Archive for Crime and Punishment
Crazy Spanish Prison Break was going to use Zepplins
I just spotted this on Gizmodo and am lifting the story for you guys from there….
In a plot that’s crazy (and evil genius) enough to be from James Bond, three people have been arrested after police discovered their plan to free a drug trafficker from an island prison using a 13-foot airship carrying night goggles, climbing gear and camouflage paint.
It’s believed that the inmate (of the Salto del Negro prison on the Canary Island of Las Palmas) was to scale the prison wall and speed off in a waiting car.
The arrested men had setup an elaborate surveillance operation of the prison that involved a camouflaged tent, powerful binoculars, telephoto lenses, and motion detection sensors. But authorities caught wind of the plan when they intercepted the inflatable zeppelin as it arrived from the Italian town of Bergamo.
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The decline and fall of the United States, Gandhi, and Corporate Death
We, the Scary Arab Clowns admit to taking a special joy in watching as the U.S. falls, but at the same time we are highly impressed with the steps the Obama administration is taking. We have convinced Vago not to give up his U.S. citizenship and he is even considering returning someday to his native land of birth. In any event, we think that things are going in the right direction and we bring you this update of the news we find most interesting in the world.
We admit that we are enjoying the blogging. We may start a new network called al-Clownzeera.
We think that Venezuela’s Chavez and the North Korean Kim Jong Il are only the vanguard of nations that will begin testing the limits of the United States.
President Hugo Chavez seized a unit of American food giant Cargill on Wednesday and threatened to take over Venezuela’s largest private company, renewing a nationalization drive as the OPEC nation’s oil income plunges.
A day after warning Washington against launching military exercises on South Korean soil, North Korea focused its rhetoric Thursday on its neighbor and warned of “powerful” retaliation if Seoul goes ahead with joint drills next week.
There will be other tests of the limits of United States power.
Kyrgyzstan will not reverse its decision to shut down a United States military air base, which is key for Washington’s war in Afghanistan, a spokesman for President Kurmanbek Bakiyev said on Thursday.
We like that Obama is doing things that go against conventional wisdom:
The Obama administration plans to expand a program to bolster Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s security forces in the occupied West Bank as part of a push for statehood, officials said on Thursday.
The debut of the two-pronged Making Home Affordable Program, focused on mortgage modification and refinancing, will likely be delayed for several weeks, though, as lenders prepare for the anticipated onslaught of borrowers’ looking for help.
We would also like to point out that if you want to treat your corporations like human binegs, you should consider making them mortal, that is, taking away the immortality of corps that are iresponsible and dangerous such as Eli Lilly.
Eli Lilly & Company’s rap sheet as a public menace is so long that for Lilly watchers to overcome the “banality-of-Lilly-sleaziness” phenomenon, the drug company must break some type of record measuring egregiousness. Lilly obliged earlier this year, receiving the largest criminal fine ever imposed on a corporation.
And we have a rather nice update on the soundtrack of the Fantastic Depression. We think it is more than likely it will be Phish. Link.
And here is an itneresting way to find a wife…”If you build a road, they will come” We call this the field of dreams method.
More than 100 Bachelors from a remote village in Bihar, India, are building a mountain road to the outside world to raise their eligibility among prospective brides. The village of Barwaan Kala is located high in the Kaimur hills and known locally as the “village of unmarried people.” The last wedding in the village was reportedly 50 years ago.
We find these two stories about Morocco interesting today.
1. Sufism in Moroccan Islam Link
2. EU Cooperation with Morocco to Increase Link
Finally we want everyone to know that if Gandhi’s eyeglasses go on auction we plan to buy them for $4.95 and if anyone else raises the bid we will cut off their head. Link.
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Kangaroos and Pirates
For today’s great movie quiz, what film is this still from? (answer is at the bottom of this post)
It turns out that we are more closely related to kangaroos than you might think.
“There are a few differences, we have a few more of this, a few less of that, but they are the same genes and a lot of them are in the same order,” centre Director Jenny Graves told reporters in Melbourne.
And the Saudi Oil Tanker that got hijacked by pirates yesterday has arrived in Somalia.
A Saudi supertanker seized by pirates with a $100 million oil cargo in the world’s biggest ship hijacking reached Somalia on Tuesday, and another ship was captured in the perilous waters off the lawless state. The capture of the Star is one of the most spectacular strikes in maritime history.The seizure of the Star, three times the size of an aircraft carrier, followed another high-profile strike earlier this year by the pirates when they captured a Ukrainian ship carrying 33 tanks and other military equipment. They are still holding that vessel and about a dozen others, with more than 200 crew members hostage. Given that the pirates are well-armed with grenades, machineguns and rocket-launchers, foreign forces in the area are steering clear of direct attacks.
Answer: The General starring Buster Keaton. One of the greatest silent films of all time.
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Virtual Stocks, Virtual Murder, and Radio Raheem
For the first time since 2003 when I stopped being a stock broker, my virtual portfolio has gone into the red. Until a month ago I was continuously up more than $5000 on a virtual $20000 portfolio based on the stocks that I sold to my clients. Hopefully, someone told them to sell when the market reached a high. As of this morning, my virtual portfolio is down $84. Not bad really, I’ve been surprised it lasted this long. Maybe I should have stayed a broker…or a DJ, or a casting director, or an air traffic controller, or a bartender, or maybe I should stay a tour guide….nah…no regrets on leaving those or this job behind me and moving on…
While on the subject of the virtual, this story caught my attention this morning…
TOKYO – A 43-year-old Japanese woman whose sudden divorce in a virtual game world made her so angry that she killed her online husband’s digital persona has been arrested on suspicion of hacking, police said Thursday.
The woman, who is jailed on suspicion of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data, used his identification and password to log onto popular interactive game “Maple Story” to carry out the virtual murder in mid-May, a police official in northern Sapporo said on condition of anonymity, citing department policy.
“I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry,” the official quoted her as telling investigators and admitting the allegations.
The woman had not plotted any revenge in the real world, the official said.
She has not yet been formally charged, but if convicted could face a prison term of up to five years or a fine up to $5,000.
Players in “Maple Story” raise and manipulate digital images called “avatars” that represent themselves, while engaging in relationships, social activities and fighting against monsters and other obstacles.
The woman used login information she got from the 33-year-old office worker when their characters were happily married, and killed the character. The man complained to police when he discovered that his beloved online avatar was dead.
The woman was arrested Wednesday and was taken across the country, traveling 620 miles from her home in southern Miyazaki to be detained in Sappporo, where the man lives, the official said.
The police official said he did not know if she was married in the real world.
In recent years, virtual lives have had consequences in the real world. In August, a woman was charged in Delaware with plotting the real-life abduction of a boyfriend she met through “Second Life,” another virtual interactive world.
In Tokyo, police arrested a 16-year-old boy on charges of swindling virtual currency worth $360,000 in an interactive role playing game by manipulating another player’s portfolio using a stolen ID and password.
Virtual games are popular in Japan, and “Second Life” has drawn a fair number of Japanese participants. They rank third by nationality among users, after Americans and Brazilians.
I think the intersection of the virtual and ‘real’ is one of the most interesting phenomenon we are likely to experience in my lifetime. It is certainly more interesting than an election where the best candidates are ignored by the media…
Yesterday on the bus I heard an interesting exchange between two guys that seemed like average working guys:
Guy 1: We are about to elect the first non-white president!
Guy 2: I don’t care what his nationality is, he doesn’t have experience!
It’s nice to know that the voters are so well informed that they confuse race with nationality. As if black people aren’t citizens of the U.S. Actually, I think this is representative of a lot of McCain voters. They are racist, poorly educated, and they tend to get their information from prescription drug abusing right wing talk show hosts. What they forget is that those same sources were blasting McCain in the primaries. By the way, I love that McCain spent $150,000 to upgrade the Palin families wardrobe from the stuff they bought at Mervyns.
I was pleased to note that a poll at kaleo.org (the UH student paper) has McCain(12%) trailing Nader (16%) by 4%. Obama is way ahead of both, after all, this is Hawaii, where the first question people ask you is where you went to high school (and it really matters to them!), so of course a guy who went to high school here is going to win. Here’s what Larry DAvid, co-creator of Seinfeld and star of Curb Your Enthusiasm has to say about the election.
If Obama loses, it would be easier to live with it if it’s due to racism rather than if it’s stolen. If it’s racism, I can say, “Okay, we lost, but at least it’s a democracy. Sure, it’s a democracy inhabited by a majority of disgusting, reprehensible turds, but at least it’s a democracy.” If he loses because it’s stolen, that will be much worse. Call me crazy, but I’d rather live in a democratic racist country than a non-democratic non-racist one.
While we are at it, check out how cool Scandanavia sounds just in case McCain does win.
Now, as to Radio Raheem, I was talking with my brother yesterday and he told me that big boom boxes aka Ghetto Blasters are going for inflated prices on ebay, apparently we are on the eve of a boombox revival. The timing is about right for the return of the 80′s by a generation that never was there.
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Mountains that shouldn’t be there.
We like to think that science can give us all the answers but sometimes we don’t know as much as we think we do. Take the huge range of mountains that goes across Antarctica and the fact that scientists can’t explain why they are there, they can explain why they shouldn’t be there though.
An Antarctic mountain range that rivals the Alps in elevation will be probed this month by an expedition of scientists using airborne radar and other Information Age tools to virtually “peel away” more than 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) of ice covering the peaks. One of the mysteries of the mountain range is that current evidence suggests that it “shouldn’t be there” at all.
And while the UFO’s that an Australian Psychic predicted would hover over Alabama didn’t materialize, a recently released report shows that U.S. fighters have been scrambled to see UFO’s in Britain.The files are online at: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos
One pilot said he was seconds away from firing 24 rockets at the object, which moved erratically and gave a radar reading like “a flying aircraft carrier.” The pilot, Milton Torres, now 77 and living in Miami, said it spent periods motionless in the sky before reaching estimated speeds of more than 7,600 mph (12,000 kph).After the alert, a shadowy figure told Torres he must never talk about the incident and he duly kept silent for more than 30 years.His story was among dozens of UFO sightings in defence ministry files released at the National Archives in London.
And here is a story even more bizarre…who the hell would do this?
The Asheville (N.C.) Citizen Times reports, “A dead bear was found dumped this morning on the Western Carolina University campus, draped with a pair of Obama campaign signs, university police said.”
Maintenance workers at 7:45 a.m. found a 75-pound bear cub dumped at the roundabout at the entrance to campus, said Tom Johnson, chief of university police. “It looked like it had been shot in the head as best we can tell. A couple of Obama campaign signs had been stapled together and stuck over its head,” Johnson said. University police called in N.C. Wildlife Resources officials to remove the body and help in the investigation. “This is certainly unacceptable,” Johnson said. “Someone was wanting to draw attention to the election.
“If we find out who they are, we’ll make sure Western Carolina University deplores the inappropriate behavior that led to this troubling incident,” said Leila Tvedt, associate vice chancellor “We cannot speculate on the motives of the people involved, nor who those people might be. Campus police are cooperating with authorities to investigate this matter.”
So, what is real? Can you steal something that doesn’t actually exist in the real world? Apparently you can. You can even get punished for it.
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – A Dutch court has convicted two youths of theft for stealing virtual items in a computer game and sentenced them to community service.
Only a handful of such cases have been heard in the world, and they have reached varying conclusions about the legal status of “virtual goods.”
The Leeuwarden District Court says the culprits, 15 and 14 years old, coerced a 13-year-old boy into transferring a “virtual amulet and a virtual mask” from the online adventure game RuneScape to their game accounts.
“These virtual goods are goods (under Dutch law), so this is theft,” the court said Tuesday in a summary of its ruling. Identities of the minors were not released. The 15-year-old was sentenced to 200 hours service, and the 14-year-old to 160 hours.
Here is another question that needs an answer since we don’t have one…why are middle aged American white women killing themselves?
U.S. suicide rates appear to be on the rise, driven mostly by middle-aged white women, researchers reported on Tuesday. They found a disturbing increase in suicides between 1999 and 2005 and said the pattern had changed in an unmistakable way — although the reasons behind the change are not clear.
One can certainly speculate…especially about the emptiness of the career track.
Finally, it appears that we are close to the time when we can make cars and planes out of paper. Now who in the world would believe that?
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