Flutterby™! : Airport security

Reading Crypto-Gram is always good, but there's a note about the two classes of weapons when it comes to air travel that's worth a read:

Contrast that with a terrorist plot that requires a 12-ounce bottle of liquid. There's no evidence that the London liquid bombers actually had a workable plot, but assume for the moment they did. If some copycat terrorists try to bring their liquid bomb through airport security and the screeners catch them -- like they caught me with my bottle of pasta sauce -- the terrorists can simply try again. They can try again and again. They can keep trying until they succeed. Because there are no consequences to trying and failing, the screeners have to be 100 percent effective. Even if they slip up one in a hundred times, the plot can succeed.

I don't want to admit to anything here, but... uh... I know how to get a knife in to the passenger compartment of a commercial airline flight, reliably, with essentially zero down side to a failed attempt. The prohibition against blades, at least of a relatively small form factor, doesn't work. What does work is cockpit doors, but if we were serious about actually being secure, rather than just making a pretense, we'd stop confiscating nail clippers and pocket knives, 'cause the only thing that's doing is getting people used to law enforcement profiting from confiscations, and helping out the pocket knife and nail clipper industry. In the same way that vandals breaking windows help the economy.