Scan This !

The past few days have reminded me why I have avoided flying for more than two years. And my last two flights weren't my choice. I had to handle a matter in Las Vegas, fast, and then get back three weeks later just as fast. I managed to smuggle a pen knife and a couple of other deadly weapons on my body, but I forgot they make you take your shoes off, so they found my bomb.

Luckily I had a civilian trial, so I'm free to bore you with my opinions on government unfettered by a conviction for terrorism. Is this a great country or what? OK, you got me. I made most of that up. But the Vegas trip was true, and even then I felt like an accused felon being checked for weapons. And all of this was before they instituted the latest wastes of time, energy and money. I didn't have to make the choice of getting a blast of carcinogenic rays or getting felt up by a drooling moron who finally got off unemployment and went to work for the TSA.

Now the truth is that unlike the gal in the photo, I am neither a vegan nor do I have the same toned gender equipment. But I'm not crazy about being bombarded by dangerous machine emissions, and I've always had a certain reticence about being touched intimately by total strangers (well, at least since I left Berkeley). I'm not particularly shy, but I prefer to make the choice of when and to whom I'm going to show my private parts. And no, I'm not talking about that incident at the porn theater.

The TSA says we shouldn't be upset because they give us a choice. That's like my doctor saying I have the choice of cancer or a heart attack. Or simply the old choice of the devil or the deep blue sea. Of course there is the third choice, which is to say screw this, I just won't fly. That's the one I've chosen, and intend to stick to until the government decides to hire Mossad to conduct airport security. Then I'll know I'm safe--both from terrorists and the hands of amateurs who have no idea what they're doing. Of course there would always be the issue of ethnic profiling, but since 98% of airline terrorists have been Middle Eastern Muslims, I'll take that option.

This is supposed to be a banner year for the airlines at Thanksgiving. I'd rather stay home and give thanks that I'm not at an airport waiting to be X-rayed by some machine that will show the steel pin in my leg as a lethal weapon or being groped by a dull-normal government employee (who is likely soon to be a union employee who can't even be fired). If the 24 million people expected to fly this Thanksgiving would follow my lead, the airlines and the government would both get the message very quickly.

I loved flying in the old days. I commuted back and forth between San Francisco and Los Angeles on a regular basis. Boy, do I miss PSA and those stewardesses. And there was the freedom of deciding on a whim to head for New York or New Orleans for an unplanned weekend. Today, the airport security check (and I use that term very loosely) takes longer than the flight. I'm not known for my ability to keep my opinion to myself, and I suspect the first time one of those losers ordered me to submit to one or the other of the useless procedures, I'd probably be saying something far worse than "if you touch my junk, I'll have you arrested." At least if a cop makes such a demand of you, you've probably done something suspicious that has drawn his attention, and he's likely to know exactly what he's doing.

That's a major part of the fallacious security measures being taken today. Unable to distinguish between a sweet old Swedish grandmother and a turbaned Middle Easterner with crazed eyes mumbling "Allahu akbar" everybody is treated as a potential terrorist. No logic, no signs, no observation--everybody's a possible mass murderer. It wouldn't help if they tried to use the Israeli methods which have been so successful, since the Israeli security people are highly-trained professionals and our TSA employees are people who failed the tests for jobs as street-sweepers. Our geniuses couldn't distinguish between an elephant and an elephant seal.

Instead of looking directly into the passenger's eyes and asking pertinent question while observing body language and listening for inconsistent answers, our Transportation Silliness Agents stumblingly read the questions off a card they can't seem to memorize and don't even watch the person they're questioning. If they're not reading from the card, they're looking off into the distance for the airline clock that will tell them it's time for lunch. "Gee, Mr. bin Laden, are you planning on blowing up any buildings or airplanes today?" "Nope" "OK--next passenger."

The other problem is that the screeners (and their idiot bosses and the dumbass politicians) spend all their time concentrating on everything more hardened than a Q-Tip as being potentially dangerous in the air, and no time at all considering the importance of keeping a dangerous person on the ground and off the plane. Box cutters were used by the 9/11 terrorists, so now we can't carry penknives. Some explosives can be liquified, so now we can't carry over a certain amount of apple juice or mother's milk. A shoe-bomber almost pulled it off, so now we all have to take our shoes off, as if the silly screeners would know a shoe-bomb when they saw one, on or off the passenger's foot. Those lethal weapons wouldn't have been lethal if the jihadists hadn't been allowed on the plane in the first place.

As for the present garbage security, a ridiculously suspicious scumbag boarded a Christmas flight to Detroit with murder in his heart and explosives in his crotch, so now Grandma Johanssen has to have her nether regions scanned or groped. There were at least seven significant signs that the underwear bomber was too dangerous to be allowed on an airline flight, and his underwear was the least of them. I guarantee he never would have gotten on that plane if he had tried to embark from Tel Aviv airport.

The liar, liar pants on fire panty bomber wasn't even stopped on the plane until smoke started emanating from his trousers. Was he thwarted in his nefarious scheme by the pilot, the co-pilot, and air marshal, or one of the flight attendants? Nope. An observant and alert Dutch filmmaker didn't think people's crotches should be smoking under any circumstances, so he jumped on the damned fool and poured liquid on his flaming pants. Maybe we could just eliminate the TSA employees and hire Dutch filmmakers to do the screenings before the lowlives get on board a plane. "Observant" and "alert" are not words I would use to describe the TSA employees I've seen. "Semi-conscious" comes a great deal closer.

The Constitution forbids only a certain type of discrimination, and the definition applies to "ethnic profiling." That is a political concept, not a legal one. Sooner or later there's going to be one too many complaints from suspicious looking and behaving Middle Easterners about discrimination, and we might finally see a clear exoneration of profiling at the Supreme Court. The Court has already made it clear that it is not "discrimination" that is forbidden, but "invidious" discrimination. That means discrimination which is arbitrary, capricious, irrational, and not reasonably related to a legitimate purpose. A 98% Middle Eastern terrorist fact, combined with the clear need to protect airline passengers and the folks on the ground eliminates any sensible argument about singling out a certain group for special attention before boarding planes. It's not arbitrary, it's completely rational (statistically and factually), and what can be more reasonable than saving large numbers of lives?

So I'm suggesting that the next time you think of flying for any reason other than a dire emergency, cancel the flight and instead send a letter to the airline stating that you have chosen not to fly, and will continue to do so until the airlines, airports, TSA and politicians get their act together and institute genuine airport security instead of an expensive, intrusive sham. It might give the new Congress and hopefully the next administration the idea that the nonsensical, bureaucratic, welfare-to-workfare phony security imposed by TSA and Janet Napoleontano at Homeland Insecurity is making airline travel extremely undesirable. That is damaging to a very important, money-producing, tax-paying major business. I think the proper term for this waste of time and energy and violation of personal privacy is "counterproductive."