Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Sounds Like Murder to Me

If you want to kill someone and make it look like a suicide, this is the way to do it.

Shawn Lonsdale, whose one-man crusade against Scientology made him a public enemy of the church, was found dead at his home over the weekend in an apparent suicide. He was 39.

Police discovered Lonsdale’s body at 12:20 p.m. Saturday after neighbors reported a foul odor. They found a garden hose stretched from the exhaust pipe of Lonsdale’s car into a window of his home at 510 N Lincoln Ave., according to Clearwater police spokeswoman Elizabeth Daly-Watts.

Since Scientology has a history of going after its enemies, it can’t be ruled out.

UPDATE: L Ron Hubbard’s gay son was also a critic of the church and died in a similar fashion. Hmmm.

One of Shawn’s last films.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Scamming the Scammers

This is a hilarious page full o examples where people have scammed Nigerian 419 scammers. Those people who send you emails claiming there’s a huge fortune over there that they need to deposit in your bank account for some reason or another.

The last one on the page had me LMAO. You gotta love it. 

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Hilarious

I just received this scam letter. You have to give these guys credit for a sense of humor.

Dear Victim,

How are you today? Hope all is well with you and family?,You may not understand why this mail came to you.
We have been having a meeting for the passed 7 months which ended 2 days ago with the then secretary to the UNITED NATIONS.

This email is to all the people that have been scammed in any part of the world, the UNITED NATIONS have agreed to compensate them with the sum of US$600,000. This includes every foriegn contractors including inheritors that may have not received their contract sum, and people that have had an unfinished transaction or international businesses that failed due to Government probelms etc.

We found your name in our list and that is why we are contacting you, this have been agreed upon and have been signed.

You are advised to contact Rev Dom Kele of ZENITH BANK NIGERIA PLC, as he is our representative in Nigeria, contact him immediately for your Cheque/ International Bank Draft of USD$600,000. This funds are in a Bank Draft for security purpose ok? so he will send it to you and you can clear it in any bank of your choice.

Therefore, you should send him your full Name and telephone number/your correct mailing address where you want him to send the Draft to you.

Thanks and God bless you and your family.Hoping to hear from you as soon as you cash your Bank Draft.

Making the world a better place

Regards,

Mr. Kofi Annan
Former Secretary(United Nation)

Don’t these guys realize the UN only takes. It doesn’t give. 

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Irony DuJour

Italian police burst into the room of a suspected Mafia mobster in Sicily and arrested him as he watched a television show about the arrest of a Mafia boss, investigators said Friday.
Italian Carabinieri police accompany Michele Catalano (C) after his arrest in Palermo November 29, 2007. [Agencies]

Police said Michele Catalano was watching the concluding chapter late Thursday of the TV mini-series “The Boss of Bosses,” recounting the arrest in 1993 of real-life Cosa Nostra leader Salvatore “Toto” Riina, when he was detained.

They Catalano, 48, was suspected of being a senior commander serving under the latest “boss of bosses” Salvatore Lo Piccolo, who was arrested this month after nearly 25 years on the run.

Catalano faces charges of drug trafficking and extortion.

China Daily

Losing the War on Drugs

Rolling Stone has an article on “How America Lost the War on Drugs”. While I generally find Rolling Stone articles to be biased politically, this article is pretty dead on target.

We’ve been fighting the war on drugs for over 30 years and drugs remain cheap and plentiful. Drug gangs have only grown in strength. There are more now gangs than ever before.

We’ve spent billions, if not trillions of dollars on the drug war and the problem hasn’t abated much. It’s more socially unacceptable to be a drug user than it was in the 70s, but it’s also socially unacceptable to be an alcoholic or a smoker and that hasn’t stopped them either.

The only way to win the war on drugs is to completely change tactics and make it legal. That would eliminate the business for drug lords and gangs. It would cut off a major source of revenue for terrorists. Because if we grew our drugs and managed it ourselves, that would destroy the business of the drug trade. And by taxing drugs, the government would have insane amounts of capital to pay for things it needs to fix, like Medicare and Social Security.

Instead of sending people to prison for using drugs, addicts should be sentenced to rehab and education, which could be funded by drug taxes.

But that would make too much sense. This is why governments and bureaucracy can never solve problems. They get stuck on a failed ideas and keep it going almost indefinitely. The welfare state ran for 30 years and caused immense harm to families in America, especially in minority communities. The drug war has sent millions of people to jail or prison needlessly and empowered a criminal underclass to wreak massive harm on society.

You would think the lesson of prohibition brought would have clued these politicians to the realities of banning things. When you ban something you create a demand and a black market. Prohibition in the 20s helped Organized Crime to become rich and powerful. It cost serious amounts of money and manpower to take on those gangs, and the Mafia is still with us today. 

I can fully understand why people would not want to legalize drugs. Drugs cause a lot of harm when they are abused. But by criminalizing drugs, you drive drug abusers into secrecy and hiding. Which makes the problem much harder to deal with.

The vast majority of crime in the US is drug related or drug enabled, meaning the people involved were under the influence. If the government really wants to solve this problem they have to take a different tact. They have to consider changing the laws and seeing if an open approach works better. The evidence suggests it would. 

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

A Cop Turns

An ex-Texas cop decides to make a DVD telling people how to hide drugs from the cops. Why? Because he realizes how wrong and unfair the war on pot is.

But when Cooper left West Texas and moved to Upshur County in East Texas, things began to turn. First, Cooper arrested the mayor’s son for possession of methamphetamines. He then arrested a city councilman for driving with a bag of pot and a gun. Busting long-hairs on the highway was one thing, but the aggressive narcotics officer was not endearing himself to important people in East Texas. After four years, Cooper left law enforcement behind. He then discovered a little of what life is like on the other side of the police baton.

“I used to break into houses at three o’clock in the morning with 10 other men, after throwing a flash grenade through the window,” Cooper says. “I would drag Mom and Dad away and send the kids to the department of human services — over a bag of pot — and totally ruin that entire family. I started reaping what I had sown.”

Without the cloak of being a police officer and in the middle of a contentious divorce, Cooper was on the wrong side of small-town politics. He was arrested for returning rental movies late and for unlawfully carrying a gun. His ex-brother-in-law, a constable, showed up with an order to remove his two girls. They put up such a fight, the effort was abandoned.

All of the charges against Cooper were eventually reduced or dismissed entirely, but he was angry. So he figured out a way to hit back — and make money doing it.

The amount of time, money and tax dollars wasted on arresting, convicting, prosecuting and imprisoning pot smokers or dealers when there are so many other more important things we could focus on, is absurd. It’s not one of those drugs like Meth or Crack that has massive health and crime consequences. A lot of countries have decriminalized it. Many states have voted to make it legal, at least medically. The Feds keep trying to squash that. You have to wonder what that’s all about.

And no, I don’t do drugs. Never have. But I believe our society would solve a lot more problems and achieve better results if we stopped wasting our time trying to control people and looked for positive solutions to things. Sending people to prison for something like having a bag of weed not only ruins someone’s life, it costs tax payers a lot of money that could go to fixing roads or bridges. Or improving schools.

A lot of cops ignore situations where someone has weed. This guy took his civil disobediance further. You have to wonder when society will stop this prohibition. It’s as pointless as the one against alcohol. 

Thursday, October 11, 2007

No More Viagra Ads

Well, you may be getting less of them until someone takes up this guy’s business again.

Alexey Tolstokozhev (btw, in Russian his name means ‘Thick Skin’), a Russian spammer, found murdered in his luxury house near Moscow. He has been shot several times with one bullet stuck in his head. According to authorities, this last head shot is a clear mark of russian hit men (known as “killers” in Russia).

Who hated Tolstokozhev so much as to hire a hit man to assasinate him? Well, I guess you have about one billion e-mail users to suspect. Tolstokozhev was a famous spammer who sent millions of e-mail promoting viagra, cialis, penis enlargement pills and other medications. Links in these e-mails usually led to some pharmacy shop, which paid Tolstokozhev a share of its revenue. This is a well known affiliate scheme employed by spammers worldwide. Tolstokozhev is estimated to be responsible for up to 30% percent of all viagra and penis enlargement related spam.

In order to send millions and millions of unsolicited letters, Tolstokozhev employed a network of infected computers (so-called “botnet"), which he rented from hackers.

How profitable is spam? Well, the authorities say that Tolstokozhev has likely made more than $2 million in 2007 alone. (in comparison: average russian monthly salary is $400)

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

How Much Do You Want to Bet?

That the GW people won’t suggest pot growers switch to sunlight to fight global warming?

British Columbia, with a population of four million, has an estimated 20,000 inhabitants who raise a potent local marijuana known here as “B.C. Bud.”

The plants, collectively worth nearly seven billion dollars each year, account for a whopping six percent of this province’s power consumption.

The labor-intensive crop is an energy sponge thanks in large part to the 1,000 watt halogen lights, fans, irrigation pumps and other equipment needed for their cultivation. As a result, the pot growers’ energy bills are about three times that of the average consumer.

Friday, September 07, 2007

He Deserves a Lot More Time

Prosecutors who know people are innocent and still try to send them away should be punished a lot harsher than Nifong was.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

The More the Things Change

This is all too common and yet another reason not to trust the governments intentions. The facts are, give people power and money they will want more. And will do anything to get it. Throw a lot of money at a problem and all the crooks come sniffing around. And who gets punished for trying to stop them?

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.

Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers - all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

A lot of lefty blogs are using this story as an example of how corrupt the Bush administration is, but anti-whistleblower laws are as much a Democrat thing as Republican. The sad truth about wars is they make excellent places to skim money and steal and resell hardware. It was true in WWII, where much of the supplies set over to the troops on the front line never made it because they were stolen and resold. It happens in every war and you would think there would be a serious effort to stop it. Especially when our money and material is being resold to the enemy.

The military, the government, are supposed to prevent this and yet here they are more or less encouraging it.

And they wonder why people complain about taxes.