MSG Tripps wrote:

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/communities/hammonton_egg-harbor-city/cedar-creek-student-had-chemicals-at-home-that-could-be/article_e129dbde-498a-11e2-ad39-0019bb2963f4.html

If this had happened when I was in high school, I'd probably have gotten my supplies confiscated and been given a stern lecture. It certainly wouldn't have been national fucking news.  They fucked this kids life up for some media time.

XregnaR wrote:

Most homes in the US have the chemicals to do this.

found several items, including electronic parts and several types of chemicals that when mixed together could cause an explosion

A motherboard, Mentos and diet coke?

Up until the early 80s, pretty much everything kind of precursor was available in the college chem lab (which gifted HS students such as this kid may have had access to).  Nobody was interested in terrorism, they were too busy making recreational drugs.

Ah the bad old days.

Tall Paul wrote:

opsec wrote:

It certainly wouldn't have been national fucking news.  They fucked this kids life up for some media time.

That's what passes for news these days.

It's not "these days," PollyWog, it's ever since the Puritans set up shop on Plymouth rock to escape the riotous, balls-to-the-wall, full-time dicks-out sexuality of the English. (This is the part of the discussion where it really helps to have read Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité, but it's a big book, and I don't have time to read it to you.) Suffice it to say that to be American is to grow up at the complicated nexus of a national sexual dysfunction rooted in puerility and fear. We have the same sort of thing in Canada, but up here we know that you can't write laws to support the insanity of religion-based vagina-horror - people will start acting like English schoolboys on a sex-holiday to fantasy land (the horror, the horror), the media will obsess on the inventiveness of their peccadildos, and the Puritans amongst us will use the news to charge up their repression&judgement batteries. There are better solutions. When that awful little man in my small clothes demands attention I simply follow the cue of my thrifty Scottish ancestors and fill my underwear with a large wooden spoonful of cold porridge. Later, once the starch has returned to Satan, I have something warm and steaming for my mid-day meal, without spending a single penny on cooking fuel.

And every farm has enough fertilizer and diesel to blow up a major federal building, but we can't all be Tim McVeigh.