We’ve mentioned Laura Hall, the Happy Hacker, before.
Seems as if she was up for parole again…and got turned down again.
Time sure flies, doesn’t it? Except maybe if you’re spending time in prison for helping your boyfriend cut up a body. I bet it just creeps along in that case.
Officer Karl F. Thompson Jr. of the Spokane, Washington police department was convicted in Federal court yesterday of civil rights violations and obstruction of justice.
What did Officer Thompson do? He confronted a man named Otto Zehm in a convenience store. I apologize for the length of this excerpt, but I want to give you a full picture.
Let me repeat that. Thompson hit Zehm twice in the head, knocked him to the ground, tased him while he was down and in a fetal position, and then hit him seven times in eight seconds while he was down and in a fetal position.
But wait! It gets better!
Here’s a timeline of events from the Spokane Spokesman-Review. Reading over it:
And Thompson had the support of the mayor and police chief (not Jim Nicks: just wait):
On the other hand,
It sure looks to me like Thompson and company beat a man to death for no reason, and then the Spokane PD and city of Spokane tried as hard as they could to cover it up; it took the Feds becoming involved for the whole dirty story to come to light.
The prosecution is apparently asking for six to eight years in prison for Officer Thompson, who is 64 years old. Otto Zehm was 36 years old when the Spokane PD murdered him.
Three stories from the NYT:
…
Edited to add: I don’t get this. When I preview this post, the numbered list shows as a numbered list (1,2,3) and the nested unordered list shows with bullets instead of numbers, exactly the way it should show. But when I look at it in Firefox, I get two nested numbered lists. Anyone see anything different in other browsers?
Mike Quade out as manager of the Chicago Cubs.
And, no, they’re not considering Ryne Sandberg no matter how much you complain.
I personally see this as a positive move, and am going out on a limb to predict that the Cubs will win the World Series next year.
The snark just isn’t flowing today. We might as well just jump right into this week’s TMQ after the jump…
There’s been quite a few nice tributes to William the Coroner posted since yesterday.
A couple of my favorites: Matt G., Brigid, Borepatch, OldNFO.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Anonymous may or may not be having second thoughts about taking on the Zeta cartel. This HouChron piece seems unclear. I have seen another report that says Anonymous has backed down, but that report comes from a site I do not find trustworthy and will not link to.
You know the classic joke about the child who kills both parents, then throws himself on the mercy of the court because…right?
Yeah. Well, Robert “Ratso” Rizzo, late of the City of Bell, is suing the city.
Bear with me, folks. I’m having a pretty crummy day and am going to have a long night.
I haven’t forgotten the TMQ watch for this week, but my target at this point is mid-morning tomorrow.
William Zeus Bligh-Glover, M.D.
Dr. Bligh-Glover was a consulting forensic pathologist, and an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University.
He was also known in the gunblogging community as William the Coroner.
I’ve mentioned before that I have family in the Cleveland area. Next time I went up to visit them, I was hoping to be able to invite William and some other Cleveland bloggers out for dinner and storytelling one night. I never met him (though we exchanged comments a few times on his blog), but he struck me from afar as someone I’d very much like to meet and befriend.
Tributes from Calvin’s Mom and Ambulance Driver.
Sounds like folks are sweating. And that’s leading them to make dumb decisions. The question is, how far up the chain of command does the dumbth go?
By the way, the two prosecutors in question are the same ones who got thrown out of the grand jury hearing.
I wanted to toss up a link to Lawrence’s piece on “The Decade of Weirdness: The 1970s”.
I am a little surprised he didn’t mention Transcendental Meditation in his roundup, but the 1970s were a target rich environment; if you brought up all the weird stuff from that decade, you’d probably have a novel-length post.
The story starts with Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation.
Specifically, it starts with Stallman’s “info packet” for people who want to book him to speak. The date on that post is October 20th, but it seems to have been widely linked in the past week; I’m not sure why this is suddenly getting so much attention.
I’ve avoided commenting directly on it because a) I haven’t read it all and don’t have time, and II) I’m not sure what I could say about it. There are many things (based on a quick skim) that strike me as reasonable (don’t change dates and times and expect Stallman to show up, check with him first). Kottke mentions the parrot issue: I am willing to bet that the “DON’T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me.” line is in there precisely because people have done exactly that.
I think there are things in that document that can be legitimately questioned: Gruber notes his stance on cell phones as one example. But much of the criticism has gotten personal and ugly. Dave Winer and Reginald Braithwaite have both done very good blog entries about this.
There is a podcast that I’ve been listening to regularly, which features a prominent blogger. (Not Cory Doctrow, Mike.) I don’t want to name the podcast or the podcast network here for reasons I’ll get into shortly, but there are probably enough clues embedded in this piece for folks to figure out which one I’m talking about.
During the most recent episode of the podcast, the Stallman document came up as a topic. That’s fine; it is a legitimate topic of discussion for this podcast. But one of the podcast hosts went on to assert that he’d received email from people (as in, more than one person) who’d hosted Stallman in their homes, and “had to burn the sheets” afterwards. Indeed, the title of that podcast episode is a reference to the “burn the sheets” emails.
I give money to the FSF, but I have my share of issues with them and Stallman. I thought Stallman’s comments on the death of Steve Jobs were out of line, and I seriously considered resigning my FSF membership because of them. I disagree strongly with Stallman’s support for Communist governments. I don’t much care for FSF’s recent Apple bashing. I think there’s room in the world for both open and closed source software, and I think FSF’s dogmatic approach hurts the cause. I don’t believe FSF thinks enough about making it easy for the 80 year grandmother to keep in touch with her grandchildren; I think in many ways FSF would be happy with computers as a priesthood, not as a commodity.
But I believe that there is work FSF does that is worth my monetary support. And I believe that the issues I disagree with FSF and Stallman on are issues that we can discuss and debate like human beings. We don’t need to be schoolyard bullies sitting in the dark tittering over anonymous accusations that people have to burn their sheets after a guest leaves. That’s wrong.
One of the reasons I don’t want to name the people or the podcast is that both of these podcasters have young sons. I’ve made it an ethical principle of mine that I won’t drag people’s families into things, and I don’t want to do that here.
But I would like to ask both of these men, if they’re reading this: is this how you want your son to treat his classmates? Is this how you would like your son to be treated by his classmates?
Is this how decent human beings act?