If you can find one for this oddity:

Teen Shot to Death at Mo. Snowball Fight

Mob Justice

When I first read about this story some time back, I figured it was the usual crazed crowd of cranky Chicagoans hauling someone out of their car and beating them to death, but the linked story is one of those amazing pieces of investigative journalism that explores the lives of the five victims and the eight killers in extraordinary detail. A bit of a long read, but worthwhile.

Not My Job

That seems to have been the thinking of the mental healthcare workers who let LaVeta Jackson fall through the cracks in the system. Ultimately, she died in gunfire in a bloody basement, but it didn't have to be that way.

Alone to gain weight, to sprout blemishes, to develop tremors and tics, to face old parking tickets and calls from a bill collector, to watch her 3-year-old bond with another woman, and finally, to apply for Section 8 housing supplements and disability payments and food stamps and to coordinate her own medical care.

Stumped Me

I couldn't make much of this A&LD essay titled Invasion of the Culture Snatchers? Winfried Fluck got carried away with his own words, methinks.

Cultural Americanization is thus part of a modernizing process. Americanization is not a form of cultural imperialism, but the embodiment of modernity's promise of painless self-realization for each individual, in contrast to the demands made by more traditional concepts of emancipation.

Closed Circuit Circus

Here's a look at the new revolution in security videocameras: digital-to-disk. According to the article, we're moving away from tape and downloading digicam data to massive drives. Facial recognition pattern analysis is just around the corner, meaning there won't be a gum-chewing porn-mag reading rent-a-cop on the other side of the camera, but rather a sophisticated software package that can do all kinds of stuff. F'rinstance:

Geoff Beale, owner of The Alarm Company in Los Gatos, has installed a whole digital setup at the San Jose estate of one client.

If someone moves past the light beams that line the home's perimeter, the movement will activate the estate's 15 security cameras, which work even at night and record their data onto hard disks. The motion detector will also trigger the garage door to let out the owner's German shepherds.

What Were They Thinking?

First, this one from the UK Guardian. The story's titled, "Minister labelled racist after attack on rap 'idiots'" and it's hard not to agree with the poor chap. His opening remarks addressed the recent shootings of two girls in a hairdressing salon, which we reported on a few days ago.

Mr Howells, who previously attacked exhibits at the Turner Prize show as "cold, mechanical conceptual bullshit", launched into an extraordinary attack on black British music hours after the police had criticised the music industry for "glamorising guns".

"The events in Birmingham are symptomatic of something very, very serious," he said. "For years I have been very worried about these hateful lyrics that these boasting macho idiot rappers come out with.

In a related vein, you've probably been reading about Bill Back's senseless act of idiocy in California that has all but destroyed any chance he had at securing the chairmanship of the California Republican Party. He circulated an article to party members in 1999 via e-mail, which included the following passage written by Bill Lind of the Center for Cultural Conservatism:

"Given how bad things have gotten in the old USA, it's not hard to believe that history might have taken a better turn," Lind wrote.

"The real damage to race relations in the South came not from slavery, but from Reconstruction, which would not have occurred if the South had won."

4:14:52 PM       

Hit it if you got one. Today's datascan reveals an evil end-of-holiday Monday replete with a lethal dose of carnage courtesy of your friendly neighborhood suicide commandos, and a Texas-sized home invasion nightmare. Not helping matters any, our President looks like a drunken wino as he peddles a dividend tax cut to anybody who will listen—which is like pushing for a fois gras rebate in the House of Starving Children. Head back to bed now if you can.

Average Schmoe

I should know better than to shill for a network, but when I saw the commercials for Fox's Joe Millionaire, I almost fell down laughing.

They dug up an out-of-work character actor making less than $20K a year and got 20 women to believe he inherited $50 million. The gold-digging bimbos are going to be clawing each other to shreds trying to land this hunk.

Then comes the secret, which we all know by now: He's not really a millionaire!

No Noose Is Good Noose

A pair of Louisiana prosecutors got scolded in court yesterday for violating the dress code.

When they showed up at a pre-trial capital murder hearing, they were "wearing ties decorated with a hangman's noose and the Grim Reaper."

Defense attorney Clive Stafford Smith accused Rowan and Mary of making light of the possibility that his client, Lawrence Jacobs, could get the death penalty if convicted.

They'll Be Sorry

We're finally at our lead story today. This one comes from London, where the UK government is urging Internet chat room operators to "provide children with virtual panic buttons to help protect them from online paedophiles."

The code recommends chat room operators should provide both virtual panic buttons and prominent safety messages on their sites.

But Don't Panic Too Soon

A Frontier Airlines mechanic did last week, when he freaked out in Denver. Seems that a jet was preparing for takeoff, and Corydon Van Dyke Cochran felt it was unsafe for flight due to an earlier lightning strike. So he "threw a wheel block into the running engine." This stopped the plane, but...

Cochran could have grounded the plane by making a log-book entry saying he felt the airplane was unsafe or advising the pilot.

9:41:52 AM