Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Radiation Fears? Think The TSA, Not Japan...

Because the Japanese are competent, and our government is not:

The Transportation Security Administration announced on Tuesday that the x-ray body scan machines installed at airports nationwide emit 10 times more radiation than previously reported.

While insisting the machines are safe, TSA admitted there was “a calculation error” during previous tests. “Certainly, the errors are not acceptable. It’s not every report. We believe the technology is safe,” TSA spokesperson Sarah Horowitz told Wired. ”We’ve done extensive, independent testing. It doesn’t raise alarms in terms of safety.”

I wonder what the comparative dose of radiation is, say, to someone 10-15 miles outside of Japan's quake-damaged Fukushima nuclear plant (which, MSNBC tells us, is "a crisis spinning out of control") compared to what the TSA has been dosing us with every time we walk through one of their full-frontal body scanners...

I'll bet the difference is relatively insignificant (but please feel free to correct me). Except Americans are being dosed by their own government - which also can be labeled a "crisis out of control" - as opposed to the Japanese, suffering from a natural disaster.

Our disaster isn't natural, we created it - a government so amok that they either have no idea how much radiation they are forcing their citizens to absorb, or are lying about it. We can fix it, but alas, changing the course of our bureaucratic institutions these days is honestly more difficult than bringing the Fukushima nuclear plant under control.

Which is so sad....how the hell did we get here?

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