Anyone that's flying on Wednesday.

[Cain]

Also, the protests against the Republican Party in St. Pauls in 2008, and the followup raids in 2010 were justified on anti-terrorism grounds.

I would say this makes my discipline look bad, but then I recall no-one who actually knows a damn about terrorism is anything more than a consultant or spy, and I feel a little better.

[Cain]

Heh.

I'm seeing a lot of implication in liberal circles lately that complaining about TSA screening methods means you are a Koch-backed Teabagger.

This is just like 2003, only in bizarro world, and more retarded.

[hooplala]

Heh.

I'm seeing a lot of implication in liberal circles lately that complaining about TSA screening methods means you are a Koch-backed Teabagger.

This is just like 2003, only in bizarro world, and more retarded.

Liberals are becoming almost as ridiculous as Republicans during the Bush administration.

[Remington]

[Jasper]

  Saved.


So, I've done a bit of research and I think you could protect yourself from the worst of the x rays by wearing a lead lined hat with resistance of 2mm Pb at 125 Kv.

Which is to say, you would need an equivalent of 2 millimetres of lead lining your head.  The worst of the radiation is purported to come down at the top of the head, at 20 times the intensity the TSA reports for their instruments. 

I tried to find a faraday cage method instead, but was unsuccessful in determining if that would be practical, based on the scant data available to me.

[Triple Zero]

What? So far I've read, the dangers of that scanner are as good as negligible? Got a link to where it says it could actually pose risk?

[Jasper]

Link:

http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/post/2010/07/full-body-scanners-pose-cancer-risk-at-airports-us-scientists-warn/98552/1

The risk is low on an individual basis, but still.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I'm just not gonna fly, and wait for the hilarious reports of cancer clusters among TSA employees and flight staff.

[Eater of Clowns]

I will readily say that I know nothing about radiation effects.  At all.  The way I see it, though, is that if these deliver a tiny amount of radiation small enough to be deemed harmless, that's still more than people were being exposed to before.  So yeah, it might be less harmful than other devices producing radiation, but if you're combining it with all the other things that give off harmless radiation, how many times before it adds up?

Like mercury in fish.  Small fish eat mercury runoff and aren't harmed, bigger fish eat lots of smaller fish, biggest fish eats lots of bigger fish and suddenly you have a high mercury concentration.  Bioaccumulation motherfuckers.

Or



Edited to remove microwaves because I don't understand things, and really if I replaced radiation with magic in this post it could only serve to improve my comprehension of it.

[Don Coyote]

Microwaves are non-ionizing radiation. X-rays are ionizing radiation. Non-ionizing radiations can cause burns. Ionizing radiations can also cause mutagenic effects.

[Eater of Clowns]

Microwaves are non-ionizing radiation. X-rays are ionizing radiation. Non-ionizing radiations can cause burns. Ionizing radiations can also cause mutagenic effects.

Okay I'll take microwaves out of there because it's not important to the message, thanks.  The point still stands that while these machines might emit harmless amounts of radiation, we still don't know how harmless they are when topping off the rest of the radiation we're already exposed to also deemed to be at a harmless level.

[Jasper]

I'm not prepared to devote the amount of time it would require to have an impact on whether backscatter machines are used in airports, so the best solution I can come up with is to figure out how to minimize my risk.  That is, best I can figure, by getting a hat with a few millimetres of lead lining.

[Triple Zero]

Okay I'll take microwaves out of there because it's not important to the message, thanks.  The point still stands that while these machines might emit harmless amounts of radiation, we still don't know how harmless they are when topping off the rest of the radiation we're already exposed to also deemed to be at a harmless level.

Yes. This is already taken into account in any statement about possible risk of radiation exposure.

If they were to ignore the cumulative effects, the radiation would be 100% harmless, because nobody gets cancer from one backscatter scan.

However, people get radiation from all sorts of sources (as well as generally in the background of everywhere--thank you Tchernobyl), and it's a certain amount of cumulative radiation exposed to over a year that they can correlate with X% risk of cancer or other radiation-related illnesses.

So while you have the right idea, you would really do well on reading up a littlebit about radiation. Just start on Wikipedia, the basics are easy enough to understand.

[Cain]

Just remember to never trust Greenpeace when they start talking about radiation.

[Cain]

Liberals are becoming almost as ridiculous as Republicans during the Bush administration.

Yeah.  They're not quite there yet, but it may only be a matter of time.

Perfect examples here, from the ever-reliable comment section of Balloon-Juice:

If your name is Erin Andrews or similar celebrity with similar concerns, I might be able to understand not wanting to get ones goods exposed.

Everyone else? Shut up and get scanned.

Just for the record, there is no question that this is Drudge-created.

January 2010

http://www.infowars.com/drudge-big-sis-wants-to-see-under-your-clothes/

August 2010

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201008050012

There was a June sally as well, but I can't find it now.

As Drum noted, "Liberals have been badly rolled on this."

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/11/living-matt-drudges-world

Too bad the President and Napolitano are the only people who have the balls to stand up to Drudge and the brains to see this fake populism coming from a mile away.

Well, separate from your personal likes or dislikes (which, really, you can see are probably not going to be reflected in policy for a country of 250 million people, right?), Drudge saw what this was and pushed it.

Pisses me off no end that the supposed political geniuses of the left blogosphere ate it up. Political f'in malpractice indeed. When did it become "liberal values" to demean civil service workers and call them freaking perverts, to push the meme that govt can't do anything right, to follow a line of argument that so obviously leads to "well, let's just pat down the dark people" that you'd really really have to be blind not to see it.

At what point does the frustrated left look in the mirror and say, "Part of the problem is that we suck as advocates"? I'd settle for a moratorium on, "Here's what the President should do—easy peasy" pieces.

@jwb:

    So the question is do you believe that these scanners and pat downs actually improve security or are just so much security theater?

Well now, that is the relevant question, isn't it. I do not know the answer to that question, but I wonder that the TSA would be standing pat under the withering fire they are getting from all directions, if they didn't believe there was some benefit to it. And getting scanned, whether or not it can detect explosive underwear with a lot of accuracy, I think may act as a deterrent. And unless there is some measurable health impact to getting scanned, what is the big deal for not submitting to it? as per my question in my first comment.

But I do not see this as some big brother boogyman authoritarian power grab by evil statists. That is absurd and paranoid bullshit imo. and some ideological pol theater in it's own right.

And on and on and on.

Basically, these people really truly and honestly believe reversed stupidity is intelligence.  If a wingnut declared the sky blue, they'd argue it was red just not to concede any possible ground to the Hated Enemy and play into their hands.