North Korea amps up electronic warfare

I don't like where this is heading:

A US military reconnaissance plane came under electronic attack from North Korea and had to make an emergency landing during a major military exercise in March, a political aide said Friday.
The aide said the plane suffered disturbance to its GPS system due to jamming signals from the North's southwestern cities of Haeju and Kaesong as it was taking part in the annual US-South Korea drill, Key Resolve.

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Not quite up to 21st century standards -- UPDATED

Following up on the recent post discussing British Detective Trevor Marriott's claim that he has identified Jack the Ripper as German merchant seaman Carl Feigenbaum, I re-read his book Jack the Ripper: The 21st Century Investigation.   Unfortunately, in my edition of Jack the Ripper: The 21st Century Investigation, Marriott does not identify Feigenbaum as the killer.  Marriott apparently does so in a later edition of the book, and I seem to be having trouble finding places that differentiate between the two editions.  And in any event, I was so unimpressed by the earlier edition that I am reluctant to spend the money on a rehash of the same.

Casebook: Jack the Ripper investigates Marriott's theory and pretty much levels it.  After discussing the lack of corroboration of the evidence provided by Feigenbaum's attorney, Willam Sanford Lawton, Casebook goes into Marriott's independent evidence on Feigenbaum:
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Not Alaric but Totila

In the same vein as my talk of how the riots in London and across the US calls to mind Alaric and his sack of Rome, Victor Davis Hanson, without naming him, invokes the 6th century Gothic leader Totila:

Last week, I mentioned that my local community is struggling with council members calling each other names and alleging serial conflicts of interest, theft of the city’s manhole covers by public employees, and child pornography charges lodged against a policeman. This week? An epidemic of the theft of honorific bronze plaques from the walls of the city’s schools, civic centers, and public buildings — the sort of commemoration for good deeds that are the stuff of civilization. It reminds me of Procopius’s description of post-Roman Italy in the 6th-century AD, when lost Ostrogoth and Visigoth souls drifted amid the great cities of the Old Romans, cannibalizing the ancients’ marble, bronze, and lead clamps, and melting down monuments for lime. What scares me is that the gang bangers, who are prying these plaques off the walls and selling them, for pennies on their original dollars, for scrap, have no idea of the now dead who built and created these buildings and institutions, but so often in extremis will expect to use them. Did the man who built a school or the woman who founded a civic club ever expect that their commemorative citations would end up in a melt-down pile in the local wrecking yard?

Copper wire torn out from agricultural pumps? Manhole covers stolen by their very custodians? Commemorative plaques pried out? We are almost an entire generation of parasites that cannot create anything new and so feed on the capital and labor of the past. Sixth-century Rome to the core, or maybe Dark-Age Greece around 1000 BC where the illiterate and ignorant were wandering beneath the walls of Mycenae or Pylos looking for shelter that they could not build for themselves, and swearing superhuman “gods” must have erected such walls. Who knows, just as the most fertile period of Greek myth-making came out of the oral traditions of the Dark Ages as an impoverished and illiterate age tried to make sense of the monumental traces of a lost civilization, so too soon we may think our forgotten dam builders and water project architects of the last century were Apollo or the Cyclops, as we watch their legacies erode and crumble.

It's nice to think like a great mind, as Victor Davis Hanson is definitely a great mind.

Has anyone ever seen these two men together?

Muammar al-Gadhafi 2009

Michael Jackson 2002

Has Jack the Ripper been identified?

Not sure what to make of this:

A reconstruction of a murderer's face has reawakened interest in one of the world's most famous unsolved mysteries: Who was the serial killer behind Britain's "Jack the Ripper" murders in 1888?

More than 100 suspects have been suggested over the years, including Lewis Carroll (author of "Alice in Wonderland") and Victorian painter Walter Sickert (who was fingered in a book by crime novelist Patricia Cornwell after a $4 million investigation). This week, the BBC is throwing a spotlight on a dark-horse candidate: German merchant seaman Carl Feigenbaum, who was executed in New York in 1896 for a totally different killing.

Feigenbaum was convicted for the murder of his landlady in Manhattan, and his attorney, Willam Sanford Lawton, said afterward that his client admitted to having an "all-absorbing passion ... to kill and mutilate every woman who falls in my way." It was Lawton who first suggested that Feigenbaum was behind the murders of women in London eight years earlier.

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Metro Police give green light to stealing cars

Another stupid idea in law enforcement is coming to Indianapolis:

The chase that ended in the deaths Tuesday of two suspected car thieves would have been banned under a new vehicle pursuit policy under review by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department.

Chief Paul Ciesielski said Wednesday that the new policy would allow officers to chase only violent suspects who are an immediate threat. Currently, police can pursue any motorist who flees, regardless of what they did.

Critics of chases say they put police officers, offenders and innocent bystanders at risk.

"The advantages of a new policy would be that it takes into account the safety of our officers and meets our moral and ethical obligation to keep citizens safe," Ciesielski said.

Ciesielski, who favors the new policy, said there is no time frame for deciding whether to adopt it.

The disclosure follows a fatal accident in which two teenagers fleeing police were killed after a three-minute chase on the Westside. Brandon Palmer, 19, and his passenger, D'airres Hightower, 15, were in a Chevrolet Trailblazer that had been reported stolen at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday.

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Ohio State better start raising hell

Over this:

Quarterback Jacory Harris and 11 other Miami players who accepted extra benefits from former booster Nevin Shapiro will be allowed by the NCAA to play again, the first sanctions in a scandal that continues to overshadow the Hurricanes.

Of those, eight will miss at least one game, and all 12 must pay restitution.

The harshest penalties handed down Tuesday were reserved for those who took gifts from Shapiro while being recruited. Defensive lineman Olivier Vernon will sit out six games, while Ray Ray Armstrong, considered among the nation's top safeties, and tight end Dyron Dye will miss four games apiece. Among the players sanctioned, only Vernon will miss more than one Atlantic Coast Conference game.

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