I can see the future of airline travel. You ship ALL your luggage separately on a cargo plane. At the airport, you strip & you package up your clothes for shipment back to your home. While nude, pass through security for x-rays & a cavity search, then you put on new disposable coveralls & sandals. After boarding the plane, everyone will be handcuffed to their seat. If you must make a head call, you will be escorted to the can & observed while using it. At your destination, you will be released & must immediatly leave the airport. Only people flying will be allowed into the airport. You have to apply at least 6 months before flying for a permit to fly. This will involve all the checks for a security clearance. Your travel docs will be encoded into a RFID chip in advance & will be implanted under your skin. The handcuffs prevent martial arts type moves being put on other passengers. What good are unbreakable cockpit doors if the hijackers say "Open up or we will strangle one passenger with a shoelace every ten minutes until you do"?

If you read the Koran (actually, you should), you get to find out that Allah really doesn't like people who kill in cold blood.

So maybe these guys are the Muslim answer to the Satanism.

It's a protection racket, basically. You turn in your village turd, you get your throat cut.

BTW, I'd love to know where you got that quote. I don't recall it in either of my translations of the Koran.

As I said, terrorism works. It doesn't matter if an attack is successful, only that it was tried, becuase it scares the intended people.

It scares the people, who ask the politicians to protect them from "those people" over there.

It scares the politicians, who are afraid someone will blame them for not doing enough. So they get more oppressive, and without an invasion, you can only really opress your own people.

The government presses down on everyone, making everyone's life harder, but it presses down just a little more on "those people".

"Those people", who happen to be our neighbors, our coworkers, our classmates, and up until a few weeks ago, our friends, start to resent being singled out just becuase their parents came from the country that the real turds live in.

"Those people"'s children take that resentment and turn it into something ugly. While at the same time, the turds can turn to thier supporters and say "we are the good guys- look at what they do to us".

And if the government decides to opress someone else, and invades another country were the turds are a minority (not turd supporters, but the real deal- if supporting turds was a crime, half the cops and feds in Chicago and Boston in the 70s and 80s should be hung for supporting the IRA via NORAID). And in the process, you make more turd supporters, some of whom get angry enough to turn into turds themselves.

And so forth and so on.

Mal, I havent' checked the news for about 12 hours- did you get that off one of the "news" services, or are you going off my post? That assessment was from the gut- technically from the ulcer. It always says "hiya" when someone screws up a doesn't do thier ************ job.

Hey, Mike, let me say thank you. I'm glad to know that there is at least ONE person with a brain advising the bueracracy.

Although I have to admit, I rather like the "you pack it, you sip it" policy- it would save a lot of time on trials.

Huh... sounds like "ConAir"

I think that was the most comprehensive posting I've seen on the subject. I wanted to point out that my posts seem really against things, but I do believe that the government MUST protect us from explosives. That is the only thing a passenger cannot defend against. Everything else should be in our court, but there are alot of crazy and untrained people in the world that think they know what they are doing. I don't have that training, and I'd feel real uneasy about trying to identify the "bad guy" in an evironment where everyone has a weapon.

I would just like to have all of my freedoms back. Unfortunately, in all democracies (I think...) the few bad apples have spoiled everything and there is a slow gradual eroding of rights. All in the name of "safety" or "national security". *sigh*

Once we're all flying naked, how long do you think it will take these extremist morons to take a cue from the drub smugglers and start swallowing balloons filled with things (like nitroglycerin). Then they'd just throw a tantrun in the plane's aisle, jumping up and down, and there you go. No carry-ons with liquids, no electronic mp3 players for detonators, but still ... BOOM!

I suppose the TSA would then start Tasering everyone to see if they could set them off.

That would have been a "cover" beverage. There are a number of things that could have been disolved in it, but it would NOT have been the sports drink itself. Mike or I could terrify everyone here listing things that go boom when mixed with eachother, or just need a little nudge.

Here's the funny thing to me- one of the "news" agencies is listing components. Not ratios, but trial and error would tell you want you need to know. And the even funnier thing is, if I remember my misspent teenage years properly, what they list needs more than just a little electrical shock to detonate.

The "pack and sip" rule on baby formula should be on everything. Mike, correct me if I'm wrong, but without mentioning specific components, every liquid explosive has a key component that is:
a) a strong oxidizer, acid or base,
b) a petrochem, or
c) a heavily nitrated compound, usually a hydrocarbon
and usually all three. Figure it's an hour between the drink and the boarding- long enough for your body to react to the chemicals in a negative manner. And anyone who seems more interested in his buddy's drink when he's coughing up blood should probably be called suspicious.

And the piece that just pisses me off is why did they snag half the turds in question and tell the media? They should have snagged them all, told the media if NEEDED and in that order. English law is much more relaxed about making people dissappear than US law is. Now the other half have gone to ground.