Saturday, December 31, 2005

Snitch of the Week: 12/18 - 12/24



There are Webcam whores, and then there are Webcam whores.

Justin Berry's story of becoming a child porn star (alternate link) by selling himself through his webcam and how his father helped pimp him out is not exactly easy reading, but it's worth the time.

But it brings up the ever present questions as to why the hell his mother didn't know what was going on, the role of technology and children as well as the idea of objective reporting in the face of shitty things happening.

The Times reporter on the case, Kurt Eichenwald, became pretty involved in it all. He ended up convincing Justin to snitch on everyone in his child porn ring and stop his own business as well.

Some retard on Slate had the nerve to call him out on it.

I guess it would have been better to maintain some fantastical notion of neutrality while little kids were getting molested all around him? Even despite the fact that the article has shaken up the kiddy porn industry?

Between the investigation and the Justin's information the Times got the names and credit card numbers of over 1,500 people who paid for child pornography and an analysis showed that many of them were doctors, lawyers, businessmen and teachers.

Surprise, surprise.

Justin berry, for bringing down thousands of perverts and opening up a world I won't be reading up on any more, you are the Snitch of the Week.

Sunday, December 25, 2005

Snitch of the Week: 12/11 - 12/17



So many snitches, so few weeks.

This week's snitch is particularly relevant to me because of the end of the year surge democracy has been making.

Whether it is Hamas surging in the Palestinian elections, Sunni Muslims crying foul over the Iraqi elections or growing evidence of civilian spying in the good ole US of A, the idea of "true democracy" is having some problems.

But nowhere is struggling with democractic growing pains worse than China. With its 1 billion + people, even their minor problems are major.

So this is why I'm giving a little shine to Gao Zhisheng.

As a civil liberties lawyer, he's fighting enormous battle and odds against a government that has no problems with a troublemaker disappearing in the middle of the night.

And the way he came up isn't anything to scoff at either.

"Mr. Gao was born in a cave. His family lived in a mud-walled home dug out of a hillside in the loess plateau in Shaanxi Province, in northwestern China. His father died at age 40. For years the boy climbed into bed at dusk because his family could not afford oil for its lamp, he recalled.

Nor could they pay for elementary school for Mr. Gao and his six siblings. But he said he listened outside the classroom window. Later, with the help of an uncle, he attended junior high and became adept enough at reading and writing to achieve what was then his dream: to join the People's Liberation Army.

He scraped together the funds to take a self-taught course on the law. The course mostly required a prodigious memory for titles and clauses, which he had. He passed the tests easily. Anticipating a future as a public figure, he took walks in the early morning light, pretending fields of wheat were auditoriums full of important officials. He delivered full-throated lectures to quivering stalks.

By the late 1990's, though based in remote Xinjiang, he developed a winning reputation. He represented the family of a boy who sank into a coma when a doctor mistakenly gave him an intravenous dose of ethanol. He won a $100,000 payout, then a headline-generating sum, in a case involving a boy who had lost his hearing in a botched operation."


Damn homie...

He's been driven underground recently after the internal secret police told him "You must be proud of what you have achieved as a lawyer after your self-study. Certainly you must be worried should something happen to derail that" during a visit to his home.

I'm a little disturbed by his recent conversion to Christianity, which in China, is done through underground churches with customized Bibles and preachers claiming to be the second coming of Christ.

But another than that, Gao Zhisheng, for your Chinese brand of gulliness and government opposition, we here at Start Snitching award you Snitch of the Week.

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Well all you had to do was ask



So Joey Ratz, or as he is better known, Pope Benedict XVI, has finally went and done what no one else had the sense to do.

He asked for peace in Middle East, which isn't special per se, but he went and did it on Jesus' birthday!

It's all about timing.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

So hood, they can't help it

I think I lose my official blogger license if I don't link or share this Chronic of Narnia clip from SNL.
So here it goes.

"Lazy Sunday" (Need Flash)

You Dead Wrong


(Still getting niggas shot)

Eight years after his death, three posthumous albums and 480,323 shot rappers later, nobody has learned a damn thing.

Three negroes done got themselves stabbed and three others got themselves shot at an album release party for Biggie's horrible "Duets" album.

The violence erupted when angry rappers realized their verse didn't get on the album when so many other garbage verses did.

Puffy, let the dude go. I don't need a fifth remix of "Nasty Boy" with Nelly sing/rapping all over the damn place.

He's nasty, I get it.

Now pardon me, pass the safe, before I blaze the place.

And here's six shots just in case.

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Go 'head South Korea!



The three major South Korea cell phone carriers have agreed to standardize the peripherals on cell phones.

And it's about damn time these companies realize that standards just make sense.

The simplicity of one standard is why USB devices are so popular, and why Wi-Fi has been adopted so quickly.

There is not one Wi-Fi for Cablevision and other for Verizon.

The shit just works.

However most tech companies would rather divide the market so consumers are forced to buy hundreds of dollars of crap with each new cell phone or to stick with one brand for life.

Imagine the three major U.S. carriers, Nokia, Motorola and Samsung, all having interchangeable headsets, earphones and battery chargers.

The sweet unity of it all.

Eye KaNt ReEd!


(But I'm still happy)

If you've have ever tried to participate amongst the masses or followed election results, you can attest to the fact that most people are just generally stupid.

It's not a well hidden secret.
But how stupid?

This stupid.
And this stupid too.

So out of the 218 million adult Americans (18 years or older) out there, 30 million have below basic English comprehension and 11 million are straight-up "I can't understand the brilliance of Startsnitching.com illiterate."

And one of them is an American Idol. Although the viewers of that show just want someone like them to win.

This illiteracy cuts across all lines, as it has affected all American on every level of education.
From the article

"Perhaps most sobering was that adult literacy dropped or was flat across every level of education, from people with graduate degrees to those who dropped out of high school."

As further evidence I enter Exhibit A, an authentic letter of supreme illiteracy from an American adult.
All names have been blurred to protect the stupid.




Step it up America.
Or there won't be anyone here worth spying on.

Monday, December 19, 2005

Snitch of the Week: 12/4 - 12/10




If you follow politics at all then you know about Diebold, the company that makes easily hackable voting machines with closed-source software, untraceable non-paper ballots, and digitally unverified results as well as their mysterious machine malfunctions and dubious record of bipartisanship.

Well I guess someone at the company wasn't too pleased with their track record because recently an insider at Diebold Election Systems blew the whistle on the company's knowledge of their faulty electronic voting system and clandestine culture, which they were recently sued for and had a CEO resign over.

Claiming that the company constantly breaks state election laws by issuing unauthorized patches, tinkers with the software to prevent paper trails of votes and lowers the quality of the machines to keep themselves involved through technical support; the whistleblower tells what everyone pretty much expected, but from an insiders view.

"Dieb-Throat" for your witty alias and insightful, if late, act of snitching, we here at Start Snitching award you the Snitch of the Week award.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Tinfoil shortages across the land



Peep how your cell phone acts as a homing device.

And how Bush wants to utilize said homing powers.

The 9/11 report shows that some people clearly need to be spied on, but that necessity needs to be weighed against the fact that there is a lot of obvious ass information that the government passes over to go out of their way and spy on weird liberal groups and library patrons.

That whole Boost Mobile "Where You At?" campaign takes on a brand new meaning.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Is it too late to return this?



I picked up one of these two years ago because all the cool kids wanted one and um, things haven't gone that well since then.
I thought if I got him everything would be better but its not.

I was looking around the store the other day and I saw one of these.



I was just wondering if it is too late to change my crazy ass Muslim leaders?
_________________________________________________________

Is Bush's Christmas list looking something like that this year?

Two years to the exact day of Saddam's capture on Dec. 14, 2003, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went and denied the Holocaust on Dec. 14, 2005.

Plain and simple, Iran is a problem.

The coincidental timing of these two events is evidence enough for a cosmic exchange.

Two years is long enough to learn a lesson.
There are crazier Muslims than Saddam.
I'd let it slide.

Snitch of the Week: 11/27 - 12/3



Two British men, David Keogh and Leo O' Connor
, have been charged with violating the Official Secrets Act by leaking a document that revealed a private conversation between Bush and Blair. In this document it is believed Bush presented the notion of bombing the headquarters of the Al-Jazeera satellite channel.


Having seen Control Room, an interesting if somewhat stilted documentary on the Middle East media situation, the record number of journalists killed in Iraq and with the recent discovery of the military planting news stories in the Iraqi media, this isn't exactly the hardest thing to believe.

Many Muslims in these Middle Eastern countries believe all types of paranoid conspiracy theories about the U.S. and Israel as it. Pre-Iraq II there were interviews with "Arabs-on-the-street" where they purported Bush to be in kahoots with Sadam in order to have a reason to invade Iraq and everyone has heard the "Jews were behind 9-11!" theories by now. All we need is for something as great as "The U.S. blows up Arab news stations" to actually be confirmed.

David Keogh and Leo O' Connor, for risking your lives and freedom to get some revealing, if obvious, information out to the public, we here at Start Snitching award you the Snitch of the Week award.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

It's been a long time...



Well we were experiencing technical difficulties but that's all over now. I had some downtime due my personal battle with Windows XP but I won.
In the mean time I kept myself busy with
  • A Nip/Tuck and Deadwood marathon.

  • Reinstalling Windows and wiping my entire computer clean. After installing all types of garbage on my laptop for two years, and getting some beastly mystery spyware infection, the shit was slow as hell. If you can back-up your files and have your original Windows disc, then go for it. I didn't realize Windows was this fast.

  • The ensuing reinstallation of all my programs.

  • Finishing Harry Potter V. That book was dark as all hell.

  • Finishing the V for Vendetta graphic novel. The upcoming movie that will draw lots of heat, since the source material takes a pro-terrorist stance in response to a fictional fascist government.

  • A Madden 2005 binge. The Cowboys need my support to get into the playoffs, so I'm reliving their season in all its PS2 fourth quarter glory as encouragement.

  • Reading up on some allhiphop.com. After their Snitching editorial, I got a link that sent some folks my way. If you came to this site recently and thought that it has been kind of dead, well you're right. But the neglect has ran its course.
    I will be updating at least once a day from now on.
    So if you're feeling what's going on, dig around the archives and come back for some quality snitching.
    I should be dropping some Top 10 lists soon.

Saturday, December 10, 2005

Snitch of the Week: 11/20 - 11/26



The new Showtime show "Sleeper Cell" has got me focused on terrorism again so it's only right I give this belated Snitch of the Week award to Imam Mohamed Magid.

The role of post 9-11 Imam has changed and it is good that some of them are accepting the responsibility that comes with the powerful position they hold.

Working out of the Washington D.C. area, Imam Magid runs the ADAMS mosque, an acronym for All Dulles Area Muslim Society. With its middle to upper middle income and dozen plus ethnic demographic it ends up being one of the more progressive mosques in the U.S.

In case you're not buying it, they buck the longstanding tradition that requires women to pray in rooms separate from the men. At ADAMS, women not only pray in the same room with the men (although in a partitioned-off section in the back), they hold four of the 13 seats on the mosque's board of trustees and chair a majority of its committees.
For Islam, that's pretty good. Last time this was attempted, bomb threats came a knocking.

So with this in mind, it's not hard to see how this Imam would be intolerant of extremists seeping into his mosque.
He has worked with the FBI to follow up on leads, issue alerts of anything suspicious and creating a gateway between law enforcement officials and the community in starting dialogues.

Granted, the U.S. government hasn't been all that um, smooth?, in their differentiation between terrorists and regular Muslims, so his extracurricular FBI activities don't make him all that popular with different parts of the Muslim community. But in today's reality where the Muslims who speak the loudest and most violently dominate the conversation it is time for Muslims who hold a more moderate view of Islam to be speak up and Start Snitching.

For your post 9-11 redefinition of Islam and willingness to take the less popular road, we here at Start Snitching present you with the Snitch of the Week award.

Too bad he has to work with a government that may send his congregants on an unpaid vacation to Cuba, to do it.

Friday, December 09, 2005

Negrodamus Returns



Following Comedy Central's idea that "The Chappelle Show" doesn't need Dave Chappelle, I have decided to indulge my inner Negrodamus since my wild predictions are so on point.

For example I predicted Harry Potter, crack-cocaine, Hurricane Katrina, white girls with fat asses and Reggaeton.

With my tremendous success rate I am about to drop some techno wisdom.
  • All phone calls will eventually be free.
    It will take time for the financial models to be developed or broken so the telecos can face the reality that Internet calls over Skype and its ilk will only become easier to make and more understood with time and that the idea of a landline is becoming a fossil but it will happen.

  • Cell phones will be the center of entertainment.
    Nokia is blazing the way with their N Series of cell phones with MP3 players, respectable cameras and video recorders and television capabilities (Europe only.) Although the prices are a little up there right now they will get cheaper when more companies get on the ball and mainstream it.

  • TV shows will be broadcast online and on TV sets at the same time.
    More networks are realizing they can reach a larger tech savvy audience with the same ad supported model that they use on regular TV. Comedy Central, NBC, Cartoon Network and most recently CBS realized the wisdom of reaching viewers this way and have offered online versions of their shows.
    With the viewers being online while they watch TV, a relevant ad can be looked up instantly, opposed to the vegatation TV sets encourage. And it helps out those without cable, ahem or NFL Direct TV Satalite package. I need to see them Cowboys games!
P.S. Why do people in modern cities use dial-up? AOL dial-up costs more than DSL.
Unless you

A) Can't add
B) Own AOL stock
C) Enjoy the sound of screech, scooo, ttccch, 0101010, boop, zzzzzhhhshssh

You should have high-speed Internet.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Update: Terrorists still scary, some are white



(Four escaped terrorist detainees or System of a Down pre-concert?)


(You decide.)

Four prisoners recently escaped from a military "detention" center in Bagram, Afghanistan. Military detention is a little stricter than afterschool detention of yore, although the rules for afterschool detention are clearer.

Military officials were at a loss to explain the escape. One military official was quoted as saying,

"It was like Prison Break and Ocean's Eleven, but without out all the good-willed, pretty white people."

Unlike most of the prisoners held at these detention centers, who are usually pulled in for being Muslim at the wrong time, tortured and sent on their way with a "Thanks for fighting terrorism card," it is agreed upon that these four were serious A1 terrorists. And despite all types of shackles, guards and unpleasantness they got away.

Hopefully we tortured them a little before they got away.

_________________________________________________


(A ride and die chick? Eve, watch yo ass)

In one of the weirder trends I have been following, it seems more people not born of psycho Muslim influence are becoming psycho Muslims.
Check out Muriel Degauque, who has achieved the dubious distinction of being the first female European Muslim suicide bomber.
Her path is tragic and pretty damn interesting. It lends itself very well to a story. In about 5 years there will no shortage of memoirs and bio flicks about people involved in the terror wars.

Although the confluence of tragedy and alienation that fuels the Unibombers and Muriels of the world will never cease, it is worth the effort to identify the warnings signs before you have to identify the body parts.

Friday, December 02, 2005

Great. We're outsourcing American deaths too.


(Hello! This is India, I mean Dell. How can I help you?)

So America has just executed its 1,000 prisoner (Texas has a third of these executions. God damn Texas!) since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
That's almost 30 years and only 1,000 people.
That's 33 people a year.
Which is less than 3 people a month.
Which is nothing.

And 125 more soldiers have died since the 2,000 casualty mark in late October. At this rate, the 3,000th death in Iraq will occur 10 months after the 2,000th.

Opposed to the 14 months for the 2,000th and 18 months for the 1,000th death.
See a trend?

We have been at war since 3/19/03 and as of 12/2/05 about 985 days have passed.
That means a little over 64 soldiers die per month.
That is something.

Are we going to let foreigners kill more Americans than we do?
Hell no!
This is America, we are louder, faster, stronger and all that.

I say we ramp up the executions to take the spotlight off of the quicksand that is Iraq.
And if that doesn't work we can send death row inmates to fight in Iraq. That is what I call a win-win situation.

Any if they live, their sentence is commuted, but then they are re-enlisted for a second and third tour of duty like we do anyway.

I have ideas, people.
Start Snitching for President.

Princ I Pal? I think not.


(I watch your children pee.)

First there is the principal who outed a gay student to her parents and was sued for privacy violation (Start Snitching does not approve of such low quality snitching. We all have a long list of activities in high school that we would prefer not to be reported home.)

And then there is the pervert principal, Howard Fore, who installed cameras in the boys bathroom of Jasper Middle and High School in Georgia in order to "deter vandalism."

When reached for comment, Principal Fore was quoted as saying

"These hot, young, virile, pubescent boys cannot just...mmm, huh, what were we talking about?"

Given the history of school officials, video cameras and children I would not exactly want my number onesies and twosies to be recorded by an unnecessarily happy white man.

Where is the principal from "Lean on Me"?
He was cool.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Who says rappers are the only exploiters of big booty hoes?

After hosting the Country Music Awards in New York and placing numberous albums at #1 on the Billboard charts all year, country music has finally found out how to conquer the mainstream.

Songs about asses and videos to show those asses.

Trace Adkins has fired the shot heard 'round the world with "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" (Yahoo! login, IE only)

If the Nelly and Tim McGraw song "Over and Over" and Cowboy Troy aren't a clear enough indication of what is going on here, maybe should end all confusion.

Dammit people, this is part of Karl Rove's plan to make inroads into the black community!

Soon Jamal Jenkins will have Nascar season tickets and Laquisha will be voting Republican.

Don't say I didn't warn y'all.



Coming to a belt buckle of a hood near you.

More reasons why Coldplay sucks

As if the Ray J thing wasn't enough.

"In the Wednesday night episode of CSI: NY, a cellphone belonging to investigator Danny Messer will ring. The ringtone will be the song Talk from Grammy Award-winning band Coldplay. In a cross promotion deal between CBS and Capital Records, shortly after the scene airs and for a limited time, viewers will be able to purchase the same ringtone for their own cellphone. The hows and how muches of that process will be explained in a series of promotional messages that will run during the next commercial break.
"

The people who buy ringtones should be locked in a room with the Jamster Crazy Frog and be forced to listen to Alex F on repeat.


Jeezy may have that snow

Firefox-Logo

But I got that fire.
Firefox that is. (Oh, I'm so witty.)

The newest version of the Firefox browser (1.5) was released earlier this week and if you're not using it already you should be.

Download here.

It's much faster than the highly suspect Internet Explorer (which I'm forced to use for Launchcast) and the old Firefox 1.0 which launched my computer nerddom.

If you don't know what Firefox does, it does a lot and the more people that people use it the less companies will make their websites specifically for Internet Explorer (which is bad) and the less amount of spyware you will let onto your computer.