Seasonal confusion and delay

Whilst I was away doing Christmassy things, we had further proof that the Islamists used up most of their competent terrorists on 9/11 and in the early noughties. The the idiotic Christmas special from Johnny Jihad and His Exploding Underpants was about as scary as one of Santa's elves. Predictably, the reaction of the authorities was to impose Ryanair-like levels of misery on airline passengers, in the name of being seen to "do something". It would be more effective to:

a) stop trying to terrify the public about relatively small risks - just point and laugh instead

b) once people have stopped quaking with fear, introduce effective measures to counter the actual level of threat, rather than PR stunts intended to soothe the very people you frightened out of their skins by hyping up the terrorist threat level

Effective measures like these, as highlighted in a much-quoted article in the Toronto Star (via):

Israelification.

That is, how can we make our airports more like Israel's, which deal with far greater terror threats with far less inconvenience....

"Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don't take s--- from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for – not for hours – but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, `We're not going to do this. You're going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport.'"

Read how it should be done here.

Another transport-related tit bit which caught my eye over the holiday period was an academic take on the Thomas The Tank Engine by one Shauna Wilton, gleefully dissected in the Fora blog:

Ms Wilton has been studying Thomas the Tank Engine. My two children, love the stories and as a result I have some familiarity with them. I have always thought them to represent pretty good values on the whole. For example the catchphrase about the engines wanting to be “really useful” has been thoroughly productive when encouraging the children to tidy up after themselves and, indeed, to do the right thing generally.


I should have realised of course that anything suggestive of discipline, or values of any sort, would get up the nose of modern academics. According to the report:


“She was critical of the fact the show only has eight female characters out of the 49 who feature.

"The female characters weren't necessarily portrayed any more negatively than the male characters or the male trains, but they did tend to play more secondary roles and they're often portrayed as being bossy or know-it-alls," she said.

She also objected to the way the show portrays Thomas, Percy and James slaving away for wealthy bosses like the Fat Controller.

Any attempt to break out of this controlled hierarchy to gain individual power, show initiative or dissent is met with punishment, usually because it goes wrong, she said.”

I would note first of all the supreme irony in her statement that the female characters are “bossy or know-it-alls” when it is hard to think of a female better meeting that description than herself.


I would also invite her to look after two children aged two and four and encourage rather than punish dissent or attempts to gain individual power.

Any academic who majors in Thomas the Tank Engine Studies* is fair game, so far as I'm concerned, although I do still maintain, along with Ms Wilton, that the stories are disturbingly authoritarian. It's fair comment that young children aren't reasonable and need more discipline than adults, but some of the treatment meted out to the engines isn't the sort of thing you'd wish on anybody, adult or child. I've just been reading the story in which the Scottish engines Donald and Douglas come to Sodor and the way they're treated come straight out of some trashy, exploitative reality TV show, with the threat of expulsion hanging over the least successful engine.

Still, at least there's no terrorist angle here - or is there?



*if such a subject existed, my three-and-a-bit-year-old son would be a Phd by now...