Tag: hit&run

Supporters of America’s long war on drugs said marijuana legalization would create disaster. Has it? No, writes John Stossel.

In California, people that Stossel interviewed said legalization made the streets safer. “It’s cleaned up the corner,” said one woman. Marijuana stores “have a lot of security (and) pay attention to who’s on the sidewalk.”

Sounds good.

View this article.

Check out Peter Bagge’s latest comic on the bad incentives that face police officers.

View this article.

In St. Augustine, Florida, parking on city streets is free on federal holidays. So a number of people doing their last-minute Christmas shopping on Dec. 24 were surprised to come out of the store and find tickets on their vehicles. The city manager says staff had already left for holiday vacations when President Donald Trump signed an executive order making Dec. 24 a federal holiday, so it wasn’t communicated to parking enforcement officers that parking should be free that day. Officials say they are working to correct the problem.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) offered a brief response to President Donald Trump’s Oval Office address on border security. They emphasized the disruption caused by the current shutdown while arguing for reopening the government without any wall funding.

“President Trump has chosen to hold hostage critical services for the health, safety, and wellbeing of the American people and withhold the paychecks of 800,000 innocent workers across the nation,” said Pelosi. She also said Trump must stop “manufacturing a crisis and reopen the government.”

“Make no mistake, Democrats and the president want stronger border security, however we sharply disagree with the president about the way to do it,” added Schumer, who accused Trump of governing by trantrum. “How do we untangle this mess? Separate the shutdown from arguments over border security.”

Both Democrats also did their best to lay the blame for the shutdown on Trump’s insistence on funding a border wall, something Pelosi descibed as an “obsession.” The two also brought up Trump’s oft-made promise that it would be Mexico, not American taxpayers, paying for any border wall.

Schumer and Pelosi also stressed their support for a form of border security that did not include wall funding, with Pelosi saying there was a need for additional technology and personnel that would “secure our borders while honoring our values.”

Their position is unlikely to sway Trump, who has repeatedly pledged to oppose any effort to reopen the federal government that does not include $5.7 billion for the construction of a border wall. Postponing discussion on wall funding till a later date would both be a humiliating defeat for the president and eliminate whatever leverage the ongoing shutdown gives him to press for increased border spending.

This all means that the current federal government shutdown, now in its 18th day, will likely continue for the foreseeable future.

During his nationally televised Oval Office address Tuesday night, President Donald Trump made the case for more immigration control. Central to his argument was that drugs are flowing into the United States across the southern border. His favored solution: Build the wall.

There’s just one problem. Building a wall would do very little to stop drugs from coming into the country. “Our southern border is a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs, including meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl,” Trump said. “Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90 percent of which floods across from our southern border.”

He’s not completely wrong: As The New York Times notes (citing a 2017 National Drug Threat Assessment), most of the heroin smuggled into the country does come in via the southern border with Mexico.

But it’s not coming in the knapsacks of border jumpers. “For the first 11 months of the 2018 fiscal year, 90 percent of the heroin intercepted at the border and 88 percent of the cocaine, was captured at a legal port of entry rather than between those ports,” USA Today explains, citing Customs and Border Protection data.

Even if the wall gets built, legal ports of entry aren’t going away. Most smugglers aren’t trying to hop across in the first place; they’re trying to sneak contraband by manned border posts. A border wall likely won’t change this.

It’s also worth noting that, according to the Times, most black market fentanyl comes into the U.S. from China. As Trump’s own opioid commission reported in November 2017: “We are losing this fight [against fentanyl] predominately through China.”

Trump’s attempt rally support for his border wall by warning of the drugs flowing into the country isn’t anything new. He famously kicked off his 2016 campaign by claiming Mexican immigrants were “bringing drugs” into the country.

Conflating the war on illegal immigration with the war on drugs creates a perfect storm for the violation of civil liberties and the expenditure of huge amounts of money, and all for very little gain. Building a wall would involve, among other things, spending tens of billions of dollars and seizing private property. Yet it’s an ineffective solution for keeping out both the illegal immigrants and the drugs the president hopes to block.

Author, activist, and sex worker Maggie McNeill has been suspended from Twitter for an obviously hyperbolic comment about harming the White House. Her offense? McNeill responded to a tweet saying furloughed government employees working without pay should go on strike with: “They should. And burn the White House down.”

On Tuesday, McNeill (who has contributed to Reason) was informed by Twitter that she had violated its policy against “targeted harassment” and “abusive behavior” and would receive a one-week suspension.

“‘Targeted harassment’ of a government building of the most powerful Empire on Earth?’ McNeill quipped when asked about the suspension. “I had no idea I was so formidable.”

McNeill called Twitter’s decision “stupid and hilarious at the same time.”

The debacle calls to mind one that Reason found itself in a few years back, after a commenter’s quite clearly facetious remark about running a federal judge through a woodchipper was deemed grounds for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate, demand Reason commenter data, and bar Reason staffers from talking about any of it.

Thankfully, Twitter can’t suppress speech through state force. But increasing skittishness by it and other social platforms means that a whole lot of hyperbole, humor, sarcasm, and otherwise benign banter is being caught up in content-moderation filters.

If a growing cadre of conservative and liberal forces gets there way, any missteps by digital platofrms could lead to serious criminal charges and costly civil cases. So we can expect to see silly suspensions like this start to get worse before or if they ever get any better.

Perhaps now is a good time to follow podcaster and reporter Thaddeus Russell’s advice: “Drop what you’re doing and contribute whatever you can to alternative social media spaces, before it’s too late.”

Newly minted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) will soon fire Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel over his mishandling of the police response to the Parkland shooting in February 2018.

DeSantis’s office has not confirmed these plans, but people with knowledge of the situation told The Miami Herald that Israel’s days were numbered. The sheriff plans to fight the matter in court, and will request a trial before the Florida state senate. Presumably, that body’s Republican majority will back DeSantis and give Israel the boot.

The firing would be long overdue. Israel’s tenure was marked by incompetence, corruption, and gross mismanagement. While he is not responsible for the actions of Nikolas Cruz, the deranged teenager who killed 17 of his former classmates and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last year, nor is he directly responsible for his deputies’ failure to respond properly, Israel was ultimately the man in charge. His office staff was poorly trained, their equipment malfunctioned, and their security protocols failed, according to the state’s 458-page report on the shooting.

One might have expected a sheriff who presided over such a disaster—a disaster very possibly made worse by his office’s myriad failures—to come across as apologetic, or at the very least humbled. But Israel has remained defiantly confident. In fact, he called his own leadership “amazing,” and gave the following non-response when CNN’s Jake Tapper asked him if he would have done anything differently: “If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, O.J. Simpson would still be in the record books.”

Israel’s allies are attempting to paint any attempt to fire him as a political move, since DeSantis is a Republican and Israel is a Democrat. But firing him is the right move regardless of party affiliation. Israel is a bad sheriff, and the sooner he’s gone, the better.

Several people have died in national parks since the government shutdown began. These deaths are tragic. Yet, several news outlets have insinuated that President Trump’s prompting of the shutdown is somehow related. Statistics, however, show that it is disingenuous to link these deaths so closely to the shutdown.

A partial shutdown began in the days leading up to Christmas, spurned by Trump’s insistence that Congress add $5 billion in spending for his border wall. Though national parks and memorials remained closed during shutdowns in past administrations (leading to heated debate during the Obama presidency), national parks have remained open this time around—though some have since made the decision to close.

A few days ago, outlets including NBC News and The Washington Post published articles insinuating that at least three deaths were due in some part to the government shutdown. Four additional deaths were cited, but officials believe them to be suicides. The articles cited a 14-year-old girl who fell to her death at Glen Canyon Recreation Area in Arizona, a man who died from injuries related to a fall at Yosemite National Park in California, and a woman killed by a falling tree at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which borders North Carolina and Tennessee.

The articles pointed to difficulties faced by emergency personnel in reaching some of the bodies. As for the direct impact that the shutdown had on the deaths, however, the articles barely touched on a connection. The Post, for example, wrote, “the deaths follow a decision by Trump administration officials to leave the scenic—but sometimes deadly—parks open even as the Interior Department has halted most of its operations.” NBC noted that the National Park Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment about such a correlation. Quotes from park officials, meanwhile, merely mentioned not having sufficient rangers to warn or guide visitors, the inconvenience of not having restroom maintenance, and needing crews to fix the roads before the summer season.

Following these reports, CNN released an article with quotes from Mike Litterst, who is the acting chief spokesperson of the National Park Service and its chief of public affairs. According to Litterst, an average of six deaths occur per week at national parks. The causes of such deaths, Litterst explained, include accidents as well as medical incidents, such as heart attacks. Furthermore, the number of average weekly deaths pales in comparison to the millions of weekly visitors to the parks. While there is a possibility that a lack of government employees or government funds may have played a part in some of the deaths that occurred since the shutdown began, it is just as likely, statistically speaking, that these deaths would have occured in any given week.

To the Post‘s credit, the six-death figure is cited in its report. Before giving too much credit, however, the figure does not appear until the third paragraph of the nearly 1,700-word article.

President Donald Trump will take eight minutes of your time this evening to talk about the slowly unfolding crisis at the southern border in Washington, D.C., as the government shutdown concludes its 18th day without any end in sight.

Will Trump declare the lack of a physical barrier along the United States’ border with Mexico to be a national emergency? Some of his top advisers reportedly say that’s not the plan—but, well, in this administration that only means so much. It’s also possible that Trump could use the occasion to flog the necessity of comprehensive immigration reform, boosting the chances that aide de camp Jared Kushner and Vice President Mike Pence can strike a deal they’ve reportedly been working to reach with Democrats in the House of Representatives.

Regardless of what Trump says tonight, though, his track record suggests there will be exaggerations aplenty—and probably a few outright lies—about his plans for a wall, how much it will cost, whether it will stop illegal immigrants from entering the country, and just how many of them there are here in the first place.

In an attempt to keep you ahead of the curve, here are a few important numbers—both real and fake—to know before Trump opens his yap tonight.

$5.7 billion. This is the most important number. It’s the amount of money the White House is currently asking Congress to appropriate for the construction of a “steel barrier” along the border. The price tag for Trump’s wall has changed quite a bit over the past three years. When running for president, of course, Trump promised that Mexico would pay for the wall. Last year, the White House sought $25 billion, then dropped the ask to $18 billion and eventually to $15 billion. Taxpayers should be thankful that Trump likely negotiated himself out of a much higher spending total, since Congress was willing to give Trump the full $25 billion last year in exchange for immigration reform—but the dealmaker-in-chief dismissed that plan as “massive amnesty.“

234 miles. That is the length of the steel barrier that the White House says could be built with $5.7 billion. That’s roughly 12 percent of the 1,950 mile land border with Mexico.

$24.3 million. This is the per-mile cost of the proposed steel barrier. Sure, that’s a lot less expensive, per mile, than building a subway in Manhattan, but it’s still pretty expensive. For comparison’s sake, it costs about $1.25 million to build a mile of four-lane highway (remember Infrastructure Week?). For an even better comparison, a four-mile stretch of border wall recently built in El Paso, Texas, cost $22 million total. Trump’s wall isn’t just coming up short, but it appears to be over cost already.

$59.8 billion. This is the estimated price tag for The Wall, according to Alex Nowrasteh, senior immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute. Nowrasteh reached that figure by allowing for a 50 percent cost overrun (a conservative estimate; the average government infrastructure project runs 3.3 times over-budget), and by assuming the Trump administration would eventually want to construct a barrier along the remaining 1,637 miles of Mexican border not covered by pedestrian fencing. This does not include maintenance costs.

6. That is the number of non-U.S. citizens listed on terror watch lists who were apprehended at the southern border since October of last year. Trump has repeatedly, and falsely, claimed that nearly 4,000 terrorists have been caught coming across the border in the past year. Almost all of these so-called “special interest aliens,” which includes plenty of people who are not suspected terrorists, were caught at airports and various other points of entry. For more on the Trump administration’s misleading rhetoric about terrorists pouring over the border from Mexico, read Matt Welch’s piece here.

235,000. This is the number of criminals that Trump has claimed have been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the past two years. It’s not exactly clear where this number is coming from—and it’s possible Trump is pulling it out of thin air. It wouldn’t be the first time that he’s done that. As The Washington Post‘s Salvador Rizzo explained yesterday, it seems like Trump is muddling together several different totals that can’t really be mixed together accurately. “If it’s a tally of ICE administrative arrests, he’s omitting that many of those are solely for immigration violations and not the dangerous crimes he portrays,” Rizzo observed. “Looking at charges and convictions does not give a total for ‘criminals,’ because one individual may be facing multiple charges, as ICE notes in its yearly reports.” And, of course, just because someone is arrested does not make that person a criminal.

67 percent. That is the estimated number of illegal immigrants who entered the United States legally and became illegal by overstaying their visas, according to data from the Center for Migration Studies. “A wall not only will do nothing to stop these people from entering, but it may actually incentivize more people to stick around without authorization,” wrote David Bier, an immigration policy analyst for the Cato Institute, in a 2018 Reason cover story.

2,000. That is the number of illegal border-crossers that Trump has claimed the Border Patrol apprehends every day “at a minimum.” During the fiscal year that ended on September 30, the Border Patrol reported 396,579 apprehensions. That’s a little over 1,000 per day, but it includes arrests made at airports and border checkpoints—not exclusively those caught trying to sneak over the border, as Trump has tried to imply.

1.6 million. This is the number of illegal immigrants apprehended at the southern border in 2000. That’s four times as many as were caught last year, but somehow this counts as a crisis now?

Several well-known academics wrote letters in support of Portland State University (PSU) philosophy professor Peter Boghossian, a co-author of the hoax “grievance studies” paper now facing academic misconduct charges.

As I reported on Monday, PSU administrators have claimed Boghossian’s efforts to trick academic journals into publishing fake studies violated institutional review board (IRB) protocols because he did not seek approval to carry out experiments on human subjects. Boghossian and his supporters—co-authors Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay among them—have protested that they didn’t need any such permission, and asking for it would have risked giving away the game.

To recap: Boghossian, Pluckrose, and Lindsay submitted hoax papers with social justice themes—animal sexuality, fat studies, etc.—to leftist academic journals in order to demonstrate that fake, jargon-filled treatises on oppression and intersectionality could easily pass for the real thing. By some measures, they were successful: Seven of the papers were approved for publication. But this little experiment has landed Boghossian—the only one of the three with an actual academic position—in hot water with PSU’s IRB, which determined that he conducted unethical research.

Boghossian has asked his defenders to write letters of support to PSU’s administration, and several prominent names have done so. Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of Our Nature, urged PSU not to seek revenge on Boghossian for raising legitimate questions.

“This strikes me (and every colleague I’ve spoken with) as an attempt to weaponize an important [principle] of academic ethics in order to punish a scholar for expressing an unpopular opinion,” wrote Pinker. “If scholars feel they have been subject to unfair criticism, they should explain why they think the critic is wrong. It should be beneath them to try to punish and silence him.”

The author Richard Dawkins used even stronger language, accusing PSU of seeking to punish satire.

“To pretend that this is a matter of publishing false data is so obviously ridiculous that one cannot help suspecting an ulterior motive,” wrote Dawkins.

And Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and leading thinker of the so-named Intellectual Dark Web, wrote that “any ‘academic misconduct’ that is occurring is being perpetrated by those who are raising and pursuing the allegations, and most certainly not on the part of Dr. Boghossian.”

In the last 24 hours, I’ve interacted with many scholars, academics, and higher education experts with a variety of opinions about PSU’s actions. Not all agree that the administration is in the wrong. Joel Christensen, an associate professor of classical studies at Brandeis University, told Inside Higher Ed that Boghossian “did commit academic fraud, by design, and that some professional sanctions might be warranted,” but he believed that such sanctions should not include termination. (That was in line with what Jeffrey Sachs, a lecturer at Acadia University, expressed to me when I asked him for comment on Monday.) Others have furiously debated whether the IRB would have been likely to authorize the project.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s Robert Shibley worries that Boghossian’s situation is evidence that IRBs in general have moved well beyond their original mandate, which was to protect test subjects from real abuse. The federal law requiring scientists to consult IRBs before gathering research dates to 1974, and was originally intended to prevent misconduct along the lines of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which researchers failed to give proper medical care to hundreds of black patients who had contracted the disease. According to Shibley:

Over time, the use of IRBs has become increasingly commonplace, and seemingly required, even for social science research or experiments that have a far less direct effect on the humans who might be involved. As Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger, a prominent critic of the current role of IRBs, has pointed out, even oral history projects and opinion poll research, which simply consist of asking people for their own stories or opinions, can be subject to change or simply forbidden by IRBs. (Oral history, at least, was relieved of this burden by federal regulatory changes that took effect just last year.)

Particularly when removed from the medical context, it becomes all too easy for some fundamental IRB rules—such as the requirement that studies be done only with the informed consent of all human participants—to fail to work well. As Lindsay and Pluckrose point out, the Grievance Studies Affair is one of these situations, as “it is impossible to conduct a valid quality assurance investigation, which this audit was, after informing those being audited that they’re under examination.” Assuming it’s correct to characterize the journal editors as subjects of an experiment who needed to be protected from its potential physical or psychological harm, the IRB process would at the very least have required that the authors inform all of the potential “subjects” that faked research papers were coming their way. Truly “informed” consent might have required rather more specificity than that. It doesn’t take a scientist (or a whole group of them on an IRB) to understand that such a restriction would make this particular research effort pointless, but PSU nevertheless determined that the research violated its rules and was worthy of discipline.

Shibley concluded his post with this observation: “When it comes to this type of research…it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that if the rules forbid it, it’s the rules, not the researchers, that have gone wrong.”