TSA: Real Home-Grown Terrorists

Homeland Security, Private Property, Terrorism, The State

At last, that statist strongholds, The Washington Post, has permitted a contrary position on the sacred homegrown state terror that is the Transportation Security Administration. However, the solution offered is wrong. It is not the privatization and regulation of the cattle prodders and molesters at the airports that must be sought; but the privatization of airports and airlines.

If the past 10 years have taught us anything, it’s that, one way or another, the TSA is going to get at your crotch. The latest data point comes from Denver, courtesy of CBS4:

‘A CBS4 investigation has learned that two Transportation Security Administration screeners at Denver International Airport have been fired after they were discovered manipulating passenger screening systems to allow a male TSA employee to fondle the genital areas of attractive male passengers.’

Apparently, the two screeners, one male and the other female, worked out a system. The female screener operating the body scanner would misidentify attractive men as women on the scanner, so that the machine would flag the extra, uh, bulk in their groin area, which then initiated a pat-down from her partner in lechery.

I once had a similar experience at a TSA checkpoint. I had thoroughly emptied my pockets, but the body scanner nevertheless detected an object in my pants. Fortunately, my TSA agent did not appear to take any pleasure in the business and went about his duty with grim professionalism.

At the time, I was merely annoyed at the inconvenience, not to mention the poor performance of the taxpayer-funded $170,000 millimeter wave scanner that I had assumed was able to tell the difference between a brick of C-4 and genitals. It turns out those scanners have never stopped a terrorist, but maybe one day the TSA screeners will inadvertently catch a cute jihadist.

It’s a sign of just how resigned we’ve become to the TSA’s existence that most of the men getting felt up probably shrugged it off and thought, “Well, that’s the TSA for you.” We’ve become desensitized to being scanned and prodded and told our toothpaste is too large and must therefore be confiscated in the name of national security. TSA’s expansion of its PreCheck program and an announcement that it would stop searching black women’s hair for weapons are what pass for progress. …

… MORE (but no need to bother; the gist was summed up above in my into).

Lincoln Died Today; His Cult Never Says Die

Fascism, History, Media, Neoconservatism, Propaganda

Today, in 1865, is the day John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln, well after the 16th President of the United States had already done insurmountable damage. The heroic Lincoln myth-buster, Tom DiLorenzo, marks (but doesn’t mention) the anniversary with a detailed and well-sourced swipe at the cult that never quits:

… These are all the main ingredients of a modern Lincoln cultist, as [David] Brooks demonstrated in an April 7 New York Times column entitled “What Candidates Need.”

“I have two presidential election traditions,” Brooks wrote. “I begin covering each campaign by reading a book about Abraham Lincoln [probably not one by Yours Truly], and I end each election night, usually after midnight, at the statue of the Lincoln Memorial.”

Brooks should be credited with bravery for being anywhere in public in Washington, D.C., The Town That Lincoln Built, after midnight. He does not say if he holds a séance there, or just prays at the foot of the gigantic statue of the corporate lawyer/lobbyist in an armchair that is the Lincoln Memorial.

Reading most books about Lincoln by “Lincoln scholars” will generally make one stupid and misinformed, as Brooks very ably demonstrates. This is because all such books are bundles of excuses, phony rationales, and fabrications. They are all written like defense briefs in The War Crimes Trial of Abraham Lincoln, authored by third-rate lawyers or law students. Being a “Lincoln scholar” means fabricating an excuse for everything. The bigger and more elaborate the excuse, the more “prestigious” is the “Lincoln scholar.”

For example, when the high priestess of the Lincoln cult, Doris Kearns-Goodwin, wrote in her book, Team of Rivals, of how Lincoln was actually the source and promoter of the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution, which would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery, she praised him for it. Rather than condemning him for supporting the explicit enshrinement of slavery in the text of the U.S. Constitution, Goodwin heaped praise on Lincoln because this slick political maneuver, she said, helped “save” the political fortunes of the Republican Party.

Another example is how, in his last book on Lincoln, Harry Jaffa tried for the ten-thousandth time in his career to explain away Lincoln’s admonition in one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates that he was “opposed to making voters or jurors of Negroes.” Lincoln opposed giving “Negroes” the right to vote in the 1850s, Jaffa wrote, so that they could have the right to vote in the 1950s. This of course is absurd nonsense but also a good example of the dishonest academic hocus pocus known as “Straussianism.” …

… The complete column is “The Very Model of a Modern Major Lincoln Cultist.” Read it.

UPDATED: By Mistake, Maureen Dowd Said Something True

Business, Economy, Hillary Clinton, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Taxation

To borrow from Camille Paglia (who was once interesting, but no longer), Maureen Dowd is a “catty, third-rate, wannabe sorority queen; empty vessel. One pleasure of reading online is that one never has to see anything written by people like Maureen Dowd [Kathleen Parker, Eugene Robinson, Thomas Friedman, Cynthia Tucker, on and on]. I ignore their hypertext like spam for penis extenders.”

Ditto.

However, I heard another sorority queen, the likeable, lovely but celebrity courting Megyn Kelly, mention that Dowd had penned an unfavorable piece on Hillary. So off I trundled to suffer through the tedium of “Grandmama Mia!” which is without one original or insightful idea.

By mistake, Dowd does say something true when commenting about “the ostensible and obscene $2.5 billion that [Hillary] is planning to spend to persuade us to make her grandmother of our country.”

She should give the kids some of the money, suggests Dowd. If Dowd liked Hillary she would, however, want Mrs. Clinton to keep the cash so that she could do all those “wonderful” things once elected.

Dowd is a dumb-dumb. She doesn’t understand that any politician makes the world a better place by giving money allotted for buying votes to privately run charities, instead of spending these billions on buying votes so as to get into office and pass programs, ostensibly for the poor, that ensconce bureaucracies that consume the lion’s share of the revenue stream coerced from taxpayers, in perpetuity.

UPDATE (4/15): Even better: Start a real business—as opposed to a foundation—with all those billions of dollars. Disinvest from politics. As Maimonides, I believe, instructed, it is better to give a poor person a job than a donation.

Hillary’s Old Hat Already

Education, Elections, Hillary Clinton, Morality

Make community college “free.” “[T]here’s something deeply wrong’ about students and their families needing to go into debt to finance a college education.” Those were Hillary Clinton’s strokes of genius, proposed during her first meet-and-greet, mainly with members of the press, on the campaign trail, in MONTICELLO, Iowa.

Didn’t we have The Same Talk, back in April of 2012, about America’s next financial bubble in search of a pin: the $1 trillion student-loan debt? Campaigning in Iowa, where Mrs. Clinton was today, didn’t B. H. Obama promise America’s miseducated Millennials to keep the student-loan bubble from bursting?

Earlier that year, during his State of the Union address of January 2012, Barry Soetoro Frankenstein vowed to keep the student-loan bubble afloat by mandating more loans at fixed prices.

Watch media react with wonderment at Hillary’s “fresh” robbery plans.

On the other hand, a message about the immorality of undertaking more debt than one can afford is a message that has not been tried before.