TSA + MIT + Boston = Near Darwin Award Winner

Unless you have been living under a rock recently, you know that law enforcement has been bitch-smacked by the liberal socialist press recently for two incidents, which I like to refer to as “Don’t Tase Me, Bro” and “Wow, I’ve Been Living In A Techno-Cave”. Since we all know about the dickhead who, essentially, wanted to make a name for himself on YouTube and thus started disrupting John Kerry at a speech with questions and then resisted arrest, I won’t discuss any more on that subject.

Here’s what I will talk about: ideology verses common sense in the case of one Star Simpson.

Ideologically, innocence is always innocent — if you only mean one thing and someone takes it the wrong way, that’s someone’s problem, not yours. But, in practice, this simply isn’t the case. Much like in law, ignorance of the law does not excuse breaking the law, ignorance of social mores or cause and effect is not an excuse. For example, if I walked into Germany wearing a swastika because I was trying to say my body is my Hindu temple (or something equally unknown in the mainstream) I would have absolutely no right to look shocked that I was arrested — it is illegal to wear or display the Swastika in that country.

I do not agree with Germany on that policy, but I would not be angry with the police who arrested me when it was *I* who needed to know what the Swastika is interpreted as and how the law is designed around it.

Since the day that two buildings in New York City fell down, terrorism has been a real and imagined concern in the eyes of the populace, but even before that (I say this as a former airport employee, by the way) before TSA and all the Orwellian nightmares they induce, before planes were turned into Weapons of Mass Murder and Destruction, you could not walk into an airport and through security with something strapped on your chest that had exposed wires and an exposed electrical supply and anything resembling plastic explosive on your hands. Would you have been shot — or at least stared down the business end of a gun? Maybe, maybe not. Most people weren’t that stupid. Most people knew the rules, even before water became a threatening substance: no guns, no (large) knives/weapons, and nothing that looks like a bomb.

Remember Pan-Am 103?

So why, in the name of all common sense, would anyone think that an electrically-wired shirt with an exposed battery and wires would make it through security? More over, why would anyone defend this?

Oh, that’s right — because TSA are always wrong. Always.

Now, I’ll tell you something, as someone who was in the airport when there were private security firms, who knows people who lost jobs to the TSA overhaul, who couldn’t go to work for three days because suddenly my security clearance wasn’t up to the newly-imposed standards, who had to deal with John Wayne cowboys who wouldn’t let me take my lunch through security more often than not, even though this was years before the liquids ban, and MPs (Military Police) who sexually harassed me every day I went to work, I hate the TSA more than anyone. Yet, I’m not going to fault them for doing their job. I’d think someone who was walking around with exposed wires and batteries and putty on their hands was up to no good too.

And, ladies and gentlemen, look at what airport this took place at: LOGAN. This was the airport from which two of the buildings fall down day airplanes left from, who took most of the flack for the terrorist attacks of the day. This is an airport in BOSTON, a city which arrested two men who were just putting up some guerrilla marketing and only cared about hairdos of the 1970s, for putting up hoax devices.

None of these things make what they did right, but neither is banning a symbol. Yet that’s the reality you have to live with until we can get enough people petitioning enough politicians to change the law. And, by the way, martyrdom may raise awareness, but it’s a piss poor way to do it, especially when it involves gratuitous acts of stupidity.

You’d have to be an idiot to wear that shirt into Logan Airport and not expect something to happen. Hell, if this was London, she’d have been shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder.

You’d have to be an idiot, or much like “Don’t Tase Me, Bro”, a fame hound.

You be the judge.