Patrick Smith, a commercial airline pilot wrote this piece for the NY Times:

The Airport Security Follies

Six years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd. The changes put in place following the September 11th catastrophe have been drastic, and largely of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational, wasteful and pointless.

No matter that a deadly sharp can be fashioned from virtually anything found on a plane, be it a broken wine bottle or a snapped-off length of plastic, we are content wasting billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened, asked to queue for absurd lengths of time, subject to embarrassing pat-downs and loss of our belongings.

The folly is much the same with respect to the liquids and gels restrictions, introduced two summers ago following the breakup of a London-based cabal that was planning to blow up jetliners using liquid explosives. Allegations surrounding the conspiracy were revealed to substantially embellished. In an August, 2006 article in the New York Times, British officials admitted that public statements made following the arrests were overcooked, inaccurate and “unfortunate.” The plot’s leaders were still in the process of recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers. They lacked passports, airline tickets and, most critical of all, they had been unsuccessful in actually producing liquid explosives. Investigators later described the widely parroted report that up to ten U.S airliners had been targeted as “speculative” and “exaggerated.”

Down with airport security!!

It's always, since Sept 2001, been a joke. There was a wonderful story back in 2003 of a journalist traveling back to the UK via Logan airport where he was forced to wait hours just to check in then hours to get through pretty stringent security barriers, metal detectors, pat downs, thorough bag searches  and all the rest, when he got to his airline's dedicated departure lounge right by the gate 5 and half hours after arriving at the airport, he was dying for a cigarette, so asked if there was a smoking area...the airport security lady he asked pointed him toward a double door and said "Just go out there honey...everyone else does" He did and passed through the doors to a small hallway and thence through another pair of doors with one-way panic bars on them and....he was back out on a busy public street where he could have let in a platoon of terrorists.

HAHAHAHAHA

Genius!
 

That's what you get for action without thought

The whole setup is there to create an illusion of security, and preclude anyone from suggesting that not enough is being done (would anyone call for more security checksafter seeing what the things that are already in place are like?)

My english teacher was stopped at a Russian border for carrying what was actually powdered milk.

Do you know how much milk fetches on the black market in Moscow?

Yes I am in fact a Russian Milk expert in disguise.

It's not FOR safety, it's to make people FEEL safer.

"Well I don't mind really, as long as those Muslims from Iraq with Sadaam Hussein don't get in this country of my forefathers." Zipp MacDonald.
 

I don't feel safer.... I feel more harassed....

I can get dangerous when harassed
 

No one wants to see Dek angry.

Eggactly....

Yeh, we don't want her to get all big and green and ugly with a bad temper

Leastways, not more than once a month.
 

GRRRRRRRR

Oh noes!  it is Hulk Dek!

WTF is going on here?^^^^

What's confusing you JR?

The big question is why common sense appears to becoming so ........Uncommon!

And as far as carrying powdered milk - just imagine if it turned out to be powdered water!!
 

Common sense is so boring.