James R. Rummel

I am a self defense instructor who lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Martial Law in New Orleans

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The title of this post is actually rather misleading. The Associated Press is reporting that hundreds of National Guard troops will be deployed to New Orleans this next month as an anti-crime measure. So far as I know, martial law has yet to be declared.

Using soldiers to keep the civil peace has always been problematic. Troops equipped and trained to defeat another nation’s military are ill suited to arresting street gangs and investigating crimes. New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, the two politicians behind this decision, understand that well enough to emphasize that the NG troops will have “law enforcement experience”. The news article linked to above doesn’t mention which units will be used in NO, so there is no way to tell if they will confine themselves to using MP’s and refrain from having regular troops patrol the streets.

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Rather Awkward Exit

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There have been many predictions about the impact of blogging. Some people have claimed that this hobby of ours (la blogga nostra?) will replace main stream media some day. Eventually there will be no more TV news shows, no more newspapers. Everyone will get their fast breaking news from the blogs.

I think this prediction is not very realistic, if for no other reason than bloggers usually write about items they find in the news instead of getting out there and nailing down the story by themselves. But there is no question that blogs have done a great service to this country.

The scandal known as Rathergate showed just how blogs can be used to keep traditional media sources honest. Forged documents were held up as evidence in a story that would have seriously damaged President Bush’ chances to win the 2004 election. If not for bloggers, history would have been altered.

Rathergate is the single great blog success story so far even though it is two long years in the past, but it has some very long legs. The Washington Post reports that Dan Rather will probably be forced into retirement some time this year.

It could very well be that the scandal which bears his name has nothing to do with the end of Rather’s career. I do note that the author of the WaPo story keeps mentioning that piece of old news, though.

One of the executives at CBS had an epitaph for an old anchor who spent his career in the service of one of the traditional media giants.

The CBS executives hope a dignified exit can be arranged and that Rather can find a second career, perhaps in cable, the sources say.

Or, I suppose, he could start his own blog.

Jihad and Miami Vice

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I was working the night shift at police HQ back in 1991 when they brought in a Japanese national to be fingerprinted.

He had entered the country a few days before in Hawaii and immediately boarded a plane for Los Angeles. Once there he rented a car and made a marathon drive across the continental United States to my home town in Columbus, Ohio. Besides a hundred pounds of illegal drugs there were two suitcases full of cash in the trunk. The money was startup capitol earmarked to recruit a Columbus gang or two, the drugs merely a sample of the product that the locals would be expected to sell every month if they went international and joined the organization.

Anybody out there watch Japanese detective movies? Then you know the stereotype of a Yakuza gangster. This guy was all that and more. Tattoos galore and a few fingers shy of a full set. He claimed to know no English but he followed every command given while he was processed. (“Turn left. Turn right. Face front. Give me your right thumb.”) He certainly knew his Miranda rights since the only thing we got from him was a whole lot of nothing. Must have learned that from American detective shows that he watched back in Japan.

We got our own little Yak invasion in the Midwest because law enforcement had made great strides since the freewheeling Miami Vice days of untouchable drug cartels and flamboyant kingpins. Gangs had been infiltrated, smuggling routes closed off, and people had been arrested. The criminals were desperate to find a safe haven, an area where the cops were so ignorant of how the big volume drug trade worked that it would be business as usual right under their noses. The reason the criminals were getting caught no matter where they went was due to that fact that US law enforcement was smart enough to hound them mercilessly and deny them that haven.

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Apron Strings

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I noticed last year that most of the people I encountered through my self defense class wanted to ask about methods to protect their children or grandchildren from the Internet. At first I thought they were concerned about shielding underage people from adult content, and I started to carry around info that I had downloaded which explained about blocking software like Netnanny.

It turns out that wasn’t what they wanted at all. News reports had started to appear that breathlessly hyped the dangers lying in wait for children that use the Internet as a social medium. Kids that set up a Livejournal account, so the talking heads said, were waving a red flag in front of a bull. And the bull in this case are pedophiles that obsessively surfed the ‘Net in search of their prey.

Reports of this nature have gotten pretty prevalent of late, maybe even routine. Most local law enforcement agencies, always sensitive to charges of lacking positive action, have set up little task forces to try and catch adults who search online for teen victims. The conclusion that any reasonable person would reach is that a child who visits the Internet is just a few mouse clicks away from being singled out for a kidnapping.

(As an aside, most of the websites look annoyingly similar because they got started from a grant from the US Department of Justice, and I suppose they just put up a modified version of DOJ’s template. The most interesting webpage of this variety I’ve come across is the one for Idaho, which also has a great deal of useful child-friendly links at the bottom. Kudos to Idaho!)

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Going Towards the Sound of the Guns

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The cable news networks are all abuzz about a reported shooting at The Rayburn House Office Building, one of the complex of buildings that house US government offices around the US Capitol in Washington, DC.

According to the talking heads sitting at their desks in the TV studios, someone called the Capitol Police and reported the sound of gunfire on the underground garage level. The police reportedly didn’t find anything, but they did sniff the distinctive odor of cordite (modern gunpowder). The cops locked down the building, refusing to allow anyone to leave, and now they are making a room-to-room search.

This is the proper response, of course. Footage shot by reporters being escorted out of the building by way of the parking area show it to be really huge, taking up more than one level and stretching for some distance. If somone ripped off a few rounds from an autoloader, it will take a fair amount of time to find the spent shell casings. They could have used a revolver, though.

There would be shell casings only if some shots were fired in the first place. I routinely hear distant sounds that I could swear are gunshots while I walk my dogs in the wee hours of the night. It turns out that it is only garbage trucks emptying dumpsters.

This could be a false alarm. We will see.

I have decided to watch the Fox News Channel. The reporters are able to phone elected officials trapped in their offices by the lockdown to get their impressions. Pretty neat.

There is going to be a press conference in 20 minutes.

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