Whew...

Just read in the news that the TSA (Transportation Saftey Administration) is halting the practice of having their female security guards feel between the breasts of women who get selected for random pat downs. Thank God. Seriously. This had me really ticked off. My initial thought wasn't even about the invasiveness (not really). My thought was, if terrorists can force us to visit this indignity on our women, then havn't they already won? They've forced us to change our ways by visiting death and violence on us. Ergo, is not the best way to fight them to not respond to them? Both Eamon De Valera and Gandhi both held the opinion that simply ignoring the british was the best way to defy them. That the dictatorial british rule of their lands could best be fought by refusing to aknowledge it as a legitimate force. Eventually they would see that they simply cannot force you to change who you are, and quit. Now this does not work perfectly in the real world, but suppose we limited our responses to military ones? If we retaliated when wounded, to the extend required to crush the military power of those involved, but effected no social changes on ourselves, then certianly they would observe that the only reaction gotten by violence was an ass kicking. They can make us fight perhaps (a nation must defend itself, even the Orthodox empire of Byzantium did so as did Russia), but if they are made to know that they cannot force us to change who we are, then they might think to themselves "This is futile. We kill them but nothing we do changes their foregin or domestic policy, and it only gets us hurt, and makes us look worse in the public eye." Wouldn't this just be an extention of the immutable rule "Do not negotiate with terrorists" ?

Philosophy aside, I had another counter-argument to the validity of feeling up the breasts of random female passangers. It wen't something like this:

If a bomb detector can spot a bomb underneath someones clothing, then this absurd practice is totally unnesecary.

If a bomb detector cannot spot a bomb underneath someones clothing, then it definitly can't spot a bomb lodged in a body cavity (use your imagination).

Since any airline bomber is going to die by definition, they wouldn't care about physically stuffing the bomb inside themselves. And sine we can't detect that short of a full body cavity search, which we don't do, and it would therfore not be detected, why bother violating a womans private areas? You can't blow up plastic explosives without a deatonator, and I've never seen or heard of one of those which contained zero metal parts.

My theory, which I have yet to really research, is that the Chechen women who bombed the plane (if that is, indeed what happened, we won't ever actually know) didn't undergo a thourough screening. Probably didn't get metal detected at all. And if they did, they probably didn't go through a bomb detector. And if they did, then they had special explosives that don't give off any ionized gas (the detection of which is how bomb dogs and machines detect explosives). And if they had that, we won't find it anyway. So why bother?

Public immage probably. If I were a betting man I'd say that there are some explosives guys and girls up at the FBI accademy at Quantico laughing their butts off at what the FAA is wiling to say in public to quell fears about the uncontrolable things in life.

Heres one way to fight terrorism. Accept it as a fact of life (and possibly death). The Isralies deal with it all the time, they don't even flinch anymore when it happens on a large scale. They bury their dead, do their best to nail whoever did it, and they go back to living their lives like they did before. If they didn't, then the terrorists would win wouldn't they?

But then if we did things the Isralie way we would have had armoured cockpit doors and four armed guards on every airborn plane, and 9/11 probably wouldn't have happened.

OK, It's late and I've rambled enough.

Alexey the Sinner.