Sounds like folks are sweating. And that’s leading them to make dumb decisions. The question is, how far up the chain of command does the dumbth go?
By the way, the two prosecutors in question are the same ones who got thrown out of the grand jury hearing.
I wanted to toss up a link to Lawrence’s piece on “The Decade of Weirdness: The 1970s”.
I am a little surprised he didn’t mention Transcendental Meditation in his roundup, but the 1970s were a target rich environment; if you brought up all the weird stuff from that decade, you’d probably have a novel-length post.
The story starts with Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation.
Specifically, it starts with Stallman’s “info packet” for people who want to book him to speak. The date on that post is October 20th, but it seems to have been widely linked in the past week; I’m not sure why this is suddenly getting so much attention.
I’ve avoided commenting directly on it because a) I haven’t read it all and don’t have time, and II) I’m not sure what I could say about it. There are many things (based on a quick skim) that strike me as reasonable (don’t change dates and times and expect Stallman to show up, check with him first). Kottke mentions the parrot issue: I am willing to bet that the “DON’T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me.” line is in there precisely because people have done exactly that.
I think there are things in that document that can be legitimately questioned: Gruber notes his stance on cell phones as one example. But much of the criticism has gotten personal and ugly. Dave Winer and Reginald Braithwaite have both done very good blog entries about this.
There is a podcast that I’ve been listening to regularly, which features a prominent blogger. (Not Cory Doctrow, Mike.) I don’t want to name the podcast or the podcast network here for reasons I’ll get into shortly, but there are probably enough clues embedded in this piece for folks to figure out which one I’m talking about.
During the most recent episode of the podcast, the Stallman document came up as a topic. That’s fine; it is a legitimate topic of discussion for this podcast. But one of the podcast hosts went on to assert that he’d received email from people (as in, more than one person) who’d hosted Stallman in their homes, and “had to burn the sheets” afterwards. Indeed, the title of that podcast episode is a reference to the “burn the sheets” emails.
I give money to the FSF, but I have my share of issues with them and Stallman. I thought Stallman’s comments on the death of Steve Jobs were out of line, and I seriously considered resigning my FSF membership because of them. I disagree strongly with Stallman’s support for Communist governments. I don’t much care for FSF’s recent Apple bashing. I think there’s room in the world for both open and closed source software, and I think FSF’s dogmatic approach hurts the cause. I don’t believe FSF thinks enough about making it easy for the 80 year grandmother to keep in touch with her grandchildren; I think in many ways FSF would be happy with computers as a priesthood, not as a commodity.
But I believe that there is work FSF does that is worth my monetary support. And I believe that the issues I disagree with FSF and Stallman on are issues that we can discuss and debate like human beings. We don’t need to be schoolyard bullies sitting in the dark tittering over anonymous accusations that people have to burn their sheets after a guest leaves. That’s wrong.
One of the reasons I don’t want to name the people or the podcast is that both of these podcasters have young sons. I’ve made it an ethical principle of mine that I won’t drag people’s families into things, and I don’t want to do that here.
But I would like to ask both of these men, if they’re reading this: is this how you want your son to treat his classmates? Is this how you would like your son to be treated by his classmates?
Is this how decent human beings act?
$39 million dollars in debt, the city can’t pay the LA County Sheriff’s Office for police services, and they fired their third city manager in five years a few months ago.
How bad does a police department have to get before that’s the only thing left to do?
Story #1:
…
Story #2:
Edited to add: Knew I left something out. Hattips: David Codrea for the NOPD link, TJIC’s retweet of Declan McCullagh for the NYPD link.
Dear New Orleans Saints:
I understand wanting to celebrate Halloween, but disguising yourselves as the 2008 Detroit Lions was not a great plan.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Miami
Indianapolis
It seems that someone belonging to the Anonymous group has allegedly been kidnapped in Veracruz.
Anonymous, or at least someone claiming to be part of the group, thinks the Zetas drug cartel is responsible for the kidnapping.
So they’ve posted a video…
…
I would say “pass the popcorn”, but this is the sort of thing you want to watch from a very safe distance. The dark side of the moon seems just about safe enough…
Or, what do you do when you find a cargo container at your port that’s emitting large amounts of ionizing radiation?
This is the kind of article I think Wired does well (see also the story of the Cougar Ace, or Neal Stephenson’s transatlantic cable story.)
Ten of the officers involved are “officials” in the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (aka the NYPD police union).
…
(Hattip: TJIC on the Twitter. Though oddly enough, NYT links on his Twitter feed always come up with the NYT asking me to subscribe. That doesn’t happen with freeNYTimes or other Twitter feeds.)
Robert “Ratso” Rizzo sold his house in Huntington Beach.
It went for $939,000. Ratso paid $1.13 million in 2007. (Four bedrooms, three baths, two stories, 3,250 square feet, “…a cherry-wood walk-in closet in the master bedroom, built-in cherry-wood bookshelves in the living room and a formal dining room and travertine, granite and marble surfaces throughout. There are crystal chandeliers in the bathroom.”)
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos has been asked to testify in an ongoing DWI trial.
And if you’re not reading “Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center” already, why not?
Here’s the longer HouChron story I expected about yesterday’s decision to bar the Harris County DA from participation in a grand jury investigation that may implicate the DA’s office.
I also wanted to note another story out of Houston: Roderick Fountain was convicted of murdering his 3-year old son. What makes this story noteworthy (in my opinion) is that he was convicted even though nobody has ever found the son’s body, and mostly based on the word of jailhouse informants.
Murder convictions without a body are not unheard of, but they are certainly rare and unusual enough to be noteworthy. (As a side note, the phrase “corpus delicti” does not mean the body of the victim, but the “body of the crime”; that is, all the evidence that indicates a crime has been committed. It is entirely possible to have a “corpus delicti” without a murder.)
It does seem, though, that the murder conviction without a body is becoming more common. This is the second case I can think of in Texas in the past year or so. (Here’s a link to some press coverage of the other case.) Does this point to improvements in forensic science? Or is there something more sinister going on?
Short piece in the HouChron: I expect a longer one in tomorrow’s paper.
The article goes on to quote the judge’s order as stating “that grand jurors are investigating ‘possible criminal conduct by members of the Harris County district attorney’s office.'”
…
Latest update from the runaway Harris County grand jury:
They’re asking for an extension of their term, and for the district judge who set up the grand jury to appoint a special prosecutor.
They’ve also issued subpoenas to at least some of the assistant DAs in the office. Wonderful thing, a subpoena.
More from the Honorable Murray Newman.
Edited to add: And more from The Hon. Mr. Newman. I do loves me a good Nixon reference.