One jackass sticks an M80s worth of low-grade explosives in his underpants, and everybody loses their shit about the horrible threat of terrorism.  Then the TSA ups the overreaction ante by enacting rules so infuriatingly pointless that even the recently exhumed and reanimated corpse of Niccolò Machiavelli suggested “They may be taking this whole ineffective bureaucracy thing a bit too far”.

Thankfully, someone who isn’t a complete fuckwit decided to crunch the numbers and see what sort of threat terrorism actually poses.  The answer is, of course, almost none.  Your chances of dying in a terrorist attack are so infinitesimally small, you would need to fly to the moon and back twenty four thousand times before you were likely to see someone blow up their own crotch in the name of Allah.

So here we are, pissing away half a trillion dollars a year on “homeland security”, while the actual risk posed by terrorism practically zero.  Meanwhile, when the first guy in 8 years actually does try to sneak a bomb onto a plane, none of the security theater at the airports manages to catch him until after he detonates his skivvies.

Man, those two unnecessary wars may have been expensive, and we may have lost the good faith of the world by torturing and killing people for no particular reason, and sure, we’ve given up most of our constitutional rights for the illusion of security, but at least the system works, right?

For fuck’s sake.

(infographic via Gizmodo, but you can’t blame them for the rant)