They actually brought him in alive

So, the massive and unprecedented manhunt has ended when they found him hiding inside of someone's  boat in a backyard, injured and who the fuck knows. Hopefully he is kept alive and they are able to glean some answers. I wonder if he will end up an enemy combatant and get locked up in a brig on some ship somewhere in the middle of the ocean?

There have been seriously worse things to happen to this country but this one being in the public as it was and so thoroughly documented just brought with it a new level of surreal. The instant newsification I mentioned in the last post and the fact that the whole thing, more or less, was wrapped up inside of a week is impressive. So, so many surreal images from this week but I think the one that may burn into my mind could be this one:

"Suspect 2" Dzhokar Tsarnaev passing by "his allegedly" dropped bomb while his about to be victims look on...Just fucking insanely surreal that we have reached a day and age where everything is captured on some camera somewhere. The only thing left will be the advent of civilian drones buzzing all around everywhere and everyone. The notion of privacy is rapidly becoming a quaint memory but all the same is a useful tool for these sorts of events. All the same, I hope they hang this image in Dzhokar's cell.

Frankly, I am surprised there haven't been more of these kind of attacks as I mentioned the day of the bombing this shit is pretty regular in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kenya, Israel and many, many other countries. An important distinction though is that we are willing to shut down one of our largest metropolitan areas in the country completely and hunt you down if you blow shit up like that.

Deadspin has been pretty good at covering this whole shit show, kind of above and beyond for a sports blog, they put out a great collection of some of the images from the last couple of days as seen here:

To gun nuts who like to say they need their guns to overthrow the government if things go south...You ain't got enough guns to contend with something like this. This was what a police state would look like. not to pick on the police and say they shouldn't have done what they did...Looking at these kinds of images it reads as an even bigger miracle that they brought Dzhokar in alive, shot, but alive. This is heavy duty shit and for two dudes aged 26 7 19. Granted those "dudes" decided to have a firefight and throw bombs at the cops so one can't be too judgmental. 

Overall, aside from whatever endless speculation on the whys and all the motivation oriented questions this incident is, more or less, over. It was surreal, it was weird, and as mentioned in the previous post a main event for a really fucked up week in April. Let's all have a nice weekend now, eh?

It's April, time for a tragedy!

Now, it's certainly not every April of every year that some tremendous, news-media-orgy-style, tragedy happens nor is it obviously exclusively April when things like the Boston Marathon bombing goes down. But it sure seems like the third week of April is a fairly common time for massive, nation wide, nightmares to occur:

• Waco Siege ended April 19, 1993
• Oklahoma City Bombing, April 19, 1995
• Columbine Massacre April 20, 1999
• Virginia Tech Massacre, April 16, 2007
• Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig explodes, April 20, 2010
• Boston Marathon Bombing, April 15, 2013

Also, Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 and in 1939 Germany made April 20 a national holiday celebrating his birth! Plus Tax day in the U.S. is always April 15 and in the "stoner counterculture" 420 is slang for the appropriate time to get high thus April 20th is oft cited as a holiday for pot heads. So, clearly THIS MEANS SOMETHING!

How could this random spattering of tragedies (that also happen to have been massive media events) just happen to occur on or around Hitler's birthday? I also have a former, ornery co-worker who's birthday was 4/20...So, it can't be a coincidence it has to be fate as deemed upon our tragic mortal coil as penance for all of human transgressions and sinful behavior. IT IS! IT TOTALLY IS!?!?

But seriously, it truly is a coincidence because we have naturally had massive, media-fueled travesties at all times of the year and they happen when they happen. The question I am really asking, during this Boston Marathon bombing week (that also happened to include record heavy rains & flooding in the Chicago region, a massive fertilizer plant exploding in Texas, and a ricin poisoned letter being mailed to the President and a Mississippi senator allegedly from a disgruntled Elvis impersonator) is are things getting worse these days or does it just seem like it because of our insane, 24 hour, internet fueled media?

I think it's the media and the never ending negativity forever perpetrated by the insatiable internet monster. One of which I am also quite guilty of as I am practically drowning in social media these days myself. IN fact, an apropos Tweet I saw just a little while ago, from @theTweetofGod, sums up the insanity quite well:

Behold the dawn of the 24-second news cycle.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) April 19, 2013

As I write this post the media is frantically speculating all about "suspect 2" as he has not been caught or killed at the moment. He's  Chechnyan, is he or isn't he a Muslim.  He's trained or not trained, he's a lost soul who, along with his brother, are like the Columbine guys, or not...And, if you choose to watch, the news is just spiraling around in an information maelstrom, a virtual tornado of empty rhetoric, anger and confusion fueled by endless speculation and worry. And the Boston story is just  the biggest one of several "BREAKING NEWS" threads spinning and spinning and spinning. In the end, besides my belief that climate change is making the weather weird, the only thing that is different is the media amplification resulting in the perception that things are somehow worse than they were in the proverbial, undefinable, really just an abstract concept of "BEFORE."

And this post, and really this blog in general, does nothing but add a teeny, tiny, micro drop into the media shit-storm of misinformation and opinionated bullshit. All the same, though, it's been a long week.

Hang in there Boston.

I haven't felt the need to post on this site lately. Been busy doing other things, other blogs, but it's always the tragedies that bring me back in...No words for this yet:

America like Israel.

 News frenzy in full swing.

Someone else pointed this out today as well:

Insurgents in Iraq deployed a series of car bombs as part of highly co-ordinated attacks that cut across a wide swath of the country today, killing at least 55 on the deadliest day in nearly a month.

So, it's a pretty regular thing in many parts of the world. No idea who or why at this point in time, have a weird gut feeling that it'll turn out domestic but who knows. Considering the amount of video coverage in that area I imagine it will come out sooner than later.  Ugly shit, could have been way worse and, as so many have pointed out today, more people involved in helping those hurt than those involved in executing the hurting.