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"Liquid Explosives"
OK, I've read some of the articles and such about liquid explosives from the BBC. They all allude to some vague, nebulous ingredients that might be able to be combined to make a liquid explosive, or combining a liquid and a solid.
They read like bullshit, as in, as credible as "red mercury" being a nuclear material.
Yes, there are liquids that can be combined to make explosives. In order to get explosives out of these, they have to be highly concentrated. Some are considered "volatile". This means they stink.
Take acetone, a well known ingredient in nail polish remover. The concentration is low, the smell is high. If someone decided to "do their nails" on an airplane flight, they'd get lynched - that shit is vicious in an enclosed environment.
Or various acidic drain cleaners: hard to handle and package without burning yourself, or sufficiently low strength to not do anything more than fizzle. These stink too.
Hydrogen peroxide: the stuff you can buy in the drugstore is low concentration. It would have to be concentrated (not a simple process), then repacked in the original bottle. It smells when you open it, too. Hair bleach developer has a slightly higher concentration, but again has the smell problem.
Gasoline/Fuel oil: first, it smells; second, its already prohibited in aircraft cabins.
So, basically, it would take a lot of effort, coordination, and ingenuity by the terrorists, plus gross apathy on the part of their fellow passengers. Ain't gonna happen. Not when passengers that look like they *might* be doing something funky get tackled promptly by fellow travellers.
They read like bullshit, as in, as credible as "red mercury" being a nuclear material.
Yes, there are liquids that can be combined to make explosives. In order to get explosives out of these, they have to be highly concentrated. Some are considered "volatile". This means they stink.
Take acetone, a well known ingredient in nail polish remover. The concentration is low, the smell is high. If someone decided to "do their nails" on an airplane flight, they'd get lynched - that shit is vicious in an enclosed environment.
Or various acidic drain cleaners: hard to handle and package without burning yourself, or sufficiently low strength to not do anything more than fizzle. These stink too.
Hydrogen peroxide: the stuff you can buy in the drugstore is low concentration. It would have to be concentrated (not a simple process), then repacked in the original bottle. It smells when you open it, too. Hair bleach developer has a slightly higher concentration, but again has the smell problem.
Gasoline/Fuel oil: first, it smells; second, its already prohibited in aircraft cabins.
So, basically, it would take a lot of effort, coordination, and ingenuity by the terrorists, plus gross apathy on the part of their fellow passengers. Ain't gonna happen. Not when passengers that look like they *might* be doing something funky get tackled promptly by fellow travellers.
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Every single one of your points about smell or notice, is voided by simply -sealing- the container before you bring it to the airport. NO smell from a sealed container. I only need 10 seconds to detonate just about anything, really.
At least get off the high horse of 'OMG SO INCONVENIANT!'. They were, according to the reports I read, just a few hours away from actually putting the plan in to action. OBVIOUSLY someone with a bit more education in chemical sciences than either of us thinks it was credible enough to put three nations on alert and utterly inconveniance thousands of travelers.
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The key to carry on baggage is the ability to reassemble a disassembled IED in to an actionable state. This lets me sneak what would be obvious aboard in an inobvious fashion. Each IDE typically has 4 componants. The Trigger, the Timer, the Power Source and the Explosive. In a dual charge mixture, you have two explosives, a trigger and a powersource. Timers not needed as its directly triggered. This is the entire reason for carry on searches, to root out one or more componants.
As for the checked in luggage:
Checked in luggage, every bag, is swept for explosive compounds. Further, it is subjected to an examination more akin to an MRI than an Xray, with slices of a bag examined ever 1-2 inches, thereby cutting a standard bag in to 20 or more images to be viewed. The problem wiht checked in luggage, is the item to explode must be able to explode with no further human contact, IE: Assembled and ready to go. This will be detected by the above scan.
If anything looks even vaugley suspicious, its pulled out.
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Or whatever they are calling the technology. I haven't read up on scanning technologies in a couple years.
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The chemical reactions needed to produce explosives are not instant.
OBVIOUSLY someone with a bit more education in chemical sciences than either of us thinks it was credible enough to put three nations on alert and utterly inconveniance thousands of travelers.
Actually, I doubt that anyone with any realistic knowledge in this area was involved in the alert.
The alert serves a political purpose, not for the alleged terrorists, but governments who want to "boil the frog" by slowly aclimatizing us to more and more invasive surveillance and restrictions.
Maybe it's credible, but I doubt it. These people's track record sucks - "red mercury" anyone?
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And there are chemicals like caesium and rubidium that explode on contact with plain water. There's a video on the web somewhere; probably YouTube.
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IIRC, there are only a few liquids that when combined are instantly explosive. Most go through a reaction (often exothermic, which is what makes playing with boombooms
fundangerous) that isn't quick and gives off nasty fumes.no subject
The liquid/slurry explosives are quite inert, even after they're mixed. No reaction at all. (Most emphatically not like making nitroglicerine.) It's a lot like mixing hydrogen and oxygen. They're very stable until they're hit by a shock wave, e.g. from a spark or a sharp impact. At which point they detonate, the way any other high explosive does -- the energy of the reaction forces the shock wave to travel supersonically. That's the definition of a high explosive.
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As far as I'm concerned, air travel while disabled was already enough of a PITA that I drove to Seattle rather than fly and put up with the phoney security. It's 1,000 miles from here.
Now my drive v.s. fly threshold has increased. The car rental is cheaper than bail, after all.
I refuse to succumb to the senseless paranoia and overblown hysteria - I won't "play along" with it. Reasonable precautions are one thing - but this crap went past reasonable years ago.
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Look, you want to be rightiously indignant that YOU HAVE BEEN PUT UPON.. you go right ahead.
But remember, travel by air is a fucking privilage, not a right. You want to drive, do that. Take the train. But air travel ain't exactly in the constitution. You're off base and you're ill informed, worse, you show absolutly no interest in actually observing information put in front of you, instead relying on what you =know= to be true.
Just like any other christian fundimentalist.
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So the ability to travel by a particular mode is a priviledge, not a right if it isn't mentioned in the Constitution? Guess what? No mode of a right to travel (by any means) is mentioned in the Constitution. From usconstitution.net (http://www.usconstitution.net/constnot.html). But, note the following: So, essentially, it's not written in to the literal Constitution, but "it is a right broadly assertable against private interference as well as governmental action. Like the right of association, ... it is a virtually unconditional personal right, guaranteed by the Constitution to us all." Please note that no mention is made of the means of travel. There is no differentiation between car, bus, train, plane, or bicycle. Either the right to all exists, or none. I would say, based on the above, that the right exists to travel by any means you can afford. You're now spouting statist nonsense.
You're off base and you're ill informed, worse, you show absolutly no interest in actually observing information put in front of you, instead relying on what you =know= to be true.
Ah, yes, when you have no facts or logic, nor even precedent to back you up, resort to ad hominem attack. Please notice who could make use of a simple search engine, and provide at least a few unslanted citations for my position.
Just like any other christian fundimentalist.
Sorry, but your position is the one of the christian fundamentalist: advocating submission to authority as frightened, terrorized sheep. State or priest, what does it matter? Sheep are sheep.
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Hey, guess what?
It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. (from Supreme Court ruling, Marbury v. Madison)
Who knew? The Supreme Court says that there's a separation of powers. OK, they said it once upon a time... we got a bunch of pansyarse rubberstamp motherfuckers on the bench now. But it's still the law.
Sheep are sheep.
And along with sheep and wolves, there are sheepdogs. Fear the dawg. ;-)
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Yeah, law, precedent and even the Constitution don't matter much to this administration.
And along with sheep and wolves, there are sheepdogs. Fear the dawg. ;-)
o/~ You ain't nothin' but a houn' dawg... o/~
;-)
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Lack of right and means of travel was quite effective in the old Soviet Union in keeping the populace controlled. Not safe, controlled. I've been predicting since the 1970's that we will be in trouble when we start seeing more and more restrictive regulations on travel, more than anything else. It's nothing big. It's just a few steps, and a few more... "That's how freedom will end, not with a bang, but a rustle of file folders..." as someone said on the net around 1990. Go head, call me a conspiracy theorist. People have been doing it since I was in high school. But things I predicted then have been following a progression that matches certain patterns from past political situations. I don't know, maybe I just know too much about the Bolshevik Revolution, the Maoist government, and the French Revolution, and the Tokugawa bafuku, and... It's been proven, time and time again, through history, throughout the world, it's one of the most effective ways of controlling a restive population.