From ABC News:

French training exercise leads to explosive mistake

It was supposed to have been a harmless exercise, but police at Paris’ main airport managed to send a package of plastic explosive winging around the world and were still looking for it on Saturday.

Fortunately, “it is no more dangerous than a bar of chocolate,” said a source at the military’s information department.

Gendarmes at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport placed the 150 gram block of explosive in a bag on a conveyor belt to find out whether their sniffer dogs were able to detect it.

During what was described as a “lapse of attention,” a baggage handler put the suitcase with checked luggage being sent to an aircraft hold.

Police said the explosive could have been placed on any of about 80 flights.

Airlines were alerted but officials said the explosive represented no danger since it does not react to shock or fire and did not have a detonator.

The military source described it as “totally inoffensive”.

Over at Jihad Watch, they put an Inspector Clouseau spin on it.  Very cute.

And I think I will quote their “totally inoffensive” line if I ever get caught carrying some plastic explosives onboard a plane.  And no, you don’t get to use my guns, explosives making equipment or my wife while I’m in prison for 25 years either.

A long, long time ago when I was going to high school in Orofino I lived up on top of the hill to the Northwest of town.  Sometimes on the way to school it would be a bright sunny day up on top and we would be greated by a river of fog in the valley below.  A similar thing happened today when Barb, Nancy (Barb’s sister) and I went to Clarkston to do some shopping.  I had to stop and get some pictures.  All those years ago I never got a picture of that wonderous sight.  In part because it was a fairly common occurance.  You don’t take pictures of everyday things very often.  You’ll see essentially the same thing soon so why bother?

It had been a while since I had seen that sort of image and I had a camera with me today.  Here are the results.  A sample to get you interested:

Eugene Econ, the instructor for the Boomershoot 2005 Precision Rifle Clinic, has given me the details and I have put them on boomershoot.org.  If he gets enough entries there will be a two day clinic this year.  You can sign up for Friday and/or Saturday.  The main Boomershoot 2005 event will be on Sunday May 1.  The precision rifle clinic always seems to fill up with a waiting list by early April.  Get your entries in early if you want to attend.

Over at the Belmont Club there is a better response than mine to the article So what do you do when your home is burgled? He quotes a passage from George Orwell’s 1984 and notes the similarities.  Another book is applicable here as well. F. A. Hayek was trying to warn Briton about the hazards of socialism because of what he saw in Nazi Germany when he wrote The Road to Serfdom.  Hayek argues that when the government takes responsibility for the welfare of the people they will create more problems than they solve.  The socialist mind will conclude the reason the government failed is because didn’t have enough power given to them.  They will obtain the additional power and things will continue to worsen and again they will say it wasn’t a problem with the concept of government control it was that they didn’t have enough.  The cycle continues and no matter how benign and well intentioned the initiators the concentration of power attracts the attention of the worse sort of people–the Hitlers and the Stalins of the world.  Ruthless and driven they will seize the power given to the government and will abuse it.  The only way to prevent that from happening is to not give the power to the government in the first place.

How ironic, both Hayek and Orwell wrote while in the U.K. as warnings for the British people and now those people are facing the very thing they were warned about 60 years ago.