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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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people may have a very quixotic idea of their own or others' bono

By far my favorite phrase of the day.

one beautiful thing of the hypothetical true masterminds would have been to make the ultimate guilty party the radical wing of German Greens or some other environmental nuts.

But these groups are surely even more ineffectual than the Mexican cartels, no? It takes a lot less sophistication to bomb an undersea pipeline than to put a man on the moon or whatever, but surely a lot more than it takes to block traffic, and I see the latter as more within the capabilities of enviro-nuts.

Edit: Seeing elsewhere in the thread that the pipe was only 350 feet underwater. Maybe this operation would have been within the capabilities of the enviro-nuts after all, and could have been disguised as such -- but the size of the actual explosion seems like it would have been beyond them.

Breivik made a bomb of that scale in his garage barn, alone, from freely available fertilizer. McVeigh's one was vastly more potent. Dumping something of that sort from a fishing vessel or a yacht, guiding it with a few underwater scooters to the pipe, is not much harder. I suppose you're contemptuous of Greens and believe they're intellectually below either of those men, but it's eminently doable.

You could be right. I really don't know. Do you really just build a bomb like this and then shove it off the side of a boat? Do fertilizer bombs even detonate when they're waterlogged? Do the kind of detonators someone like Breivik could access even work under 350 feet of water pressure? Beats me.

Half a ton of explosives (1009 kg per explosion according to Swedes) and some very good amateur divers could have done it.

Of course, right before the explosions and in recent weeks the areas was being patrolled by US Navy helicopters, according to a plane movement website.