Just a play off the title of this piece in the New York Post - which savages their feloow New York paper, the New York bird-cage liner - er - Times over the latter's "news" about the Duke lacrosse fraudulent rape charges.
Duke Case: Will The Times Apologize?
…..Worst of all, this story so neatly fit the radical agenda of our "newspaper of record," The New York Times, that the paper disgustingly advanced the hoax on its front page, long after other media outlets had backed off.
In a case of "all the lies fit to print," the paper on Aug. 25 affected an air of Timesian authority in a damning article, spoon-fed by DA Nifong. It tried to put to rest some of the alarming inconsistencies in the accuser's story about the night she was "attacked."
"While there are big weaknesses in Mr. Nifong's case, there is also a body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury," quoth the Times. And, "The full files, reviewed by The New York Times, contain evidence stronger than that highlighted by the defense."
Will the Times make reparations now?
But there is no repairing three damaged lives.
No, I rather suspect that there will be much high-fiving over the sacking of Don Imus for his admittedly stupid and offensive comments, but not a peep of an apology to the young men who's lives they willfully tried to ruin in pursuit of their own agenda. (Astute readers will note that I very, very seldom quote the Times these days. Frankly, sorting out their distortions from reality is damn near impossible. I no longer consider the New York Times to be a credible news source for much of anything. THere may be an exception or two, but in general, they just are not worse the time.)
And when we say bad habits, we mean bad habits. A melee broke out in a convent in Cyprus. The nuns and the priests were apparently acting more like the Sharks and the Jets. Two people were treated for stab wounds and two others were arrested.
Witnesses said priests and nuns were involved in the night-time fracas at the Metamorphosis tou Sotiros convent, some 35 km (22 miles) south east of the Cypriot capital Nicosia.
Disputes there have been simmering for months over control of its speculated vast wealth.
The people injured and those arrested were laymen, police said. "Two required stitches for head injuries inflicted by sharp implements and two were detained for obstructing police," a police source told Reuters.
A turf war in a convent? Gee, officer Krupke, where are you when we need you?
Gee, Officer Krupke, we're very upset;
We never had the love that ev'ry child oughta get.
We ain't no delinquents,
We're misunderstood.
Deep down inside us there is good!
(West Side Story, Gee, Officer Krupke)
Do you need something to fill the time during the weekend? Are you one of those people with a need to keep busy with projects? Are you a real, hardcore, weekend warrior in the home improvement wars? Then we have just the project for you!
Nail yourself to the nearest wall with a cheap nailgun ! Join the other 37,000 weekend warriors who do so annually.
Since 1991, nailgun injuries have risen about 200 percent, the CDC said in its weekly report on death and disease.
"This increase likely corresponds to an increase in availability during the 1990s of inexpensive pneumatic nail guns and air compressors (to power the nail guns) in home hardware stores; however, no sales data are available for confirmation," the CDC reported.
But when the CDC looked at who was getting injured, it became clear that the number of work-related nailgun injuries had stayed stable since 1998. It was consumer-related injuries that had soared.
"During the 5-year period 2001-2005, an average of approximately 37,000 patients with injuries related to nail-gun use were treated annually in emergency departments, with 40 percent of injuries occurring among consumers," the report read.
Years ago, I worked with a very early nailgun. It was heavy as heck, very awkward to use but would launch a 16-penny coated sinker a real long ways if you defeated the safeties.
Not that we ever did anything remotely like that, mind you. (Kids, don't try this at home. Go to a friend's house.)
Well, the seals are eating people again. Or at least trying to. We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have been reporting on the man-eating flippered warriors of the Animal Uprising™ for a while now. But now, they are going after the surfers . Dude. And kayakers, dogs and other seals also apparently taste pretty good to them as well.
The 2,000-pound lone male is seen frequently at the Russian River outlet to the Pacific, and local marine recreational outlets are warning the public about the seal's aggression.
On Easter Sunday, the seal grabbed an 80-pound pit bull and only let her go after he was attacked by the dog's owner.
"I was throwing a stick in the water for the dog," Angel Garcia said. The dog "started to shake when this torpedo thing launched itself out of the water and grabbed her."
On Tuesday, Nibbles growled at a kayaker, scaring him out of the water, said Suki Waters of Water Treks, a kayaking tour company.
Surf shop worker Craig Henderson said the seal and local surfers share the same turf. "It is scary when he jumps in the water with you. He is huge, like a VW bug or something," he said.
Brit Horn, a California State Parks lifeguard, said the seal has been seen killing smaller harbor seals. They've now moved to other areas along the Sonoma County coast.
We have been warning about this for a while now. Well, we try to anyway. We keep getting disconnected right after we tell them who's calling. Perhaps the authorities should check their phone systems - something appears to be wrong with them.
Stuart Benjamin, writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, points out just how unusual the statement made by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper yesterday really was. By declaring that the three accused Duke lacrosse players were, in fact, innocent of any crime, he essentially gave them complete vindication.
He could have said that there was insufficient evidence, and that he would not go beyond that characterization because no further statement about the strength of the evidence was necessary for his decision. And I imagine that his political advisors probably told him that this would be the politically safe route to take (I can see counter-arguments, but my guess is that would have been their advice).
I find it remarkable, then, that he went so much further, saying that the accused players were in fact innocent, that there was no credible evidence against them, that the accuser's many different statements could not be rectified and that she contradicted herself, etc. This was not a garden-variety statement about insufficient evidence but instead was about as complete a vindication as the defendants could have imagined. Indeed, I think that Cooper said just about everything that the defendants could have wanted. Cooper must have really been convinced.
Prediction: Nifong will be disbarred very shortly. He'll be lucky to escape criminal charges over his conduct. But the lawsuits will be devastating against him. He literally has no defense whatsoever at this point. Cooper saw to that pretty thoroughly.
Oh, sure. They report on the orangutans at Zoo Atlanta playing video games in an approving tone. They make it sound like a good thing.
The orangutans use a touch screen built into a tree-like structure that blend in with their zoo habitat. Visitors watch from a video monitor in front of the exhibit.
"That's so cool," Jeri McCarthy told her three daughters as Bernas drew a red, blue and yellow picture on the screen. "He can't get enough!"
Zoo officials hope the exhibit will raise awareness of the rapidly diminishing wild orangutan population, which is on track to completely disappear in the next decade, and potentially provide keys to their survival.
"The more we understand about orangutan's cognitive processes, the more we'll understand about what they need to survive in the wild," said Tara Stoinski, manager of conservation partnerships for the zoo. "It enables us to show the public how smart they are."
In one game, orangutans choose identical photographs or match orangutan sounds with photos of the animals — correct answers are rewarded with food pellets. Another game lets them draw pictures by moving their hands and other body parts around the screen. Printouts of their masterpieces are on display in the zoo.
But our informants tell us that there is another, darker, side to this story. The orangutans are actually agents of the Animal Uprising™. At night, when nobody is watching them, they use their computers to get on the internet. They are playing internet poker and winning big money which is being funneled to the animal overlords to finance their plots. It turns out that orangutans are very good at poker. The chimpanzees, meanwhile, are actually running a spam ring which dumps comment and trackback spam onto blogs. As for the spider monkeys, our code of conduct here in the Crabitat forbids us from discussing what they are doing. Let's just say it's a new low in the "adult entertainment" industry.
In one easy step. Have your lawyers send a letter demanding that a blogger take down a post. This will buy you all the bad publicity in the world - for free! You'll be the subject of countless blog posts, more - and much worse - information about you will be strewn about the internet. People will even post all of your Better Business Bureau complaints - which are extensive and not exactly glowing references for your business. Big blogs with enormous readerships will give their many, many readers all the details and links to various things you probably wish nobody had ever seen.
Big, powerful law firms like Nashville's King & Ballow really ought to hire someone with journalistic and new media experience to advise them on how to handle clients who complain about things published by bloggers. Then they wouldn't do stupid things like issue threats of libel suits that they can't win against bloggers who, it turns out, have lots of friends willing to make the law firm and its client look bad for it..
That thought occurred to me as I read that Nashville blogger Katherine Coble is being threatened by the powerful Nashville law firm King & Ballow with a libel lawsuit unless she removes from her blog something she wrote that offended one of the law firm's clients. King & Ballow sent Coble a "demand letter" demanding she take down a post she published. K&B and the client - the headhunter firm JL Kirk Associates - are already getting blowback - and it's only going to get worse as word of the case spreads throughout the blogosphere.
But, hey, if you're really out to see your own business destroyed, this is definitely the way to go!
Media | Gaius Thursday, 12 April , 2007 | 
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