"The Fatherland Security troops are publicly embaressed and showing their brown shirts."
Well, I'm not convinced you guys have detected the right intended message here.
Basically, the real message may be: "it's impossible to protect Americans through local policies alone". In other words, there's no serious desire high-up to truly seal our ports in the short run. American perceived insecurity will allow "us" to eventually move into places like Indonesia, in order to "defend" our ports. The fact that it may actually be impossible to screen everything coming in is immaterial. No wait...it's beneficial.
-TD
From: "Major Variola (ret)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Fatherland Security agents above the law? Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2003 11:26:49 -0700
At 10:41 AM 9/11/03 -0700, Tim May wrote: >* depleted uranium (DU) is essentially pure U-238, with very low >specific activity (decay rate); removal of the 2-3% of the higher >specific activity U-235 lessens the overall decay rate of the original >metal substantially.
Commericial airliners often contain tens of kilograms of DU as ballast. Ref: _Living with Radiation_, by Frame & Kolb. They often carry medical or other isotopes during civilian flights too. There are rules for distributing those containers so no one passenger gets too much extra dose.
DU gives off plenty of alphas. (Thus you don't want to breathe DU dust, which will also heavy-metal your kidneys in the short term.) But they're stopped by anything, including aluminum foil-- lead pipe is overkill. The only way to detect shielded DU is gammas, to identify it you need gamma spectroscopy. The neutron analysis being done at some ports of entry only works on fissile materials.
The Fatherland Security troops are publicly embaressed and showing their brown shirts.
--- Of course Pierre Curie didn't die from radiation poisoning, he was hit by a horse drawn cart.
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