Another bad cop

Many of our police are upstanding men and women who are a service to society.

Then there’s this man out of Georgia.

He was arrested at his police department after state authorities got tips that he was selling pot while on duty and in uniform. And after investigators bought pot from him in two different counties. When he was arrested, his car was searched, revealing more pot, drug scales, and plastic bags.

I’m sure every honest police officer out there is just as outraged about this as I am.

Kansas channels Stone Cold Steve Austin

If you don’t get the title… when he was performing in WWE, Austin regularly popped fingers at authority figures, opponents, the crowd, or whoever his antagonist at the time was. Often double-barreled.

The Kansas Jayhawks men’s basketball team is indisputably one of college basketball’s flagship programs. And it’s one of the programs most tied to the recent NCAA recruiting corruption scandal. Last month, the Jayhawks received a notice of allegations from the NCAA, stemming from the school’s relationship with Adidas, the apparel company most tied (so far) to the scandal.

According to this post from a popular University of Kentucky sports blog:

There are two ways to respond to rule-breaking allegations. You can decide to lay low, comply and embrace a straight-edge lifestyle to prevent any further damage, or you could deny any rule-breaking whatsoever and become defiant. Kansas chose the latter in the most over-the-top way imaginable.

For starters, Kansas posted a video promoting Snoop Dogg’s appearance at Late Night in the Phog, the team’s first preseason practice. The video featured longtime Jayhawks head coach Bill Self wearing a T-shirt with Adidas’ logo and a chain with a dollar sign. Mind you, this was four days after receiving formal charges from the NCAA.

(Kansas is one of many schools that makes said practice into a major evening event; Kentucky’s version is known as Big Blue Madness. “The Phog” is a nickname for the Jayhawks’ arena, Allen Fieldhouse; it’s named after one of their past great coaches, Forrest “Phog” Allen.)

Then came the event… with Kansas going full Stone Cold, sticking two middle fingers right in the NCAA’s face. Complete with the following:

  • Pole dancers during Snoop’s performance.
  • Kansas’ mascot “smoking” a huge fake blunt during said performance.
  • Snoop firing a money gun into a section where Kansas recruits were seated. Granted, the money was obviously fake, with Snoop’s face on it, but still…

The aforementioned post from the UK sports blog even threw in a dig at the Louisville basketball sex scandal, saying “Kansas brought Minardi Hall to Phog Allen.”

(Minardi Hall is Louisville’s men’s basketball dorm, alleged site of several of the parties that triggered that scandal.)

Kansas couldn’t backtrack from it fast enough. Self said he was caught off-guard by Snoop’s performance; he had gone back to the locker room early on and didn’t see most of it. Kansas’ athletic director Jeff Long—no stranger to athletic scandal, since at an earlier post as AD at Arkansas he had to deal with the fallout from the revelation that the head football coach was (1) having an extramarital affair and (2) had hired his mistress for the team’s office staff—issued an apology. Actually, two apologies, since his first version made a very awkward reference to the pole dancers that caused no end of snickering on the Internet.

I could say more about this, but I think it speaks for itself.

America’s Dumbest Criminals Strike Again!

Figure it’s time for me to get back into posting a little. How, may you ask? Well, let’s get back to a favorite theme of mine… stupid criminals!

How about this one… a Florida moron Googles “how to rob a bank” and proceeds to do just that? Needless to say, he soon got caught.

Or this one: Man in Georgia decides to rob a game store. Before doing so, he disguises himself, using plastic wrap from water bottle packaging. It didn’t work… his face was clearly visible despite the “disguise”. Not to mention that he didn’t bother to cover a distinctive tattoo on his right forearm. It took the police a couple of days to catch him… but not until after they told the public, “You can help us catch him, once you stop laughing.”

And a creep in Pennsylvania put a hidden video camera in a porta-potty at a construction site, and recorded several victims before a worker found the device. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for future users of that toilet, he forgot that he had recorded himself setting up the cam.

And finally, another moron out of Florida. He bought some meth and had a bad reaction, and thought that his dealer was cheating him. So what does he do? Calls the local sheriff’s department and asks them to test it. The cops were more than happy to oblige… and arrest him once they confirm that it was indeed meth. The quote at the end of the linked story is absolutely priceless.

To shamelessly adapt a famous H. L. Mencken quote, police will never go broke underestimating the intelligence of your average criminal.

Rapper lives his music… and pays the price

Found out about this not long ago.

Seems there’s this minor rapper going by Montana Millz (real name Michael Persaud). One of his songs (if you want to call it that) is “Sell Drugz” (alternatively spelled “Drugsz”).

Well, he decided to do just that.

Which brings us to another of his songs: “Feds Watching”.

They were.

And he got caught.

As Amir often says on these pages, The Law of Sowing and Reaping is not up for repeal any time soon.

Single-blindness in the Church

It’s been a while since I posted here, but something happened not long ago that showed me just how blind many in the Church are to the needs of singles.

I dropped by Southern Baptist Seminary, mainly because I wanted to check out the LifeWay there. While looking around the store, mainly at the bookshelves, I decided to try to find whether they had any resources specifically dealing with singles. It took some serious looking—while the shelving is organized by general topic, you can’t see a “Singles” sign anywhere.

Unless you happen to look in the “Marriage” section… and scan down to the lowest level of a three-level shelf… and to one corner of said shelf (which is about 12 to 13 feet across)… and then find maybe a dozen different titles. And one or two of those I saw on my visit were actually about marriage! And, may I add, a couple of the titles that are about singleness were by Joshua Harris of I Kissed Dating Goodbye fame (though not IKDG itself)… the same Joshua Harris who has now apologized for the work that made him a celebrity in certain Christian circles (as Amir pointed out on this blog last year).

Keep in mind that SBTS is one of the largest seminaries in the world, not just in the US, and trains a pretty substantial number of the SBC’s ministers (plus a decent number from other Protestant traditions). And yet in the bookstore of arguably the flagship seminary of the SBC, there seems to be virtually nothing in the way of resources to deal with singles or singleness.

And the single community in the Church is much larger than many people think. Not long ago, one of the two churches I go to—easily the biggest church in the area where I live—had a sermon series on relationships, with the first one being on singleness. (In fairness, this was only one of several recent signs that this particular church is starting to “get it” when it comes to singles.) During this first message, the pastor pointed out some statistics about this congregation that may (or may not) surprise you:

  • Of this church’s membership in the 21–35 age bracket, about two-thirds are single (as in “not currently married”, which is my definition of “single”). Not really that big a surprise to me, given the way our culture has been going in recent decades.
  • In the 35–65 bracket, almost a third of the membership is single—a statistic about which the pastor openly expressed surprise.

If this congregation is typical of others within the Church as a whole, it means that there’s a huge community in the Church’s very midst that too many congregations have ignored (if not worse). And it isn’t helping when one of the more prominent institutions in American evangelicalism (i.e., SBTS) apparently doesn’t consider that community important enough to provide the resources that could help future leaders deal with it.

One year ago today…

…a young woman in the Cincinnati area played in a college basketball game.

But not just any game.

You see, she had an inoperable brain tumor, and it was touch-and-go as to whether she’d see 2015. But thanks to her school, the planned opponent, another local school, and the NCAA, her dream came true.

And it didn’t end there. She played in three more games before her condition made it impossible for her to keep playing. This past April, she lost her battle, but not until she had raised more than $1 million for research on the cancer that would end her life. And her legacy lives on, as the two local schools have teamed up for an annual season-opening event that will bear her name.

Over the past year, I couldn’t help but contrast the story of Lauren Hill to a couple of others that made the news.

The day before Hill’s first game, Brittany Maynard, who was also suffering from a terminal brain tumor, chose to end her life, as she had announced several months earlier, with most of the MSM cheering her for her “courage”.

And then there was Bruce (Caitlyn) Jenner, whose story has been covered ad nauseam over the last few months. Most tellingly, when it came time for ESPN to announce the 2015 recipient of its Arthur Ashe Courage Award (handed out at the ESPY Awards ceremony in July), it went with Jenner—to considerable criticism, with Bob Costas (no conservative himself) calling the announcement “a crass exploitation play.” Hill’s first game did receive the consolation prize of the “Best Moment” award at the ESPYs.

Courage? Lauren Hill, in her current state, has more courage in her little finger than Maynard or Jenner has ever had or will ever have. Unlike Maynard, she kept fighting and kept active until she couldn’t go on any longer, and she and her family left it up to God when she’d go. (I don’t know Hill’s religious affiliation, but she did go to a Catholic college.) Unlike Jenner, she didn’t seek to change the hand she’d been dealt in life, and in fact embraced it.

Call me politically incorrect, insensitive, transphobic, whatever… i don’t care. This is my opinion, and I’m sticking with it. PERIOD.

 

Note: The tagline for this post may read November 3, but it’s still November 2 where Amir and I hang our hats.

America’s Dumbest Criminals, Part 197,814

Time for the newest entry in our series of utterly stupid wrongdoers!

Setting: A cell phone store near Pueblo, Colorado.

A 60-something man with a felony record sees a younger man talking to the clerk. He apparently decides he’s got an easy score, so he identifies himself as a cop, and asks the man in front of the desk if he’s a drug dealer because he has so many phones. He then demands that the younger man give him the drugs. The younger man asks for his credentials, and the older man demands the drugs again.

That’s when the younger man ID’s himself as a real cop and arrests the older man for impersonating a cop.

 

Hypocrisy, Islammunist style

Last month, the Pew Research Center surveyed nearly 40 countries worldwide on the question, “Should society accept homosexuality?”

Needless to say, the answer was “yes” in the US and Western Europe. Near the bottom of the list: Pakistan, at 2%.

But that’s not the end of the story. FAR from it.

The survey also looked at the frequency of Google searches for terms related to gay porn, starting in 2004 and continuing to the present.

Pakistan’s world ranking in search volume for the following terms was:

  • shemale sex — #1
  • teen a*** sex — #1
  • man f***ing man — #1
  • gay sex pics — #2

But wait, it gets better. The highest number of hits for some of these terms, including “shemale sex”, come from Peshawar—a bastion of conservative Islam and currently on the front lines of the GWOT.

HT:  New York Post, with more extensive coverage in Mother Jones (extreme left-wing rag)