Bryan Strawser

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Archives for August 2004

Toelicking

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Reports today on CNN indicate that the Netherlands will soon ban toelicking:

Unsolicited toe-licking would be banned in the Netherlands under a law sought by the Dutch Labor party after police were unable to prosecute a would-be Casanova with a taste for female toes because he had committed no crime.

A police spokesman said Friday a man had been detained after women sunning themselves in Rotterdam’s parks and beaches claimed he had snuck up on them and begun to lick their toes.

“The officers had to let him go. Licking a stranger’s toes is rather unusual but there is really nothing criminal about it,” the spokesman said.

Operation Neighborhood Shield

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The Boston Globe is reporting today that the Boston Police are going to begin taking aggressive measures to curb the sharp increase in violence in South Boston:

In response to escalating violence in Boston, officials said yesterday that State Police and federal agents will be deployed throughout the city in a massive show of force, using the kind of cooperation between law enforcement agencies seen during the Democratic National Convention.

“We’ve had enough; we won’t tolerate bold acts of violence,” Boston Police Commissioner Kathleen M. O’Toole said yesterday in announcing what police are calling Operation Neighborhood Shield.

With officers on motorcycles lined up behind her outside police headquarters, O’Toole said federal agents from the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; and the Drug Enforcement Administration will work with Boston police, Massachusetts Bay Transporation Authority police, and State Police to patrol troubled neighborhoods, in uniform and undercover.

She said that federal, state, and city law enforcement will combine undercover and uniformed forces, a more significant level of cooperation than was attained during the antiviolence campaigns of the late 1980s and early ’90s, when the city saw a sharp rise in gang violence and homicides.

Boston’s violent crime rate – particularly in the South Boston, Dorchester, and JP neighborhoods – is skyrocketing. Already this year more homicides have occurred than in all of last year.

Task Forces such as this can work – but they are almost always temporary. At some point, they will go home. It’s going to take a long-lasting strategy in order to drive down this violent crime rate. But this is a good first step.

Hanson: A Return to Childhood

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As usual, Victor Davis Hanson sums up how I feel:

The best way to sum up this now popular leftist analysis of the rage of Islamic fascists and their sometime supporters in the Middle East would be simply to imagine a different America, in, say, January 1941.

So envision a Vice President Henry Wallace lecturing the American people on its failure to win the hearts and minds of European youth. He perhaps would say something like, “What have we Americans done wrong to lose millions of Spaniards, Italians, Germans, and Japanese, who turn their back on democracy and prefer fascism?”

Roosevelt then might expound further, “Look at the world! We don’t have an ally anywhere but Britain. What have we done to earn the animus of most of Europe that has either joined Hitler or would prefer to be neutral? Why is all of Eastern Europe against us? Whether Communist or fascist, Russian or German, the common enemy is either the United States or England. All Stalin and Hitler can agree on is shared dislike of America. Why? Even Mexico and South America feel more affinity for Germany than for the U.S.”

Then a congressional board of inquiry could issue a finding that America had failed to give proper aid to Europe during the depression. It could suggest further that we are isolationists and self-absorbed. More thoughtful senators, the intellectual precursors of a Patty Murray perhaps, could rail that whereas Hitler built autobahns, we lent out high-interest loans to those who were already struggling.

All such browbeating would have an element of truth in it, but, of course, in its totality remain an outright lie: Hitler, like bin Laden and his epigones, was the problem, not us. The only difference is that our grandparents knew that and we don’t.

Revisiting Vietnam in 2004

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Once again, James Lileks brings us back to ground truth:

Revisiting Vietnam in 2004 seems about as useful as debating the Phillippines war while the troop ships are sending Doughboys to the trenches in France. We have more pressing issues, I think. The news today noted that the men arrested at the Albany mosque were fingered by some documents found at Al-Ansar sites in Iraq, of all places. Iraq! Imagine that. I would sleep better if I could snort sure, it’s a plant and tell myself that it’s all made up, it’s all a joke, a phony show designed to make us look the other way while a cackling cabal of Masons and Zionists figure out how much arsenic they can put in the water next year. (Arsenic: the fluoride of the left.) But no. I am one of those sad little pinheads who think it’s really one war, one foe, with a thousand fronts. And I want us to win.

If you bridle at the terms “us” and “win” you really are reading the wrong website.

And I get to visit his fair city here shortly for a brief stint. Brit’s pub, here I come!

RIP: Norman Hughes

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My neighbor for twenty years, Norman Hughes, who lived but 150 feet from my home in Covington, Indiana, passed away on Sunday:

Norman Dale Hughes, 71, of Covington, died unexpectedly Sunday (Aug. 1, 2004) at home.

He was born Nov. 1, 1932, in Covington, the son of Oscar and Gladys Hershberger Hughes and was a life resident of Veedersburg and Covington.

He was a 1950 graduate of Veedersburg High School and a Navy veteran of the Korean War. He was employed many years at Fountain County Co-op in Veedersburg and the VA Hospital in Danville in maintenance, where he retired. His memberships include: First Baptist Church where he served as a trustee, VFW Post #2395, American Legion Post #350, Fountain Democrat Club and Covington Senior Citizens. He was an avid Cubs fan.

Norman married Donna Dewlen on Oct. 26, 1958, at Covington. She died June 10, 2001. Surviving is a daughter, Sarah (Tim Taflinger) Keller of Catlin, Ill.; two grandsons, Jacob and Cole Keller; mother-in-law, Lenore Dewlen of Covington; a brother, Dean (Shelby) Hughes of Attica; an aunt, Goldie Yerkes of Danville, Ill.; and several cousins. His parents preceded him in death.

Unfortunately, it was my brother Steve who found Norman’s body.

In all of the years I knew Norman, I never knew that he was a veteran of the Korean War – and a Navy Vet at that.

Heroism and Horror

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As I make my way through the 9/11 Commission Report, two paragraphs about the FDNY response to the World Trade Center fire stuck me:

Immediately after the second plane hit, the FDNY Chief of Department called a second fifth alarm.

By 9:15, the number of FDNY personnel en route to or present at the scene was far greater than the commanding chiefs at the scene had requested. […] several other units self-dispatched. Third, because the attacks came so close to the 9:00 shift change, many firefighters just going off duty were given permission by company officers to “ride heavy”.. […] Fourth, many off-duty firefighters responded from firehouses separately from the on-duty unit [..] or from home.

And then this about leadership in the FDNY:

After the South Tower collapsed, some firefighters on the streets neighboring the North Tower remained where they were or came closer to the North Tower. Some of these firefighters did not know that the South Tower had collapsed, but many chose despite that knowledge to remain in an attempt to save additional lives. According to one such firefighter, a chief who was preparing to mount a search-and-rescue mission in the Marriott, “I would never think of myself as a leader of men if I had headed north on West Street after [the] South Tower collapsed.”

Where do we find such men? And how fortunate we are that we have found them….