Things I didn’t know.

Lunch in Houston is done.  Waiting on the plane to Clearwater.  Somehow, I figured out how to turn off the vocals on Windows Media Player 12.  Listening to Maxwell Murder (Rancid) without lyrics was something I would have relished back when I played guitar.  I don’t do that anymore, but that’s because my guitars were one of the first things to go when I went broke. 

A few hours later, I figure it out.  Still in Houston, waiting on the plane.  I charge my phone to full at a charging station and it dies to half in less than an hour.  Wonderful.  So I’m eating the laptop battery to charge the phone so the phone can give me directions to where I need to go in Clearwater.  Which makes me think I should find where I’m going ahead of time.  And Google maps on my phone solves the problem in just a few minutes.  I think I will reboot my phone, though.  It shouldn’t be dying this quickly.

Airports are interesting in that they are slight microcosms of the rest of the world, just thrown all together in a compact, foot-mobile space.  I read an article by an Israeli responsible for security at Ben-Gurren airport.  And I begin to realize just how unsafe every airport I’ve been to is.  Airports are designed to provide the illusion of security to those who aren’t into dealing death.  There’s lots of people being very hands on and very invasive, and as Americans we’ve taken it for granted that is what security means.  But it’s security that doesn’t really secure anything.

A couple of suicide vests in those wonderfully long lines could take out hundreds before the person ever hits the so called “security”.  And if the bombers did what they did in Beiruit with the bombing on the Marine barracks, then you’ve got a giant clusterfuck of a situation where hundreds are dead.  But then, the security was always a knee jerk reaction and was never meant to create real security.  That takes different aims and approaches. 

I’ve long contended that we failed miserably after 9/11 and we basically gave the terrorists everything they could have wanted.  I was shouted down, but I don’t think anyone ever studied the aims of terrorists. 

I don’t remember the manual, but I seem to remember the aims of terrorism to be a few of the following: money, awareness, change behavior, kill enemies.  Well, when we change our behavior and everyone and their dog knows who Al Queda is, I’d say the terrorists won.  That’s not to say we killed a lot of them in the process, but they still won.  They got us to react to them permanently while they react to us momentarily.