Recent Comments
Re: “The "Milwaukee Model"”
This sounds to me like yet another opportunity for city employees to sit in a room and bandy about terms like "open lines of communication" and "gain insight into" and "increase community awareness". Reminds me of a study done on the distribution and movements of Rockfish along the California coast. Guess what...they live in and around rocks.
Everyone already knows what the cause of the violence is! Lack of education, lack of well-paying jobs, governmental corruption/diversion of earmarked funds, and a very profitable black-market drug trade. So the ATF teams up with local police and policy makers and they figure out that a murder was the result of a drug deal gone bad instead of a personal dispute. What is the next step? Make drugs illegal? Make some more "Be Cool...Stay In School" posters? Schedule another community meeting where like-minded people can get together and yell at each other? Laughable!
In my experience, the police officers in New Orleans are by and large huge $%^holes. If you don't agree with this statement you likely are a police officer, are related to an officer, or have never spoken to one on the street who doesn't know you personally. They will belittle you, threaten you, ignore you, NEVER smile at you, and if you don't get moving quick enough, they will beat you and throw you in jail. I've seen it happen and so have a lot of you. Step 1: FIRE THE ^$$HOLES.
Everyone also knows that people frequently get off charges in The Big Easy with slaps on the wrist for gun crimes. Juvenile crime goes down in places where parents are held responsible for their child's behavior. I suggest holding members of the parole board responsible for the behavior of those they decide to parole. In fact, I propose increased accountability at all levels of city government.
Finally, there are methods for determining statistical significance and they are not very difficult. In fact, regression analysis was probably used by the gun manufacturers to determine the number of handguns they should produce this year. Instead of tossing numbers around and waving your hands, why not crunch them and state unequivocally and quantitatively the probability that the variation in the crime data is due to random error or to the treatment...in this case, the Milwaukee Model.
Re: “The Dodos with The Luyas at One Eyed Jacks”
The two dollar discount plus the $6.50 service charge means it's only 37.5% more expensive to buy the tickets in advance! Awesome deal! Thanks One Eyed Jacks!
Re: “The Pits and the Pendulum”
Nice work! I think a great follow-up article would be one stating explicitly what constitutes abuse/cruelty, how to document it when you see it, who to call once documented, and how many times you should have to call before action is taken. I think a lot of people are inadvertently abuse their animals and maybe some of these instances could be avoided. In other cases it is clearly intentional and it is very frustrating to the person reporting it to be ignored. No normal person is eager to tell someone else how to raise their pets (or their kids) so the decision to act is usually a big one and should be looked into promptly. That said...and you know who you are...Don't cry wolf!!!