Ah, and now a mad bomber. Of course.

You guyz may be too young to remember this. When the Daughter was just a sprout they had lessons in her school about how if you find a box delivered on your doorstep, and you were not expecting a box, or if you find a box anywhere and you don't know what it was, you were to stay away from it and tell an adult immediately. And if there wasn't an adult available you were to call the police. She tells me she clearly remembers being taught this. She's not sure if it was when she was in daycare in California, or when we were in Texas again in the early 1990s. The kid has a memory like a steel trap, so I do tend to believe it happened. I kind of raised an eyebrow at the thought of telling six-year-olds that there were crazy people out there, but it looks like it was a good call by her teachers, after all.

I wonder when they'll start firebombing churches/bookstores/newspapers? (I thought that would come before sending pipe-bombs to public officials, actually.) There's always got to be an element - regardless of which end of the political spectrum is acting up - that does completely stupid things like this. I hope they drop-kick them into next Sunday when they catch up to them. [Which they will.] (Code for what I can't actually write on a polite public forum). No bueno. Absolutely not cool.

Now, just in the interest of a betting pool (which is ghoulish and in bad taste, I know) when they find him, is it going to be an unemployed, mid-to-late 20s or early 30s white male with a high-school or perhaps community college education who feels as if he's not living the life he deserves? Or will it be  a white, middle-aged blue-collar guy from a rural area with just a high-school education? Either of whom will not currently be married, and who will have some sort of weird grudge against all "gummint" officials, and, possibly, a Confederate flag tacked up in the garage?

(Yes, I know the Unibomber was highly educated. I don't think this nutter is in the same league.)

[Edit:  The Daughter says it was Texas, so that'd be 1991-95. We lived near a research Uni, and a lot of the faculty lived nearby. Hence the Unibomber paranoia.]

I'm guessing it'll be some member of the alt-right community. White male and college educated.


I remember the unabomber. And not opening / reporting unknown packages. This feels like we've entered the twilight zone and are living in the past.

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Doesn't it, though? With a dash of "duck and cover" thrown in, for good measure. 

I'm guessing it'll be some member of the alt-right community. White male and college educated.

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No doubt he will be a “nationalist”.

If we end up with a hard border in Northern Ireland and the troubles start again, we could start to see bombs in the UK again. 

One more parallel between the twin horrors of Trump and Brexit.  Brought to you courtesy of Putin and Facebook.

The Daughter says her friends from NI say that the situation is not at all good there and growing worse, as far as feeling "on the street".  Brexit is bringing out the extreme "Nationalists" in England with their nasty little bits, so I can pretty much imagine what it's doing within the Orange quarters.  There's only so long you can compress/oppress a people before they'll explode, and if the Oranges start their nonsense again the Greens will definitely not put up with it.

My dear old Irish granny was still alive for a lot of the last round of insanity and so it was a regular topic of conversation. She never lived to see peace in Ireland, sadly. Or the "Celtic Tiger."  She'd have been happy to have seen both. But we were still sending care packages "back to the relatives" at the time she passed away and watching the insanity on the nightly news. I hope it doesn't go there again, because if there are bombers in England it'll be because the situation in NI is so bad they have to strike out past their borders to try to make it stop. Which will mean it's become intolerably awful for them there. (Won't be all that wonderful for the "bombees" either.)

Mad bomber update:

Ok, so the packages came from south Florida.
Is it a snowbird?
Is it someone who drove there to drop them off at the PO and then left, to throw the scent off? (Or could they think that far in advance?)
Is it someone like a trucker, who would have been down there as part of the job, and then out again?
Is it someone who actually does live there?
The drama continues.

So I wanna know - is it an idiot who can't make a bomb properly (sent 10, none of which have gone off) or is it someone making a statement, thinking that they can't get arrested for sending something that looks like a bomb but that isn't actually a bomb? (Still qualifies as terroristic threats, though. And I'm pretty sure it's breaking a federal law to send gunpowder through the mail, at the very least.)

I'm struck by the response, with many Republicans already claiming the whole thing is fake before anybody has any idea what is going.  Watching Americans talk about it just shows how we are living in two completely separate worlds.   

A man from Florida has been charged with sending 13 bombs, he is a rabid Trump supporter and his van is covered in Trump stuff including images critical of CNN. Trumps response at a rally after the arrest was to attack the media, get a chant of “CNN Sucks” going, attack the Democrats and reprise the chanting against Hilary of “Lock Her Up”.

Some/Many Trump supporters are skeptical about the arrest saying they are lying.

I  can only imagine after the "lock her up" chants came the plea for a return to civility in politics.

Thanks for reminding me, top priority today is to complete and mail my ballot.

See ya a mad bomber, and raise ya a disgruntled white antisemitic with an AR15....   

[I was close, on the mad bomber: Fifty-something white guy, low-wage jobs, not married, a bankrupt, has a thing against a public official. The stuff I got wrong: lived with his mother, so no garage of his own. And it would have been a Nazi flag, not a Stars-and-Bars. Not rural either, though. Smaller town, but not rural.  Not terribly surprised to see the idol worship of Trump thrown in. That fits with the Nazi thing. This all is going to get worse before it gets better.]

That shooting was in the neighbourhood where a good friend lives. Thankfully she is ok. I'm not sure about her friends and family (no idea if they pray there). To see people on social media blaming this on "the left" makes me want to throw in the towel. This is what we've become. Multiple hate crimes in a week and our president saying "if they had an armed guard maybe it wouldn't have happened" instead of fully denouncing hate speech and antisemitism. Republicans are pivoting onto racism to keep their seats in competitive areas. America should be better than that in 2018.

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If you throw in the towel, they win, Margo.

I find it ironic that later in the day someone must have handed trump a speech and said "you will read this word for word and say nothing else" because he did denounce it. But I'm sure today he will be back to stirring the pot and spreading xenophobia and racism at campaign events.



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I find it ironic that later in the day someone must have handed trump a speech and said "you will read this word for word and say nothing else" because he did denounce it. But I'm sure today he will be back to stirring the pot and spreading xenophobia and racism at campaign events.



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Absolutely. He has done this repeatedly in the past.

He couldn’t even tweet his own condolences after the synagogue mass killings. He simply retweeted the one from Mike Pence, and said “I agree with this”.