"Jargonauts"

Lazy academics and bureaucrats, excessive users of jargon, are the enemies of good writing. Lawrence Langer explained what jargon does to language: "The language of simplicity and spontaneity is forced to retreat behind the barricades of an official prose developed by a few experts who believe that jargon is the most precise means of communication." Jargon is a form of pretentious writing intended to make the writer, at the expense of clarity, seem intelligent, erudite, and profound. In reality, it masks banality and shallow thinking. These "jargonauts" are a blight on the written word.

The Literary Crime Buff

I'm a crime dog. I read crime novels and true-crime books, almost exclusively. I don't dig comedy, sci-fi, current-event exposes or tales of domestic woe.

James Ellroy, 1985

Charles Bukowski The Romantic

I never really found a friend. With women, there was hope with each new one but that was in the beginning. Even early on, I got it, I stopped looking for the Dream Girl; I just wanted one that wasn't a nightmare.

Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski On Being A Professional Writer

I have to drink and gamble to get away from this typewriter. Not that I don't love this old machine when it's working right. But knowing when to go to it and knowing to stay away from it, that's the trick. I really don't want to be a professional writer, I wanna write what I wanna write. Else, it's all been wasted...So did Hemingway, until he started talking about "discipline"; Pound also talked about doing one's "work".  But I've been luckier than both of them because I've worked the factories and slaughterhouses and I know that work and discipline are dirty words. I know what they meant, but for me, it has to be a different game.

Charles Bukowski in Charles Bukowski: Selected Letters 1965-1970, edited by Seamus Cooney, 2004 

Students of Distant Learning: Big Brother Is Watching

      Twelve-year-old Isaiah Elliott lived with his mother Dani and his father Curtis in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The seventh grade student at Grand Mountain School, on August 27, 2020, was in his house in front of his computer taking an on-line art class pursuant to his school's COVID-19 distant learning program. Isaiah and his parents didn't know that teachers and administrators at the Grand Mountain School were video recording home learning students as they sat in front of their computers. School officials were conducting home video surveillances without the knowledge or consent of students or their parents. 

     At one point during Isaiah Elliott's art class, he picked up a neon-green colored gun--an obvious toy-- from the couch and laid it next to his computer. This act of moving a toy in his own own home, observed by a teacher essentially spying on him, led to a series of events no reasonable person could have predicted.

     Shortly after the conclusion of the virtual art class, Isaiah Elliott's mother Dani received an e-mail from the Grand Mountain School art teacher who had seen Isaiah handle the toy gun. The teacher, obviously thinking that peeping into a student's home was part of her job, informed Isaiah's mother that her son had been "extremely distracted" during the lesson, and there was a "serious issue with the waving of a toy gun." This serious matter, according to the art teacher, had been reported to the vice principal. This teacher, besides being a spy and a snitch, must have also seen herself as some kind of family services social worker. 

     In Dani Elliott's e-mail response, she informed the concerned art teacher that her son had trouble concentrating due to his Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Moreover, her son had not waved a gun. He had fussed with what was obviously a toy. (The mother might have added that in Colorado, unregistered toy guns were legal, and posed no threat to the teacher nor Isaiah's fellow distant learning students who were safe in their homes)

     The art teacher's e-mail to Dani Elliott was followed that day by a phone call from Grand Mountain School Vice Principal, Keri Lindaman. Because the boy had been seen in his home "waving" a gun, the vice principal had taken the liberty of requesting an Elliott family home health and wellness check by El Paso County school resource officers. (Perhaps the vice principal thought she was exercising restraint by not sending a SWAT team. Who knows, gun in question may have been capable of firing pingpong balls.)

     The understandably stunned and confused mother tried to explain to the vice principal, like she had the distraught art teacher, that the gun everyone was so concerned about was a harmless toy. The vice principal's response to that was mind boggling: She said she was aware it was a toy, but had called in the troops anyway.

     When the El Paso County school resource officers arrived at the Elliott home, the officers showed the boy's father, Curtis, the incriminating footage of his son handling the toy weapon.

     The next day, Mr. and Mrs. Elliott received official notice that their son, for "waving" a toy gun in his home during a virtual art class, an act that had disturbed no one but the art teacher and the vice principal, had been suspended from the school for five days.

     The Elliotts did what any family would do to remove their son from the control of idiots, they pulled Isaiah out of the Grand Mountain School. Perhaps they would find an institution that respected the privacy of students studying in their homes. Perhaps not. 

Mohammed Afzal: No Reason to Kill

      In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at six o'clock on the evening of Monday, August 31, 2020, 65-year-old Mohammed Afzal knocked on his neighbor's door and complained about grass clippings that had gotten onto his lawn. A surveillance camera captured 35-year-old Naeem Sarosh and Mr. Afzal discussing the matter. The two men were standing on Mr. Sarosh's driveway. Suddenly, Mr. Afzal pulled out a handgun and shot his neighbor. When the wounded Mr. Sarosh ran toward his house, Mohammed Afzal shot him in the back. Mr. Sarosh died on the front stoop of his house.

     After killing his neighbor, Mr. Afzal returned to his house, changed his clothes, and waited for the police.

     When questioned by detectives, the murder suspect claimed he shot his neighbor under the belief that he was armed. He said he thought this because Mr. Sarosh was a Milwaukee County Community Police Service Officer. 

     According to a resident of the neighborhood, Mr. Afzal and his family kept to themselves. Moreover, the suspect and Mr. Sarosh, a well-liked man with two daughters, had a history of not getting along.

     A Milwaukee County Prosecutor, on September 1, 2020, charged Mohammed Afzal with first-degree reckless homicide and use of a dangerous weapon. 

     This case reveals the disturbing fact that people are commonly murdered over trivial matters. Marvin Wolfgang, in his classic 1958 text, Patterns of Homicide, called this "simplicity of motive."

Students: If You Want to Party, Attend Community College

      Imagine being a freshman at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. You either borrowed or your parents coughed up the tuition, and it isn't cheap. Then, less than a month into your first semester, you are kicked out. If that's not bad enough, the institution is keeping the tuition you paid for the honor of being a Northeastern student.

     For you to have been treated so harshly, you must have committed some horrible, unspeakable act. At the risk of shocking the reader, that act was this: you violated the university's social distancing policy by attending a party. 

     Before you leave the University and your tuition money behind, you must take a COVID-19 test. If you test positive, you will be detained on campus for 14 days--then thrown out.

     But wait, there is hope. After sitting out a semester contemplating your wrongdoing, you will be permitted to re-enroll as a freshman at the beginning of the next semester. 

     In September 2020, eleven Northeastern University students were kicked out for attending a party. The school did not return their tuition money.

What To Do With the Mentally Ill

      In the 1950's, more than half million people lived in U.S. mental institutions--one in 300 Americans. By the late 1970s, only 160,000 did, due to efforts by psychiatrists, philanthropists, and politicians to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill.

     Today there's one public psychiatric care bed for 7,100 Americans--the same ratio as in 1850. The motives behind this trend were varied. Emptying the asylums was going to save money. And who needed hospitals with all the antipsychotic drugs on the market? Deinstitutionalization was going to restore citizens' rights and protect them from deplorable conditions like those portrayed in movies like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," conditions in which an insane person was unlikely to be cured. Wouldn't it be better if the mentally ill were treated at home, given support, therapy, and medication via community clinics? It sounded good, but the reality was quite different.

     In 1961, a joint commission of the American Medical and American Psychiatric Associations recommended integrating the mentally ill into society. This plan depended on the establishment of local facilities where mentally ill people could receive outpatient care. In 1963,Congress passed a law providing funding for these "community mental health centers". States, under pressure from the patients' rights movement, downsized their psychiatric hospitals faster than anyone had anticipated…

     As of 2006, 1.3 million of America's mentally ill were housed where they used to be until the late 1800s: in prisons. Between 1998 and 2006, the number of mentally ill people behind bars more than quadrupled. In some county jails, rates of inmates with mental illness have increased by nearly 50 percent in the past five years. It's not uncommon for individual jails to report that 25 to 30 percent of their inmates are mentally ill or that their mentally ill populations rises year after year…[Today, because politicians don't want the mentally ill in jail, tens of thousands of them live in squalor on the streets.]

Mac McClelland, "Schizophrenic Killer My Cousin," Reader's Digest, February 2014 

Libertarian Radley Balko On Traffic Enforcement

     [George Mason economist Alex Tabarrok recently wrote] that there's no reason why our traffic laws have to be enforced by armed government agents.

     A police officer pulls you over and gives you a ticket, which you take home and decide whether you're going to pay, and you send it in via mail. Why can't you have some sort of civilian traffic cops who, instead of pulling you over, sees you speeding, writes down your license plate, calls it in, and you get a ticket in the mail. The end result is the same. You get a ticket in the mail that you can pay, or choose not to pay and face the consequences of that. The difference is you're not having this armed interaction or confrontation with a police officer, which is completely unnecessary.

     Our traffic laws need to be about road safety, not generating revenue. There are many studies done in Europe about using roundabouts instead of stop signs. There have been some really interesting studies about speed limits and how arbitrary they are. Our roads are actually built imagining people driving much faster than speed limits allow, which means cities and towns can place speed limits arbitrarily in a way that maximizes revenue in the city. I mean, there are small towns that 40 or 50 percent of their budgets are reliant on traffic revenue...

     Nobody's saying there should be anarchy on the highways, but we could have speed limits that are more organic, calculated based on how people actually drive. There's a study showing the safest speed limit is the one that's what the 90th percentile of people drive at. Right now the real speed limits are far lower than that. That just creates unnecessary police interactions.

     Think about all the police abuse cases that originated with a traffic stop...Think about all the animus and anger in motorized communities that come from the regular harassment from traffic cops. You take those out of the picture and it could go a long way toward rehabilitating the image of the police.

[American police reformer August Vollmer, in the 1930s and 40s, wrote extensively about the negative effects of traffic enforcement on police-community relations.]

Radley Balko interview by Nick Gillespie entitled, "Washington Post Journalist Radley Balko on Civil Rights, Militarized Policing, and the Power of Video," Reason Magazine, October, 2020

The Gentleman Thief

     Apollo Robbins, a 46-year-old from Las Vegas, is known in the trade as a theatrical pickpocket. Known as "The Gentleman Thief," Robins is considered the best in the world at lifting wallets from people's pockets and purses. He also snatches rings, watches, and even neck jewelry from his "victims."

     Mr. Robins gained national notoriety when entertaining former president Jimmy Carter. During the performance, he acquired the keys to the presidential motorcade by picking the pocket of a Secret Service Agent. The publicity resulted in requests from law enforcement agencies for training in how to catch fraudsters, thieves, and con artists. In 2006, Robbins formed his law enforcement and security consulting firm, Whizmob, Inc. Over the years, he has appeared regularly on television.