Bryan Strawser

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Archives for 2004

Charles Yancey Blabs Away

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Charles Yancey, a councilman on Boston’s City Council, warned that Boston was becoming a “police state”:

A city councilor on Sunday warned against turning Boston into a ”police state”, even as law enforcement officials touted the success of a new program that has beefed up police presence on the streets in response to a recent spate of violence.

Fourteen people were arrested Saturday night and Sunday morning as part of Operation Neighborhood Shield, which relies on the help of state police, FBI and other federal agencies for increased patrols across the city. Two guns and 500 rounds of ammunition were also confiscated, police said.

Things seem much simpler to me as I type this from my patio in the face of the rising sun.

Put additional police on the street and arrest the criminals.

Or do nothing and watch the young continue to be killed.

Easy decision? It is in my mind. Apparantly not in his.

RIP: Red Adair

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The world today will mourn the passing of Red Adair, one of the most legendary firemen of all time. Red founded the Red Adair Company in the 1950’s and was a key part of the recovery efforts after the first Gulf War in 1991:

Paul N. “Red” Adair, a world-renowned oil well firefighter who revolutionized the science of capping exploding and burning wells, has died, his daughter said. He was 89.

Adair, who boasted that none of his employees ever suffered a serious injury fighting the dangerous fires, died Saturday evening of natural causes at a Houston hospital, his daughter, Robyn Adair, told The Associated Press.

Adair founded Red Adair Co. Inc. in 1959 and is credited with battling more than 2,000 land and offshore oil well fires, including the hundreds of wells left burning after the Iraqis fled Kuwait at the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

The 5-foot-7 Houston native proudly spent his 76th birthday clad in his traditional red overalls, swinging valves in place as his crews capped 117 Kuwaiti wells left burning by retreating Iraqi troops.

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!