Category: reason

As dockless, electric scooters rise in popularity across America, the backlash against them has grown increasingly hysterical. Witness a new class action lawsuit accusing Lime, Bird, and other scooter rental companies of “neglect,” “abetting assault,” and inciting “civil unrest” in the greater Los Angeles area.

“While acting under the guise of the commendable goals of furthering personal freedom and mobility and protecting the environment, the defendants…are endangering the health, safety, and welfare of riders, pedestrians, and the general public,” reads the complaint, filed by personal injury law firm McGee, Leher, & Associates last week.

The firm is representing eight plaintiffs, all of whom claim to have been injured in some fashion by electric scooters that first appeared on Los Angeles area streets late last year.

This includes Andrea Rosenthal, an arthritic, who was unable to park in a handicapped spot thanks to someone’s careless placement of an electric scooter.

Worse off still is Tina Ogata who tripped over not one, not two, but three Lime scooters left on the sidewalk, resulting in a broken left wrist and ring finger. (The complaint does not specify if Ogata tripped over all three scooters at once, or rather suffered a series of falls a la Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes.)

Another plaintiff, Natasa Kojic reports being hit from behind by a Bird scooter rider, suffering “injuries to her left big-toe, right wrist, and left knee.”

Then there’s David “Davy Rocks” Petersen. The 62-year-old street performer was reportedly dancing in a gladiator’s outfit near the Santa Monica pier when he was struck from behind by a man riding a Bird scooter, resulting in a broken arm and torn muscle which required surgery.

“My arm is never going to be the same, not to mention the five-inch-long scar it’s got now,” Petersen told the Washington Post. “If Bird is going to profit off the human meat grinder they’ve created in Santa Monica, they should be held responsible for the suffering they’ve caused.”

This all amounts to negligence on behalf of Bird and Lime, according to the complaint, which accuses the companies of offering insufficient safety instruction to riders. The lawsuit also claims Bird and Lime are abetting assault for failing to stop their customers from crashing scooters into pedestrians.

The class action suit also dings the companies for inciting “civil unrest,” noting that some individuals have thrown the scooters into the sea, lit them on fire, or buried them in the sands of California’s beaches.

In return for all the evils dockless scooter companies have wrought, these plaintiffs are demanding a unspecified amount of monetary compensation, and a cessation of the two companies’ scooter operations.

In response to the lawsuit, both Lime and Bird stressed their commitment to safety.

“While we don’t comment on pending litigation, safety has always been at the very core of everything we do at Lime as is our mission of reducing cars from city streets and making them safer and greener for pedestrians, bike and scooter riders alike,” reads a statement from the company.

“Class action attorneys with a real interest in improving transportation safety should be focused on reducing the 40,000 deaths caused by cars every year in the U.S.,” reads a statement from Bird. “Shared e-scooters are already replacing millions of short car trips and the pollution that comes with them.”

It is of course true that auto travel is by far the most dangerous mode of transportation in America today, although that too is mercifully getting safer. There were roughly 37,000 auto fatalities last year. That’s compared to only two reported deaths of scooter riders since the vehicles first started appearing on city streets, one in Washington D.C., the other in Dallas.

The Washington Post‘s write up of D.C.’s first scooter death—the result of a rider being struck an SUV—noted that there had been 25 other transportation fatalities in 2017 in the District, including nine pedestrians, five motorcyclists, three bicyclists, seven motorists or car passengers, and one driver of an ATV.

The fact is that all modes of transportation are going to bring with them some level of risk with them, even something as simple as walking. The more electric scooters are around, the more comfortable riders will get with the vehicles, and the more pedestrians and drivers will learn how to interact with them.

This won’t stop all accidents, injuries, or even deaths, and it goes without saying that scooter pilots who cause harm to pedestrians should be held accountable. But trying to hold the scooter companies themselves responsible for all harmful uses of their vehicles, not to mention trying to get them shut down entirely, is an overreaction and one that would set a dangerous precedent for other transportation services.

Tennessee resident Calvin Bryant is serving a 17-year prison sentence for a first-time drug offense under the state’s draconian drug laws. There’s a good chance he would have served less time if he had committed second-degree murder or rape.

It’s been 10 years since Bryant was arrested at age 22 for selling drugs to a police informant. Last week, Bryant, backed by supporters—family, friends, criminal justice groups, members of the Nashville City Council, and even one of the prosecutors who put him behind bars—filed a clemency petition to Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, his last hope for early release.

The petition say he is perhaps the only first-time offender in Nashville history, and possibly the state, to receive such a lengthy mandatory sentence under Tennessee’s harsh Drug-Free School Zone Act.

“Mr. Bryant’s vastly disproportionate and possibly unparalleled sentence resulted from a toxic combination of harsh mandatory minimum sentencing, race, poverty and fatally arbitrary enforcement,” Daniel Horwitz, Bryant’s attorney, wrote in the clemency petition to Haslam.

Bryant was once a college student, well-liked in his community, and a former high school football standout who dreamed of going pro in the NFL. Reason reported on Bryant’s case last year:

Police arrested Bryant in 2008 for selling 320 pills, mostly ecstasy, out of his Nashville apartment to a confidential informant who’d been bugging him. Tennessee treats this as a serious offense under any circumstances: Normally he would have faced at least two and a half years in prison. But because Bryant lived in a housing project within 1,000 feet of an elementary school—roughly three city blocks—his sentence was automatically enhanced under Tennessee’s drug-free school zone laws to the same category as rape or second-degree murder.

Indeed, as someone with no prior adult criminal record, Bryant would have been eligible for release earlier if he’d committed one of those violent felonies.

The police informant who pressured Bryant into selling him the pills, a former family friend, had 39 previous convictions on his record. The informant received $1,000 for his work, according to a profile of Bryant by FAMM, an advocacy group that opposes mandatory minimum sentences

Bryant’s first trial resulted in a hung jury, but at his retrial, he was found guilty and sentenced to 17 years in prison, 15 of which were mandatory.

Since Bryant’s incarceration, his father has died, and his mother, who suffers from a number of medical ailments, says she has been left without a full-time caregiver.

Bryant is just one of hundreds of Tennessee inmates serving inflated sentences because of the state’s harsh drug-free school zone laws. As a 2017 Reason investigation showed, those school zones cover wide swaths of urban areas—27 percent of Nashville, for instance—and apply day or night, indoors or outdoors, even when school is not in session. And drug-free school zone offenses, according to interviews with prosecutors and defense attorneys, almost never involve actual sales of drugs to minors. When prosecutors charge a defendant with a drug-free school zone offense, it automatically enhances the felony level, turning low-level felonies into long, mandatory prison sentences that rival those of the worst crimes.

Civil liberties and criminal justice advocates argue that the large radius of these zones create overlapping “superzones” that blanket urban areas, especially poor and minority neighborhoods. Because Tennessee’s drug-free zones include day cares, libraries, and parks, it’s almost impossible to escape them in some neighborhoods. Several states have reformed their school zone laws in recent years to reduce their size and scope, but although the Tennessee legislature has considered several such bills, none of them have been passed.

Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk, whose jurisdiction includes Nashville, took office in 2014 and adopted a policy of not charging school zone offenses where no children were involved, but that was well after Bryant was arrested, charged, and sentenced.

Even one of the prosecutors who sent Bryant to prison, Rob McGuire, now says Bryant should be released.

“I fail to see how an additional six years of incarceration will improve Mr. Bryant’s amenability to correction or would be required to maintain public safety,” McGuire wrote in a letter accompanying Bryant’s petition. “I additionally fail to see how his release at a time earlier than 2023—and after over nine years of incarceration—will deprecate the seriousness of the offense for which he was convicted or significantly imperil the public safety.”

Late last year, a judge rejected a petition for relief that argued Bryant’s sentence was cruel and unusual under the Eighth Amendment. However, the judge acknowledged the punitiveness of the sentence and suggested Bryant file the petition for clemency.

“While the Court is of the opinion that it does not have legal authority to grant the Petitioner relief, the Court also feels it necessary to note that in spite of this finding, the Court agrees with the basic argument of his petition—that his sentence can be viewed as harsh,” the judge wrote.

Haslam is now essentially Bryant’s last hope for an early release.

“We are optimistic that Governor Haslam will right this grievous wrong,” Horwitz says in a statement to Reason. “As the broad coalition of support for Calvin’s clemency campaign reflects, there is simply no circumstance in which it makes sense to punish a first-time, non-violent offender more harshly than a rapist or a murderer.”

Haslam’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The 2016 election of Donald Trump to the presidency caused a quarter of surveyed college students to report systems of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to The Daily Mail’s characterization of a new study on the subject.

The author of that study, Melissa Hagan of San Francisco State University, disputes this framing, however. Having reviewed the study myself, I tend to agree with the author that the media is overemphasizing the degree to which it confirms the triggered snowflake moniker for young people. Some were stressed by Trump’s win, but to call them “traumatized” is to deploy spin.

The problem lies with The Daily Mail‘s incorrect assumption that the surveyed students—just under 800 individuals enrolled in psychology courses at Arizona State University—self-reported their feelings. But in fact, as the study makes clear, the participants merely answered questions about their levels of stress in the wake of Trump’s presidential ascendancy (three months after the fact), and the study’s authors tallied up the results. They found that about one in four students “met criteria for clinically significant symptoms.” This was noteworthy because “elevated symptoms of event-related stress are predictive of future distress and subsequent PTSD diagnoses,” according to the study.

It may be concerning that many students were so emotionally ill-equipped to deal with Trump becoming president. But these respondents did not claim to be suffering from trauma or PTSD; rather, the study’s authors placed them in a high risk category based on their responses.

“The students were not asked if they were traumatized and they were not asked if they experienced a traumatic event,” Hagan wrote in an email to Reason. “A ‘trauma’ is clinically defined as an event that involves exposure to death or actual or threatened experiences of physical harm or sexual assault.”

In my experience covering student protests, college-aged activists are too quick to cite mental health problems as a symptom of their brave resistance to whatever is happening in national politics. The best example of this phenomenon was a 2015 article in the Brown Daily Herald, concerning Brown University students’ whose political activities had reduced them to state of suicidal despair.

I suspect that many students overstate their anguish, and mistake garden-variety stress as a kind of serious trauma stemming from the inequities they perceive in the world. Life is undoubtedly hard, and the wokest of the young activists seem woefully unprepared to process this. But Hagan’s study doesn’t confirm the stereotype in the obvious way The Daily Mail reported. That a significant minority of students are somewhat stressed out a few months after the election—maybe because of Trump, maybe for other reasons—isn’t such a shocking revelation.

Lies, lies, and more lies about caravan of Central American refugees. America has a process in place for handling those fleeing from authoritarian, war-torn, crime-wrecked, and disaster-devastated countries. Many such individuals from Central America—including a lot of desperate, desolate, and powerless women and children—are now seeking to avail themselves of this process by showing up at specified U.S.-Mexico border spots to officially apply for asylum. For some reason, this terrifies Republicans.

Or at least they’re pretending to be terrified. Most folks in the “migrant caravan” coming up from Central America are following the rules we set, which should ostensibly make it more difficult for folks to pull the “we don’t hate Hispanics, we just don’t want them in the country illegally” shtick.

But President Trump and his acolytes have sidestepped this by simply lying, repeatedly, about our southern neighbors seeking refuge in the U.S. To hear Trump and company tell it, the caravan is basically all MS-13 gang members, brown men seeking to rape white women, and the occasional member of ISIS who came all the way over from the Middle East to get in on this caravan thing.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s 100 percent accurate,” a Trump official told The Daily Beast. “This is the play.”

In one particularly disgusting spectacle, a Fox News segment on the caravan featured an anchor hiding in bushes until he could ambush a boat containing a (non-caravan) migrant family trying to secretly cross into the U.S. “We seem to have thwarted this attempt,” the anchor boasts before interviewing a woman about why she was doing this. She says she can’t find work in Honduras and criminals keep stealing her money so she was heading to the U.S. to find a job. Perhaps realizing that preventing this doesn’t exactly make him the hero, the anchor hastily adds that “they’re not all women and children” coming here peacefully.

Others have resorted to using old images of violence and attributing them to migrant attacks.

A photo of bloodied law enforcement officers from 2012 was used to make false claims about the migrant caravan. Here’s Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, helping spread it: https://t.co/03omMOnwPS pic.twitter.com/2bqji6TwwH

— Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) October 23, 2018

No proof, no problem. Trump admitted Tuesday that he has “no proof” the migrant caravan had been infiltrated by ISIS, a claims he’s been making repeatedly over the past week along with claims that these evil hordes were being funded by U.S. Democrats.

The ISIS lie initially came from Judicial Watch, which twisted Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales’ statement that his administration had deported around 100 ISIS members since he took office in 2016 into a claim that these terrorists were marching north into America as part of the migrant caravan.

Department of if-only: For libertarians, there are at least two frustrating threads in all this panic and hoopla. First, there are the folks who act like immigration laws and national boundaries are immutable precepts handed down from God, and that anyone who transgresses against them is morally wrong and depraved, instead of just rejecting the arbitrary policy and geography decisions that have heretofore destined them to misery.

We could just let them in legally. There, problem solved! https://t.co/kjEHtvXELc

— (((The Alex Nowrasteh))) (@AlexNowrasteh) October 24, 2018

Second, there’s the Trump administration insistence that Democrats are responsible for migrants heading here because Democrats support “open borders.” We have yet to have a single Democratic president, U.S. senator or representative, or party higher-up come out in favor of anything close to an open borders policy, and many of the immigration policies people on the left now object to under Trump are continuations of Obama-era policies.

FOLLOW UP

But what about the killing itself? If nothing else, President Trump objects to how bad a job the Saudis did at planning and then hiding their hand in Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal murder.

Full Trump quote on Saudi killing of Khashoggi:

“They had a very bad original concept. It was carried out poorly and the cover-up was one of the worst cover-ups in the history of cover-ups. Very simple. Bad deal, should have never been thought of. Somebody really messed up.”

— Jordan Fabian (@Jordanfabian) October 23, 2018

FREE MARKETS

Houston reaches a compromise on sex robots.

“The ban prohibits the use of a sex robot at a business, but does not prevent the sales of the robots.”

…………………… https://t.co/1TqYXSsE5r

— Shoshana Weissmann, Regulatory Reform Muse (@senatorshoshana) October 23, 2018

QUICK HITS

• Secret Service are investigating a suspicious package, thought to be an explosive, left outside Bill and Hillary Clinton’s home.
• Amazon has reportedly been shopping its facial-recognition software to federal immigration agents.
• Here’s what Trump’s trade war is doing to American companies.
• Dungeons & Dragons art is “finally getting the respect it deserves.”
• Sex-segregated support for Democrats versus Republicans is widening:

Gooood morning! There are 13 days until the midterms, and as of now this election has the largest gender gap since 1958. @alexi and @StefWKight have the details for you —> America, 2018: Gender gaps, gender wars https://t.co/KjSk0XIxSH pic.twitter.com/h9W7rsjmP5

— Haley Britzky (@halbritz) October 24, 2018

Will you be able to retire? Maybe not.

Will your state pay what its politicians promised? Almost certainly not.

Politicians in Connecticut, New Jersey, and Illinois are especially irresponsible when it comes to not funding pension plans, writes John Stossel, but most every municipality has promised more than it will have.

View this article.

It turns out that when you legalize marijuana, a lot of people show up to buy it. That development seemed to surprise cannabis controllers in Canada, where shortages were reported almost immediately after legal recreational sales began last week.

In several other respects, however, Canada is handling the transition from prohibition to regulation better than the United States. Canadians seem to have learned a few things from American mistakes, Jacob Sullum says, and we in turn can learn from their successes.

View this article

On the heels of a draconian border crackdown and interior deportation raids, President Donald Trump has quietly opened another front in his war on immigration. This time, he’s going after authorized immigrants.

After failing to get Congress to institute the 40 percent cut in legal immigration he sought, Trump is trying to achieve administratively what he couldn’t legislatively—by wrapping each legal immigration category in red tape and handing his bureaucrats sweeping powers to deny applications for the flimsiest of reasons.

It’s working. A recent Washington Post analysis found that the total number of people receiving visas to live in the country is on pace to drop 12 percent in just the first two years of the Trump presidency, writes Shikia Dalmia.

View this article.

The Atlanta City Council has agreed to pay $1.2 million to settle a lawsuit brought by former fire chief Kelvin Cochran, who was fired after after writing a book in which he compared homosexuality to bestiality. Cochran said he was fired for his religious beliefs. Then-mayor Kasim Reed had questioned Cochran’s ability to lead gay and lesbian firefighters. But a city investigation found no evidence Cochran had discriminated against anyone or that his religious beliefs affected the fire department.

The 7,000-person strong caravan of Central American immigrants snaking through Mexico on its way into the United States is causing right-wing media to lose its damn mind. Witness this shocking display from Fox News reporter Griff Jenkins, who spent the latter half of a segment on the caravan literally hiding in the bushes along the U.S.-Mexico border in hopes of stopping illegal immigrants from entering the United States.

FOX NEWS ALERT: Migrant caravan grows to a mile long as it heads straight for the U.S.-Mexico border | @GriffJenkins pic.twitter.com/3ZIH6Ubsk5

— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) October 23, 2018

“Were you trying to cross into America illegally?” shouts Jenkins when he spots one family that had been trying to paddle across the Rio Grande.

Next we see the same family on the American side of the river, being escorted by a Border Patrol agent. The tactful Jenkins uses this opportunity to shout a few more questions at the family before they disappear into a detention facility.

“Can you tell me why you came illegally?” he asks one woman.

“The situation of Honduras,” she eventually responds. When asked by Jenkins what the conditions are like in Honduras, she says “you can not have work there because the criminals will always get your money.”

Fortunately, Jenkins was able to stop this woman from entering the United States, where she might have been able to find employment and refuge from criminal gangs.

And lest one take the wrong message from the segment, Jenkins closes by reminding those watching at home that “they’re not all women and children,” mentioning that a murder suspect was also caught at the border two days before.

Just weeks after President Donald Trump took office, Ford Motor Company flattered the jobs-obsessed chief executive with the announcement that it would invest $850 million to upgrade a Michigan plant amid plans to bring production of two pick-up trucks, the Ford Ranger and the Ford Bronco, back to the United States.

The plans were already in place before Trump was elected, but that didn’t matter much to Trump. “Big announcement by Ford today,” Trump tweeted on March 28, 2017. “Car companies coming back to U.S. JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!”

Less than a year later, the Trump administration thanked Ford by announcing plans to impose 10 percent tariffs on imported aluminum and 25 percent tariffs on imported steel—tariffs that Ford executives say will cost the company more than $1 billion over two years.

The broad-based steel and aluminum tariffs imposed earlier this year have fallen off the front page amid the Trump administration’s continued escalation of a trade war that’s now more focused on Chinese-made items like electronics, home goods, and industrial imports. But this week brought a fresh reminder of the economic pain that the higher import taxes on steel and aluminum continue to cause for American industries that require those raw materials to build other products.

Companies that build cars, trucks, motorcycles, and other vehicles have been particularly hard hit—as investor information released this week by Ford, as well as heavy by machinery builder Caterpillar and motorbike-maker Polaris, demonstrate.

“U.S. steel costs are more than anywhere else in the world,” Joe Hinrichs, Ford’s president of global operations, told Bloomberg earlier this week.

After rocketing upwards in the months after Trump announced the new tariffs on steel, American-made steel has seen a mild drop in price but remains significantly more expensive than steel from other regions around the globe. The tariffs on imported steel have allowed domestic steelmakers to increase prices, and greater demand for domestic steel has further fueled the price increase (though there is still little to no evidence that American steelmakers are expanding production or hiring more workers).

Some American manufacturers are trying to avoid taking a hit on those higher prices by forcing suppliers to eat the cost of tariffs, though it’s not clear how successful that strategy can be over the long term. That’s what Polaris, a Minnesota-based maker of snowmobiles and motorbikes, has been trying to do, according to investor information reported this week by Bloomberg. Even so, the company estimates that tariffs have cost it about $40 million this year, and Polaris’ stock price has fallen by 31 percent since January.

Heavy machinery builder Caterpillar estimated this week that tariffs added $40 million to its raw materials cost, and announced that it would have to increase prices next year to keep up. The news caused the company’s stock to drop sharply Tuesday, and it has now lost about 30 percent of its value since January.

None of this should come as much of a surprise, since the one-and-only goal of tariffs is to increase the price of imported goods in order to give domestic producers a competitive advantage. The problem, of course, is that there are many, many more American businesses that consume steel and aluminum—and it’s those businesses that pay for the cost of tariffs, even if Trump continues to push the fallacy (as he did again in a tweet on Tuesday) that other countries somehow bear those costs.

Billions of dollars are, and will be, coming into United States coffers because of Tariffs. Great also for negotiations – if a country won’t give us a fair Trade Deal, we will institute Tariffs on them. Used or not, jobs and businesses will be created. U.S. respected again!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 23, 2018

Yes, billions of dollars are flowing into the Treasury because of tariffs. But as the latest earnings reports and comments from Ford, Polaris, and Caterpillar readily indicate, those dollars are being drained out of American companies—the very companies that are providing the blue collar jobs that Trump likes to tout.