by With gasoline peaking at $4.00USD a gallon — more than twice as much as a year ago — it makes one wonder if that devastating blow to the commoner’s pocket is a governmental feint to hide the insidious loss of more valuable and basic liberties.
Many children wish for two things while growing up:
- To be invisible
- To have X-Ray vision
Being invisible is easy and it takes many forms. Close your eyes. Hold your hands over your eyes. You’re invisible.
Getting X-Ray vision, however, was a much harder feat to accomplish because it required the active participation of another person.
You could always find help in your X-Ray vision mission by visiting the back of any comic book and looking for a deal on “X-Ray Specs” for a dollar of your hard-earned paper route earnings.
Even though the dollar X-Ray goggles never gave your a glimpse beyond the clothing of those you coveted, you could never collect on the glasses’ money back guarantee, because it was always turned around on you:
“What do you mean you can’t see her undies? You aren’t using the glasses right. They aren’t broken. YOU are broken! Concentrate harder!”
Leave it to the USA government to make our childish, childhood, dreams come true.
Meet the Transportation Security Administration’s new anti-terror Full Body Scanner coming to an airport near you — and it won’t cost you a single cent to be the X-Ray goggles focus of another’s delight.
BALTIMORE — Body-scanning machines that show images of people underneath their clothing are being installed in 10 of the nation’s busiest airports in one of the biggest public uses of security devices that reveal intimate body parts.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently started using body scans on randomly chosen passengers in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Denver, Albuquerque and at New York’s Kennedy airport.
Airports in Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas and Miami will be added this month. Reagan National Airport in Washington starts using a body scanner today. A total of 38 machines will be in use within weeks.
“It’s the wave of the future,” said James Schear, the TSA security director at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, where two body scanners are in use at one checkpoint.
The TSA thinks these body scanners should be employed at train stations, office buildings, and probably public parks and your bedroom.
There’s no hiding from these “millimeter wave” scanners. They can identify your gender and the sweat on your back — but, oddly enough, they cannot “look through” plastic or “rubber that resembles skin.”
I guess there will be a run on Real Dolls and Reborns as the new terrorist instruments of destruction.
Do you feel these “gender scanners” — and we all know these X-Ray images will only be “immediately deleted” for the ordinary and the ugly; X-Ray images of the beautiful and the deformed will always, curiously, find a way to be saved for later mocking and adoration by those humans doing the scanning — are a violation of the sanctity of your body or not?
Has the government gone too far to invasively scan our bodies in the name of terror for too little return of actual, quantifiable, safety?
Are we becoming too reliant on passive technology to save us from our darker selves instead of using aggressive, basic, human, defensive tactics of interrogation, behavior study, and well-trained guts to protect our lives?
i still think xray glasses are better because you can hide behind things and watch people ha ha
i don’t like the scanner i don’t get why it helps
arin —
The scanner is supposed to see hidden weapons that are non-metal like, say, a ceramic knife or something stuck up your bum that might endanger the welfare of the plane.
Everytime I go through an airport scanner – I cringe…but this is something which is beyond my call I guess.
Fascinating, David! It seems fear finds new ways of making fools of us.
I cringe, too, Katha! There is no public privacy for our privates any longer. The terrorists won.
It does seem foolish to me, Dananjay — especially when a couple of ways to thwart the new system are included in a news article! What a joke we are playing on ourselves in the name of safety!