The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Homeless: A Criminal Menace

A 21-year-old woman was seriously injured Wednesday in White Plains, N.Y., when a homeless man who had been panhandling at the train station pushed her in front of a commuter train: The suspect — Howard J. Mickens, 39, who lives in a White Plains shelter — was charged with second-degree attempted homicide, police told 1010 […]

News Flash: Crazy People Are Dangerous

This isn’t really surprising, is it? The man who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard 10 days ago left behind electronic documents saying that the government had been attacking his brain for the past three months using “extremely low frequency” electromagnetic waves created by the Navy . . . The documents provide the […]

William Bratton, ‘Broken Windows’ and the Importance of Public Order

While writing about the Matthew Shepard case, I mentioned how a crackdown on fare-beaters in the New York City subway system turned up a number of criminals wanted on warrants for serious crime. Someone on Twitter asked for more information about this, so I found this article at City Journal featuring William Bratton, the police […]

The Sorelian Myth of Matthew Shepard: Petty Criminals and Liberal Media Bias

Matthew Shepard’s killers Russell Henderson (left) and Aaron McKinney (right). When I was a freshman in college, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was an assigned reading and one of the lessons of the book — perhaps not a lesson the author intended, but one I’ve since seen replicated over and over — is how notorious […]

Goldman Sachs Banker Charged With Raping 20-Year-Old Irish Student

Meet Jason Lee, 37, an Ivy League-educated managing director of the equity capital markets department at Goldman Sachs. One weekend in late August, Lee was celebrating his birthday at a bar in the Hamptons when he met a 20-year-old student from Ireland. He bought her and her friends drinks, and invited them to a $33,000-a-month house he […]

Nebraska Sex Offender Re-Offends (And His Brother Is a Sex Offender, Too)

Clintus Alford (left); Cletus Alford (right) Clintus J. Alford, 37, was sentenced to 40  to 60 years in prison Monday for raping two girls, ages 12 and 14. He had previously been convicted in 2004 of false imprisonment for a case involving an 11-year-old girl, and served two years in prison for that offense. The […]

I’m Against ‘Revenge Porn,’ But . . .

. . . proposals to create laws against it strike me as troubling: Revenge porn sites feature explicit photos posted by ex-boyfriends, ex-husbands and ex-lovers, often accompanied by disparaging descriptions and identifying details, like where the women live and work, as well as links to their Facebook pages. The sites, which are proliferating, are largely […]

Navy Yard Shooter Aaron Alexis Received Government Benefits, Had Mental Issues

The man who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard reportedly received disability benefits, telling a friend in Fort Worth this involved some problem with his feet. Whether or not there was anything wrong with his feet, there was definitely something wrong in his head: Aaron Alexis seems a study in contradictions: a former […]

« go back — keep looking »