This morning, four explosions occurred in London’s mass transit system in what seems to be a concerted attack by terrorists. Bloggers are quick to report from the scene, and Flickr has a photo pool. I still don’t understand how killing innocent people aims to prove anything about someone’s personal beliefs. The only thing it promotes is hatred, confusion, and total disbelief.

Across the pond here in the US, we have yet again raised the terror level in mass transit systems–whatever that means. Haven’t the terror levels already been raised before? How is this going to be different? I find such frivolous threat announcements to be useless for the general public. We all have some sort of common sense–if we see a mysterious package with wires hanging out, we’ll report it.

In NYC, they are doing random police spot checks on buses, which includes a short lecture on what a suicide bomber looks like. I’m no expert on suicide bombers, but couldn’t they easily take on any appearance? There’s nothing wrong with a little briefing on what is suspicious, but there definitely is something wrong with ignoring elements of a suspicious scene just because it wasn’t on the list of suicide bomber attributes handed out by the police. I’m also hoping they’re not making any broad racial suggestions about the bombers.