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.