Tom’s Big Picture

I recently had a rather unpleasant experience with the new security regulations at the airport. There’s a post under construction describing the experience, but I am fast to start and slow to finish my writing. I have about five posts in various stages of completion- a necessary process for me to avoid my greatest literary sin, that of overstatement.

The essence of the airport story is that regular Americans are undergoing needless harassment because our country cannot admit to itself that one of our supposed values - “equality” - is an obvious falsehood and failure (and also, as I will argue in a larger upcoming post, one of the world’s great lies and a major source of evil).

It’s simply not true that all humans are equally likely to blow up an airplane, yet the government harasses millions of innocent people daily in airports to prop up the lie.

Then I remembered an article by one of the most interesting columnists at the immigration-reform advocacy site vdare.com, Steve Sailer. His strategy for dealing with Muslim terrorism: “disconnect”.

He describes a particularly egregious airport security incident:

In January 2002, an 86-year-old former governor of South Dakota and retired brigadier general named Joe Foss, on his way to give a speech to cadets at West Point, was subjected to the third degree by Phoenix airport security for 45 minutes because the metal detector was set off by his dangerously pointy Congressional Medal of Honor. When I first heard this, I assumed that Bush’s anti-profiling rules would be laughed out of existence.

I was wrong.