No I'm Not In This Line

The scarcity of my posting today has nothing to do with this line of people outside a Cingular store in the San Fernando Valley waiting for a certain "best technology product in the history of man." Actually, I won't get an iPhone on principle because they're not allowing it beyond one cell service carrier, which happens to be the worst carrier for connectivity. Screw that noise.

Actually, I've just been on deadline.

What little I have heard today is that British police stopped a car bomb from exploding in London today. Once again, local law enforcement proves itself to be the best defense against crime, and that most of these free-lance would-be assassins have no basic understanding of science necessary to carry off a bombing attack that would do any kind of damage.

You know what you call a vehicle with 50 gallons of gas? A Cadillac Escalade. The media meltdown over this incident is simply shameful.

For starters, gasoline is not a high explosive. If we were talking 50 pounds of Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed. Those are real high explosives with a detonation rate in excess of 20,000 feet per second. Gasoline can explode (just ask former owners of a Ford Pinto) but it is first and foremost an incendiary. If the initial reports are true, the clown driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur when it comes to constructing an Improvised Explosive Device aka IED. Unlike a Hollywood flick the 50 gallons of gas would not have shredded the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying shrapenal.

As for the use of closed-circuit television, ubiquitous in Britain, to try and find the failed bomber (who could be IRA or a right-wing nut, for all we know), let's go ahead and try such a nanny-state scenario in the US, I'm sure those libertarians on the right will love being snooped upon at every waking moment. Heck, the Glenn Reynoldses of the world can't even stand traffic cameras. So watch the hypocrisy dance if the government decides to install a Big Brother-type system in the name of fighting terra terra terra.

Anyway, car bombs don't kill people, people kill people, right?