There's a story in the Chicago Tribune today about a mugging victim who moved from the city to the suburbs because she doesn't feel safe (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-chicago-muggings-24-aug24,0,3762222.story?page=2).
Pretty common theme, actually. Not everyone who gets mugged moves, of course. Some can't, others choose not to give up and let the creeps win. All who have been victimized live with fear, however. It may just be a tiny bit that's hidden way in the back of their minds. A niggling doubt as they pass someone a little sketchy on the street. Or it may develop into full-fledged, weapon-carrying paranoia.
Pistol packin' disturbs me the most. Sure it's fine to tell your bar buddies you're ready to blow away a bad guy. The fact remains, drawing and using a handgun during a street crime requires speed, dexterity, an adamant sense of purpose and a willingness, not just to wound but to kill. If you haven't been trained properly, blowing away that "bad guy" may have catastrophic results.
We're talking about a window of opportunity that opens for mere seconds. Identifying the threat may occur when it's already on top of you. How far away is your attacker? Is he armed? What with? Who's in the shadows behind you? For that matter, who is in range of your bullets behind your attacker? Are you being attacked at all or is it your overactive imagination? In some places, merely reaching for your weapon may be construed as a crime so you'd better be absolutely certain your life is at risk.
Have you practiced with that pistol in simulated tactical situations or just on the vanilla pistol range? Do you have any idea of the legal labyrinth you enter when you take someone's life? What if it happens by accident?
I believe in the right to carry a concealed weapon and would like to see Illinois adopt a progressive new statute to allow it. I believe even more strongly in common sense.
That may be the best weapon we own . . . and one that should never be kept concealed.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Saturday, August 22, 2009
A Mockery of Justice
If you blow up an airplane full of innocents, I don't care if your prostate is the size of your head and you've grown a third leg in the middle of your forehead...you don't deserve "compassionate release" from prison.
I love the Scots, am part Scots myself in fact, but they blew it releasing the Lockerbie bomber. He's dying of prostate cancer? Fine, let him die. Releasing him makes a mockery of everything free nations are trying to do to combat terror.
Many American politicians including the President have condemned Scotland's action but, truth be told, the very same thing might have happened had the man been a prisoner here in the states.
We've lost our frontier ethic. We're no longer the sort of people who, having shot our enemy, will routinely go up and put a final round in him just to be sure he's dead. We're soft on gangs but we go after guns, hoping that will solve the problem. We let drunk drivers have four, five, six chances and more until they finally get behind the wheel and kill someone. And then we sentence them gingerly at best. We assign our cops to chase pot smokers while billions of dollars of cocaine and heroin are flowing into our streets. We release career sex offenders from prison and then beat our breasts when, surprise! they rape and murder our children.
That wonderful Scotsman, Sean Connery, put it best in The Untouchables:
"They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That's* the *Chicago* way!"
Had it been up to me, the Lockerbie bomber would be dead already. Told his cancer was terminal, I would have kneecapped the bastard and dumped him atop of a landfill to rot with the rest of the garbage.
That, my friends, is the sort of compassion he and his colleagues understand . . . and deserve. That's the Chicago Way.
I love the Scots, am part Scots myself in fact, but they blew it releasing the Lockerbie bomber. He's dying of prostate cancer? Fine, let him die. Releasing him makes a mockery of everything free nations are trying to do to combat terror.
Many American politicians including the President have condemned Scotland's action but, truth be told, the very same thing might have happened had the man been a prisoner here in the states.
We've lost our frontier ethic. We're no longer the sort of people who, having shot our enemy, will routinely go up and put a final round in him just to be sure he's dead. We're soft on gangs but we go after guns, hoping that will solve the problem. We let drunk drivers have four, five, six chances and more until they finally get behind the wheel and kill someone. And then we sentence them gingerly at best. We assign our cops to chase pot smokers while billions of dollars of cocaine and heroin are flowing into our streets. We release career sex offenders from prison and then beat our breasts when, surprise! they rape and murder our children.
That wonderful Scotsman, Sean Connery, put it best in The Untouchables:
"They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That's* the *Chicago* way!"
Had it been up to me, the Lockerbie bomber would be dead already. Told his cancer was terminal, I would have kneecapped the bastard and dumped him atop of a landfill to rot with the rest of the garbage.
That, my friends, is the sort of compassion he and his colleagues understand . . . and deserve. That's the Chicago Way.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Say Goodbye to Saturday Mail Delivery
Bob Greene, writing an online column for CNN, reports today that Saturday mail delivery may become a thing of the past. I haven't seen any other articles on the subject but Bob says they were lost amidst the more urgent news that's been happening this summer...Michael Jackson's death, the showering of a baseball player with beer, all of that stuff.
For the moment, I'll take Bob's column as fact because it gives me something to blog about.
Frankly, I think he gets all misty-eyed sometimes just to be able to write about getting misty-eyed. He talks about the "giddy anticipation of seeing the mail carrier strolling up the sidewalk" as though he was back in the malt shop at college waiting to run back to the dorm and see if he's gotten a letter from home.
"Giddy" isn't a way I would describe waiting for my mail. At least not since the box has been routinely filled with catalogs, bills and solicitations from charities like Mercy Home that should be taking the money they spend on mail solicitations and using it to feed and house their kids.
Every day, I take at least ninety percent of my mail straight from the box to the recycling bin.
The U.S. Postal Service is a huge, clunky governmental bureaucracy that's hemorrhaging money. . . $7 billion this year, if Greene's facts are correct. If eliminating Saturday deliveries will cut $3 billion of that, go for it.
In fact, how about mail-less Mondays, too?
For the moment, I'll take Bob's column as fact because it gives me something to blog about.
Frankly, I think he gets all misty-eyed sometimes just to be able to write about getting misty-eyed. He talks about the "giddy anticipation of seeing the mail carrier strolling up the sidewalk" as though he was back in the malt shop at college waiting to run back to the dorm and see if he's gotten a letter from home.
"Giddy" isn't a way I would describe waiting for my mail. At least not since the box has been routinely filled with catalogs, bills and solicitations from charities like Mercy Home that should be taking the money they spend on mail solicitations and using it to feed and house their kids.
Every day, I take at least ninety percent of my mail straight from the box to the recycling bin.
The U.S. Postal Service is a huge, clunky governmental bureaucracy that's hemorrhaging money. . . $7 billion this year, if Greene's facts are correct. If eliminating Saturday deliveries will cut $3 billion of that, go for it.
In fact, how about mail-less Mondays, too?
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Angry
Is it my imagination, or are we an angrier and more unconcerned species than we were years ago? Nastier generally. More mean-spirited toward each other.
A fan throwing beer on a professional ball player. An entire city harboring a grudge for years against another fan who caught a foul ball at an inopportune time. An entire political party so enraged at having lost the Presidency that it will do just about anything to see his policies fail, even at the risk of damaging the country. Mortgage lenders in such heat to make their fortune on the backs of new homeowners that they deal a critical blow to our financial system? A train engineer who is talking to friends at the time of a fatal collision. An air traffic control supervisor out of the tower and his employee chatting with a girlfriend while a plane and a helicopter collide.
How many stories could you add to that list in the next few minutes?
Then there are the daily injustices perpetrated by kids with illegal guns. The almost delighted way they take human life...women, kids, the elderly...with little concern for the consequences. I suggested, seriously, this morning that we should consider establishing a Kevlar for Kids Fund for children in the neighborhoods where gangbangers rule.
Crooks are everywhere. Crimes personal to me. A burglary down the block with high school kids the perpetrators. My friend Joe held up at gunpoint while delivering sandwiches. Again, high schoolers holding the shotgun.
Every generation, when it reaches a certain age, looks at the world and thinks it's going to hell in a handbasket.
I guess it's my turn to make that observation.
What a shame.
A fan throwing beer on a professional ball player. An entire city harboring a grudge for years against another fan who caught a foul ball at an inopportune time. An entire political party so enraged at having lost the Presidency that it will do just about anything to see his policies fail, even at the risk of damaging the country. Mortgage lenders in such heat to make their fortune on the backs of new homeowners that they deal a critical blow to our financial system? A train engineer who is talking to friends at the time of a fatal collision. An air traffic control supervisor out of the tower and his employee chatting with a girlfriend while a plane and a helicopter collide.
How many stories could you add to that list in the next few minutes?
Then there are the daily injustices perpetrated by kids with illegal guns. The almost delighted way they take human life...women, kids, the elderly...with little concern for the consequences. I suggested, seriously, this morning that we should consider establishing a Kevlar for Kids Fund for children in the neighborhoods where gangbangers rule.
Crooks are everywhere. Crimes personal to me. A burglary down the block with high school kids the perpetrators. My friend Joe held up at gunpoint while delivering sandwiches. Again, high schoolers holding the shotgun.
Every generation, when it reaches a certain age, looks at the world and thinks it's going to hell in a handbasket.
I guess it's my turn to make that observation.
What a shame.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Why Sarah Palin Makes My Teeth Itch
If Sarah Palin were a man, she'd be one of those old-style, suspenders-wearing and cigar smoking politicians (usually of indeterminate party affilliation)who were a mainstay of movies through the forties and fifties.
You know who I mean. The minor characters who talked out of the corner of their mouths, patted little boys on the head, muttered under their breath about people of other races, and gave speeches that honored the flag, conservative values, middle-America, and apple pie.
In other words, she's superficial as hell.
She tosses off sound bites with the shameless fervor of a movie critic cuddling up to the studio bosses, pushing all the right buttons to make the Republican Faithful grin and nod and give her a frightening thumbs up. Thing is, though, I think her knowledge of the important issues facing America today could be measured with a teaspoon.
But, let's try a little experiment.
I took American Government during the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. My teacher was a guy named Bill Dinges. I remember him because he taught by the Socratic method and had only one rule. We had to speak in facts, not opinions. Slogans and one-liners weren't allowed. We could take any positions we liked but we had to justify them with well-founded research. And he cross-examined everyone about everything.
I'd like Sarah Palin to submit to questioning by a guy like Bill Dinges. Not a law or political science professor or Sam Donaldson-type. Just a quick-minded high school teacher who understands the issues, asks thought-provoking questions and would require Palin, his "student," to rigorously defend her answers.
Let's put the two of them across a table from each other on national TV for an hour or so. No moderator. No researchers or flacks. Just Sarah and the teacher.
A simple enough assignment for someone who wants to be President, don't you think?
Unfortunately, the results would terrify us. And, because of that, the Republicans will never allow such a Q and A to take place.
Better she be left to pat us on the head with one hand while waving an American flag in the other, all the while serving up messages that are the political equivalent of cotton candy.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Random Thoughts on a Rainy Tuesday Night
My old friend John has cancer of the esophagus and stomach. He found out last Friday. They also noted "spots" on his liver so, today, he had a PET scan.
Why does he have to wait until Friday to find out the results? What sort of heartless bureaucrats are these people in the medical community that they make a man who is gravely ill wait three days to hear if the cancer is spreading throughout his body?
In cases like his, someone should be reading the results to him as they show up. We're the most technologically advanced nation on earth. Figure it out, people!
Elsewhere...
A reporter friend asked me today if the New York Post's action in printing a picture of ESPN reporter Erin Andrews that was taken illegally is, in and of itself, illegal.
You'd like to think so, wouldn't you? You'd like to think that our Constitutional guarantees to right of privacy would protect a naked woman in her own hotel room from having some Cheese Whiz of a lowlife huckster snap secret pics of her.
Paparazzi photographers and the celebrity-hunting press, which obviously includes the Post, have pushed the envelope so far in the recent past, however, I'm not sure a judge would rule in her favor.
It will be interesting to see if her attorneys file a lawsuit against the paper and if they don't, why not?
Personally, I think whoever shot the pictures is a heartless and sexually immature excuse for a cretinous human being who women have always laughed at for having such a tiny penis.
Why does he have to wait until Friday to find out the results? What sort of heartless bureaucrats are these people in the medical community that they make a man who is gravely ill wait three days to hear if the cancer is spreading throughout his body?
In cases like his, someone should be reading the results to him as they show up. We're the most technologically advanced nation on earth. Figure it out, people!
Elsewhere...
A reporter friend asked me today if the New York Post's action in printing a picture of ESPN reporter Erin Andrews that was taken illegally is, in and of itself, illegal.
You'd like to think so, wouldn't you? You'd like to think that our Constitutional guarantees to right of privacy would protect a naked woman in her own hotel room from having some Cheese Whiz of a lowlife huckster snap secret pics of her.
Paparazzi photographers and the celebrity-hunting press, which obviously includes the Post, have pushed the envelope so far in the recent past, however, I'm not sure a judge would rule in her favor.
It will be interesting to see if her attorneys file a lawsuit against the paper and if they don't, why not?
Personally, I think whoever shot the pictures is a heartless and sexually immature excuse for a cretinous human being who women have always laughed at for having such a tiny penis.
Friday, July 17, 2009
RIP Uncle Walter. You Were The Best.
I got into journalism because of Walter Cronkite. I left when I realized the industry no longer seemed to value the ideals and ethics on which he based his career.
In Cronkite's day, journalism was straight and narrow. It was the business of bringing the news to the people as facts. We rushed to the scene. We checked our information. We double checked it. We tried to verify everything before we put it on the air and we didn't add our opinions. I was taught to, "Get there first, get the story fast, get it right and get it out!"
The true professionals of the business still embrace that philosophy. But, more and more frequently, cost, offhand ethics and basic laziness dictate how stories are covered. Some local stations don't send reporters to an event at all, arguing that a phone call will suffice and is far cheaper than having personnel on the ground. Sometimes the reason for not going to the scene is more dubious. News bosses know if they miss a story, they can always snatch a fact or two from newspaper websites or even from the competition. One of my former bosses called that "reporting with smoke and mirrors." I call it dishonesty. But I would guess it's condoned in every news market in the country every single day.
Here's a fact you may not know. TV stations in Chicago (except Channel 7), Washington D.C., Atlanta and other cities now pool their coverage of "routine" and even some breaking news. It's not used for every story every day but it works like this: stations supply crews to the pool. One crew shoots a news event and shares the video, presumably the facts as well, with all of the stations in the pool. There's no longer a race to be first to the scene of a burning building or a crime story because, hey, no competition! If the crew doesn't make it until the fire is out, so what? Many editors believe pictures of hoses being rolled up tell the story just as well as flames shooting out windows and rescues being made. For them, the necessity of seeing news happening rates a big shrug. After all, it's more cost effective to use aftermath footage. Unfortunately, if the pool crew gets the story wrong, everyone using that version of the story gets it wrong. If the pool crew doesn't interview eyewitnesses and relies only on official sources, only the official spin gets aired. Great for the officials. Maybe not so good for for the truth.
What is pool coverage but a slightly more respectable form of smoke and mirrors? Does it give us the coverage we expect? Do the stations even admit each time they use pooled video? Watch awhile and answer those questions for yourselves. And then ask another: what happened to "get there first, get the story fast, get it right, and get it out?"
Broadcast news no longer advises: it homogenizes. That's a tragedy.
Cronkite was appalled by it.
If we really want to honor his memory, we should be, too.
In Cronkite's day, journalism was straight and narrow. It was the business of bringing the news to the people as facts. We rushed to the scene. We checked our information. We double checked it. We tried to verify everything before we put it on the air and we didn't add our opinions. I was taught to, "Get there first, get the story fast, get it right and get it out!"
The true professionals of the business still embrace that philosophy. But, more and more frequently, cost, offhand ethics and basic laziness dictate how stories are covered. Some local stations don't send reporters to an event at all, arguing that a phone call will suffice and is far cheaper than having personnel on the ground. Sometimes the reason for not going to the scene is more dubious. News bosses know if they miss a story, they can always snatch a fact or two from newspaper websites or even from the competition. One of my former bosses called that "reporting with smoke and mirrors." I call it dishonesty. But I would guess it's condoned in every news market in the country every single day.
Here's a fact you may not know. TV stations in Chicago (except Channel 7), Washington D.C., Atlanta and other cities now pool their coverage of "routine" and even some breaking news. It's not used for every story every day but it works like this: stations supply crews to the pool. One crew shoots a news event and shares the video, presumably the facts as well, with all of the stations in the pool. There's no longer a race to be first to the scene of a burning building or a crime story because, hey, no competition! If the crew doesn't make it until the fire is out, so what? Many editors believe pictures of hoses being rolled up tell the story just as well as flames shooting out windows and rescues being made. For them, the necessity of seeing news happening rates a big shrug. After all, it's more cost effective to use aftermath footage. Unfortunately, if the pool crew gets the story wrong, everyone using that version of the story gets it wrong. If the pool crew doesn't interview eyewitnesses and relies only on official sources, only the official spin gets aired. Great for the officials. Maybe not so good for for the truth.
What is pool coverage but a slightly more respectable form of smoke and mirrors? Does it give us the coverage we expect? Do the stations even admit each time they use pooled video? Watch awhile and answer those questions for yourselves. And then ask another: what happened to "get there first, get the story fast, get it right, and get it out?"
Broadcast news no longer advises: it homogenizes. That's a tragedy.
Cronkite was appalled by it.
If we really want to honor his memory, we should be, too.
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