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Help Rename the Department of Homeland Security
Hugh Pickens writes "James Fallows writes tongue in cheek that U.S. Department of Fear, led by Secretary of Fear Malcolm P. Stag III, is running a poll. To what should we re-name the Department of Homeland Security? 'Possibilities include Department of ScaredyCatLand Security, reflecting the prevailing mentality of an era, and Department of Fatherland Security, to make us sound strong,' writes Fallows. 'There are many more to choose from, plus you can write in your own nominees. But act now, because the polls close Tuesday.'"
Wasting Taxpayer Money to oppress law abiding citizens
Department of Unnecessary Services, I think it sums them up quite well.
Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division
The US has Florida, so it's male.
I think Ministry of Peace would also be appropriate.
Seems like the obvious choice.
Gestapo Much easier to say, and the groups seem to be getting more and more similar each day.
I say we just be honest and call it "KGB-lite". Gestapo has too many letters and STASI just sounds too unpleasant.
Of course, over time, it will outgrow the "lite" part of the name. They all do.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
What about security threats that exist in dimensions prophesied by String Theory? These areas cannot ignored, or death shall await us, for sure, from dimension N + 1 . . . with huge pointy teeth . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Babylon 5 reference.
BTW, if you like sci-fi and haven't watched B5, you're missing a pretty good story.
There's only one reasonable name for it: Miniluv.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
The Department of Homeland Security is a mess, mind you, but that's as much implementation as anything else, it's designed to make it possible for Congress to monitor the security pork better, which had previously been scattered through the Federal Government, and therefore had no single cabinet secretary that could be brought in to testify and question, and no single budget bill to cut deals over. The problem is not the department, as much as it is that the United States has a pervasive fear in its population. For example, take a look at this gallup poll trend over the years on perceptions of crime: http://www.gallup.com/poll/150464/Americans-Believe-Crime-Worsening.aspx and then compare it to actual violent crime rates. Americans by a large margin believe that crime is getting worse, when, in fact, violent crime is going down. Note that the graph strongly corresponds to rhetoric on crime, and to personal economic, as opposed to physical, insecurity.
It does not matter what the department is called, as long as Americans vastly over-rate the chances of dying in criminal or terrorist attacks, particularly in crimes committed by strangers or foreigners, as opposed to the far more likely case of being killed by someone they know. Statistically speaking, suicide is more common that homicide, and among homicide categories, being killed by a current or former romantic partner outweighs all other categories. But that's not what DoHs monitors by and large. Instead looked at in an unbiased fashion, for example this post at Reason magazine, http://reason.com/archives/2006/08/11/dont-be-terrorized terrorism is a lower risk that we run going out to drive, or consuming ordinary products.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Let's rename the war on terror to be more accurate too ...
Virtual strip-searches, ball-fondling, never-ending but ineffectual id checks, forcing women to drink their own breast-milk, arbitrary rule enforcement, making everyone go bare-foot, singling-out people by the clothes they wear, forcing people to remove nipple rings with pliers, torturing injured flyers, making people piss on themselves, the list is practically endless.
And yet the TSA hasn't caught a single terrorist.
But they sure are doing a bang-up job of destroying human dignity. Therefore I say we rename the War on Terror to The War on Dignity.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Why hasn't it happened then? Because there is no terrorist threat.
This. Times a million.
If terrorists wanted to attack the USA there's nothing stopping them. Everything they need can be bought inside US borders and there's no shortage of targets to choose from.
The TSA is a magic tiger-scaring stone. A very, very expensive tiger scaring stone. Not just in the money sense but in the freedom sense and the inalienable rights sense.
No sig today...
One might also argue that the TSA is doing exactly what it was designed to do. By making all but the richest Americans (the ones who can afford private jets) go through these searches, they are gradually wearing down the public, conditioning them to accept regular intrusive searches and limitations on travel. This was one of the first things the Nazis did, too. It makes it harder for the peons to rise up and overthrow the government after they start doing the really bad stuff.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that sort of thinking is happening (at least consciously) in the halls of Congress. What I'm saying is that the purpose for those freedoms that the DHS is pissing all over is precisely to minimize the chances of the really bad stuff happening later. As Thomas Jefferson put it, "A government afraid of its citizens is a Democracy. Citizens afraid of government is tyranny!"
The more we tear down those freedoms, the closer we come to being another autocratic or oligarchic hellhole instead of a democracy. It is precisely for that reason that every true, patriotic American has a duty to defend the Constitution against these attacks in whatever way he or she can, and to resist any government actions that go against its spirit to the maximum extent allowable by law and, if need be, with acts of peaceful civil disobedience that are not allowable by law as well.
God bless the USA.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.