Month: October 2006

New York Daily News – Crime File – Dismantling the bodies
“The skin would be put in jars. A whole person’s skin would fit in two jars about this big, about 16 inches,” he said, spreading his hands to indicate the size of the jars.

Quote from a serial killer?  No, an organlegger (illegal organ harvester).
These are the kind of people who chopped up Alistair Cooke for spare parts, apparently.  They were not very picky about the history or condition of the bodies, and about 10,000 people in the US and Canada are walking around with pieces of the results attached to their bodies.

This is so, so, profoundly creepy I had to link it.

best of craigslist : I almost destroyed a life today

Aw man, this is a great story.  And it didn’t even take the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future to knock some sense into this guy.
People usually have much better reasons for acting the way they do than we imagine them too. In psychology they call that (or something very much like that) the Fundamental Attribution Error.  We think other people do what they do because that’s the kind of person they are.  We think we are doing what we do because of the situation we’re in.

A first step toward empathy is trying to compensate for the F.A.E. and look at others’ behavior in terms of what situation they might be in which would prompt it.

White House Upbeat About GOP Prospects – washingtonpost.com

The official White House line of supreme self-assurance comes from the top down. Bush has publicly and privately banished any talk of losing the GOP majorities, in part to squelch any loss of nerve among his legions. Come January, he said last week, “We’ll have a Republican speaker and a Republican leader of the Senate.”The question is whether this is a case of justified confidence — based on Bush’s and Rove’s electoral record and knowledge of the money, technology and other assets at their command — or of self-delusion. Even many Republicans suspect the latter. Three GOP strategists with close ties to the White House flatly predicted the loss of the House, though they would not do so on the record for fear of offending senior Bush aides.

Perhaps Bush and Rove simply know that the fix is in.

Thousands of Dollars in Licensing Fees For Three Stupid Pop Songs:

How many restaurants are going to have to die before we take arms against the music industry’s Copyright Terrorists?

George F. Will – The Leaders We Have – washingtonpost.com:

“Where’s the leader?” Bush, according to Woodward, has exclaimed in dismay about the Iraqi government’s dithering. “Where’s George Washington? Where’s Thomas Jefferson? Where’s John Adams, for crying out loud?” For a president to ask that question about Iraq, that tribal stew, is enough to cause one to ask it about the United States.