Wired News reported a couple of weeks ago that naked body scanners are coming to an airport near you. It's depressing, but no surprise. Al Quaeda wins again, thanks to us. The bad guys count on us over-reacting and destroying ourselves every time they say 'boo.' And, we seem to be altogether too happy to oblige.
America is fast becoming a severely neurotic culture that over-reacts to everything. Sure, the corporate media has a lot to do with it. But nobody is forcing you to watch cable TV news or listen to undereducated hysterics and psychos on talk radio.
Hey, people! The unsuccessful "Christmas Underwear Bombing Plot" was good news! Al Qaeda must be scraping the bottom of the suicide barrel to come up with a lunatic like 23-year old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
He's an idiot! The bomber not only fumbled the underpants bomb part, but his moronic handlers picked Detroit as the target. For cryin' out loud! Detroit's already a disaster area!
That he and Al Qaeda failed is good news, not a reason to panic.
Now comes news that corporate America wants to go one better than naked scanners and electronically searching our body cavities. They're talking about involuntary CAT-scans for every air traveler.
Bejeebus! Hospitals can't even keep their medical CT scanners in proper tune. As the Los Angeles Times' superb medical reporter, Thomas H. Maugh, wrote last month, two new studies reveal "widespread overuse of CT scans and variations in radiation doses caused by different machines -- operated by technicians following an array of procedures -- are subjecting patients to high radiation doses that will ultimately lead to tens of thousands of new cancer cases and deaths."
And now they expect Homeland Security and local airports to do a better job of it? Thanks, but no thanks. As Diane Diamond wrote recently, they won't even keep us secure:
[F]full body scan machines and more tension-filled TSA X-ray lines [are not] going to do the trick.We'll walk to Europe before we fly through any airport that insists on giving us a CT scan we don't want, don't need, and that would probably kill us well before any terrorist with a bomb up his bumbus.
* * * Just as Abdulmutallab's terrorist buddies figured out a way to sew explosives into the crotch of his underwear other fanatics will discover new ways to get around security procedures.
2 comments:
"We'll walk . . ."
That's always an option. Chances are better than flying that you won't get blown up. There is no constitutional right to fly in an airplane. Not yet anyway.
As a passenger, I don't care if you have to drop your pants, bend over, and spread'em, if that's what it takes to insure you're not carrying a bomb. I want to get there in one piece.
El Al's approach to airline security is something that we could learn from.
As for the attack itself.It wasn't exactly a failed attack. In fact, it was a successful attack. By the grace of God and passengers on board, what failed was the detonation of the bomb.
"America is fast becoming a severely neurotic culture that over-reacts to everything."
Yeah, like relinquishing individual freedom and liberty so that the government can run our health care for us.
Leaving that up to the government takes the worry and burden out of keeping our individual responsibility.
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