This generally pisses me off when going through the usual nonsense fear inducing paranoid crap at the airport: "Take Your Laptop Out Of Its Case".

WHY??!?!?!?!?

What on this little green planet of clocks makes a laptop computer any more worthy of special examination than my video camera? I regularly travel with the following items for carry-on: a laptop bag stuffed to the brim with a laptop, D/A converters, extra hard drives, powersupplies, 1394 and USB cables and gobs of other delicate crap. The other bag is stuffed to the brim with a largish video camera, batteries, tapes, power supplies, lenses, etc.

EVERYTIME I go to an airport the knuckle-dragging obsequious dupe of the conspiracy wearing a TSA badge tells me to take the laptop out.

WHY??!?!?!!?!?

Because the battery might be made of plastic explosives? Why not the Camera- heck the camera's bigger than the damn laptop! Each of my batteries could be hand grenades! But no - they just run it through the machine, no questions asked. But the laptop? OooOOOooo - it's a COMPUTER!!!! It CAN THINK (or at least think better than the crypto-fascist anti-intellectual jackass who came up with the policy of separating laptops from the rest...) so it has to be handled SEPARATELY! But my iPod, which is ALSO A COMPUTER, is NOT handled separately.

At first, I figured, OK - this nation of mediocretins is all freaked out and it'll blow over. But no - it hasn't. If anything, my "fellow americans" are more paranoid than ever, but then, an illegal unprovoked war against a sovereign nation and then murdering its men, women, and children and torturing prisoners DOES tend to engender a bit of irritation on a GLOBAL BASIS, so perhaps Americans are feeling as guilty (as they should) as they are afraid (which they shouldn't), especially as the corporate media gives them a steady diet of fear. And I figure, having to STILL PULL laptops out of their carefully set up cases is just another example of the reigning idiocy we call the contemporary American Imperial Political Consciousness.

But frankly I'm sick of it. All they do is run the damn computer under the same xray device as the video cameram, and the only thing that's a problem is I have the then PUT MY DAMN COMPUTER BAG back together, which isn't necessarily easy or straight-forward. but the tinhorn TSA doesn't care. Why should they?

So, I ask this august forum, my (obviously irritated) question:

WHY LAPTOPS???

I think it's bulls***.

Leo Studebaker