To know if your credit card is susceptible, look for the symbol at the left.
Addendum: Some advice from Z. Constantine: "If you hold your RFID-enabled cards at an angle in bright light, you will be able to see a rectangular shape (approximately 3x6mm) opposite the signature line on the back: this is your RFID chip. Take a finishing nail and a hammer and put the nail through the chip. Done. Your card is still perfectly valid for transactions when swiped, but your RFID chip is disabled so the only swiping you need to worry about is the kind you're used to."
One of the first posts I wrote for TYWKIWDBI when I started the blog in December 2007 was a piece about "Balsam bough thieves" (content below). This week I notice that PBS has addressed basically the same problem with a short video, which I've embedded above. Here's the summary from PBS Newshour:
It's a familiar sight this time of year; the live Christmas wreath on a door or a bit of holiday-themed greenery on a table. Those products are a big business in the Pacific Northwest, where forests are harvested for greenery, boughs, moss, ferns and other plants for holiday and other gift giving. Our PBS colleagues at KCTS in Seattle reported recently on the seamier side of this industry, which involves forest product smuggling in Washington State. Lesley McClurg looked into how illegal harvesting of forests harm businesses and workers in the short term and the environment in the long term.
And here's a repost of my 2007 item:
One of the classic sensual pleasures of the holiday season is the scent of balsam permeating a home or place of business. Balsam trees, wreaths, and swags are used to decorate living rooms, doors, windows, and mantelpieces. In doing so, we probably never question where the balsam comes from; if we give it any thought, we assume it is harvested from commercial tree farms or represents a reuse of forestry waste products.
This fall I visited a lot (in a platted subdivision) where I’ve been clearing brush in preparation for building, and encountered two young men with a pickup truck. I thought they were hunters, but when I greeted them and saw no guns they told me they were searching for “balsam balls” (which I interpreted as “witches brooms”). I told them they were on private property, and cordially suggested that in the future they make use of a plat book to ascertain which properties were public and private. They indicated that they would continue searching, but wouldn’t disturb anything near the driveway, and they headed into the woods.
When I returned the next day I was shocked by the devastation they had wrought on the property. About a dozen balsam trees - all within a few yards of the driveway - had been stripped of branches. After a moment’s reflection I realized that they had been hunting “balsam boughs” for the holiday decoration trade.
Perhaps more disappointing than the theft itself was the technique they had used: This wasn’t a matter of pruning a few branches from each tree; rather, the trunks had been stripped bare to the height reachable by a grown man wielding a lopper. Each of these trees is now essentially standing deadwood. And this from two young men whose heritage should reflect a deep respect for the natural environment.
The Minnesota DNR reported in 2004 that approximately 4000 tons of balsam boughs are harvested annually from our forests, each ton yielding roughly 400 wreaths; the state’s balsam bough industry had annual retail sales in 2004 topping $20 million. The vast majority of this trade is managed well, with bough-collecting permits obtained at state, tribal or county offices, depending on where the worker plans to gather material. As my experience shows, there are at least a few “rogue” workers who respect neither private property rights nor the environment.
Update 2009: Originally posted in December 2007. I've subsequently barricaded the driveway of my lot, but on other private lots in the woods I've seen the "topping" of large balsams to create Christmas trees - sawing off the top 6-8 feet of a 20 foot tree.
Here are some excerpts from a thought-provoking article at the Washington Post. This one is part of a series called Top Secret America - "a project two years in the making that describes the huge security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Today’s story is about those efforts at the local level, including law enforcement and homeland security agencies in every state and thousands of communities."
Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.
The total cost of the localized system is also hard to gauge. The DHS has given $31 billion in grants since 2003 to state and local governments for homeland security and to improve their ability to find and protect against terrorists, including $3.8 billion in 2010. At least four other federal departments also contribute to local efforts. But the bulk of the spending every year comes from state and local budgets that are too disparately recorded to aggregate into an overall total...
Napolitano has taken her "See Something, Say Something" campaign far beyond the traffic signs that ask drivers coming into the nation's capital for "Terror Tips" and to "Report Suspicious Activity." She recently enlisted the help of Wal-Mart, Amtrak, major sports leagues, hotel chains and metro riders. In her speeches, she compares the undertaking to the Cold War fight against communists...
Now, instead of having to decide which license plate numbers to type into a computer console in the patrol car, an officer can simply drive around, and the automatic license plate reader on his hood captures the numbers on every vehicle nearby. If the officer pulls over a driver, instead of having to wait 20 minutes for someone back at the office to manually check records, he can use a hand-held device to instantly call up a mug shot, a Social Security number, the status of the driver's license and any outstanding warrants...
As of December, there were 161,948 suspicious activity files in the classified Guardian database, mostly leads from FBI headquarters and state field offices. Two years ago, the bureau set up an unclassified section of the database so state and local agencies could send in suspicious incident reports and review those submitted by their counterparts in other states. Some 890 state and local agencies have sent in 7,197 reports so far...
And in Pennsylvania this year, a local contractor hired to write intelligence bulletins filled them with information about lawful meetings as varied as Pennsylvania Tea Party Patriots Coalition gatherings, antiwar protests and an event at which environmental activists dressed up as Santa Claus and handed out coal-filled stockings...
Flying in a police helicopter, Rewalt pointed out some of the cameras the DHS has funded. They are all over the city, in mall parking lots, in housing projects, at popular street hang-outs. "Cameras are what's happening now," he marveled...
There are eight pages of text at the WaPo link, and from there you can access previous stories in the series.
The wad of paper wound up on the floor because the malefactor bumped it instead of pulling it with his tweezers. Posted at Kent Brewster's Flickr photostream. Via BoingBoing.
Prevent it Buy cards that are behind a customer-service desk... Inspect the card; if the magnetic or peel-off strip on the back isn't pristine, the card might have been tampered with. When buying a preloaded card, ask the cashier to scan it to make sure the full value is on it. If you're buying from a third-party gift-card site, look at the refund policy. And always hang on to the receipts. If something goes wrong, it can help you—or the gift recipient—get a refund.
Juliet Gardiner, the social historian and author of Wartime: Britain 1939-1945, says that, while most people found looting despicable, examples differentiated between stealing someone's property and spotting a wireless or jewellery lying on the pavement after an air raid and reckoning that, if you didn't take it, someone else would. "Looting can be a rather elastic term," says Gardiner...
However, while the "spivs and drones", as the BBC described them at the time, may have had their "finest hour" and the crime rate increased by 57% from 1939 to 1945, there was never the descent into the kind of civilian lawlessness that has characterised so many other wars over the past half century.
Scrapping the £1 coin would be very expensive for the Government as well as major upheaval for consumers. However, other countries have been forced to take similar action when counterfeits became too prevalent. The 5 rand coin in 2004 was reissued after taxi-drivers and shopkeepers in South Africa started to refuse to accept them. Fakes were just 2 per cent of all coins, compared with 2.81 per cent with the British £1.
Pelican: A brown pelican coated in heavy oil wallows in the surf June 4, 2010 on East Grand Terre Island, Louisiana. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Turtle: A dead turtle floats on a pool of oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill in Barataria Bay off the coast of Louisiana Monday, June, 7, 2010. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
Hermit crabs struggle to cross a patch of oil from the the Deepwater Horizon spill on a barrier island near East Grand Terre Island, Louisiana on Sunday, June 6, 2010. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
I know these are are not items in the "TYWK" category, but I plan to keep posting images like these from time to time to keep fueling the rage.
More pix at Boston.com's always outstanding The Big Picture.
From a report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. My understanding, and the implications of the report, are that the rise depicted on the chart reflects incarceration for non-violent crimes.
We calculate that a reduction by one-half in the incarceration rate of non-violent offenders would lower correctional expenditures by $16.9 billion per year and return the U.S. to about the same incarceration rate we had in 1993 (which was already high by historical standards). The large majority of these savings would accrue to financially squeezed state and local governments, amounting to about one-fourth of their annual corrections budgets. As a group, state governments could save $7.6 billion, while local governments could save $7.2 billion.
When I saw this graph I was reminded of a story I saw earlier this week, of a woman who was jailed because she called 911 asking them to find a husband for her. Clearly that was a boneheaded maneuver by an intoxicated woman, and clearly some form of punishment was appropriate, but incarceration is expensive. It would seem that the legal establishment could come up with more creative and less costly punishments for non-violent crimes, sort of like some traffic offenders are sentenced to pick up roadside litter.
These should not be "TYWK" photos; I hope everyone has seen these elsewhere, but I want to store them here as well. The rest of the gallery is at The Big Picture.
Certainly, from what is known about Shahzad's upbringing in Pakistan, there is little obvious sign of other extremist influences. Originally hailing from Mohib Banda, a village near the rugged north-western city of Peshawar, he is the son of Air Vice Marshall Baharul Haq, a high-ranking former officer in the Pakistani military, which is generally regarded as one of the country's more secular institutions.
The family, who were rich and well-respected, were the picture of Pakistani respectability: one sister is a doctor, another is a schoolteacher, and his older brother moved to Canada to work as a mechanical engineer. Shahzad, too, showed early promise, moving to study in the US in 1999 and gaining a degree in computer science. When he married his partner Huma Mian, a Pakistani emigre from Colorado, the wedding back in the old country was notable for mixed couples dancing - another sign that both families had a modern outlook...
As a 17-year-old farmhand in Norway during the late 1800s, Belle Gunness learned she was pregnant by the son of the landlord. Unwilling to marry her, he beat her until she miscarried. He died a year later of an illness that resembled poisoning, and soon Gunness left for America.
Within three years of emigrating, she married Mads Sorenson. In 1890, Mads became violently ill and died—his death occurred on the only day two life insurance policies on him overlapped, netting his wife $8,500. A physician suspected strychnine poisoning, but the family doctor claimed he treated Mads for an enlarged heart and that caused his death.
Belle took the money and moved to LaPorte, Indiana, where she married Peter Gunness in April 1900 and became stepmother to his children. Soon his young son died (mostly likely caused by poisoning) while he was alone with Belle. In December 1900, an iron meat grinder fell and cracked open Peter’s skull.
Soon after, suitors began arriving with money in hand to marry Belle Gunness and pay off her mortgage. Man after man arrived, always leaving Gunness in the middle of the night. When Gunness secured the money from her potential lovers, she killed them, dismembered them, and buried them in the yard. It was suspected she might have fed some to the pigs.
A much more detailed biography is available at Wikipedia, which lists over 30 potential victims and indicates that a movie may be released in 2010 based on her life story.
When the kids ripped Moore's hat off during the attack, she said they called her a "bald-headed b----." When she begged for the hat back, they stomped on it.
When she told them her son had died, that she'd been through so much already, she said they taunted her with his death.
And when she begged for mercy, they showed her none.
"Then they took a stick and knocked me in the knees until I fell down," she said. "They kicked me in the back. I was crying and begging for these people to stop and they just wouldn't stop.
Police learned through interviews that the beatings were a twisted "game" called "Catch and Wreck."
Moore said she was upset to hear she wasn't the first victim.
Details are beginning to emerge from attacks Sunday on four villages in central Nigeria, where witnesses say members of the predominantly ---- ---- ethnic group targeted villages that were home to members of the mostly ---- ---- ethnic group. On Monday, local officials counted 378 bodies...
The weekend's attack appeared to be a reprisal for violence that claimed at least 300 lives in January, when ---- villagers targeted ---- in a separate, nearby village...
At a mass burial... angry residents talked of revenge as they gathered around a large pit and scattered dirt on several dozen charred and bloodied bodies...
An elderly woman prayed at the edge of the burial pit, chanting. "By God's grace we will enter their villages and kill their women and children," she repeated.
I would assume the hatred goes well beyond religion per se to involve economics, land, food and other basic needs stretching back for generations. I've redacted the identities of the religious/ethnic groups involved in this specific incident, because it really doesn't matter who started what first.
One has to wonder who ultimately benefits from violence such as this. It's probably no coincidence that it's occurring in one of the countries blessed (?cursed) with abundant oil reserves. Someone behind the scenes is stirring the pot for their own monetary/strategic benefit.
Crimethinc describes itself as a "decentralized anarchist collective" for "shoplifters, rioters, dropouts, deserters, adulterers, vandals, daydreamers." Until today I didn't know the organization existed. One presumes they are active in the street protests against The New World Order at political conventions, world trade and finance meetings, etc.
The information on their poster above may or may not be valid. I would welcome comments and any corrections to its content.
Addendum: I just remember that I posted a related video several months ago: "Why You Shouldn't Talk to the Police." It was mostly about traffic violations etc., but was quite informative.
Second addendum: "The 10 legal commandments of photography" - advice re when and where photography of the public/in public places/of buildings etc. is permitted/forbidden. Somewhat abbreviated, but with links to other relevant sites.
... somewhere in the world there is someone even stranger.
A Baraboo man who repeatedly shocked an East Side dance instructor with a stun gun on Friday claimed the instructor was a "sinner" who "defiles married women," according to a criminal complaint filed Tuesday...
Johnson told Detective Patrick Green that he had taken dance lessons before but stopped because his church does not condone bodies touching while dancing.
Johnson said he was going to scare the instructor "and tell him to leave the women alone." To do that, he said, he would go to a lesson and "take the electric thing and go zap and scare him."
The instructor told police that Johnson phoned for private dance lesson, and when he opened the door to his home, Johnson began to shock him repeatedly in the neck with the stun gun.
I presume a "stun gun" is a taser (?). Didn't know one can buy them freely on the internet - and I don't find that discovery to be very reassuring.
And I always thought the term was "peeping Tom," but perhaps there are regional variants.
This story has circulated for several days, but today a photo in a Tumblr blog finally led me to the Daily Mail Online, which says the picture corresponds to the story:
Julia Popova, 22, was stabbed by a mugger as she walked home from work one day last autumn - but she was so traumatised by the attack that she walked home without realising the knife was embedded in her, just a fraction of an inch from her spinal cord...
'This is our photo, she was here,' a senior doctor at the hospital in the north of the Russian capital told the MailOnline last night...
The low quality of the image, which was published in British newspapers today, led to speculation it was faked - especially since it first appeared in a brash Moscow tabloid newspaper and on a website widely believed by locals to run stories of doubtful authenticity...
But he said: 'The case was last autumn. She spent about 40 minutes walking home after she was attacked.'
