Amnesty International thinks tasers are a bad idea. They want police to stop using tasers until we have some proof that they're non-lethal.
As most people know, tasers are sometimes problematic. They get used in situations where lethal force is unwarranted, indeed in cases where no force is warranted, and yet they hurt like hell and sometimes kill.
All this doesn't add up to a need for a taser ban in my book, but police definitely need to consider their taser policies very carefully. For example, no tasing little kids, old ladies, or innocent men in their own homes. If that leaves you with nobody left to tase, just let me know and I'll provide you with a list of people who might benefit from shock therapy.
Links via TalkLeft , which has lots of links to stopries about taser problems, and Say Uncle, who covers tasers here and then.
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
TalkLeft writes up Ibogaine a psychedelic drug said to cure addiction to heroin and other drugs. Of course, our government, focused more on the psychedelic rather than therapeutic properties, has placed this drug beyond the reach of care-givers, researchers and suffering addicts.
TalkLeft says "the experience is anything but fun, in fact it sounds awful." In other words, this isn't a recreational drug. It will make you trip, but not in a good way. Ibogaine isn't likely to be used recreatinally because drug users are usually looking for a good time, and Ibogaine isn't a good time.
Ibogaine is a drug with potential use in the treatment of addiction (it's had some documented success). It's a poor candidate to become a party drug or a recreational drug. What's the rationale for scheduling it (a move that makes research difficult and more expensive)?
If you're interested in Ibogaine, read Erowid's page on it, Daniel Pinchbeck's Salon article, and his book, Breaking Open the Head.
Polis | 1 Writebacks | #
It is a matter of conventional wisdom among ACLU-watchers that the best place to file a first amendment claim is the third circuit. Philly judges are just more likely to be sympathetic to first amendment arguments than judges in other circuits. And not surprisingly, they came through again today.
A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, found that educational institutions have a First Amendment right to keep military recruiters off their campuses to protest the Defense Department policy of excluding gays from military service.
The best part about this is the court's willingness to use the Boy Scout's exclusion of gays to their advantage:
"Just as the Boy Scouts believed that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the Scout Oath," Judge Ambro wrote, "the law schools believe that employment discrimination is inconsistent with their commitment to fairness and justice."
It's a victory all around, and I applaud it. Some people fear the military will suffer with inferior lawyers if it is disadvantaged in the recruiting process. This is a valid concern, but one easily remedied-- stop discriminating in the hiring of attorneys.
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
A few months ago, a friend of mine stuck an anti-GMO flyer on my fridge. She assumed I was all down with the fight against Frankenfood and tinkering with nature's perfect bounty. It seems all my lefty friends are against the genetic modification.
I left the flyer up, just to be nice, but I let her know that I don't have big problems with GMO food, plants, animals, or even people. She narrated for me the parade of horribles we will soon see lest we stop messing with mother nature. And she was right-- it did sound pretty terrible.
But then I always think about the upside, the benefits of this technology, and I just can't pass on things like landmine detecting flowers. I mean, it's a flower! And it finds landmines! How cool is that?
So, yeah, frankenfood is going to make us all sterile, allergic zombies or something, but at least we won't be stepping on landmines.
Via Boing Boing.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
The Greene Dragon joined Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping to celebrated Buy Nothing Day by invading Times Square and getting arrested. The last picture on that page, of the Rev being loaded into a paddy wagon is classic.
Unfortunately, I misread the email and went to the wrong location (just a couple blocks away, but so far!) and missed the festivities. Perhaps next time I can get all patriotic windbaggy with some of the best street theater people around.
Although the Times didn't cover the Rev's latest action, the magazine did a great, flattering bit on him this past summer. Congrats to patriots everywhere!
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
Sometimes the best part of protests is coming up with slogans and making posters. You just sit around, drink, smoke and shout out whatever comes to mind. You make a bunch of posters, make your statement, and somehow lose track of all the signs. Then, months later, you're browsing the internet and see your work, carried by somebody you don't know. It warms my cold black heart, yes it does.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
Drug War Rant, while debunking the White House's latest book of marijuana lies, reminds us that the easiest and fastest way to reduce the number of kids smoking weed is to legalize it. Go read.
Polis | 12 Writebacks | #
Tennessee school bans pens and pencils. Apparently they're weapons and a violation of the zero-tolerance policy. I suspect the move is part of a long-range plan to convert our schools into padded-cell nurseries.
Via Say Uncle.
Polis | 6 Writebacks | #
What is with Republicans and rules? Every time the rules are inconvenient, they change them. Want to raise the budget, but hampered by the debt ceiling? No problem, just raise the ceiling. My favorite part is that they admit they're going to raise it again next year. They should just abolish the damn thing and get it over with.
House Majority Leader embroiled in a financial scandal? No problem, just change the rules so he can continue to govern after indictment.
These people have no shame.
Polis | 3 Writebacks | #
Bloomberg has followed Elliot Spitzer's advice and directed the city to recognize all marriages from other states, even if they couldn't be performed in New York. The upshot of this is that people married in other states won't suddenly find themselves unmarried upon coming to New York just because they're gay.
We're winning the culture war.
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
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I'm all about enjoying Danger Mouse's mashup of Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles' White Album. It gets regular rotation on my music station. In fact, I'm listening to it right now.
I never really thought about video mashing, but when I saw that somebody made a Gray Video (mirror, torrent) from old Beatle's footage and some live Jay-Z stuff, it piqued my interest. It's well done, and even the obvious seams just add to the wonder, like the puppet strings you can see in Team America. - And while we're mashing, check out the Kleptone's Night at the Hip-Hopera. The Kleptones have Disney all a twitter because they repurpose Queen all over the album. I'm on Disney's side for aesthetic rather than legal reasons. They should have ignored Queen in favor of something more like Yoshimi Battles the Hip Hop Robots. Still, Hip-Hopera is worth a listen, just for the creepy, prescient bit that comes at -20 seconds of the ODB remix in track 4.
- And finally, Allan Holdsworth -- synthy, jazzy electric guitar. Musically, it's the most interesting stuff done with guitar since Dylan went electric. He's not on my daily playlist, but is worth hearing, just to expand your conception of guitars.
Matthey Yglesias gets the scare on by saying there's no middle ground once you overturn Roe v. Wade. He says if we ditch Roe, we lose all kinds of other rights or else we ditch abortion by judicial fiat all across the land:
The logic of the anti-Roe view is either that there's no right to privacy, or else that for some reason the right to privacy does not extend to this particular matter. If you take the former approach than the universal applicability of a bunch of other rights will stand or fall with Roe. If you take the latter approach then the rest of the legal doctrine can stand, but the issue arises of why the right to privacy wouldn't extend to this matter. The answer would pretty much have to be that abortions aren't private conduct because the fetus has the rights of a person. This is the logic of virtually all the pro-life rhetoric one hears, and in the legal context it's the logic of the analogies drawn between Roe and the pre-Civil War slavery cases. This suggests that the upshot of an anti-Roe ruling wouldn't be for abortion to be decided by the congress and the state legislatures, but for a universal abortion ban to be put in place by judicial fiat.
Fortunately, the abortion debate in the courts isn't framed this way. Yglesias casts the problem as two competing rights: that of the mother and that of the fetus. The courts, though, see it as the rights of the mother vs. the rights (or powers) of the state.
The state has the power to regulate and protect certain interests. In this case, that interest is preserving the potential life of a viable fetus. The protestors and certain moralistic legislators talk about protecting fetal life and a fetus's right to life, but the Supreme Court has never employed that language.
Even the dissents in both Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey avoid characterizing the fetus in a way that would require the state to protect it. Rhenquist, writing for himself, Scalia and Thomas, goes out of his way to say that while he would recognize the state's right to regulate abortion, "It bears emphasis that our conclusion in this regard does not carry with it any necessary approval of these regulations." Likewise, Scalia writes "The States may, if they wish, permit abortion..."
Roe doesn't turn on the metaphysical question of when life begins. It turns on what protections women have from intrusions of state power. If the Court decides women have no protection in this area, it doesn't need Yglesias's justification that "abortions aren't private conduct because the fetus has the rights of a person." Instead, the Court can easily turn to the state interest in the potential lives of fetuses, which would allow (but not require) protection of those potential lives. And potential life being a pretty unique issue, this can be done without jeopardizing other privacy rights.
We know the Court can do this because this is exactly what the Court does under Roe itself. When they want to draw the line at fetal viability, the Court doesn't cast fetuses as children. Instead, it talks of them as potential lives and says the state can regulate them. There is no suggestion in any Supreme Court writing that government is required to ban abortions of viable fetuses.
When people tell you the Court might go so far as to ban abortion, they are proposing something that no member of the Court has ever come close to saying. They are proposing a scenario more conservative than even the most conservative Justice. They are predicting a ruling that directly contradicts the most conservative Justices' writings on this subject. In other words, it's not going to happen.
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
When the Boy Scouts won the right to discriminate against gays, I was bitterly disappointed. For all that they are a private organization, the Scouts are more integrated into public institutions than almost any other civic organization. At the time, I said that if they are so private as to be free to discriminate, they should give up all their public benefits. The Scouts refused to do so, of course, but I had hope that local and state governments wqould stop offering them.
Shortly thereafter, I heard tell of people pulling their kids from the Boy Scouts. And that made me happy. Some schools even closed their doors to troops. And that made me happy to. But most places were happy to keep letting their schools, libraries and parks serve the purposes of bigots. Now, through the intervention of the courts, even that tide is starting to turn.
You want to be a bigotted asshole in the privacy of your own home, go for it. You want to gather with your fellow close-minded morons, be my guest. If you want to have a private club and refuse entry to the people you hate, feel free. But don't turn my government to your evil purposes. Don't use my tax money for your bigotry. Finally, some courts are starting to agree.
Frank Rich is right. We're winning the culture war.
Polis | 6 Writebacks | #
Marginal Revolution mentions that a flat tax isn't necessarily simpler than our current income tax setup. Sure, one tax bracket is easier than several, but the complexity comes from all the exceptions in determining what counts as taxable income.
Once upon a time, our tax system was very simple. A 1040 took ten minutes to fill out. All the little rules, loopholes, and deviations accreted over time. Year by year, the rules go more and more byzantine. If you want to sweep aside all those crusty rules, you can do it regardless of whether we then also move to a flat tax or not.
But the rules all exist for a reason. Every rule we put in place had a rationale. We wanted to incentivize certain behavior, so we made a tax rule to make that behavior cheaper. Or we wanted to favor certain groups, so we make their lives easier with tax credits aimed at them. Giving up all these rules would rejigger society. And there's no reason to think Congress won't immediately start enacting new loopholes and complicated rules on top of the flat tax. It's what they do.
Arguments for the flat tax are arguments for less progressive taxation. They are not arguments for simpler taxation. We could keep our brackets and still file on a postcard because all those crufty rules could be gone any time we want.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
A new children's book tries to explain marijuana to children. It's Just A Plant is about a little girl who walks in on her parents smoking. Her mom takes her for a bike ride and introduces her to the wonderful world of weed. This work is a long way from the books I read when I was a kid. Illegal drugs! Main characters that aren't white! I just know somebody is going to object to exposing kids to such things.
Americablog's latest bit of Ohio blogging urges people to donate to Greens and Libertarians in Ohio to fund the recount efforts. I'm not really sure why that's ok when they crucified Nader and the Swiftboat Liars for taking Republican money.
I don't really have a problem with Nader taking red money or the Greens and Libs taking blue money. When two groups with few common goals suddenly find themselves in a position to work together, they should do so. We're all trying to achieve our goals and sometimes your goals match mine even if I usually hate you.
When you let your opponents dictate your allies, you let them divide you and crush you. Branding Nader as a crypto-Republican is as ridiculous as slurring civil rights groups as communist stalking horses.
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
A good friend of mine is a leftwing street-level rabble rouser who came out hard for Kerry. He put in hours and days of tough and creative work. He was bitterly disappointed on November 2.
He's also a huge gun nut. You get him drunk enough and he starts muttering about making untraceable gun barrels in his shop upstate. He believes that if our divided nation is going to fight itself, we lefties need better weapons than peace signs and slogans. He has a collection of scary scary guns and a shooting range on his farm.
He also believes, as do I, that the Democrats should give up on the gun issue. Guns are a low-intensity issue for me and most of my leftie friends. Sure most of us support sensible gun restrictions, but none of us get upset about it one way or the other. It's certainly not a voting issue for anybody I know on this side of the divide.
For the gun nuts, though, it's a huge issue. Gun nuts aren't quite single-issue voters, but they come pretty close. From a purely strategic point of view, moving to the right on guns loses you few votes and removes the automatic disqualification from all the second amendment freaks.
And since this post comes a day after Vet's day, I just want to note that an awfully nice gun nut was just called up and sent to Iraq. Dan's a cop and a crazy batshit loonie hard ass, but he also has some pretty high standards for morals and treating the world well. He's exactly the kind of guy you want in Iraq, and he's exactly the kind of guy you're sorry to see go. He served proudly in the first Gulf War, and I know he'll serve honorably this time too. Thanks, Dan and come home safe.
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
The NYTimes says bloggy rumors of stolen elections have been debunked, and they're right. This makes me happy, even though it means I was somewhat wrong. As much as I wanted to see Bush pitched, I don't really want another crisis of faith in our election system and democracy. I still think the numbers are out of whack, though, and we need to count the paper ballots in Florida.
Polis | 6 Writebacks | #
I've added two new sites to the blog roll this morning. Future Feed Forward is a site featuring humorous news from the future. It's sort of like what the Onion will look like in 2058. Via Boing Boing.
Ms. Wendolyn is cute, funny and has a big mouth. I gather she is friends with the pink, hairy sinner.
Cell phone numbers are going public, so you will be able to get people's numbers from directory assistance. Some like this, others don't, but either way, nobody wants telemarketing calls on their cell. Get on the federal do not call registry and remember to turn your phone off before the show starts.
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
If you change the electoral map to reflect each county's population, you get some very nice rorschach looking blots in a variety of pretty purples. Who knew political wonkery could be so artistic?
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
Somehwere in my surfing, I came across Unfogged. Sure they're a couple of leftwing loonies, but sometimes leftwing loonies are right. And when they're talking about Bush, "sometimes" turns out to be "most of the time". Just be warned: these fuckers have potty mouths.
Today, they take on Alberto Gonzalez, the abortion=cancer connection, Halo 2. Go read.
Polis | 3 Writebacks | #
The Catalogue for Philantrhopy publishes a Generosity Index that ranks states according to how generously people donate to charity. As they admit, the index was "conceived in 1997 as a concise way to summarize Massachusetts' and New England's greatest problem in philanthropy: that we have the nation's largest gap between our ranks in income and our ranks in charitable giving." In other words, they set out to make New Englanders feel like penny pinchers in the hopes of getting these people to open their wallets. It is therefore not surprising that they chose a questionable methodology designed to produce the desired results. It's also not surprising that the methodology is completely bogus.
Since some red staters have been citing the Index to prove they have such open hearts and wallets, I looked at the numbers and discovered that it's all a sham.
Here's how the Catalogue ranked the states. They looked at charitable deductions on tax returns and calculated the average amount people give. Then they ranked them relative to how they stack up in income. It looks like a fair way to do it until you look at what they're hiding in their "average".
The big problem is that they ignored any returns that didn't make any charitable contributions at all. Their Index says that "Of the people that gave to charity, these people gave more and these other people gave less." That's like calculating average income but ignoring all the unemployed folks. Sure the data might be useful for something, but it doesn't actually tell you what people are earning or giving on the whole.
The next problem is that they rank the states by subtracting state rank among givers from state rank among earners. Unfortunately, this makes the ranking very arbitrarily related to how much you earn relative to other states. Their method does nothing to account for the distribution of the data. What they should have done was rank the states by giving per capita income dollar. That way, you actually measure how generous people are with what's in their pockets.
So I redid their rankings by calculating how much states give per capita income dollar, which controls for population and income differences. I discovered something interesting but not surprising. The states with the lower rankings all had higher percentages of returns that contained deductions for charitable giving. Both the high-ranked states had a few people making big donations, but the low-ranked states had a lot more people making small donations. This lowered the average in those states. The methodology penalizes states that give more!
Here's what the ranking should look like. It ranks a state's per capita per income charitable giving, as deduced from itemized charitable deductions. I have colored the states red and blue, as some have done. As you can see, the red and blue states are completely mixed, which makes sense because the red and blue states don't exist. We're all blotchy purple, so it would be really weird if small variations in the purpleness of your state correlated highly with charitable giving. It should also be noted that none of the figures looked at include corporate or foundation giving, which is a huge piece of the charity pie.
California
New York
Texas
Florida
Illinois
Georgia
Pennsylvania
North Carolina
Ohio
Michigan
New Jersey
Virginia
Maryland
Tennessee
Alabama
Indiana
Arizona
Missouri
Massachusetts
South Carolina
Washington
Utah
Minnesota
Colorado
Wisconsin
Oklahoma
Louisiana
Kentucky
Oregon
Mississippi
Arkansas
Connecticut
Kansas
Iowa
Nevada
Nebraska
Idaho
New Mexico
Hawaii
West Virginia
Maine
Montana
New Hampshire
Delaware
Rhode Island
Wyoming
South Dakota
Alaska
North Dakota
Vermont
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
John Ashcroft has resigned, saying "The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." Congrats on a job well done, John! When do we call our troops back from Iraq and Afghanistan?
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
According to the Morning News, you can get photos of your NYC building, circa 1940, from old tax records. My building is an old armory, and I'm sure it looks much the same as it did 64 years ago, but I can't resist.
Yet another reason to hit the gym before taking that beach vacation. I've always wanted a pair of X-Ray specs. Now, not so much.
Via TalkLeft.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
Amidst all the accusations of Republican election fraud and cries that Bush stole the election, it is probably true that, in at least a few areas, our shiny new voting machines miscounted, discounted or recounted a bunch of votes. Evidence of such does not necessarily mean fraud, but it does mean that the machines we bought to fix our ailing system might be distorting results worse than the butterfly ballot they replaced.
I've been looking at Florida's county numbers because Florida has some very curious statistics. After the 2000 debacle, Florida abandoned its paper balloting system in favor of more advanced voting methods. Counties all chose one of two voting systems: touchscreens and optical scanners.
Touchscreen systems are the ATM-style voting machines you've read so much about in the media. These are the machines that are supposed to be easy to use and can avoid the problems associated with butterfly ballots. These are the machines that produce no paper trail and are difficult or impossible to audit after the election.
Optical scanners are a little more complicated. Optical scanning machines use paper ballots. The ballots are filled out by voters and then get fed into the machine, which records the votes. The big advantage of optical scanners is that they produce instant paper trails. The big disadvantage is that they are more difficult and cumbersome to use. After 2000, one of the big arguments for electronic voting was to get people away from filling out paper forms.
No matter which machine a county chooses, the result should be the same. County vote tallies shouldn't depend on the system chosen. What's curious about Florida, though, is that touchscreen systems and optical scanners produced very different results. The results are so different that they cannot be explained by simple chance or variance.
In most parts of the country, party registration is a pretty good predictor of how a county will vote for President. If Republicans and Democrats parties split a county's party registrations 65% to 30% (with, say, 5% registering with third or no parties), they have a 35% registration advantage. You can predict that the county will give around 35% more votes to Bush than Kerry. Things will swing by 5 or even 10 points here and there, but you can predict Bush will beat Kerry in that county. And you'll be right pretty much every time, all across America.
The only place you won't be right is Florida. More to the point, you'll be right if the Florida county in question used touchscreens, but not if it used optical scanners. In the 15 counties that used touchscreens, there is a high correlation between party registration and voting. In the 52 counties that used optical scanners, there is virtually no correlation at all.
Math types can measure the significance of the correlation between the proportion of registered voters to a party and the proportion of votes that party gets. They do this by finding the statistical significance of a Pearson Correlation. I won't bore you with the math, but it's interesting to note that while touchscreen counties showed an extremely high correlation, optical scanner counties did not. The odds of the votes turning out as they did by chance in those touchscreen counties (as opposed to correlation) are less than one in a thousand.
In optical scanner counties, we see the exact opposite story. Almost no correlation can be found between registration and voting. When you do the math, you find that suddenly party registration is completely useless in predicting election tallies. This runs counter to every political science study ever done, and it's pretty clear that something strange is going on.
But what? The voting machines were all made by one of three companies: Diebold, Sequoia and Election Systems & Software. A conspiracy to rig optical scanner machines for Bush would probably require collusion between Diebold, ES&S, various Republican officials and perhaps Sequoia as well. Sequoia only provided optical scanners for one county (Baker), although that county deviated quite surprisingly from expectations too. Diebold makes touchscreen systems, but only provided optical scanners in Florida. That's a lot of people, far too many to keep a big secret for long.
If tampering is far-fetched, why does all the improbability cut in Bush's favor? The odds of that happening by random chance are just about zero. One possible answer is that Bush did a very good job of getting out the votes and appealing to moderate Democrats. But if that's the answer, then somebody has to explain why he only did such a good job in counties with optical scanners.
So was Florida rigged? I have no idea. If it was rigged, the riggers did a pretty thorough job, although I can't imagine why they chose to do it on the machines with the paper trail.
What's clear is that the system didn't work as well as it was supposed to. The vote recorders became vote shapers. Putting aside the 2004 election, the lesson here is that we need verifiable backups to our voting machines. A simple paper trail is all people need to restore trust in our election system.
Fortunately, that paper trail exists for all the counties that used optical scanners in Florida. Dust off your FOIA request forms, because it's time for those ballots to be counted. We need to know how badly things went wrong, which means we need to audit those machines. And we will.
As for the touchscreen systems, they need a paper trail too. Every time I use an ATM, I get a receipt. Every time I buy groceries, I get a receipt. This is trivial technology and not expensive when compared to the huge financial, political and social costs of a disputed or doubted election. Every machine should print a slip of paper. The voter should be able to see the slip in a little window on the machine, and then the slip should drop into a locked box. Instant paper trail. Whenever a machine is challenged, we simply count the little slips. It's such an easy answer to end the controversy. Let's do it.
Polis | 9 Writebacks | #
Lean Left has suggestions for what you can do on January 20. They include raising money, throwing parties, celebrating diversity, laughing at Bush and stuff like that. Curiously and conspicuously absent from the list is the thing I plan to be doing on January 20: going to DC and expressing my displeasure at Bush's election. I want him to be trapped in his limo for the entire inauguration again. I want to dispel the delusion of Bush's mandate. Frankly, I want to make so much noise that Bush folds up shop and goes back to Texas.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
Several thousand shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles have gone missing in Iraq. I thought we invaded Iraq to keep things like this away from terrorists.
Guesses as to how many are missing go as high as 4000, which would triple the number of missiles in private (presumably terrorist) hands. Mmm... safety tastes like burning.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
France, Germany and Britain have put aside the differences separating old Europe from cool, hip new smells like teen spirit Europe. They have joined forces and convinced Iran to stop enriching Uranium, a move that effectively ends Iran's nuclear weapons program. In return Iran will receive trade deals and nuclear technology that can't be turned into weapons.
This is really good news, and I wish it came from America two years ago. It should be noted, though, that this is pretty much what we did in North Korea and because we never backed it up with working inspections, it ultimately failed. I don't know what the inspections provisions are here, but I hope they do the trick.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
Marginal Revolution notes that traffic congestion fees are working in central London.
Overall traffic entering the zone is down 18 per cent during charging hours, with a reduction in car traffic of 30 per cent and a similar reduction in congestion. There has been little displacement of traffic into areas round the zone or additional congestion on the ring road. Motorists themselves have benefited; for those who still drive in the zone, journeys are quicker and more reliable...
Of course, your definition of "working" may vary. London had too much traffic, so they created an obstacle to reduce traffic. It worked, but didn't increase traffic on adjacent roads, which means that people aren't routing around the obstacle. They're just forgoing their trips.
All those people driving through central London were trying to accomplish something, something that probably would have produced an economic benefit for somebody in London. And instead, these people are taking their business elsewhere. I wonder how business is doing in and around the congestion zone.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
Grits for Breakfast (ew) tells of a police officer who died while trying to bust somebody for smoking weed. It seems she smelled the weed, and stopped to hassle some passersby. One broke and ran, and she pursued him on foot. Her partner, driving backwards, gave chase in the patrol car and accidentally ran her over. Grits calls attention to the stupidity of a system that hates smoking so much we let police engage in extremely dangerous behavior to stop it.
Via Vice Squad.
Polis | 0 Writebacks | #
It's Friday. All day.
- Crazed bible humper preaches to mad lions. Here's hoping it's a trend that catches on