Today's Cool News

Feel Free to Borrow from Charlie

You may think of Charlie Manson as an icon of the 60's but America's favorite mass murder conspirator (he didn't kill anyone himself) is living firmly in the modern world of copyright law.

It seems Charlie is putting out another album of desultory music from his studio/cell in Corcoran.  But unlike his previous work, Chuck wants you to share in his creativity... because he's releasing the album under a creative commons license.

From Limewire:

CC is a special license that allows anyone to download, share and mix other people's music as long as they give proper credit. Recently, Nine Inch Nails released their album under a Creative Commons license, and it has been a great success!

Good old Charles Manson of the Tate and LaBianca murders has done the same thing.  His recent album, "One Mind" is licensed in a way that allows anyone to share it with others, remix it and use it for non-commercial uses.

So feel free to mix and slash for Charlie...

Rate Your Cop

The next time you're tooling through Gilbert, Arizona at 4:00 a.m., slow down.  Officer Dave Bush might be lurking around that next cactus.  Depending on your point of view, Officer Bush is a "dickhead", who may look like "Gargamell", but if you're a fellow cop you may find Dave the sort of fellow you would want at your 6 if your booty was in a jam.

How do I know so much about Officer Dave?  He's among the top five officers rated at RateMyCop.com which is now back live on the Internet.  I should also thank the police industry and GoDaddy.com for pointing out this useful site to me.  That's because GoDaddy pulled the plug on the controversial service with no notice to the Culver City company that started it.

Wired News reports:

Visitors to RateMyCop.com on Tuesday were redirected to a GoDaddy page reading, "Oops!!!", which urged the site owner to contact GoDaddy to find out why the company pulled the plug.

RateMyCop founder Gino Sesto says he was given no notice of the suspension. When he called GoDaddy, the company told him that he'd been shut down for "suspicious activity."

When Sesto got a supervisor on the phone, the company changed its story and claimed the site had surpassed its 3 terabyte bandwidth limit, a claim that Sesto says is nonsense. "How can it be overloaded when it only had 80,00 page views today, and 400,000 yesterday?"

(snip)

...the site went live on February 28th. It stores the names and, in some cases, badge numbers of over 140,000 cops in as many as 500 police departments, and allows users to post comments about police they've interacted with, and rate them. The site garnered media interest this week as cops around the country complained that they'd be put at risk if their names were on the internet.

(snip)

Since undercover officers aren't in the database, and the site has no personal information like home addresses, that fear seems unfounded. Chief Jerry Dyer, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, voices what sounds like a more honest concern: that officers will face  "unfair maligning" by the citizens they serve.

Sesto says police can post comments as well, and a future version of the site will allow them to authenticate themselves to post rebuttals more prominently.  Chief Dyer wants to get legislation passed that would make RateMyCop.com illegal, which, of course, wouldn't pass constitutional muster in any court in America.

(snip)

A GoDaddy spokeswoman says the company can't comment on the RateMyCop takedown due to its privacy policy. Sesto says he's already arranged hosting elsewhere, and hopes to have the site online Tuesday night.

Thanks GoDaddy for bringing this site to my attention.  The site is back up... although it's a little creaky this morning.

Your Daddy is a Rapist

What could be worse than having a 12-year old daughter who is a rape victim?  How about having the local newspaper report that you're the one who raped her.

From the Courier-Mail:

AT the age of 12 every child should have the right to be happy. But for one Queensland child - the victim of the Aurukun rape case that has made international headlines - life is just four walls and the same seven faces.

Held alone in a safe house near Cairns with little outside contact, the girl – born with fetal alcohol syndrome – is violent, rebellious and angry at the world.

Since being raped by nine males at age 10, she has racked up 70 criminal charges including violent assault, and has been diagnosed as having the mental age of a six-year-old.

(snip)

Born in 1995 with fetal alcohol syndrome, she was raped before she was five and taken into foster care for what was to be the first of 40 different homes due to her unruly nature.

Ahh... but that's apparently not how that last graph originally read.

From Regret the Error:

IN THE weekend edition of January 12-13, The Courier-Mail published an article, “Aurukun rape victim in hiding”, which incorrectly said that a 12-year-old child had been raped by her father before she was five. The Courier-Mail regrets the error, retracts the allegation and apologises to the father for any distress and embarrassment caused as a result of the publication.

Distress and embarrassment indeed.

Police Arrest "The Spirit of Christmas" aka Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer at Vancouver Mall

For a Good Time, Don't Call This Fellow

Dean Isenberg apparently had a good life before the real estate downturn started. He was the founder of a web site selling pre-construction housing.  Now maybe he should start one specializing in pre-sentencing reports.

From the Miami Herald:

A North Miami-Dade real estate agent was charged Wednesday with posting fake escort ads on the Internet using a rival's phone numbers, sparking hundreds of raunchy calls that nearly drove the woman to a nervous breakdown.

Dean Isenberg, 40, was booked into Miami-Dade County Jail at 12:09 p.m. He posted $10,000 bond late Wednesday.

He faces four counts of using personal information to harass and one other count related to using a computer in committing a crime. He surrendered Wednesday morning.

The cyber-stalking case began last summer when Debbie Blasberg reported receiving repeated calls at home from strange men.

Blasberg, a married mother of three, said she received more than 700 phone calls ``at all hours of the night.''

Some callers asked her 11-year-old daughter for sexual favors. Blasberg was swamped with text messages propositioning her.

But during one phone call, Blasberg started crying. The caller admitted he'd found her number on Craiglist.com.

Isenberg -- who sells homes with his wife as the ''I-Team'' -- had posted Blasberg's phone numbers on more than 20 raunchy personal ads on the free website, Miami-Dade police said.

The ads promised that Debbie would make ''you go home with a smile'' for the right price.

Blasberg hired attorney Leah Mayersohn and private investigator Robert Crispin, who worked with Craigslist to take the ads down -- though they kept reappearing.

The ads had been completed using a Yahoo e-mail created in Blasberg's name.

Crispin quickly narrowed suspects to Isenberg. He began covertly digging through Isenberg's trash, usually about 4 a.m.

The key evidence, Crispin said, was a calender page with an IP address that matched one used to create the Yahoo account.

''It's really worked out perfect. . . . It's the oldest trick in the book,'' Robert Crispin, a former Coconut Creek detective, said of the trash digs.

Why Doesn't Anyone Seem to Remember Richard Jewell?

It seems like everyday we're hearing stories that make poor Richard Nixon look like a small-timer when it comes to Presidential wrongdoing.  And yet, there's no national outcry about destroying videotapes of torture, lying to federal courts, destroying evidence, obstruction of justice, violation of international treaties and conventions, the political firings of federal prosecutors, etc etc etc.  Why don't the American people seem to notice?

Maybe it's because the big story on all the network newscasts is about this cop whose wife is missing and whose exes seem to die mysteriously.  A missing woman is a legitimate story but this insane morality play in which "everyone knows" the cop Peterson is guilty even though no charges have been filed seems disgusting to me. 

What I want to know is don't any of these producers or the lawyers remember Richard Jewell, the hero of the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing who "everyone knew" was the real bomber?  Poor Richard huddled in his house with his elderly Mom while the entire news media corps hounded him. 

Now, in a world where we expect this kind of excess from the people in my business, Sgt. Peterson is just having fun with the whole thing.  I hope that's because he really didn't kill anyone.  I hope he ends up financing his retirement on the same settlement checks that Richard Jewell cashed in.

In the meantime, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain jacking with your Constitution.

Bobby Seale Was Murdered in LA

The judge in the Chicago 7 or 8 conspiracy trial did everything he could to shut up co-defendant Bobby Seale.  However, he didn't go so far as murder... as in this real life whodunnit from LA.

From the LA Weekly:

ON FRIDAY NIGHT, OCTOBER 26, following the performance of Frank Condon and Ron Sossi’s docudrama, The Chicago Conspiracy Trial, at the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles, many in the cast were milling about at an opening-night reception for a comedy playing in the same building. Darius Ever Truly had just finished playing the co-defendant Bobby Seale in the docudrama, about eight “radicals” accused of conspiring to incite the bloody riot that engulfed the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. At the reception, Truly asked his colleagues and theater staff to join him at a Halloween party 17 blocks south on Bentley Avenue, near the junction of Sepulveda and Venice boulevards.

Truly asked house manager Tiffany Simms if she would go, but she had a bad feeling about the late-night party. “Something just said, ‘No, don’t go,’ ” Simms told the L.A. Weekly. Hours earlier, Simms had met Truly’s cousin, a young woman who had come to see the play. She recalls how Truly’s cousin was the only person to accompany him to the party.

Truly was never seen alive again by his colleagues. Yet nobody connected to the theater had any inkling of the violent tragedy that had befallen him until shortly before Saturday’s performance, when Truly failed to show up and the stage manager and two cast members couldn’t reach him.

He was so reliable and so invested in his Bobby Seale role that his failure to at least call in sick created concern among the theater management. As time wore on, their concern turned to dread. Though the stage manager began contacting local hospitals, nobody thought they should be contacting the coroner instead. According to the theater’s artistic director, Sossi, the show was performed on Saturday night with an understudy playing Seale, script in hand.

On Sunday, cast members were horrified to find several MySpace pages containing the entry “Darius Ever Truly: RIP.” The devastating news was confirmed by the LAPD Media Relations Web site, which reported that Truly and his cousin were both stabbed on Saturday at 3:20 a.m. in the 3700 block of Bentley Avenue between Culver City and Mar Vista. Truly’s cousin had been hospitalized and then released in stable condition. Officials say partygoers found Truly collapsed and not breathing on the sidewalk, bleeding from chest wounds. According to the LAPD’s homicide posting, a man in dark clothes was seen fleeing south on Bentley; “apparently after an argument with the victims,” adds a CBS2 news report.