TSA admits it steals your stuff.

We dropped someone off at the airport on Friday, and in so doing I saw this verbiage on a TSA sign at the check-in counter:

TSA recommends you not pack the following items in your checked baggage:

• Electronics (including laptops)
• Fragile items
• Jewelry
• Cash

Thank You

Hm.  That's for checked bags now.  Isn't that interesting.  None of that was a problem before TSA stopped on by to protect us from "an endless series of hobgoblins", and it certainly wasn't stated as a reason for TSA's "important mission" in the first place, so what gives here?  I can only imagine two possible rationales:

1. Checked bags are now routinely used for pickup kickball games.
2. These items are now routinely stolen from checked bags.

Seriously, did I miss anything there?  (Perhaps they just micro-EMP every bag to make sure that nothing in it works?  Well, even then that doesn't exactly change the point, and besides, only possibility #2 would cover all the recommended items...)

But even then, what really stuck out at me was the "this was not a problem before TSA" angle.  Yes, I understand that correlation does not imply causation, but since official science seems to forget that rule every time it wants to make a self-aggrandizing point (always at our expense), perhaps a little petty speciousness can be forgiven.

I've written many times before about how the state tends to produce the very problems that it then empowers itself to solve (and which it is in no way incented to "work itself out of a job" by actually solving), but this would seem to be a pretty literal example, wouldn't it?  No problem before TSA...TSA arrives (trumpet fanfare and release of doves)...Now, there are suddenly problems.  Must be "the bad guys" doing it.  (Oh, and you can't criticize the TSA, either--almost forgot about that point--because that would mean that you're an "antigovernment extremist".)

Anyway, if TSA were a private entity or person, would their tacit admission in this "recommendation", given the events of history, not suffice as evidence to be used against them in a prosecution?

Oh yeah, right.  How stupid of me.  The government prosecutes.  It cannot be prosecuted.

My bad.

(It's always my bad, get it?  Even if they come in and Jose me with a SWAT team, and later can't find a thing to pin me--well, my corpse--with.  It's still my bad.)