Over Christmas we had another attempted terror attack against America. By now I assume  that everyone reading this blog knows that a young man smuggled explosives aboard an International flight — the bomb making materials were apparently in his underwear — and after determining that the aircraft was in American airspace, attempted to detonate it.

Only by a combination of luck and in competence did the device not explode, but merely burned. Even that could have been very bad had passengers not acted quickly and subduing the terrorist and putting out the fire.

It stupid that this man was able to smuggle the bomb-making material aboard. We have the technology to catch this crap. It’s back scatter x-rays.

These devices can image right through clothing down to the skin. The likelihood of getting contraband through such a system is much lower than with our current wand and pat down system. (Nothing is assured – a dopey scanner operator can still miss things, but this is so much better than what we have now.)  We have not instituted these scanners because it is able to image people in the nude, right through their clothing.

Horrors, someone might see my wang.

Bloddy hell people, I’d rather have TSA people seeing an endless parade of naughty bits than not be able to see bombs. Hmmmm, nude or dead, I know which I’ll want to be.

The only reason to hold back this technology is that we are so scared of skin we’d literally rather die than have someone see some.

To quote Plan 9 from Outer Space…

“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”