Boston Marathon 2013

    Two thoughts.  We are all Bostonians tonight.  And F*CK TERRORISM.

Terrorists who don't wash their hands

A couple weeks ago, I took my first plane trip in a while. It was just a short jaunt over to Fresno, but I've been away from the TSA Security insanity for far too long. . As I entered the security check-in area at Sky Harbor, I was pulled aside by a lady in uniform and ordered to extend my hand. She proceeded to swathe it three times with some sort of liquid, and I then had to put my hand over some sort of scanner. . It of course turned out negative, and I later found out from a frequent-flying colleague that it was looking for traces of bomb-making material on my hands. Lucky for me as a chemist that none of my company's chemicals are apparently on the no-no list. . Curiously, there was a guy entering the Security Zone right behind me. The uniform asked him if he was with me. "No," he answered (truthfully). "Okay, you can go," she said, and he moved along without incident. So... . Did I really look like a terrorist, or was a TSA lady just trying to justify her existence and randomly check anyone she didn't like? And what difference did it make whether the next guy was with me or not. Do terrorists only work alone? . In any event, I feel so much safer knowing that TSA is watching out for bomb-makers who don't wash their hands.

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.