Explosives Camp 419
theodp writes "How about a summer camp where you get in trouble for not blowing things up? Students with a passion for all things explosive and proof of US citizenship pay a $450 fee to attend Summer Explosives Camp, 'We try to give them an absolute smorgasbord of explosives,' quipped a professor at the University of Missouri-Rolla, which offers a minor in explosives engineering. Here's the brochure (PDF), kids!"
Oh well.. (Score:2, Interesting)
"This camp is limited to 20 Junior and Senior high school students who are interested in enrolling at UMR and are at least 16 by the first day of camp."
I am sure there are quite a few people out there with lots of "disposable income" that would pay lots to do this. I know I had to take a look - maybe something worth a week or two of vacation time, especially seeing the 450 dollar price tag (not sure what my upper limit would be, depends on what stuff I get to play with). Alas, being 30+ pretty much puts me out of that class. There are "body guard" classes that take advantage of the same thing - it's neat to drive a car in that manner even if you live in an area that allows controlled live firearm courses.
Really, I know what I can and can not do and is why I do not play with real explosives, I like really big "booms" yet legally can not purchase them nor do I really know how to safely set them off. One would think there is *someplace* I can pay someone to let me make them, or at least blow some stuff up. I suppose there is too much liability, but I would have thought that with this type of thing even more so than allowing an older group to do so. I have no real excuse if I do something incredibly stupid, yet a 17 year old can get away with many things I can not - the 30+ year olds shouldn't have shown the 17 year olds how sparklers can explode if done wrong.
To note, I'm happy they have such and am not against it - almost anything the expands our abilities I am for. The previous is just a wish list for "older" people. In fact, I guess the older the more likely they would want too and be able to afford too set off some *big* explosives
Re:Bad idea (Score:4, Interesting)
In fact the people who go to the camp would have a greater appreciation of the dangers of explosives and be safer than those idiots on YouTube with the anarchists cookbook.
Lets create the Urban Scouts!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Lets create the Urban Scouts, where children will learn how to pick locks, phone phreak, hack computers, and social engineer.
Re:Why US citizenship? (Score:1, Interesting)
I kinda doubt it (Score:5, Interesting)
If nothing else, reading TFA, it doesn't seem like it would make that useful training for 007-like or terrorist use of explosives. Stuff like how to safely blow up a side of quarry, or better yet, how to make a spud gun, are useful for mining or respectively entertainment, but don't translate well into how to do that much else with explosives.
Or, rather, not much that you couldn't already google. I mean, you can look up ANFO [wikipedia.org] on Wikipedia, and that's the main explosive used by the mining industry. If you can buy the ammonium nitrate and wanted to make a car bomb with that, you don't really need courses in how to drill the holes and calculate the dosage to blast a rock face in a quarry.
Also, about CIA use, again, I may be wrong about America, but it seems to me that:
1. People aren't that interchangeable between mining jobs and covert ops type jobs. Just knowing how to drill a hole and prime a stick of dynamite doesn't also make you want to go abroad and blow up some Arabs. Between making a decent risk-free living at home and going and risking your life abroad for better pay, most people would choose the first.
2. And it doesn't mean you even could, probably. About 95% of the people have this interlock in the brains against being _too_ mean to other people. About 3% are sociopaths, and don't. And there are a few more in between. So, really, statistically chances are higher that you'd be in the "nice guy" category, not in the "sociopath" cathegory.
The army has had millenia of figuring out how to (A) drill people into executing some stuff mechanically against cardboard targets or with blanks, until it becomes reflex by the time they have to do it against live targets. (B) Instill an "us vs them" theme and some groupthink notions of duty, honour, patriotism, etc, to help get people pull the trigger even if they don't really want to. (C) Getting people in a situation in which, one way or the other, it's your ass if you don't cap that other guy. Now that really helps get people to pull the trigger. (D) Creating a whole organization and hierarchy for dissipating responsibility, so noone from the guy who mines pitchblende to the general who orders the strike to the pilot who drops the atom bomb on Hiroshima feels particularly responsible for it all.
And it still gets a lot of people waking up in cold sweat for the rest of their lives, a.k.a., Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [wikipedia.org].
Heck, even some of the war atrocities are, ironically, traceable to the fact that man wasn't designed to kill man. People either get to (A) break down not understanding why the other guys shoot at him, what's wrong with them? Are they savage animals? and/or (B) get caught in that grouphink trap, thinking everyone else around is brave and fearless and all patriotic, and do dumb things to hide the fact that personally they're scared shitless.
Anyway, a lot of those only work in a group, and only work in a situation where it's short term "it's either them or me" and no easy way out. It doesn't quite apply to a lone killers.
Briefly, it might be a lot easier easier to first select with someone without scruples and give them explosives training, than to convert a peaceful mining engineer into a commando trooper.
3. The last person you'd want in the army or some secret service is some "Explosions are cool, Beavis!" type who makes spud guns or blows stuff up when they're bored, and wears a "I [heart] explosives" t-shirt. You'd probably want someone a lot more mentally stable than that.
Re:Bad idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, knowledge is dangerous. But ignorance is *MUCH* more dangerous.
Humans in the world today overwhelmingly suffer and die as a result of *lack* of knowledge. (or to some degree, lack of *application* of knowledge)
I live a *much* safer life because I live in a country where there are experts on explosives, poisons, dangerous creatures, radioactive substances, cancerous agents and firearms.
Any idiot can figure out how to make a fertilizer-bomb. If anything amazes me with the London-incident it is the amateurishness of it all. Pathethic, frankly. Not even a -single- fatality ? *8* people plan a "terrorist"-attack, and they, combined, don't even manage to kill a *single* human being ? Pathethic is to weak a word for performances such as these.
UMR (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Suicide Bombers anyone? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I kinda doubt it (Score:3, Interesting)
It also seems to have started with (A) religion, and (B) missile weapons. Whatever prehistoric record (fossils, cave paintings, etc) we have seems to be mostly about hunting animals, until the bow is invented. Then we start having paintings of groups of archers, led by some shamen with some relics/totems/etc, shooting at each other.
I don't think either of the two was accidental.
Missile weapons are the easiest: they allow reasonable denial. When you're one of 300 guys shooting arrows, you never know for sure if it's your arrow that killed that other guy. Basically you need a lot less ideology, training and indoctrination to get people to use a ranged weapon without sights.
(Incidentally, that would persist for an awfully long time. As late as the US independence war, the British muskets didn't have iron sights, precisely because it allowed every soldier to think maybe _he_ didn't kill anyone. A lot of the brits were appalled by the minutemen with their sights on their rifled guns, and thought of them as premeditated murderers.)
Religion was also easy, since it was the earliest form of indoctrination and offered a very easy answer to "well, why should we kill those other guys?" Duh, because the gods want to, because the gods proclaimed those other guys to be unworthy to live or even be called humans, and will exact much revenge on our tribe if we don't do as they command. You wouldn't want to have the death of your tribesmen on your hands because you refused to obey the gods' will, would you?
Helped get the groupthink ball rolling too, which made it easier from there.
The easiest way to make a person, let's call him Joe Average, to do something dumb and which he despises, is to put him in a group of 1000 people who chest-thump _for_ doing that thing. You know, Joe doesn't want to go kill the guys in the next tribe, and his self-preservation instinct says, "dude, you'll probably get killed, and you don't have anything to gain even if you don't. All you can 'gain' in that war is to come back alive." But Joe thinks that his tribe will shun him and maybe even cast him out if he doesn't look as brave, fearless, war-like and patriotic as everyone else. Watch Joe too start chest-thumping and sabre-rattling for war, and proclaiming that only a coward and a traitor would try to weasel himself out.
In reality, the other 999 people think exactly as Joe does, but none of them will admit it. If Joe came out and said, "duh, that's dumb, count me out", each of those 999 people actually think the same deep down inside, but can't admit it either. Often not even to themselves. (Denial often works like that.) So they _will_ boo at Joe, shun Joe, and maybe even cast Joe out of the tribe, rather than admit that they were thinking the same thing even for a moment. Because now you're back to square 1: a group of 999 people, each trying to not look like he condones that kind of cowardice in front of the other 998.
Re:Training Domestic Terrorists: Dumb (Score:3, Interesting)
Agree wholeheartedly with Bruce's narrative on Security Theater. While it seems crazy that we're not allowed to carry more than 100 mL of water per bottle on a plane, yet "Explosive School" doesn't raise an eyebrow, the bad news is we're an open society. If they're determined and smart, they can get the information they need from elsewhere, but maybe the FBI is smarter than we give them credit.
PS. Whoever modded my original post a "Troll": Read your moderator guidelines. If you've got a contrary opinion, post it.
Re:Suicide Bombers anyone? (Score:2, Interesting)
As some else has already said, the knowledge is available now. At least, allow this (quite old anyway) kids to know which precautions the must take. If any of them is intent on doing harm, they won't go here anyway (how much knowledge do you need to blow up a gas canister?).
Why import talent? (Score:2, Interesting)
True story: I know of two California students, one just got an A in 11th grade chemistry, the other just did 11th grade AP chemistry. Both of them learned "compost is good for agriculture". Neither of them heard, or at least remembered, any mention of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, or *any* actual _chemicals_. When I did 11th grade chemistry it was all about the periodic table, valence and stoichiometry.
CA has created the perfect curriculum. It is guaranteed that no group will perform better than any other group. The content has been removed, but hey, who _really_ cares. First things first.
In a few decades chemistry will be replaced by subjects more suitable, such as advanced groveling, servile-mode Mandarin, etc. Someone on
--
phunctor
"bah!"
I went to UMR (Score:3, Interesting)
In reference to another thread, I seem to recall that Worsey is a US citizen. It was quite a multi-cultural experience, there was another prof from England, a brief visit from a South African, a Pole and a Russian.
If you meet Worsey (and aren't in mixed company), ask him about sheep and wellies...
Re:Suicide Bombers anyone? (Score:1, Interesting)
Funny, that you should say that. I, also, have a collection of old chemistry, physics, &c. books. Have you looked at the modern versions? They've been sanitized, in a way. No more thermite. No more TNT, NI3,&c. They're taking the fun out of science, these days. If things keep on, as they have been going, they (whoever is behind this sanitizing of science curriculum) are going to wind up taking the science out of science.
Why is it that we are teaching students *less*, today, than was (fairly) common knowledge a century ago?
Re:Suicide Bombers anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)