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….