Friday, July 18, 2008

Beavers As Large As Bears


I had a bottle of lemonade yesterday. The bottom of the cap claimed this fact: "Beavers were once the size of bears." What!?

I had to investigate and found that the really large ones were concentrated about Illinois and Indiana.

See the Wikipedia posting HERE for complete information.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Monday, June 30, 2008

Fascinating? Not really . . . Hilarious!

Reprinted from THE NEW YORK TIMES.


July 1, 2008

Town Finds Drug Agent Is Really an Impostor

GERALD, Mo. — Like so many rural communities in the country’s middle, this tiny town had wrestled for years with the woes of methamphetamine. Then, several months ago, a federal agent showed up.

Busts began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, “a meth capital of the United States,” the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.

Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood, from television mainly, to be the law.

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sergeant Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.

But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald’s anti-drug campaign abruptly unraveled after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding-performing minister, a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.

Mr. Jakob, 36, is now the subject of a criminal investigation by federal authorities, and is likely to face charges related to impersonating a law enforcement officer, his lawyer said.

The strange adventures of Sergeant Bill have led to the firing of three of the town’s five police officers, left the outcome of a string of drug arrests in doubt, prompted multimillion-dollar federal civil rights lawsuits by at least 17 plaintiffs and stirred up a political battle, including a petition seeking the impeachment of Mr. Schulte, over who is to blame for the mess.

And the questions keep coming. How did Mr. Jakob wander into town and apparently leave the mayor, the aldermen and pretty much everyone else he met thinking that he was a federal agent delivered from Washington to help barrel into peoples’ homes and clean up Gerald’s drug problem? And why would anyone — receiving no pay and with no known connection to little Gerald, 70 miles from St. Louis and not even a county seat — want to carry off such a time-consuming ruse in the first place?

Mr. Jakob’s lawyer, Joel Schwartz, said that what happened in Gerald was never a sinister plot, but a chain of events rooted in “errors in judgment.” Mr. Schwartz said he believed that at least three Gerald police officers, including the chief, knew that Mr. Jakob was not a federal drug agent or even a certified police officer.

“It was an innocent evolution, where he helped with one minor thing, then one more on top of that, and all of the sudden, everyone thought he was a federal agent,” Mr. Schwartz said. “I’m not saying this was legal or lawful. But look, they were very, very effective while he was present. I don’t think Gerald is having the drug problem they were having. I’ve heard from some residents who were thrilled that he was there.”

There were numerous arrests during Mr. Jakob’s time in Gerald (the exact number is uncertain, local law enforcement officials said, as legal action surrounding the case proceeds), but Mayor Schulte said that Mr. Jakob had, in fact, gone to elaborate lengths to deceive local authorities, including Ryan McCrary, then the police chief, into believing that he was a federal agent — with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Marshal’s Service or some other federal agency.

In addition to having a badge and a car that seemed to scream law enforcement, Mr. Jakob offered federal drug enforcement help, Mr. Schulte said, (a notion local officials said must have somehow grown out of their recent application for a federal grant for radio equipment) and asked Chief McCrary to call what he said was his supervisor’s telephone number to confirm Gerald’s need for his help.

When the call was placed, a woman — whose identity is unknown — answered with the words “multijurisdictional task force,” and said that the city’s request for federal services was under review, the mayor said. Mr. Schulte said he now suspects that Mr. Jakob adapted the nonexistent task force name from the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies starring Eddie Murphy.

“Not only were these officers taken in, but so was everybody else,” said Chet Pleban, a lawyer for Mr. McCrary and the other two members of the police force who lost their jobs after Mr. Jakob’s real identity came to light.

Of the firings, Mayor Schulte said, “Nobody wanted to, but the city’s lawyer recommended it.”

When residents first began noticing Mr. Jakob, he certainly looked the part. His hair was chopped short, residents recalled, and his stocky chest filled a black T-shirt he sometimes wore that read POLICE. They said he wore military-style boots, pants with pockets running down the legs and carried a badge (his lawyer said it was from a former job as a security guard in St. Louis). And his off-white Crown Victoria was decked out with police radios and internal flashing lights, residents said.

He first came to town in January, his lawyer said, to meet Chief McCrary, whose experiences serving in Afghanistan Mr. Jakob had read about in a local newspaper. Mr. Jakob was considering contract work overseas, Mr. Schwartz said, and the pair hit it off.

Soon, the busts began. Some of those whose homes were searched said they were kicked in the head and had shotguns held against them. Mr. Jakob, many said, seemed to be leading the crew of Gerald police officers.

“He was definitely in charge — it was all him,” said Mike Withington, 49, a concrete finisher, who said Mr. Jakob pounded on his door in May, waking him up and yanking him, in handcuffs, out onto his front yard.

Mr. Withington said he had not yet been charged with a crime; Gary Toelke, the Franklin County sheriff, confirmed that no local charges had been issued against him. . But the mortification of that day, Mr. Withington said, has kept him largely indoors and led him to consider moving. Since the search, residents have tossed garbage and crumpled boxes of Sudafed (an ingredient of which can be used to make methamphetamine) on his lawn, he said, and he no longer shops in town, instead driving miles to neighboring towns.

“Everybody is staring at me,” he said. “People assume you’re guilty when things like this happen.”

When Linda Trest, 51, a reporter at The Gasconade County Republican, started hearing complaints from people whose homes had been searched, she began making inquiries about Mr. Jakob.

“Once I got his name, I hit the computer and within an hour I had all the dirt on this guy,” Ms. Trest said.

As it turned out, Mr. Jakob, who is married and lives near Washington, a small town not far from Gerald, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2003 when he owned a trucking company, and had, at 22, pleaded guilty in Illinois to a misdemeanor charge of criminal sex abuse of someone in their teens.

Since the 1990s, he had worked, at times, as a police officer in tiny departments in towns like Kinloch, Mo., and Brooklyn, Ill., though he never seemed to stay anywhere long and was never certified as a police officer in either Missouri or Illinois, his lawyer said. (Under some conditions, short-term employees with some departments are not immediately required to have state certification.)

As in Gerald, he impressed some, if only at first. “He seemed to have experience on the street,” said J. D. Roth, the police chief in Caseyville, Ill., where Mr. Jakob was a temporary part-time officer for almost two months in 2000. “He walked the walk and talked the talk.”

In Gerald, just a day before it was revealed that he was not a federal agent, the city aldermen voted to make Mr. Jakob a reserve officer; he wanted the designation, Mr. Schulte said, so he could enforce local ordinances, and he stood before the aldermen, hands behind his back, seeking the title.

Mr. Jakob offered city officials three contact numbers — his personal cellphone, a cellphone he said he used for drug informants and his “multijurisdictional task force” cellphone, Mr. Schulte said.

“It was the movie, ‘Catch Me if You Can’ all over again,” said Mr. Schulte, referring to the 2002 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a master of deception. “I’m telling you, with this guy, everything was right.”

SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

San Zhi


San Zhi is an abandoned vacation home complex outside of Taipei, Taiwan. See the links here and here for the story.

Unrelated, but equally interesting: archigram

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Time Piece, 1965 - Jim Henson



Who has Jim Henson? Read about him here.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Happy Birthday!


February 21, 2008 marked the 50th birthday of the peace symbol.

The symbol was designed in 1958 by British conscientious objector and textile designer/artist Gerald Holtom for the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC) for their Easter march from Trafalgar Square, London, to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, England. See photo below. It also became a badge for members of the British group Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

















That same year, pacifist and former US Navy Commander, Albert Bigelow, sailed a 30-foot ketch, the Golden Rule, bearing a CND flag (which included the peace symbol), heading for the Eniwetok Proving Ground, the Atomic Energy Commission's atmospheric test site in the Marshall Islands. Much publicized, this was the first attempt to disrupt a nuclear test in protest against nuclear weapons.





















In 1960, Philip Altbach, a freshman at the University of Chicago, traveled to England to meet with British peace groups as a delegate from the Student Peace Union (SPU). He returned with a bag of buttons bearing the peace symbol and convinced SPU to adopt it as its symbol. The SPU reproduced and sold thousands of the buttons on college campuses. Eventually, the symbol came to symbolize the anti-war movement in the United States.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

So Much For Voting Machine Security


This news story is hard to believe, but apparently true: In a stunning blow to the integrity of Diebold's electronic voting machines, someone made a copy of the key which opens ALL Diebold e-voting machines from a picture on the company's own website. The working keys were confirmed by Princeton scientists, the same people who discovered that a simple hack on Diebold's machines could alter votes.

Read more at the source: Information Week

Sunday, January 20, 2008

My Rights Rant




I think I am correct in my assumption that most of us U.S. Citizens believe we have a right to privacy. I say "U.S. Citizens" because I want to distinguish us from the rest of the "Americans." That is, distinguish us from those who are not U.S. Citizens and many of whom aren't even on this continent but who consider themselves "Americans." For example, people in Mexico consider themselves Americans. And people in South America consider themselves to Americans. Which brings up another interesting topic, which is that we in the United States don't seem to have a particularly good name for our country. At least not a name that's conducive to using as a reference to oneself. i.e. you can't call yourself "a United Statian" or "a United Statan" or United anything. It just doesn't sound right. This has been a problem since 1776. They got democracy right; they messed up on the name of our country. So we call ourselves Americans, confusing some people and irritating others because we appear self-serving. You can read about it here. But I digress from the purpose of this posting: The erosion of privacy.

In 1997, the US-based Electronic Privacy Information Center and the UK-based Privacy International undertook what has become the most comprehensive survey of global privacy ever published. The Privacy & Human Rights Report surveys developments in 70 countries, assessing the state of surveillance and privacy protection. The most recent report published in 2007, available here. Notice in the map above that the United States is colored black. Black identifies the countries that have the greatest amount of surveillance and the least protection of individual privacy rights. Green is where you want to be, but only Greece (!) is green. Congratulations to the Greeks! A close look at the chart on the Report website reveals that the U.S. is listed as "deteriorating." We're far from green. Indeed, we appear to be fighting for worst place with China. Our score is 1.5 and China's is 1.3 on the National Privacy Ranking 2007. What does this score mean? It means we're deluded. Duped. Deceived. Misled. How does this happen in a country that has freedom of press? The answer to that question is another topic altogether.

Exerpts from the Report:
  • No right to privacy is included in our constitution, though search and seizure protections exist in 4th Amendment.
  • REAL-ID and biometric identification programs (i.e fingerprints and retinal scans) continue to spread without adequate oversight, research, and funding structures
  • Extensive data-sharing programs across federal government and with private sector
  • Spreading use of CCTV
  • Congress approved presidential program of spying on foreign communications over U.S. networks, e.g. Gmail, Hotmail, etc.; and now considering immunity for telephone companies, while government claims secrecy, thus barring any legal action
  • World leading in border surveillance, mandating trans-border data flows
  • Weak protections of financial and medical privacy
  • Recent news regarding FBI biometric database raises particular concerns as this could lead to the largest database of biometrics around the world that is not protected by strong privacy law
All this is a great segue into a related topic: Security staff demanding to see your receipt as you leave a store. Do you have to show them your receipt? According to what I have read, unless the store has met your state's definition of probable cause for shoplifting, they have absolutely no right to detain you whatsoever. The exception is at membership-based stores like Sam's/Costco where you probably agreed to a search in your contract. In any event, the law varies by state.

And what about demanding to look in your bag? Fuggetaboutit.

Some interesting links:

Welcome to the Fourth Amendment
Papers Please: Arrested at Circuit City
The Consummerist

Sunday, January 13, 2008

The Perfect Crime?

The first fascinating story . . .

In 1971, a man calling himself D.B. Cooper hijacked Northwest Airlines 305 after it departed Portland, Oregon. He handed the stewardess a note saying that he had a bomb in his suitcase. He demanded four parachutes and $200,000 in $20 bills (about $1 million in today's dollars). After unloading the passengers and heading off again, he lowered the rear stairs and parachuted into oblivion. Read on . . . HERE.

Some additional fascinating links:
Unmasking D.B. Cooper
A detailed account