Your new "security"

In a bit of good news, today the US finally lifted it's longstanding travel ban on anyone with HIV or AIDS from entering this country. For those of you counting at home, that's one more list we're off of where our only companions are extremely repressive and regressive regimes. Funny how often we find ourselves on them.

Hey, wouldn't it be hilarious if the day that we were patting ourselves on the back for tolerance on one type of passenger we announced that we were also going to declare anyone darker than an albino Irishman was to be considered suspicious? Funny I should mention that...

Citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that was imposed after the Christmas Day bombing plot, Obama administration officials announced Sunday.
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Passengers holding passports from those nations, or taking flights that originated or passed through any of them, will be required to undergo full-body pat downs and will face extra scrutiny of their carry-on bags before they can board planes to the United States.
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The changes will mean that any citizen of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia will for the first time be patted down automatically before boarding any flight to the United States.

That's right, if you want to come to the land of milk and honey, we get to cup your balls first. Just to be sure. But only if you're in violation of Homeland Security's new color alert system. Right now it's at 'Eggshell White', meaning everyone gets searching in order to make everyone feel better. Soon it'll be reduced to 'Khaki' and then 'British Tan', so just us white people can feel better when we see pat downs and increased security for those "dangerous types". You know the ones I'm talking about. Ethnics.

Now I know what you're saying: "Aren't passports easy to fake? Aren't terrorists smart enough to get around this? Has any terrorist ever actually hopped on a Saudi Arabia-to-US direct flight with C4 in his boxer briefs? Wouldn't it be better to pump money into getting uniform shared databases so that information can be shared and pieces could be connected, like what didn't happen in the Detroit case? Why don't we take things seriously for once? Isn't this just more of that 'illusion of security' shit we've been going through since 9/11? Stuff that just makes us feel better but doesn't actually protect us?"

Yes, yes it is. I have an interesting response to that: Shut up. Sure, none of this will make a difference. Sure, it's kind of racist and probably harms our relations with Muslims more than it protects us from them. Sure, this is all empty theater. But it looks good and makes us feel good, so we'll take that in lieu of real safety measures. Thankfully our leaders are content to follow our lead and only deal with security and terrorism in terms of empty gestures, rhetoric, politics, and tough guy posturing.

At least they didn't decide to make us all take our underwear off at the scanners as well. There's at least that.