When I mentioned the other day that Michigan now has a set of 13 snow-cone machines that it bought with homeland-security grant money, I prefaced that by saying that everytime you think "homeland security" can't get more ridiculous, it gets…
In which those protecting western Michigan from al Qaeda did their best to justify spending a homeland-security grant on 13 snow-cone machines.
While you weren’t looking, those hilarious pranksters in Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which among other things authorizes the military to detain U.S. citizens arrested in this country “without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by…
Wait, what? Okay, Oakland sucks, but at least they aren't cracking people's skulls over there like they did in Egypt. They did what now? Okay, granted, but at least that was an accident. In Egypt the government would deliberately kill…
Reportedly, they also scrambled two F-16 fighters to intercept, just out of an abundance of caution.
In two incidents on September 11 (the recent one), F-16s were scrambled to escort planes on which "suspicious activity" had been reported. The activity: using the bathroom. Frontier Flight 623 and American Flight 34 were escorted to their destinations after…
These are tough times for unattended packages. Used to be you could sit around for weeks with not a care in the world, but these days you can't get 15 minutes alone before somebody comes along and wants to blow…
After a ten-month test of the same scanners currently irritating many U.S. travelers, German federal police have concluded that they aren't worth using. This appears to be largely because, according to the report, the scanners "triggered an unnecessary alarm in…
Speaking of groping, as you know there have been any number of incidents in which travelers have been treated horrendously by TSA screeners, and only one (to my knowledge) in which the TSA has paid anybody. They have been given near-immunity for what would be sexual assault in any…
In the interest of fairness, I thought I'd point out an instance where TSA officers actually found something potentially dangerous before it got on board a plane. I'm not sure how many times this has happened in the ten years…