The media, both corporate and honest, is alive with headlines that the “TSA has completely removed revealing X-ray scanners from America’s airports.” Technically, that’s true: the pervs at this demonic agency have complied with an order from their accomplices in Hell-sorry, Congress requiring them either to install “privacy software” on their porno-scanners or to remove the machines. But there have always been two technologies that peered through our clothing, one dosing passengers with carcinogenic X-rays and the other relying on millimeter waves. (The latter’s effect on human flesh isn’t clearly understood; it may be as dangerous as radiation, if not more so. Yet it still infests your local concourse.) The contraptions that irradiate you won’t accept said “privacy software.” So the TSA has exiled them while claiming that the millimeter-wave scanners do accept it and have accordingly been “retrofitted.” They now supposedly show a “generic” human form rather than victims’ actual bodies.

Unfortunately, we only have the TSA’s word on this. And I for one never believe serial liars.

So the fact that the TSA has bowed to Congress and removed one type of porno-scanner while doubling down on the other is newsworthy only because the bureaucracy finally obeyed the idiots who birthed it. (TSA’s contempt for Congress is awesome and legendary. And the criminals there know it: the jaw-droppingly stupid Bennie Thompson [D-Miss] prated, “I applaud TSA for becoming compliant with the law mandating that all AIT machines used by TSA are equipped with up-to-date privacy filters.” When was the last time a cop stopped you for speeding, then praised you for “becoming compliant with the law” because you slowed down when you saw his flashing lights in your rearview? Yet our elected dimwits actually and cravenly laud the TSA for finally heeding their commands.)

Of course, you’d never guess any of this from the media’s coverage — and that’s the real story here: the reporting on this non-news.

Hilariously, the press has abandoned its previous pretense, copped from the TSA, that these porno-scanners showed only innocent little images. For example, in 2009, the New York Daily News babbled, “The technology has evolved to reduce the clarity of identifying details … The systems blur faces, or they produce body images that look like chalk outlines.” And yet, that same newspaper now describes those “chalk outlines” as “graphic images of passengers’ bodies” “produced” by “X-rated X-ray scanners… The technology … creat[es] a detailed image based on each individual’s body shape. The scanners were so powerful that officers could see through clothing and observe all of the curves on each individual’s body, effectively creating a nude image.” Shameless, isn’t it? Nor is the Daily News the only culprit here. Virtually every outlet for the corporate media that is now trumpeting the scanners’ pornographic images soothingly spoke of “chalk outlines” and “blurred faces” until recently; the Daily News is one of the few whose archives extend far enough into the past to prove this point, however.

We also read for years that only the odd wacko here and there objected to these “outlines”; now, suddenly, “travelers” in general are “breath[ing] a sigh of relief” at the demise of “invasive X-rays.” Ya think?

To fathom Leviathan’s utter depravity, let us marvel at the mentality that came up with so lascivious a “solution” as gate-rape and porno-scanners to the non-existent “problem” of terrorists on planes in the first place. Retail stores have far more shoplifters than aviation has bombers, yet they don’t station goons at the exit to X-ray and grope customers lest inventory walk away. Imagine an entrepreneur’s musing, “You know, I think we’ll do a patdown all the way up the leg, to the upper groin. We’ll move our hands on top of and between a woman’s breasts — it’ll be a necessary part of the patdown. That oughta stop the theft!” Not to mention all business.

“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government…”

The Best of Becky Akers