First the good news: TSA has a blog up through which they are able to rapidly and directly explain matters to the public, such as the video of the TSA worker frisking a shirtless boy. Under ideal circumstances, this might suggest that TSA sees its mission as an assignment to work the problem, and not enforce the rules.

Now the bad news: The TSA’s blogger is named “Blogger Bob.” (Not to be confused with “Baghdad Bob.”) And he says that everything is just fine and that there are no problems—just myths–and that the polling says 4-out-of-5 dentists agree that the TSA’s peep-n-pat is awesome!

The TSA blog isn’t an exercise in debugging a problematic system–that would be messy and besides, it might be inadvisable from a legal standpoint, since lawsuits against the TSA are likely, if not inevitable. Instead, it’s just propaganda.

It’s one thing for a political part of the government, like the White House or a Congressional office, to have a propaganda arm. It’s quite another for a non-partisan bureaucracy tasked with security issues to be running one.

As I suggested a couple days ago, the current TSA pat-down/nekkid picture pushback is really just a proxy for having a debate about the government’s decision to forego profiling as part of airport security.

Krauthammer has more. He says “junk.” Bet you never thought you’d see those two sentences together.

Surely this report from the FT will prompt a Wired cover story telling us that the Age of Cable TV is already over. But the news that cable subscriptions are down sharply from a year ago does not seem, ipso facto, to mean that people are leaving pay cable for internet TV. That’s possible, of course, but it seems just as possible that cable is now feeling the pinch of the Great Recession with consumers looking to cut household costs by any means possible.

Not that cable operators need to worry. Because even if subscribers migrate away from TV subscription services to watching TV over the internet (via iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, MLB.com, etc.), you know who they still have to pay to get onto the internet? Cable operators.

Silicon Valley snobs may look down on it, but it’s good to own the dumb pipes.

Two tent-pole trailers yesterday, for Cowboys and Aliens and Green Lantern. Have a gander.

I’m surprised at how much I like the look and feel of Cowboys and Aliens–as a rule, I don’t much cotton to genre mixing. But this seems pretty intriguing. Plus, how could we have waited for almost 50 years without putting Harrison Ford in a Western? With his voice, he’ll be $$$.

Green Lantern is another exercise in genre mash-up (superhero and sci-fi), which is probably why I never much cared for the character. And the movie looks terrible. Like a transparent rip-off of Jon Favreau’s Iron Man. Look! Hal Jordan is a cad! And charming! And he’s got this neat new power! Plus–aliens!

Pass.

My little quip about the TSA employing better-looking agents was clearly inadequate. Among other things, they’d also need to allow passengers to select the sex of their patter-downer. And a champagne room. They’d need a couple of those. Also lots of Def Leppard. If the TSA just thought creatively about the problem, you could have a sizable number of travelers yelling “allahu akbar” in line, just hoping to be selected for special scrutiny.

That said, Patterico’s Aaron Worthing has a smart post on the subject of special screenings and John Tyner and it’s all worth considering somewhat seriously.

Airport security has four goals, which to a certain degree are competing. They are, in order of importance:

(1) Keep travel safe.

(2) Keep travel economically efficient.

(3) Protect the majority from undue harassment and annoyance.

(4) Protect minorities from undue harassment and annoyance.

The TSA is tasked with figuring out how to balance these goals in a reasonable manner. That’s a difficult task and one for which we should have some sympathy for several reasons, not least of which because (1) This is still a relatively new problem; and (2) Government bureaucracies like the TSA are constitutionally ill-equipped to make such judgments.

All of that said, there are a couple things which are so obvious as to be beyond dispute, I think. Namely, that the TSA’s expenditure of resources investigating John Tyner is ill-advised at best, and bullying and offensive at worst. The message the TSA is sending through this investigation is that they view the current security situation not as a problem to be solved, but as a set of rules to be enforced.

Second, I think we can all agree that situations change and so security protocols need to be fluid and adaptable. And this is a fact that civilians should be willing to accept with some degree of savoir faire.

Which brings us to the conflicting goals. (1) and (2) are reasonably self-evident–we agree that passengers must be screened in some way but that no acceptable screening regime will be 100 percent effective, because the burdens of perfection would be untenable.

That leaves us with (3) and (4). Some day terrorism in the West may be a multi-cultural phenomenon. This is not that day. The unhappy fact is that there are no Wiccan terrorists. There are no 3-year-old terrorists. There are no Unitarian terrorists. The odds that any given passenger on an American flight will be a terrorist are very, very, very, very small–probably somewhere in the ballpark of 1 in 400 million. But the odds that a 90-year-old Chinese nun will be a terrorist are so infinitesimal as to approach zero.

Post-9/11, America decided–consciously or not–that we would not use these very useful trend lines to profile passengers. (Thanks President Bush!) The calculus was that the price of the inconvenience to the majority was worth the benefit of protecting the minority from bearing special scrutiny.

Yet the costs in this equation have continued to increase. The underlying question in this entire TSA brou-ha is whether or not it’s still worth hassling everyone so as not to wind up only hassling a small group of people, over and over. Maybe it still is. But maybe it isn’t.

The immediate question is whether the new TSA procedures are–qua procedures–effective. Do the backscatter images and enhanced gropings/pat-downs provide better protection for travelers?

If the answer is no–and maybe it is, I haven’t seen actual analysis–then the TSA should abandon them as a matter of course. But if the answer is yes, they do provide some degree of increased security, we have three choices:

(1) Accept the burden for all travelers.

(2) Ask that a small minority of travelers accept the burden–while acknowledging that this is a sacrifice and a mark of forbearance and graciousness on their part.

(3) Decline the marginal increase in security as not being worth either the inconvenience to all or the discomfort of the minority.

The BBC’s modern-day Sherlock is better than you might imagine. But I didn’t buy in all the way until the last few minutes of episode 1.3 when Moriarty walked onscreen. Played by Andrew Scott he’s totally, completely mesmerizing, like a 00 agent crossed with Heath Ledger’s joker. The line reads, the walk, the changing vocal register–phenomenal work. Even more, I loved setting Moriarty up as Sherlock’s professional mirror-image–the idea of him not as a Napoleon of crime, but as a criminal consultant is sheer genius. Scott unveils himself at about 1:45 in the clip below and will probably dominate the series for the rest of its run.

Hire better looking TSA agents.

We’re here all week, ladies and gentlemen. Enjoy the buffet.

Over at the Standard.