Category: News

You know what would make a realistic plot these days for a heist movie? Industrial warehouse theft, where the bad guys back trucks up to the dock and make off with nonglittery stuff from the warehouse.

Examples include pharmaceuticals:

Thieves staged a Hollywood-style heist at a pharmaceutical warehouse over the weekend and made off with about $70 million in antidepressants and other prescription drugs, authorities said Tuesday.

Thieves cut a hole in the ceiling of an Eli Lilly and Co. warehouse in Enfield, a northern Connecticut city that borders Massachusetts, before dawn Sunday and rappelled inside, where they disabled an alarm and apparently loaded pallets of drugs into a waiting vehicle, police said. The thieves made off with enough drugs to fill at least one tractor-trailer, police said.

And metals:

Thieves swiped hundreds of tons of nickel and copper from a Liverpool warehouse in May, the latest in a rash of commodities heists spurred by high prices.

The material was stolen May 31 from a shed in Liverpool’s docklands area that was owned by warehousing company Henry Bath & Son, a unit of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. According to police in Merseyside County, which includes Liverpool, the metal sheets were worth “several million pounds.”

The heist was the second in less than a year from a U.K. warehouse owned by Henry Bath. Last September, 209 tons of aluminum ingots valued at £360,000, or about $545,900, were stolen from a Henry Bath facility in Liverpool. Police estimated that it would have taken up to eight trucks to remove that amount of aluminum.

Jumping jiminy, those are plots that are not overused.

A child abductor who killed himself was apparently quite the one man crime wave:

Jeffrey “Smitty” Smith, 49, of Hawk Point, died of a single gunshot wound to the head. He was found outside his shop on July 3.

Residents of Hawk Point, in Lincoln County, had speculated for days about a link between the homicide and Paul Smith, who abducted 4-year-old Alisa Maier from her Louisiana, Mo., home earlier in the week. Paul Smith, who is not related to Jeffery, lived in a cabin in Hawk Point.

The Major Case Squad ended the speculation at a late afternoon press conference Friday, saying a search of Paul Smith’s home had uncovered a pistol and ammunition hidden in a black vinyl case under the porch. Ballistics tests showed the weapon was used to kill Jeffrey Smith, said Deputy Cmdr. Mark Schimweg of the Major Case Squad.

Detectives said the pistol used in the homicide was not the same one Paul Smith used to kill himself on Wednesday, after police confronted him about Alisa’s abduction. The caliber of the murder weapon was not released.

Lincoln County Prosecutor John Richards said the gun was stolen in a burglary in Pike County last month. He said his office has no information that would lead to charges against anyone else for the murder or the burglary.

Police believe Paul Smith, 38, may also have been responsible for dozens of burglaries in the Hawk Point and Bowling Green areas in recent weeks.

Maybe I read too many detective books, but I hope the cops have something more to go on than a gun found outside the man’s residence after he was already dead of a gunshot wound.

You know, I ought to get back to thinking I am going to write detective books. Because that would be a good way to dispose of a gun.

Paul Krugman is crude.

(Link seen on Financial Times.)

Instapundit links to this bit about an MSNBC personality advocating the draft, again:

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, WE’D BE TALKING ABOUT RESTORING THE DRAFT. And they were right!

I’m reminded of this MoveOn ad denying John McCain’s use of Alex:

I wonder if MoveOn would be okay with Mr. Obama having Alex, but that’s idle speculation on my part. It’s two years later, after all. Even Alex’s mother might be looking to send her toddler in his terrible threes to military boarding preschool.

The left always wants to frighten young men and women with the fears of a draft, but I think this will lose efficacy as the draft recedes in living memory and the horrors of Vietnam fade.

A draft compelling young people to serve together would probably act against the left’s divide-and-rule strategy of segregating citizens into aggrieved interest groups. When all 25-year-olds have served in the military, they might have a better shared American experience and perspective. I don’t think that would serve the left very well at all.

Don’t worry about a double-dip recession. Hope for a double-dip recession, at least the W-shaped recession that looks like this:

Because at the end of both dips, it goes back up.

There’s no reason you can’t have a recession that looks like this:

Kinda like hoping that Obama is only is bad as Jimmy Carter.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers. Thanks for the link, Professor. Hey, if you’re in the IT industry, don’t forget to check out my Software Quality Assurance blog, QA Hates You.

Do not fear, citizen: it was not a rational response to the unsustainable government spending and underfunded pensions in Greece and throughout the world, including the United States and its component state and municipal governments, that triggered the Dow Jones’ plunge yesterday.

Instead, it was a computer glitch or typographical error that, for a time being, looked as though it was going to bring economic collapse upon us. That is, it was something completely accidental, random, and out of your control which wreaked havoc with investor confidence and, potentially, your life’s savings.

Carry on as you were.

Suspect in slays fan of ‘Dungeons’:

Accused campus killer Amy Bishop was a devotee of Dungeons & Dragons – just like Michael “Mucko” McDermott, the lone gunman behind the devastating workplace killings at Edgewater Technology in Wakefield in 2000.

Bishop, now a University of Alabama professor, and her husband James Anderson met and fell in love in a Dungeons & Dragons club while biology students at Northeastern University in the early 1980s, and were heavily into the fantasy role-playing board game, a source told the Herald.

“They even acted this crap out,” the source said.

Guns don’t kill people. Graph paper and strange dice kill people.

How big of a fan was the other guy?

Police seized two Dungeons & Dragons books from McDermott’s Haverhill apartment after he shot seven co-workers to death on Dec. 26, 2000.

That’s not a whole lot of fan.

(Link seen on Ace of Spades HQ.)

The family of a slain family sues the murderer’s employer for not preventing the murders:

The Joyce Meyer Ministries did too little to prevent its security manager, Christopher Coleman, from alledgedly murdering his wife and two sons, according to an addition filed Monday to a wrongful-death lawsuit.

The suit, filed here on behalf of Sheri Coleman’s family, now seeks damages “in excess of $50,000” from the international television ministry as well as Coleman.

It suggests the killings might not have occurred if the ministry had followed its own guidelines and better investigated anonymous threats against Coleman and his family.

How does that make you feel, employers? You’re now responsible for preventing murders.

Also, how do you think this will impact hiring of ex-convicts?

1 suspect in custody following Dem HQ vandalism in Denver:

A 24-year-old arrested this morning on suspicion of smashing 11 windows at Colorado Democratic Party headquarters tried to conceal his identity while allegedly committing the crime, according to police descriptions.
. . . .

he other storefronts surrounding the building on West Eighth Avenue and Santa Fe Drive in downtown Denver’s art district were untouched. But the Democratic posters are scuffed from hammer blows, Waak said.

No doubt if he had gone into the building, he would have damaged the upholstery with a sickle.

Family losing home because of seven-cent mistake:

A Michigan family is losing its home because it underpaid the mortgage by 7 cents in January, a legal aid group says.

The statement is presented as straight fact in the lead. However:

Rooks said [redacted] of Deckerville, in the Thumb, inadvertently underpaid their mortgage because a postal clerk issued a money order for $440 rather than $440.07. The couple didn’t catch the mistake and they were four weeks late making February’s payment of $690.07. She said they had been late before.

Though the Bergers caught up by mid-April, Rooks said, Countrywide Financial and its new owner, Bank of America, rejected the couple’s payments. Bank of America countered that it and earlier loan servicers bent over backward to accommodate [redacted], who has been repeatedly delinquent since purchasing the modest four-bedroom frame bungalow for $38,650 in 1997. It said [redacted] rejected a reasonable offer last week to get reinstated.

Those allegations by the people who know and who own the paper mean nothing; the paper and its wire service have their hook and story. It was the seven cents, and that illustrates how capricious and darewesay evil companies are. Only the benevolent government and its press corps can save the people.

Man wins a gunfight with a knife:

Normally you lose when you bring a knife to a gunfight, but not Ramiro Silva.

. . . .
The gunman stuffed the shotgun into a bag and ran into the woods and Mr. Silva grabbed his machete, a fearsome looking blade, and went in after him.

. . . .
Silva wacked the suspect with the sword, using the face not the blade.

Knife, machete, sword…. All the same to the kids writing news these days.

I suppose we should just be glad that it wasn’t called an assault blade.

Two disparate headlines indicating that state-run health care does death better than health:

• Health plan covers assisted suicide but not new cancer treatment
• Gov’t insurance would allow coverage for abortion

Dying is cost-effective when you’re just a number in parentheses on the government ledger.

So, if you’re a reporter, is every single discharge of a firearm “gunning down” now?

A 51-year-old man who gunned down at least three squirrels from inside his home near N. Teutonia and W. Custer avenues Sunday surrendered to officers after the Milwaukee Police Department’s tactical squad was called to the scene.

When I was a young man, this was called feeding your poor family.

I wonder why the reporters didn’t bother calling the .22 an assault weapon.

Driver tells Conn. police snakes led to SUV crash:

Police say a driver blamed a car crash in Hartford, Conn., on two pet baby snakes that he said escaped from his pants pockets as he was driving.

Fortunately, no one aside from the driver was injured, so I don’t feel as ghoulish when I laugh.

Conservative merchandise not available for sale at Concord Mills mall in North Carolina:

“Impeach Obama.”

“Al Qaeda’s favorite days: 9/11/01 and 11/04/08.”

“Work Harder. Obama needs the money.”

The bumper stickers and posters sold at “Free Market Warrior” at Concord Mills are meant to be “biting,” the kiosk’s owner Loren Spivack said.

At least one passer-by found them racist and bigoted, and took time to tell the mall in a letter and a letter to the editor of the Charlotte Observer.

Whatever your opinion, the fact is this: At the end of July, “Free Market Warrior” will not be allowed at Concord Mills Mall. The kiosk chain’s owner shared e-mail correspondence with Newschannel 36 that explains that the mall management has decided that the items sold are not “neutral” enough. The lease will be allowed to expire July 31, 2009 without an option to renew.

Meanwhile, Che shirts are probably still on sale at several of the trendy shops along with campaign merchandise from the current administration.

No word on whether the B. Dalton’s will have to remove Atlas Shrugged and The Road to Serfdom because they’re not neutral enough.

HR 3200, Health Care Reform.