Brilliant.

A Brooklyn man turned a traffic ticket into four felony charges last night by trying to use $100 to bribe a cop who had pulled him over for running a red light in lower Manhattan, police sources said.

…

Ho hand the trio of officers $100 each, cops said.

But instead of a free ride, Ho got a ride to jail. At the station house, Ho admitted he offered the money, police sources said.

But he apparently didn’t learn a lesson from the ordeal: He offered yet another $100 bribe to the police inspector who was questioning him, cop sources said.

Go to it!

Will Franklin takes on the myth of the “Social Europe.” He’s got some interesting graphs (like the one below) that look at standards and costs of living.

Check out the rest.

A new publication ban has been put inplace by the Gomer Inquiry and Captain Ed plans to violate them.

As part of the ‘imperfection’ mentioned tangentially in the Montreal Gazette, I had hoped that the brouhaha over my publication of Brault’s testimony would have convinced Justice Gomery of the folly of publication bans. Apparently not. If my original source can get me reliable information on the testimony under the ban, I will republish it again here.

Besides the fact that Jasper Rine was, er, bluffing, there is some interesting background here.

Strange Interlude has the details.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about either genetically modified food or the tenure process at Berkeley. I do know 90% of what the Rine says in the clip is technologically implausible at best.

I googled the Professor’s name (Jasper Rine), and I found that he is indeed, as he says, working with some very prominent businesses. But that’s the source of quite a bit of controversy, particularly for a tenure decision that he played a part in. It’s alleged that his financial ties to the biotech company Novartis constituted a conflict of interest in denying tenure to Ignacio Chapela, who is very critical of the biotech industry. Chapela wrote a paper, published in Nature, and then essentially retracted by the magazine about Genetically Modified food contaminating other crops in Mexico. The ensuing controversy over the ties between corporations and academia was enough to make the cover of the Atlantic Monthly. And Chapela just this Monday filed a lawsuit against the University of California Regents over this matter. Assuming there is any information on the laptop about this dispute (say incriminating e-mails), it would obviously be legally inadmissable, but it could be very embarrassing for both him and the corporations he works for. It might been motive for an activist, but I’m just speculating here. I will say, technical plausibilty aside, he seems a bad person to steal stuff from.

Saheli has more.

This article in the Feb. 2004 issue of the California Monthly, Berkeley’s Alumni magazine, seems to sum up the situation fairly well. As fellow alumni of my era will remember, in 1998 UC Berkeley signed a controversial 5-year $25 Million research contract with agricultural-biotech giant Novartis, whose Swiss successor company Syngenta inherited the deal. In exchange for the Plant and Molecular Biology Department research funding, Berkeley had to give Novartis/Syngenta first dibs on some proportion of patents (or patent licenses? It’s not clear to me) and had a 2/5 vote on the committee to select research projects. Plenty of students and faculty were unhappy about this. One of those faculty was one Igacio Chapela, untenured at the time. In 2001 he published a research article in Nature describing evidence that genetically engineered elements inserted into Monsanto corn had crept into native corne in Oaxaca, Mexico. The article was challenged by so many scientists that Nature engaged in the unprecented action of “withdrawing support.” But “Quist and Chapela point out that all of the letters printed by Nature disparaging the research–including those from the Cal campus–were written by people with ties to the Berkeley-Novartis agreement.”

The tricky part was that Chapela then came up for tenure: [Read the rest here…]

Not only is it expensive ($5,000 one time licensing fee, plus $50 - $65 per student), the attendance has been lackluster

“They had five students enrolled initially in their program,” Akers said. “I spoke to a gentleman that’s running the program. … As of Monday, they had one student still in the program. The student was arrested over the weekend and they’re not sure he’ll be allowed to come back into the school.”

You can’t make this kind of stuff up…

The home page of The Empire Journal appears to have been modified to simply say “Under Construction” - yet all of the direct hyperlinks to articles still work.

Here are their comments on the original hack (Via Sanity Ranch). And here is the front page as it looks now.