Line in the sand

At the G20 meeting last week when announcing the new nucluar weapons program in Iran, Gordon Brown, PM of GB, said the international community must draw a line in the sand over this.

That phrase comes from a scence in John Wayne movie about the Alamo, when a the Texas defenders basically made a suicide pact.

Is that what Gordon Brown has in mind? A suicide pact?

It's good to be an engineer

I didn't think that was really a surprise though. I am surprised that an economics degree ranks as high as it does on this list.

Cop forgets to turn on his camara

then he starts shooting.

In Austin a cop pulls up behind a car parked in an apartment complex with his gun pulled and ends up shooting (and killing) a sleeping passenger.

What happens when a guard kills an inmate for sport?

Kill an inmate, get demoted.

Conception

I have no idea why, but babies born to unwed teenage mothers tend to be conceived in April while babies born to married adult women tend to be conceived in August.

Althouse listens to too much Rush

It makes her delusional and somewhat paranoid. In a post about the dead census worker

Can we speculate about what happened here? If I had to guess, I'd say that Sparkman, doing his census work, encountered a criminal enterprise — perhaps a drug lab — out where people thought no one would — or should — be coming around.

Because there's so much census work that takes place in remote areas of National Parks.

I don't know what the guy was doing there, but it's very doubtful it was census work.

The American West

The local paper in Wichita, Kansas has a series entitled "To The Stars; The Story of Kansas". So much of the history of the Wild West has been romanticized, it's nice to see something spelling out the stark realities of the times.

This was how one of the articles begins:

Town marshal had law-breaking past

There was plenty about Henry Brown's past that could be considered unsavory:

He had ridden with Billy the Kid, stolen horses and fled New Mexico to avoid murder charges.

But Brown didn't disclose his past to residents of Caldwell. They were looking for a lawman in June 1882 and were most impressed with the way he handled a gun.

He was known throughout the Southwest as one of the quickest men on the trigger.

And those were credentials enough for a rowdy Kansas cowtown that had seen four of its lawmen murdered shortly before his arrival.

He was hired as an assistant marshal, then promoted to marshal. Town residents gave him a Winchester rifle on New Year's Day 1883.

And this is how it ends

But in late April 1884, Brown left Caldwell with his assistant marshal and two cowboys, telling townsfolk he was headed to Oklahoma.

He instead rode to Medicine Lodge. On April 30, 1884, he and his gang stormed into the Medicine Valley Bank and demanded cash.

click here for complete story

It's worth the read

The people of NYC did a good job

They're going to have a new District Attorney, one who had actually been endorsed by the Innocence Project rather than the Police Union.

They might actually start getting some justice from the prosecutors office in Manhattan.

Taking a Urine Sample

This guy clearly did something to piss off the cop.

An Indiana man has filed a lawsuit claiming that police forcibly withdrew urine from his body during a drunken driving arrest.

According to the suit, police pulled over Jamie Lockard, 53, on suspicion of drunk driving in March. Police said he had driven through two stop signs.

A Breathalyzer test showed Lockard was under the legal limit, but Officer Brian Miller doubted the findings.

Lockard and his attorney claimed in the suit that police took him to Dearborn County Hospital and forced him to submit to a urine test.

Police said they obtained a warrant to obtain a blood and urine sample. They said Lockard refused to provide either voluntarily, saying he could not urinate and declining to drinks fluids to help him urinate.

Lockard's attorney said his client was shackled to a gurney and had a catheter inserted against his will.

What kind of judge signed that warrant?

Look at Al Franken Go

Wow.

Logic and rhetoric of Law

Simple Justice has a nice blog post on logical argument and the process of a law school education. I made a comment on the post

Law is about rhetoric, not logic. It can't be about logic because the axioms of law (the black letter part) doesn't form any kind of consistent system, the axioms themselves are self-contradictory.

The indoctrination of our kids

In about 1937 or so Hitler spoke to my mother's elementary school. (My mother is a German native) She was chosen to present him with a bunch of flowers and he patted her on the head. She was thrilled.

In his speech he encouraged the kids to be good students and good Germans. In fact he equated the two, he told them that the way for them to be Good Germans was to be good students and to mind their parents. That was about it.

I hope we don't hear anything like that from Obama.

Another example of too many cops

They have nothing to do but write tickets and shoot people.

Why somebody needs to be prosecuted

In 2001 John Yoo wrote an internal DOJ memo reaching the legal conclusion that torture is a good thing.

In subsequent years the administration lost Supreme Court decisions related to the right to do whatever they wanted to prisoners three times plus Congress passed some laws saying that torture was bad.

Then in 2007 the DOJ prepares an updated memo using the same Yoo arguments and concluding that torture is good.

The Bush Administration had no respect for law. They had no respect for the Supreme Court, no respect for the Constitution, no respect for Congress, no respect for Rational Thought.

I don't know why they aren't all in prison.

UPDATE: All I can say to this is Wow.

Dumb, violent cops

Watch the video.

TOCCOA - Surveillance video shows 28-year-old Jonathan Ayers entering a convenience store just minutes before he would be shot. Joe Joseph, who owns the Shell station on Currahee Street, says everything seemed normal when Ayers walked in around 2:30 Tuesday afternoon.
During the short time that Ayers was in the convenience store, he came straight to an ATM and then he left.

Joe Joseph says within the next two minutes, something very unusual happened. He heard gun shots. "I've never seen anything like that before. You know, I watch movies but this was totally different."

As you can see in the video, a black Escalade truck pulls up next to a pump and before it completely stops, a man jumps out. "I think I heard 3 shots."

The men in the Escalade were undercover drug agents. Joseph says he saw them shooting as Ayers, the young pastor, tried to back up and get away. "He pulled off and they followed." A short time later, Ayers wrecked his car.

"At that time (of the shooting), I had a parking lot full of people. I mean they could have blown up one of my pumps and that would have been a total mess."

There were, of course, no drugs in the car and the young dead man was not a target of any police investigation.

This country just has too many police and too little accountability for their behavior.

Update: Some more information and observation.

Dumb thieves

This should make the Darwin Awards list.

WICHITA, Kansas – Two men attempting to steal rocks near the Keeper of the Plains statue overloaded their vehicle and it rolled into the river.

Early Wednesday morning, police say two men began stealing some of the landscaping rocks near the statue.

“They loaded the rocks into the back of this Ford Explorer,” said Gordon Bassham, Wichita Police Department spokesperson. “It became too heavy to move and, ultimately, rolled backwards into the river.”