Crime and Punishment

War & Organized Crime

by

My son-in-law,  just returned from Russia, sent an e-mail  linking to  Yulia Latynina –  who “writs for the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta (you may remembet Anna Politkovskaya, who also wrote for the  N.G. before she was murdered in 2006).”   Latynina  argues “South Ossetia Crisis Could Be Russia’s Chance To Defeat Siloviki.”     He acknowledges she may overstate the role of organized crime as motive, but visitors to Eastern Europe (and Russia)  often speak of  violence and pervasive corruption.    Indeed, “Saakashvili did say that fighting organized crime as among the reasons for attacking S. Ossetia.”    To buttress this point, he linked to another article, the older and lengthier one in Atlantic Monthly,  “A Smuggler’s  Story”.      The stories of a couple of their contemporaries who have spent summers in Tblisi are often of the lack of transparency in almost all day-to-day transactions.

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

by

Drug Abuse is Bad. The Drug War is Worse!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tony Ryan,  Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, writes: “LEAP’s first ever billboard now showing at 108th and I street in Omaha,  NE.  It is up high, where many can see it, and it shows a new website for us which we can use to measure response and effectiveness.”

Cross-posted at the Explorers Foundation blog [link].

Patriotic Thieves

by

You’ve probably already heard about the thief who alerted police after breaking into a van…which contained devices that appeared to be explosives.

This incident reminded me of another story.

Odette Sansom (later Odette Hallowes) was an agent of the WWII British sabotage organization Special Operations Executive. Unlike many SOE agents, she survived the war. She was honored by the British government with the MBE and the George Cross, and was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur by the French.

Some time after the war, the house of Odette’s mother was burglarized, and these decorations were stolen along with some silver. Odette’s mother appealed via the newspapers for the return of the decorations, and the thief sent them back along with this note:

You, Madame, appear to be a dear old lady. God bless you and your children. I thank you for having faith in me. I am not all that bad – it’s just circumstances. Your little dog really loves me. I gave him a nice pat and left him a piece of meat – out of fridge.

Sincerely yours,

A Bad Egg.

Rape is Rape, But Some People Have a Problem With The Concept

by

Long time readers know that I run a charity self defense course for violent crime survivors. I’ve been doing it for so long that word of mouth brings me more work than I can handle.

But it wasn’t always like that. When I was just starting out, decades ago, I would visit encounter groups and seminars to pass out some business cards and let people look me over so they wouldn’t be so self conscious if they dialed my number. Some of these seminars were more crowded than others.

The first seminar I ever attended for male rape victims was at one of the local hotels here in Columbus, Ohio. I was shocked to see how many people were there! It was standing room only, with men leaning against the walls and sitting in the aisles between rows of folding chairs.

Read more

The MSM Misses the Bout: Part I

by

As an amateur historian, I am given to musing about the flow and processing of information. People make mental models of the past, but those models are usually highly skewed. As both Napoleon and George Orwell are alleged to have observed, it is the winners who write history. Beyond that, most historians rely primarily on written sources, which further skews our perspective to the prejudices of a given time’s literati, as well as limiting our perspective by that self-same “intelligentsia’s” intellectual shortcomings. The uptake curve of any new trend is difficult to perceive at its inception. Important events often show up as important only well after the fact. Of all the news stories of today, how many human beings can predict what story will actually shape the world of 50 years from now? Even experts fail at this. And often, the true import of events is obscured until the generation who experienced those events has passed away, along with their distorted perceptions.

Read more