standards are sliding... are you sure that's not a Harvard A cup?

I have designed this post to be short musings on 4 of the more counterintuitive, bizarre, or disturbing items of personal or national news in the past several weeks, mostly because none of them are full-fledged enough to make their own postings.


4) My grandparents had friends from their synagogue who were amongst the first people involved in sex therapy. My grandmother's reply? "I don't know why everyone makes such a fuss about sex... it's all over in 10 minutes, anyway."

3) We've frisked you, now we need to ask if there's any chance you're pregnant.

I agree with the general consensus we need an overhaul of airport security measures. Any changes which avoid stereotypes, taking off my shoes, arbitrary decisions about what constitutes a liquid (peanut butter? I recently had it confiscated until I divulged a "medical condition" of low blood sugar), being asked to "volunteer" for a pat-down at the gate (I bit my tongue to keep from saying, "What happens if I elect not to volunteer?") will be difficult to implement, if perhaps desireable given other constraints.

If we're looking for security measures which raise our degree of certainty that any person or bag which passes through cannot blow up the airplane, we have a long way to go. For one, we still have no good way to determine which liquids are safe and which are one rag away from a malotov cocktail. Instating full-body scanners (read: a "soft" X-ray machine) in our airports brings to the table several important issues about civil liberties. Now, more often than not, I choose to advocate the position of "right to privacy/no stripsearch without a warrant" to my death in situations such as these, but this wasn't my initial reaction while musing on mass use of X-ray machines on passengers. I worried about the medical effects repeated and regular use of this imaging technology administered by someone who is not a medical expert (indeed, the policymakers are not medical experts, though they are consulted by doctors). For example, will the security personnel ask every woman if she has any chance of being pregnant? Will proper protective clothing be provided (as is necessary for women who receive x-rays in medical facilities)? Will frequent fliers have alternate choices if they are concerned about the levels of radiation they'd be subjected to if they went through the body scanners 4 times a week? ABC news quotes the director of the TSA as saying 2500 scans are needed to increase your risk of cancer by even a marginal amount, though other sources say pregnant women could be scanned 200 times without risk. I find it disturbing that these machines are being deployed without sufficient testing. You need 25-30 years to accurately estimate the medical repercussions of such devices on humans; repeated exposure regularly gives cancer decades later, not months.

2) Today's hottest game /reality tv show: Libido, Fact or Fiction?

Just a the name of the TV show sliding across the screen left me slackjawed in a Thai restaurant in Phoenix. Great ginger asparagus, though, even if one couldn't account for their taste in television.

1) Iran is still claiming their nuclear efforts are peaceful?! Are you fucking kidding me?

Ok, I guess I missed it. But I figured sometime in the last 4 or 5 years of refusing to have outside sources aid in the enrichment of uranium, kicking out UN inspectors, refusing to give accurate information (and giving insultingly false information) about their nuclear development program, Iran had given up that ghost. I mean, really... if you only care about energy, allow Russia to enrich the uranium for you. Then you won't have to spend all the money building shitty enrichment facilities, burying them underground, pretending you don't want the world to know about them, or pretending the security of these compounds is such that no one who is not authorized could gain access to them. No wonder, though... schooling is only compulsory through 6th grade (see the Iranian Embassy site) and only those who pass an exam are elligble for middle school. If we had a bunch of middle schoolers running our defense program, I suppose it might look something like that, too.