I bought accetone to get bird crap off my sidewalk..as per state and county laws.

I bought nail polish today..my nails were pretty crappy.

I bought bleach to clean the dog scrap off my driveway.( or whatever)

I bought fertilizer for my lawn…the lawn is looking sad.

I bought blah blah blah….you get the drift..

Tell her office you want to make their databasing easier..and want to by pass the Total Information Awareness program by calling directly to report on yourself!

Just imagine if they got thousands upon thousands of these calls?????????

I have read that the first set were led by a degree chemist and used lab-grade peroxide and acid with hexamine (camping stove tablets). They killed a bunch of people.

The second set killed nobody and ended up covered in wet flour or being rescued from a burning car. The thing was a complete farce. They thought that wetting flour with drugstore peroxide would give them an explosive and that a can of gasoline and a propane bottle would level a hospital.

The latter case has been conflated with the former–both in th press and in the legal system–so often that I have to suspect this is deliberate disinformation. We are being told that nincompoops armed with foodstuffs and cosmetics are as dangerous as trained professionals equipped with industrial chemicals, when that is clearly not the case.

We need to dust off the old chemistry books and be knowledgeable about threats. Nincompoops are easy to trap, as we have often seen of late, but trapping them does nothing for our security. Worse, the measures needed to trap and punish nincompoops–measures like this TIA thing–erode our liberties and make the arbitrary exercise of police power an ever greater threat.

If we fall for this gag yet again, one day soon, we’ll wake up and find Agents of the State at the foot of our own beds. Then who will be the nincompoop?

You keep coming back to the backpack, from which I conclude that you expect the volume occupied by the explosive to be roughly similar to the volume of the ingredients. It won’t be.

For one thing, the acid is a catalyst, not an ingredient. When all is done, you will still have the amount of acid you started with left in the bowl.

Some of the ingredients–the peroxide and the acetone–will be used up. But not all of them, and the volume of those that react will not necessarilly be proportional to the starting volumes. In the presence of the catalyst, the peroxide and the acetone undergoe a chemical reaction and become a completely new chemical substance, TATP, with its own density and other properties.

As with any chemical reaction, “yield” means the ratio between the amount of product that the reaction makes and the amount of ingredients that you had to use. It is never one-to-one. If you are good at your chemistry and use high-quality ingredients, you can get more from a given amount of material. But you still only get so much. I’ve never tried it, but I doubt that you could get enough to do anything with a little bottle of peroxide and a bottle of nail-polish remover, even if the impurities in the latter weren’t a problem.

I am not an experienced mad bomber, but, to do real damage in a relatively open space like a public place or even a subway car, you are talking a pound or two I should think. That might be the size of a pound or two of butter or flour–it would easily fit in a back pack. But the ingredients needed to make that charge would NOT fit in a backpack. To yield a pound of explosive, you’d need a LOT of peroxide, acetone, and acid–probably bathtubs-full. If you use only 5-15% peroxide, you won’t be able to get a useful reaction, either. You’ll need 30% or better. Some say this can be achieved by carefully boiling hundreds of little bottles of peroxide together, but I am skeptical. Moreover, you need a fair bit of infrastrucutre to support your bomb factory. You need to be able to keep these large volumes of liquid surrounded by ice. You need to be able to supply and surreptitiously dispose of large amounts of waste material–highly corrosive acid and the excess acetone. If, by the way, the acid comes in contact with bleach–in a drain or laundry tub–you will be sickened or killed by phosgene gas.

So a quart bottle of drugstore peroxide or nail polish remover will not get you far and doing it in outside of a properly arranged lab–in a house or hotel room–would be very risky.

The detonator is not a problem and need not takeup anhy room in the backpack at all. A detonator is a sensitive explosive that sets off the main charge, like a blasting cap or Primacord. With TATP, the charge IS the detonator. It is so sensitive that punching the backpack (or tripping on a step) can set it off.

As you point out, the shoe bomb was small. This was a special case. The bomber was on a pressurized plane, so he only needed enough explosive to punch a modest hole in the fuselage. After that, decompression and structural loads would tear the plane apart. The Lockerbie plane was destroyed by few ounces of military Semtex detonated in contact with the outer fuselage. But making the shoe bomber’s little charge probably took more than a little amount of ingredients.

I don’t know what the answer is. But the answer is not to eliminate the Fourth Amendment in legislative secrecy.

Damn straight.

In that vein, as an FYI aside, probably having nothing to do with the spying authorities under discussion, I noted an interesting amendment that Russ Feingold has offered on the Senate’s FY 2010 Defense Appropriations Bill (which I think may be voted on Tuesday):

SA 2589. Mr. FEINGOLD submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by him to the bill H.R. 3326, making appropriations for the Department of Defense for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2010, and for other purposes; which was ordered to lie on the table; as follows:

On page 245, between lines 8 and 9, insert the following:

Sec. 8104. None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act or any other Act may be used for the program described on page two of Annex II to the Classified Annex to S. 1494 (111th Congress, agreed to in the Senate on September 16, 2009) prior to the date that the staff of the Select Committee on Intelligence of the Senate is provided access to such program, as described in such Classified Annex.

[S. 1494 is the Senate’s FY 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act.]

And here’s a step in the right direction, that’s long overdue; good for Feingold:

SA 2604. Mr. FEINGOLD submitted an amendment intended to be proposed by him to the bill H.R. 3326, making appropriations for the Department of Defense for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2010, and for other purposes; which was ordered to lie on the table; as follows:

On page 245, between lines 8 and 9, insert the following:

Sec. 8104. (a) In collaboration with the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State shall develop a plan for replacing private security contractors with United States Government personnel within one year after the date of the enactment of this Act at United States missions in war zones where the United States Armed Forces are engaged in combat operations.

(b) Not later than 120 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense shall submit the plan developed under subsection (a) to the congressional defense committees and the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate and the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives.

But the point is, the bombers in London were using chemicals that are traced because they aren’t the run of the mill, off the shelf versions, they’re industrial strength. And the process requires titrating with an acid (usually sulfuric) which is also not really much of a beauty product. And it’s somewhat tricky, and needs to be kept cold, and all that.

What I was trying to ask mocha, was whether there were serious indications of something out of the ordinary. Buying a gallon of peroxide is a bit strange, but if it’s just ordinary strength wouldn’t be that out of the ordinary. Nail polish remover has thousands of uses, I’ve used it as glue before. And I went through a large amount of peroxide one time because I cut my finger and needed it to clean on a daily basis. But battery acid isn’t something that’s around everybody’s medicine cabinet.

As for the agent of a foreign power stuff, they changed all that around when they changed the FISA, so it doesn’t require being related to a foreign state anymore. And they changed being a terrorist, and the definition of WMD, and the definition of an MCI, and a lot of other things.

As for medical records, they aren’t as private as people think. The law everybody cites, HIPAA, protects insured people from their insurance companies, and from their employers if the employers buy the insurance. It doesn’t cover the medicine I do, whatsoever (I’m bound by a stricter set of regulations it just so happens).

There are people who would hurt us grievously if they have an opportunity to do so, so again, I think it’s vital that we not take any action, especially at this time that would hinder the government’s ability to detect, investigate, and prosecute those who are intent on killing innocent Americans.

[my bold]

Why does she add the modifier innocent? Doesn’t DiFi imply therefore that guilty Americans deserve to be killed? Isn’t ‘innocent’ redundant when referring to us Americans? /snark

There has been some discussion that 215 would let FBI get medical records, too.

Sounds like another basis to exclude coverage for a preexisting condition that cannot be challenged because it’ll be a state secret.