Travelogue: Airports and Stuff

Travel challenges your assumptions about many things. People who have traveled a lot tend not to hold provincial ideas, for example. It’s hard to think your town is unique once you see that every other town is pretty much the same. It also gives you time to think and maybe look at things with a fresh set of eyes.

For instance, I was in the airports on Friday and I now think the greatest American alive is the guy who invented yoga pants. My goodness. I looked him up. His name is Ryan McLatchy and he is credited with the spread of this wonderful trend. May his descendants multiply and become many nations! It makes being a dirty old man so much better…

Anyway, the thing I was puzzling over was why terrorists target airlines and airplanes. In America, the place with the maximum amount of government and the least amount of freedom is the airport. Everyone is watched and filmed everywhere except the bathrooms. Even there, they film you on the way in and out.

Security people are constantly watching for anything out of the ordinary. They now have K-9 units sniffing passengers in the terminal. They also have security people randomly stopping people and asking them questions. I was stopped at Logan by a nice young fellow who politely asked me a series of questions about my life. This is a tactic used by El Al Airlines and others.

It seems to me that there are much better targets than airports, but for some reason the Muslims keep attacking them.

I think part of it could simply be habit. Back when the Muslims started making trouble in the 60’s and 70’s, airports were great targets. You had lots of people in small areas and the chance to make it on the world news. There were loads of strangers at the airport, so being out of place was not a big deal. A  Muslim wandering around with bad intentions was just another guy at the airport.

Obviously, security was not what it is today. If you wanted to do something big, an airport job was a great choice. That’s no longer true. In fact, it is the exact opposite. I’m a smart guy and I can do the security math. Getting passed the initial security check is not that hard, but all the random checks is where you leave things to chance and those odds are not great.

The other motivation, I suspect, is stupidity. A thousand generations of cousin marriage have not done the Mohammedan any favors. The regions where we see the bulk of the Muslim terrorists have mean IQ’s in the mid-80’s, which is at the bottom of the human family. Throw in the cultural and religious issues and you have some uncommonly stupid terrorists….

Airports are why libertarians and central planners should never be trusted. Five minutes at an airport shows you that people do not naturally self-organize. Left to our own devices, the mob gets out of control until someone imposes some discipline. People like order and expect it, which is why no one ever complains about signs telling you where to stand or where to go.

That’s obvious. What’s not always obvious is the general awfulness of central planners. Our airports should look nothing like they do and they should not be giant money pits, but they are and there’s nothing to be done about it. In the 1950’s the people who knew best designed the American airport system and we have to live with it.

That said, it is a miracle that we can live with it and do so quite easily. The reason air travel works so well in Europe and America, despite the volume and inefficiency, is the smart fraction. A dozen times I saw some low level types struggle to make something work, only to have a smart person come over and help them through it. Our world may be a house of cards, but we have a lot of people good at keeping it going…

That’s the difference. In places like sub-Saharan Africa, the smart fraction is tiny. There’s not enough of them to supervise the rest so the result is the wacky keystone cops quality to their public services. Socialism works only where you have enough smart people around to make it work, despite the infinite number of internal contradictions.

Reading about Greece while I was waiting around for planes, I kept hoping to see someone note that Greece is the way it is because it is full of Greeks. German-style socialism is simply never going to work in Greece, even at gunpoint. Western-style democracy will never work in Arab lands. Central planning results in horror when applied to big man cultures in Africa.

In the future, something historians and possibly archeologists will puzzle over is the strange mania for homogeneity that has swept western elites.  The demand that everything and everyone be the same in all places, in the name of diversity no less, is as close to mass insanity as you get and still remain functioning as societies.

Greece has no place in the Euro. For that matter, the Spanish and Italians have no place in the Frankish economic system either. Liberal trade, open borders with the rest of Europe and economic help when necessary should be enough to keep everyone happy. Instead, the European keep making war on their own history by demanding everyone be European….

Gluten Free Vegan Magic

This goes up as I am cooking for a big party. I will be making three to four deep fried turkeys, the corresponding amount of side dishes, as well as appetizers and specialty items. I have been doing this on Super Bowl Sunday for decades now. There is a long and not terribly interesting origin story behind this tradition, but that is not important. The point is I have cooked for a large number of people many times over many years, and I have noticed some things about people and food that I thought would make a good post.

We live in the golden age of man when it comes to food. We have more than enough to feed all of us, even the poorest of us. We also have every variety of food imaginable. In addition to turkey, I will make an authentic Mexican dish with material from Mexico. I will have sides and appetizers with ingredients from around the world. Despite this bounty, everyone is now afraid of their food. Food allergies, moralizing and whack-a-doodle dietary fads has everyone looking at their plate with suspicion.

Back when this annual event started, it was easy to cook a bunch of food for a bunch of people. Besides the turkey and sides, we had beer and some store bought deserts. Then vegetarians started to show up followed by vegans. That meant adding dishes for people who do not eat meat and those who do not oppress their food, whatever the hell that means. Of course, beer was no longer enough so a variety of wines and cocktails were added to the menu. All of which came with a lecture from the food cultist about the morality and science of their new thing.

Recently everyone has become gluten free, swearing they have an allergy to bread. All those years stuffing cakes and sandwiches into their trap was part of some plot by big food to make them tubby. Statistically, I now have 25,000 friends. The reason is simple math. Science tells me that 0.2% of humans have the genetic defect for gluten intolerance.  I know at least 50 people claiming to have Celiac Disease. Divide 50 by .002 and you get 25,000. That or I have a lot of delusional friends.

The truth, of course, is bread has a lot of calories that the human body can use quickly. That is why humans make bread. It is a great way to feed a lot of people. The trouble comes when we eat too much and exercise too little. Modern humans simply do not get enough physical exercise for the amount of food they consume. When you stop eating bread, magically you reduce your calories and begin to lose weight. You lose weight so you feel better and more confident. That makes gluten evil, at least in the mind of the maniac.

My read on this faux-allergy stuff is it is mostly women. The yogurt makers have figured out how to capitalize on their psycho-somatic stomach discomfort by claiming “probiotics” are the cure. Slap a new label on the old yogurt, double the price and you have a whole new revenue stream for the Acme Yogurt Company. I wish I had thought of it.

That said, men have their own food superstitions these days. I know guys who swallow dozens of supplements every day, believing they are the key to losing weight, staying young, getting a boner, living forever, etc. If the label says good things with words containing “-trophic” then they will shell out fifty bucks for a bottle. The more made up words the better. I read some of these bottles and start laughing as the neologisms are usually nonsense.

Modern times are all about the search for the magic pill or the magic food. This site I added to the blog roll has a bunch of stuff on supplements. Most supplements like daily vitamins are a waste of money at best. Some have some benefit, depending upon your lifestyle. A few have real science behind them like fish oil and vitamin D. But knowing what real science is and what is nonsense not so easy. The linked site appears to get that and take a critical view of the research offered up by the pill makers. But I have not spent enough time there to know for sure so do not take my word for it.

That is the thing that I find fascinating. It is not just that we do not know that much about human dietary needs. It is that we have so much bad science floating around. My guess is there is more money in bogus studies that help sell miracle drugs than in studies that debunk them. The result is a mountain of junk science, burying the good science, if it even exists.

Maybe that is the point of all of this. Science is boring, but believing nonsense is fun. Believing that your cheeseburger is out to get you is more interesting than knowing you cannot live on cheeseburgers without getting fat. If your choice of food can also be a way to elevate yourself on the moral scale, then eating becomes more than a bodily function. It is an act of piety.

My own view is less grandiose. I eat a minimum of carbohydrates because otherwise I would weigh 300 pounds. I stick with poultry, eggs, and some dairy. That way I can eat tasty things, like eggs and bacon, without worrying about my weight. On the other hand, life is for living so having pizza once in a while or a bag of chips (crisps) is not going to kill me. If it does, so be it. At least I had fun with the time I had. That is the point of life. Use the time you have and enjoy it as much as possible. Hell is for people who denied themselves pleasures thinking it was their ticket to heaven.

Enjoy the big game and may your balls never go flat.