News

As if the introduction of full-body scanners after some nut set his nuts on fire wasn't enough - now security officials have decided to play a game of "hide the Semtex" and wound up losing a lump of it in a passenger's baggage on an international flight. A lump big enough to down a jetliner. And then they didn't bother to tell anyone for three days.

No, I am not making this up:

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia (AP) -- A failed airport security test ended up with a Slovak man unwittingly carrying hidden explosives in his luggage on a flight to Dublin, Slovak officials admitted Wednesday -- a mistake that enraged Irish authorities and shocked aviation experts worldwide.

While the Slovaks blamed the incident on ''a silly and unprofessional mistake,'' Irish officials and security experts said it was foolish for the Slovaks to hide actual bomb parts in the luggage of innocent passengers under any circumstances.

The passenger himself was detained by Irish police for several hours before being let go without charge Tuesday.

Look, not to be too explicit about this, but the use of full body scanners won't make a damned bit of difference to someone who wants to smuggle a bomb or bomb components onto a plane (or anywhere else.) Because there are these things called body cavities, where people have actually been known to insert and hide stuff.

The Dutch have already announced that henceforth all passengers heading to the US will have to go through such scanners. Yesterday on All Things Considered I listened to professional fear-monger and former Bush Administration Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff claim that full body scanners are the solution, but that the evil ACLU had thwarted their use:

the makers of Depends:

In the wake of the terrorism attempt Friday on a Northwest Airlines flight, federal officials on Saturday imposed new restrictions on travelers that could lengthen lines at airports and limit the ability of international passengers to move about an airplane.

The government was vague about the steps it was taking, saying that it wanted the security experience to be “unpredictable” and that passengers would not find the same measures at every airport — a prospect that may upset airlines and travelers alike.

But several airlines released detailed information about the restrictions, saying that passengers on international flights coming to the United States will apparently have to remain in their seats for the last hour of a flight without any personal items on their laps. It was not clear how often the rule would affect domestic flights.

That's from today's NYT's article. Here's what's on the TSA site:

Well, maybe there is a use for Twitter, after all. Seems that in the middle of the big snowstorm smacking the East Coast, some folks in DC decided to organize a good ol' fashioned snowball fight. You know, show up, informal sides, throw snowballs at one another. Some 150 - 200 people joined in. And everyone was having just too much fun.

Until some idiot in a Hummer drives through the intersection where this party is going on, and his vehicle gets smacked by a few snowballs. Said idiot jumps out of said Hummer, and draws a gun.

WTF?

Seriously, that's what happened. There were plenty of witnesses, plenty of pictures, plenty of video. Here's a good one, where you can clearly see the gun in his left hand:

Nice, eh?

And here's the *really* good part: the guy in question is a D.C. police detective, tentatively identified as Detective Baylor. But don't take my word for it, here he is himself:

When you get in trouble and you don't know right from wrong,
give a little whistle!

Taking the old song lyrics to heart, if inverting the intent a bit, police in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park have come up with a cunning plan to thwart crime:

Oak Park crime: Police pass out whistles to help residents fight back

Jump in burglaries and robberies prompts giveaway

Thousands of Oak Park residents are being equipped with a simple device to help fight crime in the village.

Police are passing out whistles that they are urging citizens to blow if they are victims of or witnesses to a crime.

Officers distributed hundreds of the shiny whistles at two stations along the CTA's Green Line in Oak Park on Friday and will be passing out more Wednesday along the Blue Line. Giveaways elsewhere are expected to take place in the weeks ahead.

"We think they are going to go quick," said Oak Park Police Cmdr. Keenan Williams.

The village conducted a similar program in the 1980s, and Police Chief Rick Tanksley earlier this year suggested bringing it back after statistics showed that burglaries and robberies were on the rise.

Another victory in the War On Christmas!!!

Winter Display Featuring Einstein, Bill Gates Can Go Up at Ark. Capitol, Federal Judge Rules

A secular display celebrating the winter solstice and "freethinkers" such as Albert Einstein and Bill Gates can be placed at the Arkansas Capitol alongside a traditional Christian nativity scene, a federal judge said Monday.

The Arkansas Society of Freethinkers sued last week after Secretary of State Charlie Daniels rejected its proposal, saying it wasn't consistent with the Capitol's other decorations and displays. The group asked for a quick hearing before the winter solstice, which is Dec. 21.

U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright granted an injunction Monday allowing the display to go up.

Quick, someone tell Bill O'Reilly! Maybe we'll get his head to actually assplode!

Jim Downey

HT ML!

This:

Ask Ashley

Spitzer's babe answers all your love-life questions!

Sure, she's made some mistakes. But now Ashley Dupre, the former escort who brought down Gov. Eliot Spitzer, is sharing what she's learned in her new sex, love and relationship column -- exclusively in the New York Post. Is your husband cheating? Is your daughter on a dangerous path? Our readers asked -- and Ashley fired back with her no-nonsense advice.

There are times when I do wish there was a God, and He would just repeat the Flood...

Jim Downey

Via a comment here.

Man, you gotta love the audacity combined with the stupidity:

Tea partyers petition Dem lawmaker to move office to make protests easier

A Christian civil liberties organization on Thursday asked centrist Virginia Rep. Tom Perriello (D) to move his home district office to a location more favorable to protesters.

The Rutherford Institute, which was founded by conservative constitutional lawyer John W. Whitehead, penned a letter to the freshman Perriello citing the concerns of a local tea party group and the University of Virginia College Republicans that the location of his Charlottesville office interferes with their right to protest there.

"Unfortunately, it is your choice of office location that has hindered the ability of citizens to effectively communicate concerning issues of the utmost importance to you, Congress and the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia," wrote Whitehead.

18 months ago, prompted in part by a couple of incidents in my neck of the woods, I wrote the following:

The police use of Tasers is just simply out of control in this country. Seriously. My dad was a cop, and a lot of my family's friends growing up were cops. They've got a tough job. I know that the use of Tasers have protected the lives of officers. But this is insane. It is no longer just the odd asshole who happens to make the Greatest Hits of Police Abuse on YouTube. It has now become commonplace for the police to grab their Taser anytime someone doesn't immediately do what they're told. Time to get rid of the things, nationwide.

Well, one of the incidents has now been settled:

City pays off man injured in Taser use

The man injured after falling 15 feet from a highway overpass when police shocked him with two Tasers has reached a cash settlement with the city of Columbia.

This will likely come as news to you all, I'm sure:

Believers’ Inferences About God’s Beliefs are Egocentric

Religious people tend to use their own beliefs as a guide in thinking about what God believes, but are less constrained when reasoning about other people’s beliefs, according to new study published in the Nov. 30 early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Nicholas Epley, professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, led the research, which included a series of survey and neuroimaging studies to examine the extent to which people’s own beliefs guide their predictions about God’s beliefs. The findings of Epley and his co-authors at Australia’s Monash University and UChicago extend existing work in psychology showing that people are often egocentric when they infer other people’s beliefs.

* * *

And the march of progress continues:

'Insecurity Cameras' To Track All Of Town's Traffic

A little town in California has a big and controversial idea: It wants to install security cameras on roads leading into town so that it can screen and record every license plate that comes inside city limits. The plan could effectively turn Tiburon into perhaps the nation's first public gated community.

* * *

"Tiburon is unusual because there are only two roads going in and out of the town," says Mayor Alice Fredericks.

It's quite easy, she says, to keep track of every car along those two roads. Last week, the Town Council decided to spend $200,000 to place six security cameras at strategic points along the road. For now, the plan is to make sure none of the cars coming into town are stolen. Crime statistics are low in Tiburon, but in a small town, Fredericks says, even a few crimes make an impact.

* * *

Now, this is how to mount an expedition:

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) ? a beverage company has asked a team to drill through Antarctica's ice for a lost cache of some vintage Scotch whiskey that has been on the rocks since a century ago.

The drillers will be trying to reach two crates of McKinlay and Co. whiskey that were shipped to the Antarctic by British polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton as part of his abandoned 1909 expedition.

Whyte & Mackay, the drinks group that now owns McKinlay and Co., has asked for a sample of the 100-year-old scotch for a series of tests that could decide whether to relaunch the now-defunct Scotch.

Actually, the stuff shouldn't have changed at all in terms of flavor. Once bottled, scotch doesn't really "age" any more. Be interesting to try it, though.

Jim Downey

Man, times are hard:

MOSCOW - Russian police have arrested three homeless people suspected of eating a 25-year-old man they had butchered and selling other bits of the corpse to a local kebab house.

And:

that this sounded like a good idea at the time:

(CNN) -- Police say guilt was written all over their faces.

Police received a call Friday night that two men with hooded sweatshirts and painted faces had tried to break into a man's home in Carroll, Iowa.

When police stopped a vehicle matching the caller's description blocks away, they were stunned by the men's disguises.

There were no ski masks or stockings pulled over their heads; instead, Matthew Allan McNelly, 23, and Joey Lee Miller, 20, streaked their faces with permanent black marker.

Yes, alcohol *was* involved.

Well, that solves my quandary about what Hallowe'en costume to wear this year . . .

Jim Downey

Cross posted to my blog.

. . .what's going through the mind of the flies:

OK, quirky. I like quirky. But I also wonder what people who experienced this kind of thing thought about it later. That the product being promoted was as nasty as flies? That the advertisers who came up with this were just mean bastards? Not to get all PETA about it, I think that it's a fairly cruel trick. Yeah, sure, the tag at the end says that the banners were mounted with wax, and came off on their own after about an hour, but still the flies were clearly struggling.

Thoughts?

Jim Downey

Scientologists convicted of fraud in France

PARIS (AFP) – French judges fined the Church of Scientology almost a million dollars on Tuesday for defrauding vulnerable followers but stopped short of banning the group from operating in France.

Scientology's Celebrity Centre and its bookshop in Paris, the two branches of its French operations, were ordered to pay 600,000 euros (900,000 dollars) in fines for preying financially on its followers in the 1990s.

Alain Rosenberg, the French leader of a movement best known for its Hollywood followers Tom Cruise and John Travolta, was handed a two-year suspended jail sentence and fined 30,000 euros on the same charge.

Well, I expect that there will need to be a lot more "auditing" recommended to the sheep in order to pay for these fines.

Who, me, cynical?

Jim Downey

Hat tip to ML for the link.

OK, I never really had a 'moment of enlightenment', when it came to religion. I grew up in the Catholic church, but somewhere around the time of puberty I started thinking about what they told me to believe and it just didn't really make any sense. That grew into a questioning of all kinds of religious nonsense over time, rejecting all of it and trying to be rational and realistic about the world. For me, it was just a process, not an event.

So I must admit to being somewhat interested to see what it is that causes some people to just break away from their religion - what is the "final straw", so to speak. Like this one:

'Crash' Director Paul Haggis Ditches Scientology

Over the past few days, a remarkable letter was published in four parts at the blog of Marty Rathbun, a former high-level Scientology official who has left the church and now criticizes Scientology's leader, David Miscavige.

* * *

Yay! Religious fervor leads to five women being paraded through town, stripped, beaten:

Police say that people in Pattharghatia believe that certain women in their village are possessed by a "holy spirit" that can identify those who practise witchcraft.

"These women recently identified five women from the same village as being witches who practised witchcraft and brought miseries to the area," a police official said.

Soon, an unruly mob broke into their huts, dragged them out and started beating them up.

There's even video of it there on the BBC site. Worth watching, if you need to be reminded just how insane religion is.

Or, perhaps it isn't completely insane. Maybe there is another explanation:

Experts say superstitious beliefs are behind some of these attacks, but there are occasions when people - especially widows - are targeted for their land and property.

Who, me, cynical?

Jim Downey

Via MeFi.

So, the end of March I posted the poll about pot. In comments there, I said this:

But I listen to what people are saying, and how they are saying it, in different contexts. I look at the costs associated with our War on (Some) Drugs. And I just think that we're approaching something of a phase-change in thinking in this country. Yeah, it might be a form of 'decriminalization' which is so weak as to be de facto legalization (and I would interpret it as such), but I think we'll see something fairly radical happen within a couple of years.

This morning, the news:

Colorado sheriff: Runaway balloon saga was hoax

FORT COLLINS, Colo. – The parents who set off a worldwide drama by reporting their 6-year-old son was inside a flying saucer-like helium balloon hurtling over Colorado concocted the stunt to market themselves for a television show, a sheriff said Sunday.

* * *

Alderden said the parents Richard and Mayumi Heene "put on a very good show for us, and we bought it."

The sheriff said no charges had been filed yet, and the parents weren't under arrest. He said he expected to recommend charges of conspiracy, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, making a false report to authorities and attempting to influence a public servant.

Now who is the slightest bit surprised by this? I mean, seriously? That it completely captivated the media for most of Friday doesn't change the fact that the whole thing smelled from the very start.

Jim Downey