On Human Liquid

[shipitfish]

It's going to be tough to relate this to poker, but I'm going to try. I usually don't make any political statements because this is supposed to be a poker journal. But, in this case, I can't help myself, so I will try to relate it to poker.

I am right now sitting at DFW airport, and I've just got a “special screening” because when asked if I had any liquids on my person, I answered: yes, my body is made of mostly of water. Since liquids aren't allowed on planes anymore, is it safe for me to board?. For this offense, I was sprayed with some sort of air device in a giant Borg-like alcove, during which process I could not see my bags (in other words, TSA forced me to violate their own rule that I should not let my bags out of my sight).

I have poker stories abound to tell from my trip to Dallas (and Oklahoma, as it turned out), and they'll be coming. But, I tell this story to point out something that relates to both life and poker. Too often, people simply accept things that are told them and don't question them. The status quo is considered reasonable only because it is the status quo, and for no other reasons. Are liquids really dangerous? Well, not really. There are dozens of ways for the suicide bomber to figure a way onto a plane with something dangerous. Indeed, W.D. recently missed his flight, and yet they did not remove his checked luggage from the flight he missed. Isn't that a huge safety rule we've always been told about? Shouldn't they have taken his bags off the plane if he wasn't on it?

The point is, TSA focuses on the wrong things to give safety in appearance only. I wonder if the other passengers who saw me screened because I was made of water felt safer. I asked the TSA employee if his machine determined I wasn't made of water, but he didn't answer. I suppose that I still am, as a ST:TNG script once put it, an ugly bag of mostly water.

There are no real ways to get true security, yet people believe somehow boarding a plane dehydrated because they took your water from you makes you safe. In poker, we see this sort of thing in the way people play — making the same mistakes over and over because they refuse to consider that they could do something a better way.

Even if we have to live in a anti-liquid, anti-privacy, anti-freedom regime that tells us we're safer if people act like sheep, at least we can benefit from the fact that the sheep, or rather, donkeys, at the tables will continue to give us money because they refuse to think for themselves. I suppose the $600 in my bag, that my hydrophobic TSA friend was kind enough not to steal, is nice evidence of that.