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Well, I guess that is one way to look at this one.
It’s not really that surprising that some people want Rudy Giuliani dead. He has been controversial in what he has done almost since day one. So it doesn’t come as much of a surprise to learn that while he was a U.S. attorney the mafia discussed taking him out (especially since he was going after organized crime).
Well, as it turned out two of the five family heads, mafia bosses John Gotti (Gambino family) and Carmine “The Snake” Persico (Colombo family) were in favor of having Giuliani sleep with the fishes. But this is all kind of old news. The memo that states this is from 1987 and was found in a file being reviewed during the prosecution of a former FBI agent Roy Lindley DeVecchio who is on trial for leaking information.
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We have another two-fer today: Stupid Criminals.
First up, we have a man in Suffolk County, NY who tried to rob a convenience store with a gun. Unfortunately it was either a toy gun or he was totally unwilling to use it (which technically wouldn’t be unfortunate, though if you are going to rob a store at gun point you might want to be prepared to follow through). The guy approached the counter waving his gun and demanded the money in the register. Hafize Sahin, who is, by the way, about 4′5″ and 90 pounds, said:
“I thought the gun is not real. I wasn’t going to open the drawer. I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to give him money.’ I couldn’t give him the money because I thought it was the first time he was doing it.” She added, “I was yelling at him and telling him ‘Get out of here!’ I didn’t want to hit him, I just wanted him to get out.”
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I get such glee about reading about idiocy, usually while thinking “You must be f#cking kidding me!!”
And today we have a two-fer:
First up we’ve got a school district in Atlantic City, NJ that has suspended a seven year-old due to “the school’s zero-tolerance policy for guns.”
Now, guns in school are generally considered a bad thing, and I won’t argue with that. Even toy guns can send the wrong message, so I get the idea behind a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to guns.
And I mean, a seven-year-old, right? That’s just scary. Except, the seven year-old didn’t have a gun, or a toy gun, or pretend to have a gun, or even an have an imaginary gun. He drew a picture of a gun.
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We all know the pirates are big right now. Since Johnny Depp dawned mascara and started impersonating Keith Richards pirates have been on the rise and getting really popular. Based on this you would think an article about the rise in piracy would either be referring to bootleg DVDs or Hipsters in Williamsburg.
Instead we have an article coming to us from National Geographic* about the Malacca Strait, a heavily trafficked trading route and home to some of the world’s most dangerous pirates or lanun. And these aren’t the swashbuckling pirates of yore, these are pirates armed to the teeth with modern weapons like machine guns and grenades.
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I just came across an article I missed from the middle of September. Newsweek reported on a website called MarryOurDaughter.com. The site appears to be under construction right about now, but here is what it had offered (according to Newsweek): “a matching service for followers of ‘the Biblical tradition’ of arranged marriages.” It allowed people to look through profiles of girls… and when I say girls, I mean girls, the majority were apparently around 15… whose parents wanted to marry them off and were asking for a price for their hand in marriage, a dowry if you will, usually something in the low to mid- 5 digit range.
Seems like an obvious choice for Newsweek to write about. Mail-order brides are not a new thing to the internet, but usually hey are from foreign countries and they are not underage girls. The thing is, Newsweek was not ‘exposing’ this site and telling us about the dangers of the internet, instead they were discussing the true mission behind the site.
According to MarryOurDaughter.com the site was not exactly a hoax, but rather an attempt to educate folks through something they call ‘viral politics’:
Call it an experiment an experiment in Viral Politics. That children can marry down to twelve years old in America, which they can do, is Not Right. That the age of consent is higher than the age of marriage is Not Right. That parents can marry off their children for money or for any other reason is Not Right. Railing about it on the web, as many do, wasn’t making a difference. Thinking outside the box led us to marryourdaughter.com.
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