Guys, I found something which offends me!

This is a little out of line with my normal content, but I think it's important. There are people out there claiming that the Boston bombings were staged. http://govtslaves.info/oregon-emt-graduate-questions-boston-bombings-use-of-actors/

Need I say... WTF?

First of all, this is a major public event with hundreds if not thousands of witnesses, that directly impacted the lives of everyone in one of the major cities of the US. Staging something like that would be nigh-impossible. Not to mention that the internet is full of people claiming to know, or know someone who knows, one of the victims. The sheer budget required to hire that many liars to spread the word on the internet would be prohibitive. It's ridiculous to assert that this event was staged.

So where the hell does this guy get off claiming so? There's no reason we should let him get away with that.

I mean, I'm all for a dose of healthy skepticism. That's not what this is. This is blind idiocy. Furthermore, it's blind idiocy that downplays the suffering of real people.

*Sigh* Everyone deserves the right to speak their opinion, even those of us who are blatantly wrong. That's part of what keeps the system healthy. But I've got the right to post my opinion too. Without further ado, here's why this article is blatantly wrong:


1) As a commenter points out, bleeding out from limb loss is mostly a myth. When an entire limb goes, major arteries tighten up to prevent immediately bleeding out.

2) In the scene of mass chaos and fear, describing those hand gestures as signals looks, to me, absolutely ridiculous. The woman is dazed and confused, and just left her hand where it was. The man with no legs is just trying to stand up.

3) The African woman and the man in the hood and sunglasses are not "fine" in the earlier pictures. They're half-buried under a man with no legs. Clearly they were in the blast radius. Just because they're not missing limbs doesn't mean they aren't stunned, possibly deafened, possibly injured. I am not at all shocked to see both of them laying down a moment later. Anything else would be much more odd.

4) Descriptions of those two pouring fake blood on the cement, attaching prosthetics, or making hand gestures are inconsistent with the images, and also with the timeline. These images are frames in a film reel. There's probably less than a second between each snapshot. Is that really enough time to attach a fake prosthetic (a VERY convincing one) and then pour fake blood on the cement? I call BS.

5) I don't see any evidence of false staging in the fact that everybody in the immediate vicinity is looking to the one guy who seems to know what he's doing. That's absolutely consistent with any disaster scenario.

6) The author criticizes the "relaxed posture" of several of the less-injured victims. Well, they may be less injured, but they were just in an explosion, do you really expect them to be doing a song and dance? No--they're dazed. Of course they're not doing anything! Honestly, a staging would probably have much more obvious and overblown expressions of terror and horror.

7) "Notice the rips on his jeans have no sign of blood or injury on the skin" Actually, the jeans are quite bloody where they've been ripped. He's not obviously cut underneath, but there are a few reasonable explanations for that, not least is simply that the clothes have shifted since being torn, and the cut part of the leg is no longer showing through the cut in the jeans. It's also totally feasible that a piece of shrapnel caught a loose flap of clothing without getting the skin underneath.

8) "The double-amputee actor is clearly being ignored." Again, this is happening in a matter of seconds, and it's a real disaster scenario. People aren't organized. It'll only be a few more seconds before people arrive to help him, but in these first images, it's just the initial chaos. If everybody were behaving in the most obvious and appropriate ways, that would be far more suspicious.

9) "A small amount of fake blood around him" Seriously? The ground there is carpeted in blood. There may be no arterial spray--as there shouldn't be, given the human body's survival mechanisms--but there's still buckets of bood and gore on the ground.

10) The blood on the african woman in the earlier scenes wasn't obvious because she's wearing a red shirt and has no major injuries, but as discussed above, that doesn't mean she's feeling peachy. She's probably in shock, which is consistent with her facial expressions and dazed attitude in the earlier images as well as with being in a stretcher later on.

11) And our author is back to how the guy with his legs blown off should have bled out from arterial spray, which only re-iterates how little this person knows about medicine.

12) The author closes with his/her credentials, i.e. having "firsthand experience with trauma in the field of EMS work." I'd like to draw your attention back up to the top, where the author specificies that s/he has been "on calls with heavy arterial bleeds, internal bleeding, fatalities, doa’s." Note those two little words "on calls." This person has not been at the scene of these injuries. The author is a phone support nurse. S/he has no idea what these situations look like when you're actually there on the ground. The author's "credentials" are crap, especially compared to some of the ACTUAL COMBAT MEDICS who post in the comments.

13) The site this is posted on is http://govtslaves.info/ Seriously. I could have started and stopped with that.

I understand that everyone wants to feel like a special snowflake, but there is no excusing this level of sheer idiocy, not to mention the blatant disregard for the suffering of the very real people who were injured or maimed. Last word was approximately 20 people lost at least one leg. 

I, for one, will not tolerate assholes claiming that's a hoax.