Musings from Brian J. Noggle

• Frank W. Abagnale identifies 10 ways to stop identity theft cold. Slow down, Iceman. It won’t make you a superhero capable of stopping any or all identity theft in the world, but it will remind you ways to make it harder for the badmen to get your identity. Best line:
  

  Only amateurs hack into computers; pros hack into people.

  For you damn kids out there, Frank Abagnale is the guy depicted in Catch Me If You Can. He makes Mitnick look like a script kiddie in meatspace.

• Challenged by a department store honcho, this guy goes into a store and walks out with $3500 in computers without paying.

  (Link seen on IMAO.)

Be careful out there, my students, and remember to trust no one, especially your shidoshi of paranoia.

For Brian J. Noggle agrees with Eugene Kane of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, who saith:

That’s my concern as well. With dozens – or hundreds – of young black people driving at the same time, it’s hard to pick and choose who’s breaking the law and who isn’t.

I don’t have any solutions to stop cruising, but there are plenty of answers for what to do about young people vandalizing homes, assaulting gas station employees and stealing merchandise.

Arrest them and charge them accordingly. Because that kind of behavior is a crime; it’s not cruising.

Even though we all want to get more sleep and less nuisance, it’s important to remember there’s a difference.

Cracking down on cruising, or conspiracy, or obstruction, or possession, or regulatory “crimes”, or the various other strict liability offenses that divorce mens rea from actus reus in our criminal system.

Of course, that’s easy for me to say now because advocating changing this particular law is not yet a crime–although the concept is not inconceivable.

In her defense, the former commanding officer at Abu Ghraib says:

In an interview with British Broadcasting Corp. radio broadcast Tuesday, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski said Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller told her last autumn that prisoners “are like dogs, and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you’ve lost control of them.”

Sounds like the general needs some intuition into the meaning of simile and its relationship to reality.

In the trial yesterday, officers presented testimony to how they knew Scott Peterson was the one. According to ABCNews.com, the evidence is pretty conclusive:

Officer Derrick Letsinger said Monday that he didn’t smell bleach and didn’t notice any signs of a recent cleaning, he did say that he became skeptical after seeing a crumpled rug, dirty towels on the washing machine and a wet mop behind an otherwise “model home.”

1. Dirty laundry on washing machine, other cleaning utensils near washing machine in a “model home.” That’s pretty damning stuff. But it gets worse:

Another officer, Matthew Spurlock, said there was something else that seemed suspicious: Peterson’s alibi. Peterson told him he had been fishing alone on the bay the day his wife died, but could not say what he was trying to catch.

2. He didn’t have a particular fish in mind when he went fishing. Everyone knows that an angler goes fishing for a specific type of fish each and every time he goes out. Anyone who says he’s just going to catch what’s biting is lying, and a potential murderer. Finally:

During his testimony, Letsinger said Peterson “threw his flashlight down on the ground,” before mumbling a curse word. Spurlock testified he heard what appeared to be an expletive and that “it came through what sounded like gritted teeth.”

3. Throwing a flashlight, cursing through gritted teeth.

Each tidbit is irrefutable, and when combined into a compelling narrative, we can see that Scott Peterson is guilty. Who needs evidence? Let’s burn him!

I thought I had mocked this story already, but I have not. What’s to mock? What’s not to mock about it? A fetus is an American citizen simply for gestating in this country:

A U.S. District judge in Missouri has blocked temporarily the deportation of a pregnant Mexican woman who is married to a U.S. citizen, calling the fetus an “American” and citing a federal law created to protect unborn children after the high-profile death of Laci Peterson.

Senior U.S. District Judge Scott O. Wright ordered that Myrna Dick, 29, of Raymore, Mo., who is accused of falsely claiming American citizenship, be allowed to remain in the United States for now and told prosecutors and the defense to prepare for a possible trial.

“Isn’t that child an American citizen?” he asked, according to the Kansas City Star. “If this child is an American citizen, we can’t send his mother back until he is born.”

Which might lead on to speculate…how long until states issue driver’s licenses to in-utero-Americans, that persecuted minority, and how soon can they be enfranchised to vote in California?

Truly, he has a dizzying intellect. Michael Moore’s complaining about a possible R rating for his latest mockumentary. You know, no one under 17 admitted without a guardian.

Moore said: “It is sadly very possible that many 15- and 16-year-olds will be asked and recruited to serve in Iraq in the next couple of years.

“If they are old enough to be recruited and capable of being in combat and risking their lives, they certainly deserve the right to see what is going on in Iraq.”

Dear Michael: Here in the United States, people cannot go into combat at fifteen or sixteen. Thank you, that is all.

International Red Cross bleats:

Unless the United States charges Saddam Hussein or releases him from custody by June 30 the nation will be in violation of the Geneva Convention, the Red Cross charged yesterday.

Memo to American Red Cross: distance yourselves immediately or face backlash. I recommend adopting the name American Magen David Adam.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in a story entitled Slay, Blunt butt heads over early voting plan:

However, Blunt, the favored Republican candidate for governor, said the law merely set the framework for early voting but did not give statutory authority for it. It also did not provide funding for early balloting, a possible violation of the so-called Hancock Amendment, which requires the state to pay for anything that it is requiring local jurisdictions to do. Early voting would cost about $2.4 million, according to estimates from local officials that Blunt compiled in 2002.

I think this writer is trying to use so-called as a synonym for “law commonly known as”, which is rather funny, since the writer probably doesn’t know it by any other name.

This link was sent to me by reader John F. Donigan, who seems to lament the fact that officials from the city of St. Louis want election day to last two weeks, and might have a law to stand on. Donigan writes:

KMOX ran a story in which the picketers stated that Blunt wasn’t allowing early voting because he was a Republican. Blunt answered with something on the order of “You could come to me as the most Republican-voting city in the state, (not that I can think of one at the moment) and I’d still have to say you can’t do it.” The picketers responded with It’s our right ’cause we want it!

*sigh*

I cannot take an experiential historical perspective to know if these sorts of shenanigans have always been a part of the electoral process; I suspect though that politics now trumps government in ways that it has not before, and in ways that will ultimately lead to the implosion of the Great Experiment.

Man, talk about a bad year. Now Rush Limbaugh’s getting a divorce from the lovely Marta.

Drug addiction, a jerk-smearer potential prosecution, and a divorce. The only way it could get worse if Marta reveals that Limbaugh cheated on her. With the pool boy. In exchange for drugs.

(Link seen on Drudge.)

A story I saw on Drudge: Researchers Exposed to Anthrax:

At least five workers developing an anthrax vaccine at a children’s hospital research lab in Oakland were accidentally exposed to the deadly bacterium because of a shipping mistake, officials reported Thursday.

Officials with the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute said none of the researchers has shown symptoms of infection since the first exposure about two weeks ago, but each is being treated with precautionary antibiotics.

The researchers believed they were working with syringes full of a dead version of anthrax, hospital spokeswoman Bev Mikalonis said. Instead, they were shipped live anthrax by a lab of the Southern Research Institute in the Frederick, Md., Mikalonis said.

Parents, does the children’s hospital where you take your children have a research lab where researchers work with deadly toxins better known as weapons of mass destruction? You would assume not, but I guess you can’t be sure unless you ask.

So an old joke tells us about the child who kills his parents and begs the court for mercy because he’s an orphan, but one woman in Virginia is apparently using it as a defense strategy:

The only woman on Virginia’s death row doesn’t deny that she deserves punishment for having her husband and stepson killed so she could collect insurance money.

But paying the ultimate penalty, says Teresa Lewis, is too much — especially considering the men who actually did the deed will live out their lives behind bars.

“I don’t think it’s fair for the triggermen to get life, and I got the death penalty,” she said, speaking by phone through a glass partition at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women.

Lewis pleaded guilty last year to arranging the slayings of her husband and stepson to collect a $250,000 insurance policy.

The punchline: the caption beneath her photo:

Lewis: “I just feel like I have something to live for. I’ve got a daughter here.”

Apparently, she’s not finished.

No laughs, of course, for the absolute pathology involved in saying she shouldn’t die because she has something to live for, apparently unlike her husband and stepson.