It’s not a laughing matter, but: “”If you don’t take this plane to China, I’ll cut everyone’s nose hair…”

…You have no idea how long you’ll be in ticket and security queues. I’ve gone to an airport five hours before my flight and reached the gate in 15 minutes. Friends have arrived at DIA four hours prior to flights and were shut out. Nobody, especially airport officials, knows when you should get there…

…They took away my fingernail clippers and razor, but I was able to walk into a newsstand and buy fingernail clippers and a razor before I got on the plane. I went into a B Concourse Discovery Channel store and counted a dozen things I could use to cause problems on an airplane…

Hopefully, enough such commentaries will result in a little more sanity, but I’m afraid that they’ll just back off on the new draconian nonsense without actually doing anything effective, because the terms of the debate remain fundamentally orthogonal to the real problem.

What happened on September 11 was a result not of lax security by the government, but rather the culmination of decades of attempted infantilization of the American people, in which we’ve been told that we have no responsibility for our own security, and that the only safe way of life was to disarm ourselves and trust to our paternal government. If there is any good to come out of the attacks, starting to roll back that tide may be part of it, but only if we start to have the serious discussion about it that the mainstream media has been studiously attempting to avoid for many years.