Once Upon A Time, This Is No Sh*t

The title is the official format for opening fairytales from civilians or the military, respectively.

You may perhaps remember the LAX airport shooting of last November, or my blog post on the subject when it happened.

Well, as the old saw goes, every project has several stages:

1. Enthusiasm,
2. Disillusionment,
3. Panic and hysteria,
4. Search for the guilty,
5. Punishment of the innocent, and
6. Praise and honor for the nonparticipants.

Under the heading of the last three stages, here is the fairytale from the City of Los Angeles, via their airport-running morons minions.

It's fascinating, even breathtaking, in the lengths to which they go to repeat fantasy despite the evidence of everyone's lying eyes, and miss the forest in order to focus on pruning a ficus tree in a clay pot.

For example, the report notes that the gunman entered the terminal area at 9:18, they began receiving shooting reports at 9:20, and by 9:25, the gunman was shot, down and in custody.

Once again, kudos to the LA Airport police for exemplary bravery and superb marksmanship, sparing the taxpayers further bloodshed, or even the necessity for a lengthy trial by their efforts.

But then, in a flight of fantasy usually reserved for serious writers of science fiction, the city goes on to say

"Airport Operations focused on passenger assistance and mass care for the 4,500 passengers who self-evacuated from Terminals 1, 2. and 3, and the more than 20,000 passengers who were sheltered in place on aircraft, and in terminals."

Much as the SS focused on assistance and mass care for the millions of Jews and such they "sheltered in place" in locations like Treblinka, Auschwitz, and the Warsaw Ghetto.

The report notes that operations were disrupted for days over an incident that was over in seven minutes. Then completely glosses over the fact that they interred tens of thousands of people needlessly from 9:30AM till nearly the time darkness fell without the slightest bit of information or assistance whatsoever, and left thousands more people, including children, pregnant women, and elderly passengers with wheelchairs and walkers, to fend for themselves, and trek miles and miles to reach safety, and access to shelter, water, and/or transport to parts of the city unaffected by their monumental civic stupidity on a biblical scale.

The one incontrovertible fact, totally ignored by the report, is that they provided somewhere between zero and NO passenger assistance or mass care for hours and hours and hours, and only let the Red Cross set up shelters miles away and distribute a pitifully small amount of water and blankets on site after it was clear to everyone but airport management that shelters wouldn't be necessary for the overwhelming bulk of those affected, due to them having successfully escaped the clutches of such institutional incompetence by fleeing on foot whenever able and as fast as humanly possible, lest they be "helped" any further that day.

So, other than glossing over that petty set of inconveniences and massive organizational and institutional incompetence, the report is fairly accurate in noting that after 9:25, they didn't do anything else right that day, or any day before or since, to include having no actual coherent plan for, y'know, actual emergencies, focusing their efforts on spending the millions of homeland security dollars on dealing with the day-to-day operations, while sort of completely neglecting any actual preparations sufficient to deal with even a lone gunman killed within minutes, thus dooming the city and over 1500 passenger flights to days of delays and flight cancellations and subjecting the airlines and their customers to millions and millions of dollars of lost revenue and delayed cargo shipments as well.

Having these buffoons self-critique their performance is a little like having clowns rate their own big top circus performance, if you like that sort of thing. I could go on, but their career-best performance of Assclownery On Parade can best be summed up by the line at the end of Raiders of The Lost Ark:
"Top. Men."

If so many as two active shooters descended on LAX on the same day, with rather more competence at terrorism that the sad little panda so well-ventilated on this recent outing, Los Angeles would probably be best served by simply shutting the airport down until the following summer, rather than straining the mental and managerial capabilities of city airport management, DHS, TSA, or the dozens of other incompetent levels of official stupidity we foolishly assign responsibility, to oversee the safety of people brighter than they are.

Sleep tight, America.

And remember, in any incident, the thing to do is GTFO as quickly as possible, because official assclownery is the only thing more comprehensively malicious than terrorist malice to get you killed in any incident they respond to, 110 times out of 100.