FROM THE OFFICE OF THE VICE PRESIDENT:

As a privately held company, Modern Evil is not required to publicly report on any of its operations or activities. This blog of the Research & Development Division is a faint reflection of our interests and opinions. Thank you.

~ Saxby C. Curliss, V.P. Research & Development

24.3.08

Killer Robot Plans, DIY and You

CATEGORY: Killer Robots, Suicide, DIY

DIVISION: Modern Evil Products, R&D

NOTE: Killer Robots are the backbone of every nefarious scheme - from world domination all the way down to driveway suicide. But giving away the blueprints to the DIY crowd is like showing your hand before the flop. So while we meet with our internal Products Division, we'd like to remind you that our fantastic line of Killer Robots are all ICC-Approved and finance-ready for overnight shipping within the continental U.S.










Man, 81, Kills Himself with Shot from 'Suicide Robot'

Fran Yeoman

An elderly man has killed himself by programming a robot to shoot him in the head after building the machine from plans downloaded from the internet.

Francis Tovey, 81, who lived alone in Burleigh Heads on the Australian Gold Coast, was found dead in his driveway.

According to the Gold Coast Bulletin, he had been unhappy about the demands of relatives living elsewhere in Australia that he should move out of his home and into care.

Notes left by Mr Tovey — who was born in England — revealed that he had scoured the internet for plans before constructing his complex machine, which involved a jigsaw power tool and was connected to a .22 semi-automatic pistol loaded with four bullets. It could fire multiple shots once triggered remotely.

At 7am on Tuesday he set the robot up in the driveway of his £450,000 house and activated it.

His notes suggested that Mr Tovey chose to kill himself in the driveway because he knew there were workmen building a new house next door who would find his body.

The scheme worked, as carpenter Daniel Skewes heard gunshots and ran to Mr Tovey's home. "I thought I heard three shots and when we ran next door he was lying on the driveway with gunshot wounds to the head," Mr Skewes told the GCB.

A neighbour, who did not want to be named, told the newspaper that Mr Tovey had lived at his home on Gabrielle Grove since 1984. "He was a really marvellous man, an ideal neighbour and I will miss him greatly," she said.

"He was born in England, like I was, and we used to enjoy our tea together. He had visitors from England and family interstate from somewhere far away in Australia.

"There was no inkling of anything amiss, it is just very sad."

21.6.07

The McDonald's Franchise Approach to Cosmetic Surgery

CATEGORY: McSurgery, Beauty, Appearance Medicine

DIVISION: Products, R&D

NOTE: Delayed but finally government approved, our Solo Surgery line of fine products will be available this fall. Hopefully this will alleviate some of the anxiousness surrounding cosmetic surgery. Bringing you quality choices for all your medical needs is our pleasure, here at Modern Evil.









Doctors Warn of 'McSurgery' in Quick Fix Operations Boom

By Andrew Johnson

A huge increase in the number of cosmetic surgery treatments carried out by unqualified or insufficiently qualified people is leading to the "McDonaldisation" of the industry, doctors warned yesterday.

Surgeons spoke out in response to news that a New Zealand cosmetic surgery company is offering doctors a franchise after just two days' training at a hotel in Manchester.

The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) said that high-pressure sales techniques and cowboy operators were fueling a booming market in Botox, face peels and laser treatment, some of which can result in poor treatments, injuries or, in extreme cases, death.

Paul Stapleton, of the Mapperley Park Clinic in Nottingham, said: "It's a McDonald's franchise approach to cosmetic surgery. It's a continuation of alarming developments in the field, which hasn't been helped by the Government's U-turn on plans to regulate cosmetic surgery."

The franchise deal was offered to ordinary GPs who had paid £2,000 a head to a New Zealand company called Appearance Medicine for the training weekend at the Marriott Hotel in Manchester. After practising Botox injections on volunteer hotel staff the GPs were offered equipment to start a practice in exchange for £35,000 and 10 per cent of future profits.

Dr Maurice Mann, a GP in Chesterfield, attended the course "out of curiosity" because he was inundated with patients wanting non-invasive procedures or help after procedures abroad had gone wrong.

"There were 19 doctors and one dentist on the course," he said. "It was a wide-ranging course. Some of it was very good. But what I found a little surprising was that they said for £35,000 they would give us basic kit and a franchise. It's an unregulated market.

"They're not doing anything wrong and have been doing it for 20-odd years. What is worrying is people going on these courses and just getting started.

"This is something there is terrific demand for. If people can't get it from a reputable source they will go to a disreputable one."

Appearance Medicine did not respond to requests for comment.

A quarter of all complaints to the Healthcare Commission are about "low-level" cosmetic surgery procedures such as Botox and face peels.

'I was filming a scene when my whole face froze from Botox'

Sarah Manners, the star of the BBC series 'Casualty', had Botox treatment four years ago. She had feared that her looks were not perfect enough - but the result nearly ruined her career. Her face froze while she was filming an airline drama in which she played a glamorous air hostess and an entire scene was lost. "It taught me a lesson. You can't afford to have Botox when you're an actor. It could lose you work."

10.6.07

The Guidebook for Taking a Life

CATEGORY: Instructionals, How-To

DIVISION: Education

NOTE: The actual steps for Taking a Life will vary by region, religion, and resources at hand. Taking a Life can usually be done in 6 steps or less. Remember to always wear eye-protection and clean up after yourself.









The Guidebook for Taking a Life

By MICHAEL MOSS and SOUAD MEKHENNET

June 10, 2007

We were in a small house in Zarqa, Jordan, trying to interview two heavily bearded Islamic militants about their distribution of recruitment videos when one of us asked one too many questions.

“He’s American?” one of the militants growled. “Let’s kidnap and kill him.”

The room fell silent. But before anyone could act on this impulse, the rules of jihadi etiquette kicked in. You can’t just slaughter a visitor, militants are taught by sympathetic Islamic scholars. You need permission from whoever arranges the meeting. And in this case, the arranger who helped us to meet this pair declined to sign off.

“He’s my guest,” Marwan Shehadeh, a Jordanian researcher, told the bearded men.

With Islamist violence brewing in various parts of the world, the set of rules that seek to guide and justify the killing that militants do is growing more complex.

This jihad etiquette is not written down, and for good reason. It varies as much in interpretation and practice as extremist groups vary in their goals. But the rules have some general themes that underlie actions ranging from the recent rash of suicide bombings in Algeria and Somalia, to the surge in beheadings and bombings by separatist Muslims in Thailand.

Some of these rules have deep roots in the Middle East, where, for example, the Egyptian Islamic scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi has argued it is fine to kill Israeli citizens because their compulsory military service means they are not truly civilians.

The war in Iraq is reshaping the etiquette, too. Suicide bombers from radical Sunni and Shiite Muslim groups have long been called martyrs, a locution that avoids the Koran’s ban on killing oneself in favor of the honor it accords death in battle against infidels. Now some Sunni militants are urging the killing of Shiites, alleging that they are not true Muslims. If there seems to be no published playbook, there are informal rules, and these were gathered by interviewing militants and their leaders, Islamic clerics and scholars in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and England, along with government intelligence officials in the Middle East, Europe and the United States.

Islamic militants who embrace violence may account for a minuscule fraction of Muslims in the world, but they lay claim to the breadth of Islamic teachings in their efforts to justify their actions. “No jihadi will do any action until he is certain this action is morally acceptable,” says Dr. Mohammad al-Massari, a Saudi dissident who runs a leading jihad Internet forum, Tajdeed.net, in London, where he now lives.


Here are six of the more striking jihadi tenets, as militant Islamists describe them:

Rule No. 1: You can kill bystanders without feeling a lot of guilt.

The Koran, as translated by the University of Southern California Muslim Student Association’s Compendium of Muslim Texts, generally prohibits the slaying of innocents, as in Verse 33 in Chapter 17 (Isra’, The Night Journey, Children of Israel): “Nor take life, which Allah has made sacred, except for just cause.”

But the Koran also orders Muslims to resist oppression, as verses 190 and 191 of Chapter 2 (The Cow) instruct: “Fight in the cause of Allah with those who fight with you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah loveth not transgressors. And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out, for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter. ...”

In the typical car bombing, some Islamists say, God will identify those who deserve to die — for example, anyone helping the enemy — and send them to hell. The other victims will go to paradise. “The innocent who is hurt, he won’t suffer,” Dr. Massari says. “He becomes a martyr himself.”

There is one gray area. If you are a Muslim who has sinned, getting killed by a suicide bomber will clean some of your slate for Judgment Day, but precisely where God draws the line between those who go to heaven or hell is not spelled out.

Rule No. 2: You can kill children, too, without needing to feel distress.

True, Islamic texts say it is unlawful to kill children, women, the old and the infirm. In the Sahih Bukhari, a respected collection of sermons and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, verse 4:52:257 refers to Ghazawat, a battle in which Muhammad took part. “Narrated Abdullah: During some of the Ghazawat of the Prophet a woman was found killed. Allah’s Apostle disapproved the killing of women and children.”

But militant Islamists including extremists in Jordan who embrace Al Qaeda’s ideology teach recruits that children receive special consideration in death. They are not held accountable for any sins until puberty, and if they are killed in a jihad operation they will go straight to heaven. There, they will instantly age to their late 20s, and enjoy the same access to virgins and other benefits as martyrs receive.

Islamic militants are hardly alone in seeking to rationalize innocent deaths, says John O. Voll, a professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University. “Whether you are talking about leftist radicals here in the 1960s, or the apologies for civilian collateral damage in Iraq that you get from the Pentagon, the argument is that if the action is just, the collateral damage is justifiable,” he says.

Rule No. 3: Sometimes, you can single out civilians for killing; bankers are an example.

In principle, nonfighters cannot be targeted in a militant operation, Islamist scholars say. But the list of exceptions is long and growing.

Civilians can be killed in retribution for an enemy attack on Muslim civilians, argue some scholars like the Saudi cleric Abdullah bin Nasser al-Rashid, whose writings and those of other prominent Islamic scholars have been analyzed by the Combating Terrorism Center, a research group at the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

Shakir al-Abssi, whose Qaeda-minded group, Fatah Al Islam, has been fighting Lebanese soldiers since May 20, says some government officials are fair game. He was sentenced to death in Jordan for helping to organize the slaying of the American diplomat Laurence Foley in 2002, and said in an interview with The New York Times that while he did not specifically choose Mr. Foley to be killed, “Any person that comes to our region with a military, security or political aim, then he is a legitimate target.”

Others like Atilla Ahmet, a 42-year-old Briton of Cypriot descent who is awaiting trial in England on terrorism charges, take a broader view. “It would be legitimate to attack banks because they charge interest, and this is in violation of Islamic law,” Mr. Ahmet said last year.

Rule No. 4: You cannot kill in the country where you reside unless you were born there.

Militants living in a country that respects the rights of Muslims have something like a peace contract with the country, says Omar Bakri, a radical sheik who moved from London to Lebanon two years ago under pressure from British authorities.

Militants who go to Iraq get a pass as expeditionary warriors. And the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks did not violate this rule since the hijackers came from outside the United States, Mr. Bakri said.

“When I heard about the London bombings, I prayed that no bombers from Britain were involved,” he said, fearing immigrants were responsible. As it turned out, the July 7, 2005, attack largely complied with this rule. Three of the four men who set off the bombs had been born in Britain; the fourth moved there from Jamaica as an infant.

Mr. Bakri says he does not condone violence against innocent people anywhere. But some of the several hundred young men who studied Islam with him say they have no such qualms.

“We have a voting system here in Britain, so anyone who is voting for Tony Blair is not a civilian and therefore would be a legitimate target,” says Khalid Kelly, an Irish-born Islamic convert who says he studied with Mr. Bakri in London.

Rule No. 5: You can lie or hide your religion if you do this for jihad.

Muslims are instructed by the Koran to be true to their religion. “Therefore stand firm (in the straight Path) as thou art commanded, thou and those who with thee turn (unto Allah), and transgress not (from the Path), for He seeth well all that you do,” says verse 112 of Chapter 11 (Hud). Lying is allowed only when it is deemed a necessity, for example when being tortured, or when an innocuous deception serves a good purpose, scholars say.

But some militants appear to shirk this rule to blend in with non-Muslim surroundings or deflect suspicion, says Maj. Gen. Achraf Rifi, the general director of Lebanon’s internal security force who oversaw a surveillance last year of a Lebanese man suspected of plotting to blow up the PATH train under the Hudson River.

“We thought the story couldn’t be true, especially when we followed this young man,” General Rifi said. “He was going out, drinking, chasing girls, drove a red MG.” But he says the man, who is now awaiting trial in Lebanon, confessed, and Mr. Rifi recalled that the Sept. 11 hijacker who came from Lebanon frequented discos in Beirut.

Mr. Voll takes a different view of the playboy-turned-militant phenomenon. He says the Sept. 11 hijackers might simply have been “guys who enjoyed a good drink” and that militant leaders may be seeking to do a “post facto scrubbing up of their image” by portraying sins as a ruse.

Rule No. 6. You may need to ask your parents for their consent.

Militant Islamists interpret the Koran and the separate teachings of Muhammad that are known as the Sunna as laying out five criteria to be met by people wanting to be jihadis. They must be Muslim, at least 15 and mature, of sound mind, debt free and have parental permission.

The parental rule is currently waived inside Iraq, where Islamists say it is every Muslim’s duty to fight the Americans, Dr. Massari says. It is optional for residents of nearby countries, like Jordan.

In Zarqa, Jordan, the 24-year-old Abu Ibrahim says he is waiting for another chance to be a jihadi after Syrian officials caught him in the fall heading to Iraq. He is taking the parental rule one step further, he said. His family is arranging for him to marry, and he feels obligated to disclose his jihad plans to any potential bride.

“I will inform my future wife of course about my plans, and I hope that, God willing, she might join me,” he said.