Nobody's Business

Teach 'Em Young

Here's a selection from Police Chief Dexter Yarbrough's to-do list.

• Falsify paperwork
• Condone rape
• Drive out colleagues who refuse to perform illegal favors
• Brag about beating up suspects
• Teach students to bribe informers with crack

For more than five years, Yarbrough, Colorado State University's Police Chief and a former Chicago cop, did all these things, and he did them repeatedly. And in all those years, no one who heard his rants, and no one who observed the guy up close, turned him in, apparently. In the end, just one guy did what was obviously right.

The thin blue line starts that early.

Gimme an O!

A big, screaming O!

OK, this isn't for me, and as the female Salon writer said,

...the Obama dildo looks about as titillating as stuffing a carved zucchini up your cha-cha.

Still, I mean — an Obama commemorative dildo. That's magnificent. It's even better than that cop car bong.

God, I love my country, and I'm actually sorta serious for a change. Think about it: How do you suppose a Robert Mugabe dildo would go over in Zimbabwe, or a Queen Beatrix dildo in supposedly tolerant Holland? Not well, friends. Not well at all. 

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By the way: Adding an illustration to a post on this blog means hitting a button entitled "Insert image." Hmm. For the first time, I actually hesitated a little, but you can see that insertion was, in the end, successful.

Land of the Free

Quoth Mary Beth Buchanan, one of those high-placed drug warriors who serve the letter of justice while blithely crapping all over the spirit of it:

"By enforcing the drug paraphernalia laws, we will…eliminate the demand for illegal substances by eliminating those products that are used to ingest and inhale illegal substances."

Take away the bongs and drug use miraculously plummets, right? It must. Just like banning crowbars will do wonders for the War on Burglary. Are you with me, people?

Anyway, this is all just the excuse I've been looking for to show you one of the awesomest bongs I've ever laid eyes on.

Remember, if you were to attempt to sell this, it's off to the pokey with you, and the federal prosecutors would put you away in part because you evidently "trivialize law enforcement efforts to combat drug trafficking and use." That's the book they threw at Tommy Chong.

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P.S.: Over at Culture 11, Nobody's Business former guest blogger Anita Bartholomew has a cool-headed primer about the financial consequences of the drug war. In a companion piece, Radley Balko exposes the effects of drug prohibition on domestic security and foreign policy, while David Freddoso takes on the unenviable task of arguing the counterpoint.

Thought for the Day

In lieu of a good Sunday sermon, I like to go to Planet Atheism once in a while.

If there is a heaven and it is filled with the same self-righteous Bible thumpers that you can't stand in this life, then it can't be much of a paradise after all. It reminds me of ... Taino chief Hatuey, who spurned the offer to convert to Christianity when he was told he would spend an eternity in Heaven with the same Spaniards who had murdered his people.

Exit Stage Right

Being capable of embarrassment is a sign of a feeling, empathetic person with a sense of propriety, and it's a quality that, if it isn't overdone, I often like quite a bit. Then there are these people's antipodes — halfwits and budding sociopaths who are seemingly incapable of embarrassment, thereby subconsciously shifting the burden of burning shame onto innocent bystanders who desperately wish they could be anywhere but in the same room with the clueless, emotionally stunted schmuck.

You know of whom I speak, I trust. Here's a compilation of some his most toe-curlingly awful utterances.

Four more days.

Family Values

Another paragon of virtue goes down.

On the same topic, Edward Fitzpatrick, a columnist for the Providence Journal, wishes to cede ownership of our bodies to the state.

It's striking to me that opponents of legal prostitution always invoke this netherworld of "sex-trafficking victims and women facing addiction and violence." The reality in places where prostitution is legal is that overwhelmingly, prostitutes choose their profession with no more coercion than that felt by a woman who decides, out of economic necessity, to flip burgers or clean houses for a living.

Sure, prostitution is not always the most pleasant of occupations, I imagine — but me, I'd rather be a well-compensated whore than an underpaid scrubber of the shit-encrusted toilet bowls at the local Taco Bell's. It eludes me why the former job is repugnant but the latter is a good day's work.

As for coerced sex trafficking and violence, the New Puritans only bring them up to muddy the waters. Neither offense is part and parcel of the prostitution trade; and when these crimes do occur, there are already laws in place that seek to punish the perpetrators, as there should be.

People like Fitzpatrick are part of a movement that wants to protect adults from themselves, but they end up doing more harm than good. Why on earth would you profess to champion the wellbeing of sex workers by pushing them underground and possibly into harm's way, far away from any kind of oversight of their health and safety?

Common Sense Dies at the Hands of Uniformed Twits

There's just a one-letter difference between uniformed and uninformed. Hmm. Coincidence? You decide.

Six Pennsylvania high school students are facing child pornography charges after three teenage girls allegedly took nude or semi-nude photos of themselves and shared them with male classmates via their cell phones. The female students at Greensburg Salem High School in Greensburg, Pa., all 14- or 15-years-old, face charges of manufacturing, disseminating or possessing child pornography while the boys, who are 16 and 17, face charges of possession.

Full story here. The police investigator, a captain George Seranko, has about the same grasp of digital media as Ted "series of tubes" Stevens.

"It's very dangerous," he said. "Once it's on a cell phone, that cell phone can be put on the Internet where everyone in the world can get access to that juvenile picture. You don't realize what you are doing until it's already done."

Child pornography laws were intended to protect children from adults. What we have here is consenting teenagers electronically fooling around with each other. They were, by the looks of it, unharmed — and had arguably caused no harm — until they fell into the clutches of the law. These kids need a good talking-to, by their parents, and that's all.

Last month,

...a survey of 1,280 teens and young adults found that 20 percent of the teens said they had sent or posted nude or semi nude photos or videos of themselves. That number was slightly higher for teenage girls — 22 percent — vs. boys — 18 percent.

Shall we build hundreds of new juvies, and incarcerate these teenage evildoers, so we can "protect them from themselves"? Where do these law-enforcement Torquemadas get off punishing kids for a lack of good judgment when they display precisely none of it themselves?

Determination Without Talent

26 years to solve a Rubik's cube? Like Graham Parker, I'm no wiz with spatial puzzles — all the more reason why I wouldn't be calling the newspapers with reports of my unspectacular and (frankly) embarrassing feats.

This three-year-old girl needed less than two minutes to do what took Parker a quarter century:

Driven To Distraction?

I have a hands-free Bluetooth phone system built right into my car. It takes voice commands so I can dial my wife by saying "Home," and I can dial the drive-through liquor store by saying "Holy fuck I'm thirsty."

That's not good enough for Janet Froetscher of the National Safety Council, who likens talking on cell phones to drunken driving, and who wants even hands-free setups like mine banned from the nation's roadways.

"It's not just what you're doing with your hands — it's that your head is in the conversation and so your eyes are not on the road," Froetscher said.

If that's true, shouldn't we forbid all talking in cars, as in: conversing with passengers? Shouldn't Froetscher be calling for an end to the broadcasts of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, whose mental denseness and witlessness occasionally causes me to shriek at the radio as if I were engaged in a little verbal mano a mano with said gasbags? Shall we ban MP3 players and lipstick from all vehicles, too, for the distractions they might pose? How about a law against small or faded bumper stickers, which cause drivers to tailgate in an effort to decipher yet another lame-o "Whirled Peas" or "My Other Car is a Broom" message? How long before Froetscher proposes a bill ordering drivers to tie down every last object in their cars, as this Dutch cabinet member did?

I'm getting pretty sick of the unchallenged pious bullcrap that any form of multitasking in the car is impossible to do safely. 99.99% of all drivers do just that without causing an accident: changing a CD while warning the kids in the backseat for the last time, or fumbling for sunglasses while scanning for a reststop sign, or jabbing at the temperature controls while listening to a passenger's recounting of the latest Bond movie, or eating a sandwich while glancing at the GPS screen.

I'll bet that Froetscher and all of her fellow nannies — every last one — engage in some combination of those activities, performed simultaneously, while driving. We all do. I hope they'll at least feel honorbound to turn themselves in.

Torture Another Day

Further to yesterday's remark about Saudi Arabia, here's an interesting bit of news from that lovely stretch of oil-soaked soil. The mercy of Allah and his messengers is on full display:

Two Egyptian doctors, Raouf Amin al-Arabi and Shawqi Abd Rabbuh, have been sentenced in Saudi Arabia to, respectively, 15 and 20 years in prison, and 1,500 and 1,700 lashes. While Amnesty International does not have information on the exact formulation of the charges on which they were convicted, the doctors were alleged to have facilitated the addiction of an unnamed Saudi Arabian patient to morphine after prescribing the medicine for her pain relief following an accident.

The sentences were handed down to Raouf Amin al-Arabi, aged 52, and Shawqi Abd Rabbuh by a court in Jeddah over a year ago. However, very little information has been made public about their case, and they are believed to have been convicted and sentenced following an unfair trial.

I can't fathom what 1,500 — much less 1,700 — lashes would do to the human body, except that I imagine it's pretty much a death sentence. But the Saudis, ever resourceful, have found a way to keep their prey alive long enough to torture another day. And another one. And another.

Flogging is mandatory in Saudi Arabia for a number of offences, including consumption of alcohol, and can also be used at the discretion of judges as an alternative or addition to other punishments. Sentences can range from dozens to thousands of lashes, and are usually carried out in installments, at intervals ranging from two weeks to one month.

Time was when the U.S. could have spoken out with some moral authority against such barbarity.

Alas. No more.