It wasn't already?

Yeah, I agree. Nothing new there.

Though I didn't expect that Kazakhstan would go this far to get even for Borat.

Nothing new yet but this is going to change things for the worse over the next year.

Yeah. I'm not a conspiracy nut or anything, but it is practical and logical to believe that some bad shit is in the pipeline for us because of these douchebags.

??? This is an exceptional response to an exceptional situation. I understand people's impatience for the encroachment of a police state, but thus far, I don't see it in this event.

We'll see what happens when Boston "gets back to normal". Seeing as Boston is the sort of town that panics over a Mooninite invasion*, it could go either way.



*: It's a shame Scott Brown won his Senate seat over a woman who once said of a light-up Igniknokt, and I quote, "It had a very sinister appearance. It had a battery behind it, and wires." A shame, but not much of a surprise.

I'm not talking about the immediate response - I've been very, very impressed with how well it has been handled so far by law enforcement and the public, both on Monday and now. I'm talking abut how it will be spun for political ends over the next few months.

Locally things are outright inspiring; in the mainstream news (much less the more partisan stuff) I'm already hearing a pattern of interviewers attempting to get experts to say this is about Chechnya and/or immigration.

Mainstream news is just doing its tabloidy thing right now, pumping up whatever angle gets people to tune in. Once this has ceased to be interesting they'll go back to debating whether Kim Kardashian is still hotter than Khloe. (The hottest one, of course, is Elim Garak.)

THERE ARE POLICE INVESTIGATING SOMETHING THAT MEANS POLICE STATE SHEEPLE

8===D

I think its main influence is likely to be where it right now, giving the asshole brand of Repubs a rickety anti-immigration reform platform.

The media is indistinguishable in reporting quality from the schizophrenics we also follow, except it could be argued that the media now owes every Arab American an apology.

OH hey, it's not directly related but congress just passed CISPA with basically no media coverage at all.

http://www.examiner.com/article/house-passes-cispa-online-priv acy-at-risk

tl;dr warrantless searches of pretty much every form of online communication are legal now.

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Come and get me, Uncle SHAM!

Kidding aside, if Obama doesn't veto this motherfucker he's not a Democrat anymore. He's a fascist.

Oh hey, they just announced that he is probably wearing a suicide vest, so there's that too.

NY Times has front page coverage at nytimes.com.

And TMZ of all places has live streaming video piped in from a network. tmz.com

m.wcvb.com/

live stream her, too.

I've got a friend who has started speculating who might be The Mole in this new season of 24

20 hours in, last suspect is cornered and bleeding, big twist coming up any second.

Fuck this week.

^ Exactly.

This may screw immigration reform, but I assume that the military industrial complex at least isn't insane enough to invade Chechnya

Assuming they didn't take a trip to some other country prior to this. Knock on wood with a mechanical wood-knocker.

It's a double-team conspiracy! Now the American military will be deployed to help Russia put down Chechen rebels! It'll be a joint venture between the world's two foremost military powers, paving the way towards a political union between Washington and Moscow!

It's just like the plot of Arma 2! Arma 2 must be part of the Illuminati's plan to condition the masses to accept the US-Russian alliance. And since Day Z is a popular zombie-based mod for that game, well, it goes without saying that this also ties in to the period of bio terrorism they are going to spring on us in a couple years time.

They are pretty domestic, their family moved to Baltimore from Kazakhstan in 2005, they went to a fancy charter school near Harvard Square and the one who's still at large was a med student at UMass.

Around noon I heard a rumor that they found the escape vehicle abandoned in Connecticut.

My brother is Number Two bomber in all Kazakhstan!

So wait, I've heard both Chechnya and Kazakhs now. Were they Chechens living in Kazakhstan?

Also, car found in CT? He's obviously en route to Newtown.

Turns out that was wrong. CT police were after an SUV from MA related to the bombing that was found in MA. Bomber's now supposedly in a green Civic.

Apparently yes, Chechens living in Kazakhstan who were granted asylum in the US in 2003.

Cool! That means we can invade TWO places!

It's too bad they weren't from Azerbaijan, but Chechnya and Kazakhstan are both pretty juicy oil prizes.

shit!

I was born in Soviet Kazakhstan, my passport says as much.

Fuckin' no-fly list here I come.

And does this mean all the Tea Party false-flaggers, on finding out he's Muslim, will suddenly re-examine the pixels and determine the initial attack was real after all?

EXACTLY.

Five (wanted) stars for that.

The safest place is the train.

They were switching into "TERRORISTS COULD BE ANYONE THEY COULD BE YOUR FRIENDS OR FAMILY" mode within an hour of the younger brother escaping.

Frank Conniff, the only reason I have Twitter, said that if this stops people from wearing hats backwards, it was worth it.

Too soon, Frank, too soon.

Personally, I look forward to the new wave of whiteys being auto-suspects for once. If only they had been Christian and the bombs had failed to go off, hurting no one, I would believe God loves me.

It's never too soon for a message that important.

"Too soon" would have been quoting this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxMBAjp6PhI

If you want to really have some fun, read about how Putin and the FSB probably triggered the first Chechen invasion (and thus solidified Putin's rise to power) by blowing up Russian apartment building themselves. For all our joking around about false flag operations on here, sometimes they really do happen.

In post Soviet Russia, city hall bombs you!

But all the Russians lived in Allston.

Oh, sure, like you guys haven't been crazy since 1776.

Russians? Try 1076

Bostonians.

Amazed its not Woburn.

Boston and Russia, more in common than either of us choose to admit.

Also, you'd be surprised at how many Russians there are in Somerville and Cambridge.

I'm glad to say, I'm pretty sure you're wrong. I can't envision a scenario coming out of this where we'd send a military response to Russia (which Chechnya is part of). Yeah there are dumbfucks who will always call for invasion / destruction of any country where the people are sufficiently brown -- despite these guys being Caucasian in the most literal sense -- but unlike in 2001 and 2003, PNAC is a spent force (it folded in 2006) and doesn't control the Executive Branch.

What? Where are you people getting this stuff from?

We wouldn't have to attack "Russia" itself. It'd be a "peacekeeping invasion", similar to the one Rick Perry envisioned for Mexico. We send troops to help Russia put down Chechen rebels.

That's how we nearly lost Hal Jordan, we're not about to make that mistake again.

But beyond that, you're going to have to construct a case where either a) Russia wants us involved in their internal affairs or b) they are not powerful enough to cause any problems for an over-interventionalist United States. You're also going to have to make a case for an Obama administration that is anywhere near as invasion-happy as the Bush administration.

I wouldn't rule out drone strikes, but even then it seems highly unlikely: Obama's sending drones to nations that aren't trying to do much of anything about terrorists, and say what you will about Russia, they don't take a laissez-faire attitude towards Chechnyan rebels.

All of this assumes that these guys have any links to terrorist organizations in Chechnya; without that much, there's exactly zero chance of a military assault on Chechnya.

Actually, while I don't think we're going to be putting boots on the ground in Russia, Obama's administration has *already* proven itself to be more invasion happy than the Bush administration, and that was just in his first term, when he still had to worry about reelection. He's much better than Bush at keeping the public outrage to a minimun (or, should I say, the Democrat-aligned media is much more willing to accomodate and overlook his aggressive foreign policy), but that just means that a joint peacekeeping action would be more his style.

And Russia's been fighting the Chechens for, what? Twenty years? It's like that episode of My Little Pony, where Applejack insists on doing the apple bucking all by herself, with no help from the other ponies. Sooner or later, Russia will have to set her stubborn pony pride aside and ask her friends for help.

You're defining "invasion" so loosely as to be meaningless.

Or maybe you're defining it too narrowly?

The central question here is whether or not the US military could be commited to combat operations in Russia. And the answer is yes, it can. I don't think it *will*, but it's not inconceivable.

Since I tend to define invasion as an operation designed to gain and hold territory, I make a distinction between invasion and (for example) drone strikes. Iraq and Afghanistan were invasions. Sending drones after (what are alleged to be) al Qaeda bases, or sending Delta Force to kill/capture bin Laden, are not invasions.

Very, very unlikely. Unless it turns out that they're both (1) religiously/politically motivated and (2) were trained in a vulnerable 3d party state, I think we've dodged a bullet in terms of response. Still plenty of opportunities to fuck up the domestic political environment, though.

Would we even need to invade? Just tell Putin "we're going to pretend nothing is happening in Chechnya for the next few months" and watch the fireworks.

Congress would never approve the invasion, the CIA will have to do it for us, like with the O-Bomber's other secret wars.

That's why we call ourselves "peacekeepers". Not "invaders". We deploy drones, bombers, close air support, and small numbers of ground forces (maybe a couple divisions worth of troops) to... oh not invade, oh no no, perish the thought, this is totally different. We're just dropping tons of ordnance and killing a bunch of people. Sort of like how Vietnam wasn't actually a war. It was just a conflict.

Again, you can split hairs about definitions, and I totally agree with you that a fullscale, Napoleon-style invasion of Russia is out of the question. THAT goes without saying. But the real question is whether the United States could conceivably deploy combat forces to Russia. And it's entirely conceivable, even if unlikely, given Russia's un-neigh-borly attitude.

Meme - congressional approval for military actions has been irrelevant since at least the Bush era. You remember Iraq, right?

We don't even need the CIA. We just need the President to say he "thinks" military force is needed, and bam-o, ten years of playing in the sandbox.

I was just being a snarkipuss, EvilHomer. I do agree though that invasion is defined here too loosely. If you're a citizen of a country and you live in a society where a robot can come out of the sky any time during your life and kill the shit out of dozens of people, the country of origin of that robot owns you, lock, stock, and laser guided barrel.

This isn't Machiavelli's Florence, you don't have to move your capitol to a foreign land to keep it.

Yeah, I was thinking more CIA than army, navy,marines... but war nonetheless.

8===D

\\
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\______/_________|_)
/ / \ \
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That's ... a Colonial Viper piloted by Hello Kitty?

I see that old "penis nosed fox" ASCII except with severe birth defects.

Yeah, it was a penis nosed fox, but the blank spaces got all fucked up. :(

You know, when Al Qaeda BLEW UP TWO SKYSCRAPERS and killed thousands, you might have thought that the greater risk to the country was from the attacks themselves rather than an overblown response and effects on the domestic political landscape, but you would have been wrong. Four years of an executive with carte blanche from a terrified legislature and populace and subsequent US military action did more damage to us than the attacks themselves, even leaving out the effects on non-Americans. Which was half the point of the attack in the first place. Now we've got what looks for the moment like two loners that killed three people and I'm supposed to think the real danger is that we aren't doing enough in response?

America is the biggest military empire on the planet. That we'll do something fucked up and stupid is, in general, the big worry in these situations

I'm actually LOLing at work here

I mentioned in the first Boston marathon video that this could be much bigger than the far, far worse Mumbai bombings. Unhappy to see I was right!

Fuckin'-A! ^5

"White hat/cap" is literally a euphamism for "bro/ya-dood" in Boston. This is definitely bro related terrorism.

I was about to label it "doucherrism".

If raises awareness of the term "Ya-Dood" outside of the Boston area it may have all been worthwhile.

Its been reported he already gave the US his version of "told ya so".

They've been aiding and abetting Chechnyans for more than 20 years.