Flit

NICE WORK, ARC My old

NICE WORK, ARC

My old colleague in game writing, Arcadian Del Sol, takes the Boston Phoenix (which he has a little trouble spelling, to school over linking to the Daniel Pearl video. While I still object to the Wall Street Journal using the FBI to intimidate ISPs on this score (see below), Arc's absolutely right in taking apart the Phoenix's "public has a right to know" hypocrisy:

...immediately beneath the 'Daniel Pearl Died for Our Freedom' editorial [on the Phoenix website] is an obituary for one Elizabeth Knapp who passed away on Monday the 3rd of this month. She was at one time, a well liked and well respected staff writer for the Boston Phoenix, and in their online obituary, they praise her work ethic and her love for others. What they dont do in this article is post pictures of her dead body.

So I sent them a letter and requested that they publish the photographs of her corpse being prepared by a mortuary for embalming. I feel that it is important that I fully comprehend what a loss it is to have had Ms. Knopp pass away and unless I see her chalky white cadaver draining blood into a floor drain in the basement of a funeral home, I feel I might just dismiss this as just another dead woman who contributed nothing. What better way to make her death mean something and to change the world than to show us the video of her mouth being stapled shut and her skin being spraypainted an eery shade of beige. (emphasis added)

Right fuckin' on.

SPEAKING OF IDIOT JUDGES... An

SPEAKING OF IDIOT JUDGES...

An unnamed justice of the peace has forbidden anyone to tell the name of the Canadian policeman charged with murdering a bookkeeper yesterday. This comes the same day as judge Eleanor Schnall forbade any press coverage of a child protection case involving a fundamentalist Christian family in St. Thomas, Ont., preventing the press from reportin ghe number of children or even their age range.

You know, I've had about enough of this crap. The increasing trend toward ever-more-secret trials in Canada is a serious threat to public oversight of the judicial system. We are regressing to a sixteenth-century standard of jurisprudence, and not enough people are standing up to say enough is enough. These judges are no longer instruments of justice, but obstacles to it.

GOOGLE CATCHES HIJACKER Resourceful Canadian

GOOGLE CATCHES HIJACKER

Resourceful Canadian detective David Jorgenson closed the 30 year-old cold file on the only-ever Canadian airplane hijacking by typing the hijacker's name into Google, and finding one Patrick Critton in New York. Today the judge sentenced Critton to three years. (He had previously served time for the crime in Cuba, where he'd landed: no one was injured in the course of his crime.) (from the Globe and Mail).

OH, LOOKY! A REAL WAR

OH, LOOKY! A REAL WAR PROFITEER

GroupAction, the Quebec marketing company at the center of the government's corruption scandal, took the Department of National Defence for $17 million this year for work of no apparent value, the Southam news agency is reporting (no link available). Among the tangible results were a new, rejected logo, which looked like someone was taking aim at the Canadian flag, and a major ad campaign in the fall of 2000 with a tag line saying most Canadians have a "uniform fetish." (In both cases, focus groups shot the idea down before it saw the light of day.) It goes without saying that if we'd had that $17 million maybe we could have stayed in the Afghan war a little longer.

Groupaction is closely linked to the Liberals, with some senior members having worked for the party during federal elections, and the company having donated $112,162 to the party since the Chretien government took power.

By contrast, the well-known series of U.S. Navy ads directed by Spike Lee cost a total of $2.5 million U.S. ($3.7M Cdn) (source: Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 11 Jun/99).

JUDGE RULES AIRPLANES NOT VEHICLES,

JUDGE RULES AIRPLANES NOT VEHICLES, DROPS CHARGE AGAINST SHOE-BOMBER

In other news, the judge also ruled a "sneaker" is not a "shoe", and so Richard Reid could not have committed the crime he was accused of at all. (link)