Don't You Talk About Gilligan's Island! Don't!

Joseph H. Johnson was charged with intimidating an aircraft flight crew member by writing a comment card rambling about the possibilities of the plane crashing and the passengers being trapped on Gilligan's Island with only Lovey Howell for female companionship.

The comment card read (apparently in full):

"I thought I was going to die, we were so high up, I thought to myself: I hope we don't crash and burn or worse yet, landing in the ocean, living through it, only to be eaten by sharks, or worse yet end up on someplace like Gilligan's Island, stranded, or worse yet, be eaten by a tribe of headhunters, speaking of headhunters, why do they just eat outsiders and not the family members? strange... and what if the plane ripped apart in mid-flight and we plumited (sic) to earth, landed on Gilligan's Island and then lived through it and the only woman there was Mrs. Thurston Howell III? No Mary anne (my favorite) no ginger, just lovey! If it were just her, I think I'd opt for the sharks, maybe the headhunters."

I understand that the feedback mechanisms promote this (the aircrew would be castigated if they ignored a possible threat, while there is no sanction for treating every little potential problem as if it were a bona fide danger to life and limb), but isn't this just a little overboard?

Most of my family is attending the 2010 William C. Shaw Lecture on 17 February. Airline "security" is one reason I'm not going.

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FBI Tortures Innocent Civilians

This is what happens when the children take over the country. I swear, all these people shat their pants on 9/11 and never recovered. The stench is becoming unbearable.

Right after 9/11 this Egyptian fella, Abdallah Higazy, was staying at a hotel in New York. The hotel was evacuated because everyone was panicking of security. The maid found a radio in the closet. A UHF radio, the type used to speak to aircraft and listen to the exciting jibber jabber that goes on at air shows.

The hotel contacts the FBI field office in New York. They track down and arrest Higazy for being involved with the 9/11 hijackings. They decide the only way to found out the truth is to torture the guy. They work on this guy relentlessly. They tell him that his family will be tortured in Egypt. They mention torture similar to what the Saddam Hussein conducts. (I thought that was a nice touch.) Higazy knowing full well the extent of the fun and games that Egyptian Security Forces will go to he decides to spare his family the pliers and blowtorch treatment and confesses.

Chalk one up for the FBI, nice work boys! They probably were falling all over themselves deciding who would get to be the one who told President Bush they caught a dirty stinking terrorist, right there in New York City.

Meanwhile, time passes, congress starts ripping the constitution into shreds with the worthless PATRIOT Act. The hotel gets a phone call. A commercial airline pilot was staying at the hotel and is trying to track down something he left behind. His air to ground radio. Do they have anything like that in the lost and found box?

Oops. Sorry about that. Good thing they didn't actually send the goons for his wife and kids in Egypt. Whew!

Okay, now it gets weird. Higazy has the gall to be pissed! The nerve of the guy. Anyway, he decides to sue the hotel and the FBI agent who beat coerced the confession out of him. (It not being possible to sue the government.) The decision from Court of Appeals hits the government website like all of these things and then of course is quickly deleted. Top Secret don't ya know. A blogger posts about it and the court actually contacts the blogger and asks them to remove it because it's classified. I am going to try that on my wife, sorry honey can't tell you how I screwed up the laptop, its classified just how stupid I am.

The story is from blogger Steve Bergstein who picked up on the story.

Clearly this is reason #137 why you don't torture. The value of information you get is shit. Torture doesn't work. I don't know how many times I have to say it. This isn't an episode of 24. This isn't a video game.

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