crime

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…

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…

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…

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,…

Christopher Hitchens lauds the American people’s patriotism and restraint after 9/11: “He [Hitchens] was, however, slightly disturbed by Gornick’s suggestion that the increase in patriotic displays over the last 18 months was nothing more than collective insecurity masquerading as civic engagement. “In my day, Vivian,” he said, “we called it ‘solidarity.’” Hitchens added–rather calmly, for a change–that none of the looting, pillaging, and persecution predicted after 9/11 occurred because people were acutely aware of the danger of turning into something completely antipodean to American values.” Coming from the UK where the Victorian’s famously created the idea that children should be ‘seen and not heard’, an American value that I particularly admire is the celebration of childhood. A large portion of American culture celebrates childhood. As such, the Washington snipers’ threat last week that no children were safe, produced an instinctive reaction of revulsion. So two people have been arrested over…

This is a classic – extract from a real court case in the UK, a man accused of stealing 40,000 coat hangars runs rings around the lawyer. … Counsel: Yes, m’lud. Now, Mr Chrysler, perhaps you will describe what reason you had to steal 40,000 coat hangers? Defendant: Is that a question? Counsel: Yes. Defendant: It doesn’t sound like one. It sounds like a proposition which doesn’t believe in itself. You know – “Perhaps I will describe the reason I had to steal 40,000 coat hangers… Perhaps I won’t… Perhaps I’ll sing a little song instead…” Judge: In fairness to Mr Lovelace, Mr Chrysler, I should remind you that barristers have an innate reluctance to frame a question as a question. Where you and I would say, “Where were you on Tuesday?”, they are more likely to say, “Perhaps you could now inform the court of your precise whereabouts on…