Archive for January 9th, 2017

Firings watch.

Monday, January 9th, 2017

Ray Horton out as defensive coordinator of the Cleveland Browns, who have replaced him with the man known to TMQ as “the tastefully named Gregg Williams”.

You may remember Gregg Williams as the former defensive coordinator for the LA Rams, who started looking for a new job after Jeff Fisher got fired. Or you may remember him before that as a defensive assistant for the Tennessee Titans. Or you may remember him before that as “the guy who got indefinitely suspended by the NFL as part of Bountygate”.

The Redskins fired defensive coordinator Joe Barry, plus a couple of staff members and their strength coach.

And the University of California at Berkeley fired head football coach Sonny Dykes. I think I speak for many people when I say, “UC-Berkeley has a football team? Isn’t that just an expression of toxic masculinity?”

Dykes was 19-30 over four seasons.

Not sure I agree 100% with your police work there, Lou.

Monday, January 9th, 2017

One thing the Citizen’s Police Academy “suggests” is that you should reserve judgement on incidents involving the police – if not until all the facts are in, at least until we’re past the initial reports stage.

With that said, this doesn’t look good.

Yesterday, the APD arrested a man at one of our local malls. He was charged with shoplifting, but APD couldn’t determine his identity and suspected he had open felony warrants. So they loaded him into the back of a squad car and headed downtown for fingerprints.

On the way, the handcuffed gentleman told the officer he was feeling suicidal. The officer asked him if he had the means to kill himself…

…whereupon the gentleman in question pulled a gun out of his waistband and, after a brief standoff, shot himself in the head.

The obvious question is: how did police not find the gun?

An Austin police officer did not conduct a thorough pat-down of a man who shot himself Sunday in the back of a police car because the man already had been handcuffed by mall security, a preliminary investigation of the incident has found.

Other than the obvious lesson about assumptions getting you killed, I’m also wondering: how big was the gun? If it was a full-sized 1911, that’s one thing: Ray Charles probably wouldn’t have missed that. Then again, if it was a full-size 1911, the guy would probably be dead, instead of critical. If it was something like a NAA .22, or possibly even a Ruger LCP, missing it is a little more understandable to me.

Obit watch: January 9, 2017.

Monday, January 9th, 2017

Nat Hentoff has passed away at the age of 91. NYT. Reason. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. I can’t link to them directly, but Popehat has been retweeting a lot of very good tributes to Mr. Hentoff.

hentoff

Mr. Hentoff was a personal hero of mine (who I never met). Stipulated: he was a liberal, and we probably would have disagreed on many of the social issues of the day. But there was one thing we agreed on: freedom of speech. Mr. Hentoff was an absolutist. He didn’t care if you were left, right, a student, or even a Nazi. If someone was trying to stop you from speaking, he was against it. He wrote eloquently and well for many years for the Village Voice in opposition to censors and censorship. He didn’t just limit himself to government action, though there was plenty of fertile ground there. He also spoke out against private censors. I particularly remember his condemnations of CBS for suspending Andy Rooney

(I don’t know how long he’d been ill, but I wonder what, if anything, he would have said about Milo Yiannopoulos and Simon & Schuster.)

One of the things I respected about him was his intellectual consistency. That didn’t just apply to freedom of speech. He was opposed to the death penalty. But he was also opposed to abortion (he was the only anti-abortion voice in the Voice, and he wasn’t shy about expressing his views) and euthanasia. I like the way Wikipedia summarizes his view:

Hentoff argued that a consistent life ethic should be the viewpoint of a genuine civil libertarian, arguing that all human rights are at risk when the rights of any one group of people are diminished, that human rights are interconnected, and people deny others’ human rights at their own peril.

When I was a young lad in middle school and high school, Hentoff’s books on free speech were in the school library, and my high school had a subscription to the Voice. Nat Hentoff shaped my views on freedom of speech, and inspired me (in my own small way) to be a first amendment advocate and activist.

I’m reminded of that quote from Melville Davisson Post that I often use: “He stood up as though he stood alone, with no glance about him to see what other men would do…No one of them believed in what the other taught; but they all believed in justice, and when the line was drawn, there was but one side for them all.” That was Nat Hentoff.

(He also was a pretty prominent writer on jazz, though I was born without the jazz appreciation gene and am not as well read in his jazz writings.)

91 is a good run, but the world is still a lesser place today.