Note from the legal beat.

July 8th, 2025

A story I missed over the weekend:

Nearly Half of America’s Murderers Get Away With It

…the Louisville police do not arrest anyone in roughly half of murder cases. I spoke to family members of a dozen victims. They all conveyed a similar sentiment: that the police had abandoned them and theirs. “The police don’t really care,” said Deondra Kimble, David’s aunt. “They’ve proven it to me.”

…

Louisville is representative of a national issue. In the United States, people often get away with murder. The clearance rate — the share of cases that result in an arrest or are otherwise solved — was 58 percent in 2023, the latest year for which F.B.I. data is available. And that figure is inflated because it includes murders from previous years that police solved in 2023.
In other words, a murderer’s chance of getting caught within a year essentially comes down to a coin flip. For other crimes, clearance rates are even lower. Only 8 percent of car thefts result in an arrest.

…

Why does America solve so few crimes? Experts point to five explanations.

Number two on the list, is, of course, “guns”. There’s even a handy little graph of “Gun homicide rates, 2023”, that includes the U.S., Canada, Sweden, Spain, and Australia. Not included: Switzerland.

What this story brings to mind, though, is David Simon’s great book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. My copy is in a box somewhere, so I’m going off memory here: Lawrence can probably fill in the lacunae. (I’d buy the Kindle edition for reference, but they want $14 for that.) There’s a several page section where Simon breaks down the numbers for one year’s worth of homicides. (I believe it was 1988.)

Some of the homicides were things like vehicle accidents (remember, there’s a difference between “homicide” and “murder”). Some were self-defense incidents. Some were cases where the killer died in the act (such as arson or a murder-suicide)…

…and at the end of the day, as best as I recall, your chances of even being charged with a homicide in Baltimore that year were about one out of three. And your chances of getting a sentence of more than ten years were basically zero: you had to do something awful (like molesting and killing a child) to get more than that. And a ten year sentence, with the parole laws in effect at the time, plus time spent in prison before trial, and good time credit, meant that you were likely to get out of prison after three years.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

And for what it’s worth, the Austin Police Department cleared 100% of their homicide cases for 2023. I don’t think 2024 figures are in yet, but APD has been consistently above 90% clearance since 2014.

Posted in Austin, Cops, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Drink!

July 4th, 2025

Shot:

City of Taylor dealing with invasive duck problem

“I watched them, they stopped feeding the ducks and walked away, and those ducks immediately turned and looked at us and started coming towards my son and approaching him like ‘what are you going to give us’ and started getting a little close,” said Seguin. “Really made us uncomfortable.”

Chaser:

Posted in Bagatelle, Birds | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 4th, 2025.

July 4th, 2025

Happy Independence Day, everyone. Today marks 249 years of not giving a flying flip at a rolling doughnut what the British royal family thinks.

It is going to be a busy three-day weekend, but I did want to quickly note the death of Michael Madsen. NYT (archived).

NYT obit for Jim Shooter.

Kenneth Colley. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “The Bill”, and “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (credited as “Jesus”).

Posted in Movies, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 3, 2025.

July 3rd, 2025

Robert Holton, big damn hero. He was 81.

Taxol is a hugely important drug in cancer treatment. It was originally isolated from the yew tree, but there just aren’t enough yew trees to go around. In order to isolate the drug, the trees had to be stripped of their bark, which killed them.

Dr. Holton was the first person to figure out how to synthesize Taxol in a lab, without killing yew trees.

“I have always been drawn to difficult problems, and synthesizing Taxol was a big one,” Dr. Holton said in 2018 during remarks at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Inventors in Washington, D.C. He was elected an academy fellow that year. “Seeing the drug’s success in treating so many patients has been an incredibly gratifying experience.”
The National Cancer Institute estimates that more than one million patients have been treated with Taxol. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1992 for ovarian cancer and, in 1994, for advanced breast cancer. The chemo agent is also used for the treatment of lung cancer and Kaposi’s sarcoma, among other malignancies, Dr. Boyd said.

…

In 1994, The New York Times called Dr. Holton’s synthesis of Taxol “arguably the most important drug cobbled together by human hands.” The article also noted “the cutthroat competition” to synthesize what everyone believed was destined to become a multi-billion-dollar medication. In 1999, Bristol Myers Squibb earned $1.5 billion from sales of the drug.

Barry Longyear, SF writer. I don’t have a formal obit I can link, but Michael Swanwick put up a tribute/obit on his blog.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Diddy squat.

July 2nd, 2025

I won’t say that I didn’t care about Diddy. I did care, to the extent that it was a mildly interesting true crime story, and this is hookersnblow.com. Beyond that, meh.

But: the Wikipedia entry on the Mann Act is interesting, especially the section on “Notable prosecutions under the Mann Act“.

I’m sure everyone remembers Jack Johnson (though I didn’t remember Donald Trump pardoned him in 2018). Others: Frank Lloyd Wright (charges dropped), Charlie Chaplin (acquitted), Charles Manson (charges dropped), and Chuck Berry (convicted, sentenced to three years, served one and half).

Posted in Bagatelle, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 2, 2025.

July 2nd, 2025

Jim Shooter, Marvel comics guy.

Shooter professionalized what had been a loose company in an even looser industry, making sure books were published on time, artists were paid on time and even given royalties and health insurance.
He also had a flair for developing talent, and under his aegis Marvel put out now-classic stories from writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne on Uncanny X-Men, Frank Miller on Daredevil and Walt Simonson on Thor, among others. While the artists became among the biggest names in the industry, X-Men became not only the most dominant and influential comic of the decade and beyond, but one of the first true franchises of the industry.
With 1984’s Secret Wars, a 12-issue miniseries that Shooter, Mike Zeck and John Beatty drew, he instituted the concept of publishing crossover events, a companywide initiative that saw one main story play out and influence many of the other titles coming out for months on end. Secret Wars was a massive publishing success and a toy bonanza. It’s a concept that is still being used by Marvel and DC to this day, in varying degrees.
He took fans seriously, and just like Weisinger, called and wrote readers out of the blue. Carter Beats the Devil author Glen David Gold wrote in his 2018 memoir, I Will Be Complete, of how in the summer before he entered high school in the late 1970s, Shooter phoned after reading a SHIELD story he had sent in. Perhaps seeing something of himself in a teen writing superhero stories, Shooter was encouraging, telling the auspicious writer to read as much as he could in high school and to study science.

…

Still, while many call Shooter a “complicated man,” Larry Hama, who was writing G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero for Marvel as well as editing titles, said that he believed Shooter was always trying to do the right thing. Hama recalled on Facebook how Shooter put a writer-artist on the company’s insurance plan the day after he died in order to help out his widow. (The talent had qualified for the health and insurance plan and wanted to sign up, but Marvel policy only allowed for sign-ups on Wednesdays. The man had died on the Tuesday.)
Hama wrote, “Without hesitation, Jim took the paperwork from me and went upstairs to push it through. He said, ‘They owe it to him, we just won’t mention that he already passed.’ I witnessed him doing stuff like that several times. None of it was made public for obvious reasons. It could have cost him his job, but he did the right thing.”

Posted in Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 1, 2025.

July 1st, 2025

The last of the cousins has died.

Jimmy Swaggart.

As Jimmy Lee grew older and more certain that he was on the path of the righteous, he prayed for the salvation of his first cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis, the early wild man of rock ’n’ roll who married several times (one bride was his 13-year-old cousin) and who thumbed his nose at conventional morality, as the writer Nick Tosches recounted in “Hellfire,” his biography of Mr. Lewis.
The country singer Mickey Gilley was also a first cousin to both Mr. Swaggart and Mr. Lewis. About the same age, the three boys were childhood companions. They learned to play an uncle’s piano and occasionally disobeyed their parents by going to a Black nightclub, where they were entranced by the music and dancing, Mr. Tosches wrote.

…

And he could be a hypnotic speaker. “I don’t know of anyone in America, religious or secular, who can hold a crowd better,” William Martin, a Rice University sociologist who has studied the evangelical movement, told The New York Times in 1988. Mr. Martin said a friend who was a lawyer had told him, “I don’t believe a word he says, but I don’t know anyone in the world who’s better with a closing argument.”

Posted in Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

Back to back to back.

July 1st, 2025

Holidays, that is. This is one of those times of the year when we have a whole string of them in a short time.

Happy Bobby Bonilla Day, everyone!

Here’s your obligatory yearly article from the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network explaining Bobby Bonilla Day.

Posted in Sports | Comments Closed

Happy holiday!

June 28th, 2025

I almost forgot (because it is Saturday) to wish everyone a happy Gavrilo Princip Day!

Please remember to make a toast to the late guffaw.

Perhaps by next year I’ll have found a nice FN 1910.

Posted in Guns, History | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 27, 2025.

June 27th, 2025

Fred Espenak, astrophysicist. He was known as “Mr. Eclipse”.

During five decades of chasing eclipses, Mr. Espenak wrote several books about them, notably “Five Millennium Canon of Solar Eclipses” (2006), ​​a two-volume, 742-page treatise written with the Belgian meteorologist Jean Meeus; operated four websites devoted to celestial statistics, including MrEclipse.com; and witnessed 52 solar eclipses, 31 of which were total.

…

In the early 1990s, Mr. Espenak began writing NASA’s eclipse bulletins with the Canadian meteorologist Jay Anderson. He also started a website for the space agency devoted to eclipse data. His goal: simplify and democratize complicated data so nonscientists sky gazers could geek out on the data, too.
All the while, he kept chasing eclipses — traveling to Kenya, Indonesia, Mexico, Aruba, Turkey, Zambia, Antarctica, Spain, Libya and beyond.

Lalo Schifrin. He was 93, and dang, what a career.

(Edited to add 6/28: NYT obit, which just went up today.)

The workaholic Schifrin received Oscar nominations for his scores for Cool Hand Luke (1967), The Fox (1968), Voyage of the Damned (1976), The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Sting II (1983) and for the song “People Alone” from The Competition (1980).
He scored Dirty Harry (1971) and the sequels Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983) and The Dead Pool (1988), all starring Clint Eastwood — the filmmaker presented him with his Oscar — and served as the composer on all three of the Rush Hour films.

…

His résumé also included work on Coogan’s Bluff (1968) — that kicked off his long association with Eastwood and director Don Siegel — Kelly’s Heroes (1970), Charley Varrick (1973), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Telefon (1977), The Nude Bomb (1980), Black Moon Rising (1986), Money Talks (1997), Something to Believe In (1998), Tango (1998), Bringing Down the House (2003) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004).
An inspired Bruce Lee worked out to the show’s score in his gym in Hong Kong before signing Schifrin as the composer and orchestrator on Enter the Dragon (1973). As a bonus, Lee gave the musician his first martial arts lessons, for free.
Schifrin concocted a jazz waltz in 3/4 time for the theme to the Mike Connors series Mannix — also produced by Geller — and played the Moog synthesizer on the opening music for another 1960s’ CBS drama, Medical Center.
Schifrin also was responsible for the themes for T.H.E. Cat, Petrocelli, Starsky & Hutch, Bronk and Most Wanted. And his “Tar Sequence” music from Cool Hand Luke was adopted by ABC affiliates for their Eyewitness News broadcasts.

IMDB.

Bill Moyers.

But he resisted opening up about himself. He occasionally spoke about his Johnson years, but he never consented to be interviewed by Robert A. Caro, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who has spent more than 40 years on his five-volume Johnson biography.

Rick Hurst, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Return of the Killer Shrews”, “Supertrain”, and “Murder, She Wrote”.

Carolyn McCarthy, former Congresswoman from Long Island and prominent gun control advocate.

I bet you thought I wasn’t going to post this, didn’t you? Yes, I’ve used it before (though not in this version) but for my money, I think this is the greatest TV theme of all time. (Though I admit it does have some stiff competition.)

Posted in 1970s, Books, Guns, Mannix, Music, Obits, Politics, TV | 5 Comments »

Loser update: June 27, 2025.

June 27th, 2025

We are exactly at the halfway point of the baseball season, though the All-Star Game doesn’t take place until July 15th.

Seems like a good time to do a loser update.

I think we’ve narrowed it down to two teams of significant interest.

The Chicago White Sox are at 26-55, for a .321 winning percentage. By my projections, that works out to 110 losses. Better than last year, and not record setting, but still pretty awful.

The Colorado Rockies are at 18-63, for a .222 winning percentage. As a caliber, .222 isn’t bad, but .224 is better. As a record, that works out to a projected 126 losses, which would be record setting. .222 would also be the lowest winning percentage in the modern (1901 and later) era, beating out the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics.

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Short gun crankery update.

June 27th, 2025

A while back, I quoted a report from the “Recoil” website that BATFE had banned imports of non-lethal training ammunition, such as Simunition.

“Recoil” is now reporting that BATFE has reversed that ban, on ATF Ruling 2025-2, “effective immediately”.

As they point out, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the manufacturers will resume selling to non law enforcement and military customers, but at least the legal impediments are out of the way.

(Hattip: Greg Ellifritz’s “Weekend Knowledge Dump”.)

Posted in Guns, Politics | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »