In prostitution, everybody involved gets something they want. It's a victimless crime. That doesn't stop cops and prosecutors from going after it anyway.

From the AP wire:

TARPON SPRINGS, Fla. - A woman convicted two weeks ago of being the "D.C. Madam" hanged herself Thursday, apparently making good on her vow never to go to prison for running a high-end Washington prostitution ring. The body of Deborah Jeane Palfrey was found in a shed near her mother's home about 20 miles northwest of Tampa.

That's not even the first one:

One of the escort service employees was former University of Maryland, Baltimore County, professor Brandy Britton, who was arrested on prostitution charges in 2006. She committed suicide in January before she was scheduled to go to trial.

So, two women driven to suicide when prosecuted for a victimless crime. Way to go, dickheads.

I'm not a violent person by nature, and I don't think anyone deserves to sexually molested---not on the job, not on a date, not in prison---but at 3:00 am, after a long day, I think I'd get a good chuckle out of it if someone raped these guys in the ass!

I'll probably feel bad about writing this in the morning.

Update: Yeah, not my proudest moment. I just ran across this latest travesty by Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps and thought, "Damn, I wish something bad would happen to these people to teach them a lesson! What's the worst thing that could happen to a bunch of homophobic assholes?"

And then it hit me.

Sigh. I know that most of what Phelps' people are doing is free speech, and if they wants to propound a hateful ideology, that's their right. I also know that in the universe of all possible crimes, disrupting a funeral isn't a very big one. It's incredibly crass and hateful, but it's not like they're actually injuring anyone.

Nevertheless, for some reason Phelp's protests at military funerals---and now the funerals of several women killed in a nearby shooting---just send me over the edge.

I think it's the combination of their vicious hatred, and their total inability to do anything to effectively advance their cause. It's bad enough they do that crap, but somehow it seems even worse that they're doing it for no reason.

I don't read John Dvorak's PC magazine column very often, and when I do, I usually disagree with him.

In his latest column, Dvorak bashes the RIAA for its lawsuits against people who rip MP3 files from CDs even though they own the CDs. He finds this practice reprehensible, and he implies that when we see RIAA executives in public we should spit on them.

Well...OK, he got that one right.

I used to think that O.J. Simpson was merely a double murderer. But after reading this, I think he may be one of the most despicable American criminals of all time.

The former football great...reportedly has been paid a whopping $3.5 million to write about the double murder that shocked and riveted the nation in 1994, according to a detailed report in the new National Enquirer.

But Simpson is not actually confessing to the murder—rather, he’s writing a “hypothetical” book—which the Enquirer reports is tentatively being called “If I Did It.”

The early part of the book tells how Simpson fell in love with Nicole and how the marriage collapsed, reports the tab. He goes on, according to the article, to describe in gruesome detail the killing of his ex-wife and Goldman; he stipulates that the murder scenes are “hypothetical.” But, notes the tab, the descriptions are “so detailed and so chillingly realistic” that readers are left with little doubt as to what really happened.

As Radley Balko points out, O.J. has finally found the Real Killer...it's O.J. of course.

To: Supreme Iranian Leader Ayatollah Khameini

On this day I beseech you to direct your attention to the fates of seven women of your nation who are to be executed by sangsar (stoning to death) for crimes against chastity.

You can claim it's an act of governance, and you can claim it's motivated by religion, but your claims do not change it from what it clearly is: murder.

Any moral system that prescribes the execution of people for consensual sexual behavior—adultry, fornication, homosexuality, prostitution—is self-invalidating and illegitimate on its face. It deserves no respect from anyone.

If you allow this to happen—as I'm pretty sure you will—you will have demonstrated that you and your people are uncivilized, backwards, ignorant, intolerant, and cruel. Your petty, narrow, and heartless morality has no place in the modern world.

You are a monster and a thug who who should never be allowed to have control over the lives of other people. You are a stain on humanity, and I am embarassed for my species that people such as you are given power and respect.

By this murderous act alone, you forfeit your own right to rule. You and your supporters should be removed from this world, much as one would scrape shit from the bottom of one's shoe.

I am not a warmonger, and I hope the United States does not go to war with Iran. But if we do, I hope the U.S. Air Force blows you cruel bastards into steaming bloody chunks.

Sincerely,

Mark Draughn

Sigh. I didn't really send that. What would be the point?

Perhaps a more productive approach is to visit this site and follow some of the suggestions there. That's what I did.

The busybodies in the Chicago city council have banned the use cell phones while driving. I don't use the cell phone all that much, but my wife is going to be really pissed-off.

They say you can use hands-free phones, but since the State of Illinois banned headsets, I'm not sure what that leaves. So if you want to make a call, you have to pull over. I guess I could get used to that.

But what if you receive a call? You can't control what you're doing when that happens. I guess I could try to pull over real quickly, but wouldn't that be dangerous? How many accidents are caused by people suddenly slowing down to pull over?

Or what if you're stuck in heavy expressway traffic during rush hour and the cell phone rings? What do you do? Pull onto the shoulder, potentially creating a hazard? Wait until you reach an exit, leave the expressway, and find a place to pull over in a neighborhood you've never been in and which might be dangerous?

No wonder the ordinance's sponsor had to use a parliamentary trick to bring it to a vote without warning the opposing aldermen.

Let's see, in Chicago you can't use your cell phone for the reason you bought it, you can't buy anything without paying a higher sales tax, you can't protect your home with a handgun, and you can't even buy a can of spray paint. Sometimes I don't know why we still live in this city. We should sell this place and move to the 'burbs a.k.a. the Illinois Free-Zone.

One of the most interesting technical sites on the web is Philipp Lenssen's Google Blogoscoped. He writes about Google, about search engines in general, and about all the things you can do with them.

The man seems to be that most appealing of geek types, the inquisitive genius. He's Mr. Wizard for the search-engine set. He's always writing about interesting things he's discovered in the world of search engines. Even better, he's always doing interesting things in the world of search engines.

That's why it pisses me off to see him attacked by SEOInc, one of many Search Engine Optimizers out there. SEO's aren't quite the same species as spammers, but they're in the same family of animals. They aren't doing anything good for me.

SEOInc recently suffered a bit of a blow to their business when their Google rank dropped. Lenssen wrote about it, and the geniuses at SEOInc responded by sending him a cease-and-desist order.

Lenssen is just one guy. He can't afford to be sued. So he removed the article from his web site. However, being a faithful follower of the Way Of The Web, he did what any blogger would do: He wrote an article about it and posted the cease-and-desist order on his website. It's the blogger way.

Other people, like me, are now writing about that. None of us, including me, is saying anything nice about SEOInc. In other words, shortly after their own site dropped in the Google rankings, SEOInc took an action which generated a lot of interlinked web pages critical of their firm, all of which mention it by name. Google is indexing them as you read this.

Would you hire these guys to improve your web visibility?

TWELVE YEARS we've been bombing Iraq...and Chicago's WGN cuts off the last 15 minutes of Angel to announce the explosions in Baghdad. It wasn't even a scoop: they just rebroadcast the CNN feed.

Bastards.

I called them at (773) 528-2311 at the time to complain. It's all recorded messages at that time of night, unless you press 5 to get the breaking story tip line. Since it was the news department that pissed me off, I didn't feel bad bothering them.