Day: July 9, 2002

SHAC's Extremist Tactics at the World Congress of Pharmacology

Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty sent out an update about anti-Huntingdon Life Sciences activities at the World Congress of Pharmacology Conference currently being held in San Francisco. According to the update,

Just one day after an activist vomited all over the HLS Display Table at the World Congress of Pharmacology Conference in San Francisco, protesters again stormed the conference and headed for the HLS table.

Two activists approached the HLS table, yelling and calling attention to the scientific fraud at HLS. As security escorted the activists out, HLS employee Mark Adams looked smug, relieved that the activists were gone. He quickly wiped the smirk off his face as another activist took advantage of the lack of security, and overturned the literature table and yelled “Welcome to San Francisco, puppy killers.”

Two more activists followed suit, accosting the HLS employees and letting the room know about the undercover investigations and making it clear to the puppy killers and all conference attendees: There will be no rest for the wicked. Whether it be HLS or the lab’s collaborators, we will be there to make their lives miserable.

Vomiting and turning over tables — yeah, those are the signs of a rational movement. That they approve of these actions really says all you need to know about SHAC.

Source:

Keep the pressure on the TARGET OF THE WEEK An Update! Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, July 9, 2002.

HLS Withdraws RICO Lawsuit Against SHAC

Huntingdon Life Sciences has dropped its RICO lawsuit against Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, according to a SHAC press release.

The lawsuit was filed in April 2001 and accused SHAC, other animal rights groups and individual activists of criminally interfering with a legitimate business enterprise.

SHAC’s press release tried to spin the withdrawal of the lawsuit as a great victory with Kevin Jonas saying,

HLS is a cowardly company and its pathetic attempt at intimidation through this lawsuit has blown up in its face. In dismissing this lawsuit, the lab has abandoned all of its supporters it sought to protect, via injunctive relief, had it won. The SHAC campaign is poised for victory and nothing Huntingdon throws at us will slow our progress.

Given how the anti-SHAC campaign seems to have stalled and business at HLS appears to be picking up, this seems to be wishful thinking on Jonas’ part (whatever happened to SHAC’s claims last fall that HLS was teetering on the brink?)

In an e-mail newsletter, the Foundation for Biomedical Research had a more realistic take on the decision,

SHAC has made a hollow claim of victory after Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) withdrew its RICO lawsuit against the activist group. However, the truth of the matter is that HLS has been successful in obtaining all of the protective measures they had sought in the lawsuit, making the case unnecessary.

In fact, the SHAC activists are getting so desperate, they are apparently going to start targeting beleagured WorldCom because it provides telephone and Internet access to HLS. According to a short item that appeared in The Guardian,

Greg Avery, the public face of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, calls to say that the US telecoms company provides phone and email services to Huntingdon Life Sciences. He intends to organise a campaign to show the company’s senior executives the error of their ways. Mr Avery is back on the campaign scene after recently spending six months in prison – he has just had his electronic tag removed and is ready to don his balaclava once more. His parole officer will be proud.

Sources:

Huntingdon Life Sciences fails in multi-million dollar suit. Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty USA, Press Release, July 8, 2002.

Foundation for Biomedical Research, e-mail newsletter, July 9, 2002.

City diary. Richard Adams, The Guardian (London), July 9, 2002.

Trust But Verify

Dave Winer made a minor error yesterday in attributing “F— Tha Police” to Public Enemy. His I-Pod is giving him erroneous information. But now Scripting.Com has this little ditty,

Marc Canter sheds some light. “Musical acts evolve – just like software companies. NWA was the original name of the group that did Fuck the Police. Guess what? Some of the founders then went on to create Public Enemy!”

Which is, of course, pure bunk. Public Enemy was formed long before NWA. Public Enemy was hardcore East Coast rap while NWA pretty much defined “gangsta rap.”

Remember, just because someone on the Internet says it’s true doesn’t mean it is.

Throw the Bastards in Jail

Glenn Reynolds has a few modest proposals about making CEOs and others accountable,

Also, let’s extend CEO responsibility to political candidates: let’s make every candidate face personal criminal responsibility for any illegal campaign contributions, just as CEOs are proposed to be liable for any accounting shenanigans that occur on their watch!

Absolutely. The most bizarre point of the whole Enron/WorldCom/whatever mess was when Al Gore came out and said,

I believe that a president of the United States facing this kind of situation ought to be restoring confidence in our economy and ought to be instructing the people in charge of these agencies to lay down the law.

Lay down the law? That’s quite a stark turnaround from Gore’s previous stock phrase, “No controlling legal authority.” How can Gore demand the government hold CEO’s accountable for their company’s financial statements when the former VP still claims he didn’t realize his speech at a Buddhist monastery was a fundraising event?

Whatever else you think of them, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were masters of phrase parsing and the sort of doubletalking nonsense that we’ve heard from Enron executives. In fact Enron executives’ claims that they were never informed about the problems in their company sound like they were plagiarized from Gore’s equally unbelievable claims that his staff kept him completely in the dark about his own fundraising.

And then there’s George W. Bush who completely whiffed on his own SEC violations. Rather than admit that he made a serious mistake in violating SEC laws about disclosure of stock sales while he served as director of Harken Energy Corp., Bush chose to dissemble and chalk it up to an innocent mistake. Give me a break. The law says insiders need to report stock sales within 10 days and Bush waited 34 weeks in one of the four late disclosures.

Parents Television Council’s Wrestling Moves Were Fake

USA Today is reporting that World Wrestling Entertainment has reached a settlement with the Parents Television Council over claims the PTC made that four children died after attempting moves they saw on WWE’s Smackdown!.

The PTC agreed to pay WWE $3.5 million, retract the claims and publicly apologize for its statements.

The amusing thing is that PTC is an offshoot of Media Research Center. MRC is a conservative media watchdog whose mission is to point out inaccuracies and bias in the mainstream media.

Anyway, here’s the full statement of retraction from PTC/MRC head honcho L. Brent Bozell,

`Media Research Center (MRC), Parents Television Council (PTC), Dr. Delores Tucker, Mark Honig and I have in the past made statements regarding so-called wrestling deaths — children killed by other children alleged to be mimicking “professional wrestling” moves they saw on television.

We made such statements to members of MRC and PTC, the media, advertisers on World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) SmackDown! program, retailers that sell WWE-related toys and merchandise, public officials and the public.

MRC and PTC also produced a videotape as part of a fundraising campaign in connection with its “National Campaign to Clean Up TV Now!”, which advanced the notion that the murder of Tiffany Eunick was caused by the influence of professional wrestling on Lionel Tate.

The videotape included interviews with Lionel Tate’s lawyer advancing the notion that the murder of Tiffany Eunick, the victim, was directly caused by the impact that professional wrestling had on Lionel Tate.

We based our statements on media reports and source information. We now believe, based on extensive investigation and facts which have come to light since making those statements that it was wrong for MRC, PTC, their spokespersons and myself to have said anything that could be construed as blaming WWE or any of its programs for the deaths of the children.

Simply put, it was premature to reach that conclusion when we did, and there is now ample evidence to show that conclusion was incorrect. I now believe that professional wrestling played no role in the murder of Tiffany Eunick, which was a part of our “Clean Up TV Now!” campaign and am equally convinced that it was incorrect and wrong to have blamed WWE or any of its programs for the deaths of the other children.

Because of our statements, PTC, MRC and the WWE have been in litigation since November 2000. WWE vigorously advanced its position that neither it, nor “professional wrestling” led to these deaths.

WWE also contended that MRC, PTC, their spokespersons and I had misrepresented the number of advertisers who withdrew support from WWE’s SmackDown! television program after receiving communications from the PTC, some of which regrettably connected the WWE and SmackDown! to the deaths of children.

As such, WWE exercised its right to initiate this litigation, during which facts came to light that prompted me to make this statement.

By this retraction, I want to be clear that WWE was correct in pointing out that various statements made by MRC, PTC and me were inaccurate concerning the identity and number of WWE SmackDown! advertisers who withdrew support from the program. Many of the companies we stated had “withdrawn” or pulled their support had never, in fact, advertised on SmackDown! nor had any plan to advertise on SmackDown!

Again, we regret this error and retract any such misleading statements.

Finally, concerning the statements about child wrestling deaths, it was wrong to have stated or implied that WWE or any of its programs caused these tragic deaths. Specifically concerning the Lionel Tate case, recent developments lead us to believe that others and we were given, and relied upon, false information provided by parties close to the case.

The information that we were given and relied upon may have been designed to make a national example of the Florida murder trial, pinning the blame on WWE.

For example, we were told by a source that Lionel Tate was watching a WWE program when he assaulted Tiffany Eunick. In fact, Lionel Tate was watching the “Flintstones” and a cartoon entitled “Cow and Chicken.” We were also told, by a source, that Lionel Tate killed Tiffany Eunick while executing a wrestling move unique to a WWE character called the “Stone Cold Stunner”.

We have since learned that this was not true, nor was there any evidence that it was true. It is now well documented that after the Tate trial concluded, the presiding Judge said it was “inconceivable” that Tiffany Eunick’s injuries were caused by Lionel Tate mimicking wrestling moves.

Indeed, since the trial ended, Lionel Tate’s new lawyers have filed court papers in which they admit that the “wrestling defense” was, in their words, “bogus.”

Given these facts, WWE was within its rights to be angry at the MRC, PTC, their spokespersons and I for contacting WWE’s advertisers to go beyond complaining about WWE content but passing along accusations which we now know were false. Because I feel a simple retraction is not sufficient, I have personally extended my apology to Vince McMahon and the WWE on behalf of MRC, PTC, Dr. Tucker, Mr. Honig and me.

Through this letter, I now make this apology public and specifically directed to the advertising community that has in the past, is currently or may in the future consider advertising or sponsoring WWE programming.

The PTC can have its concern with the content of WWE’s television programming – though these concerns have been reduced significantly over the past years as a reflection of WWE’s changed standards. But nowhere in that debate, including in the correspondence and statements to the advertising community, should there have been any discussion of “wrestling” deaths.

I regret this happening. It wasn’t fair to WWE.

And I say this emphatically: Please disregard what others and we have said in the past about the Florida “wrestling” death. Neither “wrestling” in general, nor WWE specifically, had anything to do with it. Of that I am certain.’

What Is Conversant?

MicroContent News asks,

What is Macrobyte’s Conversant and what does it do?

  • Is it weblog software? I’m confused!

Well, I use Conversant to manage this and other web sites and I’ve written a few things about Conversant, but the short version is that Conversant is a lot like a tub of Legos — it can do pretty much anything you want it to do.

Weblogs? Absolutely. Conversant will let you create as many weblogs as you want within a web site. This site has three or four different weblogs, though only the main page is really active. The interface is pretty straightforward with text entry boxes at the bottom of the weblog page.

But Conversant is so much more. I could go on for pages about all the features, but let me just highlight the two I use most frequently,

– E-mail lists. Conversant allows you and others to subscribe to your weblog/web site as an e-mail list. Anything you post to your weblog/website goes out to the list and anything you or anyone else posts gets posted back to the website. Once you use this, you’ll wonder why this isn’t a standard feature on all content management systems.

– Completely customizable metadata. The best way to explain this is to show it in action. Visit my animal rights faq and poke around a bit. This is a huge, dynamically generated topical index of all the content on that site. Everything there starts as a weblog entry and is filtered automatically to the correct categories using a system that is surprisingly simple to set up and customize. As others have noted, I’m pretty obsessive about the number of categories I use, but you could make this as simple or as complex as you want.

And I cannot emphasize how helpful this is. For example, jump to my 9/11 page which tracks all of the stuff I’ve written about the terrorist attacks. Plus, if you look at the right hand category, there’s a nice “Related Topics” sidebar that is, again, generated dynamically. It takes just a second or two to add or delete a category.

Whether they use Conversant or not, I would really like to see more webloggers start using some sort of system to organize their weblog entries. The basic weblog interface is excellent for seeing what’s new at a site, but it’s pretty rotten for finding topical information. I’d like to be able to go to somebody’s weblog and quickly find all the entries about Microsoft or Noam Chomsky or the RIAA. And I use Conversant because it’s the only software I know that lets me indulge my own category obsessions with ease.