Consent of the Governed

This is great!  I can hardly believe it.  In this day & age there are revolutions happening now!  Incredible.  To think that all these years of the U.S. trying to foment, encourage, cajoul various organizations to overthrow their countries' oppressive governments & autocrats and establish a more democratic government.  And all of that was money seems to have been wasted.  We paid people to revolt and all they did was collect the money.  Did we paid people in Tunisia?  I doubt it.  They wanted freedom from their oppressive and greedy government.  Egypt saw it.  Bahrain. Yemen.  Libya.   I am heartened by this.  My Christian Lebanese friend always tells me that everything that goes on in the Middle East is all about religion.  Religion that I don't understand: Islam and Judaism.  But, these revolutions give me hope that there is more to it, that there are reasonable people there that are willing to stand up, fight back and, hopefully, take charge.

As the U.S. Declaration of Independence states...

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

TSA administrative searches

Does the TSA's authority derive from the Frank v. Maryland decision?  The basis for this was that the benefit to society outweighs one idividual's right to privacy. 

There must be more law than this because the TSA does not search only one individual and in Frank v. Maryland, the government (health department) had some suspicion that they would find something (rats).  The TSA corrolary in this case should be if the health department exhaustively searched and x-rayed everyone's home for all infestations and arrested people for illegal activities or possesions they happen to notice.Yeah, the TSA may find contraband but almost all of what is deemed contraband is not dangerous and does not indicate a desire to hijack an airplane.  TSA's abbreviated list.

Backscatter more a threat to safety than terrorism

This is about the best point I've seen about the recent TSA "nude-o-scope" and "crotch grabbing" ('scuse the expressions) debacle.  Thanks, Boarding Area:

Still, Bruce Schneier points out that even though backscatter x-ray machines are expected to increase change of death by only 16 ten millionths of one percent, that’s still more than the risk of death from terrorism. And he points to Nate Silver on inconveniences of air travel pushing people to driving which is far more dangerous, and statistically attributes the equivalent of four full 737s a year in additional traffic deaths.

I could go on and on how awful this all is.  But, let me just say this:

. Remember how gradually the Jews lost their rights in Nazi Germany.
. Contrary to TSA's attitude, airline travel is a right, not merely a privilege, in the sense that we are free to associate and conduct commerce (with airlines, et al) and have freedom of movement (travel).