I'm moving

Well, not exactly. But I'll be posting the more politically incendiary stuff over on Guns-Drugs-n-Queers, here on this same Blogger thing. You'll have to figure it out yourself, if you're interested, because I still haven't mastered all these linky things.

Today's missive to ASSa9.com

After receiving today's ASSa9.com "WEEKEND UPDATE" re. the wonderful governor of Indiana's push to allow firearms in state parks, and hearing yet another idiot screaming about how it'll be the old west, shoot 'em up bang bang, all over again, well, I just really felt a calling to try and help them pull their pointy little heads out of their dumb asses.

To wit:

Dear ASSa9 Guys,

The "dangerous" people in the state parks are not the ones who belong to NRA and GOA; they are the gang-bangers, drunks, and speed-freaks; people who, regardless of how many stupid rules and regulations you post up on a sign, will bring their guns into the park anyway. Are you all too blind to understand that the only people you'll EVER succeed in disarming are the law-abiding citizens---the only ones who will come to your aid when that crackhead shoots your dumb asses and grabs your daughter and tries to rape her right in front of your pathetically helpless, unarmed face. (Well, actually, if I knew it was you who was getting shot up, I'd probably hand 'em a few more mags to make sure they got the job done. However, I would do my damnedest to save your daughter; it's not her fault she was born to a slave.)

Sincerely,
A Free American

DISCLAIMER

The preceding posts (below) are political speech, protected by the 1st (and backed up by the 2nd) amendment, and in no way are meant to be misconstrued as a threat or threats to any persons, living or otherwise. ASSAa9.com is a fictional creation of my admittedly overactive imagination, even if it does bear a dad-gum uncanny resemblance to a certain un-named internet website, whose title shall never foul the pages of this exercise in Liberty.

Good readin',
Jefferson

They're the ones who declared war. Let the games begin.

Glassin' (metaphorically, of course) for ASSa9.com

A purpose in life!

Thank goodness! I've finally found a purpose in life. I was actually getting kind of bored, sitting around the palace, tuning up & polishing my collection of .50 caliber machine guns and organizing my collection of vintage gilt-handled swords, again; and watching the new servant girl saunter around in her I-dream-of-Genie outfit. Things can really get, you know, stale after awhile here in Nirvana.

Anyway, while meandering happily along through the ever-surprising twists and turns and rabbit warrens of Google, looking for a certain preciously-rare Finnish deer hunting rifle chambered in that purportedly magic caliber: 260 (mmmmmm, the missing link which will complete my hunting rifle collection, for the time being), I stumbled across a website that naturally caught my ever-wary eye.

I'd rather not even print the name, for fear that some poor lad or lass (their young impressionable minds having already been perverted by the tortured, state-sponsored and state-sanctioned illogical shrilling of the Criminal-Enablement/Anti-Gun Rights...vermin, for lack of more detestable descriptor) will actually navigate their way over and read the effluent which gushes forth from every page of lies, disinformation and misrepresentations throughout this disgusting little website. For purposes of brevity and clarity, and in order to counter their own campaign to mislead the unsuspecting victim into clicking into their cesspool of deception (their site's name leads one to believe that he is clicking into a pro-firearms site, a real good ol' boy title, which I nevertheless refuse to print, just as any right-thinking, ethical person wouldn't print the address of a kiddyporn site) let's just call it Anti-civil-rights Sucker's bull-Shit a9.....dot-com. (it was a toss-up between BlatantLies. com, SissyIdiots.com and the eventual winner)

Anyhow, over at ASSa9.com they're mad as hell...at people who own and/or manufacture guns & ammo. They seem to labor under the delusion that owning a gun, any gun, is akin to owning, say, a flamethrower, or maybe Zyklon B---the deadly poison gas utilized by the nazis(un-capitalized intentionally) during their reign of terror in an effort to rid their hemisphere of millions of Jews, Poles, Czechs, Gypsies and anyone else they deemed unworthy to share their rarefied air with. And this ASSa9 group appears to be willing to stoop to ANY level of unethical behavior---their chief tactics being evidently a mixture of public disinformation and collusion with elected officials and bureaucrats---in order to win what they freely refer to as a "war" between us gun owners and them, the weasels.

The first thing that caught my eye was a link to a site which is dedicated to "educating citizens about the imminent danger of .50 caliber rifles in the hands of terrorists." Forget the fact that, as of this post, there have been zero domestic instances of a terrorist (nor even your garden-variety domestic criminal) EVER utilizing a .50 caliber rifle to pull off a "terror." Indeed, there are no good reasons to use a .50 caliber rifle in the first place, yet there are plenty of reason NOT to use them.

1) Why on earth would a terrorist take the chance of exposing himself by purchasing, either directly or indirectly, such a monster of a rifle? Especially when there are dozens of calibers much easier to get ones hands on AND won't raise so much as an eyebrow at the gun counter. Granted, the ballistics aren't as good; but no terrorist is going to plan an attack whose success hinges on a 1500- or 2000-yard shot.

2) The darn things weigh in between 25 and 50 pounds. A lot to stuff into your fanny pack as you're jogging along the path that leads by the reactor.

3) There is a lot of training (not to mention a lifetime worth of arthritis) that goes along with being proficient with such a beast.

4) Bombs, mortars, poison gas, poison arrows, knives, airplanes, 338 rifles, 408 rifles (both over 1500 yard guns in qualified hands), pickup trucks, 10 devotees bent on going to paradise, etc., etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum. They'll all do the job with equal if not better odds of success. In a nutshell, there are a million ways to attack any given person, place or thing; eliminating ONE of those ways is like killing one ant in your kitchen: pointless.

5) Lastly: does ANYONE with a neuron's worth of common sense seriously believe that a terrorist organization, if their plan really did hinge on a successful 2000-yard rifle shot, would be deterred from obtaining whatever caliber and make of rifle---be it a .50 caliber rifle, a 1922 Montgomery Wards 22 long rifle, or maybe an RPG(?)---which they deem necessary to complete the job?!?! Seriously, with thousands of tons of drugs and various other contraband being smuggled in through our porous borders every month, and with millions of sea containers floating into our harbors each year (hell, you can build one in your garage for chrisake!), can any intelligent person say with a straight face they believe that by adding one more toothless law to the 20-some-odd thousand gun laws already on the books, that we will stop a terrorist attack? (If so, I've got a nice Polish revolver I'd like to sell you. Cheap. It's a classic. Only shot once.)

Anyway, like I was saying, thanks, ASSa9.com, for giving me a purpose in life.

More on this later. Maybe even a new blog dedicated to exposing these idiots for what they are: wimps who just can't stand the thought of you or I being able to defend ourselves against the poor, downtrodden........thug.

VERY sincerely,

Jefferson

Death Clock

Someone should yank this thing (www.deathclock.com) out of cyberspace. Or at least warn you that staring down the barrel of the grim reaper's sniper rifle is a decidely unpleasant thing to waste ones time on. Of course, I guess I might, if I weren't such a skeptical (my brother says "cynical;" my wife says "negative!"; I say "pragmatic, Sugarplum, simply pragmatic.") person I might take DeathClock's rather pessimistic prognostication for my demise (2018!) more seriously. With a somewhat uncomfortable sensation of the space/time continuum actually shrinking, I tried thinking less pessimistically with regards to my own ability to see the glass as half-full, so to speak, and this netted me another 15 years (2033). A noticable release of tension in the shoulders, combined with a sigh of relief, and, possibly, even the first hint of a primordial smile beginning to tug at my cheek muscles; these uncontrollably positive biological reactions conspired together to actually get me wondering (albeit skeptically) if I might, possibly, have the psychological software to bend my pragmatism a few degrees northward, in the direction of "Optimistic." (Though I seriously doubt it) I gave it a whirl anyway, and was pleasantly surprised to see that (if I were someone else) I might just make it 97! (2057)

Of course, Homo Sapien Sapien being what they are, I'm not altogether convinced there is much incentive to hang around for that long....but that's another issue to grapple with....and my coffee needs warming up right now.

One final thought: This unfortunate brush with mortality, much too early in the morning mind you, opens up a can of worms not easily herded back into their proper place: the unconscious mind. And, for the life of me, I can't fig---

Oh-oh, here comes the gestapo (aka Sugarplum). Time to get back to work.

More on this later,

Marrs

GDQ Special Report: Destroying Freedom for Dummies

Health "Czar" Rober Sillen has crossed the line, blatantly, boldly, unforgivably, in usurping California's right of self-determination. Not that there are more than a toddler's handful of rights left after seven score and ten years of unconstitutional federal abuse. Nevertheless, there comes a time when even the lowliest of slaves is forced to stand up and, at the very least, attempt to wrest away the whip from his master as it comes down on his mangled and blood-soaked flesh.

The arrogance of the Robert Sillen reminds one of that infamous Pharaoh, who---after denying Moses' demand that the Pharaoh let the Hebrews leave Egypt---took away the straw used by those same Hebrews to make bricks for the Pharaoh's various projects. And then, in typically ignorant, arrogant abuse of power so common to those who wield it, Pharaoh not only maintained their quota of bricks, he increased it!

Of course, the Hebrew's god wasn't about to stand for such cruel insolence, especially from his nemesis' minions, the Egytians. So Jehovah set about sending one plague after another on the Egyptians: frogs, lice, wild beasts, pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and finally, for the piece de resistance, after having determined that the Pharaoh's hard-headed policies toward the Hebrews wasn't about to soften anytime soon, he declared all-out war on the king. He sent an angel to kill every first-born son in Egypt. (According to legend, God instructed murdering angels to bypass any home with lamb's blood on the door frame, thus Passover, but that's another story for later.)

So, here we have in a strikingly similar re-enactment, the federal government of the United States of America, creating unconstitutional drug laws and then demanding that California enforce those laws. The enforcement of these drug laws create a literal plague of inmates in the California prison system, not to mention a plague of law enforcement organizations complete with their jack-booted stormtroopers smashing down doors in the middle of the night to drag away otherwise law-abiding citizens guilty of the crime of smoking marijuana---a practice which is certainly no more socially destructive than alcohol consumption.

California lawmakers, not exactly a bunch of staunch defenders of liberty themselves, nevertheless attempt to stand on good, sound principles of individual liberty(and being generally liberal pot-smokers themselves), they legalize the harmless herb, at least for medicinal purposes. Such brazen defiance from one its provincial authorities outrages the king and he orders the drug czar to smash the uprising with the aforementioned jack-booted stormtroopers.

A virtual, and fairly invisible, war ensues between the good innocent people of California and the drug czar's army; with the inevitable results of thousands of those innocents being murdered, maimed, beaten, bankrupted, incarcerated and otherwise harrassed by the enforcement of unconstitutional drug laws.

Meanwhile, as the prisons fill up with the new class of "drug criminals," a whole new mega-industry congeals out of the muck of big-government/big-industry collusion: the Prision Industrial Complex (we'll refer to it simply as PIC). Not at all unlike a biological cancer, it is a mindless, ethically-devoid organism seeking only to spread and grow, completely unaware and unconcerned that the ultimate result of its growth is the death of its host---in the case of the PIC the host are the tax-paying citizens, both individual and corporate, of the state of California. Except at the very highest echelons it is no more evil than, say, your average rabid pit-bull; it is simply doing its utmost to thrive; and if that means unmitigated growth, then that's what it will singlemindedly pursue, with its murderously crushing jaws wrapped around the jugular vein of Joe & Jenny Taxpayer.

This singleminded pursuit of growth, combined with the inextricable corruption of publically-funded government (for which there is little or no accountability) has resulted in a reciprocally advantageous relationship between the two. In a nutshell, PIC money and influence ensures the status quo remains the status quo; government ensures the PIC has a fresh stream of "drug criminals" flowing through its gates. It really is that simple. Of course there are historical, cultural and religious aspects of the whole "war on drugs," but the end result, at least with respect to the PIC, really is that simple. It's a cancer; it supports government, government supports it. And, unfortunately, as of this writing threre appears to be no chemo-therapy for this particular strain of cancer---short of an all-out rebellion by the tax-payers of not only California but all the other spineless provincial authorities of our once-great little republic of individual states.

Jefferson
9/20/06

An open letter to Dan Brown (presumably the famous writer)

Dear Mr. Brown, Re. your thoughtful, albeit suicidally depressing, GOD AND SCIENCE essay:

It appears as though you've thrown in towel a bit prematurely. Maybe you're French? I don't know. But I do know that, in a world which OVERWHELMINGLY bows the knee, kowtows, kisses the ring or otherwise grovels & bleats like pathetic sheep---to one deity or another---"science’s victory" is anything but "inevitable."

And if your "sunsets" have somehow grown more monochromatic, it isn't the fault of physics. The laws of nature are still the same, whether or not it was Jehovah or Allah or Aslan (or some long-gone concept which homo sapiens will never even guess at) that first flipped that original light switch.

Poor Mr. Brown, if you could only live in my universe for a few moments, you might see that there are indeed still plenty of things to wonder at: to watch a baby's little cranium push its way into the this world; to hang weightless in a forest of gently waving kelp and watch as the sun beams create a light show the likes of which any hollywood special effects guru would die for; to surf down a desert mountain on a four-foot deep blanket of solidified water, which feels more like goose down fluff than crystallized hydrogen and oxygen; to push little buttons and watch your thoughts congeal on a two-dimensional hologram in front of you; etc. etc.

Yeah, there are still plenty of things to wonder at. The problem is NOT one of having lost something: Wonder. No, the problem is evidently your inability to pull yourself from the muck of deicentric thought processes, unfold your wings and begin to soar in this unfathomably big, bad, scary, and almost completely unknown universe we live in. It's really not a bad place! Try it sometime.
In complaining that "the complexities of the universe have been shredded into mathematical equations," you exhibit an astonishing degree of naivete, confusing a mere description of the Thing with the Thing itself. Indeed, it's as if you're saying, that spoken language has somehow made the ideas and concepts which rattle around inside our craniums meaningless.

"Science proclaims that Planet Earth and its inhabitants are a meaningless speck in the grand scheme. A cosmic accident."

I guess I must've slept through that class, because I can't for the life of me recall ever having heard any intelligent person refer to the universe as an "accident."

You seem to believe that a lack of knowledge and evidence of the events that led up to our present state of existence somehow makes the possibility of those events a null proposition. Granted, it does appear to be much easier, at least for the majority of the human race, to simply attribute all things unknown and/or unknowable as having come from an all-powerful deity...somewhere...out there...in that mystical place where people go when they die. We (I lump myself in with Humans only because we share a common origination; not with regards to the issue at hand) somehow dismiss the fact that all natural phenomena are directly tracable to whatever events came before them.

"Even the technology that promises to unite us, divides us."

Again, I don't recall the inanimate concept of "technology" as ever having "promised" to unite us. To be sure, many humans have suffered under the delusion that technology would somehow overcome human nature. Alas, hope springs eternal, unmindful of realities.

Alas, Mr. Brown, your last few threads of credibility vaporize with the pathetically juvenile and entirely laughable statement that the entire human race feels "utterly alone."

I don't.

My wife doesn't. My sons don't seem to. In fact thay all seem to fairly happy. Maybe we get in to therapy and find out what the problem is?

Or maybe you should join some kind of club, or have some kids, or go down to the corner pub and play a few games of pool with the local ironworkers; sitting in front of computer screens for days on end might be part of the problem.

"We are bombarded with violence, division, fracture, and betrayal."

That life is nasty, brutish and short, Mr. Brown, is not a new phenomenon. And besides that, no small amount of the violence in the short history of homo sapiens can be directly or indirectly linked to religion and a rigid adherence to laws and tenets believed to have come from God.

"Skepticism has become a virtue."

Skepticism has always been a virtue. Ask anybody who's ever bought a time-share.

You go on and on and on, digressing into simple mono-thoughts: i.e. "Cynicism and demand for proof has become enlightened thought." But you finally hit the nader of stupidity with the astoundingly broad proclamation, couched in the following question: "Is it any wonder that humans now feel more depressed and defeated than they have in any point of human history?" Indeed, in making statements such as these, completely unfounded, without any data to back them up, without even any sort of verifiable consensus to claim, Mr. Brown, you demonstrate exactly WHY science has, to borrow your own defeatist words, "won the war."

You see, Science---that impersonal machine that you seem to believe is steamrolling the poor human race into a meaningless mass of DNA-based pulp---would demand that, before you make such ludicrous generalities, you go out and do the boring and tedious work of gathering some verifiable data. But that doesn't make for good fiction, now, does it?

One wonders if maybe you're doing some sort of freewriting experiment---frenetically tapping out each and every thought, regardless of how ridiculous it might seem, in an effort to inadvertently stumble upon some little gem which might be the beginning of something worth pursuing (that common practice amongst us writers, which I myself occasionally resort to when the ol' creative digestive tract gets stopped up, so to speak)--- you ask: "Does science hold anything sacred?"

Yes, Mr. Brown, that would be Truth. Truth in all its beauty and all its unflattering ugliness.

Sincerely,
Marrs Maniteaux

PS: Go take a long walk in the hills and get some sunshine and fresh air. It's good for the soul.

GDQ Completely Unqualified Editorial: Bush Suffers from Juvenile Delusional Syndrome

Remember when you got your first car? And all of the sudden it seemed like every fourth car on the highway was the same make & model, and half of them were the same color! Well, I've no idea what the clinical term for this delusion is, so I'll dub it JDS, Juvenile Delusional Syndrome. And it appears that our president has come down with a bad case of it.

During a conservative cream-puff lobbing competition (otherwise known as a press conference) our fearless leader got up off his prayer-swollen knees long enough to inform the reporters that he has a feeling that we---you and me, Joe & Jenny Sixpack---are in the midst of a "Third Awakening." (fade in angel-choir synth swell)

He likened it to the era of that greatest of all Constitution-wreckers, Abraham Lincoln, during whose despotic tenure, so claims the Commander and Chief of the most powerful nation in the history of the human race, there seems to have been a groundswell of support (presumably the "Second Awakening") from the religious people "who saw life in terms of good and evil." Many of his own supporters, he thoughtfully opined, see the current conflict in similar terms. Imagine that.

"A lot of people. In...........America see. This as a confront..........ation. Between good.........And evil including me." Bush stumbled on. "There was a stark....... Change between the culture of the '50s........... And the '60s........boom! (sic)........ And I think. There's change happening...........Here," he struggled on. And then, in a stunning display of verbal agility, he appeared to actually complete a logical sentence: "It seems to me that there's a Third Awakening."

Now, I'm not too sure about the "boom" thing. A newcular tick, maybe?

However, I am convinced of these truisms: anyone in a position of, well, basically, Supreme Commander of Planet Earth, should at the very least be in possession at least a minimal amount introspective ability; and that there appears to be a sociopathically debilitating affliction of the aforementioned JDS at work in our CinC's cranium.

Having embraced this whole Revelation theology hokey---hook, line and sinker---he's not only surrounding himself, albeit unwittingly (as he seems to have done everything in his gilted life), with like-minded "religious people," but also, I suspect, the syndrome has run its course and caused him to begin projecting his own dangerously myopic avoidance of hell-fire & brimstone on those around him, regardless of the fact that he's still surrounded by an entourage of vicious, corrupt, soulless, power-hungry politicals.

And, as if that weren't reason enough to wrestle him into a straightjacket and haul him off to a happier place for safe-keeping, he appears to be attempting to make up for a youth and middle-adulthood of drunken debauchery and drug use by going after---none other than Jehovah's alter-ego and nemesis himself---Allah.

I keep having this recurring nightmare of our president, Stetson in hand, dropping out of the bomb-bay doors of a B-52, riding a killer whale sized nuke like a mechanical bull, hootin' and yippin' and singing at the top of his lungs, "Onward-Christian-so-oh-oh-old-yers-marchin'-on-to-war............" But instead of falling toward a giant desert somewhere "over there," he and his flying WMD are falling directly onto Monticello.

Jefferson

GDQ: Conspiracy Theorists, Right Wing Wackos and other jerkoffs who are NOT welcome at GDQ

I'm sick of seeing liberty-loving Americans lumped in with, or actually referred to as, "conspiracy theorists." As if maintaining a viable, sustainable, non-invasive government---and demanding that government (i.e. the individual people in the government) be held accountable for its actions---makes one a "conspiracy nut."

No. No, no, emphatically NO. Merely because one is vehemently opposed to, say, illegal search & seizure, or illegal taxation, or the monumentally idiotic waste of those illegally-absconded tax dollars, does not in any way suggest that we are of the opinion that our ham-fisted government was responsible, either directly or indirectly, for the 9/11 disasters. Indeed, the very concept that any arm of our government is even remotely capable of pulling off such a perfectly orchestrated attack is laughable (their best and brightest spend trillions of dollars and still can't even figure out how to make foam stick to a rocket). Seriously, c'mon, considering the sheer number of people who would necessarily have been involved, and without so much as one single person ever stepping forward and confessing, after 5 years of gnawing guilt and regret....

No, it just didn't happen that way. And few liberty-loving people believe it did. What a fair number of us do believe is that our government---after spending billions of dollars in creating that gigantic new behemoth of a bureaucracy, Homeland Security (and its retarded child TSA), and billions more sending thousands of young Americans to their graves, and tens of thousands of Arabs young and old to theirs, alienting the most of the planet in the process; and after doing everything short actually setting fire to our constitution itself in their counterproductive "war on terror," bankrupting us in the meantime---is simply too inept to conceive and carry out such an astonishingly simple plan.

And even if they were capable of such an elegantly simple operation, and then keeping mum about it, most of us still don't believe that even King George is capable of ordering such an atrocity (at least against his own countrymen). No, while those at the uppermost echelons of the American power structure are, often as not, evilly inept, they are rarely evil for evil's sake. They do not pursue evil ends out of principle, cultural animosity, nor even a twisted christian fundamentalist jihad (as, say, a bin Laden might); and they therefore have nothing to gain from killing thousand of Americans. And while it is a debatable issue as to whether or not King George is religiously deluded---enough to attempt to start an Armegeddon---I'm inclined to believe that those around him, those who have used him as their strategic pawn-king, are merely utilizing him to further their own insidiously-deep-rooted interests in what Eisenhower called "the military industrial complex."

Yet even this military industrial complex, in my humble opinion, falls far short of any sort of long-term, top-tier, organized effort to bilk the American people out of two-thirds of their hard-earned pay. Not when you have Boeing courting one senator over here, Halliburton colluding with Northrop over there, the Pentagon playing a vicious game of tug-o-war with The Office of Naval Research way up there (away from prying eyes), and all blackmailing one another and stepping on each other in a decidely disconcerted effort to get a slice of that precious federal pie.

No, it is my sincere belief, as a liberty-loving, non-conspiraphile, American, that one need not resort to conspiracy theories in order to explain the ever-growing evil of ever-growing government. Indeed, it speaks for itself.

Jefferson

GDQ Special Report: More proof that government can't do ANYTHING right.

US Marine Daniel Brown was recently detained at LAX, missing his flight while he was interrogated by our fearless incompetentocrats at TSA. Now, I'll be the first to admit that it'd be a shrewd ruse indeed: plant an American caucasian---a Marine in uniform and traveling with a group of Marines in uniform, all possessing valid military identifications along with their official orders to report to such-and-such military installation---into a group of unsuspecting military folks and have him blow up a plane.

Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that he was on his way home from Iraq?

OK, I can admit also that some overpaid, under-IQ'd, screener was simply doing his duty when his gizmotron started beeping wildly.

But, what I can't admit is that TSA are the right people for the job; because if they were, they would have by now figured out some way of eliminating (or at least mitigating) the possibility that anyone, especially such unlikelies as Daniel Brown, would have to go through such nonsense---twice.

That's right, he's already been through the TSA interrogation drill---for the exact same thing. What's that(?), you ask: baggies of C4 explosive in his carry on? Nitro-glycerin? High exposive grenades in his checked bags? No, no and no. Not even something so trivial as forgetting to declare a sidearm in your checked baggage.

Evidently he was detained (again) and thoroughly interrogated (again) for the crime of having gun powder residue on his boots! Imagine that. A Marine with (non-explosive) gun powder residue on his boots. Now, as if it's not ludicrous enough, detaining a marine for trace amounts of gun powder on the soles of his shoes; detaining the poor guy twice for the same thing is just too idiotic. Even worse, Daniel Brown, a guy who's thrown himself headfirst into the, albeit dubious, "War on Terror," had been put on a permanent "no fly" list (a place I nearly ended up after inadvertenly attempting to "smuggle on board" a tiny credit card tool with, among other non-life-threating gizmos, a one-inch knife blade. Seriously, I was photographed, fingerprinted, put on a "watch list" and sent away with a warning not to leave the country, and to not try anymore of this weapon smuggling stuff).

The whole sad story is just more proof (for anyone club-headed enough to not yet be convinced) that governments, and government automatons (i.e. TSA employees) are neither the best nor the most cost-effective answer to protecting the civilian population of our country. Indeed, they are precisely the opposite: THE worst and THE most expensive. And they cannot be held responsible for even the stupidest of actions.

Even if, all else being equal, TSA really was capable of protecting us, the fact that they will utilize four or five people for every one-person task: this alone is reason enough to bump the feds from the list of viable "security providers."

And even if the money issue wasn't enough, well, there's always that pesky ol' issue of limiting government to doing only what it was originally intended to do: protect our coasts and borders from invasion (an even bigger failure); collect some import tarriffs where absolutely necessary; attempt to settle grievances between states and massage away the insults and damaged collective egos that tend to happen in the process; to maintain a high court to determine cases which have somehow been unable to be solved in their home states; and a very few other specific tasks, which were VERY CLEARLY ENUMERATED in the original contract: the Constitution of the United States of America.

Jefferson