Today's New York Times and all the papers across the nation (almost all) that carry their drivel, reports that insurgents blow themselves up by wrapping explosives and ball bearings about their body.
Do they really wrap ball bearings are just plain steel balls? I can't imagine using a whole bearing. Why don't they never use tapered roller bearings? Linear bearings?
Obvious metal content!!
Ivan Vegvary
If the journalist can't keep carbon monoxide and carbon DIoxide straight, how can you expect them to keep the difference between "ball bearings" and "bearing balls" straight? And, of course, nails and bolts are pretty deadly, too.
Jon
Gunner
The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.
In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence, and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years . It has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaints, and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has been as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.
Theodore Dalrymple,
Those photos are chilling and gruesome. Sad.
Ivan Vegvary
Chuckle..nice people in first world civilized societies, seldom ever encounter the shitty end of the stick. Death and destruction are part and parcel of our lot on this planet, be it from a swung rock when Ogg wanted Mggs food portion, to a finely crafted high tech Fuel Air muniton detonating over a group of enemies engaged in a human wave attack.
But the result is all the same. What those nice people find chilling and gruesome..are everyday realites to many other groups.
How many kids these days have seen a deader? Grandma in her coffin. Uncle Bob in his.
Maybe a yellow tarp over a traffic accident victim as you pass by an acident scene in your car.
Sometimes I envy those nice people.
Gunner
The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.
In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence, and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years . It has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaints, and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has been as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.
Theodore Dalrymple,
Indeed. At one time there was an entire industry related to photographing the dead. This was of course at a time when photography was pretty uncommon, and death was not.
(check out the local cemetary sometime to see families with
10 or 12 tombstones, with more than half of the dates on them within a year or less)The idea was that you really didn't have a good photo of the person, so now was the time to literally prop them up and take one last picture. Typically this was done at home in the parlor.
Who else is exposed to death that much? Nurses of course. My mom said that it was sort of funny the way they would clear the hallways in the hospital and bring the gurney by with the sheet over the person, trying to be inconspicuous. "Better they just wheel them out in the open, nobody would notice a bit!"
At the nursing home she was staying at this past summer, my visits often ran late, well past their usual closing time. On serveral occasions I noticed the commercial ambulance idling outside for a pickup. I wondered why they would be delaying the job, the folks there mostly went to bed quite early. Then it dawned on me....
That nobody is exposed much to death nowadays is a direct result of the improvements in sanitation, and also antibiotics. Bascially folks just live longer and don't die so soon. No need to have
12 kids to get two or three to live.Jim
Gunner-I don't know why you find Ivan's statement funny. I don't think it's funny in the least. Nor your comments. And the worst thing is that there in absolutely no good reason why death by violence, natural disaster, or epidemics can't be as rare in the rest of the world as they are in the USA. Eric R Snow
Possibly you mis-took his tone? Read the very last part of it....
Jim
Eric..you cant see inside my head..fortunately for you some mornings at 3am when memories come..but I didnt fnd Ivans statement funny..Ironic perhaps..hence the chuckle.
Please go back and reread the last line in my post, just above the nym..ok? Think hard..think really hard about it.
Ok?
As for the rest of your post...you will have to take that up with all the odd gods of the galaxy.
Gunner
The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.
In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence, and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years . It has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaints, and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has been as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.
Theodore Dalrymple,
I did. That's the problem with writing as opposed to speaking. It's hard to get nuances across. ERS
I read your complete post. The part about the envy didn't change the way I understood your post. And you're absolutely right. I can't see into your head. I can't hear your voice either. Which would probably have helped. Like I wrote to Jim, it's hard to get nuances across in writing. ERS
I readed(sp) Gunners comments as ironic - look at the materials and methods that went into those horrible things - a "good" use of modern , readily available materials that in their intended application make life better or easier. And isnt that what most of us here do, in 'scrounging" and "adapting" stuff to do what we want? - but not with slaughter of the innocent as the intention.
Sometimes, reality is horrible - and for better of worse, this is the world we have - its unlikely to get better - we have had 2,000 years of "civilisation" and people, for whatever reason, are still devising ingenious ways to kill each other.
Andrew VK3BFA.
"Peace is that time between wars necessary for the identification of enemies." Ambrose Bierce
The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.
In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence, and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years . It has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaints, and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has been as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.
Theodore Dalrymple,
Can anyone comment on the contents of the pipe-capped main charges? It would appear the red and white wires might go to an electric blasting cap inside of each pipe. That brings up the question of timing. If they are blasting caps what keeps one (the first) blast from shearing the wires going to all of the others? Or will all of the charges detonate at once - which doesn't seem likely as they are more or less protected by the pipes. That red and white wire isn't prima cord is it?
What gives? I was surprised to see the pipe-looking affairs. I would have guessed each charge was a block of "plastic" explosive, surrounded by shrapnel, i.e., nails, bolts, etc. Why the pipe thingies??
That's just electrical wire to the blasting caps. With a high voltage capacitive discharge system, all the caps will fire more or less simultaneously... a few microseconds between, but not enough time for any one cap to be disabled by an adjacent explosion. Also, with the proximity of one charge to another, sympathetic detonation is almost certain, pretty much guaranteeing that if any one charge goes off, the others will at short enough intervals (hundreds of microseconds) that even the wearer's body wouldn't have moved much until they're all gone off.
LLoyd
Many electric blasting caps have a built in delay to allow sequenced demolition, i.e. to cause a building to implode or fall a certain direction. All the caps are ignited at one time, some just detonate sooner than the others. Also used in large earth moving projects to avoid one humongous explosion or to fragment a section to allow a segments behind it to be broken up, i.e. the frontal support is removed. Most likely the bombers are just using what they can find.
Close confinement of many explosives or solid propellants greatly amplifies their explosive qualities. The total chemical energy released is the same but it occurs in a much shorter time. Think of igniting a spoonfull of bullseye in the open air v. igniting the same quantity of bullseye in a shotgun shell in your new ruger double....
FWIW Rusty/dirty metal scraps would appear to produce more dangerous injuries than relatively clean steel ball bearings. Additional problems can occur if the ballistic material does not show up in x rays. Steel is not an ideal ballistic material as it is not dense enough. Think of the problems with the steel shot shells v. the lead shot shells. Think of the problems that cadmium / thallium, etc. plating would cause. Lots of things worse than clean ball bearings.
Uncle George
Thanx Lloyd. That makes sense and I would have to agree. But what about the pipe-looking affairs? Why do they place the explosive charge inside a thin walled piece of pipe>
Actually, it's probably thick-walled pipe, to maximize the shrapnel production. Unfortunately, those madmen aren't trying for property damage, they're trying to kill humans.
A small core - say 1/2" diameter - of PETn, HMX, C4, or TNT would suffice to turn Sch-80 iron pipe into thumbnail-sized pieces of supersonic debris. It doesn't take much to make an effective anti-personnel weapon. Humans break pretty easy.
A standard US "baseball" grenade contains roughly three ounces of composition-B. If I recall correctly, it has a lethal radius of about 25 yards, casualty radius of about 45, and (YMMV) a "safe" radius of 50 yards -- and all it uses for its anti-personnel element is 1/2" long segments of flat, notched music wire (actually, it's wound like a golf ball with that wire, and it separates at the stamped notches when detonated).
SEE? MORE Metal Talk!
LLoyd
In pipe bombs...content usually is black powder. Low velocity..but still effective. As for how to detonate them...Ill give you a hint.
Estes
Gunner
The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.
In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence, and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years . It has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaints, and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has been as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.
Theodore Dalrymple,
Comp B or RDX as I recall
Gunner
The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.
In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence, and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years . It has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaints, and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has been as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.
Theodore Dalrymple,
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