So apparently uncharged electronic devices are now as dangerous to modern air travel as a man-portable flamethrower? When did this happen? People have been carrying charged and uncharged devices onto aircraft for like fucking six decades. How is this now worthy of wasting ten more minutes in the security checkpoint?

So I’m just going to assume that if my personal molecules are somehow uncharged, that they’ll still let me board the aircraft. But I think, I guess, that this isn’t an issue because if my atoms were uncharged, that means I’m a bleached skeleton, right? I think?

You know I don’t claim to be the reincarnation of Sun Tzu, but I’m pretty sure nowhere in sound military strategy is it a good idea to broadcast to the enemy what you know about their weapon’s capabilities. I bet there’s a Yemeni informant who just got beheaded because they made him as the only guy able to pass this data to the CIA and he got burned. Gee, thanks USA government, that’ll really encourage folks to cash in on your magnanimous protection of trusted sources.

So in addition to not being Sun Tzu II, I’m also not an engineer. But I’m just going to go ahead and determine that they think if the device cannot turn on it’s because the device is a Trojan horse weapon with dynamite inside instead of your hipster iOS software. To which my question is if that’s true, then what’s all that explosive detection stuff for?

We’ve been led to believe that for over a decade our government masters/protectors can glean the presence of explosives from the inside of your shampoo bottle which you jammed all the way inside your running sneaker and then topped with your rolled sock.

This level of precision is why we subject seven year old girls to internal cavity searches, right? And now they’re admitting that the best they can do to detect an active explosive is if the damn thing doesn’t turn on? That otherwise somebody could take an explosive holding laptop right on by security? Really? That’s the best we’ve got? So does that mean that for the last decade all the explosive detecting gear was just a bunch of smoke and mirrors?

Which brings us to my next point. Is all of this security fetish shit just a bunch of smoke and mirrors? We’ve previously blogged about the lunacy of both sides picking the airways as a battleground, but this is just ridiculous. It’s going to reach the point where in order to check onboard an international flight they’ll require a sample of your blood and stool. But anybody can walk onto just about any high-speed train on the planet with the aforementioned flamethrower in a backpack and nobody’s going to bat an eye until the screaming starts.

Do you feel safe flying? Gee I sure hope so, after all the billions spent and time wasted. Would you feel any less safe if they didn’t read your DNA before you boarded? I bet you wouldn’t know the difference. Would the bad guys get one plane eventually? Sure, but that’s probably going to happen anyways, see previously mentioned explosive detection incompetence.

And in any case you’re about seventy times more likely to check out in a car accident. I recommend you accept that and get over it. In the meantime, we’re probably putting more resources into the TSA than on curing cancer.

[unintelligible mumbling] What? [unintelligible mumbling] Yeah, Wednesday night. Why? [unintelligible mumbling] Well, yeah, I guess I’ll make sure it’s charged before I leave. I need to make sure I’m not late getting aboard. I’m leaving so late, that there isn’t another flight later as a backup. [unintelligible snickering] So, okay, look, … [throws chair]

This humble salaried bureaucrat hopes that terrorism lives forever