Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's multiple injuries.

"He was questioned for two days before this hearing, without being advised of his right to counsel. He was also being administered Diluadid, a potent pain killer, every three hours."

"Do you want to be near people or away from people?"

The restauranteur asked Governor Deval Patrick, the day after the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. 

"I said, ‘As far away as I can.’ So she put in the corner, me and my book on my iPad, and she starts bringing me things. Some of them edible. In fact all the food was edible. She starts bringing me things to drink as a celebration. And by the end of the meal, I was actually quite drunk, by myself.”

"Why are they killing these children without any trial or investigation?" asked Zubeidat Tsarnaeva...

... the mother of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, after an FBI interview with a man in Florida ends with the government officials — investigating the man's connection to the Boston bombing — shooting him dead.

The officers had been interviewing [Ibragim] Todashev in his apartment for some time when he tried to attack them, [a federal law enforcement official] said....

"Dzhokhar Tsarnaev note found in boat points to mystifying motive we may never truly understand."

"... So, probably just teen alienation then."

Yes, of course! Just look at his face!

"Look at this Boston bombing. The pictures of those two brothers. Aren’t they cute?"

Said I, as quoted in The New Yorker today in a piece by Paul Bloom called "The Dzhokar Tsarnaev Empathy Problem." I was being sarcastic and criticizing the media for using a strikingly baby-faced picture of Tsarnaev in practically every report.

Bloom concludes:

Relying on the face might be human nature—even babies prefer to look at attractive people. But, of course, judging someone based on the geometry of his features is, from a moral and legal standpoint, no better than judging him based on the color of his skin. Actually, both biases reflect the parochial and irrational nature of empathy—if Tsarnaev were black, would he evoke the same response from the mothers [Hanna Rosin described here]? When someone talks about the warm feelings she has for Tsarnaev because of his sweet face, we should treat this with the same wary understanding that we would give to someone who admits to caring more about those who have the same color skin. It’s an empathetic response, and a natural one, but hardly one to be proud of.

Bloom says nothing about the baby-faced picture of Trayvon Martin that the media tended to use. Sweet faces manipulate us emotionally even when they are black. And an individual's face isn't quite the same as his skin color, because the mind is revealed through the face (albeit incompletely and often deceptively). Bloom displays the media's favorite photo of Jared Loughner and declares that we don't feel much empathy toward that face. But the problem with that face is not inborn ugliness. It's craziness in the expression. We are properly repelled by that.

It is the true sociopath — I would suggest — whose does evil things but keeps a normal-looking face. We need to challenge ourselves to recognize the sociopaths in our midst. And let's not try to overcome our aversion to faces like Loughner's or Adam Lanza's. These people have terrible problems that we ignore at great risk.

ADDED: The post title corrects a typo that appears in The New Yorker ("bothers" for "brothers").

"Teen terror suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev scrawled a confession inside the boat he was hiding in..."

"... before cops grabbed him last month, according to a report Thursday.:

The note was written in pen on a bullet-riddled wall of the cabin, and reportedly said America’s military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan was the reason behind the deadly April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon, sources told CBS News. The message reportedly said the victims — three killed and more than 260 injured — were collateral damage similar to Muslims who've died in U.S.-led wars.

“When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims,” the note said....

Tsarnaev, 19, also reportedly wrote that he didn’t mourn older brother and alleged bombing mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in an earlier gun battle with cops. He referred to him as a martyr in paradise....

"A startling number of teen girls have admitted to having a schoolgirl crush on bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev..."

"... proclaiming their love for the Boston Marathon bombing suspect on social media."

The media is to blame for this, as I accused the other day on Bloggingheads (where Bob Wright didn't seem to get why I what I was saying or why):

The body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev has been "entombed."

Somewhere. They're not saying where.

The burial location was approved by Ruslan Tsarni, the suspected terrorist’s uncle who has represented the family as he and funeral home director Peter Stefan tried to find a cemetery willing to accept the remains for burial, the [Worcester police] official said....

Stefan’s funeral home has been surrounded by media, protesters, and Worcester police, whose chief, Gary J. Gemme, on Wednesday publicly appealed for someone to step forward and end the controversy that cost his department some $30,000 in extra expenses.

‘‘We are not barbarians; we bury the dead,” Gemme said on Thursday.

$30,000... not barbarians... entombed... 

"A person has to be buried. Period. If we had Hitler here, we would bury Hitler."

Says the funeral director looking for a place to put the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

"My main thing is looking for a cemetery,” he said. “I’ve been making calls. I’ve been turned down by every one of them. All these people are petrified.”

Petrified of what? I can think of at least 5 things that are completely rational to fear.

The funeral director has sign-carrying protesters outside his door.

“He should burn in hell,” said Ann Mink of Worcester, who was part of the sign-toting crowd.

When you stroll through a cemetery, do you think about whether some of the souls previously housed in the bodies at your feet are suffering in hell? When you're choosing a cemetery, do you contemplate whether it contains bodies of souls now in hell and attempt to select one that's free of the damned? Would it trouble you to bury a loved one near the body of someone you believed was damned? If you don't believe in damnation, would you avoid cemeteries that contained bodies of those who you think would deserve to burn in hell, if there were such a place?

"Investigators sharpen focus on Boston bombing suspect’s widow."

The Washington Post reports today:

Federal law enforcement officials are sharpening their focus on [Katherine Russell, 24, the widow of Tamerlan Tsarnaev] after finding al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine and other radical Islamist material on her computer, according to law enforcement officials....

On Monday, FBI special agents spent about 90 minutes inside the North Kingstown, R.I., home of Russell’s parents. The agents left with bags of material and a sample of Russell’s DNA.

Two law enforcement officials said that investigators found fingerprints and female DNA on fragments of the pressure-cooker bombs that exploded at the marathon....

I was skeptical about her back on April 22:

I see you've got your brand-new leopard skin print hijab....

It's Katherine Russell, the widow Tamerlan Tsarnaev.  "She was just this All-American girl who was brainwashed by her super-religious husband. Nobody understands what happened to her." She was the daughter of a Rhode Island doctor and nurse. She "dreamed of going to college and joining the Peace Corps."

Brainwashed. Are you buying that or do you think that Peace Corps aspirationalists are just the kind of American kids who feel drawn to the idea of becoming the other?



I tend to think people are responsible for their own choices.

UPDATE: "Katherine Russell... has stopped co-operating with authorities as it emerged female DNA found on one of the detonated bombs does not belong to her."

"They All Idolized Jahar."

"Friend Who Had 'Fling' With Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the 3 Additional Suspects."

She got to know the group, she said, while hanging around campus with them, smoking pot and listening to music. She says her romantic relationship with Tsarnaev lasted for about two weeks. "I met him standing outside a building and honestly, his face was enough to capture my heart," she explained, noting that lots of women fawned over him. "I walked right up to him and I was like, 'Oh my God, you are adorable. Can we hang out?' I'm very forward."

Her nascent romance with Tsarnaev soon soured, though, after he invited her to come to his dorm room alone. "He wanted to go further than I did, and that made me uncomfortable, and I realized that that's not the kind of person that I wanted to be around," she says. "I don't think that's necessarily being a terrorist. I think that's just called being a hands-y teenaged boy."

"Sadly, we have been conditioned to believe that the job of the government is to keep us safe..."

"... but in reality the job of the government is to protect our liberties. Once the government decides that its role is to keep us safe, whether economically or physically, they can only do so by taking away our liberties. That is what happened in Boston."

Three people were killed in Boston and that is tragic. But what of the fact that over 40 persons are killed in the United States each day, and sometimes ten persons can be killed in one city on any given weekend? These cities are not locked-down by paramilitary police riding in tanks and pointing automatic weapons at innocent citizens.

Highlights from "Meet the Press."

Here are the things that jumped out as I watched "Meet the Press." this morning.

1. At the end of a discussion of the Boston bombing, David Gregory asks "[W]hat are you really focused on that you’d like the intelligence community and the FBI to answer?"

REP. PETER KING: I think it’s important to know are there other people involved in this threat? Are there others that are still out there?... Are there family members or people in-- in the community? That’s very important to find out. Also, what did cause them to radicalize? Was it done here? Was it done overseas? Was it done over the internet? What caused that to happen? How can we stop it in the future? Also ask why the FBI is not cooperating more with the law enforcement? Why they did not give vital evidence to the NYPD about another possible attack.

GREGORY: This is that you think a failure that needs to be learned from?

REP. KING: Absolutely. Absolute failure.

2. Chuck Todd, talking about Obama's routine at the Washington Correspondents Dinner:

...I wonder how many people realized at the end when he did his-- you know, there’s always this part at the end where they get serious for a minute, and it’s usually the part where president say, you know, I think the press has a good job to do and I understand what they have to do. He didn’t say that. He wasn’t very complimentary of the press. You know, we all can do better. He was-- it did seem-- I thought his pot shots joke wise and then the serious stuff about the internet, the rise of the internet media and social media and all that stuff. He hates it. Okay. He hates this part of the media. He really thinks that the sort of the buzzification, this isn’t just about BuzzFeed or Politico, and all the stuff, but he thinks that sort of coverage of political media has hurt political discourse. He hates it. And I think he was just trying to make that clear last night.

3. Gregory asks Tony Blair about his "now infamous meeting in the Azores" with George Bush, "at a very delicate time for [Blair] politically back home." Referring to the Iraq invasion, did Bush tell Blair: "back out if you need to, don’t do this, don’t stand by me when you have to go back and address parliament if it’s going to cost you your leadership"? Blair says:

He did say that. I mean, he-- he made it clear that, you know, he understood the-- the huge political difficulties I had and that-- that I shouldn’t, as it were, put my own premiership on the line. It was more important in-- in a way, to him, I think, that I stayed. But my attitude was that, you know, there are lots of things in politics where-- where you-- you’ll compromise and you’ll maybe back off exactly what you think you should do and, you know, these are often the run of the mill everyday types of issues. When it comes to issues of war and peace and-- and life and death, I think your-- your-- I came to the conclusion your proper obligation to your own country is to do what you think is right....

GREGORY: In this library, the president has decided not to separate Iraq-- out Iraq. Iraq is presented as part and parcel of the war on terrorism, which is how he saw it. But won’t history judge that as a false impression that this was a war of choice that became a misadventure in the eyes of so many?

MR. BLAIR: I think, you know, the controversy around that, I mean, around how you categorize it, will remain. But what I found was that, you see, removing Saddam happened within a matter of weeks. You then spent the next, you know, eight-- nine years in a different type of battle and that was a battle against precisely the forces that are trying to destabilize the Middle East today al Qaeda on the one side, Iran on the other side, and this toxic cocktail, if you like, of religion, politics, ethnicity, tribalism. So, I mean, I never said the two things were linked in that direct sense, 9/11 and Iraq, I think the difficulties we ended up encountering in Iraq were difficulties that arose from precisely this-- this force of terror unleashed by religious extremism and I think that’s the, you know, frankly, what we still face today...

4. I thought "toxic cocktail... of religion, politics, ethnicity, tribalism" was a very helpful phrase to those of us who shrink from criticizing anything that contains an element of religion (other than America's majority religion). Blair also used the phrase "an ideology based on a perversion of religion" and equated it to the violent political ideologies that are not religious and that we don't hesitate to criticize:

[There] are various groups, Islamist groups, that I’m afraid don’t have the same concept of democracy or freedom that we do....  I'm afraid, that this-- this ideology is being pumped around websites, is being encouraged by people in many different parts of the world and it’s-- and it’s there and it’s very hard for us to deal with. The first obligation of a government is to try and protect its people, but then you’ve got to-- you’ve got to cast out this ideology. I mean, I think this is very similar to the fight we faced in the 20th century against first of all fascism and then revolutionary communism. You know, it’s an ideology. It’s not got one command and control center, it's not a-- you know, you’re not talking about a country, but you are talking about an ideology based on a perversion of religion... which has an enormous force. If you don’t deal with this issue, this long-term question, this ideology based on-- on a perversion of the religion of Islam, you are going to end up fighting this for a long time.

5. And here's a nice tribute to Bush from Blair:

And President Obama actually put his finger on it when he said it’s impossible to know George Bush and not like him. So, you know, often people say to me back home, they say, come on, you didn’t like him really, did you? And I say, you can totally disagree with him but as a human being he is a someone of immense character and genuine integrity. So, you know, you can say-- people have different views about decisions, but there’s a very few people who-- who don’t like him and respect him as a person.

Speaking of my stream of consciousness, blowjobs, and "the Golden Age of Male Rage"...

"Surprise! Psycho Mother of Boston Bombers Also on Terror Watch List. Kind of a blow to Nina Burleigh’s sophomoric pyschosexual theory, though. Burleigh, for those who have forgotten, is the reporter who said she’d be happy to give Bill Clinton a blowjob in thanks for his efforts to keep abortion legal. Form your own psychosexual theories if you wish...."

I'm reading Instapundit and thinking there's a lot of rich material for me, but guess where I get sidetracked?

1. Blow to Nina Burleigh... blowjob from Nina Burleigh... interesting double use of "blow," hmm, I wonder what the etymology of "blow" is and let's check out the OED, oh wait, didn't I do a language riff on "blowjob" before?... No. That's not it.

2. Psycho Mother revelation... I already called bullshit on this lady's theatrical posings and yammerings, where's that old link?... No. That's not it.

3. Blowjobs in thanks for abortion rights...  blowjobs are another way to avert pregnancy... if women were truly enthusiastic about blowjobs, we wouldn't need abortion rights... but Burleigh's apparently not enthusiastic about blowjobs, because she's offering one in payment to Bill Clinton for the favor that he's done in keeping abortion legal as opposed to seeing giving and getting a blowjob as an even exchange, complete in itself.... No. That's not it.

4. Instapundit misspelled "psychosexual" the first time he used it. Nah. I'm just noticing that now.

5. I clicked through to the "sophomoric" theory, referring to "the Golden Age of Male Rage," the 3rd paragraph of which begins: "Curiously, these guys belong to the gender with all the physical strength and most of the well-paying jobs in the world." Well-paying jobs? Isn't it good-paying jobs? I ask Meade: "Which is correct 'well-paying jobs' or 'good-paying jobs'?" He says "good-paying." Yes, that's what I think, but how do we know that? We spend 10 minutes trying to explain the reason, and I find this discussion at UsingEnglish.com, which doesn't resolve the question to my liking but includes some choice Obama-blaming:

... I recently saw an Obama ad in which he uses the phrase "good-paying jobs," as well as a WSJ article where the phrase was used. It seems that whenever Obama uses a phrase, or pronunciation (like divissive, rather than divisive), everyone thinks he's right and starts using it.

It's true: Obama says "good-paying." My instinct says that's right (and not because Obama's saying something makes it seem right), but I can't articulate exactly why. I know how to say why "well-paying jobs" is correct: paying is an adjective, well modifies paying, and you use an adverb to modify an adjective. But I think that's incorrect. You wouldn't say "That's a highly paying job," would you? You would, obviously, say: "I am well paid," not "I am good paid." But you'd say: "That's good pay," not "That's well pay." I think the answer I'm looking for has something to do with constructing "good-paying" out of "good pay." Maybe we should start the colloquialism "good-pay jobs" to get us out of this jam.

So there's your answer. That's where the mind of Althouse went with this material. Feel free to discuss Terror Mom and The Blowjobs.

6. Speaking of my stream of consciousness, blowjobs, and Burleigh's "the Golden Age of Male Rage," I've always loved George Carlin's response to his mother's threat that when his father gets home "he's gonna read you the riot act": "Tell him I already read it myself. And I didn't like it, either; I consider it wordy and poorly thought out. He wants to read me something, how about 'The Gentlemen's Guide to the Golden Age of Blowjobs'?"

7. If you think this post wordy and poorly thought out, reel out your psychosexual theories in the comments.

8. [ADDED] I've become convinced that both "good-paying" and "well-paying" are wrong. What is needed is not an adjective (good) or an adverb (well) but a noun as in "money-paying job." The reason "good-paying job" sounds better is, I think, because it's an elision of "good-money-paying job."

"Brown University student mistakenly linked by amateur sleuths on a social media site to the Boston bombings"... drowned.

Sunil Tripathi, 22.

On Monday, Reddit general manager Erik Martin apologized for the "dangerous speculation" that "spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties." In a blog post, he specifically apologized to the Tripathi family "for the pain they have had to endure."

"Is the FBI focused enough on the real bad guys?"

WaPo asks.

[A]t the same time the FBI was concluding that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was not a threat in 2011, it launched an elaborate sting operation in Boston against Rezwan Ferdaus, who eventually pleaded guilty to charges of plotting to attack the U.S. Capitol with a remote-controlled model airplane loaded with grenades. In his case as well as others, it’s not clear that a sometimes far-fetched plot would have gone forward without the encouragement and help of FBI informants.

Gov. Patrick's administration won't release details about Tamerlan Tsarnaev's welfare benefits.

Reason given: privacy.

Rush Limbaugh, yesterday:

Tamerlan and his bride and their three-year-old daughter all have been on welfare as recently as last year.  Isn't that wonderful?  I was wondering where they got the money to buy all this stuff.  The whole family's on welfare.  So we have another great example of your tax dollars at work. Your tax dollars helped to pay for the explosives, as well as Tamerlan's at least two trips back to Dagestan, his late-model Mercedes, his $900 shoes... How could welfare pay that much money?  How can welfare pay for all this?  Okay, let's say welfare didn't pay for all of it.  If they're able to get this other stuff, what are they doing on welfare in the first place, is the question?

I want a shoplifter, just like the shoplifter...

... that married my old man.

ADDED: Just noticing I got the lyrics wrong. Based on Meade singing it in response to the linked story. I should have written: that married dear old dad. In case you don't get the allusion. (Skip ahead to 1:18 if you lack patience for this kind of old-timey nonsense.)



AND: If the girl that married dear old dad was Ozzie's Harriet, you'd sing it like this:

"[I]f Reddit is actually interested in using the power of its crowd to help the authorities, it needs to dramatically rethink its approach..."

"... because the process it used to try to find the bombers wasn’t actually tapping the wisdom of crowds at all—at least not as I would define that wisdom. For a crowd to be smart, the people in it need to be not only diverse in their perspectives but also, relatively speaking, independent of each other. In other words, you need people to be thinking for themselves, rather than following the lead of those around them.... The problem from Reddit’s perspective, of course, is that this method of sleuthing would be far less exciting for users, and would probably generate less traffic, than its current free-for-all approach."

"I want to know what anybody wants to know. You see these two schmucky looking guys in baseball caps and one's just outta high school..."

"...and a kind of a not-so-great college student. One kid is 26 and is a boxer, and people know them. You want to form a picture. You want to understand. This is not a question — I was getting hammered on Twitter by some right-wing groups that somehow I was sympathetic with them.  This is ridiculous.  I wasn't sympathetic with people who do something so horrendous and cruel and kill people and had plans for more.  But there's the human impulse to want to try to understand the — maybe something that's impossible to understand."

Said the New Yorker's David Remnick to PBS's Charlie Rose, in audio played by Rush Limbaugh, who proceeded to do the very thing Remnick sought sympathy for: hammer him from the right:

You know what's rooted in this wanting to understand?  'Cause, frankly, I don't care why people commit crimes.  I frankly am not interested.  They're perverts, they're psychopaths, they're sociopaths, I don't care why they did it.  I want 'em punished.  But these guys want to find out because in their minds there must be some justification for it.  There's gotta be some reason they did it that makes sense.  And then they make the move into what is it about us that they hate?  Or what is it about America that they hate that would justify this?  And we do seminars, "Why do they hate us?"  Seminars, trying to examine why sociopaths, psychopaths hate us.  Or, in this case, a couple of radicalized Muslims.