So we get another lame dickhead like the shoe bomber, and, as I feared when I first saw the report yesterday, countless air travelers now have more useless, meaningless hassles when traveling because the government and airlines desperately want to look like they are doing something, when actually these “safety” measures do exactly squat.

The New York Times is reporting that now, for the last hour of the flight, passengers will not be allowed to move around the cabin, and will not be allowed to have anything on their laps during descent. Really? What difference will that make? Honestly, it’s as if one bozo in his car in Cleveland runs a stop sign, and as a result, every driver in the United States is forced to slow down to 5 mph 100 feet before every single stop sign in the country. Useless, meaningless, aggravating–which was probably exactly what the secondary point of the exercise was–that if they could not blow up the plane, at least they could make as many people miserable in the heavy travel season as possible.

That’s the most frustrating thing here–the stupid security stuff they will now require just so the government and airlines can make a show of things is a nice consolation gift for whomever did this.

How about this: hire more frakking people at the X-ray and baggage check so people don’t carry frakking bombs onto the aircraft. I would think that something along those lines might be a little more productive. But that would also be a little more telling of where the responsibility for yesterday’s fiasco lies.

And Sachi and I fly back home the day after tomorrow. Swell.