Thursday, October 25, 2018
PMT: Pipe bombs and politics
Pipe bombs are hard to make, even though the idea is simple. (For those of you who are wondering how I know anything about pipe bombs, I went to a week of training on arsons and explosives when I was a prosecutor). The challenge is that to have a pipe bomb be truly explosive, you need to create excellent containment-- that is, it needs to be a strong shell with no weak points to produce a maximum explosion.
It's tough to do that-- the hard part is creating and securing end caps that will provide as much resistance to the explosion as the pipe itself. Lacking that, the force just escapes through the end of the pipe, and you have a silly-looking rocket squirting around for bit. The "Unabomber," Ted Kaczynski, had a Ph.D. in math from Michigan and taught at UC-Berkeley, and still struggled to get end-caps right.
So that's the formula, and the challenge: To make a good pipe-bomb, you have to create a contained space where an explosion can occur.
Yesterday, pipe bombs were sent to the following people:
-- Hillary Clinton
-- Barack Obama
-- Rep. Maxine Waters
-- CNN (addressed to CNN commentator John Brennan
-- George Soros
-- Eric Holder
The targeting was as clear and evil as that of James Hodgkinson, who shot at Republican lawmakers during a softball practice in June of 2017, wounding Rep. Steve Scalise and three others.
What's wrong with our politics, our values, our discourse, our morals?
It does seem as if we have created contained spaces, primed for explosions. Those who seek to escape party orthodoxy are stigmatized and insulted; the end-caps must be maintained.
None of the bombs delivered this week appear to have gone off; they were failures, in a sense. But bombers usually get better the more practice they have, until they attain the destruction they desire. And then, when the method is perfected, is when the real danger arises.
Comments:
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I am overwhelmed by the vastness of this attack and the audacity of the person(s) who are behind this. I have no mercy in my heart for any of them at this point.
So many thoughts. So easy to feel totally bereft of hope. I tend to agree with Christine (and you Mark). I hope we catch this perpetrator soon and punish him with the full force of law.
This one person among 327,500,000 worries me, mostly because one unhinged individual (or a very small coterie of unhinged individuals) can do so much damage.
As for our politics, values, discourse, and morals, I am a bit numb and pessimistic about our politics and our discourse (critical condition) but somewhat optimistic about our values and morals. That is, the vast majority of us continue to value truth, family, life, community, Christian (universal religious) precepts, and civic virtues. So, at some point when politics and discourse reaches rock bottom (maybe quite soon), perhaps we will begin to re-imagine our public space and moral framework more in line with our shared values. Creative destruction?
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This one person among 327,500,000 worries me, mostly because one unhinged individual (or a very small coterie of unhinged individuals) can do so much damage.
As for our politics, values, discourse, and morals, I am a bit numb and pessimistic about our politics and our discourse (critical condition) but somewhat optimistic about our values and morals. That is, the vast majority of us continue to value truth, family, life, community, Christian (universal religious) precepts, and civic virtues. So, at some point when politics and discourse reaches rock bottom (maybe quite soon), perhaps we will begin to re-imagine our public space and moral framework more in line with our shared values. Creative destruction?
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