Personally, I am very pleased that there has been so much noise this week about the outrageous “scope-or-grope” policy that the TSA has unloaded on the public, and I reallyreallyreallyreally hope it doesn’t simply lapse into the Internet Joke Meme of the Week. There is a genuine opportunity at pushback on a scale so large that the federal government might actually have to rescind their paranoid delusional policies and reconsider exactly how much the price of airport security is really worth.
My blog-buddy Jack Cluth has a great round-up post today featuring many of the stories that have emerged this week. Some of the stories, like the one about the TSA agent frisking a screeching three-year-old, are not new (that particular incident occurred in 2008), but I think that only reinforces the point that this shit has gone on more than long enough, and the recent insistence on even more intrusive pat-downs for people who refuse to be exposed to the “pornoscan” is only the latest outrage, not the first.
Next Wednesday, November 24th, is National Opt-Out Day. Organizers are trying to convince as many air travelers as possible to refuse to scanned by the new “naked picture” scanners and insist on being given a physical pat-down by a TSA agent on what happens to be the single busiest air travel day of the year in the United States. Needless to say, if they are at all successful, the organizers will bring airport passenger processing to its knees while people are groped and manhandled over and over again. Americans are not at all used to this sort of political action, which is only a mere shadow of actions like the recent strikes in France over pension “reforms”, but it is about time that these things start to happen.
If you are flying somewhere next Wednesday, please consider doing your part to try to stop the crumbling of civil rights in this country and tell the TSA “you gotta touch my junk”.
Meanwhile, I find this factoid extremely illuminating: A British risk-assessment consultancy has ranked all the countries of the world by their immediate risk for terrorist action and the United States is ranked 33rd. In fact, none of the Western “democracies” fell into the high-risk category, with Greece being the European country at greatest risk at #24. We are all being played for enormous suckers by very dark and dangerous forces in our own country, and this pushback may be the last chance we have to stop them.
