Sunday, December 12, 2010

Thrown Under the Bias

This is a great op-ed by a former Ukrainian (now living in NY) attacking the TSA goons ("Those Who Forget History Are Doomed to Have Their Junk Squeezed"), but I also like the fact that he upholds.... drum roll... objective reality. Wow.  What a concept.

But what I really liked was this argument against TSA security procedures that show no bias towards anyone and randomly select among all for the strip and grope:
[what if the government] applied the same “unbiased randomness” to all other activities ... the Fire Department would randomly douse one house per neighborhood per week, inevitably soaking a real fire every so often. The Sanitation Department would remove random objects from people’s driveways — a garbage bag, a car, and sometimes a random family member. City hospitals would perform random heart surgeries and treat patients for random diseases without bias towards their actual malady. And Mayor Bloomberg himself would invest his money randomly, by spinning the wheel at Atlantic City to see what he should do with his billions. ... [or] the FDA require all Americans to take equal doses of Thorazine to prevent individual psychosis. [or] the government-run Fanny Mae doesn’t engage in an equal redistribution of subprime loans … No, wait, scratch that. Rather, if Janet Napolitano’s personal broker decides to invest equally in all stocks regardless of their performance...
I'd like to see this argument developed further. We ought to have a national contest for the most ridiculous "unbiased random" things the government could do us.

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