It's worth enduring the security to check out the USA - the flight is tougher. It shifted my position to the left.... the inequality there is astounding. + it is probably the most diverse country that exists.
Well, to put your mind at ease, I have been to the US. Twice! The last time I went — and this was quite a few years ago — I recall getting through security at LAX was quite ridiculous. The amount of clothing I had to take off, I felt it was a miracle I didn’t have to go through screening in just my underwear!
Given a choice to travel somewhere in the world for, say, a holiday, I think the pain of American airport security is enough to make me more likely (at the margin) to travel to Europe or elsewhere.
(Question in response to my post yesterday on US airport security.)
Does airport security really make us safer?
One of the reasons I am reluctant to travel to the United States is that I don’t want to go through the palaver of dealing with American airport security. Over time, the tools and techniques available to US screeners has been ratcheted up — including, now X-ray machines generating 3D images of passengers (and for those who decline such treatment, an invasive ‘pat down’). But do these wonderful innovations actually make us safer?
Columnist Jeffrey Goldberg thinks not. Terrorists, after all, can be meticulous planners. If they’ve managed to evade detection by intelligence agencies, it seems hard to believe an official of the Transportation Security Administration (or its equivalents elsewhere in the world) will be able to foil a plot. Indeed, as Goldberg writes, intelligence agencies already warn that X-ray scans can be foiled by surgically implanting explosives in a passenger. (The scan can’t see past human skin.) And yet countless Americans and foreign tourists suffer the indignity of either being depicted naked in a faceless computer-generated image, or being manhandled by security staff. In many regards, airport security might make us feel safer. The evidence that it actually does so is much harder to find.
But wait, there’s more!
At the risk of overloading the site with happy snaps from Western Australia, here’s some more photos of sites and landmarks around Perth.
Hold your laughter, please
This is a bar on Perth’s waterfront called… The Lucky Shag. Apparently it’s named a bird rather than what their patrons get up to after a few drinks.
Perth statues
During my recent trip to Perth, my eye was drawn to a number of sculptures around the city. Here’s a small selection.
