I step away for the weekend
And suddenly we need to dispatch an ark to Nashville to get two of each country musician. Thoughts are with you folks. Looks pretty rough. 15 dead at last count.
And then someone decides to plant a car bomb in Times Square. Fortunately, whoever did it sucks at making car bombs.
May 3rd, 2010 at 9:32 am
“Ark”. The other way sounds like we’re sending them geometry stuff.
May 3rd, 2010 at 9:50 am
Apparently whoever tried to make an ANFO bomb forgot the FO… The Combat Engineer in me laughed when I heard that this morning.
May 3rd, 2010 at 10:56 am
It sounded like the work of someone with a 3rd grader’s understanding of bombs.
I figure that out there there are people with specialized knowledge about making complete bombs. Presumably these are the people actually making stuff go boom in the middle east. Professional bomb makers. These guys almost don’t exist in the US because there’s currently not much of a profession for them to participate in.
Then there are people with some knowledge of the chemistry for making explosives and enough electrical engineering knowledge to wire together an ad hoc trigger. These guys could become professional bomb makers if they had the inclination and they didn’t have jobs as engineers or scientists already.
Then there are people who have heard vague rumors that combining certain substances will make boom. They don’t have the scientific knowledge to actually make a bomb that will do more than weakly explode or catch fire and for some reason they lack sufficient skill at google to gain that knowledge. There was a “bomb” in the UK last year or the year before that set a bunch of stuff on fire at an airport but didn’t actually kill anyone. Probably the work of this class of bomb maker.
Then there are people who just look for everything that has an explosive or flammable warning on it and try to make a bomb by piling them up together. I think most 13 year old boys fall into this group. It seems that, absent guidance, most terrorists do as well.
May 3rd, 2010 at 11:13 am
An underwear bomber who can’t make a bomb, followed by a car-bomber who can’t make a bomb.
Our security may suck, but we are incredibly lucky.
May 3rd, 2010 at 11:24 am
“Then there are people with some knowledge of the chemistry for making explosives and enough electrical engineering knowledge to wire together an ad hoc trigger. These guys could become professional bomb makers if they had the inclination and they didn’t have jobs as engineers or scientists already. ”
Great point. I’ve been bouncing around in my head the few missing links to the equation the dumb bomber did. I’m betting with a little google-fu and some commonly found shit I could make a car go BOOM something wicked.
But why would I risk everything to do that? yep!
May 3rd, 2010 at 1:10 pm
Another thing that makes bomb making more difficult in the US is the lack of a major collapse in society or a serious insurgency. In Iraq, the government completely collapsed and thousands of tons of explosives and detonators went missing.
Once you have piles of artillery shells full of high explosive, all you really need is household items to make any sort of bomb. And since the high explosive filler would be pure, mass produced stuff, they would be good bombs.
But nothing like this has happened in the US. Everything from the factories to the munitions depots are carefully watched for signs of “leakage” It would be a huge scandal if a truck full of filled artillery shells went missing from a military base or a factory shipping dock.
May 3rd, 2010 at 6:06 pm
I was going to make a snide ark comment untill I saw the death toll on the news, my thoughts and prayers are with my fellow Tennesseans. Even musicians. As for the undershirt bomber, thank God he didn’t kill someone. These guy’s are ‘wannabees. Why the #$%^ anyone would ‘wannabee’ a T.McVeigh or an L.B. Malvo is beyond my comprehension. And yes, I tend to lump all morons into the same category. Even country singers.
May 3rd, 2010 at 11:25 pm
If you don’t mind going up with it, all you need to make a car bomb is a halfway full tank of gas, a welder’s oxygen tank, and a road flare. Beyond that, it gets complicated.
May 3rd, 2010 at 11:52 pm
I went to Nashville for a convention this weekend. I went to eat near Opryland Saturday night and had no problems. Sunday morning, almost every road in the vicinity of my hotel was closed due to flooding. It eased up by early Sunday evening, just in time for me to drive back through some of the heaviest rain I have ever seen, and in complete darkness. From Lebanon to east of Monterrey it was like a monsoon. I basically kept my eyes on the white stripes in the middle and the solid line on the outside edge so I didn’t drive off the road.
There were a lot of people there from Middle and West Tennessee who couldn’t go home, so they extended the convention and basically had a party Sunday night.
May 3rd, 2010 at 11:56 pm
As for the the Times Square bomber. Mayor Bloomberg went on tv and suggested that maybe somebody was upset with the healthcare bill or something. I have an alternative theory. I believe that it was some arrogant jackass who was upset that people can own guns and order a meal in a restaurant with salt on it, and would like to become mayor of New york or maybe even President. I sure it would be easy to find a suspect! Oh wait!, never mind!
May 4th, 2010 at 12:23 am
LKP I think you are on to something here, and if you can also cover the transfat and tobacco issues, you’ll have NYC’s political science about covered.
May 4th, 2010 at 12:37 am
Bloomberg is a jerk but the bigger jerks are the New Yorkers who sold him their city as his rich man’s toy. Didn’t he pay $100 million of his own money for his last reeleection?