My home town (Plus: Am I a racist for noticing this...?)

Behold, the greatest Rifftrax riff EVER. 16 seconds of pure capital-T TRUTH.

From the Urban dictionary, this definition of Dundalk:

...a rotting cesspool on the Eastern side of Baltimore County, Maryland (known to those in Dundalk as "Merr-land"). Sandwiched between a sewage treatment center aka the shit plant and a disgusting town called Highlandtown, Dundalk houses some of the most vile Maryland residents. Women there often boast between 6-12 teeth, hair that is at least 3 shades and copious amounts of 5$ tattoos. They have 6 kids each, with approximately 2-3 fathers, of which 1 is known. The species known as the Dundalk male frequently wear shorts that end only 2 inches from their white Reebok classics, with an Ecko shirt that they spent their entire paycheck on. Even though they have their hair shaved to a 1 they use a half a bottle of Dep gel and brag about the silver chain they bought at the North Point Flea Market.

Popular Dundalk hang outs are the Zu and Howards Pub, which on any given night, entertain you with some of Dundalks finest getting into brawls over mistaken facial expressions or a Dundalk whore showing up to the bar with her new babydaddy to make 3 or 4 other babydaddies jealous.

Devoid of good dental and linguistics but full of leg-spreading sluts and exciting new STD's, Dundalk is a place you never want to experience.

This is true for much of the rest of Balmer. I've never once heard a young woman refer to her husband or boyfriend; they always talk about "muh baby's daddy."

Hooked up Civics with "fart mufflers" reign supreme on the streets.

The girls are known for getting pregnant by the age of 14 and having 2 kids by age 17. Bottom line people, along with Essex it is the arm pit of BalCo.

Not only have I eaten in this restaurant, I've dined at this exact table. (But in the above video, I think the culprit was actually booze.)

Let's end this investigation of Baltimoronism by tying it into the thornier question of racial relations.

Most of the young (and not-so-young) white women in this lower-class Bawlmer suburb have babies born of an interracial union. These women may not have husbands, but they do have the babies. In this town, I have never seen a single baby or toddler born of two white parents or two black parents.

Everyone comments on this situation. It's a local joke.

For quite a while, I've been castigating myself just for noticing the local demographics. Back in CA, interracial dating never bothered me; in fact, I've gone out with a black girl myself. I've often jokingly told people that America could solve half her problems if we made interracial marriage mandatory. So why does the eastern sector of Baltimore bug me...?

Then it hit me: How would I feel if I were a young black female living in this ghastly burg? The young African American women here are never seen pushing strollers. These women can't feel very desirable or valued.

Yet most of the truly attractive females in this town tend to be black -- some of them look like fashion models. With few exceptions, the white women range from homely to, well, much-worse-than-homely. If I were younger and unattached, I know which ladies I'd be most likely to ask out.

So. Does the fact that I noticed this trend indicate some residual racism in my own soul? Or are the fathers of those children the true racists?

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Was Dubya dumb?

Dubya's search for rehabilitation has led Paul Krugman and other writers to pen reminders of why the Bush presidency was a disaster zone. Much of the debate concerns Bush's basic intelligence: Was he smart enough for the job?

That question isn't easy to answer. In terms of IQ points -- if that measurement means anything -- he probably has the necessary brainpower. What bothers me is the lack of intellectual curiosity. He seems willing to learn only what he absolutely needs to learn to accomplish a goal, and any unit of knowledge beyond that point is just annoying. To Dubya, education is like a fingernail: Trimmer is better.

For me, the most telling revelation came from Peter Galbraith, an ambassador to Croatia, who disclosed that President Bush did not know the difference between the Shi'ite and Sunni sects of Islam until a mere two months before the invasion of Iraq.

Galbraith reports that the three of them spent some time explaining to Bush that there are two different sects in Islam--to which the President allegedly responded, "I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!"

I never doubted the veracity of this anecdote, astounding as it is. To the best of my knowledge, neither Bush nor his official defenders ever called Galbraith a liar.

Younger readers may not understand the implications. The Iranian revolution of 1979 and the hostage crisis of 1980 received massive news coverage in this country. Throughout those two years, numerous news articles and television programs provided detailed background briefings on the Ayatollah Khomeini and his religious tradition. Any American who paid any attention to the news learned about the two main Islamic sects. Even louts in bars knew that the Ayatollah was a "Shi'ite-head" and thus not at all like the Saudis or the Egyptians. (At the time, Saudis and Egyptians were considered "good" Muslims.)

George W. Bush was 33 years old in 1979. Think of it: A man of his years, born into a political family and traveling in powerful circles, who somehow managed to avoid all exposure to Time, Newsweek or any major newspaper. If he turned on the teevee, he must have flipped channels until he spotted Gilligan and the Skipper. It took continual effort to remain so stupefyingly oblivious to the major story of that two-year period.

Is Bush a dummy? No, not in the Forrest Gump sense of the word. He's more like the rich kid in The Emperor's Club: He'll learn exactly as much as he needs to, and only when compelled. Beyond that point lies the land of "Who gives a damn?"

Such a person should never be president. I would say the same even if he belonged to my party and gave lip service to causes I favor.

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The Wall Street Journal vs. capitalism (Added note)

Well, here's something you don't see every day: MarketWatch, affiliated with the Wall Street Journal, has published a strong piece condemning the evils of capitalism:

For the rest of the world, capitalism is not working: A billion live on less than two dollars a day. With global population exploding to 10 billion by 2050, that inequality gap will grow, fueling revolutions, wars, adding more billionaires and more folks surviving on two bucks a day.

This article is really a review of Michael Sandel's new book, What Money Can't Buy.

“Without being fully aware of the shift, Americans have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society ... where almost everything is up for sale ... a way of life where market values seep into almost every sphere of life and sometimes crowd out or corrode important values, non-market values.”

Yes, it’s everywhere: “Markets to allocate health, education, public safety, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, recreation, procreation, and other social goods unheard-of 30 years ago. Today, we take them largely for granted.”

Examples ... for-profit schools, hospitals, prisons ... outsourcing war to private contractors ... police forces by private guards “almost twice the number of public police officers” ... drug “companies aggressive marketing of prescription drugs directly to consumers, a practice ... prohibited in most other countries.”

More: Ads in “public schools ... buses ... corridors ... cafeterias ... naming rights to parks and civic spaces ... blurred boundaries, within journalism, between news and advertising ... marketing of ‘designer’ eggs and sperm for assisted reproduction ... buying and selling ... the right to pollute ... campaign finance in the U.S. that comes close to permitting the buying and selling of elections.”

Sandel believes that, over the course of 30 years, we've unhappily drifted from a market economy to a market society.

And “the difference is this: A market economy is a tool ... for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.” The difference is profound.

I can see Sandel's point.

I was of adult age when the great transformation of values began. In the 1970s, you could utter the words "The best things in life are free," and no-one would argue with you. People might use that phrase as the basis for a one-liner, but they wouldn't object to it in any serious fashion. Now, for a massive portion of our population, them's fighting words. That ancient cliche offends people on a profound level.

Although I've had some relatively flush times in the past, I never really knew how to make money. I can make myself well-known, at least to a degree (past which, life becomes uncomfortable), but the words "rich" and "famous" are not the siblings many take them to be. The things I like best -- a dog licking my face, a good book, the occasional shared laugh -- either cost nothing or have a very reasonable price tag.

On the other hand, maybe one should not be too hasty in dismissing this capitalism thing. WeSeed allows you to invest virtual money ($10,000) in real companies to gauge how well you'd do playing the stock market. I made $336 (imaginary) during my first week-and-a-half. Not bad for a tyro!

Added note: I just thought of an example which demonstrates how thoroughly values changed within the space of a decade. If you were under (say) 25 years of age in 1974, the worst thing you could say about a film was: "Oh, they made that just to make money." Ten years later, people within that same age group routinely spoke of movies as if they were just another consumer commodity. They approved of Hollywood commercialism.

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The final (for now) word on Boston

I think I'm done with the Boston bombing case, at least for a little while, unless something startling and new comes up. (Or unless I change my mind.)

No, I don't have answers to the remaining mysteries. I would never dissuade anyone from pursuing the case. But for now, interested readers should do that work elsewhere.

We've reached the point where some people I respect are making claims that I question. If I raise those questions in public, the result might be one of those otiose internet pissing matches that always end up by making all parties look foolish. And who needs that?

As a parting shot, I'd like to direct your attention to this piece in the Boston Globe by Kevin Cullen, who writes in convincing detail about the shootout that ended with the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

As you may know, I have questioned the assertion (made by Watertown's police chief) that Tsarnaev was killed after being struck by an SUV driven by his brother. This claim struck me as dubious because the morgue photo shows a bullet hole and the physician who worked on Tsarnaev said that he saw no evidence of a vehicle impact.

Here's the relevant section from Cullen's piece:

Thinking fast and with sure tactical instincts, Pugliese drove not into the firefight, but down one of the side streets he knows like the back of his hand. He ran through yards in the dark and outflanked the bombers. Pugliese began firing from the side, and police believe that he hit 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, bringing him down.

Pugliese and a Boston police officer converged on the wounded man and subdued him. They didn’t know where the younger brother, Dzhokhar, had disappeared to until they heard the gunning of an engine. Dzhokhar aimed the stolen Mercedes-Benz SUV at the cops who, in a scene that would not be out of place in a Hollywood film, dove to safety. Tamerlan Tsarnaev wasn’t as lucky. His body was dragged by the car for a short distance before his little brother drove off.

That accounts for the bullet hole in the rib cage. The position of the hole indicates a strike from the side.

As for the SUV hit: Although we still don't have the level of detail we would prefer, it seems that Dzhokhar aimed for the cops, not his brother. I would suggest that, from the driver's point of view, Tamerlan's prone body might have been hidden by the cops who stood around him. As the SUV zoomed toward the officers, they leaped out of the way, making Tamerlan visible -- for an instant. Even if Dzhokhar tried to swerve away or skid to a stop, the body might have been dragged by the car a short distance.

If you have ever accidentally hit a deer carcass in the road, you can visualize this sequence of events.

So it seems that the police chief was both right and wrong. He was right to say that the body was dragged by the SUV. He was wrong when he claimed that the vehicle impact caused death.

Now let's have an explanation as to why the cops used that boat for target practice.

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Louie, Louie...

As long-time readers know, my feelings toward our current president have fluctuated between irritation and pissed-off-edness. But the fact that I'm no Obama fan doesn't mean I will tolerate the crap that Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert tried to lay down:

"It's very clear to everybody but this administration that radical Islam is at war against us," Gohmert told WND Radio "And I'm hoping either this administration will wake up or a new one will come in at the next election before irreparable damage is done. Because radical Islam is at war with us. Thank God for the moderates who don't approve of what's being done. But this administration has so many Muslim Brotherhood members that have influence that they just are making wrong decisions for America."

This statement might have some relationship with the truth if we could interpret "so many" to mean "absolutely zero."

What guys like Gohmert don't understand is that they are shooting themselves in the foot. By spewing obvious nonsense, they create support for Obama. The President looks good when his opponents look crazy. The 2012 election was lost during the Republican primaries, when the wackos vying for the nomination expectorated so much Gohmertian goofiness that the entire GOP brand took on a bad odor. Mitt Romney would be president today if he could have played to the center throughout his campaign.

In recent times, only one Republican has managed to mount an effective argument against Obama: Rand Paul. (By "effective," I mean an argument that appeals to moderates, not just to the snaggletoothed beer-swilling Alex Jones listeners who consider Louie Gohmert a brilliant political thinker.) But even Paul screwed up: He later reversed his position on drones, showing himself to be yet another opportunist, yet another militarist.

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"Al Qaeda elements located in Iran"

Normally, I respect the folks at Global Research, but their recent piece on the Boston bombings is as frustrating as it is helpful. It's frustrating because it focuses on an allegation that is clearly wrong. The article says that Tamelan Tsarnaev was Naked Guy, the fellow in police custody who was ordered to strip -- as cameras recorded the whole humiliating business.

Tamerlan did indeed resemble Naked Guy. But Tamerlan had copious chest hair, and Naked Guy clearly does not.

When I pointed that fact out in a previous post, a reader suggested that jihadis who wear explosive vests have been known to shave their chests. First, I have no idea why body-shaving would prove advantageous to a suicide bomber. Second, although there was some talk of "suicide vests" in early reports, later (and supposedly more authoritative) news accounts have assured us that Tamerlan did not possess anything other than a 9mm pistol. Third -- and most damningly -- the corpse seen in the morgue photo has chest hair, matching the shots we have of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the boxing ring.

Conclusion: Two different guys.

I still think that the Watertown police chief lied when he said that Tamerlan was run over by his brother. The morgue photo shows a bullet wound, and the doctor who worked on the body insisted that the corpse showed no sign of vehicular impact. (We've discussed all of this in previous posts.) So it remains quite possible that Tamerlan died after capture. But he wasn't Naked Guy.

There are other problems with the Global Research piece. Right now, I want to talk about that article's most important revelation -- a revelation which has nothing to do with the Boston affair. At the same time everyone in the U.S. was frantic about the bombers, the Canadian Mounties announced that they had broken up a terror plot north of the border...

At Monday’s press conference, the RCMP asserted that Esseghaier and Jaser had acted under the “direction and guidance” of “al-Qaeda elements located in Iran.”

The RCMP said that they had no evidence of Iranian government involvement.

Most American newspapers covering this story left out that last sentence -- the bit about "no evidence of Iranian government involvement." In fact, Al Qaeda (a Sunni organization) has always hated the government in Iran (ruled by Shi'ites). Al Qaeda (or whatever is left of it) has allied itself with the rebels trying to overthrow the current Iranian government.

To prove the point, Global Research links to this important 2008 Sy Hersh piece in the New Yorker:

The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.

One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.”

We have the same problem in Syria: The guys we're backing -- the Nusra Front -- have inextricable ties to Al Qaeda. I have a strong suspicion that if Nusra wins, they will soon turn on us.

My jaw dropped while watching David Ignatius pontificate about Syria on the Chris Matthews show the other day. After confidently predicting that Assad will fall, Ignatius said that the administration was now concentrating on making sure that "moderates" took over.

Laughable. The more moderate Assad opponents have been dying on the vine, because all of the Western aid has gone to the Al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front. I discussed that point at some length last month.

That earlier post links to this piece in the Telegraph:

And in recent weeks it is Jabhat al-Nusra, a radical jihadist group blacklisted by the US as terrorists and a group that wants Syria to be an uncompromising Islamic state governed by sharia, that is holding sway.

The group is well funded – probably through established global jihadist networks – in comparison to moderates. Meanwhile pro-democracy rebel group commanders say money from foreign governments has all but dried up because of fears over radical Islamists.

The New York Times revealed that Nusra's money wasn't coming through "established global jihadist networks" (unless you want to define that term in a rather novel fashion). In fact, the cash comes from your tax dollars.

The airlift, which began on a small scale in early 2012 and continued intermittently through last fall, expanded into a steady and much heavier flow late last year, the data shows. It has grown to include more than 160 military cargo flights by Jordanian, Saudi and Qatari military-style cargo planes landing at Esenboga Airport near Ankara, and, to a lesser degree, at other Turkish and Jordanian airports.

As it evolved, the airlift correlated with shifts in the war within Syria, as rebels drove Syria’s army from territory by the middle of last year. And even as the Obama administration has publicly refused to give more than “nonlethal” aid to the rebels, the involvement of the C.I.A. in the arms shipments — albeit mostly in a consultative role, American officials say — has shown that the United States is more willing to help its Arab allies support the lethal side of the civil war.

The likeliest explanation is that the U.S. is aiding Nusrah because Nusrah has the boldest fighters. Wisely, they have also set up an effective humanitarian aid program for ordinary people affected by the war.

That said, I am beginning to find the pattern alarming. In both Iran and Syria, the United States is backing jihadis who have Al Qaeda links. These warriors will probably turn against the west once in power, as did the anti-Soviet Afghan fighters. Part of me wonders if there isn't a faction in DC that considers such an outcome desirable. Perhaps the neocons want a new version of the Cold War. Or perhaps they want a hot war. Maybe that's why they're so desperate to replace Assad and Ahmadinejad with people who are more belligerent.

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"Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along."

According to an idiot named Sam Adams, writing in Slate, Tom Cruise is responsible for the scripts in all of his films.

When will people learn who does what in movies?

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Debunking Alex Jones

I like this kid.

Of course, Alex Jones -- a.k.a., Mr. Predictable -- will simply claim that this video was produced by the Illuminati.

I'm not saying that there isn't something hinkey about the Boston bombing case. But I am saying that we can rely on Mr. Predictable to get everything wrong, wrong, wrong. Of course, hyper-macho Texas blowhards like Jones never admit it when they're wrong, wrong, wrong.

Incidentally, this right-wing site accuses the mother of the Tsarnaev brothers of being a "psycho" for suggesting that the attack was staged. But most of the people pushing the "false flag" theory are right-wingers like the Ron Paulites and Alex Jones. (Remember, Matt Drudge considers Jones a credible source of information.) Of course, Fox News and the Breitbart sites offer All Conspiracy, All The Time.

By the way, Ann Coulter pissed off a lot of people when she joked that Tamerlan Tsarnaev's wife deserved jail for "wearing a hijab." Then I guess Mary, mother of Jesus, also deserves a trip to the Big House, since she wears the same type of headgear in the well-researched paintings of William Holman Hunt -- and probably wore one in real life.

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Was Misha "nash"?

"Nash." It means "ours" in spook-speak. (Or at least it used to. Slang changes over time.) For some childish reason, I love that term.

This article in The Week is not your usual conspiracy theorist yada-yada. Writer Walter Katz argues that the mysterious "Misha" -- the Armenian convert to Islam who radicalized Boston bomber Tamerlan Tzarnaev -- may have been an FBI informant. In other words, he was nash.

No, we don't have hard evidence. But the idea has its attractions.

For one thing, it explains why the much-vaunted FBI -- not to mention our much-vaunted CIA, our much-vaunted press, and our much-vaunted legions of armchair internet Sherlocks -- have had no luck in locating this Misha personage. For another thing, it would explain the anomaly of an Armenian Muslim jihadi. (Armenians are Christians.)

Katz directs our attention to this 2011 Mother Jones piece by Trevor Aaronson, on the FBI's network of terrorist informants. Katz offers this precis:

According to Aaronson, the FBI "maintains a roster of 15,000 spies — many of them tasked… with infiltrating Muslim communities." In addition, for every officially recognized informant there are three unofficial informants. During the Mother Jones investigation with the University of California, Berkeley, they examined 508 terrorism-related cases. Of those, "nearly half the prosecutions involved the use of informants." Sting operations were used in cases brought against 158 defendants. The upshot is that "with three exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings."

Aaronson described how the sting is typically started with the FBI assigning an informant to approach "the target posing as a radical." As the relationship develops, "the operative will propose a plot, provide explosives, even lead the target in a fake oath to Al Qaeda. Once enough incriminating information has been gathered, there's an arrest — and a press conference announcing another foiled plot." The question always remains, though, to what degree the plots come about from the target's own mind rather than through the machinations of the informant/agent provocateur.

We know that the Russian government had alerted the FBI and CIA to Tamerlan. It seems likely that the Russians overheard (or found out about) an electronic communication between Tamerlan and radicals in Chechnya. After the alert, the feds studied Tamerlan's internet trail and interviewed the man, finding nothing to justify arrest. But they put him on a list of people to watch.

Perhaps they decided to do more than watch. Katz:

In the experience I had as a criminal defense attorney, federal informants are moved around the country at will. They are like ghosts. Their names aren't real. They are from nowhere. They aren't very accountable for their actions as long they get their man.

If this be conspiracy theory, it's of a higher standard than the usual -- because, unlike the garbage offered by the likes of Alex Jones, this theory is falsifiable. To prove Katz wrong, the FBI need only give us some background on Misha -- give us a man, not a ghost. The feds have access to Tamerlan's entire computer history and phone records. How can they not have any clue as to Misha's identity?

By the way, please don't misinterpret my words here. I'm not saying that the feds engineered or desired the Boston bombing. Katz, if I read him aright, is suggesting that the feds attempted to "sting" Tamerlan -- to lure him into one of yet another plot that the FBI could foil "just in time." When he didn't bite, they dropped him. Then Tamerlan formulated plans of his own.

For what it's worth, an ABC News piece informs us Iran's government has suggested that the CIA is the force behind Inspire, the pro-Al Qaeda publication on Tamerlan's reading list. The article includes this hilarious bit:

Noting the general content of "Inspire" articles, a spokesperson for the CIA told ABC News, "There are some allegations that don't even deserve comment. This is one."

That's like saying: "Communism is bad. Therefore, FBI agents would never have joined the Communist Party USA during the Cold War."

The Wikipedia entry on Inspire offers further clues:

While the SITE Institute and at least one senior U.S. government official described Inspire as authentic, there was some speculation on jihadist websites and elsewhere that the magazine, due to its low quality, may have been a hoax.[31] This view was advocated, in particular, by Max Fisher, a writer for The Atlantic.[32] Fisher listed five reasons to suspect the publication was a hoax.[32] According to Fisher, the portable document format (PDF) file that contained the first issue also contained a computer virus. Fisher noted that the magazine contained an article by Abu Mu'sab al-Suri, noting that al-Suri had been in Guantanamo since 2005, and that whether he was actually tied to al Qaeda remained unclear. The article attributed to al-Suri was the beginning of a series that appeared in the next 5 issues of Inspire. These excerpts were all copied from a translation of Abu Musab al-Suri's "The Global Islamic Resistance Call" which was published in a 2008 biography of him. [33]

Peter Bergen, the national security analyst for CNN, describing it as "a slick Web-based publication, heavy on photographs and graphics that, unusually for a jihadist organ, is written in colloquial English", on March 31, 2011 discussed the column of Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a leader of AQAP, in its fifth issue.

The computer virus -- probably a trojan designed to log and transmit everything on an infected computer -- might well be the main purpose of the publication. (Betcha didn't know that pdfs can contain malware.)

This Firedoglake piece by Kevin Gosztola argues that Awlaki was a direct influence on Tamerlane. Although Gosztola seems pretty hip, he won't actually come out and make the suggestion -- as I have -- that Awlaki was also "nash." Before you scoff, see here and here and here.

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Meanwhile, the big banks have robbed us all...again

If you haven't yet read Matt Taibbi's latest jaw-dropper, do so now. Basically, Matt tells us that the Illuminati-spotters were right all along -- in a sense. Although that secret society is fictional, our real-world big banks have colluded to fix interest-rate swaps.

What are interest rate swaps? As you know, countries and states and counties and cities around the world all borrow money -- which means that they pay interest. An interest rate swap is, basically, a way to renegotiate the loan. And that's no small thing.

Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB and J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.

"It's a double conspiracy," says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. "It's the height of criminality."

This next bit is hard for me to write. You guys know how much I hate Glenn Beck, right? A couple of days ago, Jon Stewart made fun of Beck because he (Beck) recently claimed that Powerful Unseen Forces had engineered the rapid fall in gold prices. (Rightwingers sure do love them some gold.) Stewart's audience had a huge laugh at that one, and so did I.

Guess what?

The bad news didn't stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. "Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry," CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said.

We are forever being told that finance capital must go unregulated because any government intrusion would conflict with the Gospel According to Adam Smith. But Smith said that the only thing that made capitalism worthwhile is competition -- and there's none to be found at the top levels of the capitalist system.

These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati – this is the real thing, and it's no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.

There's a lot more. I suggest you take some time away from following the Boston bombing weirdness and read Matt's piece.

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WMDs in Boston -- or: Who killed Sean Collier? (Updated)

Murdered MIT police officer Sean Collier has been laid to rest, with Joe Biden speaking at the ceremony. This NYT story offers represents the first attempt to present an account of just what happened to him that night.

Officer Sean A. Collier was 27, not much older than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology students he watched over as a campus police officer, and he sometimes joined them in a game of darts or Xbox. So when an ambulance staffed by students rolled past his parked patrol car last Thursday night, he flashed his blue lights to say hello. The students answered with their red lights.

It was just a little after that routine interaction, the police said, that a pair of men approached Officer Collier’s squad car from behind and shot him to death, in what some law enforcement officials said appeared to have been a failed attempt to steal his gun. In the anguished scene that followed, the student emergency medical technicians were called back to the patrol car they had just passed, where they tried in vain to save Officer Collier’s life.

Yeah, but: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has not been charged with that crime -- in fact, the complaint against him does not mention the Collier killing. Previously, many news reports informed us that the Tsarnaevs had spoken of the killing to the man whose car they stole, but the complaint mentions no such confession.

The suggestion that gun theft motivated the murder makes no sense: The brothers already had plenty of weaponry, according to a number of reports. Or are we now supposed to rewrite those news accounts as well? (Update: Apparently, we are. See the final section of this post.)

We've recently learned that the brothers also already had a car -- a nice, nondescript Honda Civic. If they needed a getaway vehicle, a Honda would have sufficed. So what motivated the theft of a Mercedes SUV? And why have we not heard from the driver, who goes strangely unnamed in the aforementioned complaint? (Update: Okay, turns out we have heard from the driver.)

We know that the brothers either owned or had access to another Mercedes, which was in the shop on the night all of this activity occurred. Dzhokhar told the mechanic that the car belonged to a friend. When the mechanic did not have repairs finished on time, Dzhokhar became enraged and upset. Why? Odd thought: Did whatever they had planned somehow require the use of a Mercedes?

Several new accounts tell us that Dzhokhar had no firearm while holed up in that boat. He posed no threat. The cops simply showed up and opened fire. Why? And why did so many earlier news accounts paint a different picture?

So far, the only explanation for that initial barrage of gunfire is "the fog of war." That's not good enough.

I'm not normally a cop-basher. I have great respect for people who do a tough and dangerous job. But in this case, it seems clear that the police have issued misleading statements to the press in order to cover up unprofessional work.

WMDs. I've been bugged by the decision to charge Dzhokhar with possession of weapons of mass destruction, a term once reserved for nukes and CBW. If we redefine the term so loosely, aren't we giving ourselves permission to invade any country on earth?

Maybe we should take out the government of Lichtenstein. They possess weapons of mass destruction!

Reader D made the same point in a letter I'd like to share with readers...

However, what I find far more troubling than all the drama over Miranda is the way the Feds are labeling these two comparatively small homemade antipersonnel bombs as “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. Incredibly, they have indicted Tsarnaev on charges of employing weapons of mass destruction.

Has anybody raised a peep of protest about this gross misrepresentation of what were essentially nothing better than a couple of jumbo garden-variety pipe-bombs? Basically they were roughly the equivalent of large grenades, or if you prefer a couple of normal size anti-personnel mines, like a Claymore. Who in their right mind would describe a big pipe-bomb or a Claymore as a weapon of mass-destruction?

This also disgracefully trivializes what a genuine weapon of mass destruction truly is. That was definitely no pipe-bomb on board the Enola Gay.

Doesn’t it strike you Joe as a sinister Orwellian distortion of what the meaning of “weapon of MASS destruction” is actually intended to convey? I always thought the “mass” part of the term was the defining distinction, meant to connote a great many individuals as in mass-transit, mass-communication, mass-extinction or mass-hysteria.

If simply amassing a measure of destruction of life and limb is the operative concern, then Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech using a most pedestrian 9mm pistol, racked up more than ten times the number of kills than the Tsarnaevs. Does that mean an ordinary handgun deserves to be labeled a weapon of mass destruction? If so, then surely that designation ought to apply as well to the common kitchen knife. In 2001, in a cafeteria in Osaka, Mamoru Takuma conclusively demonstrated how an unremarkable kitchen knife could, in a matter of moments, separate the souls from the bodies of seven people and severely wound thirteen others. Then, we have the occasional deranged individual who intentionally plows his automobile into a packed crowd, killing and wounding a whole slew of innocent folks. Is a Buick to be classified as a weapon of mass destruction too? Something is horribly cockeyed here.

The hysteria level is not only getting out of hand, it seems that wild and unreasonable fears are being purposely exploited to get the public to accept a continued shift away from traditional liberal American law-enforcement policies, and towards embracing outright police-state methods, along with the continuing militarization of law-enforcement in general.

Update: Alex Seitz-Wald of Salon has an excellent run-down of the changes in the official story. Some readers of that piece have argued -- not unreasonably -- that there will always be a few muddled facts during the early stages of reporting on an unfolding story. I agree, but only to a point. This story zoomed past that point two or three days ago.

To mention just one example: At first the cops told us that the brothers had a massive arsenal, including a BB gun(!) -- but now we learn that the Tsarnaevs had but one 9mm pistol between them. Cah-MON. You can't change the narrative so drastically while offering the public no better explanation than "Oops"!

So who deserves the blame for these mutating facts? A lot of people would point to the journalists covering this story, but I think that reporters have simply repeated what they've been told by police and government sources. One thing is for sure: We've reached a point where no-one can say that this story is in its early stages -- yet you don't have to be a conspiracy buff to see that we still have eight or nine genuine mysteries here.

Half of those mysteries become clearer if we posit that the cops told fibs to hide their screw-ups.

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How to make a fortune short-selling

A hacker got into the AP's Twitter account and spread a false story that the White House had been bombed. The stock market took an immediate 100 point dive. It picked up again very quickly, of course...but during that brief period, a short seller could have made a fortune.

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Terror, murder, and Conspiracy Inc.

(Note: I've rewritten much of this piece since it was first published.)

Let's start with Kevin Curtis, the Elvis impersonator accused of perpetrating the ricin attacks. The cops have let him go, since his home contained no evidence of ricin production. It turns out that Curtis has an enemy named J. Everett Dutschke. He may be responsible, although he has denied the charge.

The only evidence against Curtis was a letter containing a catch phrase that Curtis often used when signing his internet missives: "This is KC and I approve this message." Of course, the person who composed that message may have been someone hoping to frame Curtis.

The most interesting aspect of this bizarre case is the role played by conspiracy theory.

For a number of years now, Curtis has trumpeted his belief that he has uncovered an organ trafficking scheme at a major hospital. I'm one of the few bloggers willing to take these assertions at least semi-seriously -- although, obviously, I've seen no independent verification. There are reports that Dutschke (who has been accused of child endangerment) and Curtis worked together on a book about the organ theft ring.

Dutschke, for his part, seems to be a great fan of noted conspiracy kook Glenn Beck -- at least, that's what I glean from the man's Twitter feed. (Also here.) Dutschke also admires Ayn Rand's writings. There's much overlap between the world of the Ayn-droids and the world of conspiracism, as any visit to the Ron Paul boards will prove.

It seems that conspiracy theory has also played a huge role in the formation of the Tsarnaev brothers' worldview.

Your best overall guide to this aspect of the Boston bombing case is this post by bostonboomer on Skydancing, headlined "Tamerlan Tsarnaev Was An Alex Jones Fan." That post quotes this article from Alternet:

Tamerlan “took an interest in Infowars,” according to Elmirza Khozhugov, the ex-husband of Tamerlan’s sister. He was also apparently interested in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and was trying to find a copy of “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” one of the most notorious conspiracy tomes of history.

There’s no doubt that Jones will take this report as confirmation of everything he’s been preaching. The report, he will claim, was planted in the AP — the government controls the media, after all — and is a naked attempt to discredit him and definitive proof that the globalist cabal views him as a serious threat.

Jones is an entirely predictable creature -- a classic hyper-macho Texas blowhard who would rather stick needles under his own fingernails than admit he might be wrong about anything. Salon's recent take-down has it right: At this point, the guy is just phoning it in. He's incapable of original thought, of saying a single surprising word. Alex Jones is America's conspira-bot, programmed to emit conspira-cliches.

But there was another influence on the Tsarnaevs. His name is Misha, and he is a red-bearded exorcist from Armenia who has converted to Islam.

According to multiple reports, Tamerlan and Misha met between as 2007 and 2009 near the Cambridge area. "Misha was telling him what is Islam, what is good in Islam, what is bad in Islam," said Elmirza Khozhugov, the former brother-in-law of the Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, who sat in on some of the conversations. "This is the best religion and that's it." Khozhugov told the Associated Press. "Misha was important. Tamerlan was searching for something. He was searching for something out there."

It all sort of unraveled at that point. Tamerlan immersed himself in radical Islam and even quit listening to music because, he said, it's "not really supported in Islam." (Misha told him that.) The 26-year-old's radical thinking wandered into the political sphere as well, and apparently, he started getting into conspiracy theories. We're not talking Area 51 or the 9/11 Truther movement. Tamerlan got into pretty much all of the conspiracy theories, including one century-old fantasy that Jews rule the world.

More here, in a Daily Mail story that draws from Tamerlan's uncle Ruslan:

Ruslan said: ‘It was all the same talking, God, God, how he's talking to demons, how he's an exorcist, how he's healing people. Tamerlan was absolutely in his possession. All around people considered him just another prick.

‘Then my brother comes in from work, very late and Anzor is talking to his wife saying what is this person doing here so late?

‘Tell him to get the hell out. And she says: 'You'd better shut up, this person is teaching wise things to your son'. This is the mother. After that Tamerlan went over his place, he changed his views. It started from people like that.’

Also here:

It was not immediately clear whether the FBI has spoken to Misha or was attempting to.
Tsarnaev became an ardent reader of jihadist websites and extremist propaganda, two U.S. officials said. He read Inspire magazine, an English-language online publication produced by al-Qaida's Yemen affiliate.

Now let's pull back and take in a wider view of conspiracism's impact on recent history.

You surely recall Jared Lee Loughner, the bizarre individual who shot Congresswoman Giffords. Although Loughner was clearly deranged, I have elsewhere suggested that his consumption of "psychotoxic" materials -- such as the film Zeitgeist -- may have aided the derangement process. Zeitgeist (described in this earlier post) is an inane conspiracy documentary which clumsily ties together three separate topics: The alleged non-historicity of Jesus, the controlled demolition theory of 9/11, and financial schemes of the "international bankers."

Some evidence indicates that Seung-Hui Cho, the Virignia Tech shooter, imbibed regularly from the fountains of political paranoia. Was he attracted to that kind of material because he had already gone mad, or did exposure to that stuff help drive him mad?

Nancy Lanza, the mother (and first victim) of Sandy Hook mass murderer Adam Lanza, was a "doomsday prepper," which we may fairly label a conspiracist subculture. (Have you ever met or heard of a prepper who did not believe in conspiracies?)

The mother of Newtown school massacre gunman Adam Lanza was a survivalist who was stockpiling food because she thought the world economy was on the verge of collapse.

Nancy Lanza began hoarding food and water because she feared that the onging financial crisis was going to bring about the end of civilized society.

And, of course, we have the examples of Tim McVeigh and Anders Brevik, two paranoia addicts doing battle with hallucinations of the Illuminati.

Conspiracy theory has become inextricably intertwined with American fundamentalist religion. To prove the point, one need only cite Pat Robertson's infamous The New World Order, which approvingly quotes noted "old school" anti-Semitic writers such as Nesta Webster and Eustace Mullens. When the internet first became popular in the mid-1990s, most "Christian" websites were only one or two links away from The Protocols. Many American clergy preach the politics of fear as routinely as they preach Jesus. This is also true in black churches -- Americans learned all about that when they met Reverend Wright -- and in some conservative Jewish organizations. And needless to say, conspiracism is very popular within certain Muslim sects.

These days, the Republican party's whole act is built around conspiracism. Just turn on Fox News and watch for an hour or so. You're sure to encounter at least one conspiracy theory -- in fact, you'll probably hear about dozens.

There's one hell of a lot of paranoia bubbling through the veins of our body politic. Above, I used the word "psychotoxin" to describe the documentary called Zeitgeist. This strikes me as a valuable term, and I hope it comes into general usage. I really do believe that some books, films and radio diatribes have the ability to push weak people into madness.

Some people may call me a hypocrite, because I also maintain that actual conspiracies exist. For example, I've never disguised my conviction that JFK was murdered by a faction of the intelligence community -- a faction led by James Jesus Angleton.

You want another example of a conspiracy theory I find credible? Take a closer look at the above-mentioned magazine for jihadists, Inspire. Some people hold that the CIA itself produces this journal as a way of "fishing" for potential terrorists. I'm quite open to that idea, although I've seen no proof; similar tactics have worked in the past. (Inspire certainly boasts top-notch design: See here)

Hell, I'm even willing to give Kevin Curtis' claims a fair hearing.

Incidentally, it's worth noting that the JFK assassination is one conspiracy theory that the Fox Newsers continually pooh-pooh. In our topsy-turvy culture, those few conspiracy theories backed by decent evidence are the ones least likely to be pushed by the media empire I call Conspiracy Inc.

Conspiracism has become an industry. When the product serves the interests of the powerful, that industry receives funding and thrives. Glenn Beck and Alex Jones do nothing to challenge -- and everything to uphold -- the established order. Being libertarians, they push the message that elected government officials are always evil, and that unelected corporate power must never be tethered. Working class people who look to Jones or Beck for answers will always be told to love their oppressors and to hate anyone who tries to make the average person's life better. The consumers who buy the wares produced by Conspiracy Inc. consider themselves the hippest of the hip, even though they are the most easily manipulated people in the world.

Conspiracy Inc. is itself a conspiracy. That's my theory.

The danger to our nation does not come from any individual conspiracy theory. Some theories have a basis in fact -- and even those which do not are not dangerous in and of themselves. Each argument must be judged individually, on the evidence.

What I have learned to fear is the conspiratorialist mindset. Like Big Tobacco, Conspiracy Inc. must continually create new addicts. If you've ever met anyone ensnared by this addiction, you already know the identifying characteristics:

* The quasi-sexual thrill derived from interpreting all phenomena in the most paranoid possible fashion.

* The instant presupposition of malice and bad faith on the part of anyone offering a counter-argument.

* An alienation from normal society, coupled with an inability to discuss mundane topics or to read non-paranoid books.

* A phobic reaction to the very concept of self-criticism.

* A manic loquaciousness, coupled with a desperate desire to prevent anyone else from completing a thought.

* Either/or thinking, coupled with a distaste for nuance.

* A chronic inability to comprehend the meaning of the word evidence.

* Above all, those addicted to the products of Conspiracy Inc. are characterized by arrogance. They have the unbridled self-confidence of the clueless.

Do these people pose a menace? Yes. Potentially.

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If Tamerlan Tsarnaev had read this blog, he'd still be alive

The headline is a deliberate provocation, but it also happens to be true. Among the eleven most mystifying things the brothers did (according to this Mother Jones story) is the following:

Keep the hostage's phone. The Tsarnaevs continued on without their hostage—but they did have his phone, which allowed police to track their location via GPS.

Mother Jones links to this piece in Time:

Naturally, the carjacking victim provided police with the make and license-plate number of his vehicle. Even better, the Tsarnaevs now had their very own GPS beacon, as authorities tracked the location of a cell phone the man had left in his car. Within minutes, police had found the men and an ensuing gun battle left Tamerlan dead and Dzhokhar in hiding, soon to be caught. End of rampage.

Look, I don't approve of criminality or bombings or terrorism. Hell, I don't approve of any sort of violence except in self-defense (or, possibly, when dealing with louts who talk during movies). But I also don't approve of stupid criminality. Many previous Cannonfire posts have pounded away at one theme: Even law-abiding folk should avoid carrying devices which allow the government to track every move.

Here are a few other tidbits from that MJ piece:

The Wall Street Journal reported that Dzhokhar stopped by an auto-body shop in Watertown on Tuesday to pick up the Mercedes he'd brought in for repairs.

As noted in a previous post, I saw a live news interview with the mechanic, who said that Dzhokhar was infuriated that the car was not repaired on time. Dzhokhar also intimated that the car belonged to a friend. Weirdly, both the malfunctioning car and the stolen SUV were made by Mercedes. (As we will see at the end of this post, the brothers had access to still another vehicle. The cops have yet to tell us if that was also a Mercedes.)

When Dzhokhar carjacked a Mercedes on Thursday night, he and his brother had one thing in mind: Get cash, and fast. They emptied $800 from an ATM using their victim's PIN number, before they reached the account limit. Holding up a stranger for money suggests a woeful lack of planning on their part (they hadn't budgeted) that helped alert them to the authorities.

If these guys owned a Mercedes, why did they feel obligated to steal cash from an ATM? They must have had some money set aside to pay the mechanic. (Anyone who specializes in repairing high end cars doesn't work cheap.) Hell, why not just sell the Mercedes on Craigslist, buy a nondescript beater for (say) $1200, and use the rest of the money to fund relocation?

Incidentally, we still have no clear story as to why they killed that MIT cop. In fact, I'd like to see the evidence that the Tsarnaevs committed that crime. Unless I missed something (and please double-check), the official Criminal Complaint against Dzhokhar makes no mention of this murder.

On another front: Rand Paul offers some sensible reasons as to why we should not treat the younger Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant. If our normal criminal justice system was tough enough to take care of Tim McVeigh, it will suffice for Tamerlan's dimwitted kid brother.

The younger and elder Pauls have an odd place in our society. I despise their libertarian politics, which would rid corporations of all restraints and regulations. If the Pauls have their way, all of American society would soon resemble the immediate vicinity of the Texan fertilizer plant that had such a noteworthy "hiccup." And yet, paradoxically, Ron and Rand Paul are the only people on the right who -- every so often -- have the balls to tell their fellow conservatives to calm down and stop trying to militarize everything. For that, I guess, we owe them some thanks.

Some commentators have cautioned that Tsarnaev should not be treated any differently from the way we have treated "white" bombers. The distinction amuses me. Born in Chechnya, the Tsarnaev brothers truly deserve to be called Caucasians. Look it up.

Think Progress posits that Tamerlan's boxing career led him to develop CTE -- chronic traumatic encephalopathy. A silly idea, this: It's not as though pugilists have a history of turning into mad bombers. No, if you're looking for motive, the latest news from the WP makes as much sense as anything else:

The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews.

Let me once again make myself clear: I loathe violence, as do all sensible people. But if we look at the situation from the detached, Olympian position of an historian writing 1000 years in the future...

Well. What was it Malcolm X once said? Something about chickens...?

And another point: I just noticed an oddity in that afore-linked Time article...

The Tsarnaev brothers were armed and had multiple explosive devices. (The carjacking victim told police they drove to another car and transferred arms from it into his vehicle; by some reports the brothers were driving in two separate cars when police confronted them in Watertown.)

Obvious questions: If they already had a car, why steal one? Why bother transferring bombs from one vehicle to another in a place where witnesses might see suspicious activity? How could they keep the carjack victim "under wraps" during the transfer operation yet allow him to escape when they tried to empty his bank account? Why would they divulge their identity to their captive?

I'm not saying that these questions have no reasonable answers. They very well might. But at this point, we really deserve a scenario that makes sense.

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Joseph Cannon's day off

Sorry I wasn't around to yammer about today's events, or to publish the comments some of you were kind enough to leave. But I took this occasion to make my way to DC, where the National Gallery is hosting an amazing -- AMAZING -- Pre-Raphaelite exhibit.

In truth, amazing is too small a word. I thought I knew these images well. I've read books about the PRB and seen a number of documentaries. But take it from me, folks: If you haven't seen these images "in the paint," you haven't seen them. More than most great paintings, these pieces simply do not exist in reproduction.

I am so off the Italian stuff for now. Even the divine Ginevra looked pokey after these Brits showed what they could do.

The star of the show, beyond all doubt, is William Holman Hunt. Although his draftsmanship could sometimes be a tad "off" -- one of these Sundays, I may devote a very impudent post to pointing out the flaws in The Awakening Conscience -- he may be the best painter in the history of the medium. Hunt's The Shadow of Death -- a huge, life-sized work -- contains an infinitude of detail and deftly-painted passages and technical challenges handled with miraculous ease. Seeing that work in reproduction is like watching Lawrence of Arabia on an iPhone. If you have any interest in art, this painting alone justifies the cost of travel to DC.

Before I saw this show, I might have told you that my favorite PRB-ers were Rosetti and Burne-Jones. But they're a bit disappointing in the original. Prosepine is the grand exception -- I think it's Rosetti's best work, and one of the all time finest PRB productions. Believe it or not, Andrew Lloyd Webber owns this picture; he keeps it above his piano. For a while, I was furious at Webber: How dare he possess a masterwork that rightfully belongs to me? However, since he was kind enough to loan out Prosepine for this show, I have decided to forgive him.

This one exhibit justifies my otherwise ill-considered move to the east coast. As a reminder of Baltimore's inherent despicableness, I nearly got into a scrape with an insane bruiser on the bus home. He tried to pick a fight, until he learned about the buck knife in my pocket. (Those one-handed openings take practice.) That seemed to make an impression.

So. Anything going on in the news?

By the way: If you want an example of what's wrong with art criticism today, go here. Yet another talent-free pretentious mofo reduces painting to subject matter -- to literature. If you want to learn about real art, my advice is to toss out everything said by anyone who has never actually held a brush and made a picture. And then toss out everything written by people who can talk only about subject matter. SUBJECT MATTER DOESN'T MATTER. ART IS NOT WHAT BUT HOW. 

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Who was that naked guy?

Two videos: The first contains an interview with an eyewitness to the arrest of...well, someone. A number of You Tube comments aver that Naked Guy (if I may bestow that name on him) was, in fact, the driver of the carjacked vehicle. Others say that Naked Guy and Tamerlan Tsarnaev are one and the same.

If he was Tamerlan, then we need to account for the condition of the body photographed in the morgue. Especially those bullet holes. Judge for yourself:



And here is a clearer video of the naked guy. He does look like Tamerlan, who was a boxer and thus in good shape.



Just for reference, here's a shot of Tamerlan in the ring.

Seems to me that, although Tamerlan and Naked Guy look much alike, Tamerlan had more chest hair. On the other hand, the video is not as detailed as we might like.

So...was Naked Guy the driver of the hijacked vehicle, as many claim? I don't think so.

On that day, journalists covering the rapidly breaking series of events made one point quite clear: The driver of the hijacked car was let go well before the brothers drove into Watertown. The map published here indicates that the driver was let go at a gas station some three miles to the east of the site where Naked Guy was arrested.



Moving away from the mystery of Naked Guy, we have this Buzzfeed article from the 19th:

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was fatally shot when he ran toward Watertown police officers and attempted to set off an IED that was strapped to his chest. He died soon after he arrived at Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center.

Buzzfeed links to this NBC report published that same night. That report gives us testimony from a neighbor named Andrew Kitzenberg, who was a direct eyewitness with a fairly close view:

The dead suspect — the man in the black hat from the FBI photos — had an improvised explosive device strapped to his chest, law enforcement officials said.

Kitzenberg said that the firefight ended when one of the shooters ran toward the Watertown officers and ultimately fell to the ground. Kitzenberg said he could not tell whether the man was tackled or had been shot.

The other drove the SUV through a line of police offcers at the end of the street, he said. A bullet from the gunbattle lodged in the wall of Kitzenberg’s apartment, he said.

So here, in this early account, we have the claim that the SUV zoomed into a group of cops, although we do not have the assertion that one brother deliberately struck another. Although I don't know Kitzenberg's exact viewing location, it's a little difficult to believe that he was able to see the suspect lying on the ground yet somehow missed seeing the same guy being hit by an SUV. Perhaps some enterprising journalist can ask Mr. Kitzenberg for a follow-up interview...?

Finally, the Boston Herald carried a follow-up interview with Dr. Richard Wolfe, who worked on Tamerlan:

“Our thought was ... there had been a blast injury with shrapnel,” Wolfe said.

When asked about reports that Tsarnaev was run over by a vehicle driven by his fleeing brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Wolfe said he did not see any obvious injuries that would back up that theory.

“I certainly did not see any tire marks or the usual things we see with someone run over by a car,” he said.

Our questions now: How did Tamerlan die? Who was Naked Guy? And if the Watertown police chief is right about one brother running down the other, why does the body have bullet holes (as evidenced by the photo and the doctor's testimony)?

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The most sublime moment in the history of Fox News

I never trusted her. Never.

But even though Zooey seems to have joined the forces of darkness, I remain a huge fan of her father's work. I saw The Black Stallion four times when it first came out, just for the cinematography. No DVD can begin to capture the way that movie looked on the big screen.

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Did Watertown's top cop tell a big, big lie?

I'm not at all convinced that there was any larger conspiracy behind the Tzarnaev brothers. (Update: The FBI now says that there were others. More on that soon.) However, I'm increasingly convinced that some cops have conspired to cover-up their own itchified trigger fingers.

Many news articles have stated -- are still stating -- that elder brother Tamerlan was shot dead by the cops. But now we are supposed to believe a new story, which holds that Tamerlan was killed by his younger brother Dzhokhar.

The police chief, Edward Deveau, describes how cops nearly apprehended the older suspect, and were placing handcuffs on him in the middle of the street Thursday night, when the younger suspect came at officers in a carjacked SUV. The cops were able "to dive out of the way," and the younger suspect then continued to drive directly over his brother and dragging him through the street. That's how the older suspect died, according to the police chief.

The younger suspect eventually dumped the SUV and ran into the darkness of the night, according to the police chief.

In the first place, why would a guy in an SUV ditch the vehicle to run from the cops? Would you do that?

More importantly, if Tamerlan was killed because a car struck him, then how can we explain the morgue photo that shows at least one bullet hole in his body? I don't want to reproduce so gruesome a photo on this site, at least not in its entirety; you can see the image here.

But I can show you a close-up of what is clearly a bullet entrance wound. You can see how he bled out from it -- the blood trails first in one direction then in the other.

(The morgue photo also shows a large gaping hole cut into the left side of his chest, apparently made post-mortem.)

In a statement made before the Boston cops issued their revised account, one doctor who worked on Tamerlan was very clear about the cause of death:

Police took Tamerlan ­Tsarnaev to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center about 1:10 a.m. Friday. He was pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m. Dr. Richard Wolfe said the suspect had been hit by shrapnel from an explosion and that he had died from “a combination of blasts” and “multiple gunshot wounds.”

But after the cops issued their "Dzhokhar did it" yarn, the medical witnesses suddenly became frustratingly vague:

Dr. David Schoenfeld said 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev was unconscious and had so many penetrating wounds when he arrived at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center early Friday that it isn't clear which ones killed him, and a medical examiner will have to determine the cause of death.

The second bombing suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was in serious condition at the same hospital after his capture Friday night. The FBI has not allowed hospital officials to say any more about his wounds or condition.

Why not?

"From head to toe, every region of his body had injuries," he said. "His legs and arms were intact – he wasn't blown into a million pieces" – but he lost a pulse and was in cardiac arrest, meaning his heart and circulation had stopped, so CPR, or cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, was started.

Schoenfeld did not address police's assertion that Tsarnaev was run over by a car driven by his brother as he fled the gunfire.

Way I see it, even one bullet wound in Tamerlan's body damages the new "Dzhokhar did it" story. Do Boston's police officials actually expect us to believe that Dr. Wolfe was wrong when he spoke of multiple bullet wounds? How could a doctor examining a body possibly be mistaken about so basic a fact?

Recall that the initial reports held that Tamerlan had been captured alive -- a story which stayed in place for at least an hour. Several news outlets even published a photo of a naked man (allegedly Tamerlan) in police custody; we were later told that this was another fellow entirely.

The claim that Tamerlan was struck by bullets was made by journalists who spoke with police at the scene. Example:

Tamerlan went down fighting, hit by police bullets. According to the police he was wearing a suicide vest.

How could a cop know about the vest but not know about the guy being dragged down the street by an SUV?

There is no photographic evidence to substantiate the tale that one brother ran over the other, even though police cars often have video cameras, as do civilian cell phones. Journalists were on the scene; NBC had video of the firefight. Under those circumstances, how is it possible that we could be learning of so dramatic a development only now?

Let me once again make myself clear: I am not making any grand conspiratorial claims about the bombing itself. The comments above concern the conduct of the police -- nothing else. Perhaps I'm wrong; perhaps Deveau has an explanation that addresses all of the concerns raised above. Right now, though, I don't see how he can account for the photo of the bullet hole, and I don't see how he can brush aside the statement by Dr. Wolfe.

Other questions: Why was the MIT cop killed? If the brothers had no car, then how did they get to that location? Why does this report say that they stole the cop's cruiser and drove it to commit the 7-Eleven robbery -- a robbery which cops now say was committed by someone else? If they stole a cop car, why did they later hijack an SUV? 

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I call "bullshit" on this one

Now we are told that Dshokhar Tsarnaev is "clinging to life."

When he was taken into custody from the bottom of a boat in the backyard of a Watertown home Friday night, the suspect was bleeding badly and too weak to resist any longer, officials said.

Police believe Dzhokhar Tsarnaev he was initially wounded Thursday night in the gunbattle that killed his brother.

It is unclear whether Tsarnaev was hit again during a final volley before his arrest in the boat.

What they aren't talking about is the evidence that cops who first showed up on the scene were trigger happy. Allow me to repeat a bit that appeared in one of yesterday's posts, taken from this ABC account:

"That boat's his baby. He takes care of it like you wouldn't believe. And they told him it's all shot up," Pizzuto said. "He's going to be heartbroken."

Erik Thompson, who lives across the street from the Henneberry's home, said he heard gunshots and saw law enforcement rush to the scene.

"There was some gunfire earlier which was almost immediately stopped. People were yelling to cease fire, and it seems to be focused on some homes across the street from where I am, which I think is the western side of the street," Thompson said.

It seems likely that Dshokhar was hit during that burst of gunfire. I pause to let the reader contemplate the absurdity of firing on a guy hiding in a boat.

On the other hand, I don't really blame the first responders for being jumpy, considering all that had happened. But the police must be honest about these matters -- otherwise, the conspiracy theorists will seize upon any falsehood, however small or face-saving, and use it to "prove" that everything we've read in the news is wrong.

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WHICH foreign country?

I can't help being intrigued by this FBI statement about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the deceased Boston marathon bomber suspect:

Once the FBI learned the identities of the two brothers today, the FBI reviewed its records and determined that in early 2011, a foreign government asked the FBI for information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The request stated that it was based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.

In response to this 2011 request, the FBI checked U.S. government databases and other information to look for such things as derogatory telephone communications, possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical activity, associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans, and education history. The FBI also interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev and family members. The FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign, and those results were provided to the foreign government in the summer of 2011. The FBI requested but did not receive more specific or additional information from the foreign government.

The obvious questions: Which foreign government?

The less obvious question: How did this foreign government learn of Tamerlan's travel plans?

Here's what his mother has to say about the 2011 interrogation:

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal from Makhachkala in Russia's Republic of Dagestan, the pair's father said FBI agents talked to Tamerlan as a "person of interest" in 2011.

He said he was present at the time, but wasn't worried: "They said, 'We know what sites you are on, we know where you are calling, we know everything about you. Everything'. They said, 'we are checking and watching' - that's what they said."

We know that Tamerlan went to Russia in 2012. Although the dates don't quite mesh, it seems likely that Russia was the requesting government. One can easily understand why Russia would track anyone interested in Chechen independence -- but the claim that they knew of Tamerlan's travel plans suggests that they had eavesdropped on his communications with members of a radical group in that country.

The FBI's statement indicates how acclimated we have become to invasions of our privacy. Think about the implications. Upon request, the feds were able to review the web surfing habits and telephone communications (including transcripts?) of a man who (we are told) had not previously been on their radar. Obviously, that sort of thing is possible only if the NSA routinely collects everyone's data all the time, and then mines it afterward as necessary.

It's not as though this snooping prevented the attack.

Is there a larger group? Three more have been arrested in New Bedford, MA. Allegedly, they are friends of young Dzhokhar -- but so far, the news accounts have not given us any reason as to why these three are considered anything more than acquaintances. Well, there's this:

One neighbor says he had a friendly relationship with Tsarnaev, and the three that were arrested share the same cell phone bill with the bombing suspect.

I'm curious to learn how Tamerlan paid for his travels. His boxing career had failed, as had his college career. So what was the source of income?

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At least there won't be a war

Although we all want to know much more about the Boston marathon bombers, the finale allows us to breathe a sigh of relief. If the bombers had hailed from an Arab country, or from Iran, conservatives would now be calling for military retaliation. War, of course, would be disastrous.

Fortunately, these two guys hailed from Chechnya. Americans don't hate Chechens -- hell, most Americans don't even know what a Chechen is. One thing's for sure: We aren't going to strike at Chechnya militarily, because Chechnya is part of Russia, and Russia has nukes. Nukes compel even the hottest of hotheads to pause and think.

Of course, if the Chechens had succeeded in their bid for independence, they would not now be part of Russia, and thus might not have the protection of Russian missiles.

Odd how things turn out, eh wot? I wonder if Dzhokhar can appreciate the irony...

At any rate, we still have quite a few mysteries to dope out: What was the motive? How did the plan formulate? Did the parents' taste for conspiracy theorizing play a role? Did the two brothers have accomplices? Which foreign country asked the FBI to interview elder brother Tamerlan? Why did he travel to Turkey in 2003? Can we identify the mysterious religious "extremists" who (according to the mother) exercised some sort of control over Tamerlan? Was the FBI keeping tabs on him? Was Dzhokhar a zealot like his brother, or was he simply (as Dakinkat has put it) a "hapless pothead and shy kid looking for direction"? Why didn't the brothers get away when the getting was good? Why did they shoot the MIT cop? Did they (as ABC reported) begin that night's adventure by setting off an explosion?

You probably have another dozen or so questions of your own...

Kook's korner. Glenn Beck, still convinced that the released Saudi engineered the attack, has given Obama an ultimatum:

Beck then went on to send a semi-coded message to those in the upper level of the government warning that they had better come clean about this Saudi national because The Blaze has information that reveals that he "is a very bad, bad, bad man" which will be revealed on Monday.

"I don't bluff," Beck stated, "I make promises. The truth matters. I've had enough of what you've done to our country. I thought I had heard and seen it all. I thought I didn't trust my government. Oh no, no, no. There is no depth that these people will not stoop to. They have until Monday and then The Blaze will expose it."

Wow. So, looks like ol' Glenn is going to prove the brothers Tsarnaev are either innocent dupes or pawns, and that the real mastermind was this unnamed Saudi who was aided and abetted by Barack Obama because...well, because Obama is just that evil.

The brothers may indeed have been part of a larger group. I'm open to that possibility. But I'm not open to any conspiracy theory proffered by a lachrymose libertarian loon whose favorite historian is Cleon fucking Skousen.

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They got him

Accused bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been hiding out in a boat in a yard all along. The boat was owned by a man named David Henneberry.

On ABC just now, there were many reports of shots fired earlier in the evening -- even though the cops denied engaging in a shoot-out. (They said they had used flash bangs, although I doubt that one could easily confuse the two.) However, ABC spoke to a couple of Henneberry's neighbors...

"That boat's his baby. He takes care of it like you wouldn't believe. And they told him it's all shot up," Pizzuto said. "He's going to be heartbroken."

Erik Thompson, who lives across the street from the Henneberry's home, said he heard gunshots and saw law enforcement rush to the scene.

"There was some gunfire earlier which was almost immediately stopped. People were yelling to cease fire, and it seems to be focused on some homes across the street from where I am, which I think is the western side of the street," Thompson said.

Looks like we've had some rather nervous cops with itchy trigger fingers. Not that I can blame them too much, given the situation. Still, I'm glad that Dzhokhar did not end up like his brother...

Elder brother Tamerlan, incidentally, had an American family from a Christian background, and they claim that he cannot have acted out of religious motivations. Yet his YouTube account shows evidence of Al Qaeda sympathies and an apocalyptic mind-set.

The YouTube page includes religious videos, including one of Feiz Mohammad, a fundamentalist Australian Muslim preacher who rails against the evils of Harry Potter. One playlist includes a video dedicated to the prophecy of the Black Banners of Khurasan, which is embraced by Islamic extremists—particularly Al Qaeda. The prophecy states that an invincible army will come from the region of Khurasan in central Asia.

"This is a major hadith (reported saying of the prophet Muhammad) that jihadis use; it is essentially an end-time prophecy," says Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "This is definitely important in Al Qaeda's ideology."

This doesn't sound so very different from the crap eschatology that made so much loot for Tim LaHaye and Hal Lindsey. How can a man buy into such an absurd belief system yet keep his feelings secret from his family?

Update: The FBI interviewed Tamerlan two years ago...

...the FBI interviewed Tsarnaev, the elder brother of at-large bombing suspect Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, at the request of a foreign government to see if he had any extremist ties, but failed to find any linkage.

Anyone out there care to guess just which foreign government? I'm thinking Turkey, since Tamelan spent some time there.

The story includes these intriguing nuggets:

Although the FBI initially denied contacting Tsarnaev, the brothers' mother said they had in an interview with Russia Today.

Zubeidat Tsarnaeva said her son got involved in "religious politics" about five years ago, and never told her he was involved in "jihad."

She insisted the FBI "knew what he was doing on Skype" and that they counseled him "every step of the way."

Wait: The FBI counseled him? This story is maddeningly contradictory.

Tsarnaeva, who is a U.S. citizen currently in Russia, told Russia Today the FBI had called her with concerns about her elder son, although she did not specify when exactly she was contacted.

"They used to come [to our] home, they used to talk to me ... they were telling me that he was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him," Tsarnaeva said. "They told me whatever information he is getting, he gets from these extremist sites... they were controlling him, they were controlling his every step...and now they say that this is a terrorist act!"

Who was controlling him? This is just the latest shard of data indicating that the brothers worked with a larger group. Where did they get their money? If Tamelan was a loner who complained of having no American friends, then who were the "friends" seen by the mechanic who worked on his Mercedes?

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The terrorist's tweets

It's true: Fugitive Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had a Twitter account. Here's an actual picture of his actual cat:

Okay, I added some verbiage. But honest, that really is the guy's cat. Cute, huh?

Other memorable tweets: Two days after the bombing, Dzhokhar reported that he was "a stress-free kind of guy." When someone else tweeted a sad human interest piece about one of the fatalities, Dzhokhar responded: "fake story."

On the day of the bombing he wrote: "There are people that know the truth but stay silent & there are people that speak the truth but we don't hear them cuz they're the minority" and "Ain't no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people"

On March 10, he wrote "There is absolutely no excuse for being a male cheerleader." An informant tells me that George W. Bush offered this response: "I beg to differentiate."

On April 15, Dzhokhar wrote a strange message in apparent reference to another tweet about the Westboro Baptist Church: "and they what 'god hates dead people?' Or victims of tragedies? Lol those people are cooked."

The right keeps finding new ways to go mad. Glenn Beck thinks that the Boston Marathon Massacre is a reason to impeach Obama, because the local cops released that Saudi national (remember him?) who was cleared of any involvement in the crime. A number of right-wing comment-writers have voiced the suspicion that Bill Ayers was somehow responsible. The Family Research Council says that gay marriage caused the terror attacks. And, as always, many right-wing responses are so schizy and disjointed, they resemble a game of Mad Libs gone horribly wrong:

quit googledjunk
psst: its Chechnyan
slaughtered by Putin dumb police no by Chechnyan

Whenever I see surreal comments of this sort (and they appear all the time throughout blogistan right), I wonder if we're dealing with some kind of code or cipher. Perhaps the writer should have mentioned something about noon blue apples...

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