8:48 pm CDT

Hypnotism assaults at library raise safety questions, need for vigilance

8:41 pm CDT

New in the theatre tonight: Chapter 1 of “The Treasure of San Diablo.” More chapters will be posted in the next few days.

8:38 pm CDT
Tonight my wife and I received a phone call telling us that last night a friend of ours suffered a miscarriage which, while not caused, was certainly not helped by the police.

The would-be mother and father called 911 for an ambulance. But, after being told the high cost this would incur, they reconsidered and cancelled the ambulance, opting instead to drive to the hospital on their own.

However, it seems that the police monitor all 911 calls, and a cancellation of an ambulance call is regarded as suspicious behavior. Thus, a squad car was sent to the couple’s home.

The couple was confronted by the police as they were pulling out of their driveway. The police then ordered them out of the car, and, acting under the assumption that this was a domestic disturbance (?), separated the two and began interrogating them.

Meanwhile, the woman was bleeding, copiously. And losing her child.

When it finally sank into the swinish brains of the police that this couple was not guilty of any crime, the police called for an ambulance.

In the meantime, however, the baby had died.

This is a perfect example of today’s cop attitude—a “guilty-until-proven-innocent” attitude that has no place in a free society but which is, unfortunately, the norm in 21st century America.

Also, at the very least, it reveals a questionable set of priorities on the part of the police.

I find it incredible that the police had nothing else better to do last night than to harass a young couple and a dying baby.

If the Austin Police Department needs something to keep them busy, I would be happy to point them in the right direction. They could start by patrolling Interstate 35 or Loop 1, or any of the congested highways and streets of Austin.

Not a day passes that I do not encounter homicidal behavior in Austin traffic. (According to a recent government study, published only a few days ago in the Austin American-Statesman, Austin has the worst traffic of any mid-sized city in the United States.) But where are the police? During rush hour—the worst time to be driving—they are nowhere to be seen.

But let someone make a “suspicious” 911 call and they are on the spot, swaggering, giving orders, interrogating, bullying.

Or, let there be the suspicion that someone is selling drugs, and there they are—in full SWAT team regalia, kicking in the door in the middle of the night, shooting innocent people.

In one recent case (one of many), the Travis County SWAT Team, while conducting a drug raid at 4 in the morning, kicked in the door of a mobile home and shot the innocent 17-year-old nephew of the suspect in the head. His offense? He had sat up in bed to see what was going on.

In another case, a mentally ill woman, armed with nothing more than a kitchen knife, was brutally gunned down by an Austin policeman. The police department conducted an internal investigation of the affair, and then announced it would not release the results. Also, in the same week that the department made this announcement, the policeman who killed her was given an award for Cop of the Year. Even the otherwise Establishment-butt-licking Austin American-Statesman complained about this outrage in an editorial.

I could tell other stories about police incompetence and corruption in Central Texas. But I will not. Not tonight, anyway.

Instead, I will return to the subject of the young couple who lost their child last night.

What got them into their scrape with the police in the first place? The fact that, like an increasing number of Americans, they could not afford medical insurance and therefore could not afford to call an ambulance.

This is the sad reality of America. It is a nation that has not only been gutted of its freedoms, but so economically gutted by the criminal globalists who have taken over this country that hard-working people are deprived of basic health care.

4:30 pm CDT

Top Shelf Asks the Big Questions has reprinted my story “Bison Bill’s Weird West” which was serialized a few years ago in XLnt, the entertainment supplement of the Austin American-Statesman. Published by Top Shelf and edited by Brett Warnock and Robert Goodin, this long-awaited anthology also features work by Chris Ware, Seth, Ivan Brunetti, Joe Matt, Tony Millionaire, Tom Hart, Jason Martin, Tom Dieck, Nicolas Mahler, Ulf K, Winshluss, Atrabile, Matt Madden, Renée French, Josh Simmons, Jesse Reklaw, James Kochalka, James Sturm, Steve Weissman, Peter Kuper, the Robot Publishing Posse, David Chelsea, Tomer Hanuka, Alan Moore, Melinda Gebbie, and many more.

In the coming months “Bison Bill’s Weird West” will make its on-line debut on my other site called BisonBill.com (where else?). Like this site, BisonBill.com will soon be moved off the old dysfunctional server to this one and will undergo an extensive remodeling.

2:03 pm CDT
Spam: This Time It's Personal

One week later, the spammer struck again, using Markley's domain. Five days after the second attack, the spammer struck yet again. Thousands of bounce reports and hate e-mails arrived in Markley's inbox. And Earthlink reps told Markley they could do nothing to help him. So "blood boiling, furious and literally foaming at the mouth," Markley set out to track the spammer down. (...)

Markley checked the headers on the original spam returned with some of the bounces. Then he learned how to access domain-registry information and how to use a trace-route program. Over the next two weeks, he painstakingly worked his way through a half-dozen hijacked servers and a dozen spoofed e-mail addresses and bogus identities to find "his" spammer. "Last Thursday, at around 7 p.m., I finally knew without a doubt that my nemesis was Eddy Marin, who has a reputation as the world's most prolific spammer," said Markley.

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1:12 pm CDT
Are the neocons in the Pentagon targeting electrical grids?

In July 2002, George W. Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 16 (PD-16), a secret plan for the United States to wage cyber-warfare against other countries. Under the directive, the Pentagon—which is under the control of neoconservative zealots who make Dr. Strangelove seem relatively sane—is authorized to use electronic weaponry to bring down the electrical grids of enemy nations.

Since Bush's directive was signed, the world had witnessed more unexplained massive blackouts in the history of the modern age of electricity. Considering that the Pentagon, through manipulative schemers like Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and retired Admiral John Poindexter, has championed such ideas as a stock market betting parlor for future terrorist attacks and an Internet-based personal information surveillance program (both fortunately killed off by Congress), it is not far-fetched to consider the possibility that the recent spate of blackouts around the world are the result of another harebrained operation cooked up by the necons to demonstrate America's superiority in cyber-warfare.

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