Sunday

Good morning. It is 33 degrees and magnificently sunny here in Upstate NY. I'm going to wait for the temperature to get a little warmer then I will head out for a slow long jog through the mean suburban streets. I had one of those epic involving dreams last night so vivid that when I woke up I felt disoriented. The residue is a lot of energy, the Spring makes you want to get busy.

As we know it's been a wild week. The articles are coming in that attempt to open up some space surrounding the events of the Boston Bombing with the desire to shed light on our collective involvement in that calamity. As I perused my Facebook page a little while ago, several friends had posted articles on this topic all of which I am posting here.

First, from The New Yorker: Terrorist Hunt Sends America Over the Edge

Whenever the word “terrorist” is mentioned in this country, reason tends to go out the window, and many other things go with it, too, such as intellectual consistency, a respect for civil liberties, and a sense of proportion.

Then there's an article from Slate on our obsession with following breaking news, it's a guide to following it all: Breaking News Is Broken - Don’t watch cable news. Shut off Twitter. You’d be better off cleaning your gutters.

Breaking news is broken. That’s the clearest lesson you can draw about the media from the last week, when both old- and new-media outlets fell down on the job. By now you’ve likely heard the lowlights. CNN and the AP incorrectly reported on Wednesday that a Boston Marathon suspect had been arrested. People on Reddit and editors at the New York Post wrongly fingered innocent kids as bombing suspects. Redditors also pushed the theory that a Brown University student who has been missing for more than a month was one of the bombers—a story that gained steam on Twitter Thursday when people listening to police scanners heard the cops repeat the student’s name.

Then someone posted this very curious article which claims that the incident was a hoax, staged, and that some of the goriest pictures were the work of actors. I would put a disclaimer here in that this is not my belief - the suffering in Boston was extreme. The writer attempts to break down the goriest images and discuss them from his perspective as an EMT worker in Oregon. If you want to go the "conspiracy" route, this is for you - Are You Just A Believer Or Do You THINK?