The changes will hit hardest at employees hired before 2009 who could plan on receiving pension payments based on their income and years of service. Each of those employees could see scores — or hundreds — of thousands of dollars less over the course of a retirement. More recent hires do not have traditional pension plans.
The Post’s pension fund is running a surplus. Jeff Bezos, the new owner, is cutting benefits so he can raid it. I don’t know why anyone should be surprised. Just take a look at how he treats his Amazon workers. Or better still, listen to the workers on the picket lines in Europe, where American billionaires haven’t yet managed to succeed in strangling people’s sense of self worth and pride in their jobs…
No you’re not. You’re Jeff Bezos’ lunch and your future is his dessert. Bezos is classic predatory rich, pure and simple. And naturally he calls himself a libertarian, which is how the rich assure themselves that with great power comes no responsibility whatsoever. Greed is good. Selfishness is a Virtue. Eat or be eaten.
So here’s another example of the rich raiding the pension funds of working people, perhaps a more blatant one than most but then hey, Bezos is a libertarian after all and they have a moral code that says it isn’t you stealing from your employees it’s the invisible hand of the marketplace and if they would only stop being so lazy they could be billionaires too. All those city employee union pensions that have gone bankrupt over the years we’ve been told, made unrealistic promises they couldn’t keep and all those elderly workers will just have to learn to like eating cat food. But look closer and what you see are a lot of tax breaks to rich people and businesses that cities and counties could not afford, and so pension plans were raided to make up the difference, until there wasn’t any left to raid. For decades now a lot of worker retirement money has essentially gone straight into the pockets of the rich who couldn’t need it less but for whom more is never enough.
Which brings us back to The Washington Post, which has been tilting more and more to the republican party and the right ever since Reagan. There is some degree of poetic karma going on here I can’t help but appreciate with delight. You get into bed with vampires, don’t complain when you wake up one day with holes in your neck.
Florida can prosecute George Zimmerman even if his wife doesn’t press charge
Sure could. Just like the last time they prosecuted him. I’ll bet he’s quaking in his boots at the prospect. They’re birds of a feather with that resentful angry thug and you don’t seriously want your soul brother going to jail just because he waved a gun at his spouse, or killed an unarmed kid who’d just gone out for some snacks.
This site uses, among other things, a product called “Sitemeter” to track visits. The other day I noticed when looking at my visit reports on the Sitemeter web page, I kept getting requests to log in from a funny looking popup window, similar to this one that Towleroad was seeing…
The value of having my eternally suspicious nature: I saw this prompt come up several times on the main Sitemeter site after I was already logged in and figured something nefarious was going on. There was.
Lesson is: never enter your login credentials into popup windows that suddenly seem to appear out of nowhere and when you didn’t expect to have to log in.
Since no one has to log in to view my web site I assume everyone who visits would know this isn’t for real if they saw it. But I’m telling you now in case you ever wonder: you don’t need to create accounts or log in here. If you ever see a login screen come up while you’re reading my blog or looking at anything else around here, it isn’t real and for goodness sakes don’t give it any information.
The other day, while Judy Shepard, the mother of murdered gay college student Matthew Shepard, was giving a talk about hate crimes, a man rose from the audience to call her a liar…
About 45 minutes in, a man rose and asked a question that amounted to repeating a current popular right-wing lie – Matthew Shepard was killed because his killers were high and wanted to rob him; his sexual orientation was irrelevant. Mrs. Shepard refuted the claim – pointing out that in one of the killer’s confessions, he admitted they acted because of Shepard’s sexual orientation; the other, in his statement in court, admitted the same. Neither men tested positive for drugs or alcohol after Matthew’s murder. The interlocutor asserted at this point that she was lying and doing a disservice to history by lying about the reasons for her son’s murder. To my eyes, Judy Shepard appeared visibly upset by the man’s accusations. He claimed to be relying on a report from 20/20…
Ah yes…the 20/20 whitewash. That gift to America’s bigots that keeps on giving…
“The Matthew Shepard Story: Secrets of a Murder,” which aired Nov. 26, promised shocking new information about the case. But it contained mostly speculation, scandalous details, unreliable new witnesses and revised confessions. The premise of the report by Elizabeth Vargas was that McKinney attacked Shepard during a robbery under the influence of crystal meth and that the murder had nothing to do with the victim’s sexuality…
Vargas went out of her way to show that McKinney and Henderson did not hate gay people. She questioned previous reports that characterized them as “rednecks” (her word), and tells viewers that in fact they had steady jobs and girlfriends. Vargas reported that Shepard’s friends promoted the hate crime theory in the days following the attack…
Emphasis mine. I’ve written about the hacktacular 20/20 piece before. But it is best summed up by Rob DeBree, the lead investigator on the case…
In his confession to DeBree, McKinney had denied using meth the day of the murder, and while McKinney had been arrested too late for the police to confirm this through blood testing, DeBree felt certain that McKinney had for once told the truth. Obviously it’s unsurprising that the lead investigator would disagree with the defense, but DeBree had some compelling reasons on his side. "There’s no way" it was a meth crime, DeBree argued, still passionate about the issue when I met him nearly six months after the trial had ended. No evidence of recent drug use was "found in a search of their residences. There was no evidence in the truck. From everything we were able to investigate, the last time they would have done meth would have been two to three weeks previous to that night. What the defense attempted to do was a bluff." Meth crimes do have hallmarks. One, "Overkill," certainly seems to describe what happened to Matt, but no others so seamlessly fit that night: "A meth crime is going to be a quick attack," DeBree pointed out. "It’s going to be a manic attack… No. This was a sustained event. And somebody that’s high on meth is not going to be targeting and zeroing in on a head, and deliver the blows that they did in the way that they did," with such precision. "Consistently it was targeted, and even if you’re drunk, you’re going to have a tough time trying to keep your target. No. There’s absolutely no involvement with drugs."
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 133 – 134
A week after we met in his office, Rob [DeBree] took me to the crime scene. As we drove out to the fence in a Sheriff’s Office SUV, he stopped in mid-sentence by the Wal-Mart" "Here’s where it began," he told me and gestured in imitation of McKinney striking Matt. We restart the conversation, but he’s made his point: the drive to the fence seems unimaginably long. It’s not far – no more then a mile or two – but the rutted dirt road they turned on to makes for extremely slow driving. When I say something to Rob about how long it takes, he agrees. "They were coming here to finish him." On that dirt track, it is hard to believe the defense attorney’s claims that the two killers had been drunk or high on drugs or crazed by homosexual panic. It just takes too long to get to the fence…
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 155 – 156
"I have never worked a homicide with this much evidence," Rob says, all these months later a bit of wonder still bleeding into his voice. "It was like a case of God giving it to us. I’m not kidding. The whole way it broke down from the beginning to the end – it was like, here it is, boys: work it. It’s almost like it pissed off God, and he says, oh well, come here, let me walk you over here, walk you over there, pick up all this, pick up all that. It was just a gift.
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 157
I drove that same path when I was in Laramie, to the extent I was able to before coming upon all the "private property signs", and that same impression swept over me like a cold clammy sickness. You simply cannot drive the path that Shepard’s killers took and come away from it believing that it was simply a robbery gone bad. Unless of course, that is what you need to believe.
Considering the sorry state of American journalism, to say the 20/20 piece represented a new low is almost complementary. But historically it is unremarkable. Since the 1950s, mainstream American journalism has always excused anti-gay violence, usually by blaming the victim. ABC didn’t so much sink to a new low, as pound some well worn territory. There is no violent anti-gay hatred in America, only homosexuals who go too far and suffer the consequences. That is what the news media in this country believes, if not on the beat, then without a doubt in the boardroom.
But now the creators of The Laramie Project have returned to their work to write an epilogue. And in the process they’ve interviewed one of the killers, Aaron McKinney…
"As far as Matt is concerned, I don’t have any remorse," McKinney is quoted as saying in the script, which was provided to The Associated Press by the production company.
McKinney, according to the script, reiterates his claim that the 1998 killing in Laramie, Wyo., started out as a robbery, but makes clear that his antipathy toward gays played a role.
"The night I did it, I did have hatred for homosexuals," McKinney is quoted as saying. He goes on, according to the script, to say that he still dislikes gays and that his perceptions about Shepard’s sex life bolstered his belief that the killing was justified.
Emphasis mine. But wait…there’s More…
According to the script, McKinney expresses empathy with Shepard’s parents over the loss of their son, though he adds about Judy Shepard: "Still, she never shuts up about it, and it’s been like 10 years."
Gaze for a moment, if you have the nerve, into that utterly empty heart and then contemplate this fact: mainstream American news publishers, editors, owners, that rarefied media club of old boy straight male testosterone, still believes, 40 years after Stonewall, decades into the gay community’s struggle for equality here in America, that gay kids like Matthew Shepard are less a normal part of American society then this cold blooded killer is. The killer they can understand. They don’t approve of what he did that night, but they understand him. The gay kid they simply cannot. He was flaunting it. He was coming on to someone who was disgusted by homosexuals. He should have known better. He brought it on himself. In the end, when all the other excuses have withered away…it was a robbery gone bad…it was drugs…that knee-jerk understanding of McKinney’s disgust at homosexuals, that if Shepard hadn’t come onto him he would still be alive today, will remain, unmovable.
The media establishment does not regard homophobia as a problem because in the boardrooms, among the CEOs, media owners and big dollar producers, disgust is a normal reaction to homosexuality. See it here, in this article on 10 Sexual Controversies That Changed TV…
With everything from the new Melrose Place to trashy Twilight knockoffs, the new Fall TV season promises steamy viewing. Hemlines may rise and morals may fall, but TV writers would do well to remember that presenting sex on network TV has always been a tricky business. Though we’ve come a long way since Ricky Ricardo knocked up Lucy, only to discover that the network censors wouldn’t let him say the word “pregnant,” it’s amazing how sensitive the suits still are to sex. Here are ten TV shows in which the sex lives of their characters dramatically changed the entire series, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
Yet in one instance after another that the authors cite, it’s homosexuality that causes an uproar, not so much among the viewing audience, as in the boardroom. Are you old enough to remember watching all of these TV shows and wonder why the gay characters never had lovers and somehow always ended up dating women…?
In the end, the network had it both ways, collecting their big ratings when everyone tuned in at the start to see what the fuss was about, then ordering that the creators downplay the sexy stuff and reshape the central storyline into a murder mystery. The worst damage was done to Crystal’s character, who attempted suicide in the hospital after being dumped by his boyfriend on the eve of his gender-reassignment surgery. He survived, but while the character continued to identify as gay, he never hooked up with another guy in the course of the series; instead, he had a quick fling with a woman, got her pregnant, and spent much of his remaining time on the show fighting for custody of his daughter…
…
…religious groups, rather than being impressed with Sidney’s anti-abortion bona fides, made such a stink about the idea of a gay man on TV that NBC delayed airing the pilot for a year, then insisted that Sidney be gelded. Apparently Sidney was so crushed by the death of his one male lover (whose photo on the mantelpiece watched over the action like a baleful ghost) that he could never date again. When, towards the end of the second season, he dipped one toe back into the dating pool, it was with a woman, as if he’d been on the shelf so long that he’d forgotten his orientation…
…
…Early ratings were shaky, and the CBS brass decided that it must have something to do with viewers being put off by threatening lesbian vibes. Though both characters were supposed to be straight, it was felt that when the two dark-haired, hard-edged actresses were seen in close proximity to each other, they looked like, in the words of an unidentified CBS executive, “a couple of dykes.” It was decided that the best way to solve the problem was to fire Foster and replace herwith the blonde Sharon Gless, who, according to some mysterious executive calculation, was judged more Malibu Beach than Isle of Lesbos…
…
…Coming at the end of an episode, the kiss was tantamount to a cliffhanger; it all but guaranteed that slack-jawed viewers would tune in next week. Those who did got to see Donohoe deliver a back-pedaling speech about how she liked both men and women equally and would be happy just to be friends if that’s what her new friend preferred, while Greene “considered” exploring a new side of herself before deciding that, nope, she wouldn’t be going there…
…
The show had a resident good-looking gay guy — Matt Fielding, played by Doug Savant — who, in contrast to the juicy goings-on by the hormonally deranged straight people all around him, seemed almost pathologically stable. When Matt was permitted to enjoy an on-screen kiss with a man, the network edited it out of the program before allowing the episode to be broadcast, though they had no problem with having him gay-bashed on camera, twice…
…
…As the show neared its seventh season, there was a persistent and widespread rumor that the youngest Connor child, D.J., was going to announce he was gay. It never happened — the big surprise of the season premiere turned out to be that Roseanne herself was pregnant again…
In 2005 the Hollywood establishment fled from Brokeback Mountain into the comforting arms of Crash, a self-serving story about racism in Los Angles, so John Wayne wouldn’t be rolling in his grave. Next year saw a remake of 3:10 to Yuma, with an added psychotic homosexual killer subtext that wasn’t in the original. Of course the psychotic homosexual killer is himself killed in the film’s climax, to avenge the heterosexuality of the hero. So the establishment returns again and again to its comfort food: Homophobia isn’t a problem, homosexuality is. Disgust toward homosexuals is both natural and normal. It is only when homosexuals flaunt it that things get violent and that is simply to be expected.
20/20 didn’t do a story about why Matthew Shepard was murdered, it did a story about why anti-gay hate coudn;t possibly have had anything to do with it. And if you think this latest confession from his killer changes that you aren’t paying attention. McKinney’s disgust and acid loathing are understood and shared throughout the media establishment, and so they see nothing out of the ordinary. It merely confirms for them that essential truth that it was Shepard’s being open about his homosexuality that got him killed. If you are a homosexual and you are open about it then you bring it on yourself. You should have known better. In the old media boardrooms that’s not considered hate, but merely a fact of life.
NEW YORK – Federal marshals seized disgraced financier Bernard Madoff’s $7 million Manhattan penthouse on Thursday and forced his wife to move out and leave her possessions behind, including a fur coat she had asked to take with her, an official told The Associated Press.
…U.S. Marshal Joseph Guccione said the marshals arrived at the property at noon with a court order permitting them to take custody of the apartment and to make anyone living there move out. Guccione said Madoff’s wife Ruth had been advised in advance of the marshals’ plans and was leaving the residence and surrendering all personal property.
"She will be leaving," he said at midday. "Restitution for the victims is the government’s top priority."
There are the people he took money from. But I wonder if he ever thought about what he was doing to his wife too…
Posted by CmdrTaco from the are-you-really-surprised dept.
David Gerard writes "Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 claims support for ODF 1.1. With hard work and careful thinking, they have successfully achieved technical compliance but zero interoperability! MSO 2007sp2 won’t read ODF 1.1 from any other existing application, and its ODF is only readable by the CleverAge plugin. The post goes into detail as to how it manages this so thoroughly."
ODF: The open standard file format that only Microsoft applications can use…
[Update…] In comments Jonathan Allen points out that ODF is the Oasis Group open document standard, not Microsoft’s, which is OpenXML. I was confusing the two, and the point of the Slashdot post. This isn’t about Microsoft’s own proprietary open standard. It’s about them applying their usual Embrace, Extend and Extinguish tactic on ODF. Here’s some of the Slashdot commentary…
If it achieves 100% technical compliance with the standard, but zero interoperability, this is certainly a problem with the standard itself.
And the problem in this case is the missing formula specification. It’s not in ODF 1.1, and ODF 1.2 is still a draft. While this is Microsoft and we all "know" that this was intentional, ODF is what should be fixed first. We were all bashing OOXML specifications, but ODF 1.1’s far from perfect, as we can see.
…
That is, curiously, not quite true. ODF 1.1 doesn’t fully specify formulas, but it does specify the general syntax that should be used for them, and Microsoft seems to have ignored this. (Also, in practice, the major spreadsheets are quite similar in terms of what expressions they accept in formulas. This makes it relatively simple to convert between MS Office formulas and OpenOffice.org ones, which are what most ODF-based apps use.)
…
The irony here is that the formula language used by OpenOffice (and by other vendors) is based on that used by Excel, which itself was not fully documented when OpenOffice implemented it. So an argument, by Microsoft, not to support that language because it is not documented is rather hypocritical. Excel supports 1-2-3 files and formulas and legacy Excel versions (back to Excel 4.0) neither of which have standardized formula languages. Why are these supported? Also, the fact that the Microsoft/CleverAge add-in correctly reads and writes the legacy ODF formula syntax shows not only that it can be done, but that Microsoft already has the code to do it. The inexplicably thing is why that code never made it into Excel 2007 SP2.
Just look at this. They’re in complete technical compliance, and yet if you read an ODF file format spreadsheet into Excel and then write it back out again it’s now locked utterly into MS Office’s specific implementation of ODF. You can no longer read it back into any other spreadsheet program that supports ODF, because it can’t read Microsoft’s ODF formula implementation.
They just never stop, do they? I started out as a Microsoft platforms developer. Now I work on software that runs on many different platforms and swear to God I will never again be a Microsoft only developer. I will not help them betray the promise of the personal computer. I will not help them put handcuffs on the whole goddamned world just because that’s their business model.
The Consumerist has a post up warning about a new rash of ATM Card Skimming devices being installed into the wild. Apparently the devices are getting smaller and easier for just about anyone to use. Placed over the real ATM card reader slot, they are often used in conjunction with fake mirrors or brochure holders that have hidden cameras in them to record your fingers entering your PIN number…
Pay a little extra attention next time you use an ATM. That would also include gasoline pump card readers too I imagine. Photos of what the devices look like on The Consumerist website.
Atlas Shrugged…Then Charged It To Someone Else…(continued)
Commentary from John Stamos on This Post regarding the new hippies. Why yes John, I have read Doctor Seuss. Let it be said that Seuss could get his point across in a few pages of a children’s book. Rand on the other hand… Well to paraphrase Mark Twain’s comment on the music of Richard Wagner, Ayn Rand’s novels are better then they read.
Approximately 2% of the American households make more than $250,000 a year and (you may find this hard to believe) a very high percentage of these high-earning go-getting producers spend their days commenting over at Michelle Malkin’s place… when they’re not busy flying their Lear jets up to Nova Scotia to see the total eclipse of the sun.
Scenes from the Go Go Gaults:
I’ve resigned from my job, and I’m selling my rental properties. After this, I’m moving to a rural little town and simplifying everything. I’ll be reading so many more books soon, if that sort of thing is still allowed.
What motivation do we have to make more money? Only to have it confiscated by the Feds. Bad enough CA just increased a variety of taxes, including the income tax. That’s why I’m looking to move to NV. I was just there on Saturday. Won’t be too long now.
I decided I will endeavor to take more business trips and continuing education classes at exotic places and try to reduce taxable income.
Yep, it’s happening. Several friends are shutting down to sustaining levels. Partly due to housing and the rest due to the tax hikes.
I shut down my online businesses in early November, I don’t remember why. I’m now a net user of Obama Cheese. I may even apply for food stamps.
Small businesses will lay off employees, and I hope the first to go are the ones that voted for bho. They wanted ‘hope and change’, well you got it. These bho voters have NO idea how much more taxes they are going to be paying. I just hope those bho voters have their IRA, 401k and stocks cratered as much as those who DID not vote for bho. Such(sic) it up kids!
I’m starting my victory garden this spring. My sister is expanding hers and in exchange for my helping with that I will be able to claim some of the produce. I’ve been couponing for over a year now and have a nice stockpile of food for when things get really, really bad. I can’t believe that my country is on this path. From Ronald Reagan to this Marxist in the span of one generation. Unbelievable.
I have a friend who is planning to not work overtime this year to stay well below the dangerous benchmark that is 250k. His point was that he might as well take some time off and enjoy and relax rather than work and give every dollar above 250 away. I don’t blame his reasoning and the loss is, he spends his money.
You have to wonder if this guy ever paid taxes because here be basically admits he doesn’t understand how the income tax works:
ABC News reports on "upper-income taxpayers" who are trying to reduce their income so they avoid proposed tax increases on those earning more than $250,000.
According to ABC, one attorney "plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law." According to the attorney: "We are going to try to figure out how to make our income $249,999.00." ABC also quotes a dentist who is trying to figure out how to reduce her income.
This is stunningly wrong.
The ABC article is based on the premise that an individual’s entire income is taxed at the same rate. If that were the case, it would be possible for a family earning $249,999 to have a higher after-tax income than a family earning $255,000, because the family earning $249,999 would pay a lower tax rate.
But that isn’t actually how income tax works.
In reality, a family earning $255,000 will pay the higher tax rate only on its last $5,001 in income; the first $249,999 will continue to be taxed at the old rate. So intentionally lowering your income from $255,000 to $249,999 is counter-productive; it will result in a lower after-tax income.
The people ABC quoted don’t seem to understand that. Worse, ABC doesn’t seem to understand it, either.
Anyway…back to Atlas Slouched, and TBogg’s personal favorite:
We also have “gone Galt”. Hubby decided to retire and start Medicare instead of our original plan of waiting two years.
Well that’s showing those looters a thing or two. Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan has a note from a reader that explains it all for the dense of skull…
Downsized out of my career in my mid-50’s, after 20+ years of faithful service to a 150-year-old company that declared bankruptcy some months after my termination. I got a decent severance – in the latest wave of layoffs, there were people with more years of service who got zilch. I have found some freelance daily-hire work here and there – last year my after-tax/after-insurance net was about 25% of what I had been making. Still looking, still hoping.
The 401(k) that I’d faithfully funded since the mid-80s lost a third of its value in just a few weeks. I had bad vibes about the bankster/gangsters over a year ago (CDO’s and swaps? I’d read about them on internet message boards back in 2006, but gave more credence to my adviser since he’s an expert and the internet is notoriously unreliable. Fat lot of good that did.) I know he wasn’t trying to steer me in a wrong direction – he feels as badly as I do. Thank God BushCo never got their filthy mitts on Social Security.
I’ve always conducted my financial affairs in a conservative fashion, so I have a (dwindling) cushion to rely on and some equity in a home with a (for now) manageable mortgage. I pay for my own health insurance (a lousy policy with high premiums and deductibles – please, dear God – help me stay healthy.) The premiums are about four times more than I spend for food, all of which is prepared at home by me. I haven’t been more than 15 miles from home in more than a year. When cabin fever sets in, I go for a walk.
I’m not complaining, really I’m not. I am able to stay warm and dry and fed, and current on my bills. I am fortunate – I know I am blessed. I don’t take it for granted and don’t consider myself more worthy than others who find themselves in far more dire straits. I could very well be in their shoes before this is all over.
This is exactly what woke me up from my libertarian delusion back during the big Reagan recession: seeing so many decent, hard working people who did everything the way they were supposed to get clobbered because the gods of finance and industry turned out to be fallible human beings too, and not Greek gods holding the world on their shoulders. I was working as an architectural model maker back then, and watched appalled as developers and their financiers ran themselves off a cliff, knowing full well they were heading for the edge, knowing full well they were going to fall off eventually, knowing full well it would be a financial disaster, but utterly unable to stop themselves from chasing those last few dollars off that cliff. When it was over, nearly all my clients, the businesses I sold my services to as a model maker, had gone belly up and I was mowing lawns to make ends meet. But at least I didn’t have any mouths to feed.
When the brakes came off the savings and loans, the crooks moved right in and without oversight, there was nothing to stop them. And even had they all been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, the damage was done. There’s the problem. I saw families who had once owned nice homes, whose parents worked hard, made good money, saved responsibly and lived within their means, living in tents in campgrounds because everything they had vanished in the savings and loan scandals. What good would prosecuting the savings and loan crooks have done for them? Their money is gone.
That was the end of my libertarian years. I saw that greed is not good after all. I saw that wealth is not an indicator of either moral, or common sense. I saw that to err is human, but to really screw things up you need a lot of money. I saw that selfishness is not a virtue. Pride is a virtue. Ambition is a virtue. Selfishness is a cancer on your soul. It turns your neighbors in this life, and all their hopes, all their dreams, everything they ever made for themselves, their families, their kids, into play money.
Garance Franke-Ruta, to her credit, has a somewhat novel take on What We Should Learn from the tragedy – namely, that we need to take domestic violence more seriously:
Because the first victim was a woman, and possible had a romantic connection to the killer, the police did not see her murder as a threat to the community. Now the police are pretty plainly telling the public that they failed to warn the campus there was a killer on the loose because they failed to understand that men who kill their partners are also threats to society.
Yes. Yes! But Sullivan doesn’t get it…
So while maybe there’s a case to be made for shutting down a campus or a neighborhood in any situation in which a killer is on the loose, it’s hard to see why intimate homicides in particular should be taken as warning signs that a killing spree is about to begin, and easy to see why police investigating a crime of passion would take the risk of random violence less seriously than when, say, there’s a murderous convict on the loose.
But it wasn’t random. There’s a sense you get, merely from the phraseology "crime of passion" that it was a spur of the moment unthinking, instant of madness kind of thing and mostly domestic violence isn’t that at all. It certainly wasn’t in this case. He chained the doors shut so the kids inside couldn’t get out. He brought along two guns and plenty of ammo. It was cold and brutal and calculating.
There are two dark and ugly shadows staring us back in the face after all this, and one of them is domestic violence and the other is the grotesque assumption that anyone who would violently attack their lover probably isn’t a threat to anyone else because…well…it was personal. But that willingness to attack the intimate other is Just the sort of thing you need to be watching out for in people. I keep harping on this quote from the author Mary Renault, but it keeps being a relevant insight into human behavior…
Politics like sex is only a by-product of what the essential person is. If you are mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your sex life and it will come out in your politics when what really matters is that you are the sort of person who won’t behave like that.
There’s almost nothing that shows us what the inner person is like, then how they treat their lover. Yes, just about no one else on earth can hurt you quite as painfully, or as deeply, as the one you love (unless it’s your own parents). Yes the emotional wounds a lover can inflect, particularly during a breakup, can be devastating. Ask me how I know. But that’s because no one else’s feelings matter to you as much. If someone you love isn’t safe around you then who the fuck else can be? Nobody, that’s who.
DUNDALK, Maryland — A dramatic hostage escape from a home near Baltimore, Maryland late Tuesday gave police information they needed to storm the house and safely rescue a remaining hostage. The alleged hostage taker, Joseph Palczynski, was shot dead in the raid, police said.
The standoff had dragged on for four days, and it was the time factor that police credited with ending the siege.
"Patience," said Baltimore County Police Chief Terrence Sheridan. "It was waiting for the opportunity to save three lives" that led to the end of the standoff.
That opportunity came when hostage Lynn Whitehead escaped through a window in the home where she, her boyfriend Andrew McCord and his 12-year-old son Bradley had been held since Friday. McCord then followed Whitehead out the window and both ran to safety.
"We were having a briefing when we were informed she had come out of the window," Sheridan said. He said that Whitehead and McCord told police that Palczynski was sleeping on a living room couch and that the boy was asleep on the kitchen floor.
"At this point, SWAT team officers made what’s known as a tactical entry," Baltimore County Police spokesman Bill Toohey said. "They broke through a window, encountered Mr. Palczynski in the family room and shot him. They then rescued the boy."
"Joseph Palczynski is dead," Toohey said. "He was shot by Baltimore County tactical officers shortly after 11 tonight and died at 11:05 on the scene." None of the police was wounded.
Police rescued the boy, who was found asleep on the kitchen floor. None of the hostages was hurt, Sheridan said.
Palczynski was accused by police of killing four people in the Baltimore area two weeks ago while he allegedly tried to kidnap his former girlfriend, Tracy Whitehead, who later escaped.
Whitehead, who is the daughter of Lynn Whitehead, had broken up with Palczynski, recently, police said. The ex-girlfriend escaped from Palczynski at a motel, police said. Family members said she had been beaten with the butt of a rifle and sustained a broken nose, black eye and multiple bruises.
You can read more about Palczynski’s violent history here. He killed the couple his ex was living with, Gloria Jean Shenk and her husband, George Shenk. He killed David M. Meyers who tried to intervene while Palczynski was dragging his ex to his car. He killed Jennifer McDonel and wounded her child during an attempted carjacking because he needed vehicle to run from the cops in. For two weeks he terrorized the Baltimore area. He took some relatives of his ex, including a 12 year old boy, hostage and for four days randomly shoot up the neighborhood they lived in, demanding that police let him talk to his ex (they didn’t, knowing full well that as soon as he got her on the phone he’d start shooting his hostages). A swat team finally brought him down after one of his hostages managed to sneak a tranquilizer into his drink and he fell asleep and the adults were able to get away. Nobody later questioned the hail of bullets he was awakened to, because for certain he would have killed the boy the instant he knew the game was up, had he the slightest shred of a chance.
To assume that nobody else but the ‘Ex’ is in danger from a violent lover is stunningly stupid on its face. If they’re dangerous to their lover, then nobody else around them is safe either.
[Update…] Now we’re hearing that girl he killed first in the dorms wasn’t romantically involved with him at all. So this apparently wasn’t all brought on by a violent lover after all. Cho seems to have simply just been mad. As in…crazy.
On the January 15 edition of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly said of Shawn Hornbeck — who was abducted at the age of 11, held for four years, and recently found in Missouri — that "there was an element here that this kid liked about this circumstances" and that he "do[esn’t] buy" "the Stockholm syndrome thing." O’Reilly also said: "The situation here for this kid looks to me to be a lot more fun than what he had under his old parents. He didn’t have to go to school. He could run around and do whatever he wanted." When fellow Fox News host Greta Van Susteren pointed out that "[s]ome kids like school," O’Reilly replied: "Well, I don’t believe this kid did."
The following day, during his "Talking Points Memo" segment, O’Reilly responded to viewer mail criticizing his comments about Hornbeck. O’Reilly concluded: "I hope he did not make a conscious decision to accept his captivity because" his kidnapper "made things easy for him. No school, play all day long."
But then…it makes everything about right wingers make sense when you think about it. Digby puts the pieces together here…
I think this is one of the defining aspects of conservatism. They have a stunted sense of empathy and an undeveloped ability to understand abstract concepts. It makes them unable to fashion any solutions to common problems, which they blame on "poor character" because they cannot visualize themselves ever being in a vulnerable or unlucky position through no fault of their own. Until it happens to them or someone they know, in which case they never question their philosophy as a whole but merely apply a special exemption to whichever particular problem or risk to which they have personally been exposed.
Empathy is not some altruistic concept. In fact, it’s quite selfish and designed to make humans better able to survive. It allows a person to walk in another’s shoes so that they might have an inkling of what it would be like if that person’s experience became their own. It is necessary to understand how to head off problems that you might someday have to confront and it is certainly necessary to fully understand other necessary concepts such as justice, fairness and love.
I’m not drawing any conclusions from this [Warning…PDF file], but it’s interesting. It seems that when they test psychopaths, they find that they can’t understand abstract concepts. I’m just saying.
That PDF from Crime Times Digby links to is really interesting…
Psychopaths are callous, glib, superficial, and impulsive; lack empathy for others; and display no guilt or remorse for their harmful acts. One reason for these traits, research suggests, is that psychopaths have difficulty understanding emotions. However, a new study indicates that psychopaths are impaired not just in the emotional realm, but more broadly, in understanding abstract information in general.
Sound familiar?
In particular, the psychopaths showed clear deficits in activating one brain area, the right anterior superior temporal gyrus, when processing abstract stimuli. This region failed to differentiate normally between abstract and concrete stimuli.
The researchers say, “These data support the hypothesis that there is an abnormality in the function of the right anterior superior temporal gyrus in psychopathy.”
“Perhaps,” the researchers say, “psychopathic individuals have difficulty engaging in cognitive functions that involve material that has no concrete realization in the external world. We might speculate that complex social emotions such as love, empathy, guilt and remorse may be a form of more abstract functioning. Thus, difficulties in processing and integrating these conceptually abstract representations to regulate or modulate behavior would be [seen] in these individuals.”
I’ve always wondered about this, particularly regarding the hard core homophobes. How is it that any decent person could stick a knife in the hearts of loving couples, do everything possible in their power to gut them of their capacity, not just to love each other, but to trust anyone, let alone love anyone? How is it they can look you right in the eye and tell you to your face that marriage doesn’t have anything to do with love…that it’s just about making babies and nothing more? How is it, they can throw helpless gay teens into ex-gay camps where they’ll be taught to fear and loath their sexual nature, how do they pray to God above that if their kid can’t be made into a heterosexual, at least dear god make them incapable of loving someone of their own sex? How does anyone do this to a kid and say they’re doing it out of love? Well…maybe this is why.
Look at what O’Reilly is saying up there again. How do you look into the camera at millions of viewers and tell them you think that kid was enjoying himself? How do you do it with an air of plain talk common sense? The only answer I can think of is, you do it like that because you simply cannot fathom what that kid must have been going through. Empathy. You could swim in the open sewer of that man’s conscience forever and not find a single shred of it anywhere.
Or in any of them. This is why appealing to their better nature isn’t bloody likely to buy you anything.
A San Diego judge has ruled there is enough evidence against a U.S. Marine for him to stand trial for murder with a hate crime enhancement in the slaying of a gay man in 2006.
…
Following his arrest, Hardy told San Diego police homicide detectives that he passed out at Catolico’s apartment and later awoke later to find Catolico trying to sexually assault him.
According to Hardy he felt violated and that “one thing led to another and I ended up choking him.”
One thing led to another…
Hardy’s attorney told the court that the murder was not a hate crime – but rather self defense – and that [the district attorny] had not established that Catolico’s sexuality had anything to do with the killing.
But, [the district attorny] countered that Hardy knew full well that Catolico was gay and had agreed to share his bed.
"He had time to think about it, and he formed a plan in his mind for the victim to lay on his stomach, and that’s when he decided to choke him out"…
[the district attorny] also told the court that following the murder Hardy went out for fast food, and then brought it back to the apartment and ate it while playing video games on Catolico’s computer.
Presumably with the corpse of the man he claimed had sexually assaulted him still in the bedroom. How does any sane person look at his, and believe that there was an assault to begin with? But you see this kind of thing over and over again in gay panic defenses.
Who would have guessed that answering a few census questions could make you a participant in battling the "homosexual agenda"?
Napa resident Marcia Zwick never imagined this when she recently received a large, important-looking envelope in the mail. She works as a legal secretary and is accustomed to handling official documents.
"I’m a reasonably intelligent person," Zwick said. "I couldn’t tell what this really was."
The answer isn’t readily apparent.
"U.S. Taxpayer Census," the envelope says on the outside in big letters. "Do Not Tamper: Reply Within 5 Days."
Inside is an official-looking questionnaire. "This U.S. Taxpayer Census has been specially commissioned to gather public opinion in America’s ‘grassroots’ about the new Social Security Preservation Act (HR 219) now pending in the U.S. Congress," it says.
"This Census is individually registered under your name to represent Napa public opinion in California 01 voting district. So it is critical you return it — even if you are undecided about some answers."
In reality, the "Census" is a mailer from something called the Christian Seniors Association. And of the nine questions it asks, six involve a slanted look at Social Security and three involve donating money to the right-wing organization.
What the mailer doesn’t tell you, though, at least not in so many words, is that any funds contributed to the Christian Seniors Association will in fact go to its parent group, the Traditional Values Coalition.
Cute. This from the man who routinely calls gay people sexual predators and pedophiles. They’re the folks responsible for this bit of fragrant web advertising:
The mailer from the Christian Seniors Association only hints at broader public-policy goals. An accompanying letter explains that the organization was started several years ago as an alternative to the AARP.
…
It’s not until you get to the fine print on the back of the association’s Census form that you learn the organization "is a division of Traditional Values Coalition" and that "all contributions are combined to help pay Traditional Values Coalition expenses."
So this ersatz seniors organization really exists mostly to funnel old people’s money over to TVC. You have to figure that’s because scaring them with the gay bogyman isn’t opening up their checkbooks like it used to. Picture Lou spending money old people gave to him out of their fixed incomes thinking it was going to a campaign for senior’s issues, on his splendid little war on homosexuality instead. I guess screwing old people isn’t ungodly if all you rape them for is their money. You know…that stuff they use to put food in their mouths and a roof over their heads and buy their medicine with. Who the hell made Lou Sheldon a reverend? John Gotti?
The web page that was inserted onto Nell Dominique’s site is being routinely updated it seems, by the crooks who hacked her site. I guess since I (and who knows how many other people) notified SIAS that their web site was hacked, they took steps to fix the problem and now the crooks are simply using another web site and apparently are able to update the redirect information on any of these other feeder web sites they’ve managed to hack. The page on Nell’s site now re-directs to opifexmundi.org, a site that seems to be otherwise dead. And whois gives rather strange contact information for the Registrant and Admin there.
If someone knows a French, can you please tell this lady that her website has been hacked? I’d really appreciate it. This kinda really pisses me off. Nell is another artist just trying to use the web to get her stuff out there where it can be seen and appreciated.
[Update…] As of December 12 the Phisher link on Nell’s page was gone. So her web admin either discovered it, or someone clued them in. Now if the cops could just get their hands on the lout who put it there…
So I get Yet Another bogus email from Bank of America in my mailbox a little while ago, and as I will do for kicks and grins and laughs, I open it up using the View Source function in my mail client (Mozilla Thunderbird), and look for the deceptive link…
Your primary e-mail address for Bank of America Online Banking has been changed. Want to confirm this email is from Bank of America? Log in to Online Banking, select Manage Alerts and Alerts History to view all alerts sent from Bank of America. Your Alerts History is updated every 2 hours.
Use the link below to go to you online account:
The email is, naturally, full of all sorts of links to the actual Bank of America website, from which it gets the actual Bank of America logos and such. But the Manage Your Account link, again naturally, goes elsewhere. This is how phishers operate. So just for kicks and grims I go look it up…
…and what I discover is that this particular phisher isn’t operating from some hit and run domain, but from a Belgian Artist’s website, a lady named Nell Dominique apparently, because I can’t read the French her website is written in. So I dig a little more. I wget the page the phish mail is linked to…
All that page is, is a simple re-direct to another page. That other page lives on the website of the Securities Investors Association of Singapore. So they’ve been hacked too. And the page the hacker(s) have inserted there seems to be a copy of the actual Bank of America login page. I can’t tell at a glance where they’ve made their devious little substitutions, but at a quick guess it seems like they’re running some servlets on the SIAS web site they’ve hacked, that substitute for the servlets that would be running on the BOA website, were that the actual BOA website, and not somebody else’s web site. But that’s just a guess. I don’t have time to dig that deeply into that code.
So… Some unsuspecting person opens up this email that seems to have come from their bank. It says their email has been changed. They panic and think that someone is trying to break into their online account. They click the handy link, and get routed to the website of a Belgian artist, then to a Singapore investment website, which serves them up a page that sure looks like it’s the Bank of America web page, except it isn’t. They enter their account name and password and then (I think, I haven’t really studied the code there carefully), a servlet wakes up and sends that information to God Knows Where.
If anyone reading this knows a little French, can you please tell the poor soul at nelldominique.be that her website has been hacked. There’s a page, "boa.html" in her html root that she needs to get rid of. I’ve already notified the folks at SIAS about their little uninvited guest, and I reckon I’ll tell Bank of America what’s going on too, although by now they probably already know.
[Update…] As of December 12 the Phisher link on Nell’s page was gone. So her web admin either discovered it, or someone clued them in. Now if the cops could just get their hands on the lout who put it there…
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