MSN offers up a “10 things” list – they erroneously tagged a “10 Commandments” list on the link I found it at – on “how to lose weight.”

It’s an interesting collection of “conventional wisdom”, some of which are correct and some of which aren’t.

Bobvis offers up a thought for a radical change in law enforcement: the elimination (or near-elimination) of prosecutorial and police discretion.

In looking through this, I see three basic complaints. I don’t necessarily disagree with any of them, but here’s a paraphrase:

#1 – The law is overcomplicated to the point of absurdity, to the point where literally nobody can say with any certainty that they haven’t ever (or even haven’t recently) broken some law. This becomes especially annoying when we apply the legal principle “ignorance of the law is no defense” – since most laws are written such that only a lawyer specializing in Field X really understands them (and even then, plenty of debate usually rages). Expecting everyone to manage to keep abreast not just of the content of all laws that affect them, but also the changes to that law constantly being made, seems pretty absurd.

#2 – “Police disproportionally choose to enforce certain laws against certain groups.” As I’ve said before, I don’t buy the whole “police are always racist” line of thought. However, I will certainly believe that certain laws are enforced more than other laws (and even to the point of “enforcing” when there hasn’t been a violation, see below), simply because it is more profitable (fines, etc) for the police to enforce those laws rather than other laws.

#3 – Where multiple laws become involved, prosecutors can too easily abuse the discretion they have to choose which charges to file. This becomes even worse as the system becomes more and more broken, too many people are coerced into pleading guilty when they are actually innocent by the disparity between plea sentencing and post-trial sentencing (see also here), and of course the system is designed to coerce you directly from the moment you first start talking to the cops. This is especially true when even taking the stand in your own defense becomes a punishable offense if you’re found guilty, under sentencing guidelines that will either (a) attempt to convict you of “perjury” (if you say “I didn’t do it” and a jury finds otherwise) or will bump up the sentencing guideline for your being “not remorseful” (obviously, if you testify in your own defense, you’re “not remorseful”) or “obstructing justice.”

On the flipside, I think there needs to be room in the system for at least some police and prosecutorial discretion. As an example: if someone’s taillight goes out, there’s a good chance they don’t know about it. A police officer pulling them over and giving them a warning (and I believe “warnings” should be logged so that other officers can tell if someone’s already been recently warned or has been simply ignoring the warnings and not altering their behavior) is not a bad thing; it helps get the vehicle repaired and keeps the streets a little safer. Likewise, there are times when the law is simply badly written or otherwise not wisely applied to a situation, and I’d like to think that – on average at least – the police officer would have sound enough judgement to recognize this.

As for the oversight option… we’re dealing with humans, here. If you start analyzing cops by a quota of how many tickets they write, then you give them a quota and we get into the problem of cops who ticket innocent people for imaginary offenses in order to meet quota. If you stick observers with them randomly, all you do is increase the number of eyes in the vehicle looking for crimes – and “missing” a crime can be as simple as having your vision obstructed while taking a sip of your coffee. If you run a camera in the vehicle, same deal; the camera may not always be where the officer is looking (though I DO think that dashboard cameras are laudable for traffic stops, and that retention of the video ought to be mandatory by law to prevent “he said, she said” problems between the cop and the citizen later).

While I don’t usually go for online videos compared to downloadable, mostly for quality reasons (*ahemyoutubeahem*), I’ve actually been enjoying the Hulu service recently. The idea is fairly straightforward; they stream reasonably high-quality copies of broadcast TV shows, with very limited commercial interruptions (no more than 15 seconds at a time, and in the standard commercial break spots). They have a number of viewing options (fullscreen, normal, or in the window with the “lights down”, a function that basically greytones everything to the point where you can focus on the video).

What got me watching the series was that they had a few episodes of House that I hadn’t seen, after Hugh and his wife got me into watching the series. Thus far, I’ve been able to catch up with a couple here and there.

The upside of the series is that they have some pretty good selection. The downside is that unless a video gets popular (or somehow gets in with a sweetheart deal), it “expires” from their service quickly; a few of House season 4 are still up, but House season 5 episode 1 is already tagged to vanish from their service tomorrow for some odd reason I can’t fathom.

The big media companies long highlight what they want to do (versus what consumers would like) on the shows. In order, here’s where I think Hulu goes right and wrong:

Right:
– They offer decent quality video. As in, progressive scan, two very viewable resolution sizes.
– The commercials, while present, aren’t annoying to the point of ridiculous. Though they are somewhat repetitive, a worry for the solvency of the service since it seems they only have 3-4 sponsors tops.
– They have a decent selection to choose from.

Wrong:
– There’s no way to watch a series completely through, unless somehow they got authorized to carry it. If you try out a show on Hulu and end up liking it, your best bet is hunting down DVD season box sets.
– The episode you watched today and emailed your friends to recommend, could easily be gone by the time they try to get to it.
– Lack of download options makes the service only usable if you have a strong, reliable network connection. I doubt their higher-quality feed would make it through a DSL-speed connection. plus, it only prebuffers as far as the next commercial break, meaning that letting it sit to load and then watching it won’t work.

I can understand the options they’re given, and if they had to sign something saying “no downloads” for licensing reasons, but the one restriction that annoys me most is the inability to download the episodes in some form or format. I have media center boxes throughout the house, and being able to download them (with commercials included) would make me likely to snag them and put them on for viewing away from my main computer. Even if I had to pay $1 per episode or something, it might be worth it.

In an earlier thread, Gannon took exception to how many people the US has in jail. I’ve already begun discussing this in the context of Jamal Damon Barack, and the types of repeat theives that public universities see.

On the competing side, two stories recently: First, a CNN video on a man who served his time, came back into society, but couldn’t make it so he handed a cop some crack and begged to be re-incarcerated. Secondly, a story on some teenagers who ran a violent prostitution ring, but managed to get off with a year and a half in juvie due to a plea bargain.

If you’re going to make a case study for where the US prison system is messed up, these are a pretty good place to start. People fall into a life of crime for a lot of reasons – some are actually in need, some simply have no respect for the law/life/property of others, some are medically sociopathic, some see an opportunity for profit that bypasses or outweighs the risk calculation of being caught, and some (though this is generally relegated to more obscure/arcane areas like tax law or financial reporting) honestly try to follow the law but simply have no clue what it actually means.

In the case of JDB, I mentioned that the (a) courts are too lax in sentencing and the comforts of prisons and (b) prisons themselves are not really set up to do a good job rehabilitating people. The homeless gentleman doesn’t appear to have gotten a lax sentence – but at the same time, when he got out of prison, he literally had no support structure to turn him back into a productive and law-abiding member of society. He sounds like the type who would have done better for it. On the other side, we have people like JDB and the pimp boys, who probably would leave jail and go right back into crime no matter what prison tried to do to rehabilitate them.

Prisons, obviously, have dual purposes. There is a large amount of debate as to which of these purposes is primary. Speaking neutrally, they can be enumerated as corrective and protective. In the corrective element, prison is supposed to serve as a place where individuals who’ve committed crime can be rehabilitated, shown the error of their ways, and then return to society and become productive and law-abiding. In the protective, prison is supposed to both serve as a deterrent to criminals (the sane ones who will weigh risk/reward and decide crime isn’t worth the risk) and also keep those who are not yet rehabilitated away from those they otherwise would harm.

Where this falls down:
#1 – Prisons and the Justice system currently do a lousy job working out who’s actually rehabilitated or not. Part of this is due to the lax sentencing problem, part of it is due to well-meant but ill-thought-out plans to try to keep prison populations (and thus maintenance costs) down, and part of it is due to the construction of the system in the first place. The end result is that a lot of people who have no business being released back into society are let out anyways.

#2 – Prisons do a lousy job of showing prisoners the reward for being productive and law-abiding. Let’s face it, most prisons have corruption problems, they have a high criminal-to-guard ratio, and the underlying society between prisoners isn’t run like normal society. People learn plenty of the wrong lessons in prison.

#3 – Prisons, especially short-term/”low security” ones, are cushy. I wouldn’t say that I’d want to live there, but I can certainly see where a guy who’s homeless and desperate might indeed see prison as “no worse” than where he currently is – in prison, he gets his meals covered, he gets a roof over his head and warm bed to sleep in at night, and he has things like cable TV and a weight/recreation room available at least part of the day. In the case of the story above, we’re lucky he didn’t go violent. If your calculation is that prison’s no worse (or even better) than you are now, the deterrent effect and protective goal of prison kind of vanishes.

Oddly enough, though it would take some and money, at least a partial solution to these problems has already been discussed in the area of sex offenders. A number of states have been considering laws that change the sentencing of sex offenders from a strict “X years unless shortened for other reasons” or “X years with first parole chance at Y years” to, instead, “jail until you can prove rehabilitation and minimal likelihood to re-offend.”

The American Criminal Liberties Union and associated well-meaning (but almost never well-doing) groups opposed these laws, but I submit that if expanded, it would improve the prison structure on both goals.

Consider the following hypothesis: all sentences from this point on (and all existing sentences commuted to the new structure) remove the “cap” of a sentence. Instead of a judge pronouncing “stealing a car at knifepoint, 10 years with possibility of parole in 5” on someone, the simple pronouncement: “Guilty. Remanded to state custody, first possibility of parole in 5 years.”

This changes the game in a number of ways.

First, it removes the idea of shortened sentences from the equation. Gone is the idea that someone will simply “get off with a slap on the wrist”, gone is the idea of someone waiting out their sentence. It also adds a sanity check on judges who are unnecessarily light to start with – a second panel would be responsible for releasing the individual, and hopefully catching the unrepentant criminals who got a light sentence to start with.

Second, it alters the game for those who actually want to get out of prison. If you really want out – if you really are repentant, really DO want to be outside the walls – then your best bet is not going to be to participate in the underlying prison dynamic, but to really learn a skill, really become marketable, really show that you can be a productive member of society. Those who don’t, simply won’t be released – and the goal of protecting society would be served. Moreover, the example to other prisoners would be there: thugs who wait around don’t get out, those who learn to play by the rules actually do get released.

Lastly, this very filter would help with the final problem – the current difficulty of ex-cons in finding work and re-entering society after prison. Those who go through construction apprenticeships, or college courses, or any other form of learning a useful skill will necessarily be the type to market that skill when they get out. The idea of someone who made a mistake, but learned their lesson and served their time and are coming out fresh, might actually have some meaning.

Looking at the three cases above – in the case of our homeless guy, he likely wouldn’t have had zero support structure when he got out of prison. In the case of Jamal Damon Barack, hopefully a parole/release board would have realized after the first few convictions that perhaps he wasn’t learning his lesson and kept him back. And in the last case, I hope to god no parole/release board would be as stupid as the judge who gave violent multiple-time rapists a year and a half each.

Some comments in this post reminded me of an incident at Southern Tech University a while back, and an underlying statement about the justice system.

Southern Tech, like most universities worldwide, has a theft problem. It has this problem partly because it’s in the nature of universities to be insecure, easy targets. Universities combine large amounts of people, relatively open buildings, unknown or shifting class schedules that leave rooms full of steal-able items exposed, and a generally open atmosphere that can lead people to let their guard down; they then mix in personal belongings that are more and more expensive (laptops, PDA’s, cell phones) and a decent amount of fairly high-ticket items (projectors, computers, equipment of varying sorts) owned by the university itself. The end result is, universities are a reasonably easy place for would-be thieves to snag something that will later be sold to a pawn shop. SoTech’s location right next to what is generally a drug- and gang-ridden slum area of town makes the problem worse, but they’re certainly not unique – nearby colleges in both rural and very rich neighborhoods have similar theft issues.

Recently, the SoTech police department sent out a memo to the entire system. Jamal Damon Barack* had been let out of prison again, and as a condition of his parole he was warned that he was no longer welcome on our campus or any others he has stolen from. We were to post fliers with JDB’s face, and keep an eye out – calling the cops if he did show up.

Gannon claims:

On the other hand, the US tries 10, 11, 12, 13 year old children as Adults and sends them to jail. In general, there a way too much people in jail.

Actually, the US has the opposite problem – we’re far too lenient on many crimes, and for many criminals, the system of rehabilitation is a joke to start with.

In discussions with the police investigator, I’ve found out a number of things. It turns out JDB is one of 5 or 6 serial thieves in the area (in addition to garden-variety opportunists, who also hit campus) who make a living out of (a) targeting educational institutions and (b) living in jail. They all have a rap sheet a mile long – JDB, for instance, has over 50 arrests in 20 years, and over 300 convictions on various counts of theft (and those are just the ones they could prove: the estimate is that he’s responsible for at least twice that number). He’s known by virtually every campus cop who’s ever worked in Colosse or its neighboring areas.

Each of them have learned to game the system and have the following things in common:
#1 – They are nonviolent. The most any have on their record is a “resisting arrest (running away)” notation, rather than citation for attempting to injure an officer.
#2 – They know how to fool judges into thinking they’re contrite.
#3 – They know precisely how to behave in jail and quickly get into the good-behavior and “trustee” positions even before their sentencings.
#4 – They exploit any “other” circumstances (one has a “terminal disease”, others have other sob stories or elderly mothers/other relatives who constantly speak on their behalf in court) for reduced sentencing.
#5 – For them, the minimum security prisons are a joke. They get a comfortable bed, 3 square meals a day, cable TV, the equivalent of a health club in the prison gym, and aren’t required to do anything at all unless they take jobs in the trustee program. The trustee program not only gets them preferential treatment but money as well, all for just a couple hours of work a day. While they’re on the streets? They have to provide their own basic necessities like food and shelter, while worrying about anyone else who might try to attack them or steal from them.

The result? A virtual revolving door for these guys, with the educational institutions pretty much supplying their income (along with the shadier pawn shops where they hock their stuff after presenting ridiculously-fake “receipts”) while they’re out. And it’s not as if they are stupid, either; they are incredibly inventive in managing to break off theft-prevention devices or get into areas they’re not supposed to be in, including traveling over false-drop ceilings or blending in with student crowds.

SoTech’s police, along with the other police departments, have repeatedly tried to get these guys longer sentencing and serious sanctions on parole to try to clean up their behavior, but the system’s not having it. Colosse already has enough trouble with a relatively constant stream of violent/drug/gang crime due to turf wars between rival gangs of Blood/Crip/MS13 backgrounds; the judges don’t want to catch grief from misguided racial advocacy groups for contributing to the numbers of incarcerated minorities and one way that they can keep their numbers down is to let “nonviolent offenders” off as quickly as they can.

Gannon thought we are “too tough” on crime, for trying murderers as adults in some specific cases; I think we’re too easy on crime. There are way too many ways for a criminal to game the system and get out early, and not enough rehabilitative ways for the system to actually work on them once a criminal’s decided that crime pays. The added problem is that, societally, many of these kids in the black/latino subcultures are being taught precisely that by parents or “role models” who themselves are gang members or glorify “thug life” behavior.

It gets worse as the gangs have begun recruiting younger and younger members, as well, which relates somewhat to Gannon’s cry about “tried as adult” children. I’d argue that a kid who joins a gang and then shoots 4 people in cold blood has made a pretty adult decision to commit murder or his other crimes, and that seems to be the general consensus as well – but even then, such prosecutions are relatively rare compared to the number of kids committing gang crimes overall.

I’m willing to take a bet that, if these kids didn’t start out learning that (A) crime pays and (B) as a child criminal, the system would give them just a slap on the wrist (especially “first time offender”), they might grow up making a different calculation on crime. Fix the culture and treat crime seriously with greater punishment and stronger rehabilitative efforts, and you might just manage to reduce the number of people willing to take the risk and ending up in prison in the first place.

*name changed for purpose of the story, naturally.

A number of posts both here and at Bobvis seem to hit on topics of the behavior of men towards women, and whether it’s cultural or not. As with any case study, there are a number of “exceptions that prove the rule”, but by and large I’ve found that men from middle-eastern or (perhaps more to the point) islam-influenced cultures have a pretty paleolithic attitude towards women. Many times, this is dressed up as insisting that the barbaric, humiliating and isolating behavior towards women constitutes some bizarre form of “freedom” for them. In reality, however, the prevailing attitude seems to be that women are (a) unable to take care of themselves, (b) unworthy of being allowed to, (c) inferior to men, and (d) largely to be neither seen nor heard (“barefoot and pregnant” at home).

This seems to have some startling parallels in the FLDS, given more by the latest round of news in which zombie-like women obviously parroting rote-memorized lines (with a very “yes. we. love. our. mother. russia” scared-of-something vibe) trot around and the FLDS, obviously wiser to the PR game, trots out dog-and-pony-show “visits” with their youngest men (who only have one wife… so far) to show how “normal” their insular society is. In reality, of course, FLDS women have no choice of husbands, no control in their own lives, and have even been referred to as “breeding stock” by the FLDS’s “prophet” Warren Jeffs.

On the Islamic side, the source seems pretty obvious – Muslims are expected to revere the “example” of the “prophet” Mohammed. The problem is, Muslim men try to follow Mohammed’s example with women. Mohammed’s track record shows up with some pretty raw abuses, including a couple of rapes he retroactively called “marriages”, plenty of sex-slave concubines, and draconian laws on divorce, proving rape, and sanctioning violence towards women that would probably even make the FLDS think twice.

Unfortunately, the FLDS parallels this pretty well. In the Islamic world, women are “theoretically” allowed veto power on whether to enter into marriage (though the reality in almost all Muslim nations is otherwise). In the FLDS, you either marry who the FLDS “prophet” says, or you’re kicked out of the group – with wives being reassigned at a whim of the “prophet” should a man happen to fall out of favor. Both groups seem to see women as primarily baby factories; both have standards of “modesty” designed around preventing a significant amount of self-expression in women as well as making it hard for them to differentiate their appearances. Salman Rushdie has famously said that “Muslim society is afraid of women’s sexuality; numerous other scholars concur, noting the incredibly pornographic verses and male-oriented idealization of “heaven” (72 beautiful ‘virgins’ that magically re-virginize and a never-softening erection to match). The FLDS ideas towards women seem similar; multiple wives in heaven with few males, women who must be “submissive” towards men at all times, etc.

In Mohammed’s time, he got plenty of men killed fighting his wars, as did most of the other tribes in the region, and so there was a pretty good abundance of “extra” women; a polygamous society necessitates behavior designed to (a) keep women “in their place” and (b) ensure that enough young men die to keep the desired (at least by the rulers) female/male ratio. Today, many young Muslim males are “encouraged” to “fight jihad against the kafir” by the older males of Muslim society, conveniently getting them out of the way for the older Muslim males to take multiple wives – even in countries where it’s against the law (the FLDS seems to have the same idea). The FLDS answer to the “young men problem” has been by simply kicking a lot of young men out into the world, not caring what happens to them after that.

In both cases, the term “submission” pops up too commonly. So common, in fact, that much of the discussion seems more like propaganda to create a “stockholm syndrome” situation; women are told that being veiled, submissive, second-class and utterly subservient is “true freedom” or “holy”, and even pitted against each other to tattle (and thus gain favor with the male of the house) if one of them shows a bit too much self-respect. Even for monogamous Muslims, the threat of taking a second wife – and relegating the current to second-class status – is all too common in Muslim society.

At root, I submit that what both groups (at least the males thereof) are really afraid of is, in fact, women being comfortable in their own self and sexuality. Too many women being confident in themselves, or realizing “I don’t have to be treated this way”, might just mean that they would stop putting up with the abusive behavior altogether.

-{Note from trumwill: I have a(nother) post coming up early next week on the FLDS raid in Texas. When that post comes up it will be an opportunity to discuss the legal angle of those raids, so lets save that discussion until then. Oh, and believe it or not, I have a post in mind for the AOC angle of religious communities and the FLDS raid, so let’s hold off on that for now, too}-

Will and I have a difference of opinion on the death penalty, but fortunately we’ve never had this argument (and there are even instances where Will admits his anti-Death-Penalty stance wavers, because of people who are “poster children” for the death penalty).

However, a standard attack by anti-Death Penalty advocates uses the “odd” idea that many DP supporters are also anti-Abortion (or, sometimes, the phrase “Pro-Life” is used, since the other size uses “Pro-Choice”).

The attack goes as follows: If you support the death penalty and oppose abortion and still claim to be “pro-life”, you’re a hypocrite. After all, you’re claiming one thing that the “Pro-Choice” people claim isn’t a human yet is worth protecting, but an actual matured human being isn’t.

The alternative is simple, but I’ve never heard it expressed so clearly until a local radio host did. I’ll paraphrase slightly because I can’t remember the wording precisely:

In the first case, you have someone who’s committed a crime so heinous that society needs protecting from that in the most ultimate form we can imagine. In the other, you have an innocent (fetus? baby? child?) that has committed no crime. That’s how I can be pro-Death Penalty and anti-Abortion all at once.

webmaster: ok… ack

webmaster: this stupid nuvaprim fake-fench-accent-you-american-women-are-so-pretty ad… if I hear it one more time I swear I’m going to throw something at my radio

webmaster: which is unfortunate given that I’m listening to streaming online radio at the moment

trumwill: Not familiar with the ad. I suspect I should be thankful.

webmaster: you really, really should

webmaster: it’s an ad for a cream for women to rub on their legs with which to hide wrinkles and spider veins and stuff

webmaster: and it’s got a cheesy, cheesy guy doing a fake french accent talking about how he wants to send a free bottle because american women are “so beautiful” and he wants to make them even more so just like european women… yikes

trumwill: Whatever… as long as they continue to shave their armpits.

A UN “study group” has decided that Tasers are a form of torture with the capability to cause death.

Aside from illustrating some of the mind-numbing stupidity I’ve come to associate the UN with by default, it reopens a long debate on what tools and rights the police should have.

In the 1990s, many “civil rights” organizations were pushing for the police to be given (and presumably, forced to use) more ‘nonlethal’ methods of solving violent confrontations. Minority-rights groups especially contended that police were “too quick” to draw weapons and fire on members of their races, who may or may not have been bloodthirsty killers and axe murderers who attacked the cops. The Taser was the inevitable result; a weapon capable of incapacitating someone, quickly drawn and fired like a gun, and which would (at least in most cases) leave someone alive to be handcuffed and taken to jail rather than dead at the scene.

A brief side note – in Colosse, we have our own cop problems. Of the cops I’ve met, given that the city has a police force 1/2 the size of cities 1/4 its population, there seem to be precisely 2 types of cop: the overworked ones (let’s face it, if you’ve worked 16+ hour days for months on end with no vacation, you’re not at your best) and the corrupt ones. Still, I’d rather be tased by either than wind up in a grave.

The Taser is not completely nonlethal, nor should any weapon ever be considered to be; even handcuffs can be lethal. It is not un-painful, but again, the purpose of any weapon is to inflict enough pain to incapacitate someone. A quick look at a Youtube search will pull up plenty on it, including demonstrations of people being tasered and explanations of how it works. However, it is a far sight better than the alternative “nonlethal” means of sandbag shotguns, pepper spray, and the “old reliable” metal nightstick.

The Taser is better than the nightstick because it does not require the officer to enter melee with someone, quite probably someone either (a) armed with a gun or knife or other melee weapon, (b) physically capable of attempting to take a weapon from the officer, (c) troubled enough by drug abuse or some other illness that may or may not be physically capable of being transferred to the cop, or (d) some frightening combination of the previous.

The Taser is better than the pepper spray because it is less likely to affect nearby people as well; I’ve been in a room when a young girl mistakenly sat on (and cracked) the pepper spray cartridge on her keychain, and it was enough to clear out a room of 50 people with their eyes watering. It also has a better range than the pepper spray and can more easily be used while keeping the officer at a safe distance.

The Taser is better than the sandbag shotgun because, instead of inflicting physical bruising, it inflicts a shock that incapacitates muscles directly. If someone is mentally ill or on many forms of drugs, their pain response to the physical bruising will likely be minimal (heck, just an adrenaline rush can cause people to ignore all sorts of pain). The Taser bypasses this and goes directly to the neuromuscular level, at least knocking someone over (by causing convulsions of the leg muscles) even if they do get up again. The Taser also does not require such precise aim as the sandbag shotgun.

And yet, we are now barraged with various news stories of why cops are “abusing” Tasers, and how they should be taken away. My suspicion is that most of the groups responsible for these stories simply have an agenda of stopping the cops from doing their jobs. Yes, I recognize (living in Colosse, it’s hard not to as I noted above) that there are times cops will overreach their authority. But I’m also painfully aware that there is a sizable population that are quite willing to attempt to kill cops merely for being cops, or in an attempt to evade arrest, and that the cops need to have the tools necessary to take these people in and defend not only their own lives but the communities they are sworn to protect.

Prior to the issuance of tasers, the default cop option was not the sandbag shotgun, or the pepper spray, or the nightstick. Why not? For all the reasons previously stated – each of them opens up the cop to more risk of being physically assaulted or killed. The default option was to pull the gun and be prepared to shoot.

When a cop is forced by a situation to draw their gun, the likelihood is someone is going to get shot with a weapon intended to kill by someone who is trained to shoot to kill in self-defense. When a cop is forced by a situation to draw a taser, the likelihood is that someone is going to get hit by a weapon intended to leave them alive.

I think the tasers should remain, and I think the UN idiots who called them “torture” need to have their heads examined.

Driving in to work today, I saw four trucks with the brand name “ATOYOT” on their front grilles.

It took me until I got to work 45 minutes later to work out that they were not an inexplicably popular new automotive brand that I’d somehow never heard of.