No lack of non-news

I  have little doubt that my skeptical view of the three amigos arrest down in Dartmouth is unpopular. My skepticism is fueled in part by a series of media reports referring to the trio as "terrorists." Did the reporters dream this up themselves or were they led by lapsis linguae on the part of law enforcement? Why do their attorneys find it necessary to insist that they had no part in the bombing when the charges say nothing like that?

I think you have to be an historian, a Southerner, or both to remember Dr. Samuel Mudd, convicted of conspiracy in Abraham Lincoln's assassination for the crime of setting Booth's broken leg, and perhaps panicking like the Amigos afterward. Despite the reasonable doubt that has caught the attention of many, in the mania that followed the assassination he was tried by military tribunal and convicted. Pardoned in 1869, Mudd's conviction has never been overturned. To  this day, majority opinion is confident of Mudd's complicity in the assassination plot. Links such as this are hard to find.

In the present atmosphere,  Tsarnaev's Three Amigos don't seem to stand much of a chance. Now or for all time. The evidence suggests no more than the crime of aggravated adolescent male stupidity, but that won't signify. There's a lynch mob mentality; there's an obsession with proving the Tsarnaevs didn't act alone. The latter is especially disturbing: the acts of self-radicalised individuals appear to be more dangerous and less predictable than any acts of organised terror. A thoughtful government would focus on that.

I'm also rather ashamed that Boston has to carry on so obsessively about an attack that killed three and injured 280 (including the superficial injuries), whilst Bangladesh mourns over 600 dead in the collapse of a sweatshop. Are we checking labels in our clothing purchases, changing our buying habits, in protest? I don't think so.

Likewise, unpopular as it is, I'm leaning toward support of Ron Paul's criticism of the Boston police lockdown the Friday after the bombing. The problem with giving the police all these toys is how fond they become of using them. We've already had a number of incidents in which police went to arrest someone, without even the quaint notion of probable cause, using 20 cops in BDUs, body armour and helmets, and carrying automatic weapons, smashing down the doors of what turned out quickly to have been an innocent person's house. There's also the disturbing report that in Newtown, CT, police stopped to don their federally funded BDUs, body armour etc. before heading for the school. If true, this would take the riffs of Alice's Restaurant to a tragic extreme.  I fear that the police mentality is too easily distracted by toys of this sort. One cop with a sidearm, on the scene in under a minute, would have helped much more than a dozen with all the militaristic regalia.