Among my many unpopular and unpatriotic opinions is that, in most of the ways that matter, the terrorists responsible for the September 11th attacks won. With less than half an hour’s work, and at a cost (to them) of less than twenty lives, Osama bin Laden’s mob of maniacs changed the course of history and cost the economies of the West an unimaginable amount.

As the holiday season kicks off, Europe’s busiest airports are melting down

As the holiday season kicks off, Europe’s busiest airports are melting down

I’m not just talking about the terrible wars that followed – though the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz costed the Iraq invasion alone at $3 trillion back when that was considered a lot of money – but the death-of-a-thousand-cuts effects of us all spending the next twenty-five years frightened that jihadi lunatics would try to smuggle box-cutters or explosive underpants onto commercial air flights.

How many minutes did the whole shoes-off, belts-off, laptops-out, full-body-scan routine add to an individual’s journey through an airport? Half an hour seems a very conservative estimate. Multiply that by the five billion or so people who (Google tells me) take a commercial flight every year. Multiply that by 25. The result is a bit........

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