Problem:

The Middle East is plagued with violence and instability. Young men, often inspired by religious leaders, are willing to commit acts of terrorism and extremism in the name of god and country.

Solution:

It’s simple, cost-effective, and even boosts critical and profitable sectors of the American economy.

Rationale:

As I and many others can attest, young men have rather high levels of testosterone, which tends to cause certain… urges. These impulses can generally be channeled in a number of ways, the two most popular being sex and violence. The real impetus for the crisis in the Middle East is simple. There are a lot of horny young men, who live in a society where sexual repression is utterly rampant. Women are veiled, alcohol and pornography are banned, and masturbation is seriously frowned upon. Given the conditions, it’s quite natural that the result is lots of violent, horny young men.

We try to solve this problem with bombs and bullets; but this can often be counterproductive. What would really solve the problem, however, is porn. Massive, copious, glorious piles of porn, produced by the fine patriotic Americans of the Los Angeles valley.

Sure, Muslims would be outraged. Mullahs would decry us as the great Satan. (Big change there, I know.) I suspect there would be lots of street protests, chanting, signs with pictures of old men in beards, and the usual firing guns into the air. However, when it comes time to *fight*, the exchange goes something like this:

Mullah Omar: “We must go fight the infidels now. Aziz! Come down here at once!”
Aziz: “Um…. I’m, um…. busy right now.”
Mullah Omar: “But you’ve been in the bathroom for three hours!”
Aziz: “Yeah…um…could you go fight without me? I’m feeling a bit chaffed.”

And thus, Middle East peace is achieved.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad now has a blog. Do you know what this means? It means there’s a blog gap. A blog gap, people! (It’s no pig gap, but still.) We’ve fallen behind in crucial strategic political blogging competitiveness. As a matter of national security, we must get George Bush a blog, no, a blog, a podcast, and a myspace page. (We should take the lead here, after all.) Maybe he could lip-sync something from the Black Eyed Peas and post it on YouTube.

Can Ahmadinejad do My Humps?

I think not.

My daily battles with stupidity are usually frustrating, but not quite on the level with what has recently been happening at airports. The new anti-liquid rule and associated paranoia just makes me want to scream, as loudly as possible, “I HATE YOU, YOU FUCKING MORONS.”

“Oh, well I don’t care what we have to go through as long as we get there safely.”
“I’m just glad the government is protecting us.”
“I’m so worried about my family that’s flying today.”

Oooh! I’ve got an idea for a new security measure. Everyone strips naked, gets shot with a tranquilizer gun, and is handcuffed to a seat. Of course, there could be some sort of implanted/ingested bomb that’s triggered by timer, so for added safety, lets have everyone go through a full body x-ray first. Then the terrorists couldn’t win.

Oh wait! Maybe the whole point of terrorism isn’t actually to inflict a lot of damage, but rather to make everyone afraid, and to cause them to take drastic, ridiculous (and generally, pointless) measures to ensure their safety.

The real problem is not of course that people are so stupid; people are always going to be stupid. The real problem is that they insist on imposing their stupidity on me. I want to fly Bob’s Bomb and Gun Airline, where one can show up 10 minutes before one’s flight, where every passenger is given a firearm with their boarding pass, and where anyone can bring whatever the hell they want on the plane. And you know what? Bob’s would be the safest damn airline out there, because no one would blow it up. Why? Because everyone expects it to be blown up. There’s no shock. Bob’s might loose lose a plane once, and everyone would shrug, and say “Well, it was Bob’s B&G. What did you expect?” Thereafter, no one would bother doing anything to a Bob’s flight, because it would have absolutely no greater impact.

Terrorism only works when one has the assumption of safety. This is why our security measures are not only futile, because they’re statistically bound to fail, but counterproductive. It is the illusion of safety that makes terrorism so damaging, not the acts themselves. But instead we, and I use that term very begrudgingly, persist in some sort of mass delusion that we’ll be safe if we just throw out our shampoo.

One of the most amusing aspects of all of this to me, when I’m not incredibly pissed off about it, is that as someone with OCD I am very familiar with misperception of risk. Humans are not very good at internalizing probability, as demonstrated by the popularity of lotteries, and gambling. But in our national obsession with terrorism, we’ve taken this misperception to a new and disturbingly omnipresent level. There are hundreds of better focuses for our time and money which would have a far greater impact on our safety, from vehicle size regulations to food safety laws. But propose that we put limits on passenger vehicle size, and people would decry it as government imposed restrictions on freedom. Propose individuals have their phone calls tapped, the right of habeas corpus be revoked, and that everyone should go through a cavity search when they take any form of public transportation, and people say “well, if it protects me from terrorism.”

What does this mean? It means that clearly, the entire nation has an undiagnosed case of obsessive compulsive disorder, and needs to be put on anti-obsessionals, stat.

Also worth reading, on the same topic, is an op-ed by a far more esteemed man.

A few nights ago, I was listening to a discussion about the ABA critique of the Whitehouse’s (I’d say the President, but it’s quite clear much of the activity stems from the office of the Vice President.) use of signing statements. Michael Greco, the ABA president, was attempting to explain how signing statements, which have no constitutional or legal standing, are attempts by the executive to essentially wield unchecked legislative power, something which is clearly and unambiguously removed from presidential control by the constitution.

As has become somewhat standard right-wing practice over the last eight to ten years, a spokesperson from the Justice Department was attempting to obfuscate and cloud the issue by claiming that the other presidents had done the same thing and were just less specific about provisions of law, that the vast jump (more than all previous administrations – combined) in the use of signing statements was really a result of this administration being more specific, that the president was trying to defend the constitution, and asked why the ABA wasn’t criticizing congress for its attempts to grab power. None of these issues were relevant or salient to the question at hand, but were designed to a.) re-frame the debate topic, and b.) suggest that there are two equally valid sides to the argument. The combination of these two tactics has been noticeably effective in the past, and are the result of truly fascinating behavioral theory.

Long before The Paradox of Choice came out, Republican strategists figured out that if one is giving a convincing argument, one generally accepts it, but if one is given two conflicting arguments, which both make some degree of sense, one tends just to abandon the issue, assuming the truth is somewhere in between. Much of the country’s rightward shift has been planned and strategized result of this. The Democrats, being generally a bit less confrontational and more open to compromise (aka, wusses), attempted to put forth somewhat balanced positions. The Republicans would then counter with far right wing position, in which reason might play no substantial component. Media outlets, in attempts to be “fair and balanced”, would air both arguments, and the precipitate would be the actual position the Republicans wanted anyway.

It’s brilliant, and I must give them credit for that, but unfortunately this has resulted in a number of disastrous policies for our country.