My one experience with the scanners is also associated with having the operator immediately switch pronouns once they saw the image.
I expect to fly somewhere soon, and I am not looking forward to a repeat of that situation.
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Or maybe a small percentage of potential fliers decide to drive rather than fly because they prefer not to be subjected to ridiculous wait times and useless hassle of racial profiling, demonstrably useless, behavioural screening, ineffective screening techniques, and surly and vindictive TSA staff. So maybe all this useless security theatre not only wastes hundreds of billions of dollars to save nobody at all and also causes more traffic fatalities as well!
Sorry, no, they don’t get a pass for assuaging an unease that they themselves invented in the first place.
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Which in and of itself should be enough to make people question the necessity of the restriction. But it’s even dumber than that.
The ‘binary liquid explosive’ that the liquids restriction is supposed to be protecting you from doesn’t actually exist. There is no way to mix two substances together on a plane to create a compound that might – if prepared correctly – be exploded with any meaningful effect, but that wouldn’t actually just decompose immediately and ineffectually upon the mixing. You would need a cold bath, you would need continual stirring, you would need to crystallize and filter and dry the product, all in sufficient quantity to do meaningful damage (i.e. more that set your shoe on fire). An explosive compound must necessarily be far far less stable than its decomposition products, and so must be prepared and isolated under conditions that do not offer enough thermal energy to allow the decomposition of even a single molecule (which would release enough energy to trigger the rest). But in order to mix two substances together and have them spontaneously form a new compound, without any input of energy, requires that the synthesis reaction itself a) have a very low energy barrier so that it proceeds immediately, and b) be energetically downhill, and release energy, triggering the decomposition.
If goes fast and releases energy, it will fizzle the explosive product you’re trying to make before you can make and isolate and purify enough of it to be explosive. If it doesn’t, you cannot make it just by mixing two liquids together.
The liquids restriction presupposes the existence of a material that is a thermodynamic impossibility.
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they don’t get a pass for assuaging an unease that they themselves invented in the first place
First, it doesn’t really matter how we got to today. The fact is, some people are scared and some people are pissed off. We don’t know the numbers or what the net effect is.
Secondly, if you are going to assign blame for the creation of unease, I would lay that at the feet of the news industry.
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