A while back I started hearing rumors about “Obama phones.” You know, Obama taking our hard-earned money to give free phones to undeserving poor people in the ghetto. Really? I keep hearing about this, so I thought there must be something to it. Take this facebook post from a Baltimore cop friend of mine: Beautiful day out and then I…
Month: April 2012
Dutch Regulate Marijuana
In a stupid way, mind you. But what I love is that if the Dutch want to regulate drugs, they can! Our illegal drugs are unregulated. What’s ironic is that this isn’t actually about drugs. It’s much more about traffic and parking. Also, don’t count the kips (chickens) before they hatch. I’d be shocked if this comes into effect throughout…
Tiger Tiger Tiger, Siss Siss Siss, Boom Boom Boom, meh.
Caleb Kennedy wrote a nice feature on me for the Daily Princetonian. “I was not particularly happy at Princeton,” [Moskos] said, explaining that he felt much of the student body came from a “New England prep school culture” that he was not used to. But I loved my professors. And one of them called me a “star student.” It makes…
Occupy Federally
An interesting development in the Occupy movement is the presence on 25 protesters on the steps of Federal Hall on Wall Street (with live stream). Federal Hall is is policed by the National Park Service Police and not the NYPD. I assume the NYPD could have jurisdiction. But I’m not certain. And it’s not clear if Park Police (and there…
I Don’t Care if Zimmerman is a Racist
I think there’s too much discussion about whether George Zimmerman is racist. I don’t care. I don’t think it matters. What matters is what Zimmerman did (and lest we forgot: suspect, pursue, shoot, and kill an unarmed and innocent Trayvon Martin). Part of the problem is the racism is too broad of a label. Since there’s no simple definition, it’s…
Gotcha!
I’m always amused whenever conservatives get to play “gotcha” when some liberal says something politically incorrect, or expresses a belief more in tune with Republicans. Because you know those same conservatives don’t really care about the issue; it’s just a brief moment when they finally get to win a round in a game they never wanted to play (hell, they’re…
Baltimore City Hall
Circa 1900. Courtesy of Shorpy.
Only if it can kill
“The absurdity of banning squirt guns but not being able to do anything about real guns is patently obvious.” Indeed that is absurd.
Food Deserts: Quantitative Research at its Sketchiest
The New York Times reports today on a RAND study (behind the Great Damned Elsevier Pay Wall) by Ruopeng An and Roland Sturm about the lack of “food deserts” in poor neighborhoods. Or more precisely about the lack of link between food deserts and obesity. More specifically, it questions the very notion of food deserts. From the Times: There is…
UC-Davis Pepper Spray
From Jack Stripling in The Chronicle of Higher Education: The pepper spraying of student protesters at the University of California at Davis in November, an incident that provoked international outrage, constituted an unjustifiable use of force in an operation that was bungled by failures of leadership and communication at nearly every level, an investigative report issued on Wednesday asserts. The…