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.

long shadows and such

The FBI wouldn't tail *this* guy on a Russian tip.

Now that the alleged perp has been captured we can start our favourite sport, the blame game. It seems that the FBI will be the primary finger-ee for having had a tip on Tamerlan and dropped it. Yeah well, where did that tip come from? The long shadow of the Cold War guarantees that the FBI, of all agencies, wouldn't take a tip from the Russian government seriously enough to keep an eye on Boris Badenov, let alone a Chechen nobody.  Nor would any Republican in Congress now lining up to lynch the agency and its director.

Whatever the facts,  we seem to have given Russia two things. First, Putin can now say "We told you so" very loudly. Second, he now has a licence to go in and take the Caucasus apart whether there is an active rebellion or not. When he's done, he can smile and say how he'd done it to show friendship with the US. Blech.

On other matters, I'm glad Dave Henneberry, who whose boat was literally in the line of fire in the capture of DzhokharTsarnaev, is getting more than a little online help. Had he not been so dedicated to his boat that his first act, aside from lighting up, on being allowed to step out of the house, was to check up on it, this drama would probably still be going on, and there might have been more innocent casualties. I'm sure many of the half-wit internet comment mob are condemning this generosity, but it wouldn't be necessary if he could expect institutional help. First, if his boat or homeowner's insurance company had immediately manned up to cover the damage or loss, there would be no need for support. As for government? I still remember the comment of one of my junior high history teachers, over 50 years ago, that there were then, still,  government Civil War claims that had not been paid. So, good luck with that source.

Having dumped on the legitimate media over the last few days, let's not spare the wannabe media of the social networks. These would be the ones whose Reddit crowdsourced "news" identified two or more innocent people as Marathon bombing suspects, people whose lives are likely to carry this stain forever. Not, you say? Imagine these people being Googled by some HR person as stupid as the Redditors in five or ten years. What do you suppose the results might be?

Some of the crowdsourcers have defended their actions with equal parts of vigour and stupidity. If you don't yet believe in the widespread idiocy of this news source, remember that this lot can't tell the Czech Republic from Chechnya: more proof that the education of Americans in geography is the worst in the world. Even though this sort of thing can be fact-checked with a couple of keystrokes, these journalistic wannabes are too lazy to do so.

If you rely on social media for information, these are the people giving it to you, about the only ones who can manage to make the American mainstream media look good.

And finally, one thing that most red-blooded Americans don't understand is why a Tamerlan Tsarnaev could turn against a country that "had taken him in," rescued him from the perpetual conflict of the Caucasus.

I do. My studies taught me that the older an immigrant is, the less likely he or she is to fully assimilate. It's most evident in language. Children under ten still have very fluid speech patterns, and adapt readily. After that, adaptation becomes progressively more difficult on every front.

In my young adulthood, I learnt a dirty little secret. My grandparents, especially my grandmother, never fully assimilated to the United States. During the Depression, with my grandfather unemployed and my grandmother only working part-time, they were angry, resentful, and not careful to keep their opinions away from their children. My father and aunt, by then in their teens, were just as angry with their parents. They were assimilated and more American than my grandparents. Sorry, red-bloods: failure to assimilate is more common than you may think.

This is what its supposed to look like

Never mind the controversy: this is what a journalist should be doing in times of crisis. This is the work of a photojournalist, of course, but their craft shows vividly what anyone in the field should be after: capturing and conveying the immediacy of the moment, ideally with the hope that someone, somewhere, may actually learn something. That hope may often be pretty deeply buried, but it ought to be there.

However, like many photos, this one is somewhat dependent on its descriptions, in this case the adjective "terrified." Small children are easily frightened. That's a universal survival skill among mammals that helps ensure there will be more mammals. What if the description told us that a child who fell on the sidewalk is being comforted by an adult? In that respect, the legendary news photos cited at the link above may be journalistically superior to Bill Hoenk's effort. They convey the horror of their moment independent of any description or caption. The context and witnesses will surely keep this photo from swinging into controversy like that  surrounding Robert Capa's Moment of Death photo. Still, it's pretty impressive.

Hoenk was a rarity that day, because he was doing his job well. He was not turning rescuer. He was not panicking on air. He was not indulging in the wildest of speculations live. He, and a handful of other photo and video journalists showed the world what was really happening at the Marathon, and thus deserve thanks and praise. If their work scares you, there are clearly many others in the media happy to indulge your tastes.

Riddle me this, and this, and this...

Yesterday's Marathon bombing news (4/17/13) made the day-of coverage look rational by contrast. The escalation of the information that the image of a suspect had been identified to "an arrest has been made and the perp will immediately be arraigned" took, what, an hour and a half?  It resembled the game of gossip more than news gathering. The de-escalation took the rest of the day. No one likes to admit they've made themselves look stupid, and media on the scene at the Federal Courthouse hadn't let go of the story when I gave up in disgust in mid-evening. Not even Gov Deval Patrick's beautifully crafted, smiling putdowns discouraged them.

At one point, near the end of this, I found a "story" by an online "journalist" which stubbornly stood pat. His source? A friend had overheard a BPD person saying (to whom?) that law enforcement had identified a man stuffing bags into trash cans. This sourcing is right out of the urban legend playbook. He claimed to have a confirmation from another, unidentified law enforcement source. Was this a statement, or did someone else overhear?

Christ wept: this is journalism?

I need hardly say that the alleged description of the suspect/detainee what-have-you varied with the political colouration of the news source. The further right the source, the darker the skin of the suspect.

Meanwhile, I do have a couple of questions unanswered in all the noise. Certainly there was security and vigilance, but a couple of gaps present themselves.

The dangers of explosive devices in backpacks have been known in Europe for over 30 years. Back ca. 1990, in the UK for example, if one left one's bags on a seat in a Tube station to look at a kiosk ten feet away, they'd be gone by the time one turned around.  However, we're told that at the Boston Marathon, runners are able to leave backpacks, or have friends leave backpacks, just about anywhere in the vicinity of the finish. At best, this seems rather a haphazard arrangement. I understand there is a bag check for registered runners, so I wonder if the alleged scattering of bags belong to unregistered runners. Of course, one must leave open the possibility that this is yet another fabrication.

The BAA already frowns upon unregistered runners, to be sure,  and if loose bags belong to the latter, it's another strike against them. Still, if they've used their ingenuity to get in the race, is it such a stretch to use a little more to stow a bag in a safe place?

Observation. Since 9/11, the MBTA has supposedly ratcheted up security and conducted random bag checks and related searches. I ride the T pretty often, and in eleven-plus years I've been through bag checks twice. Security seems honoured more in the breach than the observance unless some specific threat is in the air. A clever local must certainly have noticed this.

I direct a simple rant at another bit of slovenly American media "thinking." It does no service to persist in labeling paranoid ramblings as "conspiracy theories." To label any of this drivel a theory is to give it a credence which it never has and does not deserve. The word implies a level of rationalism which is uniformly absent from any such crap.

Today, we learn that Elvis sent ricin to Washington, and that a Texas fertiliser factory has blown up. Even though the evidence so far points strongly toward industrial accident, we find no one in the media willing to let go of the alternative explanation.* Imagine what they may do with a tornado or a mining accident.

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*I will await the evidence. However, my work experience indicates that in Texas, enforcement of workplace safety seems considered an infringement of the owners' liberties. Two plus two is what?

A new spin on yellow journalism

Back again. Blame the absence on the Beast, because I've grown tired of documenting it, especially when I've found out that people with no dog in that fight feel obliged to say that TN patients are exaggerating. 

So I return to one of my standard topics, the disgraceful performance of contemporary news media in times of emergency: in this case, the explosions at the Boston Marathon finish line.

We shall not pass lightly over the embarrassing overreaction by Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis and by most of the area news media to a fire at the JFK library. It happened soon after the explosions and people with the jitters conflated the two incidents. Props to The Examiner, which has forthrightly admitted that there never was a bomb. Also to NECN News, which had the sense to send a mobile unit to the library when they couldn't get into the Back Bay. They covered it as a fire nearly from the beginning.

The next favourite story is that "other devices" were found in the vicinity. Were they? We have one official statement which stays alive as news, from later yesterday, to that effect. By the time I went to bed, there was a lonely statement that said "maybe not." This morning, everything but the original speculation on speculation seems to have vanished from the news cycle.*

Inevitably, every talking head drew comparisons with 9/11, even though there are hardly any except that a bunch of people, including a bunch of media, who were not victims talked themselves into a frenzy of fear. There is a real parallel, the Olympic Park bombings in Atlanta in 1996: real in the MO, real in the casualty figures, real in the absence of a claim of responsibility, real in the similarity of venues.  It may even become more real if the law goes after a scapegoat and lets the actual perp go free for years afterward. After 17 years of the nonstop news cycle, it may be that law enforcement has given up on studying parallel cases and surrendered to the sound bite.

It is understandable that journalists who find themselves in proximity to a disaster whilst covering something else should be rattled: most people are.  However, one of the considerations that is supposed to make journalism a profession is the ability to rise above fear and horror until one finishes the story, when one can break down in private. That feature of professionalism was conspicuous by its absence among most journalists close to the event. We start with the local Fox News channel, which began broadcasting "we are under attack" as soon as the first rumour about the JFK Library surfaced.  Only one channel, WBZ, the local CBS outlet, was actually there. They began well, having an exclusive, then coverage began to break down under the press of events. They of all people should have been filtering official statements and pressing the authorities on statements that now appear unfounded. Worse, some of the crew committed a cardinal sin of journalism: they stopped covering the event and became involved in the rescue effort. It's a human reaction, but experience shows that quality of coverage suffers.

Having some personal interest in real information, we surfed through unsatisfactory coverage by absent media until we turned with hope to PBS. Alas, even the News Hour turned out to be slightly tainted by the speculative germ.  Nor did it help when they broadcast an interview with Boston City Councilor Steve Murphy. Now, I'm a Murphy maternally, so I appreciate the desire to tell a good story that runs in the gene pool. The lad's eyewitness account gathered steam and detail with each telling. However, only someone who has never before seen an explosion could have called either a "mushroom cloud." (Now there's a sound bite!)

Unfortunately, PBS coverage hit a low moment with the generally reliable news commentary of Greater Boston. Host Emily Rooney lives near the finish line but was not there for the explosion: close enough to be jumpy, though. She assembled a guest list of media (and the omnipresent Steve Murphy), most of whom were eyewitnesses to the explosion. Rooney would have done better to surrender the chair to someone who was not directly involved in the event, someone who could have shown some journalistic detachment. Instead, she and her guests reinforced each others' fears. By the end of the show, Murphy had added "fireball" to "mushroom cloud." A couple of guests, who had seen the worst, seemed close to hysteria. All of them had looked into the future and decided that Boston would never again have a public event. Clearly, no one was buying into "Keep calm and carry on." That's unfortunate, because Boston will need doses of that for some time.  Although a couple of the guests had attempted to get interviews on the scene, by the time they taped the programme everyone was a witness and no one was a journalist.

I understand horrors, having seen a few myself. But if one professes to be a journalist, one has three choices: put a cork in it and cover the facts, direct one's anxieties into the story by letting the words speak, or shutting up until one has command of one's emotions.

Overall,  event coverage for April 15 rates a D. My expectations for some days to come are no better.

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* Late news, and thanks to NECN again: Statement from Gov. Patrick that there were only two devices. Once again,  rumour goes around the world before truth gets its pants on.

Concerning forts

A friend and colleague, although a long-time resident in these parts, is in his heart of hearts a New Yorker. Recently, he visited Fort Warren in Boston Harbour, and interpreted its existence as a symptom of Bostonian egomania. Boston, he reasons, is less important than it thinks it is. Well, that could be true of most cities, and quite a few nations.

However, forts on the East Coast are not so much relics of bygone civic pride as they are relics of bygone military priorities. Many of them are archaeological layer cakes, because what was a good site for a fort early in the 17th century remained a good site until the dawn of the nuclear age. Materials changed: the earliest ones were earthworks. They were succeeded by stone, then brick, then more elaborate stone (such as Fort Warren), and finally earthworks again, but revetted with concrete. The forts with the longest history contain traces of every occupation, from the 1630s to the 1950s. Some are still in use, and in unlikely places if the measure of importance is Manhattan.

By the time Fort Warren was built, New York had eclipsed Boston as the East's premier port. However, that had been true only for a generation or so, and a sizable part of the nation's GNP was still collected at the Boston Customs House. Protecting such a port made good sense at the national level.

It made even more sense to a nation that generally preferred investing in forts to investing in a navy. American policy hated and feared navies, as it had in the War of Independence, until very late in the 19th century. Forts were the thing. They were palpable and accountable, and government could put them where they seemed to be needed. They could even be brought back cheaply from extreme states of neglect.

Locations were equal parts national politics and sound strategy. Boston generated large customs revenue and had a navy yard. Portsmouth, NH and Kittery, ME had customs revenues, had (still has) a navy yard, and stood at the gateway of an inland sea tailor-made for invasion, so it was fortified. Maine's Kennebec River, far from any city, produced an enormous percentage of the nation's merchant marine tonnage, so its mouth was fortified. And so on. That all three points might better have been defended by one offshore naval squadron was lost on Jefferson's administration, and several succeeding administrations through the 1800s. It was also lost on most Americans. Voters could see forts. They made voters feel good. You could never tell what those aristocratic naval officers were up to, out there over the horizon. Up to a point, the voters were right: any good harbour that was undefended was likely to be a target just because it was undefended.

Generals and politicians were still thinking like that in the Cold War. Greater Boston is ringed with the remnants of antiaircraft missile batteries called into existence by MIT, Raytheon and other interests with the ear of the Eisenhower administration. So are most American cities once within range of Soviet bombers. Like all forts, they ceased to exist not as a matter of local vanity, but because newer weapons (ICBMs) made them obsolete. The ruins of the missile batteries are not as picturesque as older forts. If they were, we would be more aware of them, and the motivations behind a Fort Warren would be less abstruse.

Yo-Ho, Part 8 and last

Back to the MBTA

There's little to say about the return trip. My wife and I swapped seats for the flight home, which wasn't a total success. She got the middle seat and didn't sleep at all. I took the window seat, where I promptly discovered that a 757 window seat doesn't have quite enough headroom for me. Wedged in, I did sleep though, for about three or four hours. Then I dozed off for about 15 minutes at a time until we saw the sun rise (because the morons in the seat in front of us hadn't pulled the shade).

The high point of the return, oddly enough, didn't come until we caught our bus at Wonderland. Ah, those squeaky, smelly, grubby MBTA buses.

Note to M-A: early on Sunday morning, they're all prison buses. But I think we got your driver with a heart of gold.

As the bus was about to pull out, a guy on a bicycle pulled up and asked if he could get a ride to Central Square, since it had begun to rain. He said he forgot his Charlie Card and did a classic Wimpy routine of how he'd pay next time. The driver patiently said no about six different ways, then finally shrugged and let him aboard.

This was not your stereotypical suburban cyclist caught in the rain in his bright Italian jersey. This was one of those cyclists one sees here and there, who are on a bike because they can't drive. I'd say one OUI too many was the cause here.

A few minutes after we started, the driver called to this guy to come up. He came, clearly fearful that he was going to get thrown off after all. The driver handed him his own Charlie card, first ringing up this ride, and told him to keep it. Our poor wet cyclist was stammering in his gratitude, and the driver said "just do it for someone else sometime, OK?"

Sometimes ya gotta love this town.

Yosemite Reflections

Having reached an age when time, money and stamina are running out at about equal rates, it's unclear if we can return to Yosemite, but I'd like to try.

If we go back, we're inclined to camp at Tuolomne and visit the valley, not the other way around. From all reports, bears up there are as common as squirrels, but bigger and smarter. So we'd need to be a bit smarter...and a bit bolder.

Now, we're having a little fun about the lack of pictures of the bear, so pardon me for grabbing a teachable moment. From the perspective of the urban east, a Yosemite bear encounter sounds like a tall tale. It isn't. The unusual thing was that we had gone a full week without seeing a bear. People who live in that and other parts of bear country will tell you that humans are the intruders in bear habitat, not the other way around. They will say that in any incident involving property loss or injury, it is nearly always the human who is at fault for offering the bear a temptation it is not equipped to refuse.

Consider that ear tag on our bear. A bear caught breaking into a car or camp for the third time at Yosemite is a dead bear. The next bullet won't be rubber. Human stupidity is a large part of this problem, and so is simple oversight (think of that candle we lost). More than that, there is a big problem with skepticism. People who have not experienced Yosemite simply don't believe that, from dusk to dawn, you are as likely to meet a bear as a human being. Carry food with you and you're ten times as likely to meet a bear. Leave food in your car and you're quite likely to have a wrecked car, a whopping fine from NPS, and an unsympathetic insurer who won't cover you.

All of these are real threats, but not as real as the death of bears faced with temptation once too often. But too many people just don't believe it and treat the bear stories as tall tales until it's their unfastened bear box that's cleaned out, their car that is wrecked, or it's them on a narrow trail between a cub and its very angry mother. If I were making up a story, I'd be sure to give myself a more heroic role.

The park's weekly reports suggest that if you want to be scared of something in Yosemite, try the people planting marijuana in remote places along the western slopes. Parks law enforcement is breaking up these farms regularly, and the planters are packing serious heat. This is not something you want to stumble across by accident.

It's tough to say what the major national parks can--or should--do about crowds. This has been a problem as long as the parks have existed and been accessible by automobile. It strikes me that one option would be a public relations push on crowding in California itself. Over 90% of the cars I saw had California plates. Even deducting for rentals, California residents still account for the great majority of the visitors. Perhaps there could be an effort to encourage some of them to go elsewhere, maybe to California state parks: California could sure use the revenue.

Now I need better boots and more hiking.

Not exactly the Hub

My friends include a couple of people who once lived in New York City. One of them is even a Manhattan native (heads turn) and a diehard Yankees fan (gasp)! Both of them have been known, now and then, to suggest that Boston is a few bricks short of a load when it comes to modern civilisation. Since I'm a Northern New Englander, we have a few points of agreement on this subject, and lately I've been up against one of the most obnoxious.

In grown-up, "world-class", civilised cities, public transport runs round the clock. It does not in Boston. Here, one guesses, the morals police of days gone by decided that no decent person needed to ride public transportation between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. So the system clings to this mid-20th century schedule while the world expands around it.

In an unlucky moment, I drew ground transport (and pet-sitting) arrangements at this end in preparation for our CA trip this summer. Our outbound flight leaves at 6 a.m. That means arriving in the terminal before 5 a.m. in these tense times: well before.

We live less than 15 miles from Logan. Having driven the route for three years at a very early hour, I can guarantee it's a 20 minute trip at that godawful time. Best of the several options is an airport shuttle which, with tip, works out to $3.25 a minute or $4.65 a mile.

Meanwhile, decent people who don't have to check in at Logan until, say, 6 a.m, can drive to Wonderland Station, park for $4 or $5 a day, get on the Blue Line and change to the airport shuttle. If they are even more decent and don't need to be there until 7, on weekdays they can catch an express bus that drops them on the departure level. In a civilised metropolis, these amenities are there when one needs them. In Boston they are only available during decent, God-fearing hours. One might add that even in some uncivilised cities, such as Washington, DC, transport to and from the airports is at a reasonable fixed rate, despite which cabbies and shuttle operators seem to make a good living.

Naturally, my wife has already completed the rail arrangements connecting us from San Francisco International to Yosemite and back, at a better cost per mile.

It's irresistible to suggest that Boston has missed the bus.