The shoe bomber story

...is an emblem of everything that is bad about how people think and make decisions. What basically happened was some guy came up with an idea but was thwarted when he tried to carry it out. The response was: "no one will ever try this again on our watch!" So they started taking people's shoes. And they made sure that no one would ever try to put explosive materials in there ever again: fool me once, etc.

This was an idiotic, unimaginative response. I guess, fine, you start doing shoe-checks and you probably won't get anyone trying that particular thing again. But how shabby, to come up with this new, absurdly narrow procedure in response to one guy giving it a shot? If a dude packs heat in his bellybutton next time, are they going to start requiring the day after he's locked up that everyone flash their navels as they walk through the x-ray machine?

It's worse even, maybe. Because the shoe-check decree is targeted squarely at those people who lack imagination in the same exact way as the legislators/whatever who came up with it. The only people who stand to be comforted by it are the ones who can't picture a thing happening that they haven't already seen, that hasn't yet been explained to them. These people didn't know to look out for shoe-bombers before, but once Richard Reid did his thing, it's all they could think about. A mind that can only wrap itself around that with which it is already familiar.

This came up because we were talking about T-Pain, and how it's dumb that after he got some singles onto the charts music producers thought they could just make more songs using that vocal effect and expect the same success.