I don't want to get this thread filled with bomb-making stuff and locked, BUT....

[Robb]

...This "oh, the Times Square bomb was never dangerous" meme is absurd. I know it makes everyone feel smug and superior that they could've built a better bomb, but it's not particularly realistic.

"It didn't explode, so Faisal Shahzad is teh stupid!11!"
- It didn't go off as planned. Great. Half the bombs set in history that weren't stamped "US Military" on them didn't. Ask anyone who's lived around bombers, Peshawar, Bagdhad, Bogota, or Belfast.

"OMG he used the wrong kind of fertilizer!!11"
- We have no idea why the fertilizer was in there. There are lots of non-explosive reasons to have it around, besides growing potatoes.

"Propane? I saw on Mythbusters it won't blow up! Hank Hilll!!!"
- Not if you shoot at it, probably not. But put it next to a big enough incendiary explosion and you've got something.

"Pff. It said he used firecrackers. Firecrackers can't hurt me."
- Yes, he did. According to FBI deputy director John Pistole he put http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/World/Story/STIStory_522732.html">more than 110 kg of M-80s into a pressure cooker. That's 250 pounds of explosives, in 'Murkin dollars. That's a nice big bomb.

Yes, we can pooh-pooh this guy in retrospect. But he still drove a bomb into a busy street and tried to set it off. Somewhere between the timing device and the pressure cooker he mucked it up, but that's no reason to be self-congratulatory here.

We got lucky, nothing more, nothing less.

[ShortnFiery]

1. My tin foil hat says "Manchurian Candidate" for PsyOps / distraction purposes.

Europe is blowing up and the IMF is raping Greece of all it's pension funds. :tinfoilhat:

[Statistical]

4. "IMF is raping Greece"

:rofl:

Greece doesn't have a pension fund. They simply keep spending money that doesn't exist and was never there's to begin with.

It would be like you borrowing a million bucks from me putting into a bank account and calling it your retirement fund. When I ask you to pay me back you say "hey stop raping MY retirement fund". Sorry champ but funding your retirement with other peoples money is generally not a good plan.

Greece pension fund (and every other govt funded program) is funded with OTHER PEOPLES MONEY!

Don't want to get "raped" then don't take other peoples money. Certainly don't take it for something as critical as retirement.

[ShortnFiery]

11. People in Greece pay high taxes and do pay INTO pension funds.

Will you personally hand over your Social Security that YOU paid into to the IMF?

Yes, the Greek People are being RAPED of their public services that THEY paid into with their hard earned tax dollars.

[Statistical]

13. No the people in Greece DON'T PAY taxes (or at least not enough to pay for the services promised).

Tax evasion is a national pastime in Greece.
Tax enforcement is extremely lax.

If all of Greece debt was erased (blam - magic gone) with no penalty and no interest Greece would STILL have an 8.5% deficit.

That is simply not sustainable (not for Greece and not for us).
Excluding all debt Greece still doesn't collect enough revenue to pay for the promises it makes.

REVENUE < EXPENSES = BANKRUPTCY.

[ShortnFiery]

14. Oh, so the people who OBEY the law and can't afford attorneys to GET AROUND taxes need to be fleeced

What a perfect world you live in. :(

[Statistical]

16. LOL. Obey the law. Nobody obeys the tax code in Greece. I mean NOBODY!

I am not talking about legally avoided taxes. We are talking about simply NOT PAYING taxes and giving the govt the middle finger.

Greece income tax system is based on stated income. Works about as good as those "liar loans" for mortgages. So if you make $50,000 a year you simply state your income is $25,000 or $20,000 or $12,000. The burden of proof is on the govt and tax enforcement is notoriously lax. Everyone (I mean 100% of the population) cheats. The only question is by how much. Some cheat 20% some cheat 90%. Roughly 30% of Greece economy is "shadow economy" to avoid VAT. To put that into perspective about 4% of US economy is "shadow economy" and that is more because it involves illegal stuff rather than any attempt to avoid taxation.

Even if Greece debt was magically gone it has an 8.5% direct deficit (spending excluding interest > revenue by 8.5%).

So even if the debt fairy erased all Greece past mistakes and their national debt went to $0.00 they WOULD STILL need to either
a) cut spending 8.5%
b) raise taxes 8.5%
c) some combination of raising taxes & cutting spending by 8.5%

You can't keep spending other peoples money forever.

[Kalun D]

27. Greece Tax Code

sounds like corporate tax revenues in the US. The highest on paper but one of the lowest in effective tax rate

and the crooked Obama backed bankers are raping Greece regardless of what they pay in taxes.

""You can't keep spending other peoples money forever.""

apparently Goldman Sachs thinks you can.

[Blue-Jay]

22. .

[customerserviceguy]

2. We did get lucky. Twice.

The Christmas underpants bomber was also an incompetent. It's good that our radical islamic enemies have not been able to recruit anybody smarter lately, but eventually, one will slip through.

[Statistical]

3. No he WAS an idiot (and we are lucky that he was an idiot).

Someone who had no clue that his combination of crap had 0.0000000000000% chance of being a significant explosive device. I mean look at his equipment list. fertilizer, firecrackers, gasoline, propane tanks. Likely all stuff he saw/read/heard makes a bomb. Generally bombs don't require that much diverse and useless elements. A trigger and some sort of explosive or incendiary material is all that is necessary (sometimes like in Oklahoma city bombing using an oxidizer makes the reaction more energetic).

I mean you think he would have made a smaller test "non-bomb" taken it somewhere remote and discovered that it doesn't detonate.

The insurgents I dealt with in Iraq had far better skills at actually putting together the right combination of stuff to make a bomb. Sometimes they didn't go off. Sometimes they went off but were improperly timed however they at least had the chance of causing an explosive chain. Hell some kids in my neighborhood built a better bomb out of pipes and matches. The caused some damage to mailboxes (the apt style with 20+ boxes in one box) before they got caught. 250 pounds of firecrackers does not equal 250 pounds of high explosives.

I do agree we did get lucky. We got lucky the bomber was an incompetent idiot. Had someone with Timothy McVeigh level of knowledge gotten a real bomb into the same location we could have seen dozens or hundreds dead.

[madokie]

5. No we WAS an idiot.

does carry some weight coming from you, huh :-) :hi:

Add: this, No we WAS an idiot. came straight from the reply I replied to before it was edited as it will be again I'm sure, as is the case so many times with this one.

[Robb]

8. In Iraq, you've got HE sitting around.

...But if you can't see how dangerous 250 pounds of flash powder under pressure is, you've got nothing to stand on but some weird McVeigh worship.

[Statistical]

9. "weird McVeigh worship"

What a weak and sad personal attack.

McVeigh was a monster but technically he did the "right" things to create a functional explosive device.

No bomb is perfect. McVeighs bomb could have failed to detonate. It happens but at least the theory was sound.
TRIGGER + EXPLOSIVE + OXIDIZER.

This guy just combined a bunch of useless (and overlapping) components that sound "explody" together.
I mean gasoline AND propane? For what purpose other than the guy had no clue. How about propane and some device to blow the valves? Wait that might actually have exploded.

KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid.

[KittyWampus]

10. the insurgents you dealt w/abroad had training. So, yeah I guess he was an uneducated dumbass

[leveymg]

6. They had to have their eyes on him for some time. Travel to Pakistan, the recorded phone calls,

let him get on the plane (to see who else might join him).

Or, perhaps, NSA is just warehousing all that intercepted data for its own sake . . . we got lucky, again, this time.

[N_E_1 for Tennis]

7. Just one more reason to STOP THE WARS. n/t

[Tsiyu]

12. Robb, You're a Dingbat

Just had to say that...sorry

Good thread, other than that :)

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

15. 110kg of M-80's fits into a pressure cooker? What the **** kind of pressure cooker?!?

M-80s are small. Do you have any idea how much space 110kg (~240lbs) of M-80s takes up?!?!
I'd guess a small/medium pallate of M80 firecrackers weighs that much.
Certainly more than any pressure cooker I've ever encountered. I call bullshit.

Modern (legal) M-80s contain a maximum of 50mg powder and a plaster-like casing in a cardboard tube (~0.5" X 1.5"lg).
That's right, only 50mg of powder. Even the old REAL (civilian illegal) M-80s only contained about 3 grams of powder.
I'd guess that either a real or modern m80 only weighs no more than about 10g apiece with the tube, caps, and fuse...
Ain't no 110kg fittin' into any pressure cooker. By my estimate that'd be about 10000+ M-80 firecrackers.

This guy is an an idiot. So much so, that I seriously doubt the involment of more than one brain.

[arcadian]

17. Has it come out yet that he was working closely with an FBI informant

who was working closely with the FBI? I'm sure it will, just like all the rest.

[berni_mccoy]

18. Bush Got Lucky Too... List of Terrorist Attacks in the U.S. during his 2nd Term:

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/berni_mccoy/973

[Mopar151]

19. I would respectfully disagree.

Certainly, he had the intent to cause mayhem and multiple deaths. He had SOME of the ingredents - but it was a truly pitiful attempt. Scores of American teenagers terrorize mailboxes with more effectiveness every weekend.

[TreasonousBastard]

20. He IS an idiot and his "organization" is no better. But, someone got us to spend billions...

chasing down assholes who can't light up their shoes or underpants and brag how smart we are that now we caught another one.

This guy went throught "training" to load up a car with this stuff? And we buy it? Just like we bought how "well-organized" the sneaker bomber was?

All over the world there are real bombs going off, set by some very nasty people who know what they're doing, and we get these losers? Something's odd about that. (Not that I want the nasty ones taking up space here, but it just makes no sense if they really want to hurt us.)

BTW, propane can blow. Back in the early 80s a lunch truck in downtown NYC had its propane cylinder go off and it put over 100 people in Beekman-Downtown Hospital while blowing out windows up at least to the fifth floors. Buildings weren't structurally damaged, but it was one hell of a mess to walk through. (We heard it two blocks away up on the 23rd floor and saw stuff blown around that high.)

According to the article, the firecrackers weren't M-80s, but M-88s, which are lameass little crackers in a big package. Still tough to fit over 200 pounds of them into anything less than a big box, though, so somethings wrong.

[Robb]

24. Maybe just a lot of convincing went on in Waziristan

...some arrangements for family, etc. Not training. Hard to say, since I wasn't there.

And I agree, something's wrong. But the 250 pounds came from the FBI, so what the hell do I know.

I do know this: fill a pressure cooker to the rim with anything explosive and ignite it and you've certainly got enough force to go through a propane tank or three.

[slackmaster]

21. He's a Muslin

:nuke:

[Ilsa]

23. I'm not certain her was an idiot. I'm wondering if he was forced to do it,

but didn't want to hurt anyone. I wonder if his family was threatened by the radicals and he did this in this way so he wouldn't actually hurt anyone, but to appease the radicals by attempting it. He was begging to get caught, leaving receipts in the car, his house keys, etc.

I'm convinced we'll never know the whole story's major facts. I'm not at the point of feeling sorry for him. I'm just entertaining an alternative scenario.

[Robb]

25. Or greed. We're all guessing

...but there's nothing wrong with good old greed, too. Maybe it was a good payday. :shrug:

[Kalun D]

26. Absurdity

""This "oh, the Times Square bomb was never dangerous" meme is absurd.""

It's absurd to think that. Even if it had gone off it would have been a fireball at best. There was nothing there that would have ruptured the propane tanks.

Even if it had been a big explosion the threat of getting killed by "terrorism" is miniscule. Like 100 times as rare as lighting. The chances are magnitudes greater of getting killed by pharmacueticals, cancer, diabetes, cell phone drivers.

It's rediculous to worry about getting killed by "terror". It's just something the MIMC is using as an excuse to get people to be afraid and support their wars for oil.

[bridgit]

28. "unexploded ordnance"? I know I feel better when its laying in green grass, however...

Whether here whether there whether boom-boom or no it represents the kinds of ideas that tend to retain their inertia


Fertilizer? Farm peeps I know like chicken-shit http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/aa205 cause its high in nitrogen from pecking up all that seed off the ground like scratch that someone tossed there so maybe RW chicken-hawk chicken-shit is the very best cause GOP chicken-hawk chicken-shits peck the earth like no others; but I have to mention that when Sam Noble is able to tie the price of nitrogen to natural gas

http://www.noble.org/Ag/Soils/NitrogenPrices/Index.htm You know right there there's more going on than the smell and the fact that high nitrous chicken-shit can blow the pit right out of your cherry

Propane? No, no, no...propane go BOOM! It says right there on the can, see?


Firecrackers? Wellll, so go buy one, hold it tight in the palm of your hand and light the fuse, but basically? We'll talk more when you're feeling a bit better :)
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_88m2S1-ucwM/Sv1bl-MZ4-I/AAAAAAAAB2U/og9bF11CV2Q/s400/2753+Clyne+Veg+Fest+2009+sm.jpg

We got lucky no doubt. In a world where some contend that there are no accidents: does 'luck' favor the prepared? You bet it does!

And it has been all day yesterday the bush/Cheney RW/GOP neocon Chicken-Hawk Chicken-Shit-Talking Hate & Birthers have continued to assert the folly of preparation as memorized in g.w. bush's and his BS 'no fly watch list' that failed to catch this guy due to a foolish, RW update parameter that equaled little more than window dressing

Janet Napolitano held in hand (And no! Its not Limbaugh's "This guy was a registered Democrat! He was a Democrat!!!" or Sullivan's Beck's or Palin's business its America's business) a list far more actionable that *caused* the airlines to update his already suspected-ass and FBI tracked/tracking activities *onto* that plane *in time* to see him smiling from a window seat (Dubai would have sent him back anyway but clearly American cohesion is not the GOP tactic - it is calamity, chaos & unfocused dis-union). A list that caused a further stripping away of any RW claim to national security as represented in all things GOP and the bush/Cheney/Halliburton admin more specifically

The GOP will have to answer for this one themselves. Dems are busy identifying the institutionalized dross of the bush/Cheney-GOP and the ASAP capture of all these scampering spiders & worms these BS RW chicken-hawk chicken-shits have dumped all over the floor