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So...is there any reporting whatsoever on the giant explosion that killed at least sixteen at an explosives factory in Tennessee?
The latest I can find on it seems to be treating it as most likely an industrial accident, but secondarily a "criminal" matter. The company website appears to have been turned into a flat landing page about the accident.
The NYT is treating it as an accident, headlining their work "Detonation Underscores Inherent Dangers of Manufacturing Explosives." This appears to be back page news across the country. I saw it reported in the paper, and a passing mention on CNBC.
But what shocks me is that the right wing news organizations aren't looking into it! Quickly glancing at the websites of FoxNews, OANN, and Breitbart at noon today, I didn't see one of them mentioning it on their front page. Instead headlines were devoted to such pressing issues as some kind of drummed up urban conflict storyline, a state department employee who mishandled classified documents, and Charlie Kirk. Breitbart in particular has their top article: Exposed: The CCP’s United Front Network in America’s Heartland, Part III engaging in extensive conspiracy theories about CCP influence in the United States. But WHY AREN'T THEY TALKING ABOUT THE REALLY REALLY LIKELY RUSSIAN SABOTAGE THAT JUST HAPPENED IN TENNESSEE KILLING 16 AMERICAN CITIZENS AND DESTROYING AN INDUSTRIAL DEFENSE CONCERN?
It seems really bleedingly obvious to me. We have the facts: that Trump announced publicly that he would offer targeting help to Ukraine and is thinking about adding Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine's quiver. Then, not a few days later, a defense plant in Tennessee blows up. Is it not clear that the latter is likely to be a consequence of the former? Russia covertly blows up a defense plant, to tell the USA "we can touch you, don't think we can't."
I might be tinfoil-hatting here. But what's making me tinfoil hat is that nobody else is tinfoil hatting! Even the people who are normally tinfoil hatting! The New York Times and the TurboLib MSNBC contingent has been seeing Russia's wicked hand everywhere since 2016, and more than ever since the war in the Ukraine began. Why are they ignoring the likelihood that Russia killed 16 American citizens? OANN sees wicked foreigners behind every corner seeking to undermine America, why aren't they at least floating the possibility that a foreign saboteur just undermined America's industrial strength? Breitbart doesn't have high standards for proof when reporting on possible foreign conspiracies, and they aren't saying anything!
What's going on here? Am I crazy?
The only explanations I can come to are that it was the Russians, and that's why it isn't being speculated in the news that it was the Russians. Either that the government is shutting everyone up quietly to avoid panic. Or that it was the Russians and they have enough pull with Breitbart to keep them quiet. Because I genuinely can't believe I'm not seeing speculation about this. Talk me off the ledge here guys.
I think the media isn't suggesting the Russians did it for the simple reason that there's no cause to think that they did. This is a tiny factory in a rural area. Even if it had a tremendous amount of automation, those sixteen people weren't supplying even one percent of the military's ordinance. It simply makes no sense to target it for sabotage.
Also worth noting is that industrial accidents of this type aren't exactly unheard of. In fact, there was a smaller explosion at this same site around a decade ago.
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I can think of another explanation: Explosives factories sometimes blow up and Fox News doesn't cover everything. Industrial accidents aren't exactly sensational reporting, and they probably take a lot more legwork than reporting on Trump's tweets or whatever. I'm not surprised that not every media outlet is covering it.
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I don't see the conspiracy angle here and I can see from the other posts that I'm not the only nooticer who feels that way. But you clearly aren't alone in your assumption either! Is this a case of different cultures inculcating different pattern matching behaviours? It does make me think - the closest this came to triggering my 'that's retarded' impulse is it made me think 'reeeeaaally?' Meanwhile I feel like I spend most of my time on X thinking 'well that's retarded'. And part of that is of course that I trust you and your judgement more than some X rando and thus extend you more charity, and similarly I don't want this to be false for political reasons (although I try not to let that influence me anyway), but there is more to it than that. I guess the 'that's retarded' impulse gets triggered when someone's pattern matching behaviour doesn't just not align with my own but aligns against the patterns I have internalised. This is probably obvious to most people but it just clicked for me.
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I think blowing up Americans on US soil would be contrary to the interests of the Kremlin.
Trump has been solidly meh about Ukraine. Sometimes he chews out Zelenskyy for not dressing adequately, then he is angry at Putin for a bit for blowing up yet another hospital, or wanting them to agree to a peace so he finally gets his Nobel.
However, Trump does have a vindictive streak. Piss him off and he will still try to destroy you eight years later.
Putin blowing up Americans would piss off Trump badly because it would be interpreted as "he made me look bad". Him being on Trump's shitlist instead of having a relationship status of "it's complicated" would hurt his aims a lot more than the Tomahawk missiles.
That's a good argument. The only counterargument I have is Putin having already made stupid decisions in 2014 and 2022. I have consistently failed to model his thought processes, so if I agree it's contrary to the interests of the Kremlin it doesn't mean he won't think it's worth doing either.
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Explosives factories can sometimes explode, you’re tinfoil hatting, and this kind of random terrorism on US soil would be an escalation for Russia.
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It would be really cool if the USCSB wasn't being shut down; if you haven't seen their investigation videos about industrial disasters, they really are wonderful.
Looks like they're only being targeted because they're "independent". Seems to me it would make sense to move them under the Department of Labor.
That's the thing; they're not just an extension of OSHA. Their primary focus isn't labor safety, or environmental quality, or industry standards, it's process safety, which touches all of those. Their role is inherently cross-functional, as you can see from the variety of organizations they make recommendations to.
Anyway, it's not being moved, it's just being destroyed. Whatever the talk there is about it being redundant, it's not being consolidated with something else, and its function will go unfulfilled.
Depends on whether or not they are actually duplicative. The proposal does not say that its function will go unfufilled; it says it should rest with other agencies with rulemaking authority.
Is that actually happening? Do you have any reason at all to believe that we're not going to lose that functionality? The budget request says:
But those agencies don't do that. Their recommendations are well-regarded by the industry (see also the quote from the American Chemistry Council here).
I note that EPA's budget is being halved, and OSHA's is being cut as well; they're also eliminating EPA's Office of Research and Development entirely.
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Because Russia can only lose. This will give Trump reason to throw way more assistance to Ukraine, where as right now he does the bare minimum of support to shut down the critics. Also - they are not that competent to pull off such kind of thing traceless. If they are going to risk the wrath of Trump it is going to be for something big.
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I don’t think there’s any actual evidence of foul play here. What you are calling a Russian attack is at best a Post-Hoc claim. Trump promised more weapons to Ukraine, and threatened more tariffs for Chinese goods, and got a ceasefire agreement in Israel. Any one of those could be the reason for an attack. But that assumes there was an attack at all. Maybe it actually was just an accident.
Quite possibly this was not an attack but I don't think it's a post-hoc claim; the warning that Russia would strike our infrastructure has been registered in some corners well in advance of this happening. Jack Murphy reported in 2022 that the CIA was conducting a sabotage campaign inside Russian soil and I've been operating under the assumption that the Russians would retaliate in kind (if the claims were true, which seemed plausible) ever since.
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Russia is much more comfortable directing sabotage operations on European soil than American soil. Since Putin came to power he has overtly, publicly assassinated dozens in Europe, including many in Western European countries like the UK, Spain and Germany. Russia also planned assassinations of major military and defense figures like the Rheinmetall CEO. He hasn’t assassinated anyone overtly in the USA, and hasn’t even come close to assassinating US defense figures.
If they were going to escalate by blowing up a munitions factory, they would 100% do so in Europe.
Alternately, Russia so successfully sabotaged the US decades ago, they no longer need to today.
I suppose it wouldn't be in YouTube's interest to add an AI auto summary to videos but it'd be nice because I'm not watching that to find out what your point might be.
Actually, YouTube nowadays is adding automatic AI summaries to many videos, though apparently not the one linked above.
Example
That’s an AI ad / promo more than a summary. Kind of like the difference between a blurb and a summary.
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Never attribute to malice what can be explained by human incompetence. Unfortunately, industrial explosions are rather common (see r/CatastropicFailure for proof). I imagine this is another industrial accident rather than some sort of hostile attack.
My friend is an industrial welder, he's told me our town has multiple large chemical plants which are basically bombs ready to explode.
On a tangent, the EPA kind-of expects some of this at scale, and requires environmental standby trusts. While Noxious Chemical Co., Inc. is operating its plant making substances that for-the-love-of-God will hopefully never leak out, it has to put money aside in a trust that it can’t unilaterally withdraw without the EPA’s joint consent.
This way, if there’s a catastrophic explosion loosing horrid material at its plant, Noxious Chemical Co. can’t just file Chapter 7 and leave the rest of society solely responsible for the cost of cleanup.
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Because "blast in explosives factory" is not necessarily "OMG, the only possible explanation is Russian sabotage"? Flour mills blow up, too, as do cement plants, and they're not even deliberately making things that go "boom!"
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Wasn't it the civilian side that blew up?
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Hating russia isn't right coded. What's the angle here?
Not quite. There's a sub-set of the right that's very, very much into hating Russia.
The left just glosses that over in place of the right who are sick and tired of involvement in foreign wars and go 'not my problem' and take that as endorsement.
Yes - but that is the pro-establishment right, who have been totally pwned in intra-right politics by the anti-establishment right.
There isn't a right-wing faction that are influential in the Trump administration or the MAGA movement more broadly that are "very much into hating Russia"
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According to news sources, the plant manufacturered TNT, among other things.
TNT has several relevant attributes here: compared to most high explosives, it is considerably cheaper, which means it can be produced in comparatively large quantities. Compared to most high explosives, it is also very unstable and dangerous (C4 famously can be burned without detonation, other military-grade HEXs are similar). TNT is also very dirty to manufacture, and has been mostly been banned from production in the US, with defense concerns only recently restarting production (AES appears to be one of those concerns). As a result, there is limited current experience in the US with best practices for safety measures.
While I am not a certified demolitions and ordnance engineer, I've dealt with them in the past, and this whole thing reeks of: "small industrial producer trying to make many metric shit-tons of TNT without grizzled old guys missing fingers to pass on the important lessons, goes about how you expect." Like the amount of safety precautions we had to take for explosives in the double-digit grams was both immense and sadly very necessary (an improperly sodered inflator squib blew up in an inspectors face killing him, shit is hazardous).
So I guess my point here is this seems like the logic of hoofbeats and zebras- malicious intervention from a foreign power is a possibility, certainly, but it seems vastly more probable this was an industrial accident.
Well, it was a Certified Women-Owned Small Business gaming the system for government contracts. Personally saw that shit all the time on contracts we were bidding for.
9 times out of 10 I assume it is "woman owned" because the owner gave 51% of ownership to his wife specifically for the purpose of gaming such contracts. My brother-in-law works at a factory where the owner did just that, and I have similar plans if I start a business.
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It's never been entirely clear to me how much of that was actual "feminist interpretive dancer-turned-defense contractor exec" and how much was "well we'll put General So-and-So's son's wife down as the President of the LLC for compliance purposes, but everyone knows the General still calls the shots"
All of the above, and the more contracts get diverted to small, minority owned businesses, the sloppier it gets. I saw my share of Certified Women/Minority Owned Businesses that just bid on contracts, any contract, and then aggressively staff up with questionable contractors to meet the letter of the contract. More or less the only permanent employees they have are project managers. Everyone else is from temp firms, H1B, and maybe a few private contractors with actual experience for the lead roles.
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I think this is plausibly correct. It might not even be about the Tomahawks: we're running sabotage teams on Russian soil, they're running sabotage teams on ours, we're both pretending that we aren't. Maybe something else happened in the specific case in Tennessee but my guess is that there's been an entire series of Recent Incidents that may later be revealed, if the .gov/Kremlin opens the books in 50 years, to have been done by Russian sabotage teams.
For states, violence is a form of negotiation. It makes governments look bad to admit that foreign sabotage teams are operating in their soil (both internationally, as it may constitute an act of war with the implications that entails and domestically, as it signals impotence or incompetence) but if you don't want to come off looking weaker in the negotiation you need to respond.
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I suspect that this was a state actor, maybe Russia, maybe China. No one took credit, which makes it pretty difficult for the talking heads to make hay on it.
For what it's worth (nothing at all), someone I follow on X says he's done tours of the facility and their safety standards were top-notch. I saw other people on X pointing and laughing that it's a woman-run business and this is just what you get when you let women make explosives.
I don't know if the American public will ever know what caused this, but hopefully there is someone in Homeland Security or the Military who is figuring it out and how to prevent it from happening again.
Why aren't the tinfoil hats all over this? Maybe they're too stupid to make the obvious inferences. Or maybe they are being suppressed to prevent a panic. I think there is just too little information. No cameras, no suspicious messages to decipher. Just an explosion at the explosion factory.
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I don't think you're being crazy here: there have been a number of announced foiled plots to attack EU arms manufacturers.
But it's not inconceivable that it was a garden-variety industrial accident, which do happen from time to time. PEPCON in 1988 in Nevada has some loose ends, but I haven't seen foreign sabotage seriously suggested even though the company was supplying solid rocket fuel for both the Space Shuttle and ICBMs. The USCSB series of videos on chemical plant accidents is sobering, if nothing else.
On the gripping hand, telling the public even if there were evidence of malfeasance inherently would raise the stakes towards calls for open warfare, and I can see an argument for responding in a subtle, yet clear-to-the-counterparty way under the table.
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