The Brothers Tsarnaev by Fyodor Predostoericity

Omg, mailing in entries is not as easy as it used to be. I wanted to juxtapose the two crucial factors in what added up to the horror in Beantown, Massachusetts. You had old-school terrorism, which yours truly was right on top of. Then you have revisionist, infoboobtubist donkeytale claiming he pinned it as death by internet. He didn't use that exact phrase. He often steals from my schtick, though not that time. But I digress.

So I googled "marathon bombers internet" and it's a lot of pudding and crackers, not this main topic. We at DFQ2 strive to bring you higher thoughts.... literally we wish to give you a buzz or cause the munchies...

Hmmm, I guess they don't make amateur internet sleuths like they used to and websites like Reddit perhaps didn't come out good on this one.

I will not comment on 4chan or Anonymous. I would like to stay neutral with them or they become my personal army; for legal activities of course, Mr. Fed. I will not be your next Barrett Brown. When it's said I am now the unofficial official spokesperson for Anonymous, the emphasis is on unofficial, ya numbnuts!

Omg, I have digressed so much, I don't have a fricken clue what we were talking about..... Aaah, yes.

Look, I don't have the time to socratise this. But we the internet addicts must come together to figure out wtf happened in Boston. I'm not talking about coming back 0-3 against the Stankees in 2004. That will never make sense. We loved it but don't expect an explanation.

So this is a work in progress. Let's quantify to the best of our sociological imaginations what % the dumbass kids were old-school terrorists in contradistinction to how much this was death by internet related.

Afterwards, cheese and whine will be provided.

God Bless the Audience!

*** Important Update ***

There will be bonus points for the use of any solid college words. Spelling mistakes will be docked except for the case of misspellicisms, that style of writing which originated from an obscure, 21st Century historic troll going by the pseudonym of donkeybreath.

I will note that the bombers appeared to be trying to shatter people's legs. That is horrific. Oh, another thought. Massachusetts is anti-death penalty. The Federal govt. is not. I am not sure if that issue will be a factor.

Let the kid live out his life. We could learn from his experience. Or just do to him what you claim was so evil he did to others. Sheesh.

And let's not jump to any Alex Jonesian, idiotic conclusions. Let's keep it real.

And let's finish this blog entry before I start talking about Mayor Menino's accent. Didja know we ye here in Boston call him Mumbles? Or that Opie and Anthony (famous now in NY or wtf) started in Boston and got fired after doing an April Fool's joke on there said aforeclaimed Mr. Mumbles?

now you know the rest of the story

A Good Read Unspoiled

I must confess that each year beginning in April, and then once more each during June, July and August, I begin to grow in anticipatory blush as the major professional golf tournaments known colloquially as the "Grand Slam" re-set to play out once more across the elitist goat pastures of the US and the UK.

No, it's not that I like to play golf. Not at all. In fact I rather despise the game, actually. I can think of little that is more boringly useless in life than the waste of five-six good waking hours hacking up a perfect lawn when I could be doing something much more stimulating like sitting in front of the keybooard LMAO over Socrates's Twitter feed.

And puh-leeze. I also simply can't be bothered dahlink to watch TV in any of its debased, postmodernist forms, but most especially following those yuppiefied walking advert boards adorned in polyesther slacks and white belts as they rake in millions playing with their putter shafts.

Nay, what truly pickles my tiddler in a pint draught about the great sport game of kings CEOs sissies is the Guardian's liveblogging of the majors, which are brought to us fore times per annum in all faded English gloriousness by an extremely gallant chap name of Scott Murray.

The 77th Masters Tournament owes us a little something today. Boil the bones down, and yesterday's third round was a thoroughly miserable affair, bookended by two experiences which crushed the soul in different ways. The day started with Tiger's Trauma, an undignified business all round, not least in the gleeful stampede to finger the greatest player of the modern era as nothing more than a two-bit cheat, when confusing the drop-at-same-spot rule with the drop-along-line-where-ball-entered-hazard option is an easy enough mistake to make at the best of times, never mind when your almost-perfect wedge has just twanged off the flag and into the blue vagueness in the heat of Masters action.

The day ended with a Couples Catastrophe, the smoothest swinger in town keeping the fairytale alive through 13 holes, then capitulating over the final five to extinguish the dream. Butch Harmon's sullen reaction on Sky to seeing his erstwhile pupil suffer as he stumbled up the 18th in the wake of a triple-bogey on 17 - "Freddie's just run out of gas," he sighed wistfully - was laced with heartbreak, and the unconscious existential realisation that the 53-year-old's fate served as an allegory of all humankind's inexorable decay and inevitable return to dust.

Better days: We've had them.

The once storied empire may long since have shrunk into the rather nasty, brutish little US protectorate we know and larf at today,  a colony of Jim Fowlers to our Marlon Perkins, yes, ah, but that purely self-deprecating low wit lives on within descriptions of the always humbling often humiliating circumstances wrought on its participants by the quintessential British Scottish game, the same one where the royals at the top suffer every pip and yelp of the choking dog meltdown as surely as us plebes, the multitude of bored infotainment consumers who must yet shake our own martinis and pull our own tattered trousers on one leg at a time without the assistance of a faithful Jeeves, the obedient servant of the late, great Merv Griffin Show, Arthur Treacher.

footnotes

1. Yes, this is a mailed-in entry.

2. G'night Mr. Thomas

Jane Hamsher: Another Victim of Obamabottery

Jane Hamsher, Queen Bee of a curious, dying online breed known as the Dilettante White Left (AKA 'the .35 of one percenters') has filed for Chapter 7 dissolution of CommonSense Media, an internet advertising network founded in 2007.

From the vantage point of your intrepid reporter, this latest sign of financial woe within the Hamsher Cult is both entirely predictable and richly [intentional pun alert] deserved.


Creditors include, among others the Daily Kos, National Review Online, the Drudge Report, plus Firedoglake and Hamsher herself.

Hamsher's audience dwindled during previous years as her reader's blog, MyFDL, came to be increasingly dominated during the first Obama term by the inchoate and often incoherent rants of elderly white people railing against America's first African-American President, scapegoating him personally for virtually every single social, economic and foreign policy problem, both real and imagined, most of which have dogged the United States at least since the 1980s.

Over time, MyFDL became known mostly as a sort of  a 'crazy aunt in the progressive blogosphere's attic' laughingstock. Hamsher herself steadily lost personal mojo among the blogging elite as her readership polarised itself into little more than yet another cranky third-Green Party adjunct group during the 2012 election.

Meanwhile, as everyone now knows, the political zeitgeist had changed in ways that were not discerned by self-absorbed ranters of either the Tea Party or Fake leftist nut fringes. President Obama quietly won a relatively easy and resounding victory in his 2012 re-election bid.

The finances of donor and ad supported blogs such as Firedoglake and Daily Kos tend to be shrouded in secrecy as privately-held businesses are not required to publicly disclose earnings.

Hamsher, reached by phone, referred The Huffington Post to her attorney, Warren Gorman, who declined to comment.

In the absence of transparency which is the ironic byword of many so-called progressive blogs, a reading of the tea leaves indicates that Hamsher's FDL donation stream may very well have spiralled downward along with her readership since the 2008 election.

For one thing, as the 2012 election season deepened into summer and blog participation increased cyclically across most political web sites, it was not uncommon for solicitors masquerading as anonymous commenters to directly or indirectly solicit donations from other commenters in My FDL threads, sometimes using cult-style shaming tactics in the process. Whether these were officially promoted by Hamsher or simply volunteer FDL acolytes is not known.

Another 'tell', FDL's two most renowned staff bloggers, Marcy Wheeler and David Dayen, have both left the blog in recent years. While their terminations were described as mutual decisions, left unanswered are questions of whether these were simply layoffs in a bad economy or the result of ideological differences or some other reason.

Hamsher's exceptionally good at getting people to put their money where her mouth is. But because Firedoglake is a blog that's dependent on financial support from PACs, it makes me wonder how much of her outrage is real and how much is driven by the constant need to fire up donors.

I posed that question to David Ferguson, who used to be in charge of Firedoglake's "Late Night FDL" feature under his pseudonym TRex. He replied, "I would hope that Jane wouldn't be so cynical as to exploit her readers in any way. I do know that working for her, there was a constant sense of crisis. Everything was always a blazing, four-alarm emergency, and I think some of that is what comes through on her blog. I don't know whether that's something she's working for effect or if that's just the way she is. Some of her alliances over the last year have genuinely surprised me, though, particularly with regard to the flap over the health care bill."  

Hamsher was widely criticised  for her handling of two PACs that collected nearly a half million dollars of donations for numerous "progressive causes" as regularly advertised on FDL.

The FEC reports show that Hamsher's PACs are a significant source of income for Firedoglake, but my experience trying to question her about them suggests that she's not big on transparency.

FDL Action PAC supports liberal causes and candidates, often with targeted campaigns such as "Tell Blanche Lincoln and Mike Ross to Act Like Democrats." Accountability Now's stated goal is to recruit primary challengers against members of Congress who "sell out the interests of their constituents in favor of corporations," according to its site.

Accountability Now collected $113,695 in donations during 2009, as it reported to the FEC, and spent $169,992 that year on nine consultants. Six of those people managed the committee: The PAC paid Hamsher $24,000, another $24,000 to PAC cofounder Glenn Greenwald of Salon.Com, $65,710 to two executive directors and $38,047 to two management consultants.