Sunday, December 27, 2009

Government strips away your right to pee!

According to Air Canada, the travel Nazis at the Transportation Security Agency are once again using a minor incident to strip all Americans of freedom—actually they don't discriminate they are stripping everyone who flys within the US of their rights as well. There is good reason to be seated during take off and landing. But the new regulations, according to Air Canada basically make you a prisoner in your seat.

First, consider the circumstances. Some idiot from Nigeria tried to light a powder he had strapped to his leg. There was some smoke and popping sounds and some flames but no explosion of any kind. The flames were quickly put out by passengers and crew members and the man incapacitated.

So the travel Nazis are now allegedly announcing new regulations that chain passengers to the seats for much of a flight, if not the entire flight. The New York Times reports that the government "was vague about the steps it was taking, saying that it wanted the security experience to be 'unpredictable' and that passengers would not find the same measures at every airport—a prospect that may upset airlines and travelers alike." Great, now you can't even prepare to satisfy the increasingly strenuous regulations pushed by these bureaucratic thugs. And since when is this a "security experience?" That is like calling rape a "sexual experience." Experience has far too benevolent a feel to it to describe the way the travel Nazis treat people.

Here, however, are some of the new rules. "passengers on international flights coming to the United States will apparently have to remain in their seats for the last hour of a flight without any personal items on their laps." So, if you fall asleep, wake up one hour before landing with a full bladder the government mandates that you wet the seat because using the toilet one hour before landing is a security risk. Apparently it is not a security risk to use the toilet 62 minutes before landing but at the magic 60 minutes your urinary tract becomes a tool of terrorism.

It has been noted that one can't move about on a flight for about the first 30 minutes until the plane reaches cruising altitude. So any flight of 90 minutes of less means all passengers are confined to their seats by bureaucratic edict—remember these rules are not laws that are debated by elected officials. These are rules that unelected bureaucrats make up any time they feel like it. So unless you can hold your bladder for at least 90 minutes you should not board one of these flights. I think a flight of 95 minutes would be interesting as there is just a five minute window for the entire plane to use the toilet. Personally I hope there is a rash of people wetting their seats. And if I were the airlines I would send the stinky seats and carpeting directly to Janet Napolitano, the new Reichfurher for Homeland Oppression.

Napolitano, a Janet-Reno wannabe (which is bad news anyway you look at it), says that new measures are "designed to be unpredictable, so passengers should not expect to see the same thing everywhere." Oh, joy! Don't you just love it when some brain dead travel gestapo member, the very people who didn't find the explosives that were strapped to the man's leg, are allowed to act in an upredictable way.

Airlines say that more incompetent TSA employees will be required to staff more check points to try to catch what the other incompetent TSA employees miss at the other checkpoints. The government's hope is that if you line up enough overpaid, under-thinking bureaucrats with the power to bark at people and act like mini-gods, that one of them will eventually prove useful.

And what I don't understand is the logic here. Everyone will be confined to their seats because a man, who was in his seat at the time, tried to light powder he had strapped to his leg. The man was "confined to his seat" when he did it—that didn't stop him from trying set the plane on fire. The individual in question would have been in compliance with the new rules had them been in place. In other words, they would have done absolutely nothing to stop the incident that happened. But then all the other measures put into place didn't stop this incident from happening either.

Meanwhile, people are refusing to fly in larger and larger numbers. Traveling to the US is such a horrific experience, due to the terrorists who work for Homeland Security, that tourism is down significantly. Billions of dollars have been diverted from the US economy by chasing away tourists. In addition, the US has merely soiled its reputation with world travelers as an unpleasant, nasty country to visit. Not long ago a friend told me that she and husband flew to China and had better treatment, and were treated more like free people, flying into China than when they enter the United States. Yep—a totalitarian nation is not as bad as the United States when it comes to travel.

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