Viciousness

It seems that just hours before Cathy Seipp died, her long-time, self-appointed nemesis, Eliot Stein (aka Troll Dolls) posted a long and severely demented post on a website pretending to be Cathy. He stole her name and pretended he was her making a confession. He's completely unapologetic, even though his fraud has been revealed and his website with Cathy's hijacked name has been taken down permanently by his hosting company.

But what was supposed to have been a dignified end for a long-suffering single mom instead turned into what friends called a disgustingly public travesty, an example of the current Wild West atmosphere of Internet privacy issues, and a sordid showcase of just how far a beef can go.

Just hours before her death, “Cathy Seipp” suddenly seemed to undo decades of hard work with an oddly written letter posted on the Web site, www. cathyseipp.com. In what came off as more bizarre rant than heartfelt apology, her supposed “very last blog entry” called her years of journalism a “shoddy,” “despicable” and “irresponsible” career as a “fourth-rate hack.” Her political stance? All a mistake.

The fiery, unwavering supporter of George W. Bush supposedly said she'd done a complete 180 in the past year and was now an implied supporter of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. What was even more perplexing was that “Seipp” was taking mean-spirited potshots at her own daughter, Maia Lazar, whom she called an “obnoxious” and “arrogant” wanna-be “skank” who was “mentally ill.” Throughout the letter, the one person whom “Seipp” seemed most sorry for ever having offended was Maia's 10th-grade journalism teacher, who had frequently clashed with mother and daughter. Finally, “Seipp” said she was probably to blame for her own illness — the “venom” she'd spewed for years was responsible for her terminal cancer.

Friends were horrified. They quickly realized that the letter was the work of an infamous character known as “Troll Dolls” who'd positioned himself as the blogger's archenemy and bought the domain name www.cathyseipp.com years earlier (Seipp's real Web site is http://www.cathyseipp.net/). Troll Dolls is really Eliot Stein, a 54-year-old former online talk-show host and stand-up comedian who had taught Maia in a journalism class for a brief period in 2004, and who blamed Maia and Seipp for his departure from the school after only five weeks. Seipp's friends marshaled their resources, creating an impromptu Internet chat room to make their plans, fingering Stein as the culprit, enlisting the help of a lawyer to serve him a cease-and-desist letter, and successfully lobbying Stein's Internet host to take the Web site down permanently.

“He's a genuinely weird dude [who wrote] a rambling, odd, mean, totally cruel series of posts … designed to trick well-wishers, as Cathy lay dying, into reading a torrent of rage and bitterness against her,” Rob Long, an L.A. television writer and longtime friend of Seipp's, wrote in an e-mail. “Just immensely cruel. It was easy to ignore when she was alive, but as she died it became intolerable — thousands and thousands of people wanted to reach out to Cathy and her family in the days surrounding her death, and this guy tricked, perverted and deeply hurt them. And for what? A years-old grudge?”

This is a long article with a lot of the whole background. I knew of some - not all - of Stein's antics in the past few years. But this is a seriously weird and completely vicious way to behave toward anyone, dying or not. One of the reasons my comment policy here is fairly firm is that I will not give a platform to some of the worst actors on the internet. (Hence shutting off comments today on the post linked by the artist formerly known as the Daou report.)

I've long said that the problem with the internet is that some people take their anonymity as a license to "say" things to and about other people that would put them in immediate need of a lot of serious emergency dental work if they said the same words to the wrong someone's face. And people like Stein make it easy for the "professional" journalists to strut and tut-tut about the lawlessness of the blogosphere.

Tappity, Tappity, Tap

That's the sound of freshman US Senator James Webb's little tap dance around actually explaining why one of his aides was carrying a gun into the Senate office building. The aide, Phillip Thompson, was promptly arrested. He told police the gun belongs to Webb and that he was carrying it for "safekeeping" for Webb.

U.S. Sen. James Webb expressed support yesterday for a top aide caught with a handgun in a Senate office building but shed little light on his role in what he described as an "unfortunate" situation.

Webb (D-Va.) declined to confirm what the aide, Phillip Thompson, told authorities after he was taken into custody on Monday: that the gun belongs to the senator and that he was "safekeeping" it for him. Webb said that a mix-up was to blame for the episode but that he could not provide details because Thompson faces criminal charges.

"I think this is one of those very unfortunate situations where, completely inadvertently, he took the weapon into the Senate yesterday," Webb said. Beyond that, Webb provided little information, never saying whether the gun is his.

"I have never carried a gun in the Capitol complex, and I did not give the weapon to Phillip Thompson, and that's all that I think I'll say," Webb said during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol.

This is an interesting response, no? Webb is not denying that the gun belongs to him. But only that he did not give the aide permission to carry it. Which kind of requires an obvious question: why was this gun lying around where someone could just pick it up? Or did Webb have Thompson carry it, only to throw him under the buss when he was caught with it? Either is a problem. The former, in many ways, is by far the worse of the two. Responsible gun ownership says one doesn't leave weapons lying about. (Even when I had the skunk incident at home, I put guns in accessible locations instead of in the gun safe, but with proper trigger locks.)

Reviving The Midle Ages

First it was Al Gore and his pompously self-righteous promoting the purchase of medieval indulgences - oh, sorry, "carbon offsets" - to forgive environmental sins. That way, Gorezilla can indulge in his unusual attraction to high-tension power lines and consume vast amounts of electricity while still pretending he's an environmentalist. Now Germany has taken a step back to the good, old middle ages as well. They are doing it with something called a "Baby-Klappe". This is similar to the arrangement most libraries and banks have for dropping off books or deposits. A slot to drop things through. In Germany, this means mothers can drop unwanted babies into these "night depositories" and walk away from them.

Good lord.

Desperate mothers are being urged to drop their unwanted babies through hatches at hospitals in an effort to halt a spate of infanticides that has shocked Germany.

At least 23 babies have been killed so far this year, many of them beaten to death or strangled by their mothers before being dumped on wasteland and in dustbins.

Police investigating the murders are at a loss to explain the sudden surge in such cases, which have involved mothers of all ages all over the country.

Now city councils have launched an advertising campaign to highlight the problem and to promote greater use of the Baby-Klappe hatches that allow women to drop off their babies to be found and cared for without having to give their names. Posters were being put up in cities and towns across Germany yesterday, urging women to make use of the Baby-Klappe, with the slogan “Before babies land in the rubbish bin . . .”

The campaign has already attracted criticism from senior clergymen and from charities, including Caritas, who argue that it could actively encourage mothers to dump their children. But there is agreement that something must be done to address what appears to be an infanticide epidemic.

The article even recognizes that these are modern trappings on a custom that was begun in the middle ages.

— In the 12th century Pope Innocence III permitted mothers to dump unwanted, and often illegitimate babies, on church doorsteps

— In 14th-century Florence a church used a wooden cylinder, the ruota, to deposit unwanted babies

— First modern baby-drop in Germany was introduced in Hamburg in 2000. There are now more than 90

Not that it isn't better than just letting mothers dump their unwanted kids somewhere in a garbage can. It just points to a sickness in the society as a whole. It is also prone to abuse, as even supporters admit. Mothers can drop off severely disabled babies or ones that are more than three months of age. Neither of those actions are legal under German law. But dropping off a healthy two month old like an overdue book is perfectly ok. Everything old is new again.