People who knew them are saying that they didn't fit the profile, that they loved America, were happy to be here, and were fun-loving guys who were involved in sports and other things. Of course people are complex and people change, but it also makes it look like they could possibly be patsies. The government appears to have no clue and/or to be desperately scrambling for a Plan C.
The father of the two brothers suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon says his sons were framed.
“They were set up, they were set up!” Anzor Tsarnaev said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I saw it on television; they killed my older son Tamerlan.”
Powerful and effective heuristics are the only way to quickly communicate the complex understandings required to save humanity, because they facilitate quick feedback. They break through information logjams. They reduce information overload. The various elite powers on the planet use heuristics in the form of propaganda to mislead the people and drive them like cattle toward a predetermined objective. But they have a great advantage over us. It's easier to confuse than enlighten. It's easier to destroy than to build. It's easier to get people to misunderstand complexity than to get them to understand it.
So unless we become clever at heuristics, we are outnumbered and outgunned. And we need to be cognizant of any model that can help us dilate the conduits of feedback to the point where our big picture understandings can spread like lightening to the general public. There are many ways to do this, mostly by commandeering well-understood terms and putting them to new uses.
While I was watching the Boston Marathon bombing coverage I heard them talk about victims who were at one point in critical condition but who had been reevaluated to serious condition. And it made me want to look up the precise definitions of these terms. That's when I saw that they could have usefulness describing all kinds of complex social dynamics. After all, that's what systems theory is all about. The five terms are: undetermined, good, fair, serious, and critical. You can find definitions here at wikipedia:
Briefly, they are: waiting assessment; stable within normal limits; indicators are favorable; indicators are questionable; and indicators are unfavorable. These concepts can be applied at every level and context of social dynamics because they are terms that describe systems. And as Donella H. Meadows stressed, the whole point of systems theory is to cut through all the jargon of the multiplicity of specialties. The point is to make things as simple as possible without making them too simple. Simplify but don't oversimplify.
I agree the two parties have become virtually indistinguishable in many respects. But the Republican Party is far more dangerous, in my opinion. And I think Democrats kowtow to big business interests and the Military Industrial Complex mainly because they are more or less forced to if they want to be able to consistently challenge Republican Party dominance. That's no excuse, of course. But I think it's very misleading to portray both parties are essentially opposites sides of the same coin. Anyway, this article points out some important differences between the two parties.
Since last fall, Republicans have pretended to be more moderate – but their politics are harsher and more destructive than ever
After watching voters punish the GOP in the 2012 elections, Republican elites have been talking a brave game about reforms that would make the party less repulsive to Latinos, women and gay-friendly millennials. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the GOP's hip-hop-quoting young standard-bearer, is pressing conservatives to back an amnesty for undocumented immigrants. Dozens of party stalwarts, headlined by former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, renounced their opposition to gay marriage in a Supreme Court brief. GOP bigwigs have even launched New Republican – a group modeled after Bill Clinton's centrist Democratic Leadership Council – which seeks to rebrand the party as “colorblind,” “not anti-government” and dedicated to “ending corporate welfare.”
Don't be fooled. On the ground, a very different reality is unfolding: In the Republican-led Congress, GOP-dominated statehouses and even before the nation's highest court, the reactionary impulses of the Republican Party appear unbowed. Across the nation, the GOP's severely conservative agenda – which seeks to impose job-killing austerity, to roll back voting and reproductive rights, to deprive the working poor of health care, and to destroy agencies that protect the environment from industry and consumers from predatory banks – is moving forward under full steam.
>Watching Danny Schechter's documentary, “WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception,” a term stood out for me: the era of post-journalism. And I could see immediately that it's an accurate term that should be adopted by academia—-just as the terms, postmodern, neocolonialism, and neoconservatism have been—-because the tradition of journalists speaking truth to power died a long time ago. Business interests are a conflict of interest that contemporary journalism has not been able to rise above. Or as jazz legend Mose Allison once said in his song: Everybody Cryin' Mercy: “Everybody's cryin' justice . . . just as long as there's business first.”
So I entered the term: post journalism era into the Google search engine and I only came up with one decent link: an article by Russ Baker from his website: WhoWhatWhy.com.
Here are the first two sentences of his article: “The Washington Post has great reporters, but as a journalistic institution, it has been strikingly sympathetic to the ruling establishment. Over the decades, reporters there have complained repeatedly about how their efforts to break out of an emerging consensus have been stymied, overtly or more subtly.”
I also did a dot edu Google search and came up with zero hits for the term post-journalism era. I think this is a term that desperately needs to be coined and spread far and wide, especially in academica. In fact it should have been coined a century ago. But better late than never.
