I was planning to write something like this Christopher Hitchens piece in Slate, and probably would have if anybody involved with my flight home yesterday had refused to let me go to the lavatory, to get up for any reason during the last hour of the flight, to have a book or anything else on my lap during the flight, or any of the other nonsense that we were hearing about over the weekend.  But that didn't happen (at least to me), and he has done a good job of expressing what I was thinking anyway: every time we fail to catch a bad guy, we then punish all the good guys for what he just did, while the next bad guy is coming up with something new to try that we will later be punished for, too.  Most comically of all, we have to pay billions to fund the cost of our own unnecessary punishment!  Ha!

Maybe this is a little harsh.  True, we failed to notice the Underpants Bomber even though he was already on a watch list because his own father had reported him to us as a threat, but we did raise the alarm the next day when somebody on another Delta flight ominously also went to the bathroom.  (He had the stomach flu . . . or did he?  Well, yes he did.)  Oh, also, Ivana Trump got kicked off a plane on Sunday after becoming "belligerent," so maybe the system is working.

Link: Christopher Hitchens, "Flying High," Slate (Dec. 28, 2009).
Link: Xeni Jardin, "Fruit of the Boom," Boing Boing (Dec. 29, 2009) (title of the year?)