A man who believed he bore the “mark of the beast” amputated one of his hands, put it in a microwave and summoned authorities, Kootenai County sheriff’s deputies say.
I’m a bit mystified about why he called the police. Shouldn’t he have called an exorcist? Hat tip: Ace (who has additional info on priorities).
Bob Krumm has a crystal ball:
If Hillary Clinton ekes out a win over Barack Obama in New Hampshire after being down in the polls and dismissed by the pundits, you can bet that the word “DIEBOLD†will start to appear quite frequently next to the name Clinton.
And whattaya know? He was right!
However, for those in the media interested in actual concerns about the integrity of today’s NH Primary, we’d strongly recommend the following video primer. In it, you’ll learn that the Diebold optical-scan system used across most of New Hampshire (some 40% of precincts still count paper ballots by hand, at the precinct), can be easily rigged by insiders, and only if the paper ballots are properly audited by hand, in some fashion, can the results of the op-scanners be trusted in any way, shape or form.
Reporters would do well to take note, particularly given the tightness of the race at this hour on the Democratic side, between Obama and Clinton — curious, given the final Zogby polling numbers which were dead-on on the Republican side, but so far, seem wildly off on the Dem side. Zogby’s numbers had predicted an Obama blowout, 42/29 over Clinton.
And he’s not the only one. There’s this:
I don’t intend to sound off alarm bells, but the question does need to be asked, as we have seen signs of this in the past, such as in Ohio during the 2004 general election. I just spent the last two hours putting together a spreadsheet of the Democratic results of the NH primary for each town with almost all but a few towns reporting, and the results were somewhat surprising. (Note: This is also without including nearly 2500 write-ins due to time constraints.)
I say “somewhat” because some people will say this entirely foreseeable. What the informal statistics show is that Hillary Clinton received a 4.5% boost in towns using Diebold voting machines compared to towns that didn’t. Meanwhile, Obama was hurt in these towns showing a 2.5% decrease in the Diebold towns.
And another. I’m quite sure similar paranoid delusions will pop up all over the web over the next couple of days. Cadillac Tight is tracking Diebold conspiracy insanity on the nutroots sites so you don’t have to.
Maybe I’ll have to reassess karma. After fifteen years of the Clintons’ feeding nutty conspiracy nonsense, it’s come back to bite Hillary. How long will it be before the moonbats start speculating that Karl Rove is helping the Clintons here?
Background info: The British government lost two CDs containing the personal information of 25 million Brits. Our idjit, a TV journalist, one Jeremy Clarkson, poo-pooed the loss of all these data, and, well, here’s the story (emphases mine):
The Top Gear host revealed his account numbers after rubbishing the furore over the loss of 25 million people’s personal details on two computer discs.
He wanted to prove the story was a fuss about nothing.
But Clarkson admitted he was “wrong” after he discovered a reader had used the details to create a £500 direct debit to the charity Diabetes UK.
Clarkson published details of his Barclays account in the Sun newspaper, including his account number and sort code. He even told people how to find out his address.
“All you’ll be able to do with them is put money into my account. Not take it out. Honestly, I’ve never known such a palaver about nothing,” he told readers.
But he was proved wrong, as the 47-year-old wrote in his Sunday Times column.
“I opened my bank statement this morning to find out that someone has set up a direct debit which automatically takes £500 from my account,” he said.
So how st00pid do you have to be to publish your financial information, including your account number, in the paper? And how st00pid do you have to be to believe that nothing will happen if you publish your account number in the paper? And how does such a breathtakingly st00pid person get a job as a talking head on TV?
But the bigger idjits are the House of Commons and the EU. The article continues with:
“The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again.
There you go! The “Data Protection Act,” one of those four thousand-and-some page laws, prevents the bank from tracking the thief because it protects the thief’s privacy! Way to go there, Euroweenies!
And there we have one of the many fundamental problems with the “Make a law!” solution to everything. Repeat after me:
Legislators are st00pid. Therefore, laws that legislators write and pass will be st00pid.
Bureaucrats are st00pid. Therefore, they will enforce laws st00pidly.
There, that was easy, wasn’t it? And the next time you start squealing about privacy, think about this privacy legislation that protects the privacy of the thief.
The good news: It looked like the hard drive was corrupted, but it isn’t. The desktop isn’t dead (though it is a piece of crap).
The bad news: It could either be a hardware problem (conflicting printer driver, though I’ve had that printer and driver installed for two years now), or a trojan shutting down the system externally. I’ve unplugged it from the router, so if it doesn’t shut down, it’s a trojan. I have spybot running now. I’ll be running malware scanners all day on it, I suppose.
Sigh.
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