Thanks to some bozo who stuffed explosives in his underwear and tried to blow up a plane bound for the US, everyone's in a tizzy again about airport security. And we should be.
.
The TSA folks are telling us we'll be safe as long as we let them do full body scans of us. Yeah, that'll attract the voyeurs to a new career in airport secuirty. "Hey Charlie! Come check out the melons on this ...er... passenger. They could be holding enough C4 to blow the plane to smithereens. Ya think we ought to poke 'em just to see if they're real? In the name of security, of course."
.
Now I might be willing to tolerate this indignity if you could convince me it really would stop the aero-terrorists. Alas, this is the same TSA, whose beefed-up security measures earlier this week managed to a.) mistake jars of honey for TNT (in Bakersfield), and b.) pull a suspicious bag (in Minneapolis) after a signal from their bomb-sniffing dog, only to find later that the bag was one of their own. You can read about it here.
.
Let's face it, TSA is a bunch of Keystone Kops and we really aren't any safer flying now than we were on September 10th, 2001. You might fool yourself into feeling a little safer when your shoes get x-rayed and your mouthwash gets confiscated. But when the security forces can't keep track of their own bags, and think that killer bees are trying to blow up the plane, giving them a free peep-show isn't going to help one bit.
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Fear of Flying
Thanks to some bozo who stuffed explosives in his underwear and tried to blow up a plane bound for the US, everyone's in a tizzy again about airport security. And we should be.
.
The TSA folks are telling us we'll be safe as long as we let them do full body scans of us. Yeah, that'll attract the voyeurs to a new career in airport secuirty. "Hey Charlie! Come check out the melons on this ...er... passenger. They could be holding enough C4 to blow the plane to smithereens. Ya think we ought to poke 'em just to see if they're real? In the name of security, of course."
.
Now I might be willing to tolerate this indignity if you could convince me it really would stop the aero-terrorists. Alas, this is the same TSA, whose beefed-up security measures earlier this week managed to a.) mistake jars of honey for TNT (in Bakersfield), and b.) pull a suspicious bag (in Minneapolis) after a signal from their bomb-sniffing dog, only to find later that the bag was one of their own. You can read about it here.
.
Let's face it, TSA is a bunch of Keystone Kops and we really aren't any safer flying now than we were on September 10th, 2001. You might fool yourself into feeling a little safer when your shoes get x-rayed and your mouthwash gets confiscated. But when the security forces can't keep track of their own bags, and think that killer bees are trying to blow up the plane, giving them a free peep-show isn't going to help one bit.
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2 comments:
This whole bit of nonsense irritates me. People will calm down in a few months and hopefully flying will become a bit easier again. I'm sick of all this "heightened security." It's not helping!
Count on the dittoheads to keep it in the news. When Americans are paranoid, they tend to drift to the political Right.
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