So on Thursday morning my girlfriend and I got up at 4:30 to catch a plane to Bermuda. After a sleepy but uneventful subway from Manhattan to JFK, we discovered that Thursday was a really bad day to travel internationally. Bermuda was beautiful: more on that another day. As for the airports, imagine how much faster it would be if we all just traveled nude. I’m joking of course, but follow the hypothetical. Even with buck naked passengers, a terrorist on a suicide mission probably wouldn’t quibble over stuffing a condom full of “liquid explosives” up the poop chute. So unless you add cavity searches to the already ridiculous proposal, it probably won’t make us any safer.

So while, I don’t object to the regulation of liquids when there is a good reason, I think naked transit (preceded by a cavity search) is the only way to be sure no one has smuggled explosives on a plane. That having been said, it seems like the better method of protection is to be less reactionary, and go after the source. That’s why I support the war in Iraq, which has finally brought Saddam to trial for 9/11. (Ha, ha, just messing with you.) In fact, it's why I support the solid policework of the UK that identified the terrorists and then their plot. It’s difficult to identify the bad guys and learn their plans, but ultimately that's more effective than guessing the plans and hoping to identify them perpetrating. Two minutes of brainstorming will show that we’ll never be prepared for every terrorism disaster that could occur. Our best recourse is to identify the the terrorists before they strike. Beyond that we have a few other things to deter terror. We can limit the number of people who want to be terrorists by promoting pacifying institutions. By that I mean not just democracy, but Baywatch, Jack Daniels, the Beach Boys, air conditioning, dentistry, peace, love, rock’n’roll, and all the other mindless shit that effectively opiate the Western Hemisphere. We should limit terrorist capabilities by having informants among them, limiting their travel, and cutting off their funds. But most of all, we should limit their accomplishments by not shitting ourselves and invading an unrelated country every time they say “boo”.

As Roger says:

This is it, folks. This is the world, from now on. Even assuming the War on Terror is a not just a bad metaphor and there is an actual measurable winning point*, the short 4GW [4th generation warfare] struggles last fifty years or so. We're going to be stopping one or two of these bastard mass-murder plots a year, minimum, for the rest of our lives. Hell, the way terror tactics and tech evolve, five years from now we're going to be pining for the dudes with the flammable juice boxes.It's now part of our life.

Let's try not to hop like the trained monkeys every time it happens.

It seems like practical advice to me. That’s why I’m pretty sure we won’t follow it. You never know though, once we all get used to the cavity searches, maybe they’ll turn out to be fun.

Link Credit: Battlepanda