Cops get house arrest for beating up disabled pensioner

“This behaviour we expect from gang members on the street, not the police. The idea that someone who committed a crime like this would be allowed to ever possess a handgun, let alone be sent into volatile situations requiring judgment and restraint while armed is simply out of the question.”

So said Justice Elliott Allen on Tuesday as he sentenced Toronto Police Const. Edward Ing and Const. John Cruz to 12 months of house arrest and prohibited them from carrying weapons for 10 years after they were found guilty of assault causing bodily harm in the beating of a 60 year old disabled pensioner.

Richard Moore was walking by the two constables questioning a drunk when, according to Const. Cruz, Moore said : "You’re the rich man’s army. Why don’t you take on some real gangsters."

So Ing and Cruz chased him home and gave him a dislocated shoulder, fractured ribs, a broken finger, a gash on his scalp requiring stitches, and abrasions to his abdomen, hip, and shoulder that Justice Allen described as "consistent with being struck constantly."
Then they arrested him for being drunk in public, charges that did not stick when Moore tested zero for alcohol because he has not had a drink in ten years.

The judge also rejected the officers’ testimony that they were trying to protect Moore from wandering out into traffic on Gerrard St. E.

At about this point I'm guessing you're remembering the Ottawa Police claimed they stripped Stacy Bonds for her own safety because she was at risk of suicide.

Back to Ing and Cruz and their Rare guilty verdict

The outcome is notable because such accusations rarely hold up in court, said Paul Bailey, former president of the York Regional Police Association.

He estimated that 95 per cent of accusations of assault against on-duty police officers do not end in guilty verdicts.

“The vast majority of officers are either found not guilty or the charges are stayed or withdrawn,” said Bailey, a past administrator with the Police Association of Ontario.

Moore's lawyer Barry Swadron said he doubts the charges would have been laid at all if he hadn’t written directly to the SIU director.

Ing and Cruz will not begin their house arrest sentences until they have exhausted the appeal process they have now started - which will probably take at least a year or so. In the meantime they have returned to their jobs on the force.
.

Perspectives . . .

WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU A LEMON, make lemonade. It's an old aphorism, but wise advice. A case in point: Examiner.com has a fascinating article by Gregg Clemmer, "The unexpected legacy of Washington's first Civil War amputee".

That would be James Edward Hanger; born in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in 1843. Apparently, Jimmy lost his leg to a six pound cannon ball in the first land battle of the civil war at Phillipi, Virginia (now West Virginia) on June 3, 1861. That unfortunate encounter made him the war’s first amputee.

Hanger survived the operation, recovered in a nearby residence, and in August was released in an exchange of POWs, hobbling his way home to Churchville, Virginia, on crutches and a crude peg-leg. Asking his mother for privacy, he secluded himself in an upstairs bedroom, requesting only food, a knife, barrel staves, and a few limbs from the willow tree in the yard. He seemed to be literally whittling his time away. Or so his family thought.

But Jimmy had a surprise . . .

Priceless

 What do MasterCard, Visa, Bank of America, Paypal and Western Union all have in common? They help you pay for what you want? Well, yes... that is unless you want to help WikiLeaks make the world a better place. To see the shocking details, please go to wikileaks.org/​support.html.
Original from WikiLeaks on Vimeo.


Couldn't get Vimeo to load so here it is on YouTube.
 h/t West End Bob

Signs of Stevie?

ZOMBIE INVASION!!! RUN!!! According to the CBC, which warns us in a report, "Zombie apocalypse warning in St. John's". Lord t'underin' — Newfie zombies!

The sign, which had been expected to advise motorists of construction that started Monday on Portugal Cove Road, had been programmed with other messages, including "Expect apocalyptic doom!"

A final message said, "Rule #2: Double tap!", a line from the 2009 Woody Harrelson comedy Zombieland.

Ah — the double tap! So important when removing unnatural pestilence, especially if you're not using hollow-points or ordnance like Desert Eagle .50's.

According to JALOPNIK, the pastime of roadsign hacking started up around 2 years ago, and like everything on the web that offers a middlefinger moment, it went viral, and now it's a world-wide phenomenon. And you can do it too! For instructions, go visit Jalopnik, great site, love those guys.

At the going down of the sun...

With condolences and respect to the family and friends of Master Corporal Francis Roy, Canadian Special Operations Regiment, Petawawa.

Servitum Nulli Secundus

Viam Inveniemus

A song for Billy Blair. . .

AND THE REST OF THE G20 WEASELS. They arrested too many of the wrong people: middle class Canadians who are educated and have money — and lawyers. Billy and the weasels are just starting to realize that this problem isn't going away. I wonder how Officer Bubbles is doing these days? Anyway, the Pressure Is On. Great country blues: fine B-3, funky violin, guitar, great lyrics.

A man of conviction . . .

Location, location, location . . .

IO9's Annalee Newitz has a disturbing report: "Epidemiologists reveal that black men in America have a better survival rate in prison than outside". Wow! Consider that for a moment.

Being in prison could save your life - depending on your racial background. A group of epidemiologists studying patterns of death among prisoners have discovered that black men in prison die at much lower rates than black men outside.

Go figure. What a great society.

Politically-correct delusions . . .

TIGHTY-WHITEY WEDGIE ALERT: Apparently the Saudis and the Pakistanis are on the Womens Rights Agency control committee at the UN. This chap thinks that's silly. He has a point, even if it's not politically-correct.

The Great Hamster of Alsace . . .

THE GREAT HAMSTER OF ALSACE is threatened. Really, there really is one, even though I fail to see what's so great about it, but I'm partial to red squirrels, myself. Seems there's only 850 of 'em, but EU aparatchiki in Brussels have determined that there should be nearly twice as many. As it's name would suggest, this is a French problem. A $24 million dollar problem, because that's the size of the fine. Anyway, Gordon Clark's account in the Montreal Gazette, "It's such a relief to know that hamsters are safe in Europe" can tell you more.

Social stress . . .

THE ROOT is a site devoted to the interests of African-Americans. Jenee Desmond-Harris has an interesting article, "Review: 'Is Marriage for White People?'". You may or may not be aware that black American society has been under tremendous social pressures in recent times, from a myriad of sources, like drugs, discrimination, changing technology and single-parent families.

It's a hell of a problem, and people like Bill Cosby have been calling for attempts to stop this disintegration. There are signs that maybe, just maybe, this has leveled off. But the problem affects different areas of black America in different ways. Consider that small minority of "successful" middle-class black females: finding a mate without the rap and bling and gangsta that has mesmerized black American males.

When titles for this book were being considered, perhaps Why Middle Class Black Women Can't Find a Man and How the Whole Problem Could Be Solved if They Would Just Marry White Guys didn't have quite the ring the publisher was after.

But that's pretty much what Stanford Law professor Ralph Richard Banks' Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone (in stores this September) is all about.

• • • • •

Is Marriage for White People? will have to answer to some of the same critiques, starting with the initial choice to dramatize the dilemma facing African-American women for whom "unmarried has become the new normal, single the new black," and blaming the "problem" on simple individual choices, instead of a complex set of issues with many causes, effects and stakeholders.

But we can tire of the way the issue is framed without boycotting attempts to get it right. And there are chapters nestled in the middle of the book that should be applauded for accomplishing Banks' stated goal: to tell the stories of single black women and "capture their lives as they experience it."

McKibben, Naomi Klein, Suzuki call for civil disobedience

on the tar sands :

"The short version is we want you to consider doing something hard: coming to Washington in the hottest and stickiest weeks of the summer and engaging in civil disobedience that will likely get you arrested.

The full version goes like this ...

Signed ,
Maude Barlow
Wendell Berry
Tom Goldtooth
Danny Glover
James Hansen
Wes Jackson
Naomi Klein
Bill McKibben
George Poitras
David Suzuki
Gus Speth

h/t  Antonia Zerbisias

Goosebumps . . .

UK'S DAILY MAIL has a fascinating report, about an exceptional 36 year-old Russian, Natalia Avseenko, who is amazingly aquatic, as you see below. That's -1° C water, by the way. Why is she starkers? That's the way the belugas want it.

Pushing the envelope . . .

This image, from Pixars Cars 2, showcases the reflectivity effects that the studio created for the new film. Here, we see Lightning McQueen reflecting the lights of Tokyo. (Credit: Disney/Pixar)

PIXAR'S CARS 2 is an incredible technical achievement. According to CNET's Daniel Terdiman, it's a whole new animation universe. 80 to 90 hours rendering time for a frame that lasts 1/30 of a second when projected — wow!

One of the keys to Pixar's ability to do what it does is the giant, powerful render farm located in its main headquarters building here. This is serious computing power, and on "Cars 2," it required an average of 11.5 hours to render each frame.

But some sequences were especially complex, particularly those involving ray tracing--which involves simulating light hitting surfaces, essentially "trying to simulate photons." And as a result, a huge amount of computing power was needed to process frames that took as much as 80 or 90 hours to render, Shah said. And that meant that the studio "bulked up our render farm."

He said that Pixar had to triple its size, and today, the render farm features 12,500 cores on Dell render blades*. As well, the file servers, network backbone, and every other piece of the computing puzzle was boosted in order to handle the making of "Cars 2."

* Non-IT people may be unaware that a "blade" is an IT term for a simple motherboard with RAM, that has no peripheral cards or hard drives, etc., that is part of a computational system.

A word, if you please . . .

THE REGISTER is a great geek site, with an irreverent attitude, as one can surmise from their slogan, "Biting the hand that feeds IT"— ya gotta love these guys. Anyway, Cade Metz has a fine article, "Wikipedia awash in 'frothy by-product' of US sexual politics".

The world's Wikifiddlers are obsessed with santorum. Though they can't agree on what that is.

For some, it's a word. For others, it's not: it's the result of a campaign to create a word. The distinction – however subtle – has sparked weeks of controversy among the core contributors to Wikipedia, the "free encyclopedia anyone can edit". If you find this hard to believe, you've never been to Wikiland – and you've never Googled "Rick Santorum".

Famously, Rick Santorum – the former Pennsylvania Senator and a Republican candidate for president of the United States – has a Google problem. But he also has a Wikipedia problem. And the two go hand-in-hand.

Ricky S.

santorum

1. That frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex.

2. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA)

Statuary statement . . .

IO9 has a delightful report by Cyriaque Lamar, "Bulgarian street artists turn Soviet war memorial into Superman, Wolverine, and other superheroes". Go check out the pictures. Now, there's all those Queen Vickie statues around our landscape, and maybe somebody can do a Lady Gaga, or Groucho Marx, or somebody . . .

The silence is deafening . . .

WHAT ABOUT SYRIA? Bashar and his psychopathic Baathists are chewing up a lot of their citizens, and all you hear from the left or the right in this country is . . . silence. WAKE UP! Right now, we have a reprise of the 1953 East German Workers' Revolt — on steroids.

Once upon a time, abuses like this created things like the Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion. Now, it's a different era and Mac-Pap Redux is not doable, but could somebody please ask Stevie to see about getting those F-18's some Syrian sorties?

E Pluribus . . .

WHAT IF THEY CLONED THE SUMBITCH? Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Maximum Bob's perspective . . .

IT SEEMS THAT MOST who wander into this blog aren't "car guys", which is just fine. However, the automotive business is an important part of our economy: jobs. As we all know, GM and Chrysler went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the US government.

These business failures were a long time coming, and had many sources contributing to the problem.

Bob Lutz (aka "Maximum Bob") retired from GM last year, after ramming the electric Chevy Volt into production, and then wrote a book about the car biz, "Car Guys versus Bean Counters" (Portfolio Penguin, $26.95). Neil Winton is a long-time automotive journalist, with the Detroit News, and has an interesting review, "Lutz says business theorists hurt auto industry more than UAW". Yup, it takes an MBA to create that kind of destruction.

Lutz reckons that his experience is not just applicable to the automotive industry, but to business generally. Originally with Ford of Europe (actually not one of his successes), Bob moved on to Chrysler, and GM in North America. A real "car guy", not to be confused with "Minimum Bob" Nardelli, the incompetent former CEO of Home Depot, who, after trashing that outfit, was appointed CEO of Chrysler by its new owner, the clueless finance outfit, Cerberus Capital Management, who bought Chrysler from Mercedes and proceeded to self-immolate.

"Shoemakers should be run by shoe guys and software firms by software guys and supermarkets by supermarket guys. With the advice and support of their bean counters, absolutely, but with the final word going to those who live and breathe the customer experience. Passion and drive for excellence will win over the computer-like dispassionate, analysis-driven philosophy every time," Lutz said.

"(Successful entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs of Apple and Britain's Sir Richard Branson) have a blissful lack of awareness of the analytical science of business. Uninfected by the MBA virus, they simply strive to offer a better product, one that delights the customer. They control costs, of course. And they tolerate a necessary level of bureaucracy. It's essential. But the focus is on the product or service ... thus the customer. American business needs to throw the intellectuals out and get back to business!"

He can't resist repeating an apocryphal story which pointed to a lack of quality in GM cars compared with the Japanese.

The Japanese had a reputation for producing incredibly tight fits in their bodywork, with no unsightly gaps around hood, trunk and doors. To test the car's air tightness, Toyota engineers would leave a cat in the car overnight.

"If the cat was active and chipper next day, there was obviously too much air entering the car somewhere. But if the cat was limp, listless or near dead, this indicated a tightly built car. Hearing of this test, a GM assembly plant also placed a feline in a just assembled car, shut all the vents and doors and awaited the morning. But when the engineers came back to check the next day the cat was gone!"

Strength through Joy Dep't.

DER SPIEGEL has a fascinating look at the best-sellers of German publishing during the Nazi era. Of course, Mein Kampf was a biggie, but according to Christian Adam, who surveyed a total of 350 bestsellers from the 12 years of the Third Reich's existence,

Perhaps the oddest of them all was Hans Surén's "Mensch und Sonne," or "Humans and Sun," a collection of nude photographs that includes lyrical praise of the male member, instructions for yoga-like exercises and even naked skiing.

It could be seen as a precursor to the sexual revolution and "Freikörperkultur (FKK)," or "free body culture" of the late 1960s, if it weren't so blatantly racist.

"An important Message from Elections BC".

Laila

Heads up . . .

AUTOBLOG has a report on a clever new helmet for bikers that uses corrugated cardboard as the shock-absorbing medium. If you need a brain-bucket, check it out before you wish you had.

The technology is called Kranium, and it uses interlocking ribs made from cardboard housed under a stiff plastic shell. Since the cardboard is easily manufactured and cut to shape, custom fitment is possible by means of a simple and personalized head-shaped template. This way, the guts can be cut out of a single cardboard sheet and replaced without buying a completely new helmet.

Tests show that these cardboard helmets can withstand four times more impact energy than regular helmets.

The eyes have it . . .

ACCORDING TO IO9, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have genetically engineered the world's first "living laser." That's right - a living cell can shoot laser light.

John Wyndham would have been so pleased, as well as Warren Ellis and the FREAKANGELS .

The perspective of stuff . . .

PEOPLE WHO MAKE HISTORY do so by living, and to do that, they need stuff. What that stuff is, who has it and how much of it they have, can tell historians a lot about the process of change over time.

Fernand Braudel was one of the first to appreciate the importance of the apparently inconsequential components = stuff = of everyday life, in his seminal tome, "Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800", a broad-scale history of the preindustrial modern world.

The Boston Globe has a fascinating account of progress in the examination of all these lists of stuff, by Gal Beckerman, "Empty trash. Buy milk. Forge history."

What has emerged so far is not just a glimpse of German life over three centuries, but also confirmation of a theory of Europe’s economic development. The team has already gone through 28,000 handwritten folios, representing 460,000 separate items of property and their monetary values, and by providing this sort of granular detail into what people owned from 1600 to 1900, Ogilvie has been able to track the beginning of consumerism. When did women start buying butter and beer at the market, instead of churning or brewing at home? When does the first nutmeg grater or coffee cup appear, indicating the arrival of exotic goods? Or for that matter, when do villagers start wearing an imported cotton fabric like calico? These small indicators lend support to a new understanding of the period before the Industrial Revolution, when historians like Ogilvie posit that there was an “Industrious Revolution,” increased consumption of luxury items that led to a desire for more income, changing people’s working habits and spurring the creation of faster, more efficient production models.

Cesar goes home . . .

ACCORDING TO COTTAGECOUNTRYNOW.CA, Cesar is back, after a year's rehab.

PORT CARMEN – Cesar, a snapping turtle who has lived in captivity for more than a year, has returned home to his natural habitat.
The turtle, weighing more than 37 pounds, was struck by a car in April of 2010 and was taken to the Kawartha Turtle Trauma Centre in Peterborough where he has spent the last year in their care.

The Kawartha Turtle Trauma Centre has a great site, worth visiting.

The Kawartha Turtle Trauma Centre is a non-profit, registered charity that operates a hospital for injured wild turtles. Once healed these turtles are released back into their natural habitat. KTTC also provides an outreach program to promote healthy turtle populations and stewardship. The Centre opened in 2002 and is located in Peterborough, Ontario.

With seven of the eight species of Ontario turtles now listed as species at risk, there is much work to be done to prevent turtles from disappearing from our ecosystems. But each turtle saved can make a difference. Less than 1% of eggs make it to adulthood, so every turtle’s ability to reproduce over many decades is crucial. Thankfully there is plenty we can all do to help make Ontario a safer place for turtles!

Civil rights . . .

ACCORDING TO THE CBC, Nova Scotia Registry of Motor Vehicles are in need of some oversight: "Man has licence revoked without driving conviction".

Wilbur was never convicted. His case was dismissed, but he still can't get his licence back.

Time to sue the NS Registry and the people he contacted, who work there, for personal damages in a civil suit for violation of civil rights under our Constitution?

June 7, 1975

ON THIS DAY, SONY released the first Betamax video recorder, and the video world changed forever, to the glee of the porn industry. According to WIRED,

Revolutionary for its day, the Betamax format was on its way to becoming the industry standard until the appearance of JVC’s VHS a year later. Betamax was probably a bit sharper and crisper, but VHS offered longer-playing ability, which made it possible to record an entire movie on one three-hour tape. The two formats were locked in a struggle that was eventually won by VHS.

It was a titanic struggle, too, keiretsu vs. keiretsu. According to Media College, the teams lined up thusly: On the Betamax side were Sony, Toshiba, Sanyo, NEC, Aiwa, and Pioneer. On the VHS side were JVC, Matsushita (Panasonic), Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Sharp, and Akai. As we know, VHS won, and the last Betamax was made in 2002.

Revelations?

WIRED has a very interesting report by David Axe, "China, Russia Could Make U.S. Stealth Tech Obsolete". It appears that advances in electronics may make US stealth aircraft unable to operate in airspace where next-generation surveillance electronics exist.

It’s been a pillar of the U.S. military’s approach to high-tech warfare for decades. And now, it could become obsolete in just a few years.

Stealth technology — which today gives U.S. jets the nearly unparalleled ability to slip past hostile radar — may soon be unable to keep American aircraft cloaked. That’s the potentially startling conclusion of a new report from Barry Watts, a former member of the Pentagon’s crystal-ball-gazing Office of Net Assessment and current analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.

“The advantages of stealth … may be eroded by advances in sensors and surface-to-air missile systems, especially for manned strike platforms operating inside defended airspace,” Watts cautions in his 43-page report The Maturing Revolution in Military Affairs (.pdf), published last week.

That could come as a big shock to the U.S. Air Force, which has bet its future on radar-dodging technology, to the tune of half-a-trillion dollars over the next 30 years.

So, should Canada proceed with purchasing the F-35, or save money and pick up the F-18 Super Hornet? This could get very entertaining over the next 12 months as costing concerns keep being raised in Washington.

Shrooms . . .

CRACK SHACK or MANSION?

Crack shack or mansion? In Vancouver, it can be hard to tell. Test your perception of reality at Crack Shack or Mansion?

From the Muffin Utility Kitchen . . .

ACCORDING TO GIZMODO, MI6 hacked into an Al Qaeda website, and replaced bomb-making recipes for cupcake recipes. What about the nut allergies? Have we engaged in biological warfare? According to Kat Hannaford,

Famed British intelligence agency MI6 hacked the first English-language Jihadist online magazine, Inspire, last year but their cheeky content-swapping mission has only just been made public now. And thank goodness.

As the story goes, they swapped potentially-destructive bomb-making tutorials with jumbled-up code for the Ellen DeGeneres talkshow website, which contained cupcake recipes from Main Street Cupcakes in Hudson, Ohio. Recipes for delicious-sounding mojito and rocky road cupcakes, which contained the caveat "warning: sugar rush ahead!"

Maybe Hortons can introduce new camel-flavor dognutz in Kandahar, too.

Mmmm . . . toasted . . .

24 TONS OF MELTED CHEESE. Really. According to the Washington Post, a truck carrying 24 tons of cheese got all toasted on a rural road in Somerset, southwest England. The Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Service has a complete account.

Take a pill . . .

PROZAC IS KILLING BACTERIA in the Great Lakes. According to Annalee Newitz at IO9,

So many humans are taking Prozac that traces of the antidepressant drug are showing up in the Great Lakes of the United States, where bacteria are dying as a result.

At least they're not depressed, I hope.