by CKR
It's the inconsistencies that bother me.
We have 300,000 people on the "Do Not Fly" list, and some of those names are wrong. There is allegedly a mechanism for correcting this, but it doesn't seem to work. From one point of view, better keep all those names on the list so you don't miss anyone. I do have to wonder if there are 300,000 terrorists around the world, but we'll let that pass for now.
The downside of keeping all those names on the list is that every time you intercept, say, an airline pilot and detain him for a few hours, you are wasting the time of the people who are detaining him as well. They might be looking out for genuine terrorists who are swarming onto the planes while the poor man is having to have his supervisors call in and vouch for him for the umpteenth time.
And here's someone who's evidently not on those lists. Or maybe they just didn't check.
Along with my friend the Armchair Generalist, I also get irritated about the false alarms and the overwillingness to inflate incidents to the WMD level. He makes a good point that chemical incidents, whether train derailments or terrorist attacks, require similar responses.
So what's going on in Los Angeles? A guy pours mercury on a transit platform, announces it, and nothing happens. Nobody from the transit authority turns up to check it out or clean it up.
Metallic mercury isn't quite as bad as the LA Times article makes it sound. I had a lovely little ball of the stuff that I played with when I was a child, poking my finger in it to break it into perfect spheres, mushing it around in my palm, coating pennies with it. I had a colleague in graduate school who accidentally swallowed some mercury when loading a mercury diffusion pump. No obvious damage to either of us, although opinions on that may vary.
But it shouldn't be hanging around subway platforms. Somebody in LA must have one of those neat little mercury vacuum cleaners to clean it up.
Maybe the transit authority were checking out people on that "Do Not Fly" list.
I'm not very worried about nine-year olds or mercury. What I am worried about is that apparent inability of Homeland Security to make sense.