The punishment can be fierce in San Diego

Getting stoned never used to be this dangerous. Sure, pot has some side effects its true, most noticeably an unquenchable thirst for sweetness, a lethargic side and procrastination for everything bar the next joint, and even that can be put off for a while. What it doesn’t include is 4 days in a San Diego holding cell without food, water or any form of contact with the outside world. It doesn’t involve drinking your own urine and eating methamphetamine as it is the only food stuff available to you, contemplating suicide, eating glass or scratching the nails on your fingers down to the bone in a botched attempt to claw your way out. The side effects do not incorporate dehydration, a perforated esophagus, mental trauma and kidney failure. Unless of course you happen to be in the wrong place at the worng time and go by the name of  Daniel Chong, as this is exactly what happened to him.

Back in 1971 a group of  crazy Californian kids, in a pot smoking equivalent to the Goonies, heard about a magical marijuana plantation that was somewhere in the vicinity of their San Rafael high school and set out to find it. Only this was more the Brady Bunch than the Dirty Dozen and they soon gave up on this magical mission and just got stoned instead. They actually had loads of weed and didn’t need a  uncut plantation of the sticky stuff; think of all the work. Before they gave up this search, however, they had unknowingly created a call-sign and the universally acceptable time for smoking pot: 4.20 pm. This was not some profound, celestial birth time, it was merely the time that they had arranged to meet after school to go in search of the aforementioned pot plantation. Just over 40 years later, Daniel Chong was observing this tradition with some friends in a San Diego pot den that also happened to harbour 18.000 ecstasy pills, when the door was broken down and the recreational drug users were carted off to a San Diego holding cell.

And this is where the ineptitude kicks in, for Mr Chong was forgotten about. For 4 days. Despite kicking at his cell door, screaming from the bottom of his hallucinating lungs and not actually being charged with any misdemeanor, Daniel Chongs cries went unheard, or at least unlistened. What beggars belief is that, well, no-one heard him. Really? Was he put inside a sound proof holding cell? Do these even exist? Was he mistaken for a terrorist and subjected to torture? Where was the water-boarding? To add to the reckless stupidity, Mr Chong was left in a cell with no sink, no toilet, no bed. Just a blanket which happened to contain a small bag of methamphetamine. Methamphetamine in a prison cell? One supposes that it is better and more fun than a chocolate on your pillow, but not really what you need 3 days into a nightmare. Besides, in a place where they forget people exist, forgetting to clean out class-A drugs from a prison cell should be expected.

This man nearly died

On the fifth day, after attempting to take his own life by swallowing glass, hallucinating about small Japanese cartoon characters, engraving goodbye wishes into his skin and contemplating the after life, the door to his cell finally opened. Mr Chong could now stop drinking his own urine.

On his release a DEA spokesman offered his apologies to Mr Chong. “I extend my deepest apologies to the young man,” he said. Really? No shit.

Obviously Mr Chong will be pressing charges and a full investigation into how such a calamitous piece of stupidity could be carried out under the noses of so many is under way. To quote Mr Chongs lawyer, who put it very accurately, when he said.

“How they failed to realize he was there or ignored him is beyond comprehension”

In a bid to make the British runners run faster the London Olympic committee have decided to give them a headstart

The Ministry of Defence has upped the anti in the billion dollar security project that is the 2012 London Olympics by ruminating the use of surface-to-air missiles to protect the skies above London during the event. In a bid to spend as much money as possible preceding and during the 2-week running race the security budget has been ear-marked as a veritable Great Blue Hole off of Belize in which to pour money, without really stopping to consider the consequences.

Surface-to-air missiles you say? Arent those the very weapons that shocked and awed Iraq? That got Iran into hot water and had the entire Asia-Pacific region quaking in its rather stylish boots when North Korea tried to, it must be said rather pathectically, test run one earlier in 2012? Well, yes, essentially. Travelling at three time the speed of sound, 3 missiles will fire in a successive torrent of explosives destroying any low flying terrorist threat that happens to have entered the airspace above the Olympic village and or Stadium. Bravo.

For your viewing pleasure, a quick video to show just exactly the kind of fire power we are talking about here.

OK, so just where are the Ministry of Defence thinking of putting these weapons? Bearing in mind these things are usually test fired in the desert a thousand military clicks from any kind of population centre and under a cloud of hushed parliamentary whispers, it would make sense that somewhere around Norwich would be as good a place as any. But as we all know the MOD likes to play rough and is in fact considering placing the firepower on the roof of some apartment buildings in east London.

700 residents of an east London tower hamlet awoke to discover their mailboxes not only full of the usual array of junk but also what could have been viewed as a practical joke. Only it wasnt April fools day and this was addressed from The Ministy of Defence and said that high velocity surface-to-air missiles could be placed on their roof.

The letter went on to explain the rational behind the decision and that is where things get interesting, because as if missiles aimed at terrorists on your roof isn’t exciting enough.

“The location has been chosen as it is situated close to the Olympic Park and offers an excellent view of the surrounding area and the entire sky above the Olympic Park.”

Take the Blame is not a bastion of military study or the science behind propelling a steel phallic test-tube at 3 times the speed of sound at a fast moving target, but one suspects that in this day and age its not necessary to be able to see what you are firing at. Indeed it probably hinders the aiming system. It is not as if a man will be standing on the roof sighting the rapidly approaching terrorist target with a pair of binoculars and a itchy trigger finger. Is it? One would hope not. Do they not have radar?

The actual decision to deploy the missiles operationally has not been officially given but tests will be carried out in the first week of May and if the government adjudges the missiles crucial to the protection of the Games then a swat team of armed soldiers will be on 24-hour watch at the missile sites. Well thats OK then, at least the ineptitude will be supervised.

delays expected this summer

As the bulging ineptitude of the Olympic Games looms over the capital and  London security chiefs mount land to air missile systems on the tops of apartment blocks in some of the most densely populated housing estates in Western Europe, Heathrow airport is continuing its gold medal winning form in the ineptitude Olympics. At the moment it is a 1-2-3 for the badly organised, incongruous decisions and preposterous spending.

Chaos in the immigration and arrival halls at Heathrow airport has been blamed on that most British of weather phenomenon, rain. Immigration minister Damian Green was called to an emergency cabinet meeting on the issue late on Monday night where he expressed his cerebral contemplation on the problem.

“There were some breaches of acceptable waiting times at Heathrow over the weekend. This was caused mainly by the severe weather”

Those breaches, which he so eloquently refers, were 2-hour queues for non-European holiday makers where a 45-minute maximum waiting time is in place. These limits were put in place without consideration for the weather as was demonstrated over the weekend by a heavy deluge which caused the airport to reach near-breaking point.

So much rain fell in the south of England that the iris scanners – that have been scrapped at other airports around the country due to their failings – and the under-staffed immigration counters couldnt cope with the influx of tourists in the, give or take, busiest airport in the world. Unless Heathrow are planning on contructing a recling roof on Terminal 5 so that everybody can wait in the sunshine whilst in their queues, then no rain can fall inside the terminal and the correct blame for the inacceptable waiting times can be attributed to the real agent responsible i.e. lack of staff and resources.

For the shambolic ineptitude to be blamed on the rain only heightened the anger of London Mayor Boris Johnson who wrote to home secretary Theressa May outlining his views on the airport.

“(Heathrow gives) a terrible impression of the UK … This summer gives a once-in-a-generation opportunity to promote what is best about London and the UK. It is critical visitors have a great experience from the beginning to end of their stay.”

Delays expected.

If you are going to escape from prison, if you are going to over-come the sheer difficulty, improbability and danger of it, then run. Run a long way from those concrete walls. Keep running and don’t look back.

It took Andy Dufresne 20 years to dig out of Shawshank with a bent spoon for a crime he didn’t even commit. Where did he go when he finally escaped? Mexico! that’s where. He didn’t, as Marco A Cabrera did, hide in the garden of a neighbour 2 minutes stroll from the prison. “Andy Dufresne crawled through 500 yards of shit smelling foulness I can’t even start to imagine” and then ran until the lactic acid ate away at his very being. He crossed international state boarders. Marco Cabrera took his clothes off and hid a stones throw from Folsom City Prison and, one would presume from the reckless stupidity of his behaviour, waited to get recaptured. Does he not watch TV?

This man has not seen Shawshank Redemption

On Sunday evening in Folsom, the prison made eternal by the late, great Johnny Cash, a man escpaped the confines of the Californian pentitentiary and ignoring the advice of the man in black -

If they freed me from this prison,
If that railroad train was mine,
I bet I’d move out over a little,
Farther down the line,
Far from Folsom Prison

- he didn’t go far from Folsom prison, in fact he didn’t even leave Folsom,  he went downtown and tried to steal a car. He couldn’t even manage that. (As an aside, you have to wonder how someone so prone to ineptitude the minute he is a ‘free’ man could possibly have escpaed from the prison in the first place.) On being thwarted by local residents stole a mobile phone and did what he should have done a long time before, he actually ran. Hallelujah. Well, not quite. He ran into the back garden of a neighbour living in the vicinity and hid in a tree – and according to some reports, took his clothes off. Only he couldn’t keep quiet and duly awoke and startled the occupants.

“The whole night, we kept hearing noises in the back yard” said Danielle Wirtz who owns the house. Marco A Cabrera was believed to be hiding behind their guest house and this was confirmed when the guest in said guesthouse met Mr Cabrera in the drive way some time later that afternoon. Being a guesthouse, and one would assume, housing a tourist, the occupant felt suspicious and went back inside to get the gun that for reasons unbeknown to anyone not American, they had taken on holiday. The escaped convict moved slowly away and was picked up minutes later by Folsom police, no more than a few hundred metres from where he had escaped over 24 hours earlier. Behold the Folsom, California ineptitude.

“Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water.”

This is the tag line from Jaws 2, the 1978 sequel to the 1975 Steven Spielberg shark film Jaws, a film about a big shark terrorising the fictional town of Amity. In the second film another giant shark finds its way into the peaceful waters of Amity and starts harassing unsuspecting bathers. After chief inspector Brody – the bumbling hero of the franchise –  takes offence to yet another man eating shark infesting his tranquil waters, he sets up a one man crack team (him) and sets about trying to exterminate the beast. In jaws 2 the Brody stakes have been upped and the Brody family, in the shape of his son, are now in danger. Not only that, but the kids on the beach are being targeted by the big rubber fish.

No killer shark and no naked men

In France a similar story is happening only without a shark, without any shark victims and without Chief inspector Brody. Infact the only similarity between the two stories is a beach. But the ineptitude in the story breaking in France far outweighs the rubber shark puppet modelling on view in the Jaws films. Take a look at the photo below.

Is that a naked man in the background?

La Redoute is a French fashion retailer that specialises in mail ordering. It is a huge company with a turnover that could squash you in banknotes. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately depending on how you look at it – no such thing as bad advertising and all that – the crack team of editors who compile their website couldn’t spot a naked man splashing around in the ocean literally metres from 4 children showing off this years summer kids collection. The photo appeared on the La Redoute website and had gone viral long before the sea urchins at La Redoute had clocked onto what was happening. In a twist of glorious stupidity, La Redoute offers its customers magnifying glasses to inspect the **cough** cough** wears more thoroughly.

At some point before publication surely the same magnifying glasses were used to inspect the photos before release? Surely someone, at some stage saw the stark bollock naked man a stones throw from some kids and said “you know what? we should airbrush this naked man out of these photos. And what of the camera crew taking the photos? Did they not sense that they were filming on a nudist beach? Or are all beaches in France nudist? And why oh why can I not see this naked man by these kids?”

TakeTheBlame™ would like to point the finger at some very glaring ineptitude.

The ineptitude has begun

Just. Where. Do. You. Begin? That title is correct. Not only did 10,000 more people than can fit inside the aquatic centre apply for tickets to watch synchronised swimming at the 2012 London Olympics, but they actually got allocated tickets, only for the organising London Olympic tickets distribution monkeys to telephone the poor unfortunates to inform them that inepts had been running the ticket allocation machine and that there weren’t any tickets after all. Welcome to part 1 of what will surely be a very expensive experiment into Olympic organisation ineptitude.

The London Olympic ticket distribution system is one of two things, depending on who you believe. Either it is a fluid, mathmatically perfect, exceptionally accurate, 7th wonder of the ticket allocation world, or, it is a big fat pile of biased, coporate mollycoddling crap. If you believe the 50% of the fee paying public who will be lucky enough to sit behind a pillar and watch the blind-folded syncronised dog sledge events, then its the later. If you believe the pampered corporate 75% who will be watching the good events and didnt even need to join the lucky dip for tickets, then its the former. Join an orderly queue.

For those who don’t know how the Olympic ticket allocation system works, Harvard business school is running a 4-year course on theoretical mathematics. Essentially what you have to do is – over the course of 2 gauntlet running draws – is put in an “order” for a sum total of tickets – the higher the bid, the higher the mathematical chances of getting a ticket – and then wait to see what you get. As you have to put in an “order” for an amount which could be anywhere between 10 and a billion pounds, you run the risk of getting all of your tickets granted, and thus having to pay out thousands, or none. Or, synchronised swimming. But at least you can be part of the biggest sporting event to hit London since.. well… ever. Or can you? No you cant. Because in an exceptional piece of ineptitude which is already being covered up with “ah, but you will now get a ticket for another event” excuses, the ticket allocation system can’t even count.

10,000 extra tickets available for this

According to a spokesman in conversation with the BBC

“As a result of finalising the seating configurations in our venues and reconciling the millions of Olympic and Paralympic ticket orders against the seating plans for around 1,000 sporting sessions, we have discovered an error in seats available in four synchronised swimming sessions…. In December we contacted around 3,000 customers who had applied for tickets in the four sessions during the second round sales process. We are exchanging their synchronised swimming tickets for tickets in other sports that they originally applied for.”

So 10,000 too many tickets were sold. Why?  ”a human data error”. Thats good old-fashioned ineptitude to thee and me.

Tickets? what tickets?

Once upon a time curiosity may well have killed the cat, but that time has long passed and curiosity won’t get you any closer to the promised land when you are a feline in the cybertronic age. Indeed the 4-footed present from long dead alien cultures are now pitting their paws against the spreading fat cats of China. And it would appear they are winning. Admittedly they are having to put themselves in Chinese cat stew to accomplish their mission, but that is just a footnote.

The fat cat in question is Chinese billionaire Long Liyuan who died on the 23rd December in Guandong Province after he himself ate a cat. As with anything in China, the news does not leave the country with feline speed but more details are slowly coming to light. Mr Liyuan made his mega fortune in forests. Now, judging by the cost of Christmas trees, it is quite easy to see how such a fortune could be amassed, but since the Chinese don’t celebrate Christmas or, indeed the trees that frequent this most unholy of holy celebrations, how do you make a billion from a tree? Ship them around the world stuffed with cocaine in an elaborate bark-coated smuggling organisation? Who knows? And one supposes we never will as Mr Liyuan is now lying in a box made of trees. How ironic.

What really happened to Long Liyuan is being investigated by Chinese police in Quandong Province and although there was a cat involved, the story is much more fishy. It would appear that Long Liyuan was having dinner with Huang Guang when he, one imagines, went a bit red in the cheeks, fell dizzy and took himself off to hospital where he promptly died of heart failure. He had fallen prey to the poison that Huang Guang had allegedly slipped into the local cat delicacy they were eating.

Huang Guang, an agricultural official, was advising Mr Liyuan on a lease that he was seeking to take out on a piece of forest in the province, when things turned sinister in a way that would have had Miss Marpel and Poirot fighting over the deduction process.

“Huang, who was helping Long take a lease on a forest, had himself used funds provided by Long. This led to an economic dispute and gave Huang the idea to kill Long with poison.”

Chinese fat cat is killed by cat

The plot, like the stew at the heart of it, thickens with some sleuth like detective work. It turns out that Long Liyuan was no saint himself, using Huang Guang to get planning permission in exchange for bribes amounting to anywhere between 0 and 400,000 US dollars. Meanwhile Huang was running up debts elsewhere and hit Long up for some more funds. When a project they were working on together began to stall the two parties showed their true colours with Long threatening to expose Huang. At some point in the whole murky timeline, Huang decided to Kill Long.

According to reports the two men, along with a third interested party, were eating at a local restaurant when Huang Guang excused himself from the table, slipped into the kitchen and sent the chef on a decoy errand and slipped the local suicide plant Gelsemium Elegans into the bubbling pot. A pot he himself was set to eat from. On returning to the table he commented that the food tasted a bit unusual (cat?) and pushed his plate aside. Mr Liyuan wolfed his down with deathly consequences. The cat got his tongue.

Shoppers on Black Friday see a bargain, lose their senses and charge

“This situation must be controlled before it’s too late. They’re multiplying too rapidly!”

This is a quote from George Romero’s 1978 zombie masterpiece Dawn of The Dead. In the iconic film the words are obviously applied to the increasing number of zombies intent on eating brains, but it could be applied to the current occupy movement which is spreading, much like a plague, across the world, as seen through the eyes of the financial and political institutions the movement is, at least in a diluted and unorganised form, trying to change. Now the two worlds of zombie and occupy have collided in Harrisburg where an occupant has been arrested for dressing like a zombie.

For those of you who know, Dawn of The Dead was primarily shot in a shopping mall and so it comes as no surprise that this particular occupy demonstration was taking place in the Capital City Mall on Black Friday, the day the traditional American Christmas shopping season gets under way. Dawn of The Dead is seen by many as a documentation of a consumer society gone mad on its own spending habits, creating a population so obsessed with spending money on material things that when they, for all and purposes, die, the only thing their disintegrating brains can remember is an innate desire to go shopping. In a bid to replicate the message of the film, the occupy protesters descended on Capital Mall dressed as zombies to highlight the folly of spending more money and escalating the debt culture. *

Jenn Hara was a zombie amongst zombies when she was arrested for not complying with mall police. According to a police report she refused to remove the face-paint she was wearing, thus breaking the “no face-paint” laws of the mall; something to do with obscuring a persons face. Jenn Hara claims that she was merely asking for more information on the draconian face-paint rules.

*no economic theories we investigated, researched or in anyway entertained for this article.

Is this game responisble for American Footballers losing their edge?

At any one moment 3 million players are locked down and playing Call of Duty 3 online. In its first week of release in early November the game shifted over 775 million dollars worth of cyber war joy, enough to make small countries, let alone the latest cinema blockbusters, weep jealous, covetous tears of saline envy into their morning cereal bowls. Modern Warfare: the game, is as monetarily successful as Modern Warfare: the reality.

The hours of lost revenue that this one game must be costing doesn’t bear thinking about; the minds of children’s this game must be warping, unknown; the cost to society; considerable. The average Call of Duty player logs over 170 hours a year, and that is small fry compared to some. But it is a damn-sight more fun than Facebook, so its not all Doom™ and gloom.

So powerful is the call for Call of Duty that University of Louisville Coach Charlie Strong has blamed the game itself for his football team being crap. Now you may think that a computer game couldn’t possibly be responsible for university men clad in over-sized ponchos failing to live up to their preconceived notions of excellence, but you would be wrong.

“That new, what do they call it, Call to Duty? Yeah, they got called to duty…… But, these are young people and that’s what we’re dealing with. Guys who, all of a sudden there’s something new and they want to try it and it just engulfs them.”

As ludicrous as it sounds, the coach could obviously be hitting on something he has no idea about, squarely in the heart. Professional athletes need a few things to keep at their peak levels, both in terms of mental and physical fitness. If these athletes are not sleeping and not training but are instead sitting in the dark twiddling their buttons and shooting German, Afghan and Iraqi soldiers for 16 hours per day, something is going to give. Sacrificing sleep for X-box is going to have a direct result on performance. Really it actually goes without saying.

The futures bright. Hopefully not mushroom cloud orange.

In February 2005 Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez accused America of entertaining ideas of political assasination whilst he himself was entertaining the Venezuelan people with his weekly radio and TV show. Now, 7 years on, he has upped the ante and brought nuclear war into the equation by blaming the United States for possible nuclear war in the Middle East.

Once again using his weekly TV and radio broadcasts he has pointed his big chubby finger at the United States, accusing them of inciting War, and this time there could be reason to his madness. Tensions between Tehran and the West have been increasing by the hour as more evidence of Iran’s determination to produce its own nuclear arsenal unsettles the (extremely temperamental) status quo. Only last week the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released a report on the Iranian nuclear program highlighting its fears and concerns about the military connotations of its program.

“The Agency has serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme….. (The IAEA encourages Iran) to engage substantively with the agency without delay for the purpose of providing clarifications regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.” Worrying.  The report in its entirety is available here.

So there is concern in the West that The Republic of Iran is gearing up for weapons capabilities. What that capability represents in terms of stability in the Middle East is a hornets nest, and a nest that Hugo Chavez believes the Americans are going to possibly eradicate with a big red button. To make matters worse the rhetoric coming out of Tehran is not exactly passive. Ahmadinejad is not known for bowing to pressure. During last years rounds of political pressure and sanctions he had this to say.

“They know that there is a sleeping lion in Iran which is waking up and if she wakes up all the relationships in the world will change. Their (The West) pathetic acts show they know what a great human power is hidden in Iran.”

With Iran being provocative in its flaunting of increased nuclear capabilities and The United States adamant on preventing nuclear proliferation proliferating further, then perhaps Chavez, although delusional with his cries of nuclear war, is not so far off the mark with his war prediction. Britain has already stepped up its military plans for Iranian (specific, nuclear targets) attack by examining where best to deploy Royal Navy ships and tomahawk laden submarines. And then there is America and Israel.

Whether Israel has the capabilities to destroy the nuclear facilities of Iran sufficiently enough to put back the nuclear program, or indeed stop it all together or not, talk of attack is already advanced. As recently as early November the Israeli cabinet was discussing attacks on Iranian facilities in the immediate future; a strategy that has been met with both support (by Iranian Prime minister and Defence secretary Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak respectively) and opposition. Any attack from Israel would be, as Iran has often stated, see retaliation against America.

And what of America? With an election looming and a population, for all their patriotism, which must be growing tired of war after war – four and counting – Americas current administration must fear another invasion, and that’s without even bringing the cost of war during a possible double dip recession into question. The population would be against it, parts of Capital Hill would be against it, the battle weary would be against it and with every escalation of war, the stakes are rising. Should Iran be invaded then the outcome is earth shattering. China and Russia have been supplying weapons for years and China is Irans biggest buyer of Oil, indeed most of China’s imported oil comes from Iran. So whose side are they on? For any security council sanctions to come to fruition then full council support is needed. With China and Russia holding vetos, there is… oh, about Fat Chance of anything coming to pass there.

Should Iran get the bomb then The West could see a cataclysmic shift in oil distribution from the Middle East, especially, as many commentators point out, the real victims of Iran obtaining fully functional nuclear weapons would not be Israel but Iran’s other close neighbours: UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The picture is bleak. But not as bleak as the one below.

Alledged American military prescence. Iran is surrounded.