All Those Things I Meant To SayI haven't been blogging very much in the past few months. Nothing's wrong; my relative silence has been for all the right reasons — I've acquired a girlfriend and we've been consuming each others' free time, plus a little more. Here's a quick rundown of a few things I wanted to say, even though this is no longer timely. Back in April, a private citizen ticketed a cop for parking illegally. He won his case and the officer was fined $35. I was shocked to read this:
So the judge doesn't think it was wrong to break the law. I guess he agreed with the defense's argument:
I see. It looks like we should elucidate the principles guiding this argument. Would the judge be so lenient if it were an on-call surgeon parking illegally? What if it was just someone with a sprained ankle who doesn't want to walk from a legal parking spot? What if it were the mayor or a congressman? If we think the law is bad, we should move quickly to fix the law. I, and all citizens, need to be able to know in advance what circumstances make it acceptable to ignore the ordinary rules. Naturally, the job of the police is to enforce the law … without breaking it. It is not acceptable for them to ignore the law because it doesn't contain a loophole they wish it did. I couldn't get away with that. Neither should they. I have a couple other examples of police misconduct. In Florida, an officer was fired after trying to shake down a coffee shop for free stuff, both on and off duty:
Taking for granted that the accusation is true, this disgrace of an officer has been serving for 15 years. I cringe at the thought of what other evil he has done. There's no way extortion for free coffee is the only thing he's done wrong. In Tennessee, a man was illegally arrested after refusing to delete pictures he took of an officer during a traffic stop. Some followup posts go into additional detail. I find this argument completely convincing:
In counterintuitive health news, a research review has shown that breast self-exams are a bad idea. The researchers don't state it so bluntly, but I was gratified that they came close: "a rational choice would be not to do regular breast self-examination" and "We don't want to recommend against it but there's no evidence to recommend for it". I'm still waiting patiently for politicians to admit mandating corn ethanol for gasoline was a bad idea. But that's politics, not science, so I'm not holding my breath. Oh yeah, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got nationalized. Of course I think this is terrible, that there is no such thing as "too big to fail", and that these institutions should have been allowed to fail. If I had time for blogging, I'd say more about that. But I don't. :(
© Kyle Markley
— Posted 2008-09-08 07:23:27 UTC —
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