Probable Cause

There’s an old saying:

It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

The quote is attributed to Abraham Maslow and I have neither a reason to doubt that, nor consider it important enough to look up.

I don’t know if it’s original with him, but, not to be outdone, San Francisco writer, speaker and broadcaster Merlin Mann, recently tweeted:

When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a reason to buy a way nicer hammer.

Both statements have applicability to the rather funny story — which also highlights a problem — that I write about today.

(more…)

Whilst I’m researching for my next article on why, even if we can’t revive the Fourth Amendment, we shouldn’t put the last few syllables of it through the shredder, I thought I’d write about something a little lighter.

Since I have a preliminary hearing tomorrow and need to finish prepping, I wanted to find something I could claw my way through in less than 15 minutes.

(more…)

When I was a kid, we had a lot more freedom.  Our nation had this little document — a document which was primarily responsible for the fact that we became a great nation — called the Constitution of the United States.  In it were encoded and enshrined the guiding principles of our nation.

As kids, we used our freedom to explore, to poke and prod, to dissect.  As we got a little bit older — but we were still kids — we used our freedom to make out, some going so far as to make love and even to (after a fashion) make war.  We sometimes got into fights with other kids.  We sometimes — either deliberately or accidentally — blew things up.  I remember I once accidentally set fire to a battleship by firing missiles shooting matches at it.

Apparently model glue and plastic are quite flammable.

I managed to get the fire out before it spread.  But I could not get the lump that had been the battleship to come unstuck from the floor — it melded with the linoleum — and I could not hide the smell.

Boy, did I get a whipping!

(more…)

In Judaism, there is a tradition known as “building a fence around the law.” As the page linked in that last sentence indicates, it derives from a verse in the Tanakh — the Hebrew scriptures known to Christians as “the Old Testament” — specifically from Leviticus 18:30.

Leviticus, as you may know, is a favored book of the Republican Party because it tells them not to tolerate homosexuals and to avoid eating shrimp or lobster at fundraisers.  According to them one of those rules is absolutely applicable to the modern world.

But I’m not really going to get into politics here: this post is about the negative aspects of building fences and how this can as easily choke the law and divorce it from the intent behind it as it can protect it. (more…)

For a long time now, the Japanese have been on the cutting edge of technology. Now police there have parlayed this seemingly-nationally-inculcated skillset into a cheap way to catch criminals.

Frankly, I was a little surprised to hear that this story came out of Japan. It has all the earmarks of what passes for police work where I live in California.

Apparently, police in the Kanagawa prefecture of Japan really want to talk to somebody. Anybody. Apparently. Why else would they use Wii’s “Mii” feature to construct a “mug shot” of a person of interest. Or is he a suspect?

No, the only thing here that is suspect is whether the police officers in question have a) too much time on their hands and b) too few brains.

On the other hand, it just might work. How many Japanese can there be with hollowed-out cheeks whose skin tone nearly matches their hair? Add to that the fact that the head is large and the shoulders missing and I don’t think this guy should be as hard to identify as it first appeared.