Unfriendly Skies

In the wake of Kevin Smith's too-fat-to-fly ousting by Southwest, Shaker Esme emails some more examples of fuckery from airlines:

TSA forces travelling policeman to remove his disabled four-year-old son's leg-braces.

and:

US Airways Philadelphia alert sparked by Jewish prayer.

One trend I've noticed in these types of stories is that it seems rare for security to deprive able-bodied white English-speaking Christian men of necessary items to fly. Instead, the people targeted are people of color (wooooo profiling), women (carrying such dangerous items as breast milk, or breasts), people who speak in a language other than English, people who pray in ways of non-Christian religions (Jews and Muslims), and people using items to accommodate a disability (wheelchairs, braces, medicine).

Of course, the terrorism that is most likely to kill people in America comes in the forms of hate crimes, and domestic acts of terror performed primarily by Christian white men.

Also, it's incredibly sad that THE SECOND COMMENTER on the BoingBoing piece uses the word "lame." Irony, thy name is Internet Dumbshit.

At some point, some genius like Richard Branson is going to realize so many people are finding other ways to travel to avoid these sorts of abuses by traditional carriers, that there's a fuckload of money to be made in an airline that services "nontraditional" flyers.

If I had a billion dollars laying around, Fly Freak Airlines, accommodating fat asses with big seats and treating every individual passenger like a human being, would be cruising on the nation's runways, like, yesterday.