Do you ever look around and wonder if you’re the only sane person left in the world?  I do, and it brings up an interesting philosophical question: if everybody else seems insane, are they really?  Or is it me that’s crazy?

(Don’t answer that.)

There are people who insist that the prions which cause mad-cow disease are an unstoppable hidden epidemic which will ultimately cause the end of the human race.  It worries me, especially when I see the way some people act.  It’s like Night of the Living Dead: first everybody is normal, then a few start acting a little weird, then they’re acting crazy, then you’ve got lurching, drooling, grunting liberals stumbling around talking about universal healthcare.

Robert Pirsig, author of the 1970s bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, wrote a less-famous sequel called Lila: An Inquiry into Morals which impressed me by providing a practical, logical, easily-administered test for sanity.  Basically, Pirsig concludes, if your paradigm works you’re sane.  If your paradigm doesn’t work, you’re crazy.  Simple as that.

So never mind if you happen to be a minority of one—it’s irrelevant.  (Whew!  What a relief.)

Using Pirsig’s test (and Michael Savage’s words), liberalism is a mental disorder because we spent the entire 20th century testing every possible form of socialism/statism/communism (whatever you want to call it) and watching it fail spectacularly and miserably—yet liberals still believe in big government.  Sometimes in the middle of a debate with liberals I want to shout, “IT DOESN’T WORK!” because, really, why complicate the simple minded with issues of good and evil which are beyond their ken?

Man is God’s creation—government is man’s creation.  It shouldn’t be a big surprise which one works and which one doesn’t.  Sheesh.

Two weeks ago some “scientists” from the University of California, Davis, announced that climate change would severely affect Lake Tahoe by the end of the century.  That’s ninety years from now.  Snow is going to stop falling, trout are going to die, rain and drought are going to increase (both at the same time apparently)—all kinds of nasty stuff.  I put the word “scientists” in quotes because I am not clear about what the word means anymore.  Apparently anybody is considered a “scientist” when it comes to climate as long as they hew to the party line and support the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

I read the Lake Tahoe report shortly after watching a crazy woman who was ahead of me in the cashier line at my grocery store.  Although this woman seemed functional—she shopped, paid for her groceries, and walked out without drooling (always a good sign)—I could tell she didn’t have a sturdy connection to reality.  I could just tell.  When she tried to get my phone number in the parking lot, I had the proof.

Anyway, the woman started me wondering about how many people walking around, seemingly functional, holding down jobs and shopping for groceries and voting in elections and raising children—and maybe even nationally critical stuff like being elected to congress or sitting in the White House or running the war in Afghanistan—are actually total loony tunes.

How many people who look normal on the surface are clinging to a thought pattern that does. not. work?

The Lake Tahoe report is a good example.  Predictions of a warming planet are based upon the I.P.C.C.’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report which was supposedly based upon rigorously compiled temperature data rigorously analyzed.  But since 2007 the I.P.C.C. has admitted they were wrong about melting glaciers, sea levels, rainforests, the percentage of the Netherlands below sea level, the rising costs of extreme weather events, and even the actual temperature data.  The whole report is a giant pile of polar bear poop and yet these University of California, Davis, “scientists” are still using it to predict Tahoe weather ninety years in the future.

It’s batty.

The day after the Lake Tahoe report, terrorist Ahmed Ghailani was acquitted of 224 counts of murder in New York.  These are murders to which he confessed—twice!—but he was acquitted because two days after becoming president, before acquiring even the tiniest clue about what he was doing, Barack Obama announced that the prison for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—Gitmo—would be closed within a year and military tribunals suspended indefinitely.  Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, decided to hold civilian trials for terrorists instead, even though they were warned repeatedly by almost everybody of almost every political persuasion that capturing enemies in foreign countries is not compatible with civilian trials and that rules of evidence would preclude using confessions and witnesses.

Even Osama bin Laden sent a letter to the White House saying, “Civilian trials?  That’s just silly, dude.”

Sure enough, during the course of Ghailani’s trial the judge disallowed his confessions and, because the witness who sold him the explosives which killed 224 Americans was discovered as a direct result of those confessions, the witness was disallowed also.  You can’t blame the judge.  He went by the rules for civilian trials, the rules that everybody warned Obama about, the rules that a “constitutional law professor” should have known.

In addition to a confessed terrorist being acquitted, the city of New York has vociferously, rudely, and publicly rejected Obama’s suggestion that 9/11 terror suspects be tried in Manhattan, and it’s been almost two years since Obama said Gitmo would be closed within a year.

Remember what Pirsig said about being committed to a paradigm that doesn’t work?  Two days after the Ghailani verdict, the Obama Justice Department announced they would continue prosecuting terrorists in civilian court.

Meanwhile, the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) has gone completely nutso.  Bonkers.  Apeshit.  They are taking small children and soldiers on their way home from Iraq and old men with artificial knees and nuns in habits and even the pilots who are about to fly the airplanes… and feeling their crotches.  Apparently they suspect that Muslim terrorists are hiding there, I don’t know.  They won’t explain because that would give the terrorists too much information.

[Insert disdainful snort.]

The issue here is not the TSA which is exactly what a rational person would expect from minimum-wage government nitwits outfitted and trained by higher-level nitwits and sent out with the first smidgeon of authority in their lives.  These are people who can’t seem to grasp the concept that the pilot doesn’t really need a bomb to crash the plane so you can’t expect competence or effective screening for terrorists.

My fellow citizens who defend the TSA, they’re the ones whose craziness scares me.  Some pertinent facts:

1. In the nearly ten years of its existence, the TSA has never caught or discovered a terrorist.  Not once.  Not even close.  Meanwhile, the passengers they rudely manhandle and inconvenience have discovered and stopped numerous terrorists.

2. TSA employees have been arrested for stealing from passengers, drug use on duty, and even planting contraband in passengers’ luggage.  Strictly going by the numbers, the TSA is a bigger threat to passenger safety than al-Queda.

3. The X-ray machines ostensibly purchased to foil the kind of bomb used by the underwear bomber… would not have detected the underwear bomber.  The manufacturer admits this.  (You couldn’t make this stuff up.)

4. The manufacturer of the X-ray machines which the TSA is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase has spent millions of dollars lobbying in Washington, D.C., trying to sell his machines to the government.  The head of the company was on Air Force One with President Obama on his recent trip to India.  Apparently they’re buddies.

5. Israel, which exists at the epicenter of the war on terror and endures the brunt of Muslim hostility, does not use X-ray-spewing full-body scanners or do intrusive crotch-grabbing, breast-fondling, rubber-glove pat downs.  Instead, they rely on the wild expedient of looking for Muslim single men aged 17 to 40 who are nervous and sweating and seem to be day-dreaming about 70 virgins.  Israel has the best safety record of any nation for air travel.

6. Scientists who claim expertise in radiation disagree about whether the TSA’s full-body scanners pose a radiation danger but even the manufacturer admits that unless the machines are kept perfectly tuned and operated exactly right they’re dangerous.  But don’t worry, they’re maintained and operated by the TSA.

7. Keep in mind, on a round trip you’ll be X-rayed twice.  The nitwit operating the machine stands there eight hours a day.  (Pretty sure there’s a nitwits-shouldn’t-reproduce-anyway joke here somewhere.)  It’s a good thing TSA employees don’t do undercover anti-terrorism work because in about a year they’ll all be glowing in the dark.

8. The rubber gloves the TSA employees wear for pat downs are not changed between passengers so whatever was on the crotch of the last 100 passengers is liable to be shared with you.  (Have a nice trip and try not to scratch in public.)

9. TSA employees have tried to confiscate a Medal of Honor—from a governor—because they were afraid it might be used as a weapon, refused a senator’s U.S. Senate picture ID and then accepted his Sam’s Club ID, confiscated nail clippers from a soldier returning from Afghanistan who was boarding the plane with his M4 Carbine rifle, repeatedly insisted that air marshals place their guns in their carryon bags so that possessions can be scanned for weapons, concentrated on women passengers to the exclusion of male passengers whenever the TSA screeners on duty happen to be women, squeezed a bladder cancer survivor’s urostomy bag until it squirted urine, and made a woman who lost her right breast to cancer remove her prosthetic breast so they could see it.

As Pirsig would point out, the TSA is a paradigm that does not work.

According to government researchers 20% of Americans are mentally ill and according to an ABC News poll 48% of Americans are okay with the new body pat downs.  I’m pretty sure the first number explains the second.

C’mon, people, fight the craziness.  We’re Americans.  Our birthright is freedom and dignity as individual human beings created by God.  We don’t have to take this crap.




From Reno, Nevada, USA

December 2, 2010 - Well maybe you can add this link to your article regarding the TSA. This one really takes the cake. A young mother was kept in a glass cage for almost an hour because she didn't want her breastmilk to go under an X-Ray device. - Samantha R., Michigan

"Following their own guidelines will not get you anywhere because they make the rules up as they go along. The latest case of TSA tyranny to hit the headlines comes in the form of a young mother who was subjected to enhanced groping and then shut inside a screening box for almost an hour by agents after she refused to allow them to put her breast milk through an x-ray device, a legitimate request that is even written into the TSA’s own guidelines."

November 30, 2010 - I fly monthly for business, and am constantly subjected to the TSA's force of mental midgits. As long as I'm not catching an attitude, I do my best to smile and try to remember that this is just another working Joe like me. He's just trying to earn a living, like we all are, in a world where most of this crap wouldn't be going on if it wasn't for all of the liberals that our country's silent majority of conservatives lets run free to the detriment of us all. Profiling like they do in Israel?? Now that would be great. But even if the TSA's monkey's were able to do it effectively, would it be successful in preventing attacks in the U.S.? My guess is that it's sucessful in Israel because of what happens to someone there who is caught trying to carry a bomb onto a plane. We can't even convict people here who freely admit to using airplanes to kill 224 people. No folks. We let the liberals make this bed for us. Until we change it, we're gonna have to lay in it. - Matt H., Minnesota

November 29, 2010 - Have you noticed? They treat terrorists like Americans and Americans like terrorists. - Walter, Nevada

November 27, 2010 - At first I thought the TSA procedures were much ado about nothing but as the days pass and the horrible stories pile up I've changed my mind. Returning soldiers being treated rudely, disabled people being humiliated, a woman searched because of her sanitary pad, TSA agents who are sexual predators, and the final straw: elite government employees getting waivers so they don't have to experience what the rest of us poor slobs do. Is this still America? - Bob, Nevada

November 24, 2010 - I traveled today and didn't make a fuss because I paid money for the ticket and wanted to see family for Thanksgiving. I hate that I have to choose between an unknown X-ray risk and being groped by jackasses in uniforms, but the government has us between a rock and a hard place. Don't think that my lack of fight means I'm happy about the new procedures. - Beverly, Illinois

November 24, 2010 - Nicely put. Remember when I was a young child with bladder issues, and several nurses, a doctor, and my mother combined could not pry my legs apart to perform a Cystoscopy? My Daddy saved me then by taking me home and once again he is defending his daughter's right to freedom and dignity. I love you Dad. - Hard Case, Michigan

J.P. replies: Your mother called and said, “Will you come down here and make your daughter spread her legs?  She’ll listen to you.”  I drove down there about 90 mph and grabbed you and walked out.  Your mother was angry and the radiologist was angry but there was a nurse who looked me in the eye and nodded approval.  Makes me wonder how I would handle a TSA nitwit trying to give my daughter a pat down.  Thousands of parents will be facing that conundrum this weekend and I hope they act in favor of their children’s dignity—like Americans—rather than accepting the TSA’s BS.

November 24, 2010 - I sorta wish I was traveling today so I could tell those facsist TSA bastards to kiss my ass while they're feeling it. Maybe I'll get my chance at Christmas. - Benjamin, Delaware