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  • Read this and laugh. Then cry.

    Funny stuff. In a way.

    SNOW JOB

    I was at the airport in Auckland the other day and mooching around the Duty Free shop. My little girl likes snow globes, so I picked out one showing some charming New Zealand sheep. No snow, technically, but when you shook it little stars sparkled around the ovine cuties. The Kiwi sales clerk swiped my credit card, wrapped it up, and then said, “Oh, wait. Are you flying to America?”

    I should have known. She consulted her list of prohibited items and informed me that, in an expansive definition worthy of John Paul Stevens, the twinkly fluid inside the snow globe had been deemed to count as a “liquid”. In theory, I could smash the incredibly thick glass, replace the sparkly stuff with something more incendiary, re-glaze it in the airport men’s room with help from co-conspirators among the shadowy networks of antipodean jihadist glaziers, and board the plane to explosive effect. When I scoffed at this thesis, the lady said somewhat petulantly, “Well, it’s not my fault you’re going to America.”

    Which is hard to argue with. If I’d wanted to fly a souvenir snow globe to Yemen, Saudi Arabia or Belgium, there’d have been no problem. I could breeze through the metal detector with a pair of snow globes in each hand shaking them like Carmen Miranda. The jihad may never achieve global domination over the Great Satan, but it has already achieved snow global domination.

    At Australian airports, they’ve evidently figured out that these heightened security procedures will be with us for a while, so they’ve reconfigured the area around the detector – a row of tables with small baskets for keys and coins, a separate row of tables with bigger baskets for unloading laptops from cases, plenty of space on the other side for reassembling oneself and one’s possessions. Works very smoothly. None of that when I landed from Auckland at Los Angeles. Five years after 9/11, the line shuffles forward into the kind of chaotic shambles that would pass muster had the procedures been introduced 48 hours ago. Surly security staff yell at passengers – “BACK BEHIND THE LINE! NOW!” – and yell at each other – “I NEED A MALE AND A FEMALE INSPECTION! NOW!” – and bins back up on the belt and wheezing geriatrics tip forward trying to re-shoe themselves in mid-hop.

    In the later stages of the IRA’s long campaign against the British government, they didn’t even have to bother bombing anything. They simply had to get a man with an Irish accent to place a phone call using the agreed code words to the appropriate authorities or media outlets. Upon receipt of such a message, London’s police would shut down Tube lines and bus routes and the city would grind to a halt and millions of pounds would be lost to the economy. That’s a lot of bucks for no bang. Just a tenpenny phone call. The jihad pulled off something similar at Heathrow. It was reported that MI-5 and Scotland Yard had “foiled” the plot, but millions of people will now be inconvenienced and discomforted at airports and on flights around the world, in perpetuity. From the jihad's point of view, with setbacks like that, who needs victories? Next time round, they’ll foil some entirely different scheme – explosive suppositories, dirty-nuke hip replacements – and another avalanche of pitiful constraints will fall upon the hapless traveler. The British Airports Authority has now banned lipstick, mascara and all other cosmetics, so, even if you fly First Class, by the time you get off you’ll look like coach.

    Meanwhile, Birmingham Airport in England has banned passengers from boarding with “gel-filled bras”. People have been demanding for years now that we need to start profiling. Well, they’re profiling in Birmingham: they’re profiling women with padded bras, which is one great profile; their highly trained staff can spot gals who really stand out. I know I feel safer knowing that unusually curvaceous women are being subject to extra security screening. So gel-filled bras are out, and presumably in another year or two we’ll be preventing gel-filled breasts from boarding.

    This is where we came in five years ago. The airline cabin was already the most regulated jurisdiction in America – a kind of way-up-there-in-the-blue state where Ted Kennedy and Al Gore’s fondest desires on gun control, smoking and indeed free speech had all been implemented. So on September 11th three out of the four planes followed all the 1970s hijack procedures and everybody died. On the fourth, free-born citizens reclaimed their rights, fought back against the terrorists and provided the only good news of the day. Half a decade on, the regulatory regime is even more coercive. No plastic knives, no tweezers, and, long after Richard Reid has died of old age in prison, we’ll still be removing our footwear in eternal homage to the thwarted shoebomber.

    The arithmetic is very simple: Can we regulate for all faster than they can adapt for some? Three of the plotters arrested in Britain turned out to be converts – or, as Islam calls them, “reverts” - part of an ever growing legion of new recruits to Islam. The jihad evidently took the view that, the US government’s protestations notwithstanding, surely not even the decadent Americans would really be so foolish as to assume the Swedish grandmother was as high-risk as the young Saudi male. So they shifted their efforts to recruiting men of non-Arab appearance with non-Muslim names – and, judging from recent arrests from Toronto to London to Perth, they’ve had some success. Absent a determination to wage war on the ideology, the question is whether we can adapt as nimbly as they do.

    In the time it took to reverse the credit card transaction at that Auckland airport shop, it would have been possible to establish that I am not a terrorist. Nor are you, nor 95 per cent of passengers. But we choose not to, preferring to shuffle through the detector, sans shoes, sans gel-filled bras, sans penile piercings, and one day sans everything, cursed for eternity to react defensively to every innovation. Our enemies think they hold the world in their hands, and I can’t even hold a snow globe in mine.
    National Review, September 11th 2006

  • #2
    This apparently is what is happening all over the world for passengers going to the US.

    Recently, my uncle nearly died because even medicines were not allowed and the non stop flight was I think 17 hours or more.

    Some kindly airline staff, seeing him lie down bearly breathing at the airport, took pity and organised some relief.

    Thank Heavens they allow medicines now, of course with a doctor's prescription. I am awaiting the day when it will have to be produced in sextipulate!

    The average air traveller is up a gum tree these days!

    Another friend who was flying to the US was not allowed Cheetos. Maybe the
    Cheetos were too hot for the Amercan pilots and would be ideal for hijacking!

    Sometimes the rules are most ridiculous.


    "Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

    I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

    HAKUNA MATATA

    Comment


    • #3
      Meanwhile, Birmingham Airport in England has banned passengers from boarding with “gel-filled bras”. People have been demanding for years now that we need to start profiling. Well, they’re profiling in Birmingham: they’re profiling women with padded bras, which is one great profile; their highly trained staff can spot gals who really stand out. I know I feel safer knowing that unusually curvaceous women are being subject to extra security screening. So gel-filled bras are out, and presumably in another year or two we’ll be preventing gel-filled breasts from boarding.
      I didn't know whether or not to chuckle in amusement or apply for a job

      Originally posted by Ray View Post
      Another friend who was flying to the US was not allowed Cheetos. Maybe the
      Cheetos were too hot for the Amercan pilots and would be ideal for hijacking!
      I was so looking forward to enshrining those Indian Cheetos.
      “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by TopHatter View Post
        I didn't know whether or not to chuckle in amusement or apply for a job

        I was so looking forward to enshrining those Indian Cheetos.


        My homage to the Almighty Cheetah not allowed!


        "Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

        I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

        HAKUNA MATATA

        Comment


        • #5
          We can shut down the muslim world pretty easily too, if we are as heartless and ruthless as the terrorists.

          Lob a few Tomahawks at their holy cities during prayers or holidays, at random of course. Make sure we get a good death count, something in the thousands each time. Then after a while, we don't need to lob missiles any more. Just a phone call to the local embassy about a possible attack and people will stay away from the holy sites. How can a site be holy if no one ever visits it?

          Two can play this game.
          "Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

          Comment


          • #6
            gunnut,

            that reminded me of the movie "The Battle of Algiers", which was mandatory viewing at the Pentagon back in 2003.

            this quote, in particular:

            Journalist: M. Ben M'Hidi, don't you think it's a bit cowardly to use women's baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people?

            Ben M'Hidi: And doesn't it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.
            There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

            Comment


            • #7
              It is better to have a Class Struggle.

              And wipe out millions.

              None will be wiser! ;)


              "Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

              I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

              HAKUNA MATATA

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by astralis View Post
                gunnut,

                that reminded me of the movie "The Battle of Algiers", which was mandatory viewing at the Pentagon back in 2003.

                this quote, in particular:

                Journalist: M. Ben M'Hidi, don't you think it's a bit cowardly to use women's baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people?

                Ben M'Hidi: And doesn't it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.


                Yes because we love the publicity of dropping napalm on women and children.
                Originally posted by GVChamp
                College students are very, very, very dumb. But that's what you get when the government subsidizes children to sit in the middle of a corn field to drink alcohol and fuck.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by gunnut View Post
                  We can shut down the muslim world pretty easily too, if we are as heartless and ruthless as the terrorists.

                  Lob a few Tomahawks at their holy cities during prayers or holidays, at random of course. Make sure we get a good death count, something in the thousands each time. Then after a while, we don't need to lob missiles any more. Just a phone call to the local embassy about a possible attack and people will stay away from the holy sites. How can a site be holy if no one ever visits it?

                  Two can play this game.
                  But that would just piss them off, and swell their numbers, gunnut. No, we should drench them in a couple thousand tons of pig byproducts in carpet bombing first, then hit them with the TacToms, that way their religious sites will be both ritually and literally unclean, insuring none of them gets their virgins when they punch out. ;)
                  Last edited by FOG3; 20 Sep 06,, 20:39.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Hell lets run a herd of Hogs right through mecca and medina!
                    Facts to a liberal is like Kryptonite to Superman.

                    -- Larry Elder

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Yes because we love the publicity of dropping napalm on women and children
                      First off the qoute he used involved the French in Algeria, a French reporter talking to an FLN leader.

                      I guess you missed the point as well...
                      To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

                      Comment

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