Please stop handing packages over to USPS. Two-day shipping is now four if I’m lucky, on a package that will be completely useless to me soon, since they didn’t even try to deliver on Monday, and then (allegedly) showed up at my office today at 6:04pm and found the front door locked.

It turns out that Rolling Stone has all the honesty and integrity of Penthouse Letters. Or perhaps less.

I hope no one was surprised.

The details of the Toys-For-Cops program have been neatly sorted, and while almost all of it is appalling and ridiculous, these two jumped out at me in a quick scan:

Monterey County Sherrif Dept:
    COFFEE MAKER,AUTOMATIC        2   $1,081.52
Monterey Park Police Dept:
    PISTOL,CALIBER .45,AUTOMATIC  5     $293.55

I think we’ve found the world’s worst .45 pistols, and the world’s best coffee-makers.

My own local cops got an MRAP and 30 M-16s, so those vegetable-pickers better mind their manners!

I’m guessing that after a few more muggings, this little snowflake won’t be quite as sympathetic:

"Who am I to stand from my perch of privilege, surrounded by million-dollar homes and paying for a $60,000 education, to condemn these young men as 'thugs?'" asks Friedfeld. "It's precisely this kind of 'otherization' that fuels the problem."

Police also aren't the solution to the problem, Friedfeld argues.

"If we ever want opportunistic crime to end, we should look at ourselves first. Simply amplifying police presence will not solve the issue. Police protect us by keeping those 'bad people' out of our neighborhood, and I'm grateful for it. And yet, I realize it's self-serving and doesn't actually fix anything."

Friedfeld suggests that the "privileged" adapt to normalized crime, until the wrongs of the past are righted.

I suggest to Friedfield that it will be my privilege to respond to “normalized crime” with 230-grain hollowpoints, because his blaming criminal acts on the “wrongs of the past” makes him a bigoted racist idiot.

There are a lot of accusations surfacing. It’s still all hearsay, and much of it is decades-old and can never be substantiated, but now that a friend of mine has come forward as a victim, I believe it to be true. I have no doubts about Victoria Valentino’s integrity.

Of course, the people who gleefully latched onto it as an excuse to undercut his advice to the black community are also despicable, just not criminal.

Upstate New York:

8.5 miles from my house:

I only felt two of the little quakes they had in San Juan Bautista over the past day, and both of them were short, sharp shocks. Generally, anything on the other side of the hills goes unfelt in my area, so it was more surprising than anything else, especially since it felt more like the pressure wave from an explosion than the usual ground effects.

…couldn’t it have waited until after trick-or-treating? I may have a few tens of pounds of candy left over if the kids don’t brave the storm.

[Update: about 35 kids. Unfortunately, based on last year, I planned for at least 130, which means I’ve got over 50 pounds of candy left.]

When Jimmy Carter calls you a sissy, you have failed utterly at foreign policy.