DHS confiscates and destroys musical instruments... Customs agents took a look at the priceless, hand-made flutes in Boujemaa Razgui's luggage, decided that they were, in fact, illicit “agricultural items” – and destroyed them. Never mind the fact that they were obviously musical instruments, never mind the fact that he had carried them in his luggage to the U.S. many times before –
this time, they were dangerous and illicit and
must be destroyed! With this logic, everything made of wood or other plant material is fair game for the DHS. Wooden flute? To the fire with it! Hockey stick? Illicit agricultural item – burn it! Antique English table? Obviously dangerous – smash it!
Good grief...
In the course of researching this post, I came across something even more frightening than flute destruction. Take a good look at that organizational chart at left. It shows just the
top two levels of the Department of Homeland Security's organization,
right off their web site. That org chart qualifies as “big government” all by itself – but each of those boxes represents up to tens of thousands of bureaucratic tools. If
this doesn't terrify you, then you must be a leftist. Gazing at this, I feel the doom coming on...
I'm sure it is soooo much more efficient than the previous entities.... How much bigger have all the agencies grown? Anyway, it freaks me out to see the blue homeland "Police" cars going up the 15. Interesting how used to the presence of a federal police force we can get. Or desensitized to checkpoints for that matter. I still remember when the first DUI checkpoints were started and all the arguments about making us safer, and that they somehow didn't violate the constitution because they were random, or not random, or something like that. I knew at the time they would grow and even though they aren't very effective at all they expanded to registration and seat belts and anything else they can think of. And to think that when I was in the Marines in the 80s, we used to mock the KGB and the lack of freedom in the soviet union.
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