Monday, July 25, 2011 The Missing Lesson from Norway: Never Trust a Man in Uniform  Roughly a decade ago, Al Pacino starred in a movie entitled S1m0ne, a cyber-era updating of the Pygmalion myth in which a film director creates an uncannily realistic digital actress. Despite the fact that “Simone” was a computer-rendered composite fantasy, […]

Monday, August 1, 2011 In Praise of “Rogue” Cops “His death was gang-involved, the way I see it,” lamented former Orange County Sheriff’s Detective Ron Thomas after viewing the mangled body of his 37-year-old son, Kelly. “A gang of rogue officers … brutally beat my son to death.”  The description of the crime is appropriate: […]

Wednesday, August 17, 2011 Ricky the Rent Boy Precocious Poseur: College-age Rick Perry displayed an early gift for role-playing. Treason, Talleyrand famously said, “is a matter of dates.” Rick Perry has amended and updated that principle as it applies to the Federal Reserve’s inflation of the money supply, and the official profligacy that results. Posturing […]

Tuesday, August 9, 2011 Pity the Poor, Persecuted Police The Man Who Terrorizes Sunriver, Oregon’s “Finest”? Robert Foster, with his daughter Rebecca. Michael Kennedy is Chief of Police in tiny Sunriver, Oregon, an unincorporated resort village in the Beaver State’s Deschutes County. Kennedy insists that his police force has been terrorized for years by a […]

Tuesday, August 23, 2011 Liquidate Your Local Police: An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Updated, August 26)  Mary Lee Cook, an 84-year-old resident of Oak Hill, Florida, didn’t seem like the kind of person who would secretly cultivate marijuana behind her home. Yet on June 6, deputies assigned to the East Volusia County Narcotics Task […]

Tuesday, August 30, 2011 The Persecution of Jeremy Hill (Updated, 9/8) Jeremy Hill of Bonners Ferry, Idaho, shot and killed a grizzly bear that threatened his children. The federal government is seeking to imprison him for violating the Endangered Species Act. Idaho Governor Butch Otter wrote a nauseatingly sycophantic letter to someone he insisted on […]

Thursday, September 8, 2011 Where Have You Gone, Conn Conagher?   “Hey mister, who gave you that shiner?” “Nobody gave it to me, son – I fought for it.”  To get the full effect of that exchange between young Laban Teale and the rangy, rough-hewn cowhand Conn Conagher, it’s best to imagine the wry reply […]

Sunday, September 18, 2011 Abolish the Police, Arm the Citizens: The “Sagra Model” of Privatized Security No surrender, no retreat: Andrei (l) and Viktor Gorodilov at the bridge.  “What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return […]