I wonder about the health effects of radiation emitted by those scanning machines. Of course, the effects on any one individual should be infinitesimally small. But I wonder if a billion scans will have some tiny public-health impact. And we must assume that every machine has zero risk of a malfunction that would increase the radiation emitted.

I suppose this is almost literally the definition of “tinfoil conspiracy thinking” (the tinfoil being used to block radiation, I believe?), but I hope that the radiation emitted by these machines is thoroughly understood.

The above has nothing to do with Rand Paul’s inability or unwillingness to behave appropriately in an airport, and his father’s eagerness to spend my tax dollars to “investigate” all this (maybe bad parenting is the culprit?). It’s just something I sometimes wonder about. Lots of radiation scans are done by our federal government, every day, to ordinary Americans. What could possibly go wrong?