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Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Books are my comfort food!

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

In after Baud. Damn.

Republicans in disarray!

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You are here: Home / Music / Monday Evening Open Thread: Bells of GoT

Monday Evening Open Thread: Bells of GoT

by Anne Laurie|  April 22, 20139:29 pm| 82 Comments

This post is in: Music, Open Threads, Popular Culture, War on Terror aka GSAVE®

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(UW-Madison carillon; h/t commentor Ranchandsyrup)
.
Kudos to the Obama Administration. From the Washington Post:

As he lay seriously injured in a Boston area hospital, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was charged with using a weapon of mass destruction and malicious destruction of property, counts that could bring him the death penalty. He made his first court appearance in an unusual, non-public proceeding in which a federal judge and several lawyers went to his hospital bed…

The criminal complaint against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, filed in U.S. District Court in Boston, ended a debate over how one of the first successful terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland since Sept. 11, 2001, should be handled. Some congressional Republicans had insisted that Tsarnaev be designated an “enemy combatant,’’ which would enable the government to charge him under the laws of war in a military commission or to hold him indefinitely.

White House press secretary Jay Carney rejected that approach on Monday, saying that the suspect cannot be tried in a military commission under federal law because he is a U.S. citizen. “We will prosecute this terrorist through our civilian system of justice,’’ Carney said at a White House news briefing.

Massachusetts public defenders Miriam Conrad, William Fick and Timothy Watkins, who have been appointed to represent Tsarnaev, did not reply to requests for comment Monday…

Tsarnaev was also, according to the transcript, read his Miranda rights.

In another tiny corner of the confusing media mosaic, two of the foreign [Kazakhstan] students arrested in an apartment complex in New Bedford during the dragnet are “being held for allegedly violating their student visas”. Since the concensus of the moment seems to be that the Tsarnaevs were acting alone, looks like these guys may have been guilty of nothing more than associating with a couple of fellow immigrant students who shared a common background.
***********

What’s on the agenda for the evening?

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Reader Interactions

82Comments

  1. 1.

    raven

    April 22, 2013 at 9:31 pm

    “The Bletchley Circle,” rockin.

  2. 2.

    RobertDSC-eMac 1.25

    April 22, 2013 at 9:32 pm

    Glad the Administration did the right thing re: Tsarnaev’s rights.

    I’m home, tired from work. About to put Modern Warfare 3 on.

  3. 3.

    Baud

    April 22, 2013 at 9:34 pm

    one of the first successful terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland since Sept. 11, 2001

    Really, WaPo?

  4. 4.

    Suffern ACE

    April 22, 2013 at 9:36 pm

    @Baud: the others weren’t in places where they have friends or sent their kids to college.

  5. 5.

    scav

    April 22, 2013 at 9:36 pm

    “We will prosecute this terrorist through our civilian system of justice,’’
    whew.

    Not entirely surprised but glad of some confirmation. Expecting lots of noise, bien sûr.

  6. 6.

    Liquid

    April 22, 2013 at 9:38 pm

    CBS Evening News mispronouncing the name as well. Is this a thing? “We don’t get his name right so we can display our revulsion.” You’re either incompetent or a fucking child.

  7. 7.

    Nutella

    April 22, 2013 at 9:41 pm

    @Suffern ACE:

    the others weren’t in places where they have friends or sent their kids to college.

    And the cameras weren’t on when the bombs/bullets started flying like they were in Boston. The easy availability of dramatic photos is almost as important as the social/economic class of the people who were harmed.

    (edited for clarity)

  8. 8.

    Roger Moore

    April 22, 2013 at 9:41 pm

    The criminal complaint against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, filed in U.S. District Court in Boston, ended a debate over how one of the first successful terrorist attacks bombings on the U.S. homeland since Sept. 11, 2001, should be handled.

    FTFY, Washington Post.

  9. 9.

    MikeJ

    April 22, 2013 at 9:42 pm

    looks like these guys may have been guilty of nothing more than associating with a couple of fellow immigrant students who shared a common background.

    That and, you know, violating the terms of their visas.

    Knowing people isn’t against the law, but overstaying your visa is.

  10. 10.

    sb

    April 22, 2013 at 9:45 pm

    Dog tired from teaching kids still burned out from last weeks standardized tests (the creator of whom need burning by acid) and I am home considering if a 2nd rescue is a good idea.

    And television. Lots of television watching.

  11. 11.

    Gravenstone

    April 22, 2013 at 9:46 pm

    Maddow had the transcript of the bedside court proceedings where they officially Mirandized Tsarnaev. To say the presiding judge was exceedingly thorough in her explanations and emphasis of his Miranda and 5th Amendment rights would be an understatement. Of course, I’m sure Grandpa Walnuts and Huckleberry Closetcase are somewhere bitterly gnashing their teeth at being thwarted in their burning need to have the young man declared an enemy combatant and preferably whisked off to Gitmo.

  12. 12.

    dmsilev

    April 22, 2013 at 9:48 pm

    Software glitch of the day: For some reason, the SD card reader on my Mac decided to stop working. I Googled the issue, and found that the recommended solution was to update my XWindows installation (!!!). Half-convinced that this was the Apple support forum’s version of a snipe hunt or maybe a Rick-roll, I tried it.

    It worked.

    WTF?

  13. 13.

    Baud

    April 22, 2013 at 9:48 pm

    FWIW, I got a CNN alert that Tsarnaev said no international groups were involved in the attacks. Since it’s CNN, I expect to be invaded by North Korea tomorrow. WOLVERINES!

  14. 14.

    Calouste

    April 22, 2013 at 9:51 pm

    @Gravenstone:

    I’m still waiting for someone to put McCain in a corner between his “Torture works” and the question “So how much did you tell the Vietcong then?”

    I’m not holding my breath though. Besides, McCain would invoke enough American Exceptionalism to power an aircraft carrier for a few decades.

  15. 15.

    dmsilev

    April 22, 2013 at 9:51 pm

    @Baud: If the Bush administration were still in charge, the bombers would already be on their way to the Czech Republic.

  16. 16.

    hamletta

    April 22, 2013 at 9:57 pm

    @Liquid: Mispronouncing what name? What are you talking about?

  17. 17.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    April 22, 2013 at 9:58 pm

    Thinking of a bumper sticker, the text “When masturbation’s lost it’s fun” with a picture of an AR-15.

  18. 18.

    Another Halocene Human

    April 22, 2013 at 9:59 pm

    Did Tamerlan murder his brother’s pot dealer?

    A bizarre triple murder in Waltham, MA, 2011, still unsolved, that seemed to be more about rage than robbery.

    Btw, if any town in the Boston area were to botch anything government related (in this case, homicide investigation, but pick anything, really), it would be Waltham.

    MotherFUCK, if they had caught this guy two years ago!!

  19. 19.

    Schlemizel

    April 22, 2013 at 10:01 pm

    @hamletta:

    Suspect #2’s name (I assume). I have heard it pronounced bout 4 different ways so I have no idea what is correct – probably need to listen to the BBC as they have standards for correctness

  20. 20.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    April 22, 2013 at 10:01 pm

    @hamletta: Tsarnaev. Mispronouncing it is a thing, but not the thing Liquid is thinking. Americans just suck at foreign or unusual words.

    See also: nukuler

  21. 21.

    gbear

    April 22, 2013 at 10:04 pm

    What’s on the agenda for the evening?

    Watching another freakin’ snowstorm. 6-8″ on the ground by morning. This is getting really old.

  22. 22.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    April 22, 2013 at 10:05 pm

    @dmsilev: Sometimes you get a one written in the wrong place instead of a zero, and the only way to fix it is to reset some stuff. I’ve seen stuff like that on windows and Linux. As far as computers and software go, we’re just about up to Gauss and Co playing with static electricity. It sort of does stuff, and it magically works because people interfere a lot.

    I’m waiting for the James Clerk Maxwell of the computing world to come along (maybe P=?=NP).

  23. 23.

    scav

    April 22, 2013 at 10:06 pm

    @Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Well, there was a lot of coy effort pretending about Ahmadinejad on certain outlets, enough to get Colbert on the case. Not to minimize the general suckiness.

  24. 24.

    Schlemizel

    April 22, 2013 at 10:08 pm

    @Another Halocene Human:

    Every great event I know of in history always had some point where it could have been stopped, where it could have been worse, where someone who shouldn’t have been there was and someone who should have wasn’t. Every.one.of.them.

    The deal is its always obvious in retrospect never in the present. There are a million coincidences in large events and thousands of variables that become clear when digging through the remians

  25. 25.

    Schlemizel

    April 22, 2013 at 10:10 pm

    @gbear:

    Why MN does not have the highest homicide/suicide rate in the nation is a mystery to me at the moment.

  26. 26.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    April 22, 2013 at 10:11 pm

    @scav: Honestly, I’ve been waiting for one of them to call him ‘Joker’.

    @Schlemizel: Joe-HARR tsar-NAH-yev. I think.

  27. 27.

    Suffern ACE

    April 22, 2013 at 10:15 pm

    @Schlemizel: because by the time you shovel the driveway, you’re too tired to bother with the crime. Who wants to be a fugitive when there is a blizzard.

  28. 28.

    K488

    April 22, 2013 at 10:15 pm

    On the agenda? Listening to the second movement of Bruckner 8 – or at least I thought I was … Also, contemplating my last day of teaching tomorrow after 30 years at my current institution, a large midwestern university, before gearing up to start anew at another large midwestern university, some hours south of here.

  29. 29.

    Schlemizel

    April 22, 2013 at 10:16 pm

    @Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:

    How about “Darrell Sarnoff”? Maybe that is to Anglicized. Doud El Cid maybe, to make it more obvious he is Muslim sounding.

    Of course there are still wingnuts fighting the old cold war so they probably like the ‘ruskie’ sounding name

  30. 30.

    GregB

    April 22, 2013 at 10:16 pm

    @Another Halocene Human:

    My pal lived just down the street from the triple homicide and he repeated what seemed to have been the official Waltham PD line that “they’ll never find the murderers”.

    This reminds me of the The Battle for Algeria when the militants began to murder all of the alcoholics, drug dealers, prostitutes etc.

    It seems to track pretty close to the older suspects entry into the faux pious world of a religious fanatic.

  31. 31.

    Another Halocene Human

    April 22, 2013 at 10:17 pm

    @Schlemizel: I’m not saying it was obvious in retrospect although there WERE reports of odd behavior by those closest to him. I’m just saying that if I had to pick an inner ring suburb for shitty police work it would probably be Waltham (if not Watertown–lol!).

    All police departments are not created equal.

    Who knows, but one problem with a case against Tsarnaev is that he didn’t deny being there on the scene, so it’s not like his fingerprints and DNA on everything prove anything. But murderers usually fuck up cleaning up after themselves because blood is messy. If they focused on the wrong person from the start (the black person, wow, what a coinkydink)–if an anonymous commenter who seemed to know one of the victims is to be believed–then they may have waited too late to gather evidence giving him time to destroy it.

  32. 32.

    Another Halocene Human

    April 22, 2013 at 10:20 pm

    @Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: He spelled it Jahar on his twitter account, not Johar. And the paper said it was pronounced JA-har.

    Also, not familiar with Chechen names, but other Slavic ethnicities’ surnames have emphasis on the first syllable, so TSAR-na-ev.

  33. 33.

    Suffern ACE

    April 22, 2013 at 10:21 pm

    @GregB: yep. Killed his best friend for not going along with his new life. Just speculating. It’s of third order interest. It’s very possible that our bomber had personal issues more than political ones.

  34. 34.

    Schlemizel

    April 22, 2013 at 10:22 pm

    @Another Halocene Human:

    No, I understood you were just wishing they could have been stopped earlier. I agree, just did a clumsy job of riffing on that the stories that you know are coming

  35. 35.

    Another Halocene Human

    April 22, 2013 at 10:23 pm

    @GregB: He killed his best friend.

    My money is still on “psychopath”.

    Also, his dad said he stayed inside and slept all day when he visited him in Russia.

    Remember the Entwhistle case?

  36. 36.

    gbear

    April 22, 2013 at 10:23 pm

    @Schlemizel: I was driving around this evening and thinking we’re lucky the trees haven’t had a chance to leaf out yet. This heavy wet snow would have taken out a lot of branches.
    I’ve got two projects at work that were counting on a mild spring on the north shore. It’s beyond the point of being an annoyance and is now a complete joke. Every time I check their weather they’re getting another 8″ of snow. Gooseberry Falls is going to be wicked if this ever melts.

  37. 37.

    Comrade Jake

    April 22, 2013 at 10:24 pm

    I wonder what Glenn Beck thinks about all of this.

  38. 38.

    Suffern ACE

    April 22, 2013 at 10:25 pm

    Gack. “He’s getting access to our impartial courts, a right he was trying to take from us.” I’ve gotta get a new TV set. Local anchor just broke mine with a flying shoe.

  39. 39.

    dance around in your bones

    April 22, 2013 at 10:26 pm

    @Mnemosyne: I just want to thank you for cluing me in to the Kaffe Fassett autobiography – I had garnered some insight into his life from his various books, but nothing like what he wrote in Dreaming in Color (I bought it for $15, so anyone who is interested, look around!).

    I read it in two days and thoroughly enjoyed it. What a life he has had! And he completely changed my ideas about what knitting could be; needlepoint too. Only got into quilting peripherally from my mother-in-law who was a quilter from her days in the hills and hollers of Tennessee. I still have about half a dozen of her exquisite hand-sewn quilts, including a double wedding ring made for our 20th anniversary.

    I don’t think I ever got beyond 9 patch squares. But Kaffe! OMG! That guy took color and just ran with it.

  40. 40.

    scav

    April 22, 2013 at 10:29 pm

    @Suffern ACE: Seeing it’s already broken, call you throw another steel-toed one for me over ABC’s going on about an al Qaeda training video on slashing throats? That’s right up there on the regional accents of BOOOMS! scale.

  41. 41.

    Redshirt

    April 22, 2013 at 10:29 pm

    @gbear: Brutal, juice. I feel your pain, I really do.

  42. 42.

    gogol's wife

    April 22, 2013 at 10:32 pm

    @Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:

    Yes, I think that’s right. The “dzh” and the “kh” in Dzhokhar are an artifact of the Russianization of the name, because there is no “j” or “h” in Russian so they become дж (transliterated dzh) and х (transliterated kh). So it’s probably closer to Johar than to Dzhokhar. And yes, the last name would be tsar-NA-yeff.

  43. 43.

    Heliopause

    April 22, 2013 at 10:32 pm

    Kudos to the Obama Administration

    Kudos for not doing the fascistic bullshit that Lindsey Graham wants us to do and simply follow the Constitution? Jesus, standards sure have fallen here in the good ol’ US of A.

    “We will prosecute this terrorist through our civilian system of justice,’’

    Oops. Alleged “terrorist”. And they were on a roll…

  44. 44.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    April 22, 2013 at 10:34 pm

    @Another Halocene Human: I’ve heard that Jahar was a nickname he used because so many people couldn’t pronounce his first name. *shrug*

    I can’t find the recording I originally listened to, but this one is similar.

  45. 45.

    gogol's wife

    April 22, 2013 at 10:36 pm

    @Another Halocene Human:

    Chechen isn’t Slavic. The last name seems to have been Russianized too (the -ev ending), and in Russian the stress would be on the second syllable. (Only Czech has fixed stress on the first syllable, as far as I know. In Polish it’s fixed on the penultimate, and in other Slavic languages stress is movable.)

    ETA: That should be Czech and Slovak.

  46. 46.

    gogol's wife

    April 22, 2013 at 10:39 pm

    @Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:

    See my comment 42 above. It really is Johar. It only becomes Dzhokhar because it was represented in the Russian alphabet which has no j or h.

  47. 47.

    Redshirt

    April 22, 2013 at 10:39 pm

    “Chechen” sounds like it should be some kind of dance from the 1920’s (Do the “Che Chen”!) or a holiday snack mix.

  48. 48.

    Kay

    April 22, 2013 at 10:42 pm

    @Suffern ACE:

    I thought I had heard them all over the last 12 years but that is new.

    “Our” courts. Defendants just get in the way of…whatever it is we do in there.

  49. 49.

    Cacti

    April 22, 2013 at 10:44 pm

    @Suffern ACE:

    “He’s getting access to our impartial courts, a right he was trying to take from us.”

    And he was trying to contaminate our precious bodily fluids.

  50. 50.

    NotMax

    April 22, 2013 at 10:45 pm

    In other news, Richie Havens has died at 72.

  51. 51.

    Hillary Rettig

    April 22, 2013 at 10:51 pm

    Left economics magazine Dollars and Sense has a brilliant cover (and article) on the housing recovery that corrects the nasty racist one from Bloomburg Businessweek:

    http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2013/0313bondgraham–ds_cover.html

    It really deserves more play. (As does the magazine itself.)

    Who could have guessed that the banksters and speculators would be theones who benefitted from the balloon?!

  52. 52.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    April 22, 2013 at 10:53 pm

    @gogol’s wife: Yep. It’s been a long time since I tried to learn Russian, but I do remember that many of the “weird spellings” of names from the various parts of the USSR were from multiple transliterations. (No teachers available. It’s different enough that self-teaching didn’t work all that well.)

    The Johar to Jahar shift left me scratching my head, but then a lot of American mispronunciations also confuse me. “How did you get that out of this?”

  53. 53.

    beltane

    April 22, 2013 at 10:55 pm

    @Cacti: Unlike that nice Charles Manson fellow who was a great believer in the rule of law.

    I didn’t know that most US criminals are strong proponents of constitutional rights. Thankfully, we have members of the media to point this out to us.

  54. 54.

    PurpleGirl

    April 22, 2013 at 10:58 pm

    @sb: Second rescue what? Dog or cat? Do you want another animal? Can you handle another animal? Then get it. And enjoy.

    (Haven’t read the whole thread, don’t know if you’ve been asked this yet and answered.)

  55. 55.

    BD of MN

    April 22, 2013 at 11:00 pm

    @Schlemizel:

    Why MN does not have the highest homicide/suicide rate in the nation is a mystery to me at the moment.

    I just got back from a nice 20 mile drive (hospital visit in Stillwater) and I’m feeling a bit stabby, but the rum is helping…

    soon to be +2 (and since I don’t have to work at 5am, there might even be a +3 tonight…)

  56. 56.

    max

    April 22, 2013 at 11:01 pm

    @gogol’s wife: Yes, I think that’s right. The “dzh” and the “kh” in Dzhokhar are an artifact of the Russianization of the name, because there is no “j” or “h” in Russian so they become дж (transliterated dzh) and х (transliterated kh). So it’s probably closer to Johar than to Dzhokhar. And yes, the last name would be tsar-NA-yeff.

    Since we’re Americans and have a hard time with consistently pronouncing the DZH sound (wrong accent) I think I’m going to settle for YO-harr. Closer in spirit if not in accent. (Although if I was trying, as opposing to settling, I’d got JYO-harr.)

    Tsarnaev seems to be of clearly Russian origin to me, so I’d go for ZHAR-nai-ev.

    @Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:I can’t find the recording I originally listened to, but this one is similar.

    Yeah, but the speaker is a Kyrgyr. And the family seems to have been Russoized. (Which I take to mean that the kid’s accent isn’t even right either, especially given that he was raised mostly in the US.)

    max
    [‘Oh, the fun you’ll have.’]

  57. 57.

    hamletta

    April 22, 2013 at 11:08 pm

    @gogol’s wife: Yeah, in one of the radio interviews I heard, I think with one of the high school classmates, they called him “Johar” because his name was unpronounceable in English.

    I think we learn how to form our mouths to pronounce our mother tongue rather early, especially the vowels.

    We have a Swedish dude in our choir, and he was teaching us how to sing this simple, dumb song in Swedish.

    If you’d been a fly on the wall, you’d have pissed yourself laughing. We looked like a bunch of demented ducks: “Euuurrr.” “Eeeeerrrr?” “No, eeeeuuuurrr.”

  58. 58.

    Suffern ACE

    April 22, 2013 at 11:08 pm

    @Kay: oh, it wasn’t a rant. More like “victory for us and our courts”. Whatever these guys were trying to do, I’m thinking impatial judges were down in the 20s or 30s on the list of things that drove them mad.

  59. 59.

    jurassicpork

    April 22, 2013 at 11:12 pm

    The drama between Mike & Doris intensifies in the latest installment of my new comic, Good Times at Pottersville.

  60. 60.

    hamletta

    April 22, 2013 at 11:19 pm

    @max: I meant to add that Uncle Ruslan dropped the Russianized -ev suffix.

    Was that a “Fuck You, Stalin?” or a “Russia Buh-Bye?”

    Compared to his brother, who couldn’t bear to die in America, he’s done rather well for himself. There’s some intense family dynamics all around here.

  61. 61.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    April 22, 2013 at 11:27 pm

    @max:

    Yeah, but the speaker is a Kyrgyr. And the family seems to have been Russoized. (Which I take to mean that the kid’s accent isn’t even right either, especially given that he was raised mostly in the US.)

    And the one I heard a couple of days ago was a history professor with a focus on Islamic former Soviet republics. I’m inclined to think he’s got a really good chance of getting it right for the area.

    However, we are giving a prime set of examples of why there are so many versions of the kid’s name floating around the media.

  62. 62.

    Mnemosyne

    April 22, 2013 at 11:31 pm

    @dance around in your bones:

    You’re welcome! I still need to buy it for myself, but the excerpts I’ve read were fascinating.

    It also seemed to encompass his very interesting story of coming out and being a gay man in the 1960s, and of becoming an expatriate, so it’s a good story on multiple fronts.

  63. 63.

    Kay

    April 22, 2013 at 11:33 pm

    @Suffern ACE:

    I don’t know why they did it. I’m not even sure the younger was a “follower.” I know what people said, but the younger was the more socially adept and successful brother.
    He also survived the carjacking shoot-out and ran over “the leader”. I’m not sure he’s a follower.

  64. 64.

    trollhattan

    April 22, 2013 at 11:38 pm

    @gbear:

    Send it to the Sierra Nevada. We’d say, “thanks!” and you could enjoy spring. Win-win.

    It’s dark o’clock, I have windows and doors open and the whole house fan running. In April. Yesterday was about 90 and the humidity dropped to 10%. In April.

    California is burning to a crisp this summer, presuming it doesn’t do so in spring.

  65. 65.

    Suffern ACE

    April 22, 2013 at 11:42 pm

    @Kay: It’s odd. If I were the younger brother’s attorney, (and his family) I would most certainly play up the idea that the dead older brother did all of the bad things when talking to the press. I mean, the older brother isn’t going to get a much of a sentence at this point anyway, so he might as well be the one who did everying.

    Not that it would help. But as a bonus, the press has already decided that younger brother had to be the follower because his friends said nice things about him and he was better assimilated.

  66. 66.

    danielx

    April 22, 2013 at 11:45 pm

    White House press secretary Jay Carney rejected that approach on Monday, saying that the suspect cannot be tried in a military commission under federal law because he is a U.S. citizen. “We will prosecute this terrorist through our civilian system of justice,’’ Carney said at a White House news briefing.

    What’s on the agenda? Exploding wingnut heads, clearly. Civilian courts? They’d prefer that he be drawn and quartered by royal decree.

  67. 67.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    April 22, 2013 at 11:47 pm

    @Suffern ACE:

    because by the time you shovel the driveway, you’re too tired to bother with the crime. Who wants to be a fugitive when there is a blizzard.

    He’s fleeing the interview!

  68. 68.

    wenchacha

    April 23, 2013 at 12:12 am

    Jesus H, Greg Ball is a giant douchebag. What a fucking bullyboy.

  69. 69.

    Jay in Oregon

    April 23, 2013 at 12:31 am

    @danielx:

    They’d prefer that he be drawn and quartered by royal decree.

    So they could then claim that he’s being a dictator and ZOMG WORSE THAN BUSH!

  70. 70.

    Citizen_X

    April 23, 2013 at 12:48 am

    @The prophet Nostradumbass:

    He’s fleeing the interview!

    I was just going to say: the real reason there’s a lack of murders in Minnesota is that not everybody has access to a wood chipper.

  71. 71.

    pseudonymous in nc

    April 23, 2013 at 1:19 am

    @MikeJ:

    Knowing people isn’t against the law, but overstaying your visa is.

    Doesn’t have to be an overstay, and “violated the U.S. visa regime” implies it wasn’t, because if it was an overstay, they probably would have said so, since that’s pretty cut and dried.

    Probably more of a red-tape violation of a F-1, such as not registering for enough classes or not submitting an up-to-date I-20 or having a part time job. Or even something as trivial as not filing a change of address form. Which happens all the time, but if you’re friends with someone who sets off bombs, the kinds of things that get overlooked, or just happen because US immigration bureaucracy is a mess, will get you a stay at Chateau ICE.

  72. 72.

    Mnemosyne

    April 23, 2013 at 1:36 am

    @pseudonymous in nc:

    Given how much pot bomber #2 was purportedly smoking, they could also have made the mistake of toking up with him, which I assume would be a violation of their visas.

  73. 73.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    April 23, 2013 at 1:47 am

    @trollhattan: Yesterday was hot here as well, today quite pleasant. It’s even a bit chilly out now.

  74. 74.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    April 23, 2013 at 1:53 am

    @raven: I’m just finishing up the first episode, and it really is pretty good.

    It’s like an intelligent version of the James Patterson “Women’s Murder Club” series of books.

  75. 75.

    Steve Finlay

    April 23, 2013 at 2:10 am

    Correct to use the civilian justice system. NOT correct to say “We will prosecute this terrorist”. Not so fast: The trial will find out whether he is a terrorist or not.

  76. 76.

    Steve Finlay

    April 23, 2013 at 2:17 am

    @hamletta: This brings back memories! When I was a kid and then a young teenager, my Danish grandparents would drive us bananas with an infamous phrase that the Danes use to expose anyone who isn’t Danish. It translates to “red pudding with cream”, and it sounds like a medium-sized pig with a horrible stomach ache.

    In university, I discovered linguistics and chose it as my major. After three years of study, including every phonetics course that the department offered, I went back to my grandparents — and THIS time, I succeeded in sounding exactly like the right kind of uncomfortable barnyard animal.

  77. 77.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    April 23, 2013 at 2:21 am

    France legalizes same-sex marriage.

  78. 78.

    fuckwit

    April 23, 2013 at 3:19 am

    I can’t look away from this whole fucking trainwreck.

    Apparently now-dead Terrorist Mastermind #1 was a stay-at-home dad with a 3-year-old daughter. How the fuck? How the fuck could he even begin to think about the kind of killing he was doing, while watching a preschooler all day? It’s…. I can’t even… Not only is that a very demanding job, it’s not the kind of thing that hardens one’s heart, quite the opposite.

    His wife was an young American, converted to Islam, walking around in what is basically a burka. Working ridiculous hours to keep them alive while he took care of the baby and plotted mayhem.

    He somehow had nothing but hatred for Americans— A GROUP WHICH INCLUDED HIS OWN WIFE AND DAUGHTER. He seems to have spared their lives, but who knows what could have happened if he wasn’t caught so quickly.

    His best friend was murdered in 2011, on 9/11 no less, along with two other acquaintences/friends.

    He may have been radicalized by his own mother, apparently, who herself grew up very secular, but suddenly became religious and convinced him to also, in order to keep him away from Western-lifestyle dangers like drugs/alcohol/girls. When she found religion, her oldest son followed, but her husband didn’t, and left her.

    They had shit-tons of weapons. Funded how? Apparently with wife’s earnings since she was the only one around with a job… I can’t even imagine how she must feel right now, and now she’s a single mom and a widow too. Or maybe young stoner Terrorist #2 was dealing weed for a living, which might circle back to the 2011 murder, in which weed was definitely found on the scene.

    The brothers are also not Chechens. They’re HALF Chechen, half Dagestan– their mother was from there. For some reason they self-identified as Chechens, but that’s not even correct.

    The younger Terrorist #2 ran over his brother who was handcuffed on the ground, and probably killed him. Either he had been trying to run over or scatter the cops, and fucked up, or he deliberately tried to kill his brother. Some of the more interesting questions I hope he answers are that one, and whether or not his gun wounds were a suicide attempt.

    The father has health issues and also appears to be a weak-ass emotionally, and the mother is just way out there.

    I’ve long said that when big clusterfucks happen, they tend to happen at many different levels, in freak occurrences where all the failsafes fail at once. This sure looks like one.

    And Uncle Ruslan is a bad-ass mofo. The dignity, compassion, groundedness, and reasonableness he exhibits is huge. Especially in contrast to the rest of that family, which seems rather uncentered, to say the least.

  79. 79.

    fuckwit

    April 23, 2013 at 4:12 am

    @dmsilev: Driver interaction, probably. X talks to the video card hardware directly. Maybe there’s some hardware clusterfuck where something in the video circuitry fucks up the SD card, maybe current draw, or a noisy trace that runs next to the SD card traces on the board, and there’s some hacky fix in the latest X that mitigates that (by using different signals, timing, etc).

  80. 80.

    Tyro

    April 23, 2013 at 6:24 am

    The brothers are also not Chechens. They’re HALF Chechen, half Dagestan– their mother was from there. For some reason they self-identified as Chechens, but that’s not even correct.

    I’m pretty sure it’s perfectly reasonably to identify yourself as “ethnic group X” if one parent is of that ethnic group and you were raised to identity with that ethnic group.

  81. 81.

    Enceladus

    April 23, 2013 at 8:43 am

    Cool–that’s the University of Wisconsin’s carillon tower. Social Science Building is behind it. (Wait–duhh… I just noticed the caption.)

  82. 82.

    Another Halocene Human

    April 23, 2013 at 8:54 am

    @Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Jahar is a slightly unusual Indian given name.

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