Mark Draughn
Coastal Dash 2012 Travelogue – Part 2
I’m finally getting around to posting pictures of my roadtrip from last summer. (Part 1 is here.) When I went to Avalon in 2011, I was pretty disappointed in the pictures I took. I saw a lot of interesting spots filled with local color that seems a bit exotic to a Midwestern city boy like [...]
Coastal Dash 2012 Travelogue – Part 1
I’m getting ready to start planning my next summer road trip, but I realized I never got around to posting anything about last summer’s road trip. The trip started the same as any trip from Chicago must start: Stuck in traffic. I left home around 6pm on Friday, so I caught the tail end of [...]
A Few Reasons for Opposing Background Checks For Gun Purchases
I see lots of political and policy commentary go by on Facebook, and I’d like to respond to some of it, but Facebook is a very annoying place for that kind of give-and-take. People don’t write articles or blog posts on Facebook, they post images with text in them, and the only response you can [...]
The Unreal Liberal Argument for Conscription
I’ll always have a warm spot in my heart for the liberal/progressive mindset because I grew up in the immediate aftermath of the 1960′s. The era brought lots of changes for the better — the free speech movement, the expansion of civil rights, Miranda and Gideon — but the one that most vividly affected me [...]
George Bush is History’s Greatest Monster
George Bush is History’s Greatest Monster. No, not W — he’s another matter — I’m talking about his father. I just finished using an auger to unclog a toilet for what must be the 200th time since we had to replace our old, reliable toilet with one of the low-flow models. We used to have [...]
Why Don’t Authors’ Websites List Their Books in the Right Order?
Monday night I finished reading Linda Nagata’s far-future epic series The Bohr Maker, Deception Well and Vast back-to-back-to-back, and I wanted to take a break from amazing stories of super-science and find something a little more down to earth, so I looked at my Kindle’s recommendations and something about Mark Gimenez’s Accused caught my eye. [...]
Fighting Crime the Easy Way
Apparently, iPhone theft is a big enough problem in San Francisco that police have come up with a special solution: …these cops are taking a different approach than just running after iPhone robbers and cuffing them. Instead, they are going after the buyers of the stolen products, in a scheme that they call “cutting the [...]
Here Come the Naked Rescuers
Hallandale Beach Police have got a great job: The police officer lay face down on the massage table, on duty, unarmed and naked. For 30 minutes Shu Yuan Sun worked the muscles of the officer’s back, his shoulders and legs, and then told him, “Turn over.” And that, said Hallandale Beach Police Sgt. Todd Crevier, [...]
A Bad Week For Liberty
It’s been a rough week for liberty. To begin with, we had two terrorist style attacks, the moderately successful Boston Marathon bombing, and the failed ricin poisoning. I doubt either attack was because “they hate our freedom” (few attacks are) but the attacks themselves are attacks on our freedom. As is often the case, just [...]
No Comps For the Homeless in Vegas
In an earlier post, I pointed out that not even the most heartless Ayn Rand disciple would go as far as some city governments and make it a crime to feed homeless people. I singled out Las Vegas as an example, citing a report by the ACLU: In 2006, the City of Las Vegas became [...]
More About Talking To a Lawyer When Arrested
A few weeks ago, I wrote about an organization called First Defense Legal Aid that provides legal advice to people arrested or detained by the Chicago Police, just by calling 1-800-LAW-REP-4. Criminal defense lawyer Matt Haiduk (whose blog I quoted in the original post) adds this note in a comment: …don’t ever think it’s as [...]
“I’ve got mine, Jack!” Is a Lie
I’ve heard Stephen Colbert summarize the Objectivist mindset — and by extension, libertarian mindset — as “I’ve got mine, Jack!” This is true as far as it goes, but it is also a lie by omission. Consider this story in the Wall Street Journal: There’s no free lunch, goes the old saying. The IRS may [...]
Yet Another Tale of the Awful, Awful People at ICE
I have long maintained that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has some of the worst un-American tendencies of any identifiable group in the country. Whether they’re turning back friendly tourists, keeping out musical styles they don’t understand, jailing people for years and deporting them for crimes they were never convicted of, or letting [...]
Going To The Movies Won’t Be The Same
Dammit, Roger Ebert died. Over at the Chicago Sun-Times, Neil Steinberg has an obituary/eulogy for him. As with other great eulogies I’ve read, I finish it feeling like I’ve missed out on something good by never getting to know the subject personally. Yet, in a way I can’t help feeling like I did know Roger [...]
No April Fools For Me
I’ve decided that running April Fools Day prank posts is not a good idea for me. I let Eric Turkewitz talk me into it last year, and the only people I fooled were my loyal readers. That’s not the relationship I want to have with them. I don’t expect readers to agree with me or [...]
How Hotch Became Beezle
It’s been a long, long time since I did any Friday catblogging, but I just found some old video I took of the Ragdoll kitten we got in the summer of 2011, and that gave me the impetus to finally put something together. [Update: This post is now linked at the Carnival of the Cats [...]
Facebook Thinks I Like What?!?
Over on her Facebook page, writer Jennifer Abel is getting pissed off at some of the stuff Facebook is recommending for her: If this were England, I would sue Facebook for libel; I am THAT offended by the pages they suggest I “like.” Seriously: what the hell did I EVER post, here or anyplace else, [...]
Ripley R.I.P.
We adopted Ripley about 14 years ago from the Orphans of the Storm animal shelter about 10 miles north of Chicago. We had been thinking of getting a kitten, but we decided to get an adult cat, in part because most people pass them over in favor of kittens, but mostly because when you get [...]
Drug Kingpins With Badges
A few years ago, I was complaining about what I called “profitable punishment” — any type of criminal or administrative punishment that makes money for the government imposing it. The ostensible purpose of imposing punishment for crimes is to discourage people from committing crimes, but when municipalities and police departments can enrich themselves with fines [...]
Fitzgerald’s Law
Over at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield has been smacking around former federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, because Scott’s not happy with the advice Fitzgerald is giving to some corporate clients. At times, Scott seems puzzled by the things Fitzgerald is saying (although I suspect Scott is faking to highlight the outrageousness). Here are some summaries of [...]