Holy Shit!

Some freaky stuff happened in downtown Chicago. Total chaos.

I work across the street from that building and I am telling you it was total pandemoneum. I'll write more tomorrow and have a low quality camera picture or two.

UPDATE: OK, the phone pics did not turn out well. Maybe I should carry my Canon for when stuff like this happens.

Now all the reports I have read report this guy bringing a gun, knife and hammer as weapons. Now, the knife I can understand as a kind of backup for when you run out of bullets. But, a hammer?

How Can They Be So Heartless?

So your prison sentence is "too hard"? Well, you fat fuck, you should have thought about that before you help beat a homeless man to death.

Cry me a river, you slope browed, fecal brained asshat.

One of the teenagers responsible for beating a Holly Hill homeless man to death asked a judge to reduce his 22-year prison sentence Monday. Warren Messner and three other teens pled guilty to killing the man because they were bored, but Messner said prison is too hard.

Bored? When you're bored you play video games. You go to a movie. You read a book. When you're a bored, sadistic sociopath I guess you kill people.

This piece of shit is learning that society will hold you responsible for your actions. Period. Society doesn't care if he fell in with a bad crowd. No one held a gun to his head and forced him to take another person's life.

Mom doesn't quite seem to get it.

Messner's parents broke down at the denial. His mother said it's unfair, that her son fell in with a bad crowd and prison is killing him.

"He's not getting the mental health, the schooling. He's not getting anything, anything but locked in a cell all day long," Lori Messner said.

If it does kill him, she'll be the only one to shed a tear. Some people seem to be under the impression that the primary goal of a prison is rehabilitation. Bullshit. For centuries the reason for prison is that same as it is now. It is, in fact, to punish criminals.

Yes, there are rehabilitation programs in prisons. But you have to earn them. They are not a right, nor are they the primary mission of prisons. The mission of a prison is twofold. One is to deprive the convicted of freedom. The second, which happily coincides with the first, is to remove the convicted from society as whole. This boy has been excised from the public like the cancer he is.

Fair has nothing to do with it. If things were fair, that human being he helped execute would be alive today.

Just What The Hell Is Going On Here?

This is starting to turn into a bad Robert Ludlum novel.

Gaidar, Russia's first post-Soviet premier under Boris Yeltsin, fell ill at breakfast last Friday in Dublin, Ireland, just a day after former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko died from radiation poisoning.

"I went up to him. He was lying on the floor unconscious. There was blood coming from his nose, he was vomiting blood. This went on for more than half an hour," his daughter Maria said.

Order Now To Beat The Christmas Rush

I am sure everyone has heard about the Alexander Litvinenko poisoning. Apparently, he was poisoned with Polonium-210. He ended up dying a relatively painful death as a result.

Everyone agrees that there is no way this could have happened by accident. From the Wikipedia article regarding the poisoning:

Polonium-210 - ²¹⁰Po - is exceedingly rare in nature, and must be artificially manufactured using radioactive bombardment in, for example, a specialised nuclear reactor. British and US government sources have both indicated the use of ²¹⁰Po as a poison has never been documented before, and this is probably the first time anyone has been tested for the presence of polonium-210 in their body. Andrea Sella, lecturer in chemistry at University College London, has pointed out that: "This is not the sort of thing that amateurs could have cooked up in a bathtub. You would have to go to a nuclear lab."

The number one suspect is, of course, Russia. Litvinenko had been recently investigating the very suspiscious murder of Anna Politkovskaya, in whose death Russia (in particular Putin's administration) is also suspected to be involved. In addition, he was a very outspoken critic of Putin. The current, most popular theory is that Putin, or one of his cronies, ordered his death. The difficulty in obtaining and/or creating ²¹⁰Po is cited as part of the reasoning behind this theory. It is claimed that of all the parties interested in his death (as far as I know, Russia is the only one interested), only Russia has the means and motive for this murder. And really, how hard is it to find opportunity in a large metropolitan city like London?

While I am convinced Russia is ultimately responsible, the means part of this equation may need to be reevaluated.

The radioactive material that killed a former Russian spy in Britain can be bought on the Internet for $69.

Polonium-210, which experts say is many times more deadly than cyanide, can be bought legally through United Nuclear Scientific Supplies, a mail-order company that sells through the Web. Chemical companies sell the Polonium-210 legally for industrial use such as removing static electricity from machinery. United Nuclear claims that the material is "currently the only legal Alpha source available without a license."

I'm heading over to their site and see what other cool shit I can order.

So Long As You Have Your Priorities Straight

Hans Reiser has been arrested on suspicion of Murder.
The estranged husband of an Oakland woman who has been missing for more than a month was arrested today on suspicion of murder.

Hans Reiser, 42, was taken into custody at 11 a.m., hours after Oakland police and FBI technicians searched his home in the Oakland hills. His estranged wife, Nina Reiser, 31, has been missing since Sept. 3, when she dropped off the couple's son and daughter at his home on the 6900 block of Exeter Drive.

This is big news in the OSS/Linux world. Hans Reiser led the team that released one of the first stable journaling file systems built into the Linux kernel. However, when news broke on Slashdot, tacked onto the article summary this comment from a user:

While the disappearance (and possible murder) of his wife is tragic, Linux users will wonder where this will leave Reiser 4. If Reiser is found guilty, will Novell or IBM pick up the pieces and finish up Reiser 4 for inclusion in the kernel or is this the end of the Reiser filesystem project? Will there be any future for the Reiser filesystem, and if Hans is found guilty and the project is continued, will the project be renamed to avoid notoriety?

Slashdot has ceased to amaze me. Geeks truly are socially maladjusted.

Of all things to be concerned about... This blows my mind. While there are probably people concerned about this, I would say this was in poor taste, to say the least, to include this in a report about his alleged involvement in murder. The inclusion of this in the summary seems to equate the the concerns of the state of the latest version of the file system as nearly, if not more, equal to the murder of a human being. A more appropriate way to do this would have been to create a completely different article summary that addressed these concerns.

Of course, comment threads being as they are on Slashdot, they devolved quickly into the morality of the death penalty, how many people are truly psychopaths, punishment vs. rehabilitation in prisons, and, strangely enough, Scott Peterson (started with a comment in his defense, no less).