Category: News You Need to Know

Shit Keeps Dying

Yesterday I reported that a few thousand birds ended up dying for unknown reasons (it sure as the fuck wasn’t fireworks otherwise we’d have similar death rates on the Fourth of July). Well birds weren’t the only things that got killed off as 10,000 fish were also killed in Arkansas. On plausible explanation has been presented:

Right now scientist are eying natural gas as the cause of death for both the red winged blackbirds and the drum fish. Residents of the small town of Beebe were startled Saturday morning to find the dead birds littered over a 1.5-square-mile area.

The reason I say this makes sense is because there has also been a lot of problems in the nearby town of Guy, Arkansas potentially caused by fracking. Fracking is a method used to extract natural gas from shale and since beginning fracking operations in Guy, AR the number of reported earthquakes has been through the roof (over 500 since September, 2010). I checked it out on Google Maps and Guy, AR is about an hour driver from Beebe, AR making the possibilities of events being related pretty fucking high.

Free Dinner

The homeless of Beebe, Arkansas should be eating well tonight after 4,000 to 5,000 blackbirds feel from the sky:

Workers were searching Beebe, a town of about 4,500 people located 30 miles northeast of the state capital, to collect what officials estimated as between 4,000 and 5,000 birds which began falling from the sky late on New Year’s Eve and continued into the next day.

Officials have no clue what the fuck killed all those birds but their theories make little sense as far as I can see. The birds showed no physical trauma so lightening and high speed winds don’t really add up and I can’t see fireworks stressing that many birds to death on New Year’s but no on July th.

Rule Four, Learn it and Use it

Being sure of your target before shooting it is the fourth rule of firearm safety. It seems some police officers aren’t away of that rule as they shot and killed a man who was spraying his garden with a hose:

A father shot dead by two police officers had pointed a pistol-style garden hose at them and not a gun, the department chief admitted yesterday.

The police are claiming he aimed it at them in a two handed posture:

They opened fire on him when he pointed the black metal-tipped object at them in a two-handed posture, Long Island Police Chief Jim McDonnell said in an emotional news conference marked by sobs from the victim’s relatives.

You know what? I don’t buy it. What I would believe is the officers coming up behind the guy, yelling at him to drop the gun, and the man with the hose turning around in surprise with the garden sprayer aimed in their direction. Likewise seeing the long green hose coming off of the nozzle in addition to the guy being in a fucking garden should have been a good indicator that maybe he was holding a garden hose.

The family is taking legal action. Of course the only thing they’ll be winning is tax money so basically they would be looking to get a tax refund in exchange for the death of their family member.

A Slight Overreaction

The police in Australia must be bored because they seem to be looking for excuses to deploy their helicopters. A thief stole a woman’s iPhone from a hospital, the woman used the Find My Phone app to track the whereabouts of the phone, and the police went into action with a fucking helicopter.

Let’s do some quite math here for a second. The price of the top of the line iPhone 4 in Australia is $999.00 plus any additional taxes. The cost of flying a helicopter is a complex formula which adds up to being a lot fucking more than an iPhone. If the police wanted to do something while saving the tax payers money they could have just purchased the victim a new phone and called it a day.

Magic Gun Barrier Fails Again

I honestly don’t believe this story because it’s so impossible. It seem a man was able to get a gun into a school. That’s impossible though as schools have the magical gun-free zone barrier surrounding them that prevents all firearms from entering the grounds.

This news ends well in that nobody of consequence was killed or even injured:

The gunman opened fire at Husfelt and school board members. He missed them all, even though he was at close range, said Lee Stafford, director of student services of Bay District Schools. Duke said, “I’m going to kill [unintelligible],” while he fired.

Mike Jones, chief of security for the school system and a retired police officer, exchanged fire with Duke, who was wounded and rolled to the ground. Duke turned his gun on himself, dying of a fatal gunshot to the head, authorities said. Husfelt called Jones a “hero.”

It’s a good thing he was a really bad shot or didn’t want to kill anybody (I don’t care which it is, it’s just good news). It’s interesting to know that another person was able to get a firearm through the school’s magic gun barrier, I think they need to hire a better wizard.

If you look at the pictures on the site Mr. Crazy drew a crude ‘V’ with a circle around it:

But a Facebook page belonging to a Clay Duke has a profile photo of a “V” in a red circle, a logo that is used in the movie “V for Vendetta.”

According to the Internet Movie Database, the 2006 film is about “a shadowy freedom fighter known only as “V” uses terrorist tactics to fight against his totalitarian society. Upon rescuing a girl from the secret police, he also finds his best chance at having an ally.”

I’m glad CNN latched onto the V for Vendetta thing as that same symbol is often used by my friends who advocate voluntarism (and they’re smart people who don’t need CNN trying to demonize their entire movement). Either way crazy is crazy but in this case nobody important was hurt so it’s the best ending you can hope fore.

Wait… What

This has to be one of the biggest what in the fucking fuck moments in history:

Queensland police have appealed for public assistance in finding 10 handguns stolen from a Brisbane gun club.

They have recovered 14 of 24 guns stolen at gunpoint from the Sporting Shooters Association’s Belmont club at 6.35am (AEST) last Thursday.

Apparently in Australia a two man team with a single rifle between them can rob a gun range. I’m imagining how this would go down at any gun range I’ve been to in the United States… yeah I can’t see this going down the same here. The main difference I see is there being one dead thug, another thug with wet pants, and every gun stored at the range still safely locked in their safes.

Seriously how to you rob a gun range and walk away without any additional holes in your person? I’m completely baffled by this.

America Making Terrorists

If the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) creates a terrorist can they really claim they stopped stopped him? Apparently they think so:

A man has been charged with attempted murder and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction for allegedly plotting to blow up a military recruitment centre near Baltimore with a car bomb.

OK that sounds like they stopped somebody right? Wait there is more:

The bomb was also a fake supplied by agents as part of a sting operation.

This is the second guy who has attempted to “bomb” something with a “bomb” given to them by the FBI. Also it should be noted both of these guys were recruited by FBI agents working to get their arrest numbers up under cover.

It’s also interesting that the FBI manufactured terrorist is being charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. The last time I heard a regular bomb was an explosive and a nuclear bomb was a weapon of mass destruction. This classification falls under the fact a regular bomb takes out part of a building while a nuclear weapon takes out an entire fucking region of the planet. Concept of scale apparently escapes the FBI though.

Inconsistency of the FBI

This is a very interesting article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). It seems the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) arbitrarily attempts to cover up their illegal activities when complying with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The EFF obtained two copies of two documents from the FBI via the FOIA. What’s interesting in both cases is either copy of the same document had parts redacted but the parts that were redacted between copies were different:

The report discusses the FBI’s improper collection of bank and credit card records. In Version 1, all important information about the violation (including that it relates to financial records) was withheld. Version 2 reveals most of the details and shows the extent of the FBI’s violation. In this matter, the FBI, as part of an ongoing investigation into international terrorism, sought hotel and financial records on a subject. Although the agent responsible had no legal authority to obtain the financial records, he or she purposefully styled a request to a financial institution as a National Security Letter (NSL) to hide this fact, essentially lying to obtain the bank and credit card information.

What’s even more interesting is the fact this isn’t the first time such behavior has been noticed:

This certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen evidence that an arm of the Justice Department has withheld more than it is entitled to under FOIA. We found this in the FBI’s response of one of our earlier FOIA requests and reported on it here. More recently, the New York Times reported on the Justice Department’s attempts to keep from the public eye evidence of its embarrassing role in the US government’s “collaboration with [Nazi] persecutors.”

Even with claims of a more transparent government (remember that Obama promise?) it seems the amount of transparency differs day to day. This behavior, like so much of the behavior of our government, is disgusting to say the last. Thankfully it appears the EFF is going to be bringing this to court:

Federal agencies should not be able to hide their missteps behind white blocks. We plan to bring this to the court’s attention in our lawsuit challenging the FBI and other agencies’ improper withholding of reports submitted to the Intelligence Oversight Board.

Of course I question how much will be accomplished by asking the government to punish itself for its own misgivings.

Voluntary Botnet

This is kind of an interesting premise that’s not at all new but being report as such by several source. MasterCard has been under a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The attack was set off after MasterCard refused to allow customers to user their card to make donations to Wikileaks. This story is so multifaceted that I don’t know where to begin.

First this shows what kind of power companies like MasterCard and Visa can wield when they decide to no longer be a common carrier (allow customers holding their card to make payments to whoever they chose). It’s even more interesting since Wikileaks hasn’t actually done anything illegal meaning these moves are purely business.

Needless to say if you piss off the Internet is pissed on you back. MasterCard is currently under a DDoS attack but not by the usual malware created botnet. News sources are saying it’s by a voluntary botnet. Basically people are downloading an application called Low Orbit Ion Cannon (not to mistaken with GDI’s weapon of mass destruction that really does a good job of shoving it up Kane’s ass). Low Orbit Ion Cannon apparently connects to an invite-only IRC server and allows your system to become part of a botnet. Once the connection is established you system sends out constant traffic to a targeted node on the Internet.

Even more interesting is the fact that performing DDoS attacks is generally illegal. Most of the times the owners of the systems that are in a botnet aren’t held accountable because they did not knowingly allow control of their system to be taken. This case is different since each participant is voluntarily becoming part of the attacking botnet. This shows once again though that simply making something illegal is not a deterrent.

Julian Assange Arrested

I’ve haven’t covered a whole lot of the recent Wikileaks fiasco because everybody else on the planet and their grandmother already is doing it. Either way I will mention Julian Assange was arrested in Britian and is facing extradition to Sweden. Wikileaks says they’ll continue operations as normal which should be expected as Mr. Assange is mostly a founder and figurehead.