Ahab Has A Blog.

Last week, a contractor bought a bathroom vanity at a Massachusetts Home Depot and discovered two 50-pound "bricks" of grass inside. Elsewhere in the state, a plumber purchased a similar product at an unnamed "hardware store" and opened it to find 40 pounds of weed plus 3 kilograms of cocaine. Police and DEA officials have swept a dozen Home Depots in the state and found other loaded vanities. From CNN: In each incident being investigated by Tewksbury Police, all of the merchandise boxes originated from a Texas location and were distributed through one Massachusetts warehouse, Peterson said.

"I'm sure the packages were being shipped to the distribution center and someone was supposed to intercept them," Peterson said. "So that person [who was supposed to intercept the packages] either wasn't on duty that day or the packages were marked wrong."

That's why they call him "dope", right? Seriously, if the guy had some past convictions, then I feel bad for him, but otherwise, what kind of idiot would alert the cops? At least take the weed and alert the cops to the coke, right?

I know that aside from the knee jerk fuckwads who can say terminally stupid shit like this - They say let the government dictate it...I urge my colleagues to reject government regulation of the Internet - that most people have little understanding of what the stakes are. And part of that is right wing public brainwashing - the sort of "Capitalism" that doesn't believe in open, free markets, just corporate control. In other words, the kind of capitalism once practiced in Mussolini's Italy and today in Russia and China and many other countries America should not attempt to emulate. The worst kind of capitalism - no free markets, just state and corporation as one and the same.

Make no mistake - this is about turning the Internet back into cable tv.

It would be one thing if there were a market in Internet connections in America. But there isn't. And it's due to the worst kind of government interference - granting of monopolies - and the worst kind of government non-interference - no creation of a market through rules promoting competition. Even where the rules allegedly promote competition - say, requiring the "naked DSL" offering - the major corporations are allowed to flout these rules with impunity. The result is that the USA is well on its way to becoming a second-class nation in terms of Internet access. From Europe to Korea and Japan, healthy regulation provides consumers with more choice and better (faster) and cheaper selections than we have in the USA. And wonder of wonders, their corporations still turn a profit. If we had these kind of choices, I would not be worried about equal access to the Internet - any provider who denied their customers equal access would soon perish.

But we fucking don't have free market choices in the US. No free market, no freedom, protection of individual rights necessary.

Again, let's be clear: this is ALL about the kind of "capitalists" who don't believe in competition. And I say fuck them, fuck their inherited money, fuck their privileged access to capital, fuck their anti-competetive practices, fuck their bribery of elected representatives, fuck their antipathy to free democratic discourse, and fuck the horse they rode in on.

Look here for info on the software used to run this site. Initial release won't happen until the software has proven stable and all production-time kinks are worked out. The software will most likely be OSS.

I think this goes beyond fear of being yelled at. You look at national political players - press, congress-critters, whistleblowers - and you see a disturbing trend.

Take Snowe or Specter in regard to the NSA spying. Outright criticism and then... meek silence, and a return to the party line. Same with the McCain mutiny. Same with all the 9/11 probes.

And now consider the things the NSA spying might afford a ruthless power elite. There's a real possibility that the man behind the curtain has been using espionage on domestic political opponents to silence people somehow. Blackmail? A tease of enough information (true or fabricated) to say "hey, you are one of us now, you have a moral obligation to keep silent about this"?

Or both?

I think it's high time we start discussing in public how you would take over a democratic government by:

• avoiding totally fixing all elections (just enough to help)
• neutering the press (and more importantly, enlisting them to trash the few who buck the system of privilege) - but allowing "independent press"
• arm-twisting critical political opposition with a high degree of reliability (90% would be enough with good strategists on top)
• constructing phony narratives and pressing them with "big lie" techniques (e.g. Iraq and Al Qaeda connections - "no I never declared that, but it's easy to understand why people have the impression there's a connection')
• using "boiling the frog" techniques to slowly yet deliberately erode fundamental rights.

i'd love to reject all of the preceding as tin-foil hat stuff, but i can't. point by point, it looks exactly like what they are doing.

if the dems win the house in the fall, their house of cards falls. i have no doubt that election shenanigans are queued up. the question is whether democracy in the USA survives into 2007.

Nude in the News

A Huntington woman told police that an unknown man forcibly removed her from her vehicle in the 1000 block of 12th Avenue about 1:45 a.m. Sunday. Her age was not provided within the report.

The man then reportedly took the woman to the side of a house, stripped her clothing and took photographs.

A 27-year-old Lehighton man already in county prison for violating a restraining order when he scattered nude pictures of his estranged wife at her job several weeks ago was charged Monday with doing the same thing at a Lehigh Township day care center a few days later, police said.

Peter John Snyder II, formerly of of 182 Dowbush Road, allegedly distributed nude photos of his wife to people at the Teddy Bear Day Care, 4623 Lehigh Drive, on Oct. 7, 9 and 10, police said.

Police said Snyder wrote his estranged wife's name on the back of the photos along with her cell phone number and her grandmother's number.

Snyder is in Northampton County Prison after he was arrested for placing about 18 nude pictures of his wife in the parking lot at 2124 Avenue C in Bethlehem on Oct. 4, police said.

He was arraigned before District Judge William Zaun of Cherryville and charged with two counts each of harassment and stalking. His bail was raised by $22,000.

Restaurant Shift Turns Into Nightmare

An Extra Shift at McDonald's Becomes a Terrifying Interrogation

Nov. 10, 2005 ? - Louise Ogborn was always willing to take on extra shifts at McDonald's in Mount Washington, Ky. Ogborn's mother had health problems and had recently lost her job, so the 18-year-old did whatever she could to help make ends meet.

On April 9, 2004, Ogborn offered to work through the restaurant's evening rush, trying to be helpful and make a few extra dollars.

"I was just going to eat and then clock back in and help until somebody else came along that could help," she said.

But Ogborn couldn't have known that her noble gesture would turn into a terrifying ordeal that she says will haunt her for the rest of her life.

A Startling Accusation

Ogborn was called into assistant manager Donna Summers' cramped office and told that Summers was on the telephone with a police officer.

"She said, 'Here she is. This is the girl you described,'" said Ogborn. "She told me to shut the door."

Summers told Ogborn that the officer on the phone had their store manager on the other line and that he had described her and accused her of stealing a purse from a customer.

"I was like, 'Donna, I've never done anything wrong,'" Ogborn said. "I could never steal -- I could never do anything like that. I don't have it in me."

But inside the back office, which had now become an "interrogation room," Ogborn's protests fell on deaf ears.

"She said, 'Well, they said it was a little girl that looked like you in a McDonald's uniform, so it had to be you.'"

It was Ogborn's word against the accusation of a man claiming to be a cop, and she was given a choice: submit to a search or be escorted to the police station.

Listening to 'the Voice'

Ogborn was told to empty her pockets and surrender her car keys and cell phone, which she did. Then the caller demanded that Summers have Ogborn remove her clothes -- even her underwear -- leaving her with just a small, dirty apron to cover her naked body.

Summers says she never second-guessed what she was being asked to do, as she firmly believed the person she was talking to was a police officer. Ogborn says she trusted her manager to do what was right.

Because it was a busy Friday night, Summers had to leave the office to check on the restaurant. The man on the phone demanded that another employee be left to watch Ogborn until the police arrived and Summers chose 27-year-old Jason Bradley.

"He [Bradley] takes the phone and they're telling him to have me do certain things and drop the apron," she said. "He wouldn't have any part of it."

Bradley walked out in disgust, leaving Summers with no one to watch Ogborn. Then the caller made an odd request, asking Summers to call her fiancé to have him watch the girl.

Summers says she did as she was told.

"I honestly thought he was a police officer and what I was doing was the right thing," said Summers. "I thought I was doing what I was supposed to be doing."

Surveillance video shows Ogborn broke down in tears.

Two Hours of Torment

Within fifteen minutes, Summers' fiancé, Walter Nix, entered the office where Ogborn tugged at the small apron that barely covered her top and exposed her legs up to her buttocks.

Again, Summers says she didn't question the caller and completely trusted her fiancé to be left alone with the girl.

Ogborn says she wanted to run, but that it would have been too humiliating to run through the restaurant naked.

Nix, a 43-year-old exterminator, began following the caller's commands, ordering Ogborn to drop her apron, bend over and stand on a chair.

Then -- as ridiculous as it sounds -- he told her to do jumping jacks to shake loose anything she might be hiding. Ogborn says that was just the beginning of two more hours of torment.

The demands became more and more bizarre. When Ogborn says that when she failed to address Nix as "sir," the caller tells him to hit her violently on the buttocks over and over. At one point on the video, Ogborn was "spanked" for almost 10 full minutes.

"He told me I was asking too many questions, so he was told to hit me," she said. "I just said, 'Please don't do this.'"

By the end, red welts could be seen on the woman's body.

During it all, Summers periodically came back to the office, and each time, Nix threw the apron at Ogborn, telling her to stay quiet.

"I begged her every time she came in the room," Ogborn said. "'Get me out of here. Please get me out of here."

Ogborn says she even asked the assistant manager to call the police, but each time, she says, Summers told her, "No, we're still waiting for the cop."

Summers denies Ogborn ever asked her to call the police or that the girl pleaded with her.

Ogborn says that after more than three hours of dehumanizing treatment, Nix -- again on the instructions of the caller -- forced Ogborn to perform a sexual act.

The caller then told Nix to hand the phone back to Summers and instructed her to bring in someone else.

This time, she had Thomas Simms, a 58-year-old maintenance man who worked at the restaurant, get on the phone with the caller, but Simms refused to comply with the caller's strange demands.

"Tom told me, 'This man is asking ? for her to drop her apron so I can see her without the apron,' " she recalled. "And I said, 'Do what?!' "

Summers frantically called her manager, Lisa Siddons, who the caller claimed had been on the other line all along. But when Siddons answered her phone, she said she'd been sleeping.

It was then that Summers realized, she'd been had.

Police Arrive

When Mount Washington Police Detective Buddy Stump arrived at the restaurant, he had Nix arrested and began the process of trying to figure out who the caller was.

"The first thing I thought about was ? this has got to be somebody on a pay phone," he said. "Maybe over [at] Winn Dixie and they're getting their jollies off at watching all the action and the police roll in."

But thanks to an Internet search by his chief of police, Stump discovered that calls like this have been going on for more than 10 years. Ogborn, it turns out, was only the latest in a long line of victims.

After a McDonald's employee used the "*69" feature to get a telephone number for the caller, Stump learned the call had been made from a supermarket pay phone -- in Panama City, Fla.

Stump discovered that the call was made with an AT&T calling card and, upon learning that the biggest seller of those cards in Panama City is Wal-Mart, he contacted local police for help.

A Decade of Calls

It turned out that the Panama City Police Department had received several calls about investigations in multiple states for similar incidents. By early 2004, there had been more than 70 cases of hoax phone calls to fast food restaurants, dating as far back as 1994.

At a McDonald's in Hinesville, Ga., a caller convinced a 55-year-old janitor to do a cavity search of a 19-year-old cashier, while in Fargo, N.D., a manager at a local Burger King strip-searched a 17-year-old female employee.

In Phoenix, a caller had a Taco Bell manager pick out a customer and then strip-search her. And police in Massachusetts had been looking for a man who called three Wendy's restaurants near Boston in a single day.

Stump was put in touch with Vic Flaherty, a detective in West Bridgewater, Mass., investigating the Wendy's calls.

Flaherty told Stump he had traced the card's purchase to the exact time the caller bought it, but as luck would have it, the security cameras were pointed toward the front doors -- not the registers -- and didn't capture the sale.

"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law."
-Thomas Jefferson, February 10, 1814