The Case of the Scary Belt Buckle

July 9, 2013

by Bobby Casey, Managing Director

Yesterday Steve and I were en route flying from Riga, Latvia to Las Vegas, Nevada for FreedomFest. We are here in Las Vegas this week attending the event and I am speaking on two separate occasions about living and investing overseas. (If you are around we will be at booth #223 and giving away silver coins every day.)

Our route took us through Frankfurt for a non-stop flight to San Francisco. For those of you that have traveled overseas back to the US, you know the drill. Land at said airport. Submit to the immigration slave masters who drill you with ridiculous questions that have no bearing on the safety of humanity.

Then pass through customs to make sure you aren’t bringing any dangerous material like Kinder Eggs or too much money. Of all the processes, customs is the most ridiculous as they really do absolutely nothing. The literally just take your form and pass you through the line. Absurd.

Once passed, now you need to go back through security from whence you just came to have your bags rechecked in case you stopped by the gun and bomb store in the airport.

In the case of Steve and I, our flight from Frankfurt to San Francisco was a bit delayed giving us very little time to make our connection to Las Vegas. We had only 40 minutes to exit the plane, jump through all the useless bureaucratic hoops and re-board the plane to Las Vegas.

I was not optimistic. So we ran. Luckily both of us pack light so no bags to reclaim and recheck. Only carryons.

The lines were relatively light so that went pretty quickly, but the bottleneck appeared at re-entering security. As did the hilarity. And the sheer incompetence of the TSA.

Upon entering the security area, we went through the normal useless safety precautions; emptying pockets, taking out those dangerous viles of shampoo and toothpaste, removing laptops, etc.

Steve went first. I told him to keep going and convince the gate agent to hold the plane if he even made it on time. Good thing.

Of course when I went through they pulled my bags for additional screening. Like a good little slave I went to the holding area where the sheep are herded to wait for their verdict.

After re-running my bag, the thoroughly humorless TSA agent approached me and stated, “I’m sorry we had to detain you but anytime we see something that looks like a gun we all panic”.

See picture below of his findings:

This my friends is a belt that I bought from a recent trip to Austin, Texas at Allen’s Boots. Allen’s Boots is a famous cowboy boot store and I thought this belt buckle was pretty cool.

I placed a US quarter in the picture to give perspective for the image. As you can see, the belt buckle is big, from this perspective but it was clearly a buckle attached to a belt and not even the size of a toy gun any child may possess.

Upon hearing the TSA agent’s statement, I responded, “Yeah, that is a very dangerous belt.”

He was not amused.

The ironic thing is that in my backpack, I had 2 plastic containers – each with 20 one ounce silver coins in them. They each looked like a relatively large metal slug in my backpack. And this was not even questioned.

But that dangerous belt put them all in a panic.

Luckily Steve used his masculine wiles to convince the cute gate agent to hold the door open for me and we made our connection. And we spent the next hour laughing about the absurdity of the TSA.

This was just a silly story highlighting some of our travel escapades but it illustrates the bigger issues. The US is rapidly becoming a police state. It is wasting money on government agencies like the TSA and DHS for zero benefit.

There is zeros fiscal responsibility and each one of these actions does nothing except rob your wealth and destroy privacy and freedom.

How much longer will you allow the slave masters to herd you like sheep?

Get some money outside the US.

Get some investments outside the US.

Get a 2^nd passport.

Establish residency outside the US.

Consider spending some (or all) of your time overseas.

You’d be amazed at how this can transform your life for the better.