Assorted Stupidity #83
- Today was my fourth consecutive day of not tweeting or blogging any facts about the trial I'm involved in (as a lawyer, not a defendant) other than the fact I'm not tweeting or blogging about it (two facts). Because you really shouldn't do that.
- Speaking of being careful what you say, don't say anything positive about North Korea, if you are for whatever reason inclined to do so and live in South Korea. According to reports yesterday, a 73-year-old journalist there who had been charged with a Twitter crime was acquitted, but only because he merely followed the Hermit Kingdom's official account. Had he re-tweeted, that would have been a national-security violation, the court reportedly ruled. But he still got a one-year sentence (suspended) for pro-North-Korea blog entries.
- The big news today (not counting millions of people being completely screwed by the weather) is that officials in the village of Whitesboro, New York, have announced that they will work with the Oneida Indian Nation to create a new and less murderous town logo. As I mentioned last week, the old one was potentially subject to being misinterpreted as a celebration of Indian-strangling.
- Here's one of a number of stories I would be writing up more fully right now if I didn't still need to have a regular job: New Zealand's Environment Court, whatever that is, has reportedly held that a government agency can sue itself, or at least appeal its own decision. The case is entitled New Zealand Transport Agency v. New Zealand Transport Agency, and so it probably belongs in this category here.
- Here's another one (that I'd be writing up more fully): in Vancouver, some unidentified people got concerned because some other people who the first people thought looked "Middle Eastern" were taking pictures inside a shopping mall, and the first people called police. The three men are of Middle Eastern descent, apparently, but they were "taking pictures" because two of them are visually impaired and use phones or cameras to help them zoom in on things. They were in Vancouver to get medical treatment, not to terrorize it. "We're the last people who are going to be hired by a terrorist organization to take video of stuff," one of the men noted.
- Still puzzles me why the government and lots of other people, apparently, get all worked up about "suspicious characters" taking pictures of things. If terrorists have a plan to hit a shopping mall, I really don't think they need pictures first so they can go map out a careful strategy.
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