The even more ridiculous thing is that you can’t detect these explosives by X-ray, dogs, or any other available technology.

This is (literally) a dog and pony show.

“I hope next time, the terrorists try to put a bomb in a baby, so then we’ll have no babies allowed on planes.”

i literally did a spit take with my sparkling water reading your tweet. bravo, sir.

or inside a drunken loudmouth.

or a person with a really bad flu.

Following this logic, Passengers should have been banned after 9/11.

We’re all going to wind up on the internet as part of the new screener porn trend, so be sure to remember your undies.

It seems like a fantasy to assume that banning toner and ink cartridges will make anyone safer.

Then entire airport security system is theater to :

a) convince people to continue flying
b) condition people to accept life in a police state

Babies may not contain bombs, but they certainly can emit some terrible, potentially dangerous gasses. Otherwise, poor maligned screaming babies. All that pressure change hurts their sweet little ears.

Then –> The

Or, as Margaret might say, you can just embrace the insanity. I have.

Sometimes planes explode. They shouldn’t be allowed to fly. That really won’t matter once it is discovered that Al Qaeda has mastered induction of spontaneous human combustion. So no passengers anyhow, anyway.

Following that logic, aircraft should be banned on aircraft post 9/11. After all, they were used as kinetic energy weapons. Time to ban airplanes from flight!

How funny. If I coulda been a fly on the wall….

OMFG, you did not!

So no flights – but boats are OK – and once inside we can fly them to the final city??

Explosive smelling machines should have a good sales year – but overseas only major points in major shippers networks will have them because of cost, and our port’s have screening for only a small percentage of shipments, again because of cost.

Selling fear seems easy post Bush.

Oh yes I did.

I wouldn’t try that in CHI or DEN, but…

Selling fear seems easy post Bush.

Unfortunately there will always be a market. Where there is fear, there too are conservatives and vice versa.

Think about this long and hard, it is people, followers of Islam, who are sufficiently motivated to send bombs to the US.

So avoiding addressing root case, as to why follwers of Islam feel the way and act in this manner, which might address the problem, then the solution is become, which packaging will the followers of Islam adopt next?

Because my Chrystal Balls lack clarity, I cannot guess (although the free shipping label in the toner supplies to have them recycled might be a clue), this leaves two remedies:

(1) Followers of Islam cannot ship airborne packages to the US.
(2) The US can ban all packages from countries which contain followers of Islam (all countries that would be).

(1) Is probably impossible to police. As hard as it is to believe, it is possible that a follower of Islam, wishing to ship a bomb, would lie as to his or her religious beliefs.

That leaves (2). Stop all packages from being shipped into the US.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but we manufacture so much of our daily needs in the US, that I personally cannot conceive of any product that I need that is required to be shipped in a airplane to the US.

Fuel. The problems all go back to fuel. Just ban fuel from aircraft and the rest of it takes care of itself.

Or, we could remove all our troops from countries that contain follows of Islam (all countries), which would remove their motivation to mail us unpleasant things.

That’s it! I nominate 4cdave for homeland security head.

Thank you, thank you. And I pledge to do a “heckuva job”.

“But what exactly is so special about printer cartridges of more than 16 ounces that cannot be replicated inside some other household item?”

Indeed. I am not a chemical engineer, much less a demolition expert. But I believe that PETN can be mixed with a plasticizer and formed into sheets or molded into shapes. According to Wikipedia, it has been mixed with silicon rubber to form an extrudable material. Either way, the possibilities are then endless.

PETN was one of the explosive components in Semtex, the Czech-made explosive that was the first choice of terrorists in the ’70s and 80′s. Thin Semtex sheets could be pressed into the shell of a suitcase, behind the lining. So what is the point of banning specific items?

In fact, what is the point of using something as suspicious as a poorly packaged printer mailed from Yemen (not a place I associate with routine shipments of computer peripherals) and addressed to a synagogue? If you really want to blow up a plane, why not use a suitcase, with the electronics hidden in a packed travel alarm, cell phone, shaver, power convertor, or radio? Why use a printer for any target except, perhaps, the manufacturer’s service depot?

I think 4cdave (above) has given us the answer. I am not normally a tin-foil hat type. But this looks like a Reichstag- or Gulf-of-Tonkin-type pretext to me. Elaborate enough to be a good story on the evening news, unusual enough to be readily detectd, and not well-enough conceived or simple enough to be all that likely to work in practice.

And, you know, the airlines no longer take away lighters! Turned out it was verrry expensive for the guvt to dispose of them…….so lighters are good to go. Hmmm, can you light a martini on fire?

Why don’t they remove the cause instead of tweaking the effects?
Simply ban US soldiers from overseas flights on both civilian and military aircraft.

Winner

Well, cheers to you! Bet yer fun at parties.

We were told by George W. Bush six years ago that all this additional cargo screening would cause a “massive tax gap,

WTF. Explain please, unless that’s just a Bushism. In which case NEVER MIND.

Awesome! Why wasn’t this posted to youtube? Everything else that is potentially embarrassing is.

Future testimonial from a reader of FDL:

“I’ve never before felt inspired to get my body pierced before this, and I swore off airlines years ago. Thanks, KC! I couldn’t have stunned them without you!”

Really, lighters are now OK? Haven’t flown much in the last few months but I seem to remember a guard at LAX (?) barking about lighters not too long ago.

Keep the rules changing, keep the sheep uneasy and controllable…

Achmed the Dead Terrorist uses toner cartridges! Be afraid! Be very afraid!

A trip down memory lane…about those lighters, screwdrivers, scissors, etc — NYT from July 2007

I know of a woman who stole a typewriter by walking out of the store with it located between her legs. Little O/T but what the heck…

This whole evil-toner-in-the-mail-from-terrortown just has the same reek that I smell whenever (the probably long dead) UBL releases another remix tape.

And THAT creeps me out much, much more than any potential terrorist threat.

Hey David, I saw an article a the past couple of days that they were putting bombs in dogs so I expect we wont be able to travel with pets now.

Act I, Scene 9 of TSA “Terror Theater”

no, that was in the 2004 Presidential debate against John Kerry.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6146353/

KERRY: Jim, let me tell you exactly what I‘ll do. And there are a long list of thing. First of all, what kind of mixed message does it send when you have $500 million going over to Iraq to put police officers in the streets of Iraq, and the president is cutting the COPS program in America?
What kind of message does it send to be sending money to open firehouses in Iraq, but we‘re shutting firehouses who are the first- responders here in America.
The president hasn‘t put one nickel, not one nickel into the effort to fix some of our tunnels and bridges and most exposed subway systems. That‘s why they had to close down the subway in New York when the Republican Convention was there. We hadn‘t done the work that ought to be done.
The president — 95 percent of the containers that come into the ports, right here in Florida, are not inspected.
Civilians get onto aircraft, and their luggage is X- rayed, but the cargo hold is not X-rayed.
Does that make you feel safer in America?
This president thought it was more important to give the wealthiest people in America a tax cut rather than invest in homeland security. Those aren‘t my values. I believe in protecting America first.
And long before President Bush and I get a tax cut—and that‘s who gets it—long before we do, I‘m going to invest in homeland security and I‘m going to make sure we‘re not cutting COPS programs in America and we‘re fully staffed in our firehouses and that we protect the nuclear and chemical plants [...]
LEHRER: Ninety-second response, Mr. President.
BUSH: I don‘t think we want to get to how he‘s going to pay for all these promises. It‘s like a huge tax gap. Anyway, that‘s for another debate.

watertiger is upstairs!
Late Night: Your Communications Department is So Lame That…

I find the ink and toner cartridges an inspired choice. They are already known to light fear into entire offices across the US.

We are a simple people. Ritual will protect us. If we sacrifice our freedoms and privacy at the altar of the TSA checkpoint, bad things will not befall us.

It is a shame that on 9/11, the passengers were led to believe that the hijackers weren’t going to fly the planes into the Pentagon or World Trade Center. Only after 3 planes were destroyed did the passengers on the 4th realize the lie and rise up and stop the terrorists.

Since then, passengers have risen up and stopped each and every one of the terrorist plots BEFORE they were able to execute it. Putting 100+ people into an incredibly cramped space makes it really hard for people to light their shoes or underwear on fire.

I just don’t understand why we can’t appreciate the fact that, the people, when not led to believe that “Everything is OK and nothing is going to hurt you…” seem to do decent enough of a job in preventing terrorist attacks.

The TSA (in passenger screening) has been uneffective. Keep scanning all the luggage and boxes you want, keep leaving love notes in my bag saying you were there. Just stop screwing with the people.

I haven’t flown in 5+ years and if I can, I’ll never fly again.

Each and every time I fly I get magically screened. I even had my child with me and I still get special screening.

This whole thing is such a farce.

As stated before, you want to stop this? Stop blindly supporting Israel, dictators throughout the Middle East and bring our troops home.

I believe that would not resolve the problem. There is the little mater of a small country, assigned not to its inhabitants but to recent immigrants in 1948.

Maybe if all the things that terrorists put bombs in were produced here in this country they wouldn’t have any reason or opportunity to ship them over here. But it doesn’t matter. The biggest threat to the future of our country doesn’t come from terrorists, illegal aliens or drug cartels. It comes from the richest two percent upper crust white people who will absolutely not invest in the american workforce or pay taxes to support our government and by proxy our country as a whole. You can elect anybody you want. It will not matter. So, try as we might, sooner or later, when we are so depleted as a nation of money, resources and manufacturing the terrorists will get through and we the people will pay for the sins of the rich and powerful who for the last hundred years have exploited, raped and pillaged the people of other countries. Leaving us to take the blame. It is the classic and endless story. Rich people never ever care about any thing but themselves and money. Yet there will always be people like the extreme right wing conservative idealogues who support them. Even though they themselves are as poor as can be and have nothing in common with the super wealthy, they will defend their right to exploit whatever they can to become even richer while they struggle to support their families. This will open the doors for terrorists to exploit the anger and frustration of some of our citizens who will blame deteriorating conditions on other groups while the politicians who lick the boots of the super wealthy pander to the anger. It is a shame too. Given a different set of circumstances, this country could have flourished for another two hundred years. It’s just too bad that the people who had the position, the means and the opportunity to support this great nation, DIDN’T.