Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
One of my guilty pleasure is “City Confidential” a true-crime documentary show on A&E. Today I sat down to watch episode 41 – Ruthton: Tragedy in the Heartland which concerns the murder of two bankers in Minnesota during 1983. As the story progressed and they began to show pictures of the suspected murderer, a creepy feeling came over me. A little Googling confirmed my suspicion:
I knew the guy!
So Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, stated in his tribunal that:
His actions, he said, were like those of other revolutionaries. Had the British arrested George Washington during the Revolutionary War, Mr. Mohammed said, “for sure they would consider him enemy combatant.”
New Yorkers, finally fed up, voted in Giuliani. The applicability of that pattern to Jonathan’s muted optimism struck me in reading Theodore Dalrymple, who, in his usual pull-no-punches style, reviews A Land Fit for Criminals.
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.
A new scam is running around. A bank account is cracked, real checks are printed, sent out in large numbers, the checks are deposited by people thinking they are for payment of “taxes” for a lottery and the “tax payment” is sent via Western Union / Moneygram to the “tax agent”, in other words, the scam artist. The name, bank information, routing number, security features on the check are all entirely legitimate. This way the group gets money sent to them without ever actually having to touch the bank.
I just got the 2nd one of these in a month and it’s ticking me off. My local police are too lazy to follow up on reporting this sort of scam (the route I took in the first case) so I’m throwing this out for a bit of international justice. Is there a coalition of the willing out there willing to bust scammers?
The “agent” gives a number of 011-491-60-91-92-39-92 which seems to be Germany. If anybody could trace this to a locality and get the police to act, I will press charges.