Thursday, December 27, 2007

[Mutter, grumble, curse]

I watch with a certain amount of schaedenfreude the miseries of flying travelers during the holiday travel season. TV treats us to visions of people trying to sleep in airport lounges and to long lists of canceled flights. The misery not shown is the calculated humiliation of the screening procedures that one undergoes to get into that waiting area – the sock-footed moments, the dumping of dimes and pennies into a little basket, the rent-a-moron poking through the shampoo tubes, the pointless patdowns of old women. It's all a sham designed to keep people anxious about a bogus war of terror that asks no sacrifice, financial or personal, from the public. Our sacrifice is to be treated badly and subjected to phony alerts of different colors. A survey by a bunch of hotshot researchers detects no benefit from all the portentous posturing.
Airport security lines can annoy passengers, but there is no evidence that they make flying any safer, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.
A team at the Harvard School of Public Health could not find any studies showing whether the time-consuming process of X-raying carry-on luggage prevents hijackings or attacks.

Read the whole Reuters story here.

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