Cheer for your rapist.

http://www.kfdm.com/articles/former-39394-school-high.html

Former high school football star pleads guilty to assault in cheerleader case

HARDIN COUNTY- by Lindsey Kovacevich/6 News reporter -

A former Silsbee High school football star has pleaded guilty to assault in a case that involved a former cheerleader and an off campus party.

A judge sentenced Rakheem Jamal Bolton, 19, to one year in jail, but the sentence was suspended and Bolton will remain free if he follows the terms of his probation.

The 19-year-old was a football star at Silsbee High School. He was indicted for sexual assault following an October, 2008 off campus party.

Bolton pleaded Tuesday to the lesser charge of Class A Assault.

Rakheem Jamal Bolton stood before Judge Joe Bob Golden in a Hardin County courtroom Tuesday flanked by his attorney, Stella Morrison, and the special prosecutor, David Barlow.

Bolton pleaded guilty to Class A Assault. He was fingerprinted and then walked out of court.

"I feel relieved," Bolton told KFDM News. "I'm glad we came to an agreement and I'm just ready to move on with my life."

Bolton says it's been a long road to get to this point. It began in October of 2008 when he was still attending Silsbee High School.

"Yes, I do feel like it was fair," said Bolton. "Very fair."

Bolton says he wants to move on with is life and get back to the sport he loves.

"College, play football," said Bolton. "Everything else I wanted to do, I can finally do it now."

While Bolton is looking ahead in his life, he also looks back on the impact of the case on the former cheerleader.

"I have no hard feelings," said Bolton. "I never have and I feel like it was just a misunderstanding."

The former cheerleader and her family didn't attend the court hearing.

Special prosecutor David Barlow says they're satisfied with the outcome.

"The State feels it's a fair resolution for the victim, and the victim agrees," said Barlow. "I think it's a fair resolution also. The State is happy he has finally come forward and admitted his guilt."

Barlow understands not everyone in the community will be happy with the agreement.

"The community at large does not know all the facts and all the details involved in that," said Barlow. "Only the attorneys and the people involved. They are the ones that know and that's why everyone who was involved in this does believe it was justice and the proper thing to do."

Both Rakheem Bolton and the victim attended high school here in Silsbee, and even years later, the community remembers and reflects on the case."

"I believe in second chances," said Winford Harper. "He had gotten into a little trouble. Trying to clean his life up. Going to church. Doing his services every Wednesday. Trying to make a difference. He was making a difference in the neighborhood."

Jerry Howard knew Bolton as a child.

"I never had no problems as far as violence," said Howard. "I think he'll do real good getting another chance. Everyone makes mistakes."

"Very ready to put it behind me," said Bolton.

A sentiment echoed by Bolton's family in a case hardly forgotten by the people of Silsbee.

The judge also sentenced Bolton to 2 years probation, a $2,500 fine, 150 hours of community service, and he must attend an anger management course.

Bolton will always have the conviction of assault on his record.

Another defendant in the case, Christian Paul Rountree, was indicted on a charge of sexual assault. His case is pending.

Earlier report - HARDIN COUNTY - KFDM News has learned a former Silsbee High School football star indicted on a charge of sexually assaulting a former school cheerleader pleaded guilty in court Tuesday to the lesser offense of Class A Assault and received a probated sentence.

Rakheem Jamal Bolton, 19, cried during an interview with KFDM News following sentencing and told us is happy and relieved the case has ended.

"I have no hard feelings toward the girl," Bolton told KFDM reporter Lindsey Kovacevich after the sentencing. "It was a misunderstanding."

Bolton said he's ready to move on with his life, go to college and play football.

Bolton was represented by attorney Stella Morrison.

Attorney David Barlow was appointed special prosecutor in the case. Barlow told KFDM News the ex-cheerleader and her family supported the agreement and sentence.

KFDM News was in court for the sentencing. Watch Live at 5 and KFDM News at 6 and 10 for a report from Lindsey Kovacevich.

Judge Joe Bob Golden sentenced Bolton to one year in the Hardin County Jail, but the judge suspended the sentence and placed Bolton on probation for two years. The judge also assessed a fine of $2,500, 150 hours of community service, and ordered Bolton to attend anger management classes, in addition to the statutory conditiosn of probation. If he does everything he's required to while on probation, Bolton won't have to serve time in jail, but he'll have the conviction for Assault. If he violates probation, he'll have to serve the year in jail.

In November 2009 a grand jury indicted Bolton and former Silsbee High School football player Christian Paul Rountree, 20, on charges of sexual assault. They were accused of sexually assaulting a Silsbee High School cheerleader in October 2008 during a party away from the campus.

The case against Rountree is pending.

Bolton, Rountree and a juvenile who also played football at the time, were charged with the assault, but in January 2009 a grand jury decided not to indict them.

A different grand jury returned the two indictments in November 2009 against Bolton and Rountree. Attorney David Barlow presented the case to the grand jury. He was appointed Special Prosecutor when District Attorney David Sheffield recused himself.

If Bolton had been convicted of sexual assault, a 2nd Degree Felony, he could have received up to 20 years in prison.

KFDM News interviewed Bolton following the indictment in November. He told us he didn't sexually assault the cheerleader. Bolton said he looked forward to going to college and majoring in Communication. He also told us he wants to get the case behind him. He thanked his family for supporting him.

(Nov 2009)

One of two suspects indicted on charges of sexually assaulting a Silsbee High School cheerleader at a party, proclaimed his innocence during an interview with KFDM News after he posted $250,000 bond and was released from jail Wednesday.

Rakheem Jamal Bolton, 18, told KFDM News he didn't sexually assault the cheerleader. Bolton said he looks forward to going to college and majoring in Communication, and he wants to get the case behind him. He also thanked his family for its support.

Bolton was accompanied by his attorney, Stella Morrison, and an aunt, when he left the jail at about 2:30 p.m. Wednesday. Morrison told KFDM News her client, and Christian Paul Rountree, 19, are both innocent of the charges against them. Rountree was released from jail Tuesday evening after posting $250,000 bond.

The Hardin County grand jury Tuesday indicted Bolton and Rountree on charges of sexual assault of a child.

The charges are 2nd Degree Felonies. If convicted, Bolton and Rountree could face punishment ranging from 2-20 years in prison and up to a $10,000 fine.

The grand jury didn't indict a student who was a juvenile at the time of the incident and who had previously been charged in the case. A special prosecutor who presented the case to the grand jury Tuesday told KFDM News the grand jury didn't have jurisdiction over the student.

Bolton is a senior and played football this year. Rountree played last year and has graduated.

In January a different grand jury decided not to indict the three Silsbee High School football players.

They were charged with sexually assaulting the cheerleader in October of 2008 during a party away from the Silsbee High School campus.

The girl says she was pushed into a room and sexually assaulted while the door was locked.

"I believe they're innocent," Morrison told KFDM News, in reference to Bolton and Rountree. "I believe they're not guilty of sexually assaulting the young lady. I don't believe it occurred the way I heard it on the news. If the witnesses come forward, they'll tell the truth and show it didn't happen that way. There will be a lot of extenuating facts that'll shed a big difference on the outcome."

Morrison said she wants a speedy trial so Bolton can move ahead with his life.

"Rakheem has received several football scholarship offers," said Morrison. "It's important for a child who can't pay tuition to receive a scholarship and get an education. The family had been working and preparing for this for years. Now there's a question because he's looking at a sentence of up to 20 years. I don't want to say the victim isn't devastated, but yes, it's devastating to Rakheem's family."

Attorney David Barlow was appointed special prosecutor to present the case to the grand jury when District Attorney David Sheffield recused himself after he was named as one of the defendants in a civil lawsuit filed by the cheerleader's family. The lawsuit alleges the D.A.'s investigation was improperly handled. In the past, Sheffield has strongly denied the allegations.

"I thought the evidence was very compelling and evidently the grand jury did as well," Barlow told KFDM News. "I was confident this grand jury would do the right thing and obviously they have by indicting it. The State is very happy with the outcome and so is the victim and the victim's family as well."

Barlow said he'll remain on the case and oversee the prosecution.

KFDM News spoke by telephone with the cheerleader's father. He didn't want to comment on the indictments and referred us to Larry Watts, a Houston-area attorney representing the teen's family in the civil lawsuit filed in Hardin County.

"The family isn't happy with their daughter being assaulted or with anything surrounding the case, but they're satisfied the system is back on track," Watts told KFDM News during a telephone conversation Tuesday afternoon.

"It's interesting that this is the second grand jury to hear the facts that occurred more than a year ago," said Watts. "Another grand jury was scheduled to hear the case in September of this year, but because of the inappropriate release of information to the grand jury from the D.A.'s office, that grand jury was denied the opportunity to hear the case. This grand jury heard essentially the same information heard by the previous grand jury. They had the Silsbee P.D. case file. This has been available to the school district and they didn't do one darned thing except yank the cheerleader out of her activities because she protested having to cheer during a basketball game for one of the people accused of sexually assaulting her."

A spokesperson told KFDM News the Jasper chapter of the NAACP is planning a news conference to protest the indictments. The news conference is scheduled for 10 a.m. Monday at the Hardin County Courthouse.

(Jan 2009)

The Hardin County grand jury has decided not to indict three Silsbee High School football players who were charged with sexually assaulting a cheerleader during a party, according to District Attorney David Sheffield.

The grand jury heard about three hours of testimony Monday before voting to no-bill Christian Rountree, 18, Rakheem Bolton, 17, and a 16 year old juvenile.

They were accused of sexually assaulting a Silsbee High School cheerleader last October during a party at a home in Silsbee.

The girl testified before the grand jury.

"The action by the Grand Jury ends the matter unless something such as newly discovered evidence arises and necessitates presentment of the case to this or another Grand Jury," said Sheffield.

Sheffield told KFDM News everyone involved in the case is a victim of underage drinking and an extreme lack of adult supervision.

"Because everyone had been drinking, it would have made it difficult to prove the allegations raised in this case," said Sheffield.

"Everyone's memory and degree of accuracy in their recollections would make it tough to prove."

A woman at the home where the party took place faces misdemeanor charges of making alcohol available to minors.

Sheffield says because the players and the cheerleader are no more than three years apart in age, state law prevents prosecution for sexual assault if the grand jury cannot determine there was lack of consent. He says if the age difference had been greater than three years, state law allows for prosecution of sexual assault, even if there's consent.

"The case has deeply divided the community of Silsbee and especially Silsbee High School." Sheffield strongly warns that any retribution, threats or harassment of the victim could result in 3rd degree felony Retaliation charges being filed.

So that was a month ago. Now there is this.

Cheerleader Required to Cheer for Man Who Assaulted Her

If someone assaulted you, would you want to then cheer for his performance on a basketball court? A 16-year-old Texas high school student sure didn’t.

High school football star Rakheem Bolton and two others were indicted for sexual assault of a child–identified only as H.S.–at a post-game party in 2008. According to H.S.–a fellow student and cheerleader at Silsbee High–Bolton, football player Christian Rountree and another juvenile male forced her into a room, locked the door, held her down and sexually assaulted her. When other party-goers tried to get into the room, two of the men fled through an open window, including Bolton, who left clothing behind. Bolton allegedly threatened to shoot the occupants of the house when the homeowner refused to return his clothes.

In September 2010, Bolton pled guilty to a lesser charge of Class A Assault and was sentenced to one year in prison, a sentence that was suspended by the judge in lieu of two years probation, a $2,500 fine, community service and an anger management course.

Silsbee school officials had two responses to the incident. First, they urged H.S. to keep a low profile, such as avoiding the school cafeteria and not taking part in homecoming activities. With the support of her family, she refused to do so, rejecting the notion that she had anything to be ashamed of. Secondly, school officials kicked her off the cheerleading squad for refusing to cheer for Bolton. No kidding.

Bolton had been allowed back on campus during a brief period when one grand jury withdrew the charges before another grand jury reinstated them. During a basketball game, H.S. cheered for the entire team but refused to cheer “Rakheem” during his free-throws, so she was off the squad.

H.S.’s parents sued the school for violating her right to free speech, but an appeals court dismissed her case earlier this month. The bizarre reasoning: “In her capacity as cheerleader, [she] served as a mouthpiece through which the school could disseminate speech–namely, support for its athletic teams.” Not cheering for Bolton “constituted substantial interference with the work of the school because, as a cheerleader, [she] was at the basketball game for the purpose of cheering, a position she undertook voluntarily.” In other words, the “work of the school” is basketball, and H.S. was obligated to put on a robotic smile and cheer for the man who had assaulted her.

Silsbee High School officials should be held accountable for their actions. Richard Bain, Jr., the superintendent of schools, allegedly ordered H.S. to cheer for her attacker.

The Bansky Simpsons opener

This is such a completely fantastic troll that it got South Korean animators to strike.

Escape from Sobibor

Watch this absolutely great fucking movie, and I will read your tl;dr articles.

Christine O'donnell: Why am I in the picture?

Victim In Fatal Car Accident Tragically Not Glenn Beck

Victim In Fatal Car Accident Tragically Not Glenn Beck

Blizzard stumped by sad loser.

Modern US President

I brought you change, nigga!!!

Patrick Stewart on baldness

Drunk History

HITLER!!!!!!!!!

Time as an Emergent Phenomenon

Time as an Emergent Phenomenon: Traveling Back to the Heroic Age of Physics

In Memory of John Archibald Wheeler

by Dr. Elliot McGucken

ABSTRACT

In his 1912 Manuscript on Relativity, Einstein never stated that time is the fourth dimension, but rather he wrote x4 = ict. The fourth dimension is not time, but ict. Despite this, prominent physicists have oft equated time and the fourth dimension, leading to un-resolvable paradoxes and confusion regarding time’s physical nature, as physicists mistakenly projected properties of the three spatial dimensions onto a time dimension, resulting in curious concepts including frozen time and block universes in which the past and future are omni-present, thusly denying free will, while implying the possibility of time travel into the past, which visitors from the future have yet to verify. Beginning with the postulate that time is an emergent phenomenon resulting from a fourth dimension expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions at the rate of c, diverse phenomena from relativity, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics are accounted for. Time dilation, the equivalence of mass and energy, nonlocality, wave-particle duality, and entropy are shown to arise from a common, deeper physical reality expressed with dx4/dt=ic. This postulate and equation, from which Einstein’s relativity is derived, presents a fundamental model accounting for the emergence of time, the constant velocity of light, the fact that the maximum velocity is c, and the fact that c is independent of the velocity of the source, as photons are but matter surfing a fourth expanding dimension. In general relativity, Einstein showed that the dimensions themselves could bend, curve, and move. The present theory extends this principle, postulating that the fourth dimension is moving independently of the three spatial dimensions, distributing locality and fathering time. This physical model underlies and accounts for time in quantum mechanics, relativity, and statistical mechanics, as well as entropy, the universe’s expansion, and time’s arrows and asymmetries in all arenas.

“More intellectual curiosity, versatility and yen for physics than Elliot McGucken’s I have never seen in any senior or graduate student. . . Originality, powerful motivation, and a can-do spirit make me think that McGucken is a top bet for graduate school in physics. . . I say this on the basis of close contacts with him over the past year and a half. . . I gave him as an independent task to figure out the time factor in the standard Schwarzchild expression around a spherically- symmetric center of attraction. I gave him the proofs of my new general-audience, calculus-free book on general relativity, A Journey Into Gravity and Space Time. There the space part of the Schwarzchild geometric is worked out by purely geometric methods. “Can you, by poor-man’s reasoning, derive what I never have, the time part?” He could and did, and wrote it all up in a beautifully clear account. . . .his second junior paper . . .entitled Within a Context, was done with another advisor, and dealt with an entirely different part of physics, the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky experiment and delayed choice experiments in general. . . this paper was so outstanding. . . I am absolutely delighted that this semester McGucken is doing a project with the cyclotron group on time reversal asymmetry. Electronics, machine-shop work and making equipment function are things in which he now revels. But he revels in Shakespeare, too. Acting the part of Prospero in the Tempest. . . ” --John Archibald Wheeler, Princeton University, Recommendation for Elliot McGucken for Admission to Graduate School of Physics

Dr. Elliot McGucken’s Biography: “Dr. E” received a B.A. in physics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in physics from UNC Chapel Hill, where his research on an artificial retina, which is now helping the blind see, appeared in Business Week and Popular Science and was awarded a Merrill Lynch Innovations Grant. While at Princeton, McGucken worked on projects concerning quantum mechanics and general relativity with the late John A. Wheeler, and the projects combined to form an appendix treating time as an emergent phenomenon in his dissertation. McGucken is writing a book for the Artistic Entrepreneurship & Technology (artsentrepreneurship.com) curriculum he created.



Time as an Emergent Phenomenon

Steven Fry on language

I would urge everyone to watch this. Mr. Fry illustrates the frustration I feel at people who take grammar too seriously far better then I ever could. It goes deeper then clarity and perceived education. Grammar Nazism is an attack on freedom itself.

Barbara Ehrenreich explores the darker side of positive thinking.

Yahoo Answers can be a great resource!

Werner Herzog Reads Where's Waldo

Officer Bubbles

So this prick arrests a bitch at the g20 summit in Toronto for blowing bubbles, shit you not. Now he is suing everyone on youtube, posters and commenters alike, who have mocked his pathetic ass. Watch the video and join in on the ridicule. nobody has earned it more. Also, in case you are lazy I have prepared a statement for you all:

Officer bubbles you are a jackass. You earned every bit of ridicule you've received. Assault laws are on the books to protect the weak, and you would use them to arrest someone over a microliter of soap and water. Now you are suing people for speaking out against you. The only honorable thing for you to do now would be to resign, but you won't because you have grown accustomed to the protections afforded you by your position. Your a big pussy.

All Hail Bob!!

Cleveland Tourism Videos

*EDIT* I mistakenly thought Youtube was broken. The above embedded youtube video is actually a playlist that includes the second part to this video. Mysteriously the second part has disabled embedding so it will not play on this blog. I urge you to load up the video in youtube (the second part is called 'Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video: 2nd Attempt'), and watch as it is even funnier then the first part.

The Village Sniper

Happy 400th post!

I thought I would commemorate our 400th post by spamming a compilation of talent and hard work, made possible by an idle sick day. Enjoy.

Jeb Corliss and his wing suit.

Erik Mongrain's two handed tap technique

This guy is from Montreal. I especially love the youtube comment 'IT SOUNDS LIKE A FUCKING RAINBOW!'

Best fake punt ever

Autistic savant draws Rome from memory

Crazy Japanese music video.

Watch this 'till the end. Further evidence of hive mind. The dancing scene in the middle appears to have been filmed in one take, and this is completely rediculous.

Building the Enterprise in Minecraft.

For those of you who are lost: http://www.minecraft.net/

Welcome to Libertopia

http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/local/Firefighters-watch-as-home-burns-to-the-ground-104052668.html

Firefighters watch as home burns to the ground
Reporter - Jason Hibbs
Photojournalist - Mark Owen

OBION COUNTY, Tenn. - Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won't respond, then watches it burn. That's exactly what happened to a local family tonight.
A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.
The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn't do anything to stop his house from burning.
Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay.
The mayor said if homeowners don't pay, they're out of luck.
This fire went on for hours because garden hoses just wouldn't put it out. It wasn't until that fire spread to a neighbor's property, that anyone would respond.
Turns out, the neighbor had paid the fee.
"I thought they'd come out and put it out, even if you hadn't paid your $75, but I was wrong," said Gene Cranick.
Because of that, not much is left of Cranick's house.
They called 911 several times, and initially the South Fulton Fire Department would not come.
The Cranicks told 9-1-1 they would pay firefighters, whatever the cost, to stop the fire before it spread to their house.
"When I called I told them that. My grandson had already called there and he thought that when I got here I could get something done, I couldn't," Paulette Cranick.
It was only when a neighbor's field caught fire, a neighbor who had paid the county fire service fee, that the department responded. Gene Cranick asked the fire chief to make an exception and save his home, the chief wouldn't.
We asked him why.
He wouldn't talk to us and called police to have us escorted off the property. Police never came but firefighters quickly left the scene. Meanwhile, the Cranick home continued to burn.
We asked the mayor of South Fulton if the chief could have made an exception.
"Anybody that's not in the city of South Fulton, it's a service we offer, either they accept it or they don't," Mayor David Crocker said.
Friends and neighbors said it's a cruel and dangerous city policy but the Cranicks don't blame the firefighters themselves. They blame the people in charge.
"They're doing their job," Paulette Cranick said of the firefighters. "They're doing what they are told to do. It's not their fault."
To give you an idea of just how intense the feelings got in this situation, soon after the fire department returned to the station, the Obion County Sheriff's Department said someone went there and assaulted one of the firefighters.

Click through that link for a great video.

This is me irl

America, fuck yeah!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKSoiDtdi9s

This video is what happens when Jamie Oliver explains chicken nuggets to british kids.



And this is what happens with american kids.

Inception Cat

This isn't your everyday couple.

Normally this sort of shit doesn't make the cut. Admittedly the line I draw as to what to post on the blog is a bit low, but its been a slow week. So without further ado...

Part of me is repulsed, but another is happy these two managed to find each other. Only in the internet age I guess. It is much better then the alternative where they marry relatively normal folks and keep their horse-fucking secret.

BTW disease does transfer from animal to human, and this is a common medium. I have heard something like 80% of human viruses are evolved from animals and transferred somehow. So, yeah just keep that in mind in case any of you ultra liberal types try to justify this behavior. Also, animals cannot give consent, nor do they have similar mannerisms to humans. The dude in the video is just deluding himself when he thinks the horse likes it. This is a phenomena called anthropomorphizing. We imagine that the animal has human qualities and understandings. Its the same thing you see when a batshit insane old lady talks to her cat. Animals don't give consent to other animals either, but we are human and we expect a little more from each other.

Belgian children's programming.

If World War 1 were a bar fight...

Germany, Austria and Italy are standing together in the middle of a pub when Serbia bumps into Austria and spills Austria’s pint.

Austria demands Serbia buy it a complete new suit because there are splashes on its trouser leg.

Germany expresses its support for Austria’s point of view.

Britain recommends that everyone calm down a bit.

Serbia points out that it can’t afford a whole suit, but offers to pay for the cleaning of Austria’s trousers.

Russia and Serbia look at Austria.

Austria asks Serbia who it’s looking at.

Russia suggests that Austria should leave its little brother alone.

Austria inquires as to whose army will assist Russia in compelling it to do so.

Germany appeals to Britain that France has been looking at it, and that this is sufficiently out of order that Britain should not intervene.

Britain replies that France can look at who it wants to, that Britain is looking at Germany too, and what is Germany going to do about it?

Germany tells Russia to stop looking at Austria, or Germany will render Russia incapable of such action.

Britain and France ask Germany whether it’s looking at Belgium.

Turkey and Germany go off into a corner and whisper. When they come back, Turkey makes a show of not looking at anyone.

Germany rolls up its sleeves, looks at France, and punches Belgium.

France and Britain punch Germany. Austria punches Russia. Germany punches Britain and France with one hand and Russia with the other.

Russia throws a punch at Germany, but misses and nearly falls over. Japan calls over from the other side of the room that it’s on Britain’s side, but stays there. Italy surprises everyone by punching Austria.

Australia punches Turkey, and gets punched back. There are no hard feelings because Britain made Australia do it.

France gets thrown through a plate glass window, but gets back up and carries on fighting. Russia gets thrown through another one, gets knocked out, suffers brain damage, and wakes up with a complete personality change.

Italy throws a punch at Austria and misses, but Austria falls over anyway. Italy raises both fists in the air and runs round the room chanting.

America waits till Germany is about to fall over from sustained punching from Britain and France, then walks over and smashes it with a barstool, then pretends it won the fight all by itself.

By now all the chairs are broken and the big mirror over the bar is shattered. Britain, France and America agree that Germany threw the first punch, so the whole thing is Germany’s fault . While Germany is still unconscious, they go through its pockets, steal its wallet, and buy drinks for all their friends.

A well reasoned discussion of homosexuality in Uganda

Furry commercial from France.

Give this one some time to get going.

White dude terrorizes old people with his jesus beats!

This guy seriously is a Christian rapper BTW.

Black Dynamite demonstrates the proper way to deal with unwanted euphoria.

The ethics of charity.

Bullshit Business Babble

This is incomprehensible with a hangover.

"The banking and financial industry needs to focus on the customer experience as a differentiator. This includes optimizing key operational processes to improve marketing intelligence effectiveness; identifying opportunities through analytics, and gain an enterprise-wide customer view across a range of channels; act on cross-channel customer activity by using detailed rules-based intelligence linked to process and data models; and improving staff productivity and efficiency for better client care."

What multinational published this turd?

Hint: Secret deals with nazis.

The History of the Soviet Union: Tetris Style

China's Cyberposse

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Human-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

The short video made its way around China’s Web in early 2006, passed on through file sharing and recommended in chat rooms. It opens with a middle-aged Asian woman dressed in a leopard-print blouse, knee-length black skirt, stockings and silver stilettos standing next to a riverbank. She smiles, holding a small brown and white kitten in her hands. She gently places the cat on the tiled pavement and proceeds to stomp it to death with the sharp point of her high heel.

“This is not a human,” wrote BrokenGlasses, a user on Mop, a Chinese online forum. “I have no interest in spreading this video nor can I remain silent. I just hope justice can be done.” That first post elicited thousands of responses. “Find her and kick her to death like she did to the kitten,” one user wrote. Then the inquiries started to become more practical: “Is there a front-facing photo so we can see her more clearly?” The human-flesh search had begun.


Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results.

There is no portal specially designed for human-flesh searching; the practice takes place in Chinese Internet forums like Mop, where the term most likely originated. Searches are powered by users called wang min, Internet citizens, or Netizens. The word “Netizen” exists in English, but you hear its equivalent used much more frequently in China, perhaps because the public space of the Internet is one of the few places where people can in fact act like citizens. A Netizen called Beacon Bridge No Return found the first clue in the kitten-killer case. “There was credit information before the crush scene reading ‘www.crushworld.net,’ ” that user wrote. Netizens traced the e-mail address associated with the site to a server in Hangzhou, a couple of hours from Shanghai. A follow-up post asked about the video’s location: “Are users from Hangzhou familiar with this place?” Locals reported that nothing in their city resembled the backdrop in the video. But Netizens kept sifting through the clues, confident they could track down one person in a nation of more than a billion. They were right.

The traditional media picked up the story, and people all across China saw the kitten killer’s photo on television and in newspapers. “I know this woman,” wrote I’m Not Desert Angel four days after the search began. “She’s not in Hangzhou. She lives in the small town I live in here in northeastern China. God, she’s a nurse! That’s all I can say.”

Only six days after the first Mop post about the video, the kitten killer’s home was revealed as the town of Luobei in Heilongjiang Province, in the far northeast, and her name — Wang Jiao — was made public, as were her phone number and her employer. Wang Jiao and the cameraman who filmed her were dismissed from what the Chinese call iron rice bowls, government jobs that usually last to retirement and pay a pension until death.

“Wang Jiao was affected a lot,” a Luobei resident known online as Longjiangbaby told me by e-mail. “She left town and went somewhere else. Li Yuejun, the cameraman, used to be core staff of the local press. He left Luobei, too.” The kitten-killer case didn’t just provide revenge; it helped turn the human-flesh search engine into a national phenomenon.

AT THE BEIJING headquarters of Mop, Ben Du, the site’s head of interactive communities, told me that the Chinese term for human-flesh search engine has been around since 2001, when it was used to describe a search that was human-powered rather than computer-driven. Mop had a forum called human-flesh search engine, where users could pose questions about entertainment trivia that other users would answer: a type of crowd-sourcing. The kitten-killer case and subsequent hunts changed all that. Some Netizens, including Du, argue that the term continues to mean a cooperative, crowd-sourced investigation. “It’s just Netizens helping each other and sharing information,” he told me. But the Chinese public’s primary understanding of the term is no longer so benign. The popular meaning is now not just a search by humans but also a search for humans, initially performed online but intended to cause real-world consequences. Searches have been directed against all kinds of people, including cheating spouses, corrupt government officials, amateur pornography makers, Chinese citizens who are perceived as unpatriotic, journalists who urge a moderate stance on Tibet and rich people who try to game the Chinese system. Human-flesh searches highlight what people are willing to fight for: the political issues, polarizing events and contested moral standards that are the fault lines of contemporary China.

Versions of the human-flesh search have taken place in other countries. In the United States in 2006, one online search singled out a woman who found a cellphone in a New York City taxi and started to use it as her own, rebuffing requests from the phone’s rightful owner to return it. In South Korea in 2005, Internet users identified and shamed a young woman who was caught on video refusing to clean up after her dog on a Seoul subway car. But China is the only place in the world with a nearly universal recognition (among Internet users) of the concept. I met a film director in China who was about to release a feature film based on a human-flesh-search story and a mystery writer who had just published a novel titled “Human-Flesh Search.”

The prevailing narrative in the West about the Chinese Internet is the story of censorship — Google’s threatened withdrawal from China being only the latest episode. But the reality is that in China, as in the United States, most Internet users are far more interested in finding jobs, dates and porn than in engaging in political discourse. “For our generation, the post-’80s generation, I don’t feel like censorship is a critical issue on the Internet,” Jin Liwen, a Chinese technology analyst who lives in America, told me. While there are some specific, highly sensitive areas where the Chinese government tries to control all information — most important, any political activity that could challenge the authority of the Communist Party — the Western media’s focus on censorship can lead to the misconception that the Chinese government utterly dominates online life. The vast majority of what people do on the Internet in China, including most human-flesh-search activity, is ignored by censors and unfettered by government regulation. There are many aspects of life on and off the Internet that the government is unwilling, unable or maybe just uninterested in trying to control.

The focus on censorship also obscures the fact that the Web is not just about free speech. As some human-flesh searches show, an uncontrolled Internet can be menacing as well as liberating.

ON A WINDY NIGHT in late December 2007, a man was headed back to work when he saw someone passed out in the small garden near the entryway to his Beijing office building. The man, who would allow only his last name, Wei, to be published, called over to the security guard for help. A woman standing next to the guard started weeping. Wei was confused.

Wei and the guard entered the yard, but the woman, Jiang Hong, was afraid to follow. As they approached the person, Wei told me, he realized it was the body of someone who fell from the building. Then he understood why Jiang wouldn’t come any closer: the body was that of her sister, Jiang Yan, who jumped from her apartment’s 24th-floor balcony while Hong was in the bathroom. Two days earlier, Yan, who was 31, had tried to commit suicide with sleeping pills — she was separated from her husband, Wang Fei, who was dating another woman — but her sister and her husband had rushed her to the hospital. Now she had succeeded, hitting the ground so hard that her impact left a shallow crater still evident when I visited the site with Wei a year and a half later.

Hong soon discovered that her sister kept a private diary online in the two months leading up to her death and wanted it to be made public after she killed herself. When Hong called her sister’s friends to tell them that Yan had died, she also told them that they could find out why by looking at her blog, now unlocked for public viewing. The online diary, “Migratory Bird Going North,” was more than just a reflection on her adulterous husband and a record of her despair; it was Yan’s countdown to suicide, prompted by the discovery that her husband was cheating on her. The first entry reads: “Two months from now is the day I leave . . . for a place no one knows me, that is new to me. There I won’t need phone, computer or Internet. No one can find me.”

A person who read Yan’s blog decided to repost it, 46 short entries in all, on a popular Chinese online bulletin board called Tianya. Hong posted a reply, expressing sadness over her sister’s death and detailing the ways she thought Yan had helped her husband: supporting him through school, paying for his designer clothes and helping him land a good job. Now, she wrote, Wang wouldn’t even sign his wife’s death certificate until he could come to an agreement with her family about how much he needed to pay them in damages.

Yan’s diaries, coupled with her sister’s account of Wang’s behavior, attracted many angry Tianya users and shot to the top of the list of the most popular threads on the board. One early comment by an anonymous user, referring to Wang and his mistress, reads, “We should take revenge on that couple and drown them in our sputa.” Calls for justice, for vengeance and for a human-flesh search began to spread, not only against Wang but also against his girlfriend. “Those in Beijing, please share with others the scandal of these two,” a Netizen wrote. “Make it impossible for them to stay in this city.”

The search crossed over to other Web sites, then to the mainstream media — so far a crucial multiplier in every major human-flesh search — and Wang Fei became one of China’s most infamous and reviled husbands. Most of Wang’s private information was revealed: cellphone number, student ID, work contacts, even his brother’s license-plate number. One site posted an interactive map charting the locations of everything from Wang’s house to his mistress’s family’s laundry business. “Pay attention when you walk on the street,” wrote Hypocritical Human. “If you ever meet these two, tear their skin off.”

Wang is still in hiding and was unwilling to meet me, but his lawyer, Zhang Yanfeng, told me not long ago: “The human-flesh search has unimaginable power. First it was a lot of phone calls every day. Then people painted red characters on his parents’ front door, which said things like, ‘You caused your wife’s suicide, so you should pay.’ ”

Wang and his mistress, Dong Fang, both worked for the multinational advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Soon after Netizens revealed this, Saatchi & Saatchi issued a statement reporting that Wang Fei and Dong Fang had voluntarily resigned. Wang’s lawyer says Saatchi pushed the couple out. “All the media have the wrong report,” he says. “[Wang Fei] never quit. He told me that the company fired him.” (Representatives for Saatchi & Saatchi Beijing refused to comment.) Netizens were happy with this outcome but remained vigilant. One Mop user wrote, “To all employers: Never offer Wang Fei or Dong Fang jobs, otherwise Moppers will human-flesh-search you.”

What was peculiar about the human-flesh search against Wang was that it involved almost no searching. His name was revealed in the earliest online-forum posts, and his private information was disclosed shortly after. This wasn’t cooperative detective work; it was public harassment, mass intimidation and populist revenge. Wang actually sought redress in Chinese court and was rewarded very minor damages from an Internet-service provider and a Netizen who Wang claimed had besmirched his reputation. Recently passed tort-law reform may encourage more such lawsuits, but damages awarded thus far in China have been so minor that it’s hard to imagine lawsuits having much impact on the human-flesh search.

FOR A WESTERNER, what is most striking is how different Chinese Internet culture is from our own. News sites and individual blogs aren’t nearly as influential in China, and social networking hasn’t really taken off. What remain most vital are the largely anonymous online forums, where human-flesh searches begin. These forums have evolved into public spaces that are much more participatory, dynamic, populist and perhaps even democratic than anything on the English-language Internet. In the 1980s in the United States, before widespread use of the Internet, B.B.S. stood for bulletin-board system, a collection of posts and replies accessed by dial-up or hard-wired users. Though B.B.S.’s of this original form were popular in China in the early ’90s, before the Web arrived, Chinese now use “B.B.S.” to describe any kind of online forum. Chinese go to B.B.S.’s to find broad-based communities and exchange information about everything from politics to romance.

Jin Liwen, the technology analyst, came of age in China just as Internet access was becoming available and wrote her thesis at M.I.T. on Chinese B.B.S.’s. “In the United States, traditional media are still playing the key role in setting the agenda for the public,” Jin told me. “But in China, you will see that a lot of hot topics, hot news or events actually originate from online discussions.” One factor driving B.B.S. traffic is the dearth of good information in the mainstream media. Print publications and television networks are under state control and cannot cover many controversial issues. B.B.S.’s are where the juicy stories break, spreading through the mainstream media if they get big enough.

“Chinese users just use these online forums for everything,” Jin says. “They look for solutions, they want to have discussions with others and they go there for entertainment. It’s a very sticky platform.” Jin cited a 2007 survey conducted by iResearch showing that nearly 45 percent of Chinese B.B.S. users spend between three and eight hours a day on them and that more than 15 percent spend more than eight hours. While less than a third of China’s population is on the Web, this B.B.S. activity is not as peripheral to Chinese society as it may seem. Internet users tend to be from larger, richer cities and provinces or from the elite, educated class of more remote regions and thus wield influence far greater than their numbers suggest.

I found the intensity of the Wang Fei search difficult to understand. Wang Fei and Jiang Yan were separated and heading toward divorce, and what he did cannot be uncommon. How had the structure of the B.B.S. allowed mass opinion to be so effectively rallied against this one man? I tracked down Wang Lixue, a woman who goes by the online handle Chali and moderates a subforum on Baidu.com (China’s largest search engine, with its own B.B.S.) that is devoted entirely to discussions about Jiang Yan. Chali was careful to distance herself from the human-flesh search that found Wang Fei and Dong Fang. “That kind of thing won’t solve any problems,” she told me. “It’s not good for either side.” But she didn’t exactly apologize. “Everyone was so angry, so irrational,” Chali says. “It was a sensitive period. So I understand the people who did the human-flesh search. If a person doesn’t do anything wrong, they won’t be human-flesh-searched.”

Chali was moved by the powerful feeling that Wang shouldn’t be allowed to escape censure for his role in his wife’s suicide. “I want to know what is going to happen if I get married and have a similar experience,” Chali says. “I want to know if the law or something could protect me and give me some kind of security.” It struck me as an unusual wish — that the law could guard her from heartbreak. Chali wasn’t only angry about Jiang Yan’s suicide; she also wanted to improve things for herself and others. “The goal is to commemorate Jiang Yan and to have an objective discussion about adultery, to talk about what you want in your marriage, to find new opinions and have a better life,” Chali says. Her forum was the opposite of the vengeful populism found on some B.B.S.’s. The frenzy of the occasional human-flesh search attracts many Netizens to B.B.S.’s, but the bigger day-to-day draw, as in Chali’s case, is the desire for a community in which people can work out the problems they face in a country where life is changing more quickly than anyone could ever have imagined.

THE PLUM GARDEN Seafood Restaurant stands on a six-lane road that cuts through Shenzhen, a fishing village turned factory boomtown. It has a subterranean dining room with hundreds of orange-covered seats, an open kitchen to one side and a warren of small private rooms to the other. Late on a Friday night in October 2008, a security camera captured a scene that was soon replayed all over the Chinese Internet and sparked a human-flesh search against a government official.

In the video clip, an older man crosses the background with a little girl. Later the girl runs back through the frame and returns with her father, mother and brother. The subtitles tell us that the old man had tried to force the girl into the men’s room, presumably to molest her, and that her father is trying to find the man who did that. Then the girl’s father appears in front of the camera, arguing with that man.

There is no sound on the video, so you have to rely on the Chinese subtitles, which seem to have been posted with the video. According to those subtitles, the older man tells the father of the girl: “I did it, so what? How much money do you want? Name your price.” He gestures violently and continues: “Do you know who I am? I am from the Ministry of Transportation in Beijing. I have the same level as the mayor of your city. So what if I grabbed the neck of a small child? If you dare challenge me, just wait and see how I will deal with you.” He moves to leave but is blocked by restaurant employees and the girl’s father. The group exits frame left.

The video was first posted on a Web site called Netease, whose slogan is “The Internet can gather power from the people.” The eighth Netizen comment reads: “Have you seen how proud he was? He’s a dead man now.” Later someone chimed in, “Another official riding roughshod over the people!” The human-flesh search began. Users quickly matched a public photo of a local party official to the older man in the video and identified him as Lin Jiaxiang from the Shenzhen Maritime Administration. “Kill him,” wrote a user named Xunleixing. “Otherwise China will be destroyed by people of this kind.”

While Netizens saw this as a struggle between an arrogant official and a victimized family of common people, the staff members at Plum Garden, when I spoke to them, had a different take. First, they weren’t sure that Lin had been trying to molest the girl. Perhaps, they thought, he was just drunk. The floor director, Zhang Cai Yao, told me, “Maybe the government official just patted the girl on the head and tried to say, ‘Thank you, you’re a nice girl.’ ” Zhang saw the struggle between Lin and the family as a kind of conflict she witnessed all too often. “It was a fight between rich people and officials,” she says. “The official said something irritating to her parents, who are very rich.”

Police said they did not have sufficient evidence to prosecute Lin, but that didn’t stop the government from firing him. It was the same kind of summary dismissal as in the kitten-killer case — Lin drew attention to himself, and so it was time to go. The government had the technology and the power to make a story like this one disappear, yet it didn’t stand up to the Netizens. That is perhaps because this search took aim at a provincial-level official; there have been no publicized human-flesh searches against central-government officials in Beijing or their offspring, even though many of them are considered corrupt.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, argues that China’s central government may actually be happy about searches that focus on localized corruption. “The idea that you manage the local bureaucracy by sicking the masses on them is actually not a democratic tradition but a Maoist tradition,” she told me. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao encouraged citizens to rise up against local officials who were bourgeois or corrupt, and human-flesh searches have been tagged by some as Red Guard 2.0. It’s easy to denounce the tyranny of the online masses when you live in a country that has strong rule of law and institutions that address public corruption, but in China the human-flesh search engine is one of the only ways that ordinary citizens can try to go after corrupt local officials. Cases like the Lin Jiaxiang search, as imperfect as their outcomes may be, are examples of the human-flesh search as a potential mechanism for checking government excess.

The human-flesh search engine can also serve as a safety valve in a society with ever mounting pressures on the government. “You can’t stop the anger, can’t make everyone shut up, can’t stop the Internet, so you try and channel it as best you can. You try and manage it, kind of like a waterworks hydroelectric project,” MacKinnon explained. “It’s a great way to divert the qi, the anger, to places where it’s the least damaging to the central government’s legitimacy.”

THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT has proved particularly adept at harnessing, managing and, when necessary, containing the nationalist passions of its citizens, especially those people the Chinese call fen qing, or angry youth. Instead of wondering, in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, why the world was so upset about China’s handling of Tibet, popular sentiment in China was channeled against dissenting individuals, painted as traitors. One young Chinese woman, Grace Wang, became the target of a human-flesh search after she tried to mediate between pro-Tibet and pro-China protesters at Duke University, where she is an undergraduate. Wang told me that her mother’s home in China was vandalized by human-flesh searchers. Wang’s mother was not harmed — popular uprisings are usually kept under tight control by the government when they threaten to erupt into real violence — but Wang told me she is afraid to return to China. Certain national events, like the Tibet activism before the 2008 Olympics or the large-scale loss of life from the Sichuan earthquake, often produce a flurry of human-flesh searches. Recent searches seem to be more political — taking aim at things like government corruption or a supposedly unpatriotic citizenry — and less focused on the kind of private transgressions that inspired earlier searches.

After the earthquake, in May 2008, users on the B.B.S. of Douban, a Web site devoted to books, movies and music, discussed the government’s response to the earthquake. A woman who went by the handle Diebao argued that the government was using the earthquake to rally nationalist sentiment, and that, she wrote, was an exploitation of the tragedy. Netizens challenged Diebao’s arguments, saying that it was only right for China to speak in one voice after such a catastrophe. These were heady days, and the people who disagreed with Diebao weren’t content to leave it at that. In Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, Feng Junhua, a 25-year-old man who on the Internet goes by the handle Hval, was getting worried. Feng spent a lot of time on Douban, and, he told me later, he saw where the disagreement with Diebao was going — the righteous massing against the dissenter. He e-mailed Diebao, who lived in Sichuan Province, to warn her of the danger and urge her to stop fighting with the other Netizens. “I found out that the other people were going to threaten her with the human-flesh search engine,” he told me. “She wrote back to me, saying she wanted to talk them out of it.”

The group started to dig through everything Diebao had written on the Internet, desperate to find more reasons to attack her. They found what they were looking for, a stream-of-consciousness blog entry Diebao posted right after the earthquake hit: “I felt really excited when the earthquake hit. I know this experience might happen once in a lifetime. When I watched the news at my aunt’s place, I found out that it caused five people to die. I feel so good, but that’s not enough. I think more people should die.” Diebao wrote this right after the earthquake struck her city, possibly while she was still in shock and before she knew the extent of the damage.

The group tried to use this post to initiate a human-flesh search against Diebao. At first it didn’t succeed — no one responded to the calls for a search. (There are hundreds, maybe thousands of attempts each week for all kinds of human-flesh searches, the vast majority of which do not amount to much.) Finally they figured out a way to make their post “sparkle,” as they say in Chinese, titling it, “She Said the Quake Was Not Strong Enough” and writing, of Diebao: “We cannot bear that an adult in such hard times didn’t feel ashamed for not being able to help but instead was saying nonsense, with little respect for other people’s lives. She should not be called a human. We think we have to give her a lesson. We hereby call for a human-flesh search on her!”

This time it took hold. A user named Little Dumpling joined the pile-on, writing: “Earthquake, someone is calling you. Please move your epicenter right below [Diebao’s] computer desk.” Juana0906 asked: “How could she be so coldblooded? Her statement did greater harm to the victims than the earthquake.” Then from Expecting Bull Market, the obligatory refrain in almost every human-flesh search, “Is she a human?”

Feng, the user who tried to warn Diebao of the impending search, became angry that so many people were going after Diebao. “I cannot stand seeing the strong beating the weak,” he told me. “I thought I should protect the right of free speech. She can say anything she wants. I think that she just didn’t think before she spoke.” But the searchers managed to rally users against Diebao. “Her school read a lot of aggressive comments on the Internet and got pressure from Netizens asking them to kick out this girl,” Feng told me. Shortly after the human-flesh search began, Diebao was expelled from her university. “The school announced that it was for her own safety, to protect her,” Feng says.

Feng decided to get revenge on the human-flesh searchers. He and a few other users started a human-flesh search of their own, patiently matching back the anonymous ID’s of the people who organized against Diebao to similar-sounding names on school bulletin boards, auction sites and help-wanted ads. Eventually he assembled a list of the real identities of Diebao’s persecutors. “When we got the information, we had to think about what we should do with it,” Feng says. “Should we use it to attack the group?”

Feng stopped and thought about what he was about to do. “When we tried to fight evil, we found ourselves becoming evil,” he says. He abandoned the human-flesh search and destroyed all the information he had uncovered.


Tom Downey is the author of “The Last Men Out: Life on the Edge at Rescue 2 Firehouse.”


On the Media also did a story about it: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/03/05/04

Gunman's Environmental Grudges Well Known Before Discovery Channel Hostage Standoff

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/09/01/james-jay-lee/

James Jay Lee wasn't a stranger to the Discovery Channel employees he terrorized Wednesday with a gun and with what appeared to be makeshift bombs strapped to his chest and back.

Lee, a 43-year-old California man with a seemingly religious fervor for his environmental causes, had a history of targeting the channel for its programming, most notably in a 2008 protest in front of the channel's Silver Spring, Md., headquarters, where 1,900 employees work. On that day, the protest included tossing wads of cash in the air, and it ended in his arrest.

But web postings show Lee was increasingly obsessed with civilization's "filth" and the problem of over-population, which he blamed on "parasitic human infants." That obsession ended Wednesday afternoon when police shot and killed him to end a nearly four-hour hostage standoff inside the Discovery headquarters. Lee's three hostages escaped safely.

Those who knew him say they weren't surprised.

"A desperate act to validate his own ego and opinion," is how Lee's brother-in-law, Thomas Leonard, described the attack in an interview with Fox News' Neil Cavuto as the hostage standoff was unfolding.

Lee had "a lack of respect for any type of authority" and was prone to "emotional outbursts" and "erratic behavior," Leonard said.

Lee had issued a list of demands in an online manifesto that criticized Discovery for what he saw as the channel's promotion of human birth and war coverage, and he called on the channel to devote programming to exposing evil deeds of man.

"Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is," the manifesto reads. "That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn't, then get hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! It is the moral obligation of everyone living otherwise what good are they??"

In another section, he wrote: "All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it."

Discovery Communications Inc. operates U.S. cable and satellite networks including The Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet. Discovery shows include "Cash Cab" and "Man vs. Wild," and TLC airs "American Chopper" and "Kate Plus 8."

David Leavy, Discovery's executive vice president for corporate affairs, said all employees had been accounted for. "We're relieved that it ended without any harm to our employees," he said.

Leonard said Lee had been estranged from his family for about two years -- since his February 2008 protest in front of the same building.

"The Discovery Channel produces many so-called 'Environmental Programs' supposedly there to save the planet," Lee said in an ad he took out in a Washington newspaper to promote the protest. "But the truth is things are getting WORSE! Their programs are causing more harm than good."

Photos of the protest show Lee walking in front of the building while holding a sign that read, "SAVE THE PLANET DISCOVERY CHANNEL!!" He reportedly hired homeless people to carry signs as well. At one point, he threw wads of cash into the air, sparking a scuffle among onlookers.

He was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct and sentenced a month later to a six-month probation, fined $500 and told to stay at least 500 feet away from the building.

The judge in the case had nothing but scorn for Lee's actions.

"I can't tell you how foolish this is," Judge Stephen Johnson said, according to a story in the local Gazette. The judge also said that after throwing money around, Lee could "give some to the state."

Lee said at the time that his point was to show "money means nothing. Money is trash."

The Gazette also reported that Lee had spent two weeks in jail following his arrest, including several days being evaluated by psychiatrists.

"I told them my idea of saving the planet," he said. "They couldn't find anything wrong with me."

Lee said he started his crusade after being laid off from a job in San Diego. He also appears to have been inspired by books by the environmental novelist Daniel Quinn, notably Quinn's "Ishmael." He singled out pages of that novel in his manifesto, saying that Discovery should create programming based on its message. He said he also was inspired by Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."

On Lee's MySpace profile, he gave himself the label "World Guardian," and in a December 2008 blog post, Lee wrote of "having strange dreams."

"I can't seem to stop myself from this venture. I can't think about anything else except this and this alone. Thanks for ruining my life Shannon," the blog reads. "I am ready to go all the way with this one. All the way guys!"

In another posted that same month, he wrote:

"I refuse to read anything that is not directly related to the overpopulation problem and global warming. I am searching history for clues that could save the planet. I still am baffled why this is happening. It seems impossible. I am awaiting some nature videos that I ordered."

Under the "Who I'd like to meet" category of his MySpace page, he listed, "Environmentalists, scientists, readers of Daniel Quinn, and people who want to work toward a real change."

Among his TV interests: the Discovery Channel.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Clearly someone who takes hostages should be dealt with but this is what passes for news at Fox. I know you're not surprised but they seem to be going so much harder for a political message and trying to skew boogeymen out of these crimes than they ever did before. He shoots people because he's an environmental extremist.

An oldie but goodie.

The Biggest Company You've Never Heard Of.

I'm back, fuckers!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek

The majestic plastic bag.