A couple of notable cases of extreme attitudes in the news today. Here’s one: in response to the Moscow subway bomb, alegedly (sp?) the work of Chechnyan rebels, ultra-nationalist Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky said:

“All people who look suspicious must be sent away from Moscow.'”

Okay then.

In unrelated and less extremist news, the offices of the Kazaa filesharing network, as well as a couple of universities and ISPs and personal homes were raided in Australia in connection with copyright infringment allegations. What I think is interesting about this is that the people who did the ‘raiding’ weren’t police or detectives or even lawyers. They had a search warrant so I guess they were going in: they were actually guys from the record labels. No really. They threatened that anybody who tried to stop them would be arrested, walked in and started tearing up peoples computers and searching through paper work and such. Just some goons that BMG and Sony Music et al hired. Or quite possibly, it was BMG and Sony et al executives. I know if I was VP finance for EMI or Warner and the courts had granted my company a personal search warrant under some kooky old law, I’d take the opportunity to truck down there in my beemer with the music blaring and some friends in the back. “let’s go get those rats boys”. I imagine it was quite satisfying for them. I hope they enjoyed it.