The law and the jungle

It was in my mouth as sweet as hone: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter. -- Revelation 10.10:

ELKHART, Ind. (AP) — Police investigators say they found the recipe for making methamphetamine in an odd place: in a Bible on the last page of the Book of Revelation. Officers made discovery as they searched an apartment after arresting two people on methamphetamine possession and manufacturing charges Tuesday night. Police Lt. Ed Windbigler said the recipe was handwritten on the bottom of the page.

Guess everybody prepares for End Times

"No good deed goes unpunished" department: Piere's offers rides home to patrons who think they've had too much to drink to be able to drive safely. They gave such a ride to James Herald, but they didn't take him all the way home:

Herald was struck and injured after being dropped off.

I should probably apologize to Hooseir college students. After a Big Boy statue went missing in Mishawaka, I suggested police should just start looking in dorm rooms. The Boy is back now, and it turns out that the kidnappers were townies:

According to Jim Isza Jr., two young men, both in their late teens, arrived at the shop with the Big Boy in the back of a pickup truck.

Local news outlets this week have been carrying the story about the 21-year-old arrested for her third DWI in about a year, the last time while she was eight months pregnant. I almost did a post on her as an example of somebody who just isn't taking the hint. But she's young enough to turn her life around if she chooses to, or at least not turn into this guy:

The Indy Star has an interesting story about the new bait car Indianapolis Police are going to be using, which is a pretty cool way to get would-be car thieves off the street without chasing them through neighborhoods at 100 mph. This is the part that stopped me:

If you're going to steal something so distinctive that you can never display it in public, you should probably stick to paintings so you can at least sit in your room and admire them periodically. On the other hand, maybe that's exactly what this thief is doing:

Those of us who admit to having any kind of libertarian instinct run the risk of getting called hypocritcal or dishonest or philosophically incoherent any time we express the mildest approval for any kind of government action (see previous post on high-speed rail, for example). So I feel bad about criticizing Neal Boortz, syndicated radio talk-show host and self-described libertarian, but he went off the deep end a little about seat belts.

Today we have two great examples of "What, me, too?" encounters with police. First up, the father-son team of Derrick and John Sadler. Derrick, deputy coroner for Kosciusko County, was nabbed for drunken driving. So police called his father, the county coroner, to come pick up his son's vehicle:

When he arrived Trooper Brian Kreger found probable cause that John was also operating while intoxicated.

[. . .]

So, I've gotten drunk and stupid once or twice in my life. But there weren't that many witnesses, and none of the people involved have written books about the incidents so far as I know, so my indiscretions have been allowed to dissolve into the mists of time. They haven't haunted the rest of my life. There was this one time, for example, when a bunch of us who were stationed at Fort Hood started drinking on Friday night in San Antonio and somehow ended up in a motel room in Mexico . . . but let's not ruin a good memory.

I was pretty sure I wasn't going to like the Journal Gazette's editorial called "A community's loss" right from the opening, when it quoted FDR's admonition for everybody to "remember always that all of use . . . are descended from immigrants and revolutionists." What else could this be but another JG effort to urge disobeying the law if it involves illegal immigrants? Sure enough -- this is the first paragraph: