Author: VD

On June 29, 2004, at 12:28 p.m., I flew on Northwest Airlines flight #327 from Detroit to Los Angeles with my husband and our young son. Also on our flight were 14 Middle Eastern men between the ages of approximately 20 and 50 years old. What I experienced during that flight has caused me to question whether the United States of America can realistically uphold the civil liberties of every individual, even non-citizens, and protect its citizens from terrorist threats….

As we sat waiting for the plane to finish boarding, we noticed another large group of Middle Eastern men boarding. The first man wore a dark suit and sunglasses. He sat in first class in seat 1A, the seat second-closet to the cockpit door. The other seven men walked into the coach cabin. As aware Americans, my husband and I exchanged glances, and then continued to get comfortable. I noticed some of the other passengers paying attention to the situation as well. As boarding continued, we watched as, one by one, most of the Middle Eastern men made eye contact with each other. They continued to look at each other and nod, as if they were all in agreement about something. I could tell that my husband was beginning to feel anxious.

The take-off was uneventful. But once we were in the air and the seatbelt sign was turned off, the unusual activity began. The man in the yellow T-shirt got out of his seat and went to the lavatory at the front of coach — taking his full McDonald’s bag with him. When he came out of the lavatory he still had the McDonald’s bag, but it was now almost empty. He walked down the aisle to the back of the plane, still holding the bag. When he passed two of the men sitting mid-cabin, he gave a thumbs-up sign. When he returned to his seat, he no longer had the McDonald’s bag.

Then another man from the group stood up and took something from his carry-on in the overhead bin. It was about a foot long and was rolled in cloth. He headed toward the back of the cabin with the object. Five minutes later, several more of the Middle Eastern men began using the forward lavatory consecutively. In the back, several of the men stood up and used the back lavatory consecutively as well.

For the next hour, the men congregated in groups of two and three at the back of the plane for varying periods of time. Meanwhile, in the first class cabin, just a foot or so from the cockpit door, the man with the dark suit – still wearing sunglasses – was also standing. Not one of the flight crew members suggested that any of these men take their seats.

The problem isn’t that the government isn’t going to be able to stop this. The government can never be relied upon to stop anything, except perhaps an amphibious invasion by another nation’s military. The problem is that the Federal government is actively working to prevent the airlines from being able to address the situation themselves.

If we still had free association in the United States, an airline could choose to deny flying anyone it believed posed a risk or even made its passengers feel unsafe. This would certainly be discrimination, and, horror of horrors, I say to you now that there is nothing wrong with discrimination. If the business of Syrians, blacks, homosexuals or Christians is of no interest to one in a free society, free association means that one has the right to decline it. (The injustice of segregation was that it was publicly enforced law, which is another matter altogether.)

This discrimination can be financially suicidal, or it can be absolutely necessary if you want to stay in business. The airlines are already teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the next series of explosions bringing down several on the same day will finish them off unless they are allowed to do as they see fit in protecting their equipment, their employees, and most importantly, their paying customers.

Ironically, as with 9/11, people will look to the Federal government to solve a problem that its policies will be proven to have created.

UPDATE: An NRO reader writes in:

“Either there is something REALLY bad going on or that article is an urban legend. I just read a very similar story a couple of weeks ago (linked from Instapundit or AndrewSullivan or Boortz, I can’t remember) written by a man travelling with his wife and son. The story wasn’t quite as dramatic as this one but it involved suspicious arab passengers that were “wisked” away by who boarded the plane upon arrival. I can’t remember the exact details of the story but it seems to have all of the ear marks of urban legend-om.”

I don’t know “Annie Jacobsen”, so I can’t testify to the versimilitude of the article, but if it’s a hoax, the details are uncharacteristically accurate. True, she claims that the flight left at 12:28, not 12:22, but I don’t think a six-minute discrepancy casts the entire article in doubt. From NWA.com:

Northwest Airlines 327

Fri, Jul 23

4hr 39min

12:22pm Depart Detroit (DTW)

2:01pm Arrive Los Angeles (LAX)

NRO is madly buzzing about how Kerry’s apparent dismissal of the Lizard Queen is nothing but a stunt designed to create more excitement when she makes a “surprise” speech at the convention. I’m hoping that she’ll tear off her human skin, hiss at the camera and strangle Kerry with her tri-forked tongue before devouring both him and John Edwards live in front of a horrified nation.

The terrified Republicans will have no choice but to send a delegation via submarine to a small island in the Antarctic, where they will perform a shoggoth designed to awake the Deep One who sleeps beneath the ice. When Cthulhu rises, Dick Cheney will be sacrificed to appease the Great Tentacled One and New York City will be demolished by the subsequent epic battle between the demon lizard-bitch and the Elder God.

Why vote for the lesser of two evils? Cthulhu 2004!

I was just thinking, who is the greatest guest host in the history of SNL? Not in terms of who did the best overall show, or which show you would have liked to have been present in the audience – Pamela Anderson, obviously – or who had the best intro bit, but who produced the most memorable quotes that you and your friends still drop on each other today?

I’d say it has to be Christopher Walken. You’ve got “more cowbell”, you’ve got “a degree from the University of Bei-jing”, you’ve got “I got a passport to Florida”, you’ve got “no, don’ go”, and to top it all off, you’ve got the phrase that spawned the worst published poem in history, “my little wide-eyed, white-tailed doe”. I can’t even remember most of them from the census-taker, I was laughing so hard.

You realize that I’m snorting and chuckling helplessly as I’m writing this, of course.

The Gargler gargles:

Vox.. you’re pretty fond of a little saying. “Tell it to the whigs!”. Ah what a battle cry! It summons up images of the possibility of rebellion within the politcal world… Sadly its inaccurate. The Whigs were never anything to be feared, and calling them well organized is simply ignoring history. We’re talking about a party that lasted an astounding 16 years, from 1834 to 1850. That’s the official story anyway, though the initial party coalition actually started in 1824, when some boys got together to try to whip Andy Jackson (Tennessean by the way). I suppose we could give them credit for 26 years then huh?

Nate would have somewhat of a point, if one were so myopic as to reduce world history to American history. I use “tell it to the Whigs” to illustrate the shallow thinking involved in assuming that a two-party system is eternal. First, the very fact of the American Whigs relatively brief political lifespan supports my point, second, the British Whig party was one of the first modern political parties and was part of a now-defunct two-party system with the Tories, or Conservative Party. The remnants of was variously known as the Country, Whig and Liberal Party now survive in the Liberal Democratic Party, but the Liberals were replaced as the primary British opposition by Labour around 1925.

The former chairwoman of the New York State Democratic Party on Wednesday called it “a total outrage” and “very stupid” that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has not been offered a prominent speaking role at the Democratic National Convention.

“It’s a slap in the face, not personally for Hillary Clinton, but for every woman in the Democratic Party and every woman in America,” said Judith Hope, a major party fund-raiser.

I could almost kiss John Kerry. Sure, he’s a loathesome, treasonous socialist creep, but no one who uses his moment in the sun to publicly bitchslap the Lizard Queen can be ALL bad.

And then there’s Angry Shaq. He needed this to happen. Honestly, he hasn’t given a crap about basketball for four years, since they won that second title and crushed the Sixers. After that happened, Satiated Shaq stuck around and kept playing, knowing that he could accomplish more on cruise control than just about every other player in the league. I don’t think it was a malicious act on his part. It was his version of MJ scurrying off to hit baseballs for two years.

Maybe we were insulted as basketball fans, but this was also the one quality that made him stand out over everyone else: This is a good guy. He takes care of his family, looks out for his friends, never stops having fun. He dabbles in movies, music, TV, even comedy roasts. He figured out how to handle the media early in his career — mumble through your answers, use intimidation when necessary; and eventually, everyone will leave you alone. I think he’s one of the smartest athletes in any sport. Seriously. Who leads a better life than him? What team athlete makes more money than him? Who balanced the characters of Public Superstar and Private Superstar more brilliantly than him? We don’t know ANYTHING about him, yet we feel like we do. And he likes it that way.

Which made it especially ironic that, for years and years, Shaq wore the “black hat” and Kobe wore the “white hat” on the Lakers. To the general public, Shaq was just a big mumbling monster, a physical freak with no discernible basketball skills, someone who couldn’t even make a damn free throw. Casual fans (and Lakers fans, which is basically the same thing) gravitated towards Kobe, partly because he reminded them of a young MJ, partly because he seemed like such a decent guy. Nobody realized that Kobe was an impossible prima donna behind the scenes, a brooding loner consumed with basketball and nothing else, someone lacking the requisite social skills to get along with teammates on even a rudimentary level.

I’m no NBA fan, but I always enjoy the Sports Guy’s analyses, as he throws himself into them with complete abandon. Unlike almost every other sportswriter in the business, he has no fear of stating his opinion, even when it leads an entire city to regard him with utter loathing. But I didn’t like Houston either.

And besides, how can you not love a column called “More Cowbell”. Because I got a fever, and the only thing that’s going to cure it is, more cow-bell. It seems ESPN is more flexible than WND – I wanted to call my column “Defending the Mike” but that got ixnayed. I suppose “More Cowbell” is marginally less obscure, but still….

The preacher placed before a World Muslim Brotherhood conference a working document drawn up at “a secret meeting of the movement” somewhere in the Middle East, calling on all brethren in the Muslim world to rise up and foil Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and, most of all, to combat any potential Egyptian or Jordanian role in its implementation. The Brotherhood was exhorted to resort “to all means available.”

Sen. John McCain of Arizona broke forcefully with President Bush and the Senate GOP leadership Tuesday evening over the issue, taking to the Senate floor to call such a constitutional amendment unnecessary — and un-Republican.

“The constitutional amendment we’re debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans,” McCain said. “It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them.”

38: States with explicit Defense of Marriage acts

05: States with similar statutory language

43: Total States with Defense of Marriage laws

50: Number of States in the Union

Apparently Sen. John McCain is operating under the assumption that 14 percent is somehow equivalent to “most”. Edwards may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but McCain’s mathematical genius may be why Kerry elected to pass on him as a running mate.

And we let this joker vote on the budget?

Jayuf asks:

What do you believe is the one significant flaw with the LP platform? Is it their stance on abortion or their stance on immigration?

The LP position on immigration will keep me from voting for Badnarik. It does not seem rational in this day and age to grant amnesty to illegals who have originated from states supporting militant Islam.

Good question. I’d actually been giving this matter a little thought of late, and I believe that it is the abortion plank that is the significant flaw. (I should mention that amnesty is a position of the Bush administration, not the Libertarian Party, wherein there is no such thing as an “illegal” immigrant.) Immigration is problematic, but very few people will refuse to vote Libertarian on the issue, as neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are the least bit interested in closing the border either.

The Libertarian Party’s position on abortion is a priori reasonable. An individual has a property right to their own body, ergo, the government has no ability to violate that property right. This was a logically sound conclusion in 1971, when it was first articulated. The problem is that it is now scientifically outdated. The unborn child is now proven to have different DNA, therefore, it is a distinct individual with its own property right to its own body as well as a concomitant right to life. The fact that it cannot survive on its own is irrelevant; neither can a newborn and as birthing technology improves, even the mother is becoming increasingly unnecessary as a host.

For example, when a woman has her eggs fertilized in-vitro and implanted in another woman, does the surrogate mother have a right to abort the unborn child? It’s her body, after all. The fundamental wrongness of the property right claim to the unborn child becomes all the more obvious when one considers the question of an artificial machine womb. If the child is no longer even in the woman’s body, how can she possibly claim the right to kill it without consequence?

More on this and immigration later.

Okay, this made me laugh. I came across it courtesy of le petit Dark Window. I’m not sure which I appreciated most, the innovative group protest – wouldn’t want to participate in that one myself – the president’s response, or the guy’s reaction to the response. It’s all good, except for the reminder that free speech and protest are no longer legal in the USA. And that goes doubly for the last sixty days before an election.

At the front of this second bus was The W himself, waving cheerily at his supporters on the other side of the highway. Adam, Brendan, and I rose our banner (the More Trees, Less Bush one) and he turned to wave to our side of the road. His smile faded, and he raised his left arm in our direction. And then, George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States of America, extended his middle finger.

Read that last sentence again. I got flipped off by George W. Bush.

A ponytailed man standing next to us confirmed the event, saying, “I do believe the President of the U.S. just gave you boys the finger.” We laughed probably for the next half hour, and promptly told everyone we knew.

I love the American spirit, especially when it resides in those with acorn-sized intellects.