Last week's series of events in Boston was the stuff of Hollywood movies. An iconic marathon on Patriot's Day... 2 bombs go off killing 3 and injuring over 100... wild speculation as to the culprits... photos released... said culprits do a Thelma and Louise, with one brother down and the other wounded and hiding... a city on lock down as hundreds of police scour neighborhoods looking for the second brother, who is finally found hiding and bleeding out in a boat in someone's backyard with a possibly self-inflicted gun shot wound.

Except, of course, that it was all real. The released photos and video were all it took for acquaintances of the two to put names to faces. Once that happened, the rest of it was only a matter of time. Left to their own devices and with few options, they tried to escape, but were unable to. With one brother dead and the other incommunicado in the hospital, the big question still remains: why?
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86 comments (Latest Comment: 04/23/2013 01:26:31 by TriSec)

Good Morning. As our city gets back to normal today, I had a passing thought. This won't take long.

The last time we were attacked on our own soil, the response was quite different.

We started two wars.
Thousands of US Soldiers were killed
Untold trillions of dollars were wasted
We became a virtual pariah state around the world.
And the guy responsible? It took more than a decade to hunt him down.

This time?
The city of Boston and it's environs were 'locked down' for 16 hours.
Nobody was killed during the hunt. (Although two police officers were shot, one killed, during the early going of the investigation.)
The rest of the United States stood by our side and cheered.
And we got the guys in less than a week; one alive!

OF course there's more to it than simplistic observations....but cooperation and competent leadership sure makes a world of difference, doesn't it?
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8 comments (Latest Comment: 04/21/2013 00:30:26 by velveeta jones)

 
"Can't we all just get along?"
- Rodney King

In 1991, a man was pulled over after a high speed car chase and beaten mercilessly by the police. It would have been just another day in Los Angeles, with white racist cops venting their hatred on another black man, had it not been for the person who recorded the beating and made it public. That resulted in the cops going on trial and Rodney King - the aforementioned sap how got his face broken - becoming a public name. It was AFTER the cops' trial where none were convicted that anger, frustration, and justice denied once again resulted in riots in LA and elsewhere in the country. Any white person unlucky enough to be near a black inner city neighborhood when the verdict was announced was in trouble. It was during this mayhem that a bewildered Rodney King uttered his famous phrase.

That phrase has been reused often - generally for comic effect - since then to punctuate the naive notion that we could actually all get along. "What? - people not lash out in violence?", implies the quoter. *chortle, chortle*...

Charles Darwin theorized that we evolved from a primative ancestor. As mankind and society have moved forward through time, it seems that we have had trouble as a species leaving behind that reactive violence that seems so normal in the animal kingdom and so abhorrent in ours. It seems we still dip our toes into that primordial soup from time to time and lash out in anger, hatred, and fear.
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137 comments (Latest Comment: 04/19/2013 11:12:49 by TriSec)

Good morning.

We interrupt our regularly-scheduled “Ask a Vet” for a rant from Your Loyal TriSec.

This is my city.



Yesterday was our day.

I mean no insult to New York, or those that were lost, but until September 11, it was just that, September 11, an otherwise ordinary day with no significance to New York.

Patriot’s Day is Boston.
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99 comments (Latest Comment: 04/17/2013 02:22:22 by Raine)

Good morning! Just a few things today, since Velveeta overslept; too much beauty sleep is not a bad thing.

Anyone remember this crazy woman? Lisa Biron, a lawyer who worked for the Alliance Defending Freedom which claims to be a Bible thumping, anti-gay, "pro-life", family values organization that "spreads the gospel" according to their website. Ms Biron, who has been expunged from their pages, video-taped her 14-year old daughter having sex with several men. Now that's a strange kind of values for a family. But maybe that's just my opinion.

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2 comments (Latest Comment: 04/14/2013 19:15:28 by TriSec)