The Pendulum Swings
This story just moved me. I’ve asked in the past what changed in our society. When a mass shooting takes place, and people talk about how available guns are now, and how cheap life if, I point out that guns are harder to get through legal channels now than they’ve ever been in our country’s history. You used to be able to buy rifles through the mail. Kids used to carry their .22 rifles to school to go hunting afterwards. So what’s changed? I often suggested it was the moral fabric that allowed life to become so cheap.
Akio Clark shows that the pendulum might swing back, and there might still be hope for us.
I’m going to try something new here. I’m going to set up a PayPal donation button on the front page, and I’m going to accept donations for him. He needs money for therapy. He needs money to live on; he’s lost his job due to losing his sight. I’m not asking for much from anyone, but I’m asking for a little from many. If you’ve got a mother or a sister, and you would have wanted someone to stop to help her, then click through and drop a buck or two in the virtual bucket. I’ll be in contact with the reporter who wrote the story to coordinate passing on the money. Please spread this far and wide, and see what we can do for him.
Update:I’ve activated the donation link. If you are led, please make a small donation. I’ll be coordinating with David Montero or someone at the Rocky Mountain News to get any funds to Mr. Clark.
In Review: A Voice for the Dead
A Voice for the Dead: A Forensic Investigator’s Pursuit of the Truth in the Grave
ISBN: 0399152253; 304 pages; Putnam Adult (February 17, 2005)
Professor James Starrs is a Professor of Law as well as Professor of Forensic Science at the George Washington University, Washington DC. His work Scientific Evidence in Civil and Criminal Cases is a standard text in its field. Starrs is probably best known for his 1995 exhumation of Jesse James, done in order to verify that the body found in that grave was indeed James. Throughout the years, Starrs has participated in a number of exhumations and subsequent forensic research, and this is the story of five of them, including the James exhumation.
He begins, naturally enough, at the beginning, with the story of his first exhumation, the victims of Alfred Packer. Packer was convicted in 1883 of five counts of murder, then eventually retried and convicted in 1885 of five counts of manslaughter. It was widely believed that he had committed cannibalism, though he was never charged with that particular crime. As with each case discussed the in book, Starrs discusses how he came to hear about the case, and what drove him to take it up. He also talks about the legal hurdles to such an undertaking (pardon the pun), such as finding a relative to secure permission from for the actual exhumation. Equally important, though, are the technical issues, like making sure one finds the right grave, and covering the gravesite with a sunshade during the exhumation, to prevent the sun from drying the bones.
The book reads somewhat like a college lecture, which is unsurprising given Starrs’ professorial background. The reader can almost picture him strolling around the front of a classroom, a piece of chalk carried loosely in the hand as he briefly saunters off on a tangent before returning to the case at hand. In other chapters, the reader might feel as though Starrs is discussing the case at a dinner party, complete with occasional asides regarding different people or aspects of the case.
The cases themselves are fascinating, running the gamut from victims of a 19th century cannibal to Jesse James, Huey Long’s accused assassin Dr. Carl Weiss, and Mary Sullivan, the apparent last victim of the Boston Strangler.
Starrs even manages to include a case where the people he wants to talk to conveniently start dying off just before their appointments with him. Was the CIA involved in the death of Frank Olson? If not, how did he get enough of a running start to push himself through a closed 13th-story window, when the room was too short to allow even a professional athlete to reach the requisite speed? And why was a suicidal man being held in a 13th story hotel room when there was a CIA safe house just a few minutes away?
The final chapter touches on cases Starrs tried to take on and how he was thwarted. Why isn’t Gouverneur Morris, the author of much of the US Constitution, buried in the casket that is in his tomb? Did explorer Meriwether Lewis die by his own hand? Why is the National Park Service preventing an exhumation that could answer that question? What about Lizzie Borden’s parents? Why did the Falls River Historical Society stymie his efforts to learn more about their deaths?
This book is a great read for those who watch every episode of CSI, or anyone who wishes they could. Starrs does a wonderful job of conveying the human side of exhumations, while conveying just enough scientific knowledge to whet the appetites of those who enjoy the technical side of CSI as much as the human drama.
Paternity Fraud
Florida is about to revamp their paternity law. This article talks about the changes. As I understand it, if a man shows through DNA testing that he can not be the father of a particular child, even though he might be named on the birth certificate, he is no longer financially responsible for the child.
Makes sense to me. Why should a man have to pay support for child he didn’t father? The question you should ask yourself is “Why is this such a big deal? Why do they have to make this law? This should be common sense, right?”
Common sense isn’t all that common. Here’s more reading.
Update: Officially Sanctioned Identity Theft
The Columbus Dispatch reports today that the Ohio Highway Patrol is investigating the actions of the Ohio Investigative Unit, the Troy Police Department, and even Miami County Prosecutor Gary Nasal regarding the use of Haley Dawson’s driver license in an investigation. One of OHP’s duties is investigating possible criminal acts by state agencies.
The investigation will center on how the liquor agents, who enforce Ohio’s alcohol-permit laws, came into possession of a woman’s driver’s license and how it was given to a confidential informant working for the Troy Police Department, patrol spokesman Lt. Rick Zwayer said.
Investigators “are going to look into those things,” Zwayer said. “That’s part of a thorough and accurate investigation to look toward those leads, take them.”
In this post, I first discussed the situation, where the above-mentioned agencies employed Michelle Szuhay in an investigation of the Total Xposure club. She was paid $100 per night by the investigators to strip, while agents watched the club for liquor violations. Troy PD also set up an internet account to watch the show using the personal information of a dead man. I’ve not heard if his estate is pursuing any action.
The original investigation netted only misdemeanor charges against the club’s management, but the club ended up closing down, which was the intent of the prosecutor. However, Szuhay was charged with perjury and obstructing justice, due to her staying after hours and drinking with club employees. Those charges were dropped and tehn refiled; Szuhay has pled not guilty.
Nasal, who had helped coordinate the sting operation that eventually closed the Total Xposure nude dance club in late 2003, said he welcomed the investigation.
“I don’t think that based upon the statute, there is a basis upon which to prosecute anybody that the mere ID was used,” Nasal said yesterday.
Nasal continues to point to a 2002 change to Ohio law that negates liability for identity theft if: “The person or entity using the personal identifying information is a law-enforcement agency . . . and is using the personal identifying information in a bona fide investigation.”
Nasal concluded that Haley Dawson, the woman whose identity was used, was not the victim of a crime.
“I don’t think that what happened was right,” Nasal said. “What happened to this girl was wrong. Whether it was legal, it was wrong.”
If it was wrong, why did he let it go on?
It’s my understanding the the Department of Liquor Control came into possession of Dawson’s ID after she was charged with a liquor law violation some time ago. So while the OL number was certainly not valid, the address and social security number, if present, would have been valid (Ohio allows you to opt out of putting your SSN on your license.)
More as I hear it. This Google News search should help keep you up-to-date as well.
Issue 31- SWCS Levy
Issue 31 is the proposed property tax levy for the South Western City School District. It’s a touchy issue around here. It’s a 9.7 mil proposal, which will add $297 per $100,000 of value. For me, that’s almost $1800. I can’t afford it. Add to it that this is the 3rd time in 7 months they’ve made this proposal, and you’ll see why it is going to be a rough couple of weeks.
Someone at the SW Columbus Area Homeschoolers group on Yahoo forwarded this blog entry, which is a fairly well thought-out pro-levy position.
I’ll pass on my thoughts as well. I’m voting against it. I did the last two times as well.
The board is being obstinate in its position that a property levy is the only way to fund SWCS. The district covers 11 different tax districts, and has some large businesses in the area. Why couldn’t they come up with a combined package? Why couldn’t they combine an income tax, property tax, and increased fees in the school system (including a small pay-to-play fee), to spread the burden out? In fact, the state just passed a bill that I think will allow them to tack on a sales tax as well (I’m not certain on that, but I believe it to be the case). A board member said last week that their hand are tied, and they don’t have any other way to fund the school system. But they do. They just are being short-sighted and unimaginative about it. Four other districts in central Ohio have income taxes. Did they call any of them for advice?
I attended the Choices 4 SWCS rally/meeting last week, and heard from several couples who have lived in the district for over 40 years, and have put a number of children and grandchildren through SWCS. They’re going to have to sell their houses if the levy passes, because they won’t be able to afford the increase. “But it’s only $300!” That’s per $100,000 of value. For a $200,000 house, that’s $600. “Well, if they can afford a $200,000 house, they should be able to afford another $600 in taxes.” But that house is paid for now, because they’ve owned it for 40 years. The value has gone up, but they’re on a fixed retirement income now.
Why are a majority of the positions to be cut those of teachers, and janitorial staff? Why is the district so top-heavy in administrators? Why aren’t some of the purely administrative positions being cut? SWCS is in the business of teaching. Why are they going to cut teachers? Why are they going to cut their production workers, the ones who make the product they’re selling? What layoffs are planned from district staff? Any?
Why hasn’t the board come up with a different plan? The November issue went on the ballot about 6 months out from the election, if I recall correctly. They’ve had then about a year to deal with the levy issue, and the best they can come up with is to ask us the same question we’ve already said no to twice? What have they been doing for the last year? Why didn’t they have a contingency plan in case the levy failed? Even my young children understand that if they ask me for something, and I say no them twice, they’d better come up with a different way to ask me. “Well, ask them again. They didn’t really mean no,” is not a contingency plan.
The scare tactics are more than annoying as well. The campaign chairman screaming at (Franklin) township trustees, when they rightly say they should not take a position on the levy? Trying to tell me that 21,000 student will be out on the streets unsupervised, and it’ll be my fault? I’m sorry, but I’m only the father to 6 kids who live in the district, so those are the only ones I’m directly responsible for. The parents of the other 20,994 can take care of their own. That number sounds more than a little inflated as well. Is Mr. Saxton assuming that the kindergartners will be out terrorizing the neighborhoods on their trikes and Big Wheels?
Come up with a better plan, and I will likely support it. But I can’t support something like this, that will hurt too many people.
In Review: Masters of Chaos
Masters of Chaos, Linda Robinson
ISBN: 1586482491; 388 pages; Publisher: Public Affairs (October 30, 2004)
Many books talk about what the U.S. Army Special Forces do, but few detail how they do it. Their mission certainly includes direct combat operations, but their primary mission is unconventional warfare, which revolves around teaching guerrillas or insurgents how to fight. (Just as important, but often overlooked, is the opposite end: “de-escalating” those same people after the armed conflict ends.)
Linda Robinson has spent years covering wars, rumors of wars, and plenty of SF operations. In 2001, as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, she began researching the Special Forces, and developing the credentials that would eventually allow her to be embedded with SF ODAs and other special operations forces from Umm Qasr to Basra, Nasiriya Kut, and beyond. She combined that experience with interviews at Fort Bragg, Macdill AFB, and Fort Campbell along with time in Columbia and return trips to Iraq and Afghanistan to create an intense, informative lesson about what the Green Berets have gone through since Vietnam, what they’re doing in military operations worldwide now, and what their future is.
The connection she has with these soldiers is obvious in the second chapter as she takes the time to tell us about how each man came to the career he chose. The gut-check stories from the Q course are not something freely shared with people outside the special operations forces community. She takes time to talk about how one soldier was blessed by his battalion and company commanders to try out for SF after he completed his Ranger training, but then points out that his sergeant major felt that he had “forsaken” that same Ranger training.
From there, she leads us first through four years of operations in El Salvador, Just Cause, Desert Storm and Somalia. She spends two chapters talking about CONUS ops and training, then uses most of the rest of the book to talk about Afghanistan and Iraq with each chapter generally covering a mission. Each report is detailed enough to give the reader a firm understanding of what went on, filtered through the screen of operational security. She carefully skirts discussing anything that might prove useful to any miscreant hoping to glean something useful.
She wraps up with two solid chapters; “Coming Home” is the counterpart to “Leaving Home,” the opening chapter, and talks about what the featured SF soldiers are doing now, and what it’s like for some of them to hang up the gear, and move from the field to the office as support staff.
The final dozen or so pages talk about the future of SF, giving emphasis to the writing of MG Geoffrey Lambert, former commandant of the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School. Lambert also led the U.S. Army Special Forces Command for two years, as well as the Special Operations Command. During and after his tenure, Lambert spent plenty of time brainstorming with his command staffs, historians, retired generals and special operations forces operators and others with broadly divergent perspectives.
Robinson wrote a solid operational-level discussion of what’s been happening in the U.S. Army Special Forces for the last thirty-plus years, but kept focused on the men who make it happen. This book will give you a better understanding of what’s going on right now in places most people don’t even have nightmares about, and of the men who stand there and say, “Nothing’s going to hurt you tonight, not on my watch.”
The Chicken or the Egg?
Which came first? Jobs that don’t pay enough to live on, or the workers to do them?
Open immigration proponents say that illegal aliens do the jobs that most Americans don’t want to do, because of the low wages attached to those jobs. They claim that if the illegal aliens weren’t doing those jobs, then the wages would go up, and that would increase the costs of those goods (typically farm produce, fast food restaurants, or janitorial positions).
Is it true that most Americans don’t want the jobs due to low wages, or are the companies that employ illegal aliens paying the low wages because they can, because there are people who will work for little money?
As I follow the immigration issues being discussed at Global Affairs, and at various blogs around the net, it has occurred to me that there are real problems, and no easy solution. But until we admit that foreign governments are helping their citizens violate US immigration and drug laws, we’re not going to get anywhere. If that’s not tantamount to an invasion, I don’t know what is.
Does that mean I support a military response to Mexico’s actions? Not yet. But the Waite House needs to recognize and admit there’s a problem down there, and accept the help that its citizens are offering instead of calling those citizens “vigilantes.”
Officially Sanctioned Identity Theft
This is simply unbelievable.
To summarize, Miami County, Ohio prosecutors and Ohio liquor-control investigators decided to investigate a strip club. To infiltrate, they used a a 22-year-old University of Dayton criminal justice major, who was also an intern with the U.S. Marshals Service and in a security post with the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. How did they get her in to the club? Did they create a false identity? Well, sort of. They borrowed someone else’s. Without asking her.
They took the identity and social security of a 26-year-old Cincinnati woman. And they said it was OK, because the law allows them to. Ohio Rep. Jim Hughes, the Columbus Republican who sponsored the change, disagrees. “It was not intended for that, I can tell you that.”
The law was apparently designed so that law enforcement investigators could more easily work credit-card fraud and other identity theft crimes, according to a lobbyist who helped set up the law.
Jeff Gamso, legal director of the Ohio ACLU, said, “What (lawmakers) didn’t mean is that the police could actually engage in identity theft. Anybody who gave it a moment’s thought would know that they didn’t mean that.
The Ohio Department of Public Safety, which is the parent agency for the Ohio Investigative Unit that the state investigators worked for, is looking into the incident.
By the way, the county only ended up with misdemeanor charges against the club, which eventually closed. They did, however file and subsequently drop charges of perjury and obstruction of justice against someone. Their informant.
Nothing Difficult is Ever Easy
Yes, I know I haven’t been writing here as much as I probably should. But I’ve been productive in the other writing arena, at least up until today. 2,500 words since the first of April, and that’s better than half of what I wrote during the entire month of March, (4,500) so I’m getting somewhere….at least, as I said, up until today…
The main character in Don’t Stop Believin’ is named Scott Elliot. His dad, named James, is a Detroit firefighter with some emotional issues, including a drinking problem – a bad one. It’s sort of important to the story, in that it has a lot to do with how Scott turned out the way he did. It’s not critical, mind you, but sort of important. I was doing some research at a couple of Detroit Fire Department web sites (here and here and I found out that DFD has a tradition of naming their fireboats after former chiefs. I discovered this when I read this section:
Since Detroit grew up along the waterfront, the need for fireboats emerged. The city’s first fireboat, the Detroiter, built by the Craig Shipbuilding Company, went into service in the summer of l892. Dry rot set in a few years later. In l902, its fire fighting equipment was transferred to the new steel- hulled James R. Elliot, named after Detroit’s second fire chief. The custom of naming fireboats after early chiefs began in l900, when the James Battle joined the Detroiter on the river. Later, Detroit’s third fire chief, John Kendall, was honored by a boat built in l930 to replace the Elliot.
That was lovely. My drunken firefighter dad had the same name as the second fire chief at DFD.
When I posted my dilemma on the Mystery Writer’s Forum, I suggested that I would just change dad’s name to Jerry or something like that, forgetting at the time that Jerry Elliot is a local morning radio personality. Then a member pointed out that
Your biggest name issue isn’t that your MC’s character’s dad is named Jim Elliott. It’s that your MC’s name is Scott Elliott, which is already the name of a Shamus-winning hard-boiled PI created by Terrence Faherty for a series of historical (or maybe period, but I won’t quibble over that) mysteries set in 1940’s-’60’s Hollywood.
Well, that was annoying in a huge way.
So Scott now has a distinct German influence in his ancestry. His name is now Scott Erichson. Dad is still James, and I think I’ll be safe with those names, at least for now, according to Google.
Sigh. It’s never easy, is it?
Words from Global Affairs
GA is a forum I frequent. I’ve learned a lot there in the six months or so since I’ve joined. There are some great folks there, from all over the world. One of them goes by the handle ShinyTop, and he wrote this today:
I have heard or read one too many times about how Americans know little of the price of freedom, how we know little of the reality of living without freedoms, how we are spoiled by our freedoms and need to listen to the lectures of people who have come here from afar and believe they hold some special knowledge.
While I will concede we have much to learn from people of other nations I will not concede they cannot learn from our experiences, that we have more to gain from the sharing of experiences.
The rest of his post is here. Check out the forum, and feel free to hang out a bit. Guaranteed that everyone will not agree with you, or you with everyone there. But we treat each other fairly.