TSA

I retain a requisite amount of contempt for government-run institutions and the bureaucrats with whom I have to deal on occasion. Every interaction with them makes me want to pull my hair out. Government websites function as if they haven’t been updated since dial-up. I would rather go to the dentist than the DMV. It’s as if each employee has been specially hand-picked to make you hate the government more. These are features of the system, not bugs. Take the TSA, the organization which seems to derive the most joy out of making things difficult for parents flying with toddlers. In an effort to thwart these desperate adults chaperoning tiny terrorists, the agency will inexplicably change up the protocol for strollers every single time.

For the past several years, the air traffic I see out the windows of my office has been constant — a regularly occurring string of flights headed north up the Potomac toward Ronald Reagan International Airport, and others headed south after taking off. Yesterday morning was the first time I can remember seeing the skies utterly clear of traffic, as the ferry boats that normally take tourists and visitors from port to port along the river were instead repurposed as salvage vehicles for divers seeking out the remains of the passengers lost in the crash of American Eagle Flight 5342 and soldiers flying the Army Black Hawk it collided with a mere 400 feet above the water.

House Republicans will be investigating the Transportation Security Administration to work out how a prolific Swiss hacker who identifies as a “tiny kitten” was able to obtain over a million entries from the No-Fly List, The Spectator has learned. The hacker, a twenty-three-year-old who goes by Maia Arson Crimew, was able to access a 2019 version of the list after what she described as just a few hours of hacking.

During the entire past two years of Covid hysteria I never stopped traveling. “Work from home” wasn’t a privilege awarded to me. My love of logic and language was perpetually bothered by a frequent airline announcement: “Federal law requires” mask mandates, a statement most untruthful. There is no law. Congress passed no new legislation; there is only regulation, the demon spawn of power-hungry politicians and a bloated bureaucracy. For those who can’t be bothered with the democratic process of elected officials proposing bills and deliberating, voting and enacting legislation, the immeasurable, and not enumerated, power of the bureaucratic state is an attractive work-around.