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A blog wherein a literary agent will sometimes discuss his business, sometimes discuss the movies he sees, the tennis he watches, or the world around him. In which he will often wish he could say more, but will be obliged by business necessity and basic politeness and simple civility to hold his tongue. Rankings are done on a scale of one to five Slithy Toads, where a 0 is a complete waste of time, a 2 is a completely innocuous way to spend your time, and a 4 is intended as a geas compelling you to make the time.

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Another Link for Breakfast

David Brooks in the NY Times had a column on Friday about reactions to Qaeda Underpants that I also think is worth reading.

And another thought on what he calls (as have others) "Security Theatre." As best as I know, we don't have a good track record for unraveling plots against air transportation by catching bad guys going thru security checkpoints. I say "best as I know" because I want to recognize the possibility that we've done so but that it's been put under lock and key and kept under wraps to protect intelligence sources or an ongoing investigation or something like that. I kind of doubt it; it's hard to keep that kind of thing wrapped up, and too tempting to leak for political points, but it's possible. But 9/11, the shoe bomber, Qaeda Underpants, let's forget about Lockerbie because that was so long ago when the Theatre was much shorter than it is today, it seems like the bad guys have a good track record for getting on board the planes. So why are we all going this ever more layered security checkpoint? Can we say we haven't caught the bad guys because they don't bother trying because our security is so good?

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