Editor’s Note: Happy Thanksgiving from the Media Consortium! This week, we aren’t stopping The Audit, The Pulse, The Diaspora, or The Mulch, but we are taking a bit of a break. Expect shorter blog posts, and The Diaspora and The Mulch will be posted on Wednesday afternoon, instead of their usual Thursday and Friday postings. We’ll return to our normal schedule next week.
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Wednesday is the heaviest travel day of the year in the United States, as millions of Americans head home to celebrate Thanksgiving. Some of you are probably reading this dispatch on PDAs as you wait in an interminable line at airport security. Here’s some food for thought.
At Grist, food writer Michael Pollan officially declares himself a Rules Guy. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean he won’t accept a Friday dinner invitation offered after noon on Wednesday. Pollan thinks that our healthy eating skills are passed down to us as part of food culture. In this era of drive-through windows and meal replacement bars, a lot of the old wisdom is falling by the wayside and Americans are finding themselves adrift in a sea of calories. On the eve of Thanksgiving, Pollan provides some helpful guidelines for avoiding the food coma:
[M]any ethnic traditions have their own memorable expressions for what amounts to the same recommendation. Many cultures, for examples, have grappled with the problem of food abundance and come up with different ways of proposing we stop eating before we’re completely full: the Japanese say “hara hachi bu” (“Eat until you are 4/5 full”); Germans advise eaters to “tie off the sack before it’s full.” And the prophet Mohammed recommended that a full belly should contain one-third food, one-third drink, and one-third air. My own Russian-Jewish grandfather used to say at the end of every meal, “I always like to leave the table a little bit hungry.”
But wait, there’s more!
Unions representing airline pilots and flight attendants are advising their members to avoid the the TSA’s new backscatter x-ray scans because of concerns about the long-term health effects of x-ray radiation. Crew members who refused scans have been subjected to new “enhanced” pat-down searches. This week, the TSA granted an exception to pilots, but not to flight attendants. As I reported for Working In These Times, all crew members go through the same FBI background check and fingerprinting process. “Don’t touch my junk!” has become a rallying cry for passengers, particularly white men, who are not accustomed to being asked to give up any part of their body’s autonomy for the greater good. Is it a coincidence that 95% of pilots are men and three-quarters of flight attendants are women? [Update: The TSA has relented. The agency announced Tuesday that flight attendants will now get the same exemption as pilots.
Adam Serwer argues in The American Prospect that it’s easy to demand tough security measures when the presumed targets are faceless Muslims in a distant country. When air travelers are asked to compromise their own privacy in the name of security, the tradeoff suddenly seems very different.
Employee health insurance deductibles are skyrocketing at Whole Foods and CEO John Mackey is trying to blame the increase on health care reform. “This is very important for everyone to understand: 100% of the increases in deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums in 2011 compared to 2010 are due to new federal mandates and regulations,” Mackey wrote in a corporate memo. In fact, as Josh Harkinson reports in Mother Jones, Mackey’s memo is pure, organic BS. The provisions in the Affordable Care Act that might increase costs won’t go into effect until 2014, so it’s hard to figure out how federal policies could be responsible. Health insurance costs were rising by about 5% per year, year after year, before the Affordable Care Act passed. The truth is that health insurance is getting more expensive because health care is getting more expensive. As Harkinson points out, one of the reasons that health care is getting more expensive is because corporations like Whole Foods are pushing more of their employees into part-time work to avoid covering them. Of course, when those workers get sick, someone has to pick up the cost of their care. So those who have insurance, including some of Whole Foods’ own employees, have to pay more to make up the difference.
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A quick word on the TSA scanner/pat-down outrage, after reading Digby’s piece on “security theater”, and TSA Administrator John Pistol’s op-ed in yesterday’s USA Today.
I attended Yom Kippur services a few months ago at Temple Beth Am synagogue in Williamsville, New York, as I do pretty much every year. Every year patrons are asked to remove objects from their pockets and are patted down. I was, it went smoothly, and I went on my way.
I was in Charlottesville last Saturday for a Dave Matthews Band show, and I was patted down before entering John Paul Jones Arena, like every other patron.
I will be home for Thanksgiving this week and will attend a Buffalo Sabres game on Friday, and will be patted down, like I am at every Sabres home game.
The attendance at these three events, non-overlapping, is just under 35,000 people. Yet those screenings were and always are so pathetically cursory that I often joke with my companions on the way in about the knifes or other weapons I could have easily hidden in my shoe, under my belt, or any number of other places. If they can’t stop a guy like me from bringing a weapon in, they sure can’t stop someone a lot better and more dangerous than me. But hey, we shouldn’t go too far into people’s privacy- just far enough to keep people feeling safe.
And you know what? That’s the real security theater, here- not the airports. It’s the events that have tens of thousands, even a hundred thousand people attending, but don’t involve an airplane, so just-a-little-screening-but-not-too-much will do. Often it’s because of money- I bet some authorities would like to have screening at every DC metro stop, but it’s not doable. And I don’t want my civil liberties violated, but I’d also like to not get hurt attending a concert, or religious service, or sporting event. Yet when TSA decides it will do that job, except doing it in a way that is far more thorough, people feel violated.
I don’t know what the balance is, and I don’t pretend to be a terrorism expert. And the new procedures have certain civil liberty concerns. But I will say that the new TSA procedures aren’t the outrage, to me. It’s in what Digby writes:
It’s not like the they haven’t shown that they are creative enough to do something other than blowing up an airplane to make their point. Look at the London and Madrid subway bombings or the Mumbai operation or that horrible Chechen school hostage taking.
Exactly. Terrorism goes far beyond the airports. The outrage is what is not being done to improve just-a-little-screening-but-not-too-much checks- or none at all.
Do you know one? Perchance your mother, father, brother, or sister is a person you would characterize as lovingly protective. He or she maybe an individual who works to shield loved ones from harm. This fine fellow or femme plots and plans in an attempt to prevent any crisis. People come to depend on caring souls such as he or she. Indeed, you may be the cautious crier who actively expresses concern for the health and welfare of those you treasure. It is a tough task, but you, or someone in your life may have assumed responsibility for the well-being of another. Surely, someone must keep us safe and sane. One never knows who might lurk or linger in the halls, bathroom stalls, on a plane, boat or train. Credentials must be checked. If family and friends cannot safeguard us from the crazies and fanatics certainly, our sweet Uncle Sam will.
