Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.
[Carroll]
For the third time, then: Ian Parker-Joseph:
In a judgment announced yesterday, the European Court of Justice has ruled that a secret list promulgated by the European Commission, specifying items to be prohibited from airline carry-on baggage, cannot be enforced against individual airline passengers because it was not made public…
He cites this story in the Times, to which is appended this comment:
Last week Birmingham airport refused to allow me to take some rope through security. The rope was brand new, fully lashed and sealed, and totally inccessible without a knife to remove the lashings. Nowhere is there any mention of such items. Very annoying as it will cost me over £60 to replace it.
My immediate conclusion was that if the airport goons are allowed arbitrarily to confiscate, and doubtless subsequently sell, valuable private property in this way then one can immediately see why the list of prohibitions is kept secret.
3 in one day. I feel honoured kind sir.
Are your “security” thieves private contractors? Over here it is a low-IQ underpaid affair of unemployables being stuffed into polyester sweat-stinking too-tight uniforms and then NOT being told anything, before being put on the cattle chute with a (supposedly trained) mentor, or some other old lag.
OUR baggage stealing, I am pleased to tell you in terms of our American efficiency myth, is an organized behind-the-scenes affair that goes on from out on the tarmac, from whence a Leading Aircraft Unloader Person misdirects a trolley or two to the wrong concourse baggage room for subsequent “sorting. Through the affirmative active years and decades, the main beneficiaries have been (in approximate order) Cubans, les Haitiens and other Aethiopians and, latterly, the Somalis….”
Meanwhile, in the treblinkan slot, the mainly elderly judeo-caucasoid hapless (and, in Minnesota, their Norwegian-Lutheran agnates) are divested of various small but valuable items, everything indeed being posted as part of our American transparency myth, but items listed change with “terror alert” color of the day and so it goes here, in The Land Of The Free & The Objectively God-Damned.
(I’ve not flown in twenty-one years and most certainly shall not do again; but, I did accompany a mate to the concourse entrance the other day, it is really Christ-awful beyond belief and not a fit enterprise for any actual adult, this air travel cramming and jamming…”yuck,” as our young say here!)
The only compensation I suppose is that, here, the proceeds do not redound to the government and go rather to the bona fide underworld.
To be honest, I haven’t used commercial aviation for some years and so couldn’t really say from which department of the zoo the UK branch of this mafia are currently recruiting their staff.
Here they seem to dredge a fair number from among the ranks of Unwed Fathers & (Now) Mothers Behind On Their Child Support — the less doughey specimens are dragooned in various privatised ‘Work Readiness’ scams being put across by the county welfare bureaux, in cahoots with The Corporation. In this connection, the 1953 ‘Modern Library’ re-issue of /The Cotton Kingdom/, Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1861 review of Negro slave life in the old American South is instructive. These Homeland Security (har!) under-rentiers actually now infest also the railway stations and bus depots. And, I am reliably informed that technology now exists to superintend and record the mileage, as well as destinations, of ones motorcar, on the pending Oregon state model. There, a tax now is mooted on mileage, as a kind of experment in the direction of ‘Green globalisation’. So far for some reason motorbikes don’t lend themselves to the RFID systems, and of course pushbikes don’t figure. When The Chinamen do actually get here, this thing will all be nicely sorted and, hence, eligible be flogged at a nice premium.