I think the attempted underwear bomber was after Reid. Here&#x27;s the thing though: if you&#x27;re trying to set something on fire or storm the cockpit or some other actually undesired behavior, it&#x27;s not going to be some routine in an airline manual that stops you. It&#x27;s going to be all your seat neighbors who are going to physically stop you because you&#x27;re obviously a threat.<p>The real problem is these wildly unqualified citizen-Paul(ine)-Blarts who saw on an episode of Criminal Minds that looking up and left while writing non-ASCII characters is an indicator of terrorist intent. She essentially pulled the fire alarm on a bunch of people because she&#x27;s an idiot. What she did is functionally no different than calling in a false report about some random passenger on a plane that&#x27;s about to take off. She should have to pay a fine for all the time and resources she wasted with her little ruse (I&#x27;m sure she felt very clever when she conceived it).<p>Imagine a Richard Reid scenario where some guy beats the piss out of his seat neighbor because he thinks he&#x27;s trying to bomb the flight. If he&#x27;s right, he&#x27;s a hero (and he <i>should</i> be applauded for stopping a bombing). If he&#x27;s wrong and the guy was just tying his shoes, he gets charged with assault. This is a good thing, because we don&#x27;t want people seeing physical violence as a cost free option.<p>Being too dumb to tell the difference between an episode of 24 and your boring ass day is not a tolerated excuse to physically assault people. It shouldn&#x27;t be tolerated as a reason to call in false alarms either. I&#x27;m sick of stupid people being able to inflict massive amounts of inconvenience and even degrees of suffering with no consequences for being wrong.<p>* I realize that stupid is perhaps an imprecise and mean choice of words, but I can&#x27;t come up with a better explanation for adults who cannot appropriately assess the threat posed by a nerdy Italian guy writing in a notebook who doesn&#x27;t want to talk to them. I get that calling people stupid isn&#x27;t a way to make them smarter, and that it can have a negative developmental impact for younger kids to view things in a smart&#x2F;stupid fixed-talent paradigm, but we need to somehow bring back some of the cultural rejection for acting like a goddamn idiot. I don&#x27;t really care if she gets smarter (though that would be nice), I have lower aims. I want her to be afraid to be wrong because actions should have consequences. If there&#x27;s no cost incurred to this person (actually, she&#x27;ll probably be praised for her &quot;vigilance&quot; by people she respects) where do we draw the line?