Barely a day goes by without another example of idiocy in the name of anti-terrorism. Today’s gem? Yet another item has been banned from US airplanes: cigarette lighters. According to ABC News:
The genesis for the ban was Richard Reid, who tried unsuccessfully to light explosives hidden in his shoes on a trans-Atlantic flight in 2002. He used matches. The sponsors of the ban, Democratic Sens. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Ron Wyden of Oregon, worried that a lighter might have worked in that kind of situation.
Maybe we should ban shoes. You can never be too careful.
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0 responses to “More anti-terrorism silliness”
The ‘one nutter’ factor has been pissing me off.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/14/wood_green_ricin_case/
That’s a fantastic article.
Reminds me of the Admiral Duncan(?) where suddenly folk I know were scared to be out at night because of the Nazi nail-bombing death squads they were being warned about. When, again, one nutter.
Also, ricin is the new bogey man. There’s loads of the stuff in the country. It’s most common use ia as a solvent for ink. Whenever they break up one of these ‘cells’ of illegal immigrant obviously mullah-mad terrorists they stress that they’ve found some ricin. I mean, what on earth could illegal immigrants be doing printing stuff? Maybe that’s an arguement for introducing ID Cards, there’ll be no ambiguity when they discover a stash of laminates.
I think that the biggest issue in the world today is not climate change, international terrorism or any of the other usual suspects but that the rise of stupidity is not being curtailed. Maybe politicians should be sterilised at university age.
I’ve been saying since about 15/9/01 that they should be handing out weapons to every passenger that gets on a plane. Would you try and hijack a plane if you knew for a fact that every passenger was armed?