On how knowledge dissipates fear

One reason I wouldn't have panicked about Lite-Brites maybe being bombs is because, when I was a kid, my friends and I blew shit up.

That sort of gives me a feeling for how explosions work. If someone suggested that those Lite-Brite ads hanging around Boston were bombs, I'd look at them, and realize that there's just not that much explosive you could pack into them. They're just not big enough.

Oh, you could certainly injure, or, if you were VERY lucky, kill someone. You could maybe pack as much explosive in there as you have in a grenade. Of course, they were generally high up, so they weren't close enough to ground level to have significant concussive impact, but if you had shrapnel, you could do some damage.

Still, not enough to worry about.

Could they damage the bridges? Only if they were very carefully placed shaped charges. And those probably wouldn't have a Lite-Brite on them.

So, I guess that one major problem that this country has is that too few people have grown up doing dangerous stupid shit. Because, when you grow up doing dangerous stupid shit, you actually end up with a better idea of risk assessment. And a better idea of what actually can and cannot be done.

Um. Those of us who survive, I mean. Danno did blow his thumb off, but they found it and reattached it. And Rusty got pretty severe burns on one leg. But other than that, we didn't have any serious injuries that I remember.

But, well, if you grew up knowing how to make pipe bombs, it gives you a certain, I don't know, comfort level with the idea of pipe bombs and other improvised munitions. You get a feel for what can be done, and what can't be done. And so you can look at things and get a feel for, if they DO happen to be bombs, whether they're bombs worth worrying about.

Plus, if you've played with Lite-Brites, that would also have helped in this case.

Now that I've heard more details . . .

I've got a lot more sympathy for the Boston Police Department.

Okay, so they find the Lite-Brite, send folks in to deal with it, and realize it's a Lite-Brite.

That, really, ought to have been it.

Except that, at 1 pm, someone ACTUALLY left a REAL bomb at one of the medical centers -- I'm forgetting which one -- Tufts or BU, I think. Probably Tufts, because I think it was in the Longwood Medical Area.

Once you've got someone ACTUALLY leaving bombs, okay, it's maybe a little more understandable to go back to your original false alarm and revisit the situation.

So I have more sympathy for the police.

I still think it was a shame to arraign the artists who put the things up.

I don't expect it will go to indictment, though. I mean, arresting them, I could see -- they were still trying to figure out what was going on. I guess I can understand the arraignment, although I think that, by the time the arraignment came around, they probably could have figured out that the artists had nothing to do with the ACTUAL bomb, which was an entirely separate and unrelated event.

I don't think the DA's stupid enough to try to proceed to an indictment, and I'd hope that even a grand jury would laugh at this.

(Quick rundown on the American justice system, at least the way it's supposed to work: first, you arrest someone. You can hold them for a short period of time, like a day, before you charge them with a crime. Only a short period, though -- that's what "habeas corpus" means -- you have to be charged with some sort of crime before very long has passed. You are charged with a crime at an arraignment, which just basically gets the paperwork started. At that point, however, bail, or bond, is set -- an amount of money that is put up that is forfeit if the parties charged do not show up for further court things. Bail is intended to keep people from running away, and it does reasonably well at it. In certain cases, people may be denied bail after arraignment, but it's rare. After you are arraigned, the District Attorney, acting for the state, gets together a preliminary case. They eventually take this preliminary case to a "grand jury", which is a jury of ordinary citizens who determine if there's enough evidence to make it plausible that a crime has been committed, and the accused could potentially have done it. If there's a remote possibility that the folks are charged of something that it's reasonable to charge them for, they are "indicted". After that, things go forward, and you eventually get to a "trial", in which actual guilt or innocence is decided. In general, it is not difficult to get an indictment -- the grand jury process is there to simply screen out the most blatant and overbearing abuses of power, not to determine actual guilt. There is a saying that a competent DA ought to be able to get an indictment against a ham sandwich -- and a DA won't proceed to attempt to get an indictment if there's a reasonable chance that they'd fail. Let's face it -- an attorney who fails to get a suspect indicted would be a genuine laughingstock -- it would either mean that they were truly incompetent, or that they tried to indict someone who was patently innocent. Which would also be a mark of incompetence, actually.)