Tag: hit&run

Watching The Disaster Artist, James Franco’s new movie about the making of the wonderfully horrible cult film The Room, is not a lot unlike watching The Room itself. Especially if you’re watching it with a theater full of people who’ve seen that 2003 picture—perhaps many times more than once—and can shout out whole clumps of dialogue from it. At midnight screenings in major cities where the movie has been attracting devotees for more than a decade, footballs fly down the aisles and cheap plastic spoons fill the air, along with hooted echoes of the movie’s many deathless lines. (“You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” “I definitely have breast cancer.” “Hi doggy.”)

As written, produced and directed by its star, the entirely untalented Tommy Wiseau, The Room is an aggressively awful film. It has no redeeming virtues: Its plot, its dialogue, its performances, its wretched scene-blocking—all are very bad. And so The Disaster Artist, directed by its star, James Franco, immediately prompts comparison to Ed Wood, Tim Burton’s 1994 tribute to the creator of Glen or Glenda, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and many other entertainingly terrible movies. But Wood’s complete lack of talent (if not passion) was compounded by a paucity of money for making his films. Wiseau does not have this problem: Among the several mysteries surrounding the man (how old is he? What planet is he from?), the most intriguing is the source of his money, of which he has lots. And yet, as loaded as he may be, he still made a cruddy movie. Which makes him an even worse filmmaker than Ed Wood. Which is really, really saying something, writes Kurt Loder in his latest review for Reason.

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Facebook will open a second office and hire 500 more contractors to help it comply with a new German hate speech law requiring social media to remove illegal content within 24 hours. By the end of the year, Facebook will have 1,200 people in Germany reviewing the content of posts.

When a bullet from a gun in the hands of Jose Garcia-Zarate, a non-citizen in the U.S. who had been arrested and deported multiple times, ricocheted off the ground and killed sightseer Kate Steinle on a San Francisco pier in July 2015, it set off a national debate, which then-candidate Donald Trump inflamed, over the merits or demerits of certain cities’ policies of not actively enforcing federal U.S. immigration law or cooperating in handing over illegal immigrants to federal authorities.

If Garcia-Zarate had been deported again (he had already been five times) as federal law insisted he should have been (he had been in San Francisco city custody on a warrant regarding fleeing from an old marijuana charge from 1995, moved to them from federal custody for felony illegal re-entry to the U.S.) prior to Steinle’s being shot, went the argument, she would still be alive.

Today after six days of deliberation, a Superior Court jury in San Francisco acquitted Garcia-Zarate on murder, manslaughter, and assault charges, finding him guilty only on a lesser charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

That carries a minimum sentence of 16 months, according to this Courthouse News report by Dave Tartre. The maximum sentence he faces is three years, according to a detailed report on the outcome from Vivian Ho at the San Francisco Chronicle.

The jury seemed to have been convinced by defense arguments that Garcia-Zarate had no direct intention of firing the .40-caliber Sig Sauer pistol that he found that day on the waterfront, four days after it had been stolen from a U.S. Bureau of Land Management ranger’s car nearby.

The defense insisted, as per the Chronicle, that Garcia-Zarate, “who had a history of drug crimes but no record of violence, found the gun wrapped in a T-shirt or cloth under his seat on the pier just seconds before it discharged in his hands.” His public defenders insisted he “had never handled a gun and was scared by the noise, prompting him to fling the weapon into the bay, where a diver fished it out a day later.”

Assistant District Attorney Diana Garcia for the prosecution insisted in closing arguments that Garcia-Zarate was playing “his own secret game of Russian roulette.” The defense on the contrary painted the incident as pure accident, and the jury accepted that interpretation. Even the involuntary manslaughter charge would require the jury’s belief that he had been acting recklessly.

I wrote in July 2015 critiquing Rand Paul’s unlibertarian approach to the sanctuary city issue in the wake of Steinle’s death, noting that:

as Nick Gillespie pointed out last week, despite immigration restrictionist fantasies that illegal immigrants = crime wave, a sanctuary city such as San Francisco…has a lower murder rate than many comparable non-sanctuary cities. Much-touted increased deportations of “criminal immigrants” are much more often about violators of traffic laws, not laws against person or property. Higher rates of immigration do not equal higher rates of actual crime.

It’s curious for Rand Paul, or any Republican, to get outraged in this case that laws exist that, if more toughly enforced, could potentially have saved a life—even though in the staggeringly vast majority of cases enforcing deportation laws would save no lives but but merely bedevil or harm someone trying to peacefully live and sell his labor or services to others.

A selection of Reason TV videos on the facts about sanctuary cities can be found here, concluding that “New immigrants, including illegal immigrants, are less likely to commit violent or property crimes than U.S. citizens, and there’s little evidence that crime rates are higher in sanctuary cities than in non-sanctuary cities.”

It’s not yet a fait accompli, but Thursday was a good day for supporters of the GOP tax proposal. The bill, however, still doesn’t come close to paying for itself.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), considered a crucial swing vote on the measure, said he will support the bill. House leaders are reportedly preparing for a vote on Monday to go to a conference committee to iron out differences between their version of the tax bill (passed earlier this month) and the Senate bill. All that comes less than 24 hours after the first vote on the Senate tax bill—a motion to proceed to debate, a procedural step that’s been anything but simple on other major GOP initiatives this year—including a drama-free “aye” from all 52 Republican senators.

The only thing that slowed the tax bill’s momentum was a new analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation (a number-crunching cousin of the better-known Congressional Budget Office) showing, once again, that the GOP proposal will add about $1 trillion to the federal debt. This, even after accounting for increased economic growth from cutting corporate income taxes.

Here’s how the JCT spelled it out:

All of those minues show the one glaring flaw in the plan. Republicans mostly seem willing to ignore the defect, claiming increased economic growth will cancel out an estimated $1.4 trillion blow the plan will deal to the federal budget. The JCT report shows clearly that is not going to happen. Increased economic growth cancels out about $400 billion, leaving a $1 trillion shortfall.

That’s roughly in line with other estimates. When forecasted economic growth is factored in, the Republican proposal will cost about $500 billion, according to The Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank. A separate analysis by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania says the cost, including projected growth, will exceed $1.3 trillion.

Here’s a neat summary of various estimates, compiled by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which opposes the current tax plan because of how it will add to the debt.

Projections are tricky things, with lots of moving parts. No one knows for sure what dynamic effects the tax changes will have on the economy, or what outside factors could drive growth—or trigger a recession—in the coming years. There are, however, no estimates, even from Republican sources, showing that tax bill cuts would fully pay for themselves.

Instead, Republicans have responded to the estimates much the way Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) did today after the JCT analysis was released.

.@JohnCornyn tells me re: JCT score “I think it’s clearly wrong.” Says growth projections are too conservative

— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) November 30, 2017

In other words, close your eyes and wish really hard for the Economic Growth Fairy to make everything okay. It’s a vision that you’re tempted to believe in because it means you get all the benefits with none of the costs—which, in this case, are the tough political decisions about cutting spending—but it’s not one that tracks with the real world or the economic and political history of the last 30-plus years.

This isn’t new. It’s the same thinking that drove the passage of the Reagan tax cuts, properly understood as “tax deferrals,” since the debt has to be paid back someday, as National Review’s Kevin Williamson wrote in a memorable 2010 piece. The same thinking that drove the passage of the Bush tax cuts. Correcting this view, as Williamson wrote at the time, requires equating “spending” and “taxes” so that every dollar spent today means a dollar in taxes must be raised, either today or tomorrow.

Unfortunately, that’s not where we are right now.

When the Bush tax cuts passed in 2001, the nation’s debt-to-GDP ratio was 31 percent. Today, it’s 77 percent. And Congress is about to add another $1 trillion to future Americans’ tab.

Michael Eisen’s goal is to change the way scientific findings are disseminated. Most research papers today are locked behind paywalls, and access can cost hundreds of dollars per article. The general public, and most scientists, don’t have comprehensive access to the most up-to-date research, even though much of it is funded by U.S. taxpayers.

“It’s a completely ridiculous system,” says Eisen, an acclaimed biologist at UC Berkeley, an independent candidate for Senate in California running against Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D), and a co-founder of the Public Library of Science, or PLOS, which publishes some of the largest and most prestigious academic journals in the world. These publications stand out for another reason: They’re open access, meaning that anyone with an internet connection can read them for free.

PLOS seeks to break up the academic publishing cartel, and it’s a leading force in the so-called open science movement, which aims to give the public access to cutting-edge research and democratize scientific progress.

Click here for full text, a transcript, and downloadable versions.

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Criminal justice researchers are alarmed at missing data from the FBI’s latest annual crime report and say it will hamper efforts to study drug arrests and violent crime, two of the Trump administration’s biggest priorities.

The new outlet FiveThirtyEight first reported in October that the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) for 2016—the first year it was released under the Trump Administration—were missing many key fields from previous years. The report is the most comprehensive annual survey of crime in the U.S. and an invaluable tool for researchers and public policy experts.

In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and acting FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday, the Crime & Justice Research Alliance, a Washington, D.C. organization representing roughly 5,000 criminologists, urged the Justice Department and FBI to re-issue the report with the old data fields intact.

“The unnecessary and surprising removal of the majority of the data tables does not reflect the FBI’s stated commitment to meeting the needs of the users of these data,” the group wrote. “Given the administration’s public statements about addressing violent crime, victims’ rights, the opioid epidemic and terrorism, it is unfortunate that the 2016 report removes key data about these topic areas.”

According the organization, the removed data fields include such information as the relationship between homicide victims, their killers, and the circumstances of the crime. The removed fields, the group argues, will prevent researchers from gaining insight into family and intimate partner violence, as well as gang and drug-related homicides.

Also missing are data on arrests related to specific drug types, making it hard for researchers to track trends in law enforcement efforts to combat drugs such as heroin and opioids, a major focus of the Trump administration.

The Justice Department referred a request for comment to the FBI, which did not immediately respond.

This week, the White House announced it was appointing Jeffrey Anderson, a former political science professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy and fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, to head the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the federal agency tasked with collecting and analyzing national crime data.

In May, five former directors of the BJS sent a letter to Sessions urging him to appoint someone to head the agency who had “scientific skills; experience with federal statistical agencies; familiarity with BJS and its products; visibility in the nation’s statistical community.”

Anderson has no relevant experience in criminal justice statistics, although the White House did note in its announcement that he “co-created the Anderson and Hester Computer Rankings, which were part of the BCS formula to determine college football’s annual national championship matchup.”

A lawsuit accuses police in Euclid, Ohio, of mistaking a colostomy bag for a gun, pulling the bag’s owner out of his car, tasing him, and then maliciously charging him with obstructing official business, resisting arrest, and criminal trespass.

It took seven months before the charges against Lamar Wright were dropped, but don’t expect anyone to be punished for what he endured. Even if Wright prevails in his suit—via a jury or, more likely, through a settlement—the prosecutors who abetted the cops by dragging the charges out for more than half a year are highly unlikely to be held accountable themselves.

Wright says he pulled his rental car into a driveway to use his cell phone “safely” when two armed men approached him. After he realized they were plainclothes cops, he says he put his phone on his dashboard, and then one of the officers grabbed him by the arm through the window. The cop yelled at Wright to show his hands, then pulled him out of the car and tased him just as Wright was trying to explain his colostomy bag.

“I told you I got a bag on,” Wright yelled at the cop. “What’s a bag?” “A shit bag, man!”

The interaction was caught on body camera:

In his lawsuit, Wright claims he was not released from custody after posting bond, instead remaining in detention. He says he was taken to the county jail and searched with a full-body x-ray scanner and not released until four to five hours after posting bond. He also alleges the cops laughed at him being in pain.

“I filed this case to stand up against police brutality, and to stand with other victims of senseless attacks by officers from the Euclid Police Department. These officers’ illegal treatment of people in the city must stop,” Wright said in a statement. “We need justice for all the victims of the EPD.”

The Cleveland Scene notes two other recent police incidents in Euclid. One is the fatal police shooting of Luke Stewart, in which no charges were brought. (The family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit.) The other is a violent traffic arrest that did in fact lead to the firing of a police officer—an outcome that could lead to some hope here that, at the very least, some incompetent cops might be removed from their jobs.

Scene also provides a kicker: The department announced last week that it had won a AAA Platinum Award for community traffic safety.

• Rep. Nancy Pelosi, leader of the Democrats in the House, is now calling for Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) to resign over the sexual harassment claims leveled against him. Conyers was hospitalized overnight, reportedly for stress.
• Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) announced he was going to retire from Congress next year in the wake of stories about him sending nude selfies to women.
• Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) says he’s going to vote in favor of the GOP tax reform package.
• Legislation to recognize same-sex marriages under the law easily passed Australia’s Senate and heads to the lower house. If it passes, Australia will become the 26th country to legally recognize gay marriages.
• Prosecutors have dropped all charges against a Virginia mother who had put a recording device in her daughter’s backpack to try to find evidence she was being bullied at her elementary school. The mom faced felony wiretapping charges.
• Paul Manafort has agreed to an $11 million bail deal where he’ll put up four of the properties he owns as collateral to guarantee that he won’t skip out of the country to escape charges of money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent.
• Sources say the White House is planning to dump Rex Tillerson as secretary of state and replace him with current CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Then they may try to move Sen. Tom Cotton to replace Pompeo to run the CIA.
• Jim Nabors, better known as the actor who portrayed Gomer Pyle, died today at the age of 87.

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At the 48-hour mark of Reason’s annual webathon, you wonderful co-champions of “Free Minds and Free Markets” had made a whopping 380 gifts, worth a combined $56,000, far outpacing last year’s already robust haul. As that orange bar to the right keeps climbing, and as the value of your hoarded Bitcoin keeps spiking, please consider making even more libertarian journalism and commentary possible.

Won’t you please give a tax-deductible donation to Reason right around now?

OK, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room: In a year like 2017, with a presidency like Donald Trump’s, against a backdrop where anything that can be politicized probably already has been, and in a week like this damned week, many people are reacting to the news of the day/hour/minute with a lot of, shall we say, emotion.

I hope every senator who votes for this POS tax bill rots in Hell for all eternity. Trump will be there to greet them at the door.

— Bruce Bartlett (@BruceBartlett) November 30, 2017

Being at least half-human, we here at Reason are no exceptions to various strains of Derangement Syndrome. But we’re also mindful that our founding editor‘s first-issue promise was to deliver “logic, not legends,” while refusing “to smear the issues with irrelevancies and falsifications.” The magazine’s damn name is Reason (drink!). Imperfectly, and to the sporadic annoyance of even some of our oldest friends, we try to keep our heads clear of hate and our feet grounded in fact, particularly in moments when others have become completely unmoored.

Last week’s announcement by Federal Communications Chair Ajit Pai that “net neutrality” regulations will be on the chopping block this month, for example, was greeted with creepstalking of Pai’s children, at least one threat to kill a congressman and his family, and roughly a cajillion tweets like this (from a law/technology journalist, no less):

i’m still not sure ajit pai is a living breathing human being because I have yet to meet one that doesn’t like net neutrality ?

— women in general (@sarahjeong) November 22, 2017

We not only interrogated Pai and engaged in much explanatory chewing of the regulatory and technical issues underneath, but Ed Krayewski pointed out how a viral infographic from a Democratic congressman actually made the argument against his own side. If you wanted logic, not legends, about Pai’s move—even if you disagreed with it—Reason was your oasis.

The same has been true over President Donald Trump’s persistently misleading, inflammatory, and occasionally false statements having to do with Muslims, immigrants, and violence, particularly in the wake of terrorist attacks. When the president earlier this year warned, “You look at what happened last night in Sweden. Sweden! Who would believe this!” we commissioned a piece from actual Swede Johan Norberg (who had done such a brilliant job in 2016 debunking Bernie Sanders’ bass-ackward notions about Scandonomics), under the headline “Trump’s Fake News Attack on Sweden, Immigrants, and Crime.” Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey, in reaction to Trump’s assertion that the Islamic nature of terrorism was being underreported, looked at the actual research. “Do Muslims Commit Most U.S. Terrorist Attacks?” was the question in Bailey’s headline. The answer? “Nope. Not even close.”

Already, these two examples scramble the usual political tribes, but that’s a feature, not a bug. A quick tour of our hysteria-debunking headlines from the past year will give partisans whiplash, but not y’all:

“Gorsuch Is More Liberal Than Garland“

“No, the AHCA Doesn’t Make Rape a Preexisting Condition“

“The House Passes a Gun Measure Supported by the ACLU and Mental Health Advocates. Media Hysteria Ensues.“

“Anti-Trumpers Hyperventilate Over Nothingburger Story About U.S. Ambassadors Leaving After Inauguration Day“

“Seniors Won’t Starve if Meals on Wheels Loses Government Grants“

“No, the Solar Eclipse Will Not Cause a Spike in Sex Trafficking“

And so on. As we try reminding people, then and now, the boy who keeps crying wolf eventually stops being listened to. Which is unhelpful when the wolf shows up. Speaking of which, one of the side benefits of trying to fend off our own inner hysteric is that we can treat issues and political personalities on a case-by-case basis, rather than working our way back from a conclusion. So it is that consecutive covers of the magazine can have a persuasive case against Trump’s signature campaign issue of building a wall, and a breakdown of the president’s potentially revolutionary deregulatory agenda. As CBS News anchor John Dickerson told, uh, Charlie Rose earlier this year about the latter story,

[I]f the FDA starts changing the way in which they evaluate new drugs, that is a big deal….The people [Trump] has named are changing things in a way that they are going largely unnoticed. And [it] is going to make a real change in things that really affect people, and that`s another big thing that he has accomplished even though he may not even cite that as the things he has accomplished. It is quite, you know, when Reason magazine can give him credit for being a real deregulating president because of the people he has named, that is a surprise: Reason was not a big fan of the president when he was a candidate.

Look, we have biases and strong opinions. (Mine toward the president has not improved much since my original assessment.) But unlike 99.9 percent of media outlets you read, we actually show you who our staffers and contributors plan to vote for every four years, including how they mentally approach the task (or in Katherine Mangu-Ward’s case, don’t). Honest journalism relies on and champions transparency; we actually believe that stuff begins in the home.

Every day we’re out here correcting media misnomers, advocating core principles even/especially when they have gone out of political favor, and trying to come up with our own crude systems for navigating this weird new political world. It’s a journey, not a destination. Won’t you take it with us?

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Will it be possible someday to tweak your mood with a machine? And if such mood organs ever do appear, will it be ethical to use them?

This month’s Society for Neuroscience conference featured two teams of researchers who want to use brain-machine interfaces to treat mood disorders. One group, based at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, recorded the brain activity of six people who’d had electrodes implanted in their heads as a treatment for epilepsy. The scientists then correlated the subjects’ brain activity with their reported moods. “By comparing the two types of information, the researchers could create an algorithm to ‘decode’ that person’s changing moods from their brain activity,” reports Nature. Once the neural pattern for an upbeat mood has been identified, the researchers want to see whether implanted electrodes could stimulate a subject’s brain cells in a way that reproduces that sunny mood.

The Columbia University neuroscientist Christine Denny has already achieved just that result in mice. Denny is able to record the neural pattern of a mouse that feels safe and is in an apparently good mood. When she puts the mouse into a situation where it feels fearful, Denny replays the neural pattern and the mouse engages in behaviors that suggest that it is remembering its earlier feeling of being safe and happy.

The other mood-machine team at the meeting is mapping the brain activity associated with different behaviors, such as concentration and empathy. Based on these neural maps, the researchers, based at Massachusetts General Hospital, have developed algorithms designed to guide the application of electrical pulses in subjects’ brains. The goal is to improve their performance on test tasks, such as identifying emotions on faces. “The researchers found that delivering electrical pulses to areas of the brain involved in decision-making and emotion significantly improved the performance of test participants,” reports Nature.

Both teams ultimately want to learn how to stimulate the brain without having to implant electrodes. The machine-brain interfaces being developed Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk’s Neuralink startup may be an appropriate model.

Both teams’ work is being funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. One salutary goal of such research would be to use machine-brain interfaces to lift the mental burden of veterans and active soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. On the other hand, it is not too far a stretch to imagine the military using the technology to dampen the neural patterns for empathy and fear.

Nature also cites the concerns of Baylor College of Medicine psychiatrist Wayne Goodman, who worries about “overcorrecting emotions to create extreme happiness that overwhelms all other feelings.” This fear is reminescent of “wireheading,” a phenomenon in Larry Niven’s Known Space science-fiction stories where people use electronic brain implans to stimulate the pleasure centers of their brains.

Niven was inspired by the work of psychologists James Olds and Peter Milner, who in the 1950s discovered the mammalian pleasure center by implanting electrodes into the brains of rats. The rats could activate the electrodes by pushing a lever. “Some rats would self-stimulate as often as 2000 times per hour for 24 hours, to the exclusion of all other activities. They had to be unhooked from the apparatus to prevent death by self-starvation,” notes HuffPost.

It is entirely appropriate to be on alert for governments misusing machine-brain interface technologies to manipulate people. But when it comes to people voluntarily altering their own minds, the authorities should butt out. If it is ethical to use neuropharmaceuticals to treat depression or anxiety, surely it is also acceptable to use a machine-brain interface to accomplish the same therapeutic goals more effectively.