Silkwood II?
Tommy Hook, who has alleged financial fraud at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory, got a good skull-kicking this weekend, just before he was scheduled to give testimony to Congress. From the Project on Government Oversight:
On Saturday night Hook went to a Santa Fe bar to meet a person claiming to be a fellow Los Alamos whistleblower that called that night. When the person did not show, Hook left the bar after two drinks. In the parking lot he was pulled out of his car and beaten so badly by 3 or 4 men that he had to be taken to intensive care. Hook did not provoke these men. The men concentrated on kicking his head, and Hook's family thinks the men would have killed him if it hadn't been for the witness who had just walked out of the bar.
The men didn't try to take Hook's wallet, his watch or his car; they just told him to keep his mouth shut if he knows what's good for him. Tommy Hook was expected to testify before Congress this month (and talk to a congressional investigator this Tuesday–tomorrow) on possible fraud at Los Alamos
Link via Sploid.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
Maybe they were just trying to keep a drunk driver off the road.
“Click it or we’ll kick it!”
Well that’s awfully low tech. What the fuck am I paying taxes for? Why couldn’t they unleash some kind of microwave beam on him while he slept? Or used the HAARP thing to disrupt all his bio-patterns?
Has Bush bankrupted the Feds that badly that they’re reduced to beating the shit out of hostile witnesses now? I demand a refund.
I hope I don’t uncover any wrong-doing at NIH. The biologists might infect me with Ebola or something.
Hey, while we’re on the subject of being attacked by thugs, I’m thinking of learning how to shoot. I know that Virginia is better than Maryland on gun laws, but my wife wants to live in Maryland. (She grew up there and has family in the area.) The deal was that if I dragged her across the country then she’d get to pick where we live. Does anybody know what the gun laws are like in Maryland?
I hope I don’t uncover any wrong-doing at NIH. The biologists might infect me with Ebola or something.
Don’t give ’em any ideas. Really.
I prefer this type of phrasing for expressing my concern regarding the future acts of retribution I fear may be visited upon me:
“I hope I don’t uncover any wrongdoing during my
upcoming internal corporate investigation; those Corporate Officers might have someone key my car.”
Seriously though, two drinks would probably put him over the legal limit, depending on how long he waited for the guy to show up.
The men didn’t try to take Hook’s wallet, his watch or his car
I always notice this on Law & Order type shows: “They didn’t take anything, so we know it wasn’t a robbery.” I immediately think: cover your tracks! Why not take the wallet? Then the police will think it is just a robbery!
Why not take the wallet? Then the police will think it is just a robbery!
Not if you want to send a message! You need to watch more cop shows, Papaya!
Yeah, right. Whenever I go to a nudie bar at midnight, I always feel like six guys have been kicking my head the next morning.
thoreau,
http://crime.about.com/od/gunlawsbystate/f/gunlaw_md.htm
oes anybody know what the gun laws are like in Maryland?
thoreau,
The gun laws in Maryland are atrocious. Not as bad as Mass., NY, CA, or NJ, but damn close. You can forget about self-defense in Maryland–there it is unlawful to keep an assembled firearm in your house, let alone a loaded one.
If you purchase a handgun or so-called ‘assault weapon’ you have to wait about 14 days to pick it up.
On the bright side, you can own machineguns in Maryland as long as you go through the Federal rigamarole, and I think you have to have a separate state permit.
I don’t know as much about VA, just that it’s better. PA is by far the bast state in the region for firearms ownership, though you probably wouldn’t want to make that commute. Why did you pick that area of the country anyway? Oh, that’s right, NIH.
p.s.
thoreau, if you’re going to be in the VA/MD/PA area, let me know sometime if you’re interested in shooting. I have some good friends in the DC area and one is a member of a really nice gun club in MD NE of DC. Maybe someday if I’m out visiting we can take you out shooting.
You can also check out http://www.packing.org for information on different states’ gun laws, although they specialize in information on carry permits.
The strip club was called “Cheeks.” And the pictures are pretty brutal.
It’s a fine mess you’ve got us into, Ollie.
Where is “homeland security” when you need it?
Reminds me of when Benjamin Franklin Bache (Ben Franklin’s grandson) was set upon, because Bache opposed a “standing” army/navy.
I’m sure someone, somewhere is dismissing this as the speculation of tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists. How frightening!
BTW, I think I remember hearin’ talk of them droppin’ the laws in VA prohibiting concealed carry on this very site. Sorry to hear Maryland has gotten so bad.
…It used to be that every other redneck in Md. had a shotgun on a rack in the back window of his pickup.
From the link:
Also flying out tomorrow is the Project On Government Oversight’s Senior Investigator Peter Stockton who investigated the 1974 murder of nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood in his previous position as a Congressional investigator.
Uh huh. And Vince Foster was murdered too.
If I’m a government whistleblower about testify in front of congress I don’t think I am going to go and meet some anonymous person alone.
It doesn’t sound like he was blowing the whistle on actual government activities, but on hanky panky by people who worked there. I agree with the worm, that isn’t how they shut people up in the X Files, but how four tough guys hired by an ebezzeller would earn their $500 each.
Poor bastard. Oh well, whistle’s blown now. Whoever’s screwing around at Los Alamos is about to catch holy hell.
It was the blue balls that really got him
Yes I think the “I’m going to meet another whistleblower at the nudie bar” is an excellent excuse to get away from wife. Too bad the guy got beat up after he left and had to stick to the orginal story once the cops got involved…
Wow, you commenters are awfully cute about thugs savagely beating a Government Whistleblower right into Intensive Care on the eve of his attempt to expose government crimes paid for with your tax dollars. Is this the Reason site, or was it hijacked by Free Republic?
I don’t know, maybe I’m not down with the latest trends, but when did this kind of thing become funny?
Don’t fuck with the physicists!
I don’t know, maybe I’m not down with the latest trends, but when did this kind of thing become funny?
Two parts to this:
One, I think we’ve all heard crazy reasons given by the government to explain things (“Why were all those nuns executed and dumped in a shallow ditch? Well, maybe they were trying to run a blockade.”). It’s done by a lot of crooks who’ve been caught, but none ever as repeatedly brazen as people in office.
Two, this was so awful that all you can do is either give more information on it or bring in some dark humor.
Does anybody know what the gun laws are like in Maryland?
Montgomery, PG, and Baltimore counties don’t want anybody to have guns. Everywhere else in Maryland they have them and they use them. Lots of hunters, rednecks, etc.
I’d swear I saw this on the Rockford Files last week.
Did they use Slide Rulers?
Thoreau,
VA has some OK laws regarding guns. You can carry openly (make sure that if you are in Northern VA you don’t wander to DC, then again, don’t go to DC unarmed, better tried by 12 than carried by 6)
Anyhow, I was stationed in VA, and they have some stupic tax that you pay, and they will issue a concealed firearms licence.
There are lots of good places to shoot in VA too, lots of indoor ranges. Lots of places to go learn to shoot well also.
“don’t go to DC unarmed, better tried by 12 than carried by 6”
Ever actually lived there, kwais?
thoreau, check these sites.
http://www.nraila.org/GunLaws/Default.aspx#
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/schools/gun.control/
http://www.gunlaws.com/links/
My reading in general is that VA is more friendly to carrying than MD, and VA might have more gun shops and shooting ranges. But only DC has a total gun ban (for all practical purpose).
Your best bet is to find a friendly gun shop and ask questions. Go to several different ones until you find one you like. Things like personal service and knowledgeable good advice count for a lot. Like most other things there is a lot of bullshit out there, but you strike me as a guy with a finely tuned detector.
Send me an email, Thoreau. I’ll be delighted to buy you a beer at the Ram’s Head Tavern in Annapolis and explain the little I know about Maryland gun laws. Mr. Fletcher is correct. Montgomery and Prince George’s County and Baltimore City are leftist enclaves of social engineering and urban planning (think “Joe”). The Eastern Shore and Western Maryland are rural (by Mid Atlantic standards). Hunting is a fairly common recreational activity in these areas and firearms are a part of the culture. In most places, you can find a shooting range within easy driving distance.
Oh, and Joe, the fair city of DC has won the coveted “murder capital” award on more than one occasion for highest murder rate per capita. On a related note, I have lived in Baltimore although I fail to see how my anecdotal experience of me living in the city has any bearing when empirical data is available. Baltimore, by the way, has a murder rate almost as high as DC. Perhaps if Baltimore enacts tougher firearms laws like DC it can make up some ground?
Well then, Jose, you’d better stay away from the scary bad people. You can recognize these people from their zip codes.
At even the slightest hint that you have money in your wallet, you will be riddled with bullets and dumped in Rock Creek Park.
I don’t need a zip code, Joe, to look around and see boarded up public housing tenements complete with trash, rats and street dealers. Of course, these neighborhoods look much better colored in magenta in your community comprehensive plan as “high-density residential transit-oriented urban revitalization overlay zones.”
As for my personal safety, Joe, thanks for caring. In my experience, the sharks that cruise the waters of your shining cities prefer easier prey or to simple murder one another.
Jose-
When I’m in MD I’ll get in touch. I move at the end of the month. We’re moving to Montgomery County. The deal was that I made the decision to move across the country, so my wife decided where to live once we got there.
“I don’t need a zip code, Joe, to look around and see boarded up public housing tenements complete with trash, rats and street dealers.”
Yup, that’s Adams Morgan all right. And Georgetown. And Dupont Circle. And Southwest. And Logan Circle. And Mount Pleasant. And Downtown. And the West End. And Capitol Hill (well, only part of Capitol Hill). And the National Mall environs.
Maybe you should stop watching “Good Times” reruns, and actually find out what a city neighborhood is like.
Actually, that sounds a lot like parts of Mount Pleasant.
But I agree, vast portions of DC are perfectly nice, safe places.
Sure, Joe, and the Inner Harbor, Fells Point and Canton are typical “city neighborhoods” in Baltimore. Oh, and the HBO series, “The Wire,” is not really based on an inner city, Joe. It’s science fiction, an alternate reality because we know every urban neighborhood is just like Georgetown.
I know you’d rather do this by anecdoate, Joe, but you might want to try reading the crime data by PSA for the district.
Good Times. Dyn-o-mite, Joe.
gotta agree that the “visit dc and be armed” is an attack of the dramas, too.
where the hell are you visiting? anacostia? c’mon.
good times: based in cabrini green, chicago. it was a great day they tore down that highrise (seward park – where sedgwick ends at division, south side of the street)
jose: again, who the hell, when they’re visiting baltimore, goes to scene locations in “the wire”. that kind of macho bullshit posturing “ha ha! i’m gonna be armed. not carried by six”. right.
internet tough guys. maybe one of you will talk about how you can kick ass from the correspondence wing chun course, too. jeez.
again, if you’re visiting a town as a tourist and you wanna visit the slums, hey, go for it. but 86 the drama.
I have to agree with the D.C. as a miserable – Miserable place to visit. It is dangerous – myself and friends were robbed (With banned guns) outside the 9:30 club a couple of years ago. The city is miserable with crime, it’s dirty, it’s hard to navigate (Hint – the number/letter/state name road system is just inconsistent enough to get people seriously lost in some really bad areas). Further, the city is dirty – especially around the Mall area. I kind of get a little embarassed for America every time I go past the reflecting pool towards the Lincoln monument.
But hey, the museums are nice and Georgetown is nice (but vastly overpriced) and so are a couple of other areas – a few good apples don’t save the bunch.
“I know you’d rather do this by anecdoate, Joe, but you might want to try reading the crime data by PSA for the district.”
While I’m at it, would you like me to base my dealings with Latinos on crime data?
I’ll pass. It just isn’t a very intelligent way to go about things.
Here’s some crime data for you: almost all violent gun crime is committed by gun owners.
How should this effect my perception of gun owners?
Well, “drf,” people live in the areas where HBO films “The Wire.” I lived a couple of blocks from one of Baltimore more infamous drug districts (surprisingly, not far from Johns Hopkins) for a time. Apparently, the mature bullshit posturing worked well enough for me. It did not work so well for my neighbor who was brutally attacked. Maybe she should have tried the “wing chung” correspondence course?
And, Joe, you are running out of sides of your mouth. You cited some gentrified areas of DC which, if you know anything about the city, reflect nothing of other neighborhoods. Returning to the point, the draconian laws in DC do nothing to keep it from being America’s murder capital. Of course, this is the time-honored lesson of Prohibition cited by liberals when it comes to drugs but ignored when it comes to guns.
To answer your question, deal with people as individuals, not as members of a racial or ethnic group. When I say a particular neighborhood in DC or Baltimore is a hellhole, it does not mean every person living therein is a scumbag. Good people live in bad places. Unforunately, so do bad people. And perhaps worse, people with good intentions (like you and your urban planning brethren) actually make things in bad neighborhoods worse.
Oh, and base your opinion on a gun owner on whether or not the gun is pointed at you.
“You cited some gentrified areas of DC which, if you know anything about the city, reflect nothing of other neighborhoods.”
And if you know anything about the city, you know that the “other neighborhoods” reflect nothing of those neighborhoods.
“When I say a particular neighborhood in DC or Baltimore is a hellhole, it does not mean every person living therein is a scumbag.” You didn’t say a particular neighborhood in DC was a hellhole. You said DC was a hellhole, and you needed to walk around armed to be safe there. That just is not true, and your habit of stereotyping urban areas by the worst neighborhoods in the worst cities is as offensive as any other variety of prejudice.
Here’s some crime data for you: almost all violent gun crime is committed by gun owners.
And almost all drunk driving is committed by car owners!
How should this effect my perception of gun owners?
Exactly the same way drunk drivers affect your perception of car owners.
Joe-
So how much of a city has to be bad before you’ll allow someone to call it a “hellhole” without being accused of bigotry? DC has the highest murder rate in the nation, but you can’t call it a hellhole because Georgetown is pretty? Baltimore is a crime den but you can’t insult it because the Inner Harbor is so damned beautiful? What the hell?
I’m late into this joe vs. jose thing here about how safe DC is. I lived in that area (in Maryland) for a long time.
About 1/4 of DC is for the most part safe to walk around in, even at night. Go anywhere else in that city and you better watch your back. Whether or not you’d be better off carrying a gun depends I suppose on what you intend to be doing, but this general vibe I’m picking up from joe that DC is a wonderful place where you can lark about without having to worry about your safety is just putting on rose-colored glasses at best.
That city is a national disgrace in so many ways, it’s just depressing as hell even to think about it.
Just FYI, people who legally own guns are less likely to commit crimes than the population at large. (Also, it’s interesing that households with legally owned guns have slightly lower rates of juvenile delinquency than households without guns.)
Almost all violent gun crime is committed by criminals.
Jennifer, “So how much of a city has to be bad before you’ll allow someone to call it a “hellhole” without being accused of bigotry?”
All of it. Let me ask you, how high does the conviction rate of black males have to be before it becomes acceptable to say “Black males are violent criminals?”
Steveo, RC, you make my point exactly – drawing conclusions based on stereotypes and generalities is of very little use. You need to make some common-sense distinctions (between law abiding gun owners and career criminals, between good city neighborhoods and bad city neighborhoods).
Doug, DC’s got some real problems and there are certainly places I wouldn’t want to live. But there are some great neighborhoods, too.
Joe-
“So how much of a city has to be bad before you’ll allow someone to call it a “hellhole” without being accused of bigotry?”
All of it. Let me ask you, how high does the conviction rate of black males have to be before it becomes acceptable to say “Black males are violent criminals?”
This is a false analogy; there’s a huge difference between judging a geographical area based on the characteristics of a portion of it, and judging an entire ethnic/racial/whatever group based on the characteristics of its individual members. It’s the difference between saying “Afghanistan under the Taliban was a hellhole” and “Afghans are [whatever the human equivalent of ‘hellhole’ is].”
You know what’s funny, Joe, is that the gist of your argument is: This city with monstrously high crime rates isn’t bad at all because the rich neighborhoods are doing fine.” Had I saw that post on its own, completely out of context, I’d’ve guessed it came not from you but from one of those super-callous uber-Randroids that you and I BOTH find incomprehensible.
To save me some time, let’s pretend that a couple of years from now the US unemployment rate goes up to forty or fifty percent, and there’s some asshole posting here that the economy is doing great, because productivity is higher than ever and the stock market is positively BOOMING.
You sound almost like that guy.
Actually, Jennifer, many of the good neighborhoods are middle class or mixed income.
Do the travails of Gary make it fair to say “Indiana is a hellhole?” Detroit/Michigan? East St. Louis/Southern Illinois? Oh no, in each of those cases, anyone who knows anything about those areas would point out the obvious points about the diversity of the areas, and draw some common sense distinctions. But when the area being maligned through prejudiced stereotyping is entirely urban, we’re just supposed to tell the unfairly slandered people living on nice, quiet blocks that they shouldn’t be so sensitive? Not me.
And if you malign a place, you malign the people who live there.
And if you were to ever tell an Afghan what a hellhole his country is, expect to hear about the picturesque mountains, the “best pomegranites in the world,” the history, the culture, and his big family.
Again, Joe, judging a city by its neighborhoods is a much smaller scale than judging a state by one or two cities. All of Maryland is not a hellhole, but Baltimore sure is; all of Connecticut is not a hellhole, but Hartford and Bridgeport sure are; all of Virginia is not a hellhole, but that little piece of it that was torn off and made into D.C. sure is.
No, there are many lovely parts of Baltimore. Great neighborhoods to raise kids, and a great waterfront to live the good life.
And Arlignton County, Virginia – the part that was once part of DC – is an expensive, highly desireable suburban area, with some high end urban development near the state line. But I won’t hold that against you.
Exactly, Joe. The expensive, highly desireable suburbs or enclaves are great places to live, this negating the fact that the areas where the poor have to live are miserable and dangerous. Here in Connecticut, the town of Greenwich is one of the most beautiful and super-rich parts of the country, but this does not change the fact that Bridgeport, just a few miles over on I-95, is a dangerous hellhole where I’d be in grave danger if I walked the streets at night. You’re up around Northampton; you must have some knowledge of the two cities.
Also, many states and regions have a huge % of their population their cities.
I look at a lot of maps, and at different scales, you’re able to get different levels of detail.
If I colored every block in a state white if it was a “good area,” and blue if it was a “bad area,” a map of the state would look like a mottled area of blue and white. Blue would be more prominent in some areas, and white would be more prominent in others.
If I zoomed into the metro area of the state’s largest city, you’d see the same thing – mottled blue and white areas, with some larger areas of blue, and some larger areas of white.
If I zoomed into the incorporated city, ditto.
If I zoomed into even a lower income neighborhood of that city, ditto. (Unless it was an entire neighborhood that was urban renewed, but that’s a different question).
So, at what level of zoom is it appropriate to ignore the mottling and make an unqualified generalization? Or another way of asking the same question, at what degree of mottling – 50/50? 60/40? Go ahead, draw a line for me.
I do know the area, but I’m nowhere near Northampton.
And I’ll bet there are nice areas to live in Bridgeport, and crummy areas to live outside of it.
Of course, it you are defing “hellhole” as “place where poor people live” – as many are wont to do, wittingly or not – then it becomes very easy to say that all the neighborhoods with rental housing are hellholes. Some of us, otoh, use more fair criteria.
How big are these blocks of yours, Joe? Zoom in to where I lived one year in college: my apartment occupied by safe non-criminals; crackhouse across the street; petty criminals up and down most of the block save for two or three apartments; overall city with an appalling rate of murder and rape and burglary; overall city mostly dirt-poor; but the rich neighborhood of Ghent and the college campus was really, really gorgeous and quite safe, too. Nonetheless, there were individual houses where the people worked hard and hurt no one and ducked the stray bullets and buried their dead and wished to God that their poverty didn’t force them to live in this hellhole. But no, wait, they’re bigots for saying that. Hooray for the urban youth who wants to leave the ghetto, but damn his arrogance if he says “I hope I make it out of this hellhole someday,” eh, Joe?
By the way, Joe, to further support my theory that you’re actually an uber-Randroid in disguise for this thread, I’ll point ut that I’m discussing factors like numbers of violent crime victims and number while you’re arguing own vs. rent. But hey: almost every city in America and even in the world has areas that are really nice, which means no cities are hellholes, which means Earth itself must be a damned paradise except maybe for the low-population ares where the number of good people per square mile aren’t enough to outweigh the bad.
SERIOUS typos in that last post of mine. Jesus.
Jennifer,
If rent vs. own, crime rates, home sale prices, household income, and a lot of other metrics appear interchangeable when discussing the amorphous concept of “good areas” vs. “bad areas,” it’s not my fault.
As for the size, I wouldn’t feel comfortable make broad statements about areas larger than a few blocks. Neighborhoods change fast.
I’m sure there are some cities that could properly be defined as hellholes – Gary comes to mind. But DC cannot be – there are areas where you could walk for an hour without passing a house anyone would be proud to live in.
By “neighborhoods change fast,” I’m referring to geographically, not temporally. Neighborhood character tends to change very gradually over time, but areas within a few hundred feet of each other can be entirely different.
Except when you’re talking about urban renewal, like Cabrini Green. It’s just the opposite there – the neighborhood is depressingly monotonous as you move through the space, but changes happen very quickly – the tearing down of the old, the building of the new, the collapse, and the demolition and revitalization go very quickly, due to their artificial nature.
Sorry, I know, totally tangential, but it’s an interesting observation. If you’re an urban geek.
Anyway, thoreau, if you’re still reading this, some of the neighborhoods in DC are quite nice, and some are real hellholes. Don’t write off the entire district as you search for housing.
joe-
My wife picked out an apartment complex in Rockville. Just a few blocks away from a Metro stop. She has family there, and the deal was that I made the decision to move across the country, so she got to decide where to live once we got there. And that’s where she decided to live.
Just a little advice about Rockville metro stops. Don’t let your wife walk home alone in the dark. Seriously.
But there are some great neighborhoods, too.
I heard Beirut had nice neighborhoods too when the war was going on there.