Stand back... I've got fingernail clippers, and I'm taking this plane to Cuba!

Common sense isn't common anymore.  We are trained monkeys, following senseless pronouncements that improve nothing.  Start with the airport.  For some reason, my TSA Pre-check status didn't make it onto my ticket.  So I was in the line that required me to take off my shoes and stand with arms over my head to be scanned.  I put every [...] thing in bins, of course.  My iPad in a separate one, of course.  I was behind another elderly lady, this one with some major physical issues.  The TSA agents took her sturdy, three-footed cane and handed her a slim wooden one to get through the scanner ordeal.  It was barely enough to keep her upright.  Once she was through the scanner, they pulled her aside, and I watched as she was patted down, head to toe, for about five minutes.  This lady was so clearly not a terrorist that a caveman could have told you so.  Old, overweight, barely able to walk.  Ankles so swollen that it looked painful.  I got to watch her ordeal because they patted me down, too, all because I'd forgotten I had a pill in my pants pocket that I was meant to take on the flight.  I was made to take it out, show it to the agent, and then they patted me down, focusing on that darned now-empty pocket.  Maybe it was a terrorist weapon?

At United Airlines, racism and sexism are their copilots.  United Airlines has apparently conquered such mundane issues as late flights, canceled flights, uncomfortable flights, rude counterworkers, lost baggage, multi-hour delays in answering their phones, that plane urchin who keeps kicking the back of your seat and the ample passengers who've sandwiched you into the middle seat and the moron in front of you who's thrown his seat back into your knees at about Mach 2. [...] And so United has announced they're joining the woke wars.  They boast that they will reserve 50% of their new pilot slots for People of Color and women.  The wokerati applaud.  This presents a question.  Why doesn't United already have at least 50% POC and women pilots?  Instead, United's pilot corps are about 13% POC and 6% women.  There are two potential answers to this question, and only two.

Man Kicked Off Plane For Not Wearing Mask In Between Bites of Food.  A man was kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight because he didn't wear his mask in between eating bites of food, which according to the TSA is now a federal mandate. [...] The most stunning aspect of this story is not that flight attendants were pedantically enforcing a stupid rule made up on a whim, but that this ludicrous practice is now a federal mandate.  After [Avi] Mandel emailed Southwest, he was told that it is now official TSA policy.  "According to the Transportation Security Administration, passengers may remove masks while eating, drinking or taking medications but must put them on between bites and sips — and cannot leave them off for "prolonged periods," reports the New York Post.

Baltimore County Man Says He Was Kicked Off Southwest Flight For Not Wearing Mask While Eating Twizzlers.  A Baltimore County man said he was kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight for not wearing a mask while eating Twizzlers and wants to share his story in the hopes things will change.  Avi Mandel said he was a frequent Southwest flyer until his flight Sunday out of Thurgood Marshall Baltimore Washington International Airport.  He showed WJZ a selfie video he made during the flight, in which he said, "I, Avi Mandel, just got kicked off a plane because I wasn't wearing my mask in between bites while I was eating."  "That's so sad.  That's so wrong," Mandel told WJZ.  "It was absurd.  The way I was treated was absolutely absurd.  It was crazy and it wasn't fair."

Masks are a Joke, But No One is Laughing.  [Scroll down]  As I approached the door to board the jet with several passengers ahead of me, my eyes met the fierce, darkly penciled eyebrows of a flight attendant overseeing the boarding.  Of course, I couldn't see the rest of her face due to her face mask.  For a fraction of a second, I thought she was going to give me a welcoming smile, but she yells over the people in front of me and points at my face, and says "Your mask, pull it up all the way, cover your nose completely!"  Apparently, unbeknownst to me, my mask was not sufficiently secured to my face, even though it felt okay to me.  I made sure not to let that happen again!  Next, throughout the flight, in two languages, we were berated and chided about the importance and necessity of thoroughly covering our faces, or risk being ejected and suffering the consequences.  We were told how to eat and drink while only momentarily lowering our masks.  Meanwhile, the rather large passenger in the seat next to me was invading into my seat space, even using my foot space, but as long as I have my face muzzled, when not eating or drinking, all is well in COVID world.  It is a complete joke, but no one is laughing.

Southwest Airlines Put Woman On No Fly List, Strands Her At Airport For Showing A Medical Exemption Note For A Mask.  This woman was stranded at an airport and not allowed to fly home to her 3 young children for showing the airline her medical exemption, signed by a doctor, for not having to wear a mask.  The airline told her she still can't board the flight and when she argued, they put her on a no-fly list, even when she said she would wear the mask even with the exemption.  Southwest Airlines has perhaps the nastiest reputation when it comes to mask rules, even kicking off an autistic 3-year old from a flight last year because he wouldn't wear a mask.  [Video clip]

Fixing Racism by Being Racist?  United Airlines, joining the trio of woke airlines, is not protesting Georgia election law, but their own hiring practices.  Aside from wanting to fly the friendly skies, United passengers want competent pilots, those who can safely land a plane when one of two engines explodes as occurred recently on a flight out of Denver.  Or Captain Sully's emergency landing on the Hudson River.  United's new woke goal states, "Our flight deck should reflect the diverse group of people on board our planes every day."  Contrast this to Princeton University, which doesn't want their student body to reflect the American population.  Why not simply reflect the best suited for the cockpit or classroom?  United has its own plan to fix racism, structural, institutional, or whatever, "That's why we plan for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color."  United passengers will be comforted knowing that the pilots they are entrusting their lives to were selected based on gender or skin color, rather than competence.  As Tucker Carlson observed, "Safety is no longer that airline's top concern — identity politics is."

United Airlines goes there: vows affirmative action for pilots.  Airline pilot is one of those jobs, along with brain surgeon, that used to be used as an example of the type of position for which affirmative action was obviously unsuited.  Who wants to board an aircraft or go under the knife with someone in charge chosen for factors other than ability?  Lives are at stake, after all.  Anything less than the absolute best should be unacceptable.  Yet, in this age of identity politics madness, United Airlines proudly proclaimed its intention to choose half of its pilot training recruits based on skin color and X-chromosomes:  [Tweet]  Uh, no.  I won't fly on an airline that prioritizes anything over pure ability when it comes to pilots.

Pilot ability no longer matters to United Airlines, but skin color does.  For three months, we've been trying to guess:  What is this "equity" that is now our country's main reason for existing?  We know it's not the same as "equality," or even closely related.  In the name of equity, for example, the Biden administration supports open discrimination against Asian college applicants.  They're Asian, therefore they can't get in to school.  It's that simple.  We used to call that kind of behavior "racism" and had laws against it.  Now we call it "equity" and we have laws demanding it.  It turns out that racism and equity are pretty much the same thing.  Who knew?  Here's the latest illustration of the principle, and it comes not from the Biden Administration, but from United Airlines.  United used to be a conventional commercial air carrier.  It flew airplanes from place to place, most of the time uneventfully.  That was the old United Airlines.  The new United is very different.  It's a combination of a hyper-aggressive corporate HR department, and a left-wing political action committee.  The new United is big on moral pronouncements and mandatory social engineering.  United has embraced equity.

Passengers banned over mask mandate claim Spirit is full of hot air.  Spirit Airlines banned a family for violating its mask policy weeks after the plane touched down — but the travelers claim they were masked up, and had no complaints from the crew during the flight.  The budget airline sent two letters via certified mail to the family of seven, weeks after they flew from New York to Florida, according to Yeshiva World News.  A family member told the outlet that both parents and their five children wore masks during the non-eventful January journey, and sat in their assigned seats the entire time without a word from anyone about the pandemic protocol.

Spirit Airlines Boots Family For 2 Year Old Not Wearing Mask While Eating, Deplanes All Passengers.  Spirit Airlines is defending its decision to deplane a flight over what it said was one family's mask violations.  The Monday [4/5/2021] fight from Orlando, Florida, to Atlantic City, New Jersey, was ultimately delayed more than two hours after passengers were deplaned and the family was allowed to reboard the flight.  A video from a portion of the incident was posted on Twitter, but the full event remains unclear.  In one widely shared video, a father, a pregnant mother, and their two children are seen being told to exit the plane.  In the video, the mother and father are both wearing masks, though the father is seen removing his at some points to speak with the flight attendant.  One of their children is sitting on the mother's lap, not wearing a mask, and eating.  Spirit told Insider it directed the family to exit because the parents were not complying with mask mandates, which the company said was not captured on video and came before the widely shared video was filmed.

This is Out Of Control!  Family is being thrown off a Spirit Airlines flight from Orlando to NY because their two-year-old child is eating without a mask.  [Video clip]

For once, in an airline mask story, the right person got punished.  Yet another story about airlines behaving badly broke on Monday.  This time, a family of four got kicked off a flight because the two-year-old toddler was eating.  However, unlike all the other grotesque examples of panicked mask fascism, this story has a happy ending: the flight attendant who caused the ruckus was the one who ultimately got kicked off the plane, and the family was allowed back on.  As a preliminary matter, the evidence is very strong that little children neither get nor give COVID from or to those around them.  And as a factual matter, putting masks on a child who has just turned two is cruel.  The family's situation was also difficult:  not only did they have a baby who had just turned two, but they also had a special needs child who has seizures, and the mother is seven months pregnant.

Disturbing incident on a Frontier flight as staff told a Hasidic couple to get off because their 18 month old had no mask.  An Orthodox Jewish person spoke up in defense of the Hasidic couple.  Then the whole family siblings and in-laws started leaving the plane at which point the [airline] ordered everyone off of the airplane.

Security Theater Redux.  After the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government employed various counterterrorism measures in an atmosphere of panic.  Some made sense and stood the test of time, such as vetting airline passengers or banning knives on planes.  Others were abandoned and memory-holed as ineffective and wasteful, like the Iraq Campaign.  The Right focused on the failure of security efforts to distinguish loyal and law-abiding Americans from high-risk groups.  The spectacle of children and grandmas being subjected to humiliating pat-downs at airports stands out as particularly galling.  The Left and the libertarians were wary of the expansive authority of intelligence agencies and the domestic use of the military.  In one instance, a tank was parked outside of Miami International Airport, as if al Qaeda would unleash an armored attack.  Critics labeled such dramatic and mostly symbolic efforts for what they were:  security theater.

United Airlines Gives FREE Flights To Illegal Aliens Who Crossed US Border.  If you want to travel from Houston, TX to Phoenix, AZ on United Airlines tomorrow, you will have to purchase a ticket that will likely cost over $1,000.  If you're an illegal alien, however, you can fly for free.

Woman fined $500 for saving free Delta Air Lines snack.  A Colorado woman is facing a $500 fine from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol for saving a free apple she received as a snack from Delta Air Lines on her way back to the United States from Pairs, France.  Crystal Tadlock told Fox 31 Denver, toward the end of her flight from Paris, flight attendants passed out apples in plastic bags as a snack.  Tadlock put the fruit in her carry-on to save for when she was hungry during the second leg of her trip. [...] When questioned about the snack, Tadlock explained she received the apple from the airline and asked if she could throw it away or eat it, Fox 31 reported.  The Customs agent allegedly told her no and fined her $500 for carrying the undeclared fruit.

Guard dogs without teeth:
Guidance to unarmed aviation police: Run and hide.  Hundreds of police officers at one of the country's busiest airports say in the case of an active shooter, they are instructed to run and hide.  That's because these officers are unique among the nation's major airports:  They don't carry guns.  Their badges, uniforms and vehicles all say "police."  And they are certified police officers in the state of Illinois.  But these nearly 300 aviation police officers, also known as aviation security officers, are not allowed to carry guns at Chicago's O'Hare and Midway airports.

The Transportation Security Administration, which administers the list, instructs airlines not to deny boarding to children under 12 -- or select them for extra security checks -- even if their names match those on a list.