I shared this with Lawrence on Saturday, and he was amused (in the “WTF?!” sense):
“Georgia man sentenced to 20 years for bombing woman’s home, planting python to eat her daughter”.
In case you were wondering: 20 years. Federal time, so there’s no parole.
(Also on the “WTF?!” front, a very quick review of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”: pretentious navel-gazing crap.)
I would like to remind everyone that the “flames” in “you’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena” are metaphorical, not literal. Most of the time.
Why do I feel a need to put that reminder out there?
A deputy mayor of Los Angeles had his home raided by the FBI yesterday.
“A questionable LA politician? Quel fromage!” I know, right? But the reason is interesting, and you will rarely (I hope) see this combination of categories together.
The deputy mayor is suspected of phoning in a bomb threat to City Hall. He was…
So he has close ties with law enforcement. According to the report, the LAPD initially determined that he was the likely originator of the threat, but turned the case over the FBI because of his law enforcement ties. (I would also think that bomb threats, especially ones against municipal buildings, would fall under Federal purview. But I Am Not A Lawyer.)
Additional coverage from the LAT, but it really doesn’t add much.
I’m not naming him here, even though he is named in the articles, because he hasn’t been charged with a crime yet and is entitled to the presumption of innocence. Honestly, though, making a bomb threat is a pretty stupid crime. These days, phone calls and other electronic communications are easily traceable. Unless you’re very very careful and practice good OPSEC and COMSEC, you’re going to get caught. I think most bomb threats these days are phoned in by teenagers who wouldn’t know OPSEC and COMSEC if it walked up and bit them. Which is generally what happens.
TMQ: It’s money time in the NFL
What does that even mean? And why does TMQ feel compelled to start off with horse racing metaphors?
After the jump, this week’s TMQ (which you won’t be able to read in its entirety unless you subscribe to “All Predictions Wrong”, which is the actual title of Gregg Easterbrook’s Substack)…
I’ve written before about the Halifax explosion.
I did not know that Damn Interesting had also done an article, and since Alan Bellows is a much better writer than I am, I would encourage you to read it.
(Also, if you feel like it, I’d encourage you to throw a few dollars at Damn Interesting. They’ve missed their goals for the past couple of months and I’m a little worried about the continuing viability of the site.)
Mike Batayeh, actor and comedian. NYT (archived). Other credits include a show I do not acknowledge the existence of, “The Shield”, and “Life”.
Burning in Hell watch: Ted Kaczynski.
His terrorist strategy, and the ideas that he said undergirded it, enjoyed an afterlife few would have predicted in the 1990s.
The Norwegian news media reported that Anders Beivik, who killed dozens of people at government buildings and at a youth summer camp in 2011, lifted passages from Mr. Kaczynski’s manifesto in a manifesto of his own. More curious was the way a variety of law-abiding Americans developed an interest in the same line of thought.
In 2017, the deputy editor of the conservative publication First Things, Elliot Milco, credited Mr. Kaczynski with “astute (even prophetic) insights.” In 2021, during an interview with the businessman and politician Andrew Yang, Tucker Carlson cited Mr. Kaczynski’s thinking in detail without any prompting.
Online, young people with a variety of partisan allegiances, or none at all, have developed an intricate vocabulary of half-ironic Unabomber support. They proclaim themselves “anti-civ” or #tedpilled; they refer to “Uncle Ted.” Videos on TikTok of Unabomber-related songs, voice-overs and dances have acquired millions of views, according to a 2021 article in The Baffler.
Hugh Scrutton, Thomas Mosser, and Gilbert Murray were unavailable for comment.
Two really weird crime stories from the past few days.
1. Four bicyclists went missing in Oklahoma last week.
Later in the week, police pulled human remains out of a river.
…
“We believe the men planned to commit some kind of criminal act when they left the resident on West 6th Street,” Prentice told reporters.
“That belief is based on information supplied by a witness who reports they were invited to go with the men to ‘hit a lick’ big enough for all of them,” he said, using slang for obtaining money illegally.
It is a shame that Big Don Westlake is dead, as this sounds like something out of a Parker novel.
2. The Mad Midnight Bomber What Bombed at Midnight was a cosplayer. And a sex offender.
…
The victim, identified in court documents as NK, suffered serious injuries. He and his girlfriend, identified as SB, were members of the “Dagorhir” gaming community along with McCoy.
The game is described as “a live-action roleplaying (LARP) battle game” involving medieval costumes and mock combat with prop weapons.
McCoy approached SB over Discord and confessed his romantic feelings for her. She turned him down, reminding him she was dating NK. So McCoy built a homemade bomb, gift-wrapped it and dropped it off at NK’s doorstep, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland.
He researched how to build it, bought materials in cash from multiple stores to conceal his efforts, and ultimately built a package bomb that he placed inside a shipping box, which he drove to the victim’s house himself, according to prosecutors.
The bomber seems fairly clever. But not clever enough: they got DNA, they got location data from his cellphone, and they got video from a neighbor’s doorbell camera.
I hate to link to Crimereads two days in a row, but this is another one of those articles I feel like I have to link. Especially since it lets me tick off multiple categories from my list:
“Fireworks at Graceland: How Elvis Spent His Last Christmas Before Boot Camp“.
I’m not going to add it to my wish list yet, but Christmas with Elvis (affiliate link) sounds like it could be a fun book.
From the LAT (through archive.is):
At a news conference, Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore said officials responding to a home on the 700 block of East 27th Street had found several thousand pounds of illegal fireworks as well as improvised explosive devices that were “more unstable.”
An LAPD bomb squad transferred the improvised devices into the iron chamber of a semitruck that’s meant to contain such explosive material, he said.
Police detonated the devices at 7:37 p.m., believing that the vehicle would be able to contain the explosion, but there was a “total catastrophic failure of that containment vehicle,” Moore said.
…
At the residence’s patio, officers found several thousand pounds of commercial fireworks stacked 8 to 10 feet high in boxes, and bomb squad personnel spent the day moving them to be stored at another location.
Officers also found improvised explosive devices with simple fuses — about 40 the size of Coke cans and 200 smaller objects of similar construction — and conducted X-rays to determine their contents.
Less than 10 pounds of the devices were transferred into a semitruck, which Moore said was rated, with its outer containment shell, to handle 18 pounds. Officials established a 300-foot perimeter behind the vehicle and evacuated the north and south sides of 27th Street.
According to reports, none of the injuries are “life-threatening”.
FotB RoadRich can correct me if I’m wrong, but I have a memory of APD’s bomb squad telling us (when we were going through the Citizen’s Police Academy) that the most dangerous thing a bomb squad does is…disposal of fireworks. I don’t know if that’s because they do more fireworks disposal than anything else, because people get blasé around them (“It’s just fireworks!”), or if because fireworks are more volatile than anything else they deal with.
Edited to add: Lawrence sent over this tweet from CBS LA: their helicopter was directly overhead when…
WATCH: Sky9 was overhead when police attempted to detonate a stash of illegal fireworks that ended in an explosion in the 700 block of East 27th Street in South L.A. https://t.co/KpWiAEoyqv pic.twitter.com/UbIXLDoZjh
— CBS Los Angeles (@CBSLA) July 1, 2021
George Stranahan, colorful figure.
His family owned the Champion Spark Plug company, so he had family money. He got a PhD in physics, and spent a lot of time doing physics in the late 1950s.
So he did:
The Aspen Center for Physics was born. It proved pivotal in the development of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, for a long time the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, and the formulation of string theory, regarded by many physicists as the most promising candidate for a “theory of everything” that would explain all the universe’s physical phenomena.
Sixty-six Nobel laureates have visited. “I’m convinced all the best physics gets done there,” Tony Leggett, one of those Nobelists, wrote on the center’s website. Another, Brian Schmidt, called the center “the place I have gone to expand my horizons for the entirety of my career.”
He cut back on his involvement in physics in 1972.
He went on to found Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey (which I have heard good things about, but never been able to find) and Flying Dog beer.
He also did some ranching:
In 1990, Mr. Stranahan’s Limousin bull Turbo was declared grand champion at the 1990 National Western Stock Show, a highly regarded trade show. The price for a shot of Turbo’s semen rose to $15,000.
He quit the business not long after. Even with Turbo, Mr. Stranahan estimated that he lost $1 million during 18 years of ranching.
Going back for a minute, if the Woody Creek Tavern rings a bell with you, yes, that was Hunter S. Thompson’s hangout. Mr. Stranahan and Hunter were close friends.
Mr. Thompson either leased or bought the land he lived on from Mr. Stranahan. The details of the arrangement, intended to be easy on Mr. Thompson, appear to have been lost in a haze of friendship and misbehavior. The first time the two men met, Mr. Stranahan told Vanity Fair in 2003, they took mescaline that hit him “like a sledgehammer.”
“We talked a lot, drank a lot and dynamited a lot,” Mr. Stranahan said about their friendship in a 2008 interview with The Denver Post. “If you’re a rancher, you have access to dynamite.”
For the historical record: NYT obit for Frank Bonner.
Military History Monday!
This is also the last entry in MilHisMon. Sort of. It’s complicated.
Somewhere in my collection of books on leadership, I have a thin little pamphlet that I picked up at the National Museum of the Pacific War: “Arleigh Burke on Leadership”.
Who was Arleigh Burke, other than being a guy who has a whole class of destroyers named after him?
“Saluting Admiral Arleigh Burke”, circa about 1961 (around the time he retired, after three terms as Chief of Naval Operations).
Bonus #1: This might be the last chance I get to do one of these. Plus: CanCon!
“Canadair CF-104 Starfighter”.
Bonus #2: And as long as I’m taking last chances…”Secrets of the F-14 Tomcat: Inflight Refueling” from Ward Carroll.
As a side note, which I learned from Mr. Carroll this past weekend, did not know previously, and don’t really have a good place to stick it: one of Donald Trump’s final pardons was granted to Randall “Duke” Cunningham.
Bonus #3: A documentary about “Operation Blowdown”.
“Operation Blowdown”? Yes: back in 1963, the Australian military decided to simulate a nuclear blast in a rain forest, just to see what conditions would be like afterwards. Because, you know, why the heck not?
A device containing was detonated to partially simulate a ten kiloton air burst in the Iron Range jungle. The explosives were sourced from obsolete artillery shells and placed in a tower 42 metres (138 ft) above ground level and 21 metres (69 ft) above the rainforest canopy. After the explosion, troops were moved through the area (which was now covered in up to a metre of leaf litter), to test their ability to transit across the debris. In addition, obsolete vehicles and equipment left near the centre of the explosion were destroyed.
There’s someone on the ‘Tube who has a channel, “Demolition Dave Drilling and Blasting”. I think he’s ‘stralian, mate.
In this video, Dave reviews a Chinese generator.
How do you say “Harbor Freight” in Australian?
Mike the Musicologist sent me this: it is a little more recent than I’d like, and I think I’ve seen it linked on Hacker News, but I still think it’s worth highlighting here.
“What Really Happened at the Oroville Dam Spillway?” from Practical Engineering.
Finally, here’s something that’s just about 25 minutes long, and that I think some folks will enjoy: “The Unfortunate History of the AMC Pacer”.
“There’s a fine line between uniqueness and strange.”
I said I wasn’t going to make Safety Saturday a thing, and I’m still not. However, I do have a couple of videos I can’t pass up.
“Handling Explosives in Underground Mines”. There’s some good information in here, if you are a miner.
The most important safety tip, which is not covered in this video, is: do not try to cross Boyd Crowder.
Bonus #1: How about something different? Like trains?
Bonus #2: This could have gone in Military History Monday, but it is short and amused me. The Marines remind you: “Safety First”.
Don’t forget to hydrate.