The specter of residents of the suburb of Watertown, in the Greater Boston area, being forcibly turned out of their homes and stared down by SWAT teams is not likely to disturb your average American. Said the great Roman statesman Cicero: “Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.”

Perpetual children, Americas don’t know squat about their constitution, its philosophical origins, and why the framers, who were sophisticated thinkers, put certain provisions in place.

Of those Americans who vaguely compute something about a Fourth Amendment—“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects”—most still believe that blatant violations of these sacred protections are probably justified, and visited only on “terrorists.”

In other words, if an authority figure violates the Fourth Amendment—you average, pliant American will simply surmise that it’s likely OK.

In addition, liberty as it was codified by the founding generation demands a rational mind. Being both childish and sentimental in the extreme, Americans shun rational thought. It thus becomes impossible to think clearly about liberty.

This isn’t it:

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UPDATE (4/26): Locked-down Bostonians rationalize tyranny:

Where is the outrage that the Powers That Are in Boston essentially made prisoners of an entire city? On what grounds and by what authority does any municipal government presume to place every citizen of a major United States city on house arrest? In the afterglow of the successful capture of the remaining Boston Marathon bombing suspect, alleged Islamist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the people celebrating in the streets that Tsarnaev was taken alive (ironically, only because the “lockdown” was lifted and the property owner in whose boat Tsarnaev was hiding could finally go outside and check his yard) ought to be asking themselves what they have to be happy about. They are beta testers of the New Freedom, which looks a lot like the Old Oppression. At whim, your government may order you to remain in your home, and if you dare disobey, they will point guns at you, essentially threatening to murder you.

How inefficient is the massive US militarized Managerial State? Not very. Scrap that. It is more accurate to say that, as a deracinated entity whose business is treason, the Managerial State (a James-Burnham construct) is selectively efficient. It moves speedily and ruthlessly against law-abiding patriotic Americans. Not so against the enemies of the very people whom its functionaries have sworn to protect.

Via RT:

“The US may be shocked that the terrorist suspects behind the Boston bombings are Chechen natives, but Russia has long cautioned Washington about giving asylum to Islamists from the North Caucasus, political analyst Dmitry Babich told RT. …”

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UPDATE (4/21): Countless are the instances (since we are unaware of most) in which FBI, and other agencies entrusted with protecting Americans, willfully discounted warnings of impending danger to Americans from terrorists.

“In 2011,” concedes CNN, “the FBI interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev at the request of Russian authorities, according to a senior U.S. official.

Following his interview with the FBI, Tsarnaev traveled to Russia for six months and returned in July 2012. The Tsarnaev family originally hails from the Russian republic of Chechnya and fled the brutal wars there in the 1990s. Tsarnaev’s father currently resides in Dagestan.
After Tsarnaev came back, he created a YouTube channel with links to a number of videos–two of which were tagged under a category labeled “Terrorists” and were deleted. It’s not clear when or by whom.
“If he was on the radar and they let him go–he’s on the Russians’ radar–why wasn’t a flag put on him, some sort of customs flag? I’ve done this before. You put a customs flag up on the individual coming in and out. And I’d like to know what intelligence of Russia has on him as well. I would suspect that they may have monitored him when he was in Russia,” McCaul told CNN’s chief political correspondent Candy Crowley.

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All the Kings Horses and All The King’s Men—the agencies the government has created to protect us—often possess the requisite information needed to stop or supervise certain characters closely, but opt not to.

For example, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the suspect in the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas or 2009. The FBI received advance warning about the 23-year-old Nigerian national, with reported links to al-Qaeda, from no other than his … father. This good man the FBI discounted.

Maj. Nidad Hasan, any one? During his secure tenured career as a psychiatrist in the Army Medical Corps, Major Nidal, as he was known, openly proselytize for his faith. Preaching Islam to already traumatized patients did not hinder his rise through the ranks. Read “Your Government’s Jihadi Protection Program” for the extent of the betrayal.

What do Muslim, bomb-carrying boys to do in order to get the attention of the scatterbrained schemers at Homeland Security? Go on Oprah? This is a cry for help!

And YOU want to entrust government—an entity in which every single incentive to act productively is inverted—with your healthcare.

Ever wonder why people who don’t have jobs are always chilling? “Only America has figured out how you get to be poor and have money at the same time,” explains that irrepressible exile Fred Reed. Listen up, America, to the lessons Mr. Reed learned from a chap (a prototype) called “Git-Some”:

When I got to Washington, DC, I decided that I ought to be poor. It’s a good deal. You get lots of free stuff and you don’t have to work. If I had knowed about poverty when I was fourteen, and what a good thing it was, I’da give up my paper route. I mean, who in his right mind would get up at four-thirty in the morning in January, with eight inches of snow on the ground, and ride across lawns on a bike with four hundred pounds of the Wheeling Intelligencer in a basket, so people could read about crooked politicians and clip grocery coupons? And then I’d catch the school bus.
That teacher lady said I was pretty smart, and she hoped I’d go far, but I reckoned she’da been happy if I just went to the next country over.
When you got out of high school, you had to get a job, and get up mornings even if you didn’t want to, and do something all day that you probably didn’t like. Unless you were poor, and then you could sleep in and do what you wanted all day. I didn’t know it then, though.
Best thing if you want to be poor is to go to Washington, the Yankee Capital, and take up poverty. Then the feddle gummint gives you a house for free. … The gummint gives you Medicaid in case you fall on your head, and Food Stalmps … welfare ain’t a lot of money. It ain’t a lot of work, either. But it’s enough to live on really good if you think about it.

Uncle Fred don’t lie. Ask Kristina Cogan, who receives $80,000 worth in government benefits for being “poor.”

MORE from Fred.

When I heard that a victim of the Boston Marathon bombings was being held as a “person of interest,” I thought of Richard Jewell. He was a “security guard … who became known in connection with the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Discovering a pipe bomb on the park grounds, Jewell alerted police and helped to evacuate the area before the bomb exploded, saving many people from injury or death. Initially hailed by the media as a hero, Jewell was later [hounded] as a suspect.” (Wikipedia)

Despite having never being [sic] charged, [Jewell] underwent a “trial by media” with great toll on his personal and professional life. Eventually he was completely exonorated [sic].

(Information and grammar courtesy of Wikipedia.)

The rumor about the apprehension of a suspect has since been dispelled by CNN. Still, let us hope that no lives are ruined, à la Richard Jewell, in the course of what promises to be a showy and politicized FBI hunt for the perpetrators.

While I was hoping no more innocent victims—this time in the form of the falsely accused—suffer; Bill Anderson, at LRC.COM, has a good idea who ‘The Southern Paranoia Law Center’ is “praying” will be implicated in detonating the Boston marathon bombs:

Anyone reading this post right now almost certainly does NOT know who was responsible for the despicable bombing today at the Boston Marathon. Yet, given that the USA is a hopelessly-politicized country, I am sure that accusations already are being thrown about like so much else of the ignorance that is spewed on various venues these days.
I AM sure, however, that the people at the Southern Paranoia Law Center (SPLC) are hoping, HOPING! that the perpetrators were “white supremacists” so that the SPLC immediately can send out fund-raising letters to turn this sad event into a cash cow. (And I am sure that Paul Krugman would love to be able to blame the Tea Party or maybe even Ron Paul supporters.)
According to news reports, federal agents are “flooding” the area and, I suppose, probably are doing as much damage as an overflowing Charles River would do. One thing is for sure: these “investigators” will botch the case and then lie about the results. The authorities seem to do that quite well.