I have now decided that the initials TSA does not really stand for the Transportation Safety Authority, but rather “The Stupid Agency.”
All out efforts to solve a problem based on an assumption that is clearly not true always leads to disaster. This has been repeated many times throughout human history. Perhaps the most devastating example was with yellow fever. For many years, doctors firmly believed in the miasma theory of disease. Basically this theory was that disease was spread by bad air. The theory was that decaying materials would contaminate the air and make people sick. Since people living near swamps frequently got yellow fever, the bad swamp vapors were often blamed. But, the miasma theory was wrong.
In 1850 an American doctor, Josiah Nott wrote a medical article proposing that yellow fever was probably spread by mosquitoes. His work was ignored. In 1881, a Cuban doctor, Carlos Finley not only verified that yellow fever was spread by mosquitoes, he figured out which specific mosquito was the culprit. He was also ignored. Yellow fever had killed thousands of French workers trying to build the canal. It also killed a lot of American troops during the Spanish-American War. An Army doctor, Walter Reed, was sent to CUBA to find out what caused yellow fever. He read the works of Carlos Finley. He did not believe him, but after nothing else worked, he decided to conduct an experiment to find out for sure. He paid people $100 to allow themselves to get bitten by mosquitoes that had previously bitten a yellow fever patient. Obviously, they didn’t buy the mosquito theory either. One of the people bitten was a doctor, Jesse William Lazear. He may or may not have allowed himself to be deliberately bitten by a mosquito. Soon, just about everyone bitten by the mosquitoes died a horrible death. It became obvious that Nott and Finley were right, mosquitoes did spread yellow fever. Dr. Reed published his findings and Dr. William Gorgas read them and believed in the results. Dr. Gorgas was assigned to manage the medical situation at the Panama Canal, and he went to war against the mosquitoes. It worked, which is why the Panama Canal exists today.
Today we have another example of people making decision based on assumptions that are clearly not true. We have a serious problem with suicide bombers who dream of going to paradise along with a plane load of innocent people. So far, all of the recent attempts have been made by young Muslim males. There seems to be a severe shortage of other people willing to blow themselves up. I have met some really stupid people who could be talked into doing some dumb things, but I don’t know of anyone who could have been convinced to setting off a bomb built into his underwear. If one did believe in the 100 virgin theory, it would still seem logical to want to arrive in paradise with critical equipment still functioning.
At some point in the future we may face some unexpected risk from families on vacation, outraged nuns or white grandmothers on a mission, but so far it’s pretty much been a jihad thing. So it would seem obvious that focusing on a Muslim male, traveling on a one way ticket, paid in cash by someone else and having no baggage would have some merit. That is exactly what happened with the “Christmas bomber” but the airport screeners were too busy patting down everyone else on the flight to notice. They didn’t even notice that this guy was on a no-fly list until just before the plane landed. Nice! The only thing that prevented disaster was an alert passenger who became suspicious when this guy set his underpants on fire. Once again the disaster was only avoided by the good fortune of being attacked by an incompetence terrorist.
The new TSA regulation are more than annoying, they are downright evasive. But that is not the biggest problem. The real concern is that trying to search everyone distracts the airport screeners from paying enough attention to those people who clearly are a threat. It is like the French at the Panama Canal. They spent a lot of time trying to deal with swamp vapors, when they should have concentrated on killing mosquitoes. The French even put little saucers of water under the legs of their beds, providing a very convenient place for mosquitoes to breed in close proximity to their preferred food source. In fact, they didn’t even need to kill all the mosquitoes, just the one specific breed that likes to carry around the yellow fever virus. Until they figured that out they spend a lot of money, killed a lot of innocent people and made zero progress toward fixing the problem. Actually, the French never figured it out, which is why the Panama Canal zone was built by the U.S. Remarkably similar to what is happening at the TSA today.
Any policy, based on an assumption that is not true, is doomed to failure. That is why the TSA is really “The Stupid Agency.” What makes this worse is that if someone other than a Muslim male is likely to be a serious threat, it is likely to be a Muslim female coerced into doing it by a Muslim male. Yet the TSA has already adapted rules to avoid offending Muslim females wearing a head scarf by letting them “pat themselves down.” That may seem like a dumb idea to some people who do not understand the importance of political correctness.
TDM