Beyond the Nanny State
If there is any good that might come from the Transportation Safety Administration’s heavy-handed move to full-body scanners, complete with refusers being forced to endure aggressive pat-downs that all too often fit the dictionary definition of sexual assault, it’s that it may shake enough Americans out of their presumptive, too-comfortable complacency about our government’s benign intentions.
The TSA mostly had my backing until several weeks ago. No, let me correct that. The TSA employees on the ground who carry out the government’s required searches at our airports had my sympathies. After all, they’re not the ones who decided that all passengers must be profiled equally (if you won’t profile on any other basis, that’s what you’re doing). To be clear, this horrible no-profiling non-judgment goes back to George W. Bush’s neanderthal Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta. TSA’s frontline employees aren’t the ones who decided that everyone must send their shoes through the X-ray machines, and they’re not the ones who have compiled the detailed list of what you can and cannot take onto the plane or include with your checked baggage.
But my compassion for TSA employees who have public, er, contact mostly vanished when I learned that the “Advanced Imaging Technology” (AIT) currently being employed:
- May not be safe — “[S]ome researchers are sounding the alarm about airport scanners and the radiation they give off,” including, according to CBS News, “a group of doctors in San Francisco [who] want the FDA to do an analysis of the radiation risk.”
- Hasn’t been proven safe, at least to the public — “It appears the Obama administration wants to keep that information classified.”
There’s also plenty of justification for doubting AIT’s security effectiveness. CBS also tells us that:
- A report issued after investigators for the Department of Homeland Security “tested the devices in eight airports using federal agents disguised as passengers to see if the items they had on their person were detected by the controversial whole body scanners” stated: “The number of tests conducted, the names of the airports tested, and the quantitative and qualitative results of our testing are classified.”
- “The Government Accountability Office has criticized TSA’s internal testing of the machines.”
What’s with the secrecy? If AIT screening is truly effective, the government would be performing a public service by saying so. The idea that potential terrorists would take such an announcement, if backed by the facts, as some kind of a dare is pretty weak; it isn’t as if they’re not already constantly looking for other airline-related lines of attack. More likely, the lack of willingness to disclose how well AIT and other procedures really work is emboldening terrorists to continue their pursuit.
But let’s get back to the TSA’s employees. Anyone there who understands the problems with AIT, and the completely logical reasons why people would refuse to subject themselves to it, should be asking themselves how they can continue to be participants, when a passenger’s only alternative — besides walking away — is to be subjected to an aggressive, privacy-invading, dignity-compromising pat-down. TSA employees who stay on the job in the midst of all of this are telling us a lot about themselves, and it’s not complimentary.
The bottom line is that millions of passengers are being forced to endure deliberately high-visibility searches which, if they improve security at all, only do so marginally, while obviously more effective measures, including logic-based profiling, remain sidelined.
The Democrats, as well as the RINO Republicans, are just proving the point maintained by all of the Tea Party members that the Federal Government is out of control and has turned this country into a socialist, some would say quasi-communist, state. Their time, though, is almost up. The American people have finally woken up, which is why the Democrats did so badly in the 2010 election. There is much hope riding on the new, Conservative, Congress and, if they don’t get the job done, count on a third party being created in 2012. Don’t believe me? Look how far the Tea Party has come in less than two years. It has already gotten candidates elected and thrown other entrenched politicians out of office. So the people in Washington should not discount the idea of a new third party taking over in a few years. If it does not, I fear worse things are in store for this country, things that will look a lot like what’s happening in Europe right now.
Please, God. Let me wake up from this bad dream which has been the first two years of FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE, obama-style…
Remember, freedoms lost, or simply given away are not easily restored.
“They must be stopped.”
That is the scary suggestion. As you mentioned, “it may shake enough Americans out of their presumptive, too-comfortable complacency about our government’s benign intentions.”
As far as I have been able to read the reactions of fellow Americans, one group – the majority – loves the enhanced security measures and the ‘free’ gifts from the White House. The second group is pissed off and wants something done. The third group is waiting and preparing for the civil war to commence.
I’m not sure what the government has in her mind, except to limit the freedom of citizens.
“America is at that awkward stage; it’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.” – Claire Wolfe
Who say’s it’s too early??? Although I think hanging politicians is
more appropriate than shooting them.
Avarice and hanging have been linked since antiquity, and the image appears again and again in art.
They will not be stopped by any method currently under discussion…except mass revolt.
Elected politicians don’t dare to interfere with the alpahbet agencies; they’re too afraid of IRS audits, to say nothing about what the other bureaucracies could do to them. It’s We the People’s turn at bat.
Gandhi might have had a better chance against the British occupiers of India than we do. General morality and human fellow-feeling were stronger then. All the same, massive civil disobedience, all the way to peaceable shutdowns of things such as airport security checkpoints, remains our only option…until the guns come out.
PLEASE write more of this short story. Develop it into a book. I recently read “Patriots – a novel of the coming collapse,” and am hungry for more along these lines. “Patriots” is flying off the shelves. Your book could do the same.
It’s a strange and a sad thing to contemplate that your short story now represents the best-case scenario for the restoration of the Republic.
As I have said elsewhere, we have by now seen ample proof that those within the 0bama regime have no intention of listening to the American people nor do they respect the founding principles of this country. In fact, they hate both. Their lust for power – the power to kill and to do so without consequence – is what animates them and it’s a guarantee that neither conscience nor . decency nor the rule of law will stop them. In the end, the only thing that will decisively stop them is the last argument of kings (ultima ratio regnum).
“Childhood Nutrition Bill”
Michelle Obama’s own reasoning: “…we need to feed our hungry school children, or they’ll become obese”
I’m NOT making this up!
“TSA employees who stay on the job in the midst of all of this are telling us a lot about themselves, and it’s not complimentary.”
What are they telling us besides “thanks to the Obama economy and its 17% real unemployment rate, I have no choice but to do this even though I hate it?”
I mean, standing up and fulfilling the Tom Blumer definition of “noble” by walking off your job as a TSA screener may seem cool and all, but it won’t put a roof over your head or food on your family’s table.
Maybe when we get a President and Congress who understand how to promote economic growth, you’ll have a point, but people have far fewer choices in the Obama sub-prime economy.
Today, walking away from ANY government job is stupid. What, forsake the 25% higher pay than the private sector? And, the TSA is soon to be unionized. Think of the additional benefits that the taxpayer will need to support.
Leftists are control freaks. That’s pretty much it. They can’t handle the thought that someone, somewhere, might even want to try to do something on his own, without someone smarter “helping” him.
The idea of instilling obedience in a formerly independent and even obstreperous population also occurred to me. You couldn’t pull it off in one fell swoop as might be possible in some European countries where forelock-tugging deference to authority seems almost to be in the DNA. No, you would have to keep nibbling away at the edges until the conditioning is sufficiently advanced to finish the job. And you can’t be open about it, which explains the deceit and secrecy used by the Big Government fans in both parties. Even now the people who brought you ClimateGate are saying numerous investigations have upheld the veracity of the research. They don’t say the investigations were conducted by the same people involved in the scam in the first place: the government-financed grantees whose living depends on discovering problems that don’t exist or can’t be helped — Greenland grew grapes a thousand years ago when it was called Vineland — by the puny efforts of humankind. Make no mistake about it, as Obama would say, Washington, D.C. wants to make us vassals of the state.
You are correct – instilling obedience in a formerly independent and even obstreperous population isn’t going to go well, despite the best efforts of an educational establishment that surrendered to the Gramscian meme long ago. But this is nothig new. Here’s what Niccolo Machiavelli, 15th century advisor to Florentine nobles had to say when it came to conquering those who lived in relative freedom:
So don’t look now, but we’re all living in what’s left of a seriously weakened Constitutional republic in which the collapse of the ideas underlying individual liberty is very far advanced.
Take a good long look at what’s happening now in America. Then dare to turn around and take another look. If what they’re saying doesn’t square with what they’re doing; if it looks like there’s an concerted effort to destroy our once Constitutional Republic and replace it with… something else – then you’re probably right. None of what’s happening today makes any sense at all unless you look at it that way – and then it makes a perfectly clear and terrible sort of sense, doesn’t it?
By every measure of reason, this regime is working to destroy our republic for their own ends. Even at its worst, America with all its faults is a paradise compared to the concentration camp culture of the Machiavellian Marxists who have gotten the upper hand today. History is my witness. Given the subversion of the rule of law in America today, there will be only one way to stop them.
That’s exactly what’s been happening in Britain. The British character has been systematically weakened.
“Recent Obama administration ideas and actions….”
TSA body scanners were first brought on-line in 2007.
You have no rights. You only have privileges they haven’t gotten around to taking away.
Go shopping.
Be honest.
23 minutes. You’re slipping.
Be honest. Address it.
Good. Simple, declarative sentences. Original thoughts. This is good. Wait,is sense a slipping . . . hang on, Lucky . . . hang on . . .
“Go shopping”
You know, you’ve got a point there. That got me mad back when, and it still gets me mad.
And has anyone researched if the backscatter x-ray machines influence sperm production in any way or if a woman is in the first few weeks of pregnancy, a fetus? Women are cautioned against drinking a glass of wine as soon as pregnancy is known, how about AIT machine exposure?
Dose to the skin wouldn’t affect an embryo or fetus, but I’m not sure about sperm.
A public of ever more compliant sheep sounds to me like what is going on. I just can’t understand the American people putting up with all of this governmental intrusion, however. In an earlier day and time none of this would have been tolerated and those who tried to impose such regulation on the people would have died horrible deaths. I don’t know what it will take to stiffen the spines of the American people, however defunding these various agencies who would foster tyrants and tossing the radicals out of power surely would help.
The frog is boiling and no one is jumping out of the water. The sheeple are finished, cooked, toast, and so is the U.S.
It’s our government, right? or Wrong? I’m not even in a position to go flying, but I must say, why is each and every frequent flyer being treated like a drug-runner in a car in Jersey ( allegedly profiled). Spouse thinks it’s b/c the government wants embarassing photos of successful people who can be blackmailed.
Is this a way to make flying so distasteful that only wealthy people fly? I know transportation was nearly shut down in various places and times in history by threat of sexual assault. I can’t quite see having my daughter irradiated, or fondled by strangers.
Why can’t we profile? Honestly, we’ve been sumbitches before. Norm Mineta got employed and promoted by the gov’t that stuck him in a camp. He survived. Why not profile like crazy, and then their grandchildren can celebrate ( alive) owning an American airline, 100 years in the future, when the whole islamist blowing up American stuff is over and done with. Why are we looking so perplexed? We fried Italian anarchists, we jailed bombers, we sent home IRA agitators. Why are we being so clueless now?
Do we just have to wait two years, otherwise we’d be sending some guy home to Indonesia, or Kenya, or someplace other than 1600?
Cool. Let’s profile all middle-aged white Americans cuz they’s most likely to be carrying a gun. You don’t mind, do you? National security and all. You understand.
Pointless, Sensei. Most middle-aged white Americans who are carrying guns are doing so legally. It’s the young African-American males who are most likely to be illegally packing (often packing illegal weapons), and it would be politically incorrect to profile them. And don’t you know this DoJ would bring lawsuits against that practice even more quickly than they brought their lawsuit against Arizona.
Nice try, though.
Congratulations! You’ve just made the profiling list. Don’t worry, though, if you’re not doing anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.
“Your Sensei” is neither mine nor a sensei. It is an idiot troll. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT engage it.
Cool, let’s behavioral profile all young black males standing on street corners 24/7, cuz they be the ones pushing the dope and the coke and doing most of the black on black violent crime. Do it for the children. You understand.
Cool. Let’s behavioral profile the Catholic priests cuz theys the ones sexually assaulting young boys. Let’s profile the Pope while we’re at it, since he be a former Hitler Youth. That’ll be three Hail Marys and a couple novinas. Go forth and blog no more.
LiarLeaks.
“Cool. Let’s behavioral profile” Born Liar sleazits Persons and see if the Modern Liberal Cesspool is up to a self cleansing action. So who are all these “you peoples”? Explain the need to lie about your identity repeatedly. Can’t do it? “Collar too tight”?
Address it. Show that “Courage and Intelligence” that you are so well known for. Yeah, by the Funhouse Mirror. Come on Persons Galore, be all you can be, lay down some street rap and mil talk. Bring on the Kick Me sign and set yourself up down range for some Liar Love.
Archives are a bitch!
49. Your Sensei
“And you wonder why we hold you people in such low regard.”
November 6, 2010 – 7:20 am
Wow Really
It’s stunning how uninformed, arbitrary and gullible you people are.
October 20, 2010 – 4:14 pm
Betty Knows
You people are precisely what’s wrong with this country.
Carl
I swear, you people are beyond help.
August 14, 2010 – 12:39 pm
Praetorian
But the Constitution is a bit inconvenient for you people right?
July 29, 2010 – 6:18 pm
Praetorian
It’s gonna be a rough eight-years for you people (i.e. fascists).
July 3, 2010 – 8:46 pm
Is Mr. President moving Right? Sin of sins!
It’s getting touchy. You need him now. Used and discarded? A story of Hope and Change!
Whatever.
Cool, since your not an agent of the state, you can profile to your heart’s content, how about Muslims for doing sheep, cruelty to animals, or is that to risky for your liberal neighborhood watch program? In the ghetto they’d call you the snitch police program and bust a cap in your ass. Happy blogging.
Oh, gosh darn it! You almost hung on. Better lucky next time.
Sensi:
Been reading your comments for awhile now and they really are senseless.
They have been attacking free transportation for decades. What do you think $40,000 cars that don’t work are all about. What do you think multi-billion dollar light rail systems are about.
When you make a cell phone call or use the internet,they have your covered, but when you jump in your car or a plane, who knows where you might end up or who you might talk to, and what you might talk to them about. You might even have an anti-politburo conversation.
Channel the chattel into buses and trains and make flying so distasteful that the scum never attempt it again. Much easier to keep tabs on the hateful subjects that way. That’s how they did it in the USSR, and if it was good enough for the masters of control, then it sure ought to be good enough for us.
Saying it is about contol understates it by a long shot.
Absolute control is more accurate. Just like they had from the time people began living in cities until the mid 18th century.
All this freedom jazz just isn’t making it for the Soros and Obama’s of the world.
Every single detail of the liberal / progressive / socialist / fascist / statist / communist / totalitarian agenda can be traced to that one overriding objective….Absolute Control.
From their perspective, freedom isn’t a good thing, it is the one overriding evil that prevents them from having the total power they have wanted back for 230 years.
Radical Islam isn’t their enemy. Racism isn’t their enemy. Poverty isn’t their enemy. Disease isn’t their enemy. YOU are their enemy.
Absolute control requires absolute power. And as Orwell told us long ago, power is its own reward. Those who seek that sort of power are monsters – killers without conscience. The history of the last 150 years is drenched in the blood of their victims.
Someday on the horizon we’ll all be forced to wear helmets cuz we might fall down. Read Jack Williamson’s old (1940s) science fiction story, “With Folded Hands”.
I can’t wait to have a robot who’s around to take away my hammer cuz I might hit my thumb with it.
Political Correctness is a form of cowardice and Emily Post gone mental.
“Don’t worry young man, feeling your testicles will make a Pakistani man feel better – somewhere. So don’t be afraid. We’re just being polite. Not to you but somebody we don’t want to offend even worse than you. If you’re white you can’t actually be offended. It’s a scientific fact proven at honky.com. Here’s the literature. Now pull up your pants and get on the plane. And oh, here’s a lollipop for you to suck on”
The TSA is full of incompetent goons who no one should ever give any kind of authority to.
http://www.punditandpundette.com/2010/11/more-tsa-horror-stories.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/tsa-security-horror-stories-2010-11#
This next link has the video of a woman who was so badly beaten by TSA goons that she has permanent brain damage.
http://rawjustice.com/2010/11/22/10-of-the-most-outrageous-tsa-horror-stories/
The one where that woman got assaulted and injured alarmed me. I wear contact lenses. If you are going on a trip you have to have lens cleaner.
I know how condescending and rude these jerks can be. That could have been me. They seem to think that they have the right to punish you for raising your voice, disagreeing or questioning them. The American Gestapo.
All airports should hire private security companies. They are better trained and held to a higher standard.
And as for putting the Department of Homeland Security in charge of our agriculture INCLUDING WHAT WE GROW IN OUR OWN BACKYARDS… control, control, control. Food prices are going up and will continue to. How do you like the idea of these high school dropout – “just got my GED and now I’m an officer” goons on your property tearing up your gardens and telling you that you can’t grow tomatoes and this orange tree has to go?
Fundamentally Transforming America into sh*t.
Actually, I’d prefer the drop-out with a GED to an Ivy League graduate, but otherwise your point is well taken.
Latest leaks include letter from Janet Napolitano on TSA searches, read it here… http://beautifulletters-bls.blogspot.com/2010/12/tsa-expands-reach-of-grope.html
Not the real deal, but it has the ring of truth. Especially the part about re-interpreting our fourth amendment rights and surrendering our Constitutional rights at the security check point.
What part of WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN THE TARGET don’t you guys understand? Ever since the false flag that was 9-11, our government has went beyond the call of duty in making sure we are bullied,groped,illegally searched,videotaped and unlawfully detained. Meanwhile,people who should have had their names on terrorist watch lists have been allowed to freely go as they please.
WAKE UP B4 IT’S TOO LATE
For a full preview of what’s in store, you really could not do better than review the plight of the UK in recent decades, particularly the 13 years of socialist rule that only seemed to end in May 2010. These are just a small portion of what the citizens of the UK did NOT vote for, but got rammed down their throats anyway, comprising the destruction of a once Great Britain:
>Rule by unelected commissars in brussels;
>Subjugation of British law to the tenets of the European Convention on Human Rights;
>Mass immigration by the lowest of the low of all EU countries, and the granting of outlandishly generous benefits to all comers, including known terrorists and polygamists;
>A wholesale assault on Christianity, including by the awful Archbishop of Canterbury, and refusal to uphold and defend the Christian faith;
>24/7 surveillance of all citizens;
>Adherence to every nutjob UN treaty out there, including loss of parental rights and ‘educating’ 5 year olds on the benefits of homosexuality and abortion;
>The treatment of drivers as enemy number one, using trackers that feed data on miles driven, where to, where from and when;
>A reduction to bi-weekly garbage collection and a concomitant rise in the vermin population;
>Tags on your garbage bins to ensure re-cycling, with fines or refusal to pick up if the now legal requirements are infringed. Local government inspectors to spy on said garbage and the placement of your garbage bins – usually right outside your front door. Fines for not having them where they ‘should’ be.
Plus all the usual propaganda regarding the muslim religion of peace, food/obesity obsessions, pre-school and childhood ‘education’ for the production of future little proletarians.
In other words, marxism writ large – and what isn’t here already is coming our way. Look at the UK and realize that nothing, I mean nothing, is too small or personal for these numbnuts not to want to intrude on it with their madness. The so-called conservative/liberals who won the last election in May 2010 have merely taken over from the socialists by virtue of a bit of window dressing. Despite the blather, there have been no changes made to anything in accordance with what the people made clear they want, especially getting out of the EU.
Therefore, beware RINOS and the next incarnation of the Demonrats/Socialists/Marxists, who will be up and running again in 2012.
Who say’s it’s too early to shoot them??? Although I think hanging politicians is more appropriate.
Avarice and hanging have been linked since antiquity, and the image appears again and again in art.
SHOCKING AIRPORT VIDEO.
This frightening video is absolutely shocking. How can peaceful, patriotic, America-loving, law-abiding citizens protect themselves from the government? Unless this is stopped now, even worse terror will be perpetrated against us by our own government. Who will protect us from the government?
The TSA is out of control
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhkQoiaf7Uc&feature=player_embedded
The terrorists have won. The inept, terrifying government response to Islamic terrorism is to terrorize innocents.
It is unacceptable and immoral that innocents at U.S. airports are humiliated with degrading full-body scanners exposing their naked bodies and destroying their health with cancer causing radiation; and subjected to extremely aggressive, invasive “pat downs” which analysts say are criminal sexual assaults.
This has NOTHING to do with security. It’s all about power and control and destroying our health, basic human rights and our freedom. Ruling elites know the body scanners are useless:
“Full-body scanners are waste of money, Israeli expert says
A leading Israeli airport security expert says the Canadian government has wasted millions of dollars to install “useless” imaging machines at airports across the country.
“I don’t know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747,” Rafi Sela told parliamentarians probing the state of aviation safety in Canada.”
http://www.vancouversun.com/travel/Full+body+scanners+waste+money+Israeli+expert+says/2941610/story.html
American leaders have a responsibility to copy the highly successful Israeli airport security. Israel are the experts.
Council on American-Islamic Relations: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faiths, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.” – Omar Ahmad (CAIR co-founder).
Addressing a youth session at the 1999 Islamic Association for Palestine’s annual convention in Chicago, CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) founder Omar Ahmad praised suicide bombers who “kill themselves for Islam,”
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52184
Health-destroying, cancer-causing, degrading naked body scanners or dirty sexual assault needed for airport security? A LIE FROM the PIT of HELL.
Global Jihad advances greatly, not because of cruel Islamo Fascists, but because of weak, fiercely pro-Islam, Western enabler leaders. U.S. Airport Security is Deliberately and Shockingly DESTROYED for U.S. top FAVORITE, Islam:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com
Controversial Muslim group
gets VIP airport security tour
Feds show CAIR latest screening steps,
sensitive counterterrorism procedures
August 18, 2006
The Department of Homeland Security
took a Muslim group with known past ties to terror organizations on a VIP tour of security operations at the nation’s busiest airport at the same time British authorities were working to break up a plot to blow up U.S. airlines.
On June 21, a senior DHS official from Washington personally guided Muslim officials from the Council on American-Islamic Relations on a behind-the-scenes tour of Customs screening operations at O’Hare International Airport in response to CAIR complaints that Muslim travelers were being unfairly delayed as they entered the U.S. from abroad.
CAIR is a spin-off of the Islamic Association for Palestine, identified by two former FBI counterterrorism chiefs as a “front group” for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Several CAIR leaders have been convicted on terror-related charges.
During the airport tour, CAIR was taken on a walk through the point-of-entry, Customs stations, secondary screening and interview rooms. In addition, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents were asked to describe for CAIR representatives various features of the high-risk passenger lookout system.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=51573
“One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.”
—Former Algerian President Houari Boumedienne’s prophetic warning to Europe in a speech at the U.N. In 1974.
In Sweden, many Muslim youth wear a t-shirt proclaiming: “2030-then we take over”
Add to all of that: On the Left there are persons preaching pre-emptive surrender to Islam, presumably because they have no stomach for a fight. That homosexuals, unmarried women with sex lives, and sincere Christians and Jews might find that unacceptable appears not to bother the Kossacks at all.
http://www.justice.gov/ for the latest dose of marxism–google the quote at the top of the new homepage and check into it’s author
Submitting to a strip search, albeit a digital one, or a groping is beneath the dignity of a free man, and it needs to STOP.
One of the “Mythbusters” guys said he got through one of those scanners with 12-inch razor blades, and they weren’t detected. Can’t remember where I read that, sorry…
It stops with me.
Nanny state? Leftists are simply control freaks. It really comes down to that.
This type of large scale, low level tyranny needs to be made unacceptable. Undeniable *PROTESTS!* should be made on a tea-party scale and methodology, in every legal way everywhere possible… both in the individual and group level via email, via letter, outside airports, outside government offices etc, ALL the political representatives and bureaucrats everywhere need to be shown face on face, day after day that ordinary people should not be treated like this.