Category: reason

As California suffers one of the worst fire seasons in the state’s history, officials have arrested a man they suspect of starting some of the blazes. Now one local firefighter says much of the destruction could have been avoided had law enforcement not ignored years of complaints.

The suspected arsonist is 51-year-old Forrest Gordon Clark, whose cabin in Holy Jim Canyon is the only structure in the area to remained untouched by the raging fires. Police believe he sent volunteer fire chief Mike Milligan an email a week before the fire began, threatening that “this place will burn.” He faces charges for arson, felony threat to terrorize, and resisting arrest.

If Clark is guilty, a Washington Post interview with Milligan suggests that police could have prevented the arson. For the past three years, Milligan says, he has been warning the local sheriff’s office and U.S. Forest Service about Milligan, repeatedly telling them, “You have to do something or he’s going to kill someone or burn this place down.” Milligan reports that Clark sent him several texts promising that the area was “going to burn just like we planned.” Milligan say that he attempted to alert the authorities but did not receive a response. He criticized, “Why the hell didn’t they respond? I reported this over and over again.”

Clark was involuntarily committed in 1996 for mental illness, the Post reports. In addition to the Holy Jim fire, he is accused of starting a fire in Trabuco Canyon. California firefighters are currently working to contain at least 18 fires in the state.

Clark’s case has some similarities to that of the accused Parkland high school shooter, Nikolas Cruz. The Sun Sentinel has posted a timeline of the complaints about Cruz’s behavior that different authorities—the Broward Sheriff’s Office, the Florida Department of Children and Families, even the Federal Bureau of Investigation—received before the massacre. In one instance, a blogger in Mississippi warned the FBI that an account named “nikolas cruz” wrote on his YouTube page that he was going to be “a professional school shooter.”

The Peak Pegasus left Seattle on June 8 with a a cargo of American soybeans destined for China. It was supposed to be a month-long voyage.

The ship is still at sea, still loaded with soybeans, drifting in circles off the coast of China—both a casualty and a metaphor for the trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

The ship was closing in on its destination when China threatened to impose a series of retaliatory tariffs on American agricultural products, including soybeans. Over the next two weeks, the boat sprinted—to the extent that a fully loaded 47,000-ton cargo ship can sprint—toward the Chinese port of Dalian, hoping to clear customs before the new trade barriers took effect. On Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform, messages about the ship actually outnumbered posts about the then-ongoing World Cup soccer tournament.

But the Peak Pegasus didn’t make it.

The ship was about 25 miles away from Dalian on July 6 when Beijing announced that the tariffs were taking effect. That announcement came just hours after the White House announced that it would put a 25 percent tariff on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods. The soybean-laden ship slowed, stopped, and turned around.

And for the past month, it has just kept turning.

A casualty of the #tradewar: Peak Pegasus, the US cargo ship carrying over $20m in soybeans, has been circling aimlessly at sea for a month after failing to beat the Chinese #tariffs deadline on July 6. The fate of the ship is still uncertain. pic.twitter.com/Fi4u0o85SB

— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) August 9, 2018

The Peak Pegasus been drifting in circle in the Yellow Sea, waiting to hear what it should do with $20 million worth of soybeans. China’s 25 percent tariff on American soybeans will increase the cost of buying the Peak Pegasus’ cargo by about $6 million.

The cargo is owned by Louis Dreyfus, a Dutch commodities trading company. According to The Guardian, the company is paying about $12,500 per day to charter the ship, which means the extra month at sea has cost more than $400,000. Louis Dreyfus won’t have to pay for the tariffs—tariffs are import taxes, and will be paid by whomever buys the soybeans in China—but trade barriers create other costs and unintended consequences.

Soybeans have been caught in the crossfire of the U.S.–China trade war because America is the world’s largest exporter of soybeans—with nearly half the U.S. crop sent abroad annually—and China is the largest importer of them. There are few singular products that better illustrate the benefits of global trade between the world’s two largest economies than the humble soybean.

But it’s not just soybeans caught in the middle of the trade war. It’s soybean farmers, international commodities companies, buyers and wholesalers in China who have had to find alternate suppliers, and of course the crew of the Peak Pegasus. Supply chains aren’t just lines on a map and lists of goods—they’re people too. The sad saga of the Peak Pegasus is a Darkest Timeline version of “I, Pencil,” in which thousands of people all around the world who have never met one another are linked by the problems created by Washington and Beijing’s trade barriers.

Perhaps the soybeans’ owners were hoping to keep the ship at sea until the trade war comes to an end. If so, those hopes appear to have been dashed. This week, America imposed another round of tariffs on an additional $16 billion worth of Chinese goods, and China vowed to retaliate again.

And so the Peak Pegasus is finally heading to port. CGTN reports that the ship is now heading once again for Dalian. As the trade war escalates, it likely won’t be the last ship to encounter unexpected troubles on what should be a routine trip with a mundane cargo.

This one takes the Summer of Snitches to a whole new level. Yesterday a self-identified Donald Trump supporter called the cops on a state senator for “dividing people.” More exactly, he was talking to voters and handing out pamphlets outside a subway station in Brooklyn.

A video of the woman was posted on the legislator’s social media accounts. In it, the woman, who speaks with an Eastern European accent, contrasts New York state Sen. Jesse Hamilton (D-20) with the president. “I support Trump,” she tells a Hamilton staffer, “and I see the difference between Democrat and Republican—and I see the difference between you and Trump.”

The woman then criticizes the “Fighting Back Trump” slogan on one of Hamilton’s pamphlets. “If he really wants nation be as one and fight for the better life and live the better life you would not put this slogan here,” she says. “This is what Democrats does, exactly.”

“She said, ‘You should not stand here.’ She said, ‘You are dividing people,'” Hamilton tells the New York Post. Law enforcement sources inform the Post that the woman called 911 and whined about Hamilton’s anti-Trump stance on immigration. When police arrived at the scene, they explained that “public assembly and free speech are not against the law,” Hamilton’s office tells AM New York.

As they say, in politics, pepople fight most fiercely when they disagree the least. So it is between social justice warriors and alt-right extremists. While they come to blows on college campuses and elsewhere, their standard bearers, Bernie Sanders and Donald J. Trump come closer together. Examine the issues, and you realize that any disagreement between the two is more stylistic than substantive.

Exhibit A, notes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia, is that they both are America Firsters. Rather than talking optimistically about taking America to new heights in the future, they look backwards to the past for a paradise that never existed. They both wax darkly about America’s decline that they seek to reverse by going after their preferred scapegoats: rich people first and foreigners second, in Sanders’ case—foreigners first and rich people second, in Trump’s case. They are yin and yang—yang and yin.

View this article.

One year after the violence that left a woman dead in Charlottesville, Virginia, the “alt-right” group that started the deadly ruckus is headed to Washington, D.C. This weekend “Unite the Right” plans to protest the “civil rights abuses” the group claims to have suffered in Charlottesville last summer.

The group had originally intended to return to Charlottesville, but the city said no. The D.C. rally will take place in Lafayette Square, just across from the White House, on Sunday evening.

All sorts of counterprotests throughout the day are planned as well. “A coalition of anti-fascists have reserved a portion of Lafayette Park to accommodate 1,500 people, as well as two other spaces in D.C., which each accommodates 500 people,” reports Vice. “Another activist coalition, including Black Lives Matter, have reserved Freedom Plaza, half a mile from Lafayette Park, for 1,000 people.” More information on the counter-events can be found here.

Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler said in an event application permit that about 400 people were expected at his rally.

Uber and Lyft drivers have been debating in internal forums whether the surge-pricing rates will be worth it to brave the fray, The Washington Post reports. “Regardless of event, drivers are advised to follow all local laws but have the right to refuse service to riders who are disrespectful or who make them feel unsafe,” Uber told employees in a statement. Airbnb has said the company “won’t hesitate” to boot guests found to be part of the alt-right rally.

“The year since [The Charlottesville rally] has been difficult for the rogues gallery of Nazis and pseudo-Nazis who championed it,” notes Adam Serwer at The Atlantic.

From the looks of it, the Nazis lost the battle of Charlottesville. After all, President Trump’s handling of the aftermath of the rally, in which he said there were “very fine people” on both sides of the protest, drew bipartisan condemnation. The attempted rebranding of white nationalism as the genteel and technologically savvy Alt-Right failed, the marketing campaign faltering after the murder of the counter-protester Heather Heyer and the attempted murder of several others revealed to the nation the logical conclusion of Alt-Right beliefs and arguments. The bloody outcome of that day foiled the white nationalists’ attempt to garner sympathy from the mainstream right, and in doing so, make themselves respectable.

But the Alt-Right and its fellow travelers were never going to be able to assemble a mass movement….And as an ideological vanguard, the Alt-Right fulfilled its own purpose in pulling the Republican Party in its direction.

As evidence, Serwer cites Trump administration ways—thae travel ban, the treatement of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, the efforts “to make it harder for legal immigrants to become American citizens,” to name a few—as well as commentary from such Fox stars as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. On her Wednesday night show, Igraham said that “in some parts of the country, it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” thanks to “massive demographic changes [that] have been foisted upon the American people.”

Ingraham took a lot of heat for the statement, but at least one fellow found it refreshing:

In response, Ingraham put out a statement saying “white nationalists, and especially one racist freak whose name I will not even mention,” were “distorting” her words:

The purpose of last nights angle was to point out that the rule of law, meaning secure borders, is something that used to bind our country together….[M]y commentary had nothing to do with race or ethnicity, but rather a shared goal of keeping America safe, and her citizens safe and prosperous.

Ah, yes, the well-known “massive demographic changes” bringing in multicultural anarchist hordes…

Here’s the transcript of her ridiculous walk back.

It’s entirely irreconcilable with her statement before. @IngrahamAngle isn’t just a bigot. She’s a coward.

https://t.co/B3I74sjQL1

— QHatSecretMessages (@Popehat) August 10, 2018

FREE MINDS

“Mounting pressure from the political left to censor hateful speech may have unintended consequences,” warns Erik Nielson in a New York Times op-ed. “‘Hate’ is a dangerously elastic label, one that has long been used in America to demonize unpopular expression. If we become overzealous in our efforts to limit so-called hate speech, we run the risk of setting a trap for the very people we’re trying to defend.” This can already be seen many times over, most recently with the Black Lives Matter movement.

By accusing Black Lives Matter of peddling hate, politicians effectively turned the tables on the movement, allowing lawmakers, in some cases, to strengthen protections for the police. Since 2016, several “Blue Lives Matter” bills have been enacted across the country, many of which seek to add police as a protected class covered by hate crimes laws. Following this logic, Black Lives Matter’s opposition to police brutality is a kind of hate itself, from which the police require additional protection. Yet killings by police officers are increasing while line-of-duty deaths of police officers are decreasing.

It is difficult to imagine a more ridiculous outcome. But it speaks to one of the most serious perils of limiting speech: a measure to protect minority perspectives can instead be used to further marginalize them.

Meanwhile, Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic contends that democratic socialism could lead us to a similar place as the anti-“hate” laws.

FREE MARKETS

Marco Rubio once presented himself as a fan of limited government and free trade. Now he “fully backs Trump’s trade war with China” and “warns of a lack of corporate morality and patriotism” in American tech, notes John McCormack at The Weekly Standard:

Earlier this summer, Rubio delivered a speech in Washington calling for a “new nationalism” in which he decried an “economic elitism that has replaced a commitment to the dignity of work with a blind faith in financial markets and that views America simply as an economy instead of a nation.”

Rubio’s nationalism is “the kind…admired more by David Brooks than Steve Bannon,” notes McCormack. And while it may seem like an ideological departure for Rubio, it’s not at odds with his actual record. As McCormack writes: “Most of the actual economic policies Rubio has been prominently fighting for in Congress—an expanded child tax credit to benefit the working class and the paid-family leave bill—are of the same type he has long promoted with Utah senator Mike Lee.”

FOLLOW-UP

TSA officials told legislators that “about 5,000 US citizens had been closely monitored since March” as part of its “Quiet Skies” program, “and none of them were deemed suspicious or merited further scrutiny,” the Boston Globe reports. A Globe investigation first revealed the existence of the program last week.

Tim Cushing at Techdirt isn’t having it:

The TSA had to tail 5,000 people just to determine they weren’t suspicious. That’s the wrong way around, constitutionally-speaking. The government isn’t allowed to snoop on people until it can find a reason to snoop on people. That’s not how the Fourth Amendment works.

As noted here yesterday, the TSA’s head honcho thinks the program is “very effective.”

QUICK HITS

• The U.S. dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 73 years ago this week. A Twitter thread from historian Alex Wellerstein explains about what people get wrong about narrative.
• “White officers are no more likely to use lethal force against minorities than nonwhite officers,” says Charles Menifield, lead author of a large new Rutgers study on the cops’ use of deadly force in America. But black Americans are killed by police more than two times as much as Americans Generally.

Feds allege a 33-year-old guy in Massachusetts tweeted an offer to pay someone to “kill[] an ice agent” and are charging him with “Use of Interstate and Foreign Commerce to Transmit a Threat to Injure Another Person” in an indictment unsealed today. https://t.co/H4KJ1l23cb pic.twitter.com/Rt5FasAazP

— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner) August 9, 2018

A scandal in San Joaquin County illustrates the problem with California’s joint sheriff-coroner offices.

Last December, the county’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Bennet Omalu, alleged that the county sheriff interfered with his investigations. As the Sacramento Bee put it, “Hands chopped off bodies; corpses left to deteriorate; doctors pressured to classify officer-involved deaths as accidents rather than homicides: San Joaquin’s two forensic pathologists resigned in recent days over what they said was intolerable interference by Sheriff-Coroner Steve Moore.” The allegations are troubling.

An investigation by the state Assembly said the allegations “call into question the integrity of the fundamental checks and balances of our criminal-justice system, as these medical determinations are often the basis for whether…charges filed.” Indeed. Moore has denied the allegations. KQED paraphrased him saying that, “Determining cause of death—what killed a person—is the purview of the forensic pathologist…but he has the final say on determining the manner.”

But just from a good policy standpoint, shouldn’t a medical professional should be the one to make the final determination on the cause of death?

Currently, sheriffs—who have an official, vested interest in these cases, especially regarding officer-involved shootings—make the final cause-of-death determinations. The current system is an outrageous conflict of interest, writes Steven Greenhut.

View this article.

Of course, Facebook, YouTube, and other media are free to ban conspiracy-mongers such as Alex Jones from their platforms, writes David Harsanyi. They have a right to dictate the contours of permissible speech on their sites and to enforce those standards dutifully or hypocritically or ideologically, using any method they see fit. No one seriously disputes this.

Twitter also has a right, as a private entity, to take a stand and, as the company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey explains it, dispassionately allow free exchanges of ideas—even the ugly ones Jones’ Infowars offers—as long as users don’t break the company’s rules. Yet here we are, watching a number of journalists—supposed sentinels of free expression—demanding that billionaire CEOs start policing speech that makes them uncomfortable.

View this article.

Back in the mid-1970s, Ron Stallworth became the first black police officer in the town of Colorado Springs, some ways south of Denver. In 1979, in an even more impressive feat of cultural pioneering, he became the first black member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Therein, of course, lies a story. Stallworth told it in a 2014 book, and now it has provided rich material for Spike Lee, a director long-overdue for a hit. The movie he’s made from Stallworth’s tale is surprisingly funny, mainly because most of the white Klansmen we meet here are such utter buffoons. There are dark currents running through the film, too, of course, and Lee doesn’t let them flow by unnoticed. But when you hear one character talking about black people being “shot down in the streets by white racist cops,” or saying, “They’re killing us like dogs,” you’d have to be terminally narcoleptic to miss the contemporary resonance, writes Kurt Loder.

View this article.

Bradenton, Florida, police officer Amy Schwartz was suspended for 100 hours without pay and ordered to go to counseling and re-training after she failed to respond with due urgency to a shooting. Schwartz was assigned by dispatch as the primary responding officer but did not activate her lights and siren, obeyed all speed limits, stopped for stop lights and even pulled to the side to allow another officer, who was running his lights and siren, to pass. She told internal affairs she does not use her lights and siren to respond to calls unless a fellow officer is down or has requested help.

Not long after fatally shooting an unarmed man, a Pennsylvania police officer reportedly admitted to a fellow cop at the scene that he “fucked up.”

South Whitehall Township Police Officer Jonathan Roselle was charged with involuntary manslaughter on Tuesday, less than two weeks after the July 28 shooting. The 33-year-old U.S. Army veteran had only been a cop for about six months when the shooting occurred.

Prior to the shooting, Roselle was monitoring traffic when a “hysterical and frantic” woman pulled up alongside his police car, according to Lehigh County District Attorney Jim Martin. The woman told Roselle that a man had attempted to break into her car. ABC News recounts what happened next:

Roselle then encountered a bleeding man walking on the street, and the man banged on his car and jumped on the hood, Martin said. After that, Roselle reported the incident over radio—saying that the man may have mental issues—and issued several commands for the man to get off the vehicle and step away.

Martin says the man—44-year-old Joseph Santos—started walking away but then turned around, refusing Roselle’s orders to get on the ground. According to Martin, Santos said, “Don’t do it,” before Roselle shot at him five times.

Santos was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Roselle, meanwhile, told at least one fellow officer at the scene that he “fucked up” and “didn’t know what to do,” Martin says.

According to the district attorney, there’s no reason to believe race played a factor. But he believes the shooting was still unjustified. “This was the act of a relatively inexperienced officer, who held a subjective fear for his own safety, but made a decision which objectively was unreasonable in light of the facts as they existed and appeared at the time he discharged his weapon and killed Mr. Santos,” Martin says.

“[Santos] was not running or rushing,” Martin adds in a statement. “He did not have anything visible in his hands; he was not clenching his fists; he did not present a threatening posture.”

Roselle’s attorney, on the other hand, says the “deadly force” his client used was “justified and appropriate.”

Roselle was released on bail and has been placed on paid leave by the South Whitehall Township Police Department. As I noted yesterday, that’s not a particularly surprising short-term fate, given that getting paid not to work is a pretty common “consequence” for officers involved in controversial shootings.

What is surprising is that Roselle was charged so quickly. In fact, just 90 police officers involved in fatal shootings have faced criminal charges since 2005, according to Bowling Green State University professor Phil Stinson (there have been 613 officer-involved fatal shootings so far in 2018 alone). Of those 90, just 32 have actually been convicted. Roughly half of those convictions resulted from guilty pleas.