Jonathan E. Cowperthwait ([info]cowperthwait) wrote,
@ 2006-08-11 16:07:00
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Entry tags:advertising, airliners, airport security, breaking news, gratuitous kathy griffin joke, islam, sierra mist, stella, super bowl commercial, television, terrorism

whoops
Is this Sierra Mist ad now funny or sad?

[insert the-real-threat-to-national-security-is-Kathy-Griffin's-explosive-plastic-surgery... joke here]




FOLLOWUP:
The more I think about it, it's definitely funny. I mean — inadvertently brilliant!

The Ad Council should pick it up as a PSA:
Our Nation's Security Screeners: Do What We Say, Or We'll Digitally Rape You.


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[info]catmoran
2006-08-12 01:44 pm UTC (link)
I was pissed off the first time I saw it -- probably has something to do with a power-tripping TSA employee I had the misfortune to encounter on the way to my grandmother's funeral. (Happily, that's the only TSAer I've run into who wasn't at least minimally polite.)

My opinion is unchanged.

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[info]hydrobromic
2006-08-12 08:08 pm UTC (link)
The Trib's main "human" angle was the tragedy of passengers throwing away expensive lipsticks. who ended up with these alleged thousands of discarded, pricey cosmetics? security personnel? hobos?

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[info]cowperthwait
2006-08-12 08:31 pm UTC (link)
As I understand the threat, both from news stories and from Ron Suskind's description in The One Percent Doctrine, it's that two individually benign-but-explosive combined chemicals can be transported in a container, separated by a membrane that can be disintegrated by remote electrical pulse. Pierce the membrane, chemicals unite, boom.

So if this is the threat from which we're being protected ... wouldn't confiscating our liquid containers and tossing everything into one big garbage can be just about the stupidest way to handle this threat possible?

Is it the case, as [info]cmdroverbite suggests, that nobody would be at all that interested about blowing up an airport, anyway? If you think about it, in terms of sheer numbers: at the checkpoint line, you could easily wipe out three or four flights' worth of people in one swell foop, without going to all the trouble of trying to smuggle the poison gas through security — just hand the Sierra Mist to the guard and let her toss it into the big garbage can.

But terror is about psychological warfare (... terrorizing), not simply death tolls, so it's much more effective to their cause (their thinking goes...) to get one plane's-worth of people in the air, instead, and hence all the hard work to try to smuggle this stuff in. ... I guess.

Anyway. Given that this is the way the threat works, my guess would be that that the guards are not permitted to forage for swag among the discarded lipsticks. Such a waste of lipstick!

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