Tech support scam taken down

Tech support scam taken down

This might explain why I haven’t had any calls from these parasites lately: Tech support scams have been crushed by Canadian, Australian, and United States authorities. 

Religion and crime

This is a heat map: the redder the tones, the more feverish the problem In this case, it’s religiosity by U.S. state vs. various types of crime. Religion looks like a bad influence. The diagram is from here. A good place to find secular resources, including pro-bono lawyers for the secular side in U.S. church vs. state cases, is Secular Nation.

Man burns woman to death in elevator

Hello, Richard Dawkins! Let’s hear you be sarcastic about this as you convey that Muslim women have it worse so the problem doesn’t exist. Let’s hear you explain how safe elevators are because a woman can always press the stop button if she wants to get away from someone: Man burns Dolores Gillespie to death in elevator. He waited on her floor and then stepped into the elevator when she tried to get off.

The woman, who had grocery bags in her arms, turned about 180 degrees and then crouched in an attempted to protect herself, he said. But the man sprayed her directly in the face and continued to spray her “sort of methodically” over her head and parts of her body as the bags draped off her arms. She turned around and retreated to the back of the elevator….

Neighbors reported a fire in the building, unaware that the woman, whom police declined to identify, was burning to death in the elevator.

Sex abuse in Scouts Canada

Yet another organization proves to have feet of clay. The CBC’s Fifth Estate found 340 children abused by active scout leaders. There are many fine leaders in Scouts Canada. But child abusers go where the children are.

Religious hate speech isn’t OK after all

Extreme Christian and probable madman Dennis Markuze was hit with another fourteen counts of criminal harassment and uttering death threats against atheists and skeptics, bringing the total to sixteen charges. I’m sure that’s just a preliminary look at the most obvious crimes. He did not get bail. He has been sent to a psychiatric hospital for thirty days of psychological examination. And that’s a good thing: the threats appearing to come from his busy fingers included death, decapitation, and torture for skeptics, their families, and anyone they talked to.

Religious nut charged with two counts of threatening death

A religious (not pseudo-religious, as some newspapers would have it) crank has finally been charged for his threats:

• A deranged spammer of religiously based death threats has been charged with two counts–perhaps the most recent and local of his offences? Or perhaps the most vicious? Those with the youngest victims? Who know? At least the Montreal Police were shamed off their duffs by the blaze of publicity shone on them by an online petition.
• He wasn’t lured into threatening the police. I don’t think anyone expected that he would start threatening them, but he started signing the petition himself in order to place threats against other signers in the comments. Which sent his threats straight to the police. Then his habit of choosing “Reply All” for anything that mentioned him meant that his Tweeted threats against people discussing him also went to @SPVM, the Montreal Police.

Dennis Markuze threats reported in 2009

In September, 2009, Prof. PZ Myers asked for advice on how to report death threats from Canada:

• Time to activate Team Canada! “He’s leaving a few hundred threatening messages a day, which I clean up as I find them, and has also said he is emailing these threats to every individual member of my university (I haven’t verified that he has yet, but he has done so in the past). I’d say he is just another deranged spammer, except that he’s been escalating lately — the messages have become more personal and much more violent. …— at some point he’s going to snap and cause harm to himself or others, and investigators will look with considerable alarm at the rising tide of hysterical threats he has been posting and wonder why no one did anything…. I think he’s too scrambled up in the head to make the concerted effort necessary to get all the way to Morris, Minnesota (and I have mentioned him to the local police), so I’m not barricading my doors — but he has loudly announced his desire to commit mass murder. I think the innocent residents of Ottawa or Montreal (it’s not clear where he lives) are in some danger.”   PZ got lots of good advice in the comments.
• And he acted on them: Update on Dennis Markuze. “I gathered together all of the crazy posts he made over the course of one evening, and printed them out in very small print — it made for a small 61 page book, which would be impressive if it weren’t so repetitive and vapid. I took it down to the local police station, along with what little we know about Markuze’s addresses, IP numbers, email, and phone numbers, and plopped it down in front of a police officer….. It is now entirely in the hands of law enforcement, and all further complaints will wend their ponderous way through official channels. Our local police will talk to the Montreal police and alert them to the loon on a hair trigger in their midst, and will also alert national law agencies.” Too bad the Montreal Police can still confidently say: “NOBODY EVER COMPLAINED BEFORE!”