Dave is right on to keep banging on about the morbid obsession with the JonBenet story.

My take is that this is somewhat apallingly taking the place of a light relief story, like a dog on a skateboard clip.

Current geopolitical stories in the Middle East in particular are difficult to grapple with or find a clear cut answer to - so when a Paedophile is wheeled in, people find no moral ambiguity there, and just react on gut without having to think, venting their anger with a ‘burn the witch’ chorus.

To saturate the news with this makes Paedophile baiting a form of light entertainment distraction, although nobody will admit to the fact, which is very disturbing.

888 Holdings is a $1.5billion company built on spam. Last year, prior to their CSFB underwritten IPO I noticed that a large portion of the comment spam on my own site was from them and called them up in their gangster den in Gibraltar (largely for a laugh).

Their share price is holding up nicely, after all, blog spamming etc. is far too geeky and seems too trivial for people to listen to. I would argue that 888’s revenues, and certainly their initial competitive edge, are significantly dependent on spam. Recently one of their own industry organizations, the International Gaming Affiliate Marketing Initiative, IGAMI, has blacklisted them because of spamming.

If this had been a company employing the same techniques in traditional marketing, their IPO would have been pulled and some of its employees would likely have ended up in jail. But no investigative journalist has so far covered the case.

This is from a report by the IGAMI:

“iGAMI has been meticulously investigating and tracking unscrupulous marketing activities since September of 2005 conducted by and/or for the online casino - Casino on Net / 888; which is currently listed on the London Stock Exchange

Two very different headlines in the UK press illustrate a truism in news - people always gravitate towards the sensational. Overall, crime has dramatically fallen.

BBC: Violent crime figures rise by 12%

Independent: New figures reveal that crime has fallen 39 per cent over the past nine years - the biggest sustained fall since the 19th century

Excellent review of a myth busting biography of Dick Turpin the 18th Century highwayman who according to popular mythology was the epitome of the glamorous and likeable villain, an archetype that stretches from Robin Hood to Butch Cassidy to the fictitious Hannibal Lecter.

How far then is the squalid reality of Armin Miewes, the German cannibal, from the dapper and erudite Lecter. The real Turpin it seems was just as different, an unattractive, unchivalrous and brutal thief who raped and murdered.

“In April 1739 a pock-marked butcher was hanged at York for crimes against His Majesty’s Highways. Richard Turpin’s death was just about the only thing in his shortish life that conformed to anyone’s idea of how a highwayman was supposed to be.”

“There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”

21st-Century Slaves - National Geographic Magazine

via Zeldman

An old work colleague told me a story of how he used to work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as a student in the 1950’s. Periodically they would throw stuff in the garbage that they didn’t feel was worth restoring. A restorer who had worked there all his life used to salvage these pieces and restore them, at home, in his spare time. When the restorer fell ill and, unusually, didn’t show up for work, his boss decided to visit him and check if he was OK. On entering the restorer’s house he found an Aladdin’s Cave of salvaged artifacts. The restorer was fired and his pension withdrawn. The restored artifacts were removed from his house, placed in a pile and burned.

Curators are outraged by the loss of Iraqi antiquities, but unless they offer up some of their own collections they are hypocrites. Looting during war was the very process by which much of the contents of Western museums was originally obtained. There are two solutions to the loss of antiquities in Iraq: 1. document and try and get back objects as they come on the market; 2. fill the Iraqi museums with objects sitting in the US and UK. Not surprisingly I don’t hear anyone at institutions like the British Museum suggesting the latter.

Times Online:

“Unlike Greece, Iraq has, up till now, never made any demand for the return of what may be considered its patrimony and heritage. Most of the vast holdings, some 250,000 items in the BM [British Museum] alone, were acquired long ago.”

The only justification for keeping stolen goods such as the Elgin Marbles (the sculpted frieze of the Parthenon) is protection. For many artifacts, this is a myth. Many museums do not have the funding to catalogue, or protect, let alone display a large proportion of their collections. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London reputedly has the largest collection of Indian Art anywhere - including any museum in India, yet the true extent is not known as it is not completely catalogued. The last complete specimen of the extinct Dodo rotted in a cupboard at the Oxford University Mueum of Natural History and had to be burned in the 19th century. Only part of its beak and a foot were salvaged, retrieved from the flames by a thoughtful curator.

Will there be an international architectural competition for a new Mesopotamian museum in Baghdad, to be stocked from the existing collections of institutions like the British Museum? I doubt it.

State Can Make Inmate Sane Enough to Execute

“In 1986, the United States Supreme Court held in an opinion by Justice Thurgood Marshall, that the execution of the insane was barred by the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. ”

What were the Supreme Court thinking here?
Surely the issue with insanity is that it diminishes reponsibility, i.e. some lunatics aren’t responsible for their own actions, and therefore get treatment.

To say that not being of sound mind makes the process of execution cruel means that the sedatives that are used prior to lethal injections are potentially unconstitutional.

More books from the minds of the criminally insane:

Dancing With Cats

other related titles include “Cat Artists and their Work” (Shouldn’t that read ‘Con Artists’?) and “Test Your Cat’s Creative Intelligence: Eighteen Easy-To-Use Test Cards to Verify Your Cat’s Artistic Ability”

Thanks Nick

The raised awareness of the potential horrors of bio-terrorism may shortly lead to the vacination of 0.5M healthworkers in the US against Smallpox and measures to detect containers of bio weapons. Surely then, the most difficult bio weapons container to detect would be a human.

In other words, could a suicide terrorist infect his or herself with a disease and take employment somewhere that put themselves in contact with lots of people e.g. in a large restaurant, in order to carry out a biological terrorist attack?

The thought that created this fear, was the memory of the story of Typhoid Mary. - Didn’t thousands of people die when she deliberately infected people with Typhoid as she worked as a cook?

Looking into the true story of Typhoid Mary however reafirms the notion that one of the most worrying things about biological weapons is that they are more readily weapons of mass hysteria than destruction.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Medical (Typhoid Mary)

Glenn Reynold’s quotes a story from the UK’s Daily Telegraph.
Fewer guns: more crime

The ‘fewer guns’ is Glenn’s addition, and conclusion to explain the UK’s growing crime rate (incidentally the numbers of guns are also on the increase in the UK - but I don’t need to go into that).

From the same newspaper:

“Robberies in America are much more likely to be at gunpoint, which is one reason why the murder rate is much higher. The main reason for a much lower burglary rate in America is householders’ propensity to shoot intruders. They do so without fear of being dragged before courts and jailed for life.

If American tourists coming to Britain are frightened of being murdered, a rare crime in any case, it is much less likely to happen in London than in any American city… Murder is the most likely cause of death in young men, who are 50 times more likely to be killed in Washington than in London, mainly because guns are so easy to obtain.”

Remember Sweden and the Netherlands have higher crime rates than the US - but the US is a much more violent place to be.

Fewer guns: fewer murders, QED.