Category: reason

Delray Beach, Florida, police have charged Alexander Jerich, 20, with criminal mischief over $1,000, and reckless driving with felony enhancement for evidence of prejudice. Jerich reportedly did a deliberate burnout over a LGBT pride mural painted in the crosswalk of a city street.

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John McAfee wanted to be free, and he wanted you to be free. Facing the reality that the U.S. government was not likely going to let him breathe another free breath, the 75-year-old software entrepreneur and 2016 Libertarian Party presidential candidate was found dead via hanging in a Spanish jail on Wednesday just hours after news had broke that he was finally being extradited to face tax charges back home. He was 75.

McAfee, who had been locked up in Spain for eight months, had long admitted that he had not paid income taxes in many years, and never intended to.

Most famous for founding the antivirus software company bearing his own name, McAfeee stopped working there in 1994, and over the past few years had became a colorful promoter of cryptocurrency, famously vowing to eat his own dick if Bitcoin didn’t break $1 million in 2020.

In between those ventures his life was a living men’s magazine profile, with one Wired feature already optioned for a long-discussed feature film. He was known for cavorting with wild woman, waving around guns, manufacturing drugs, filming sloppy cocktail videos on his boat, discussing the finer points of fornicating with whales, and generally being the loud archetype of the untamable male id.

A trickster, McAfee wanted us all to know years ago that if in the future he seemed to have killed himself, he most certainly did not, posting an image of himself in 2019 with a tattoo reading “whack’d.” A couple of weeks into his Spanish incarceration, he tweeted that “I am content in here. I have friends. The food is good. All is well. Know that if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine.”

His Twitter feed from prison contained some of his usual musings on high-level math anomalies, data security, software designers as spies, hackers’ invincibility, and mordant prison wisdom such as “Today a man facing a difficult situation asked if I knew of painless ways to kill himself. Having little experience in such, I was of not much help. The amazing thing is that the tone of the discussion was like discussing the weather. Prison is a strange environment.”

A week ago he tweeted, and pinned, that “The US believes I have hidden crypto. I wish I did but it has dissolved through the many hands of Team McAfee (your belief is not required), and my remaining assets are all seized. My friends evaporated through fear of association. I have nothing. Yet, I regret nothing.”

Having had the pleasure of many, many hours in McAfee’s company—all reporter/subject stuff, though he relished that dynamic—I can tell you that John McAfee was a trip, and loved a life of interacting, mindfucking, communicating and miscommunicating, striving to both be understood and to twist your understanding to his momentary whims.

One of the first things he told me when we met for a story on his 2016 campaign was, “Don’t care about me, please. Commune with me. Dance with me. Laugh with me. But for God’s sake, if you care about me, keep the fuck out of my life.”

When he launched a more haphazard 2020 L.P. run in exile, on the run from an indictment he knew was coming, he told me, “Aren’t we supposed to be standing up and risking things, putting ourselves on the fucking line” for freedom? “Well I’m doing it. Please God give me credit for that.”

Our last conversation, as I recall, was in June 2019 from Cuba during his months as an international fugitive prior to his Spanish capture in October 2020. He had been enjoying his time in Cuba and delighted in outraging the sensibilities of Libertarians appalled by his partying in a totalitarian state. To John McAfee, the world was a totalitarian state, just not one powerful enough to stop him from partying in it.

If speculations abound as to whether his suicide was real, that is exactly as he would have wanted it. McAfee was a man of appetities, a man of dreams, a rogue and a scoundrel who made his mark on the world because of his flaws and not despite them. He would simultaneously chase windmills and laugh at those who think they’d ever catch one.

“Libertarians are not going to get elected this year, maybe forever, and if we pretend we are we are fools in the eyes of those whose support we are trying to get,” he told me in 2019. “Questions like, ‘What are you going to do your first day in office?'” he said,”It makes me vomit. Serious people are watching us here. Please, God, get real with yourself.”

Still, he’d also tell you, with burning sincerity before coming in third for the 2016 nomination, that “Let’s win. Of course the nomination will be the simplest way. I’m old. I tire easily. But I’m not gonna stop. I’m not going to give in to frustration and fear. I will not let this [current system of government oppression] go on to my children, on the backs of my blood. I will not do that. I’m not giving up.”

McAfee was electric, jolting those around him to a more vibrant, if more confusing and confused, life. His persona, both public and private, made the world seem more exotic, mysterious, perplexing; he told you to his face how much he lied; he warned you being near him could lead you to being shot or abducted; he told you he was about to win when he was about to lose; and he also told you he knew he was going to get an indictment out of Tennessee, and he turned out to be right about that.

McAfee was accused of many crimes more grave than not paying the U.S. government off for the sin of earning money, including allegedly murdering a neighbor in Belize (which he denied, blaming Belize’s corrupt government for the accusations). But that this force of nature spent his last days locked up is no sort of justice for the crimes the U.S. government sought to make him die in prison for.

John McAfee’s very last tweet, his last coherent message to the world, five days ago, was a characteristic warning about the dangers of state power: “In a democracy, power is given not taken. But it is still power. Love, compassion, caring have no use for it. But it is fuel for greed, hostility,  jealousy… All power corrupts. Take care which powers you allow a democracy to wield.”

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Ammon Bundy, best known for leading the 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, announced last weekend that he is running for Governor of Idaho.

“I’m running for Governor because I’m sick and tired of all of this political garbage,” he states on his campaign website. “I’m tired of our freedoms being taken from us and I’m tired of the corruption that is rampant in our state Government.”

Bundy has become something of a figurehead for rural ranchers skeptical of federal power. Prior to the month-long Oregon standoff in 2016, he and his father, Cliven Bundy, were involved in a 2014 cattle grazing standoff with the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada.

Since 2016, Ammon Bundy has continued to be a controversial and outspoken activist against government overreach. In 2018, Bundy released a video criticizing Trump’s immigration crackdown and put out a call to sponsor refugee families. Last July, he made a video in support of Black Lives Matter and defunding the police, stating that “you patriots, if you really want to call yourselves that, somehow think that the law enforcement is your golden calf…There needs to be a defunding of government in general.” 

Bundy was also arrested on trespassing charges last August after leading a protest at the Idaho statehouse against measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Bundy is now trying to work within the state government, rather than against it. 

“We cannot afford to have state leadership that lets the federal government bully us,” said Bundy—who is running as a Republican—in a campaign video. “And it’s an unfair fight when the federal government unlawfully attacks the people—believe me, I know, as my family and I experienced this first hand.”

In another video on his campaign website, titled, “3 Lies the Mainstream Media Has Told You About Ammon Bundy,” he denies that he is anti-government: “Think about it this way—if you don’t eat poison, does it make you anti-food? If you don’t do drugs, does it make you anti-medicine? And if I don’t support government overreach nor the open, plain, and obvious corruption in government, does that make me anti-government or just anti-corruption? I think it’s pretty obvious.” 

Bundy’s platform—called the “Keep Idaho IDAHO Plan”—says he would curb government overreach in almost every way imaginable. He advocates for the elimination of all property tax, personal income tax, and personal property tax for businesses, calling it “nothing more than legal plunder.” The only kind of tax that he supports is a consumption tax. 

Bundy’s platform also includes plans to take back Idaho’s federally managed land, end restrictions on medical treatments, eliminate forced curricula in public schools, strip back gun control, and end state licensure for professions like hair styling. 

Criminal justice reform figures heavily in the Keep Idaho IDAHO plan. Bundy supports increasing accountability for police officers and ending civil asset forfeiture. He also supports ending the war on drugs by stopping the incarceration of drug users. 

“The propaganda machine has worked diligently for years to create a strange dichotomy as it pertains to Law Enforcement—either you love everything that all police officers do everywhere, no matter how illegal, unethical, or immoral it is—or you are ‘anti-cop’ and you hate the police,” said Bundy in another video on his campaign site.

“I don’t hate the police,” Bundy continued. “I love and honor every honest police officer who executes his duties according to the Constitution and with the fear of God. Likewise, I detest any police officer who abuses his power, terrorizes innocent citizens, and violates peoples’ rights simply because he can get away with it.” 

To decrease incarceration rates, Bundy proposes Idaho enact “Restitution and Restoration Laws.” He sees these as a better and more economical way to deal with non-violent crime:

It is simple, if someone steals your iPhone, it must be immediately returned to you along with a judgment in your favor for and an additional 20% of the value of it. That’s it. It’s simple. Restitution and restoration. If you’re a victim of a non-violent crime, you get restored, plus 20%…There is no reason for us to incarcerate so many non-violent criminals.

Bundy was not available for comment.

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A new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) found that injury crash rates rose by about 7 percent in five states after they legalized recreational marijuana use. But there was no statistically significant increase in traffic fatality rates, and state-licensed recreational sales had no apparent impact on injury rates. Meanwhile, another IIHS study found that “drivers who used marijuana alone were no more likely to be involved in crashes than drivers who hadn’t used the drug.”

Given these mixed and counterintuitive results, the take offered by IIHS President David Harkey is misleading. “Our latest research makes it clear that legalizing marijuana for recreational use does increase overall crash rates,” Harkey said in a press release. “That’s obviously something policymakers and safety professionals will need to address as more states move to liberalize their laws—even if the way marijuana affects crash risk for individual drivers remains uncertain.”

The fear that marijuana legalization leads to more car crashes is based on the expectation that legalization increases use, resulting in more stoned drivers on the road. But if so, you would expect to see some impact from newly legal commercial distribution, and the IIHS study found no evidence of that. In fact, the researchers report a slight decrease in injury crash rates after state-licensed retailers opened, although that change was not statistically significant.

Furthermore, the effect of legalization on road safety depends crucially on “the way marijuana affects crash risk for individual drivers,” and the second IIHS study suggests that marijuana use does not increase crash risk. As the IIHS notes, that result is “consistent with a 2015 study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration [NHTSA],” which “found that a positive test for marijuana was not associated with increased risk of being involved in a police-reported crash.”

The IIHS researchers compared injury crash rates in five states that legalized marijuana (California, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington) to trends in five Western states (Arizona, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming) where recreational use was not legal during the study period. They found that legalization of recreational use was associated with “a statistically significant 6.6% increase in injury crash rates and a nonsignificant 2.3% increase in fatal crash rates.” But after retail sales began, injury crash rates fell slightly, reducing the increase following legalization to 5.9 percent. The overall increase in fatality rates was 3.8 percent, which was still statistically insignificant.

Those averages conceal considerable variation between states. “The effects of legal marijuana use and sales on injury crash rates ranged from a 7% decrease to an 18% increase,” the authors report. “The effects on fatal crash rates ranged from an 8% decrease to a 4% increase.” None of the changes in fatality rates was statistically significant.

Even assuming that legalization increases the number of stoned drivers, its net impact on crash rates is not as straightforward as people tend to assume. Laboratory studies indicate that marijuana has a much less dramatic impact on driving ability than alcohol does. Marijuana users are not only less impaired than drinkers but more aware of their impairment, taking precautions such as driving more slowly and maintaining more distance between vehicles.

Such compensatory behavior might help explain why the IIHS study found no significant impact on fatal crashes. “It is reasonable to expect that such behaviors will reduce the severity of crashes that result,” the authors note. “In that sense, past research suggests that fatal crash rates may be less affected by marijuana legalization than less severe crash rates. That is, the compensation exhibited by marijuana-impaired drivers, especially lower speeds, may not be sufficient to avoid a crash, but it may be enough to reduce the severity of that crash.”

Another consideration: To the extent that newly legal marijuana replaces alcohol, that substitution would tend to have a positive impact on road safety. The IIHS researchers note that “laws allowing the distribution of marijuana for medical purposes have been associated with an 8% to 11% reduction in traffic fatality rates—possibly because drivers are substituting marijuana for other, more impairing substances.” The implication of that framing is that marijuana might replace medications that have a bigger effect on driving ability. But in states with relatively loose rules for medical use, doctor-approved marijuana may also have replaced alcohol as a recreational intoxicant.

The second IIHS study underlines the point about the relative riskiness of stoned vs. drunk driving. The researchers looked at patients who were treated for crash-related injuries at three hospitals in Denver, Sacramento, and Portland, Oregon. In addition to asking the patients about drug and alcohol use prior to their accidents, they tested blood samples. Comparing the patients to a control group, they found “no increased crash risk associated with [marijuana], except when [it was] combined with alcohol.”

As the IIHS notes, “studies of whether marijuana itself makes drivers more likely to crash have been inconsistent.” Two meta-analyses published in 2012 found that cannabis consumption roughly doubles the risk of a crash. A 2018 meta-analysis of 26 studies estimated that marijuana use increases the risk of a crash by 18 percent to 32 percent. By comparison, a 2016 study sponsored by NHTSA found that a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.08 percent, the current DUI threshold in almost every state, was associated with a fourfold increase in crash risk, while a BAC of 0.10 percent, the old cutoff, nearly sextupled the risk.

While marijuana’s contribution to car crashes remains unclear, the results of the IIHS hospital study are consistent with what NHTSA found in 2015, when it looked at accidents in Virginia Beach, Virginia. In that study, which the agency described as the “largest and most comprehensive” of its kind, marijuana use was not associated with an elevated crash risk once other variables were taken into account.

The NHTSA researchers matched each of 3,000 drivers who were involved in crashes with two drivers who were not but who were on the road in the same location on the same day of the week at the same time and traveling in the same direction. The initial analysis found that drivers who tested positive for THC were 25 percent more likely to be involved in crashes. But that difference disappeared once the researchers took into account age, gender, race/ethnicity, and alcohol use.

Those results suggest that recent cannabis consumption could be an indicator of other variables that independently affect crash risk. “If the THC-positive drivers were predominantly young males,” NHTSA noted, “their apparent crash risk may have been related to age and gender rather than use of THC.”

Michael White, an Australian psychologist who keeps track of research on marijuana and driving, thinks that observation may explain the results of other studies that did not adjust for confounding variables. “What they report as a marijuana effect might well be a young man effect,” he says. Young men are especially likely to be cannabis consumers and especially prone to crashes even when they are perfectly sober. Furthermore, the sort of young men who think nothing of getting behind the wheel right after smoking pot are probably more reckless than the ones who decide that’s not such a good idea.

There is some evidence that marijuana and alcohol together impair driving ability more than either alone, although not all researchers agree on that point. If marijuana legalization makes the joint use of both intoxicants more common, that might help account for the increase in crash injuries that the IIHS found.

In the hospital study, the IIHS notes, “13 percent of the crash-involved drivers tested positive for marijuana only, compared with 16 percent of the control set.” But “the reverse was true for the combined use of marijuana and alcohol,” with “5 percent of the crash-involved drivers and [less] than 1 percent of the control drivers testing positive.” The IIHS says “those combined-use numbers could help explain why crash rates have increased.” It suggests that “legalization may be encouraging more people to drink and use marijuana together.”

If so, that still would not explain why easy availability of marijuana from state-licensed outlets had no apparent effect on crash injuries. Do people go wild once they can no longer be busted for pot possession, recklessly driving after drinking and toking, then calm down after they can actually walk into shops and legally buy marijuana? Maybe new cannabis consumers learn the dangers of such behavior from experience, but how many new cannabis consumers are there when the only sources of marijuana are home cultivation and the black market?

The IIHS researchers do not really grapple with that puzzle. But they do warn that their results should not be overinterpreted.

“Even if legalization leads to a higher prevalence of driving after marijuana use, the increased crash rates may be due to other, unobserved factors,” they say. “Marijuana users may be riskier drivers even when not impaired, and the legalization of marijuana may encourage more travel by these risky drivers. For example, marijuana users in counties that do not allow retail sales may drive to counties where such sales are permitted. Some states have used the legalization of marijuana as part of their tourism promotions, bringing in more potentially risky drivers. Thus, the results of this study do not necessarily imply that marijuana use before driving increases the risk of a crash.”

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Arctic Village, Alaska, is about as remote a spot as you’ll find in the United States. Tucked into a sweeping bend in the east fork of the Chandalar River, Arctic Village and its roughly 150 full-time residents live more than 100 miles from the nearest “metropolis”—that would be Fort Yukon, Alaska. Population: 582.

And yet, under the terms of a sweeping federal elections bill that hit a wall in the Senate on Tuesday evening, Arctic Village would have been required to keep its polling place open for 10 hours every day for at least 15 days prior to every future federal election.

“The whole town could practically vote in an hour,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R–Alaska), pointed out Tuesday during a speech on the Senate floor that deconstructed some of the practical issues with the sprawling For The People Act. “When you nationalize something—when you have federal overall oversight—it ends up being a one-size-fits-all mandate coming out of Washington, D.C., that in many cases doesn’t work in a place like Alaska.”

Federalizing control over elections is a major goal of the bill, which would give federal officials a much-expanded role in regulating things that states have always been left to decide, like when polling places are open and how much early voting occurs. But in a country as diverse as America, one set of rules doesn’t make sense everywhere. A possible solution to long lines at polling places in Atlanta creates a ridiculous and expensive mandate in places like Arctic Village.

“The bill that we have in front of us is not so much about voting rights as it is a federal takeover of the election system, and a partisan federal takeover of the election system,” Murkowski said Tuesday. A few hours later, she joined the 49 other Republican members of the Senate in voting against a procedural maneuver that would have allowed the bill to come to the floor for debate—a vote that effectively kills the For The People Act’s chance of passing into law anytime soon. (It cleared the House in March.)

The bill is a response to what Democrats see—with good reason, in some cases—as Republican-led attempts to undermine voting rights in some states. Efforts to disenfranchise voters should be steadfastly opposed at the state level, but senators like Murkowski are rightly hesitant to use the hammer of federal law to accomplish that goal.

That’s not only because of the silly mandates it would impose on places like Arctic Village. There are also serious legal and constitutional issues with other parts of the bill, which would regulate political speech and mandate state-level behavior in ways the federal government has never before attempted. Even if you don’t care about the First Amendment issues in the bill, they would guarantee years of litigation over its provisions.

Instead of creating more certainty about election rules, dozens of lawsuits and conflicting court rulings could create “messy litigation that leaves the state of election law uncertain for years to come,” Murkowski said Tuesday. Imagine, for instance, if you had to understand the latest legal battles over Obamacare before being allowed to see a doctor.

What’s more, federalizing elections to make them more secure might actually make them more vulnerable. Think back to the Republican-led efforts to disrupt the election last year. They were thwarted by state-level officials (including fellow Republicans) who applied the law correctly even when under intense political pressure from President Donald Trump and his top allies. If Trump had to exert pressure on a few federal officials rather than a diffuse network of state-level elections boards, most of which were staffed by people who owed him nothing and had little incentive to cave to his threats, would the outcome have been different?

These practical and legal concerns have been largely glossed over by the bill’s advocates, who have framed the measure as the last stand for democracy. But the fate of America’s democracy has never hinged on just one bill or one vote because most of our election systems are decentralized.

That said, there are many good ideas included in the For The People Act. Expanded early voting, automatic voter registration, and restoring voting rights to people who have served time in prison are worthy policies for increasing voter participation. Redistricting commissions, which the bill would mandate all states use for redrawing congressional district lines, are a decent solution to a messy problem. Banning states from using voting machines that don’t provide paper trails for all votes would make elections more trustworthy.

But, as Murkowski argued Tuesday, those provisions could be considered separately from the “sprawling” proposal Democrats have been pushing. Though it is also fair to point out that Republicans were none too interested in a narrower proposal offered as a potential compromise last week by Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.).

Certainly, there is an element of partisanship to Murkowski’s stance—particularly since she’s facing the prospect of a Trump-backed primary challenger next year when her seat is up for re-election. But it would be wrong to dismiss her for that reason alone. For three consecutive congressional sessions, Murkowski has been the lead Senate Republican sponsor of the Voting Rights Advancement Act, a bipartisan bill that would update the 1965 Voting Rights Act to require that states get federal permission before making changes to their voting laws in advance of an election. That’s an actual, practical way to stop some of the shenanigans that states might pull in the future. Murkowski also voted to convict Trump for his role in the January 6 riot—hence why she faces a Trump-backed primary challenger next year.

In short, some Senate Republicans have no qualms about supporting attempts to undermine elections, but Murkowski is clearly not one of them.

“It will make administrating elections more difficult, more expensive, subject to federal micromanagement,” she said. “My fear is that this measure does not lead us further down the path” to fairer elections.

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