The Wanna-Be MacGyver Doctors Still Aren’t Al Qaeda
Enough already! Everybody is reporting that the UK government is saying that the would-be London and Glasgow bombers were linked to Al Qaeda, only they didn’t.
What government officials have been saying is that the attack is in the same style as Al Qaeda in Iraq and that Al Qaeda is a threat in a general sense. I checked what Gordon Brown and others actually said, and they aren’t claiming that this is an Al Qaeda cell. There is a good article on this on Raw Story under the heading “UK officials caution media reports tying car bomb attacks to Qaeda”.
Even the government link on why the attempted attacks are similar to Al Qaeda attacks is tenuous. Car bomb attacks using widely available ingredients hardly constitutes a pattern unless ETA in Spain, the IRA, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and every group in Iraq are all in cahoots. The difference is that those four groups actually make car bombs, not incendiary devices, and the bombs work, also unlike these nitwits.
Also, the reaction to the attempted attacks has been hysterical, with calls to curb civil liberties in response to the “threat”. Let’s look soberly at the real risk. In the past three years, 52 people have died from terrorism, all of them in the 7 July 2005 attacks. According to UK Statistics, in the same time period about 550 people have died of malignant neoplasm of the rectosigmoid junction, rectum and anus, otherwise known as ass cancer. But we’re not talking about taking way our civil liberties to protect us from the threat of ass cancer, are we?
Doctor, doctor
Turns out that the would-be bombers were NHS doctors, and here I was thinking that when the NHS killed people it was an accident.
This raises a couple of interesting questions, such as that many people believe religious nutters are stupid. Sadly, that is not always the case. However, in this instance, the stereotype holds.
These doctors, if they really were doctors, presumably had medical educations, which include chemistry. The “car bombs” — really incendiary devices that failed [see previous blog entry] — didn’t go off because they lacked oxygen. Since this is something that should be obvious to anyone who has an even passing knowledge of how chemicals react, it begs the question of whether the wanna-be terrorists were either pig-stupid or lying about their medical educations. How stupid? They made devices that had petrol and propane but no oxygen to react with. They work in hospitals … that have oxygen bottles in them. They worked in the best place to get bottled oxygen, yet, it didn’t occur to them. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that anyone who has studied chemistry to have made such a basic and obvious oversight — it’s up there with forgetting the eggs in an omelette — that I think that the NHS is hiring people who say they are doctors and aren’t. This is a much bigger risk to people’s lives than a handful of knuckleheads trying to make some bonfires.
What government officials have been saying is that the attack is in the same style as Al Qaeda in Iraq and that Al Qaeda is a threat in a general sense. I checked what Gordon Brown and others actually said, and they aren’t claiming that this is an Al Qaeda cell. There is a good article on this on Raw Story under the heading “UK officials caution media reports tying car bomb attacks to Qaeda”.
Even the government link on why the attempted attacks are similar to Al Qaeda attacks is tenuous. Car bomb attacks using widely available ingredients hardly constitutes a pattern unless ETA in Spain, the IRA, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and every group in Iraq are all in cahoots. The difference is that those four groups actually make car bombs, not incendiary devices, and the bombs work, also unlike these nitwits.
Also, the reaction to the attempted attacks has been hysterical, with calls to curb civil liberties in response to the “threat”. Let’s look soberly at the real risk. In the past three years, 52 people have died from terrorism, all of them in the 7 July 2005 attacks. According to UK Statistics, in the same time period about 550 people have died of malignant neoplasm of the rectosigmoid junction, rectum and anus, otherwise known as ass cancer. But we’re not talking about taking way our civil liberties to protect us from the threat of ass cancer, are we?
Doctor, doctor
Turns out that the would-be bombers were NHS doctors, and here I was thinking that when the NHS killed people it was an accident.
This raises a couple of interesting questions, such as that many people believe religious nutters are stupid. Sadly, that is not always the case. However, in this instance, the stereotype holds.
These doctors, if they really were doctors, presumably had medical educations, which include chemistry. The “car bombs” — really incendiary devices that failed [see previous blog entry] — didn’t go off because they lacked oxygen. Since this is something that should be obvious to anyone who has an even passing knowledge of how chemicals react, it begs the question of whether the wanna-be terrorists were either pig-stupid or lying about their medical educations. How stupid? They made devices that had petrol and propane but no oxygen to react with. They work in hospitals … that have oxygen bottles in them. They worked in the best place to get bottled oxygen, yet, it didn’t occur to them. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that anyone who has studied chemistry to have made such a basic and obvious oversight — it’s up there with forgetting the eggs in an omelette — that I think that the NHS is hiring people who say they are doctors and aren’t. This is a much bigger risk to people’s lives than a handful of knuckleheads trying to make some bonfires.
posted by The Yank Abroad at 10:11 am
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