Kevin Drum wrote the so far most useful post about events in Boston:
A quick update on yesterday’s bombings at the Boston Marathon:
- There was not a third bomb at the JFK Library (it was a fire in the building’s mechanical room).
- There are no suspects in custody (the “Saudi national” that dominated the news yesterday is a witness, not a suspect).
- There are not 12 people dead (the New York Post just jumped the gun).
- Police did not find any unexploded devices elsewhere in the city (that’s what Gov. Deval Patrick says, anyway).
- Cell phone service was not shut down by the authorities after the bombs detonated (AP has walked back its original claim, and various people have reported sending texts immediately after the bombing.)
Just thought you’d like to know. For more on what did happen, check out our ongoing explainer here, which is being updated regularly.
It would be nice if every cable news channel reporting on this story had a banner running across the bottom of the screen just repeating these six words: Don’t trust early reporting. Don’t panic.
We don’t yet know who the bomber is – their sex, their race, their religion. But whoever they turn out to be, it will be useful to bear in mind that they are not representative of their group.
What Bruce Schneier said:
Remember after 9/11 when people predicted we’d see these sorts of attacks every few months? That never happened, and it wasn’t because the TSA confiscated knives and snow globes at airports. Give the FBI credit for rolling up terrorist networks and interdicting terrorist funding, but we also exaggerated the threat. We get our ideas about how easy it is to blow things up from television and the movies. It turns out that terrorism is much harder than most people think. It’s hard to find willing terrorists, it’s hard to put a plot together, it’s hard to get materials, and it’s hard to execute a workable plan. As a collective group, terrorists are dumb, and they make dumb mistakes; criminal masterminds are another myth from movies and comic books.
What Ross Douthat said:
But what I hope we don’t see, when the next race or a parade or festival looms up in front of us, are layers of extra stops and searches and checkpoints, wider and wider rings of closed streets, the kind of portable metal detectors that journalists remember unfondly from political conventions, more of the concrete barriers that Washingtonians have become accustomed to around our public buildings … more of everything that organized officialdom does to reassure us, and itself, that soft targets can somehow be eliminated entirely, and that everything anyone can think of is being done to keep the unthinkable at bay.
This kind of security theater is a natural response to terrorism, but it’s a response that since 9/11 we’ve done an absolutely terrible job of reasoning through and then gradually ratcheting back.
Oh, yes – and what Mister Rogers said.
#2) A Saudi national with a student’s visa was seen “acting suspiciously” before the bombing and then running away from the bomb site with bad burns after it. Of course, a) WTF = “acting suspiciously”?, b) in a crowd of thousands in Boston ‘s Back Bay you can probably throw a net around 1000 people and pull in half a dozen Saudi nationals with student visas, and c) yeah, I’d be running like hell, too, especially if I’d been close enough to be burned but still had both feet.
#4) I was listening to a live press conference yesterday and the Boston Police Commissioner himself said there’d been a 3rd device found, unexploded. So I’m not going to fault any media outlet for making that report.
This could be anyone. It could be an Islamic terrorist from overseas. It could be a wannabee recent Islamic convert who’s gone extremist and worked this up all on her own with no backing whatsoever from any group. It could be someone pissed off about the lack of gun control. It could be someone pissed off about excessive gun control. It could be someone trying to wipe out their ex-husband as he crossed the finish line. It could just a complete psychopath who wanted to see a lot of blood and dead people. It could be anything. Patience is called for.
There are things that can be done to reasonably reduce security risks. But nothing can make you safe. Nothing can relieve you of the responsibility of taking your own steps to increase the safety of yourself and those you love. And nothing that either you or the government can do will ensure your safety.
It could be an Xtian fundamentalist, it could be a wannabee converted Xtian fundamentalist whose gone extremist and blah, blah, blah. Or it could be somebody to whom Tax Day and Boston are significant. Can they resist pushing the shiny, red, candy-like button? That’s just it. We don’t know! So we’ll just continue naming our disfavored groups as possibilities.
On another topic, I can’t believe that Douthat wrote something that I agree with. Perhaps you’ve taken it out of context and, were I to read the whole thing (ha!), it’d be the expected awfulness that he usually proffers.
Two men robbed a convenience store in Kendall Square, which is at the northern point of the main MIT campus. They shot and killed an MIT Police officer, carjacked a Mercedes SUV on Memorial Drive (which is on the northern/Cambridge bank of the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge) and drove west to Watertown. During the pursuit one of the two men involved was wounded both by gunshots and by shrapnel from explosive devices (which apparently they were using). He died at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital. A trigger for an explosive device was found on his body. He is believed to be Suspect #1 of the Marathon bombing, identified by the FBI yesterday.
The other suspect is still at large. The following is taken from here:
To the Members of the MIT Community:
MIT suffered a tragedy last night: an MIT Police officer was shot and killed on our campus in the line of duty. We have posted a brief news story with further details.
While the circumstances around the officer’s death remain the subject of an active investigation, what is certain is that the officer gave his life to defend the peace of our campus. His sacrifice will never be forgotten by the Institute. We are thinking now of his family, and our hearts are heavy.
In consultation with faculty chair Sam Allen, we have decided to cancel classes today (Friday). All employees are encouraged to use their best judgment about whether they are prepared to come in to work today: any absence today will be considered excused.
MIT is working now to plan a gathering later today on campus. Once we have determined the time and place, we will communicate with you all.
President Reif is en route home from international travel and will be back with us on campus this evening. We know he will want to be in touch with the community when he returns, and will have his own message to share.
Let’s just say I had occasion to interact with the MIT Police a few times. A good group of people who took their jobs seriously but themselves not too much.
MIT has identified the police officer killed in the line of duty on Thursday evening as Patrol Officer Sean A. Collier, 26, of Somerville, Mass.
Collier had served as a member of the MIT Police since Jan. 9, 2012, following service as a civilian employee with the Somerville Police Department. He was single and a native of Wilmington, Mass.
…
Collier was shot Thursday evening following an altercation at the corner of Vassar Street and Main Street in Cambridge, roughly between Building 32 (Stata Center) and Building 76 (David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research) on the MIT campus. He was transported to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
…
“In a very short period of time, it was remarkable how engaged he was with students, particularly graduate students,” DiFava said. He added that Collier had become active with the MIT Outing Club, joining students in skiing and hiking.
…
“The MIT Police serve all of us at the Institute with great dignity, honor and dedication,” said Israel Ruiz, MIT’s executive vice president and treasure. “Everyone here — those who knew Officer Collier, and those who did not — are devastated by the events that transpired on our campus last night. We will never forget the seriousness with which he took his role protecting MIT and those of us who consider it home.”
Such a waste. “Killed in the line of duty” is heroic, I guess, but what it really means is “a good cop is no longer around to do his job.”
So: multiple commentators on CNN, MSNBC, NPR and such spun speculations that the people responsible were possibly Tea Party/conservative/angry white males protesting tax day or something such. Not so much, it turns out. Turns out they are two brothers, Islamic, from Chechen. Sorry to disappoint, folks. I know it doesn’t help spread the “Tea Party = racist violent people” meme. Better luck next time.
I won’t call them “Islamic terrorists” at this point. We need to find out their motive as well as it can be gotten out of the surviving brother. To my mind, that’s what the “x” stands for in “[x] terrorist”. Not the terrorist’s group identity(s), but their motive.
I strongly believe that they were mere pawns in Mitt Romney’s War On America!!! ™. All the evidence points to it. Mitt Romney is the terrorist mastermind here.
(Yes, this is a joke.)
You must watch too much MSNBC.
Yeah, I know it was a joke. But then so is MSNBC, so I figure it fits.
Well, as long as we’re being all partisan about this…
Senator Lindsey Graham Says Suspend the Constitution For Boston Marathon Suspect And Designate Him An Enemy Combatant
The Czech embassy had to put out a note, politely telling people that Chechnya and the Czech Republic aren’t even a little bit the same. Sigh.
They used to teach geography in schools, didn’t they? I can remember tracing out maps and learning capitals and locations and cultural facts and exports and such. Guess that’s gone by the wayside. Someone probably flunked and got his self-esteem hurt.
The Volokh Conspiracy has an excellent posting on Tsaranev and his Miranda rights. It turns out that the cops do NOT have to read you your Miranda rights before they talk to you. it just means that they can’t use any statement you make against you. But they can use the information. For example, you say “I hid the gun I used to kill him under my bed.” They can’t use that as testimony against you in court. But they can do look under the bed, find the gun, and use it as physical evidence. Lots of good stuff in there, I suggest you all read it.
The Senator is a goof, apparently, at least on this matter. But frankly I’d skip convicting Tsaramev on the terrorist bombing if it meant getting a good heads-up on some future bombings. Not looking too likely, but it’s worth it. They can still get him on the murder of the MIT Police officer, attempted murder of every cop they shot at or threw a bomb at, etc, .etc. He’s highly unlikely to not spend the rest of his life in jail. And if they DO convict him of the Federal charges made against him as a result of the bombings, he will be liable for the death penalty – Massachusetts doesn’t have a death penalty, but in this case the Feds do.
This is slightly off topic, but have any of you seen this satire of Sarah Palin? Like the satire or not, what is really kind of sad is how many people, based on what I’ve seen on Facebook, didn’t recognize it for what it was and thought Palin had really said those things. Why is this sad? Because even given Palin’s poor performance in some of her interviews, the writing of the piece clearly signals that it’s satire. That so many people seem not to have recognized it is troubling to me.
No need to be troubled. People have only been dealing with written text for a few thousand years, and with the level of text in our current culture literally only for a few years. Compare that to the length of time we’ve dealt with verbal language; maybe as much as 200,000 years.
Much sarcasm expression actually turns out to be highly coded in body language. If someone was reading the Sarah Palin article to folks, or acting it out in person or video, they would very likely have gotten the joke. (Interestingly, the use of emoticons to explicitly tag the emotive context of raw text causes a huge spike in the correct evaluation of whether something is sarcastic. Why? Because emoticons are body language…they’re little faces.)
You’re an extremely adept verbal symbolic manipulator, with a wide knowledge base (despite your shameful lack of public choice theory grounding) and so sarcasm detection through context analysis and subtle semantic variations seems easy to you, second nature. (And I imagine that being a translator, who must find and parse the tiniest clues for shades of intended meaning, heightens your skills.) But for most people, it’s quite difficult. They aren’t stupid; they just haven’t optimized their brains for the kind of symbolic analysis that you have. Maybe if someone held a gun to their heads and said they’d die if they didn’t correctly guess whether a piece was sincere or sarcastic, they’d dig deep and eke out a few percentage points of improved differentiation…but most text just isn’t worth that kind of investment 24/7.
Differential cost plays a role too; if it takes you 0.001 seconds to do a sarcasm screen, but Earnest Earl needs 30 seconds, you’ll subject everything to such a screen, whereas Earl might not run a check unless there was some blatant flaming reason to (like, people poking fun at him on Facebook for sharing a link that he thought was real but turned out not to be).
I tried to think of a sarcastic joke with which to end this comment, but I failed.
Richard, this is hardly a new phenomenon. A great many people still think that half of the bits that Tina Fey did on Sarah Palin on SNL were things that Sarah Palin actually said. America is gullible.
My daughter will be home the weekend after next. She’s planning to run in a local 5K or 10K (I forget which), visit some old friends, see us (probably in that order), etc. We got a package sent to us yesterday. She’s going to be running in a Boston Athletic Association “Boston Stands As One” T-shirt. Adidas is selling them for $26.20 (the length of the Marathon in miles) and is donating 100% of the money for the relief of the victims.
I think she should run in the T-shirt they made up after David Ortiz gave his speech before the first Red Sox home game after the Marathon, when he told the capacity crowd and everyone listening on radio and TV “This is our fucking city!” The “u’ is replaced with some logo or another. HIs speech was broadcast uncensored, and the head of the FCC, who has connections to Boston, has let it be known that he is entirely uninterested in sanctioning the Red Sox or any of the media involved.
My boyfriend was recently asked by one of his coworkers,
CW: “You know the movie ‘Olympus Has Fallen’? Is that real?”
BF: “Doesn’t the White House get destroyed in that movie?”
CW: “Yes…”
BF: “Then no, it’s not real.”