TSA-holes

The new predominant rant acorss the blogosphere is the inanity of airport security, its laxness, its ineffectiveness, and most often intensely annoying actions of mentally-challenged airport security agents who are either abusing their perceived power or are just invasively frustrating without cause and doing little to nothing to actually improve air safety.

Like this well-written rant from a guy who was told it was illegal to wear sunglasses in LAX, or drink his bottled water before throwing it away.

And of course the useless checking of boarding passes, much less double-checking of the passes just a meter or two later, has been parodied by the many boarding-pass generators on the web.

Why does no one seem to remeber that any and all terrorists trying to affect air travel have all had valid IDs and boarding passes?

Another favorite is the guy who decided to express his opinion about the whole "you can only carry liquids under three ounces and in a clear plastic bag" moronic practice (and let's point out that the possibility of combining portable liquids into a relevantly dangerous substance has been dismissed by any and all scientific communities) by getting a sharpie and writing "Kip Hawley is an idiot" on his bag of toothpase and hair gel. He was also detained and accosted.

And the new "three ounce" rule is so asinine, especially in the TSA agents' inability to enforce it correctly or consistently. Is it that the container has to be less than three fluid ounces, or contain less than three fluid ounces of fluid? There are many tales of people losing their nearly-empty tubes of toothpaste as even though there was less than one ounce of toothpaste, the tube could originally contain four ounces.

Wow. We have shown those terrorists haven't we? Thank you Homeland Security for protecting our freedoms-- well, you haven't "protected" them as much as "taken them away." But I sure feel safer with these chapped lips/hands, frizzy hair, and bad breath. Correction: safe from moist hands, groomed hair, and basic hygene.