Archive for September 22nd, 2010
QUESTION: How do you think passengers would react if a gunman tried to take a cockpit post-9/11?
What would you do if a terrorist tried to hijack a flight you were on with a gun?
The new NBC show “The Event” featured a ridiculous scene where a gunman leapt out of his seat and tried to storm the cockpit on an international flight leaving Miami full of fuel.
As he rushed towards the front of the plane, and started waiving his gun, the passengers (including large males) just sat in their seats, started crying, and held their hands to their mouths shocked by what was happening in front of them.
Not a single person got up to smack the living daylights out of that would-be hijacker.
That’s beyond unrealistic to us, because after 9/11 it should be clear to everyone that if a hijacker gets into the cockpit everyone on the plane is going to die…and there’s a good chance those hijackers intend to take out a few buildings and kill thousands more on the ground with that plane.
Now, living in Chicago, and observing the TSA that runs security at Midway and O’Hare, it’s scarily plausible for a terrorist to get a gun through the screening process and onto a plane. While the TSA makes a point of patting down elderly grandmothers, harassing girl scouts, and wanding handicapped people, no concerted effort whatsoever is made to pay special attention to men in the age and ethnographic cohort that’s most likely to try to take down a plane. That’s because the TSA wants to be politically correct and not profile Muslims. Hence, 95% or above of its efforts are wasted scrutinizing Americans who pose no threat, so that Muslims can’t claim discrimination.
It’s like swimming in the ocean and investigating yellow tangs, sea turtles, dolphins, and happy, dancing little shrimp with the same level of life-preserving scrutiny you reserve for great white sharks.
Meanwhile, we’ve never found an instance of a non-Muslim bringing down an airplane, trying to take control of an airplane, or otherwise causing mayhem and terror in an airport. Just as we can’t think of a single instance of sea turtles chomping a man in two.
But, that’s a whole other essay.
Today, we’re thinking about the trip we all took down to DC for the Restoring Honor Rally last month and how we were all wide awake, staring forward on our flights. We no longer sleep when we fly. We try to sit in the back, on the aisle, so we can watch what’s going on in the whole plane. If we saw anyone rushing the cockpit and causing a commotion, we’d be up out of our seats with anything we could use as a weapon to take that guy out before he got into the cockpit. Period.
In “The Event”, the man holding the gun had six bullets, max, at his disposal. If seven people rushed the gunman, even if he was a Secret Service trained Olympic grade sniper, he’d only be able to kill six of those guys trying to stop him. Then he’d be out of both bullets and luck, and he’d be tackled and hopefully beaten unconscious by the remaining passengers.
We don’t think there’s a great chance the gunman would be able to kill six people rushing him, either. He might kill one of them, if that, and one than one bullet would probably go into the first guys charging towards him. He’d be out of firing power licketysplit.
If you know you and everyone on the plane is going to die if the Muslims get into the cockpit, what would stop you from taking a chance head-on with these terrorists by rushing them before they got to the pilots?
Would you just sit there in your seat, cry, and make those “what’s going on? I’m so scared!” noises?
Or would you get up on your feet and DO SOMETHING?
None of us know what we’ll really do in an emergency, but we think it’s good to have a mental plan set the same way you prepped for fire and tornado drills as a child. If you are on a plane and you see someone trying to take that flight over, you can’t just sit there and hope for the best. You need to “roll”. As in, “let’s roll” and take these agents of Islam down before they crash us into the White House or Sears Tower. If we’re going to die anyway, we like the odds of surviving a shooting to waiting for Islam to incinerate us in the wreckage of a building they’ve targeted.
Answer honestly: have you thought of any of this?
What would you REALLY do if ever you were in this situation?
When you fly, do you do threat assessments of your fellow passengers and stay awake during your flights to make sure no one tries anything?
Do you consider it a patriotic duty to be ready to help take down a terrorist on a flight if anything 9/11-esque happened while you are a passenger?
QUESTION: Is anyone watching the new NBC show "The Event"
How much of the Obamas is NBC using in "The Event"? By the looks of it, 0% Michelle at least.
NBC sent actor Blair Underwood to the India State Dinner at the White House to prep him for his role as a US president on "The Event".
We choose not to watch any of the shows on NBC, even though we really like Bob Harper (the trainer on Biggest Loser), because he comes to Chicago a lot, hangs out at Sidetracks, and is always very nice to all of us. The networks of NBC were so evil to Hillary Clinton in 2008 and continue to be misogynist and sexist towards all female candidates running for office — not to mention the constant false charges of RAAACISM! and other lies NBC and MSNBC level against the Tea Party movement — that we have more or less decided that anything NBC-related no longer merits our attention.
A few years ago, NBC bet everything on a show we knew would bomb, called “Kings”, that was an update of the story of David, supposedly, in modern times. This year, the big NBC show is called “The Event”, and it too looks like absolute garbage.
Set in a parallel universe to our own, an ineffectual, naive, media-beloved black president wants to shut down a secret detention facility in Alaska and free 27 “people” who are kept there. The “people” are either space aliens or beings from an alternate dimension. In the show’s pilot, a commercial jetliner is hijacked by its pilot, on orders from someone trying to keep those “people” incarcerated and is nosedived into where the “historic and unprecedented first black president” is having a press conference announcing the detention facility’s closing. Just before the plane can hit, in the last minutes of the first episode, “something” opens a portal in the sky and swallows the plane, saving President Blair Underwood (who still, remarkably, looks just as he did back on L.A. Law in the 80s, when NBC actually aired watchable shows and wasn’t so committed to misogyny and personal destruction).
As guys who like shows such as Sliders and other Sci/Fi in the alternate universe genre, we hope it carries some added, expert weight when we say just how stupid this “The Event” show is.
We are curious, however, just how the black president on this show will compare to the illustrious president we have now. We’re still jonesing for a David Palmer in the White House…but will have to wait until 2020 or so for Lt. Colonel Allen West to fill that role. That’s the kind of black president we want to see as Commander in Chief…and the sort of TV character we’d really like in the White House. In the meantime, we wonder just how much of the effete and dithering narcissist in the Oval Office now is being reflected in this NBC show featuring an Obama-esue (in appearance, at least) president.
Is anyone watching “The Event” who can keep tabs on this for us?
We’re just going to be reading recaps and transcripts of the show as we can’t imagine sitting through another full episode of this, even if we do watch it on Hulu for free.
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Not that this is the most ridiculous thing about “The Event”, but the photo we used above of President Blair Underwood, his First Spouse, and First Son also nags at us because the Secret Service would never allow a shot like that to happen.
In the episode, a plane is flying towards the president, to kill him. The threat has been identified, Secret Service is alerted, and the president is hustled into the back of a limo where the First Spouse and their son are waiting.
This would not have happened, folks.
Secret Service would have used one of the limos at the event to evacuate the First Spouse and the child as soon as they were out of the building…once they were in the car, her SS detail would have been burning rubber to get her to the nearest established safe house. The First Spouse has her OWN protective detail, and the little boy would have had HIS own too (though probably not a vehicle reserved for him if he was traveling with his parents). The First Spouse would not have been in a car waiting while a jetliner was headed her way. If she tried to bark orders and make the car wait, she would have been slapped across the face if need be…because when lives are on the line, the First Spouse does not give orders, she becomes an object the SS protects and does not consult.
The same for the president. He would be dragged, a foot of the ground, to wherever he needed to be to keep him safe.
On 9/11, we heard stories about Laura Bush and Dick Cheney being dragged, off their feet, out of the rooms they were in and hurried to safety. We believe Mrs. Bush was in the White House. When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, we remember hearing that Mrs. Bush was lifted out of the chair she was sitting in and hurried, against her will, down into the emergency bunker.
We believe Dick Cheney was in a meeting and was grabbed by SS and rushed out of the room and into a secure location himself. Agents literally burst into the room and said, “Mr. Vice President you need to MOVE” and essentially kidnapped him.
This is what’s supposed to happen, because this is what these people are trained to do.
They would never allow the President of the United States and First Family to sit in a car with the door open staring at the sky while a jetliner barreled down on them.
We know this is television, and we’re supposed to suspend all disbelief and just try to be entertained, but this is so stupid that we had to say something about it.
BREAKING: Most bizarre press conference ever. Alaskan Senator officially renames herself "LeNa JaBrowski" and reveals secret crime-fighting alter ego
"You give me that funny feeling in my tummy"
In what has to be the most bizarre press conference anyone’s seen since Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced, proudly, that Delaware Senate candidate Chris Coons was his “beloved, squirmy pet”, Alaska’s senior United States Senator took to a podium in Anchorage today, dressed in salmon, declaring her new official name to be “LeNa JaBrowski” and advising all dozen people assembled before her to never again call her by her old, previous name.
“Today I stand before you in the form I see myself in my mind’s eye. I am LeNa JaBrowski. I was born LeNa JaBrowski. It’s taken 70 years for me to be the woman I am inside, and to be honest with myself and with all my dozen or so supporters here in Alaska. I stand before you the way I dress not only at home, but late at night in Washington where I fight crime in the guise of this once-secret alias. I wear a wig of truth, and magic glasses that allow me to see acts of daring-do and superhuman awesomeness that only I, LeNa JaBrowski, can do. This is why you all need to write my name down, spell it correctly, and put LENA JABROWSKI on your ballots come November 2nd so that I can remain not only your Senator, but the scourge of criminals in our nation’s Capital. I’m like Batman in this way, if Batman was a lady, wearing a blonde wig, a salmon suit, eyeglasses, and wanted so desperately to remain a Senator because he didn’t know what else to do with his life and had no real marketable skills”.
“I always knew she was LeNa JaBrowski. She wasn’t fooling anyone,” said one Alaskan in the crowd, bored by the press conference. ”It’s just like how she’s really a Democrat, but has been calling herself a Republican all this time. Her and those Weird Sisters in Maine, that tangerine-colored Charlie Crist down there in Florida, and that Lindsey Graham in one of the Carolinas, whichever one he stinks up. All those people are Democrats, and that’s their not-so-secret identity. They only ran as Republicans in the first place because Democrats didn’t want ‘em, but that can’t change who they are inside. This clown, LeNa JaBrowski, or whoever the Hell she’s calling herself now, should have been wearing that wig from Day One though, ’cause it suits her better than how she normally looks. Damn stupid, if you ask me”.
In a corner of the room, LeNa JaBrowski’s staff furiously worked through the press conference making buttons with the candidate’s new name on them, while scratching out her old name on flyers, signs, and commemorative plates from the Franklin Mint. In the background, LeNa JaBrowski’s inexplicable campaign theme, “Love Rollercoaster” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers played in a loop. Flustered staffers tried convincing Alaskan voters that this was not some weird way of telling the world that LeNa JaBrowski was, in fact, the long-lost missing third member of Beavis & Butthead and that LeNa JaBrowski was not, in fact, something drawn by Mike Judge as a cartoon.
“She’s a real person, we swear. And she’s currently Alaska’s Senator. This all might seem ridiculous, but this is her calling. One day, she woke up, and instead of the toaster telling her to burn things and neighborhood dogs trying to goad her into rummaging through the trash with them, all inanimate objects and animals started telling the Senator to reveal herself to Alaskans as LeNa JaBrowski and play ‘Love Rollercoaster’ while she did it. We don’t have any more information on this than you do, but please just hear LeNa JaBrowski out on this”, pleaded one staffer.
Meanwhile, on the stage, JaBrowski droned on about what it would be like at the Daily Planet if the readers of that paper decided to fire Clark Kent one day, when he hadn’t finished his work as SuperGuy yet. ”I know this is all a big shock to many of you, but it’s time I act like SuperGuy and stand here before you as my true self, and leave the Clark Kent fake identity behind me. Just as the readers of the Daily Planet should not try to fire Clark Kent, because then they would lose SuperGuy, Alaska’s voters should not have tried to get rid of me, under my old name, because that will cost them the protection of LeNa JaBrowski, my true self, and all the good that I do in Washington as a crime-fighter and superhero in my own right”.
“That woman up there, whoever the Hell she is, is damn skippy,” said Millie Gruhbecht, 57, a retired physical education teacher from Juneau. ”First off, she’s so stupid she doesn’t even know it’s “SuperMAN” not “SuperGUY” and none of this makes any sense. So, she’s claiming that for 70 years she’s been walking around with a secret identity, and that would be her “old name”, but really she was LeNa JaBrowski this whole time? So, “Clark Kent” was just the fake identity for Superman that his parents on Earth cooked up for the superbaby they found in that field, who was really Superman? And that means that LeNa JaBrowski’s father, the one who made her a Senator in the first place, found this nut in a field somewhere as a baby and gave her a secret identity like “Clark Kent” so that she could live amongst us mortals and no one would know that she was a space alien? Is that was this press conference is all about? Because I’ve got Dancing with the Stars on TIVO back at home and there’s only 40 hours of recording time on this DVR, because it’s an older model, and my roommate Kim still hasn’t watched all her Vampire Diaries from last season so I really need to get home and watch my show before it’s accidentally erased. This LeNa JaBrowski business is just a damn waste of time if you ask me”.
Following her remarks from the stage, LeNa JaBrowski and her aides led the seven or eight people left in attendance in a spelling bee, so everyone would know how to spell L-E-N-A-J-A-B-R-O-W-S-K-I and be ready to write her name on their ballots come November 2nd.
Most of these people were sticking around solely for the promised refreshments that were supposed to be served after the spelling bee was over.
Crushing disappointment soon followed when the “refreshments” turned out to be nothing more than plastic bowls of Alphabits cereal and Campbell’s alphabet soup, carrying the spelling bee theme to ridiculously childish extremes.
“I want you all to be able to spell LeNa JaBrowski correctly, even at snack time, so I personally, with my own unwashed hands, took any extraneous letters out of your cereal and soup so that no one would get confused with any “Ms”, “Us”, or other letters that are not present in my actual, official name, which is LeNa JaBrowski. Remember, if you are going to write my name on anything, it needs to be spelled exactly correct as LeNa JaBrowski. There are no “Ms” or “Us” in my name anymore. Tell everyone you know, even cats and dogs this. It’s very important. Then eat your cereal and drink your soup and let’s get out there and win this write-in campaign to keep me fighting crime and being the superhero that I am in Washington!”.
“That woman, whoever she is, is crazy. I ain’t spelling nothin’, no way, no how. I just wanted me some cereal and soup, ’cause it’s Wednesday, and that’s what I always eats on a Wednesday. If she wants people to write her name on stuff, she should have her father do it. That’s how this nut got that job in the first place,” said local fisherman Vern Bludkllept, speaking for the three or four people still milling about the room, summing up what just about everyone present thought about the most bizarre press conference any of them had ever seen.
Vote LeNa JaBrowski!
Wednesday Open Thread: September 22nd, 2010
What’s on your mind this Wednesday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
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Operation Samantha Stevens: Day Three:
Click to embiggen -- taking the sting out of the Left's attacks
What creative ways can YOU help Christine O’Donnell in Delaware today?
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