns that the typist himself is not aware of, we do not know each other. We don't know what the other's company is like in what used to me called "real life". We certainly don't know much about each other's friends and beloveds, or what topics appear in their time together.

Twelvethly, and to conclude, this calls to mind old point about people who write at no cost to us on the internet, bloggers or commenters, and those who so fastidiously complain about them. If you're certain you know better what you'd like to be reading, why don't go read it? Or even better, go write it... While investing no more in your present disappointment?

Andrea Peyser. Sorry. They all look alike to me.