Tag: hit&run

In the 1980s, a popular but untrue axiom held that domestic violence spiked drastically during the Super Bowl. In this century the myth got a modern makeover, with people now proclaiming—despite an utter lack of evidence—that the Super Bowl and similar sporting events are huge draws for human traffickers.

Now, like all things 2017, the urban legend is taking on an even more ridiculous iteration. Media outlets across the country are claiming that forced prostitution will peak with next Monday’s solar eclipse.

What, you might wonder, is the theory here? Will sex traffickers be emboldened by the extra bit of darkness? Do they get extra aggressive depending on lunar phases? Alas, this fearmongering is much more mundane. As with the Super Bowl story, the authorities are claiming that an influx of visitors to eclipse-viewing areas will also bring an influx of evildoers.

In Kentucky, Allyson Cox Taylor, head of the state’s Office of Child Abuse and Human Trafficking Prevention, suggested that “people who weren’t trafficking before may decide, there’s people in town that are anonymous, people we don’t know from another place, and this is an opportunity to make money.” Apparently she thinks finding and forcing others to do your bidding is something that people just up and decide one day to do on a whim.

In Bend, Oregon, several pre-eclipse seminars focused on how locals could spot the incoming sex traffickers, offering up a mix of the mundane and the absurd. “Among the signs,” warns the Associated Press (sigh), are “one man with a large number of girls, multiple guests in a hotel room, unsupervised children, a minor with multiple cell phones, a man who always speaks for the women he is with, or poker chips passing hands.”

Eclipse-pegged sex-trafficking warnings have also shown up in Oregon, in Ohio, in Wyoming, and in Nebraska.

Most of these manage to stop short of total paranoia, and at least acknowledge that the TV/movie version of sex trafficking, with strangers abducting women and children, almost never happens. But a few do suggest that sex traffickers will be lurking in the dark, waiting to snatch up children who get separated from their parents for even a few minutes.

(In the midst of all this, however, behold the rarest of rare occurences: TV news and local police in Portland teaming up to announce that “they have no reason to suspect there would be a surge in human sex trafficking in the metro area.”)

Even “the FBI is looking into the credibility of human trafficking threats during the eclipse,” according to WDRB in Kentucky.

“We’re going to have a lot of people come into Central Nebraska,” Tony Kavan of the Nebraska State Patrol told a local ABC affiliate. “Anytime there’s a large group or a large influx of people, statistically right now it looks like we can expect an increase in sex trafficking.”

There are in fact no statistics that support that contention, and there is only the flimiest of evidence that prostitution advertising more generally might increase around big public events. Mainstream media outlets from CBS News to The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, Sports Illustrated, and The Huffington Post (to name a few) have cautioned against this bunk theory. (As have we here.) And a 2011 report from The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women states unequivocably: “There is no evidence that large sporting events cause an increase in trafficking for prostitution.”

But why let reality get in the way of good government propaganda, exciting local news programming, and excuses to do vice stings?

Have you checked out the revamped website of The Fifth Column, your very favorite non-Reason podcast, starring Michael C. Moynihan, Kmele Foster, and me? Episode links—such as last week’s, featuring Thaddeus Russell and Radley Balko—now include topic breakouts, relevant book links, and other helpful information. Check it out!

This week’s episode is so hot off the presses that even I haven’t listened to the featured scrum at the end, when Kmele sits down with blue-vested Black Lives Matter activist and Campaign Zero co-founder DeRay McKesson for a frank exchange of views on race, policing, and “dangerous” ideas. (Read Reason’s interview with McKesson from 14 months ago.) The conversation before that is mostly an extended argument over President Donald Trump’s reactions to Charlottesville, with me talking about the ideological/comportmental aspects that Trumpism, the alt-right, and a big chunk of the broader right has in common; Kmele giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, and Moynihan spitting fire about LARPing tiki-Nazis. You can listen here:

Reminder: Over the weekend you can listen to an hour-long version of The Fifth Column on Sirius XM POTUS (channel 124) Saturdays at 11 a.m. ET then Sundays at 1 a.m. and 3 p.m. And you can always find more Fifth Column at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.

So you’ve got an old Confederate statue you need to toss out. Don’t worry, many cities in America are going through the same spring cleaning you are. The relevant question is: what do you do with a marble effigy of an old bearded racist once you’ve knocked it off its pedestal?

The main argument against removing these statues hinges on historical preservation, that we shouldn’t dynamite historical artifacts whenever the Left gets tetchy. I agree with that in principle: If Michael Moore starts wandering around a Calvin Coolidge statue with a hacksaw, I’ll be the first to restrain him.

Most of these statues, however, are not memorials to the dead erected by their mourning relatives. They are tributes erected at the height of the Jim Crow era, basically big bronze and concrete middle fingers racists erected to protest integration. And if there’s one thing I really hate, it’s passive aggressive statuary.

That’s why I’ve provided these elegant solutions for all of the Confederate detritus you’ve got lying around. Discuss them with your mayor next time you run into him at a Rotary Club breakfast or key party.

Turn the Statue into Darth Vader

Eastern Europe is littered with statues of dead socialists. Lenin is the lawn gnome of Eastern Europe. Commie strongmen are less in vogue since the Soviet Union petered out, however, leaving people with a glut of memorials to murderous psychopaths who murdered millions of people, or alternately, to disastrous technocrats who murdered millions of people inadvertantly.

Ukranian artist Alexander Milov came up with the brilliant solution for all of the Lenin clutter: turn them into statues of Darth Vader. I’ve never visited Columbia, South Carolina but I’m fairly confident tourism would spike if only the city retrofitted its surplus of Confederate ephemera into Sith lords.

There could be copyright issues, but that’s an easy fix. If Disney protests, simply turn your statue of Stonewall Jackson into a velociraptor riding a Tyrannosaurus-rex. Stonewall Jacksons’s horse probably wasn’t racist, so there may be no need alter it. But if you’re already making one dinosaur, why not splurge and do two? A velociraptor riding a T-Rex makes an awesome cover for your tourism brochure.

Another nifty option is to weld boxy metal parts to your Jefferson Davis statue to make it look like a clunky 1950’s robot. Be sure to add a plaque that says, “Erected in Eternal Memory to the Robot Uprising of 2046.” Three hundred years from now won’t that be a great practical joke. Oh, and did I mention installing lasers in Ol’ Jeff’s eyes?

Build a Monument Over It

People are preoccupied with the celebration of institutional racism these monuments represent. But has anyone stopped to consider that Confederate statues celebrate losers? We don’t celebrate losers in the USA. That sends a bad message to the kids. We look up to winners.

Consider building an eighty-foot statue of Ulysses S. Grant triumphantly stepping on your now-dwarfed Stonewall Jackson statue. Voila, you’ve now got a Union monument.

Also makes a phenominal roadside attraction.

Donate It to a Third World Country

You know how Third World countries wind up with all the t-shirts from Superbowl teams that lost? Well here’s an idea: donate your statue to one of those countries. Do your research beforehand because many of them have their own peculiar reasons for disliking confederates.

Dump it in the Ocean

You might be tempted to round up all of the Confederate statues and put them in one place, say, somewhere like Fallen Monument Park in Moscow. The problem is your park is going to be swarming with bigots and their tiki torches. That’s a fire hazard.

Your park should be under water, maybe somewhere in the Florida Keys. That way if the Alt-Right wants to hold a rally, it’s going to have to leave the continental United States. Good.

Recycle It

Sorting garbage into organized piles of garbage is all the rage right now. No reason not to do the same thing with large bronze figurines, although it’s slightly more labor intensive and not very environmentally friendly. Melt down that unwanted bust of Alexander H. Stephens cluttering up your state capitol and recast him as Edgar Allen Poe. People mistake Poe for an Englishman (probably because he was moody and pale) but he grew up a son of the South in Richmond, Virginia and made his fame in Baltimore where they were tearing down Confederate statues just the other day. Seems like a natural to memorialize.

Why the fixation with authority figures? It’s more than a little disturbing that our culture has such a hard-on for generals. I don’t mean we shouldn’t honor veterans. I mean the ratio of generals and politicians to doctors, writers, chefs, and inventors is wildly disproportionate.

Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead, we erected more statues of people like Norman Borlaug? That man arguably saved more lives than anyone in all of history. He died a professor at Texas A&M, so the Lone Star State can claim him, but they’ll probably have to go halfsies with his home state of Iowa.

The South has Earl Scruggs, Booker T. Washington, Dolly Parton and many more, not one of them architects of an odious slavery. There’s no reason these figures should be overshadowed by misused scrap metal. Someday, God willing, we won’t associate the South with the Confederacy or racism. It will rightly celebrate bluegrass, barbecue, jazz, and friendliness.

And, of course, the Robot Uprising of 2046. Never forget.

Thailand government critic Jatupat Bonnpattaraksa, a.k.a. Pai, has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison for lese-majeste, or insulting the king.

Pai, a former law student who has been outspoken about the military junta running the country, was arrested just two days after Maha Vajiralongkorn took the throne as the new king last December. Pai’s crime: sharing a BBC Thai profile of Vajiralongkorn. The article was fairly objective—you can read the English-language version of it here—and thousands of people shared it on social media. Pai was the only one targeted by authorities.

Pai pled guilty and had a five-year sentence reduced to two and a half. “Pai confessed,” his attorney told Reuters. “He knew that if he tried to fight the charges it would not be of any use.”

As Reuters notes, the number of arrests for the crime of lese-majeste has increased sharply since the military overthrew the democratically elected government back in 2014. The arrests have often targeted government critics.

“Jatupat’s case is only the latest in the Thai government’s increasingly repressive and arbitrary attempts to chill expression online and censor content critical of the state, including banning interaction with certain exiled dissidents and making it a crime to simply view lese majeste content,” the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s Gennie Gebhart writes. “These extremes are not just about stopping the flow of information; they are also about spreading fear among users that the authorities may be watching what they read, share, and say online.”

Human Rights Watch condemned the verdict, and in a statement its Asia director, Brad Adam, suggested Pai was “prosecuted for his strong opposition to military rule more than for any harm incurred by the monarchy.”

Amnesty International also condemned the verdict. “This verdict shows the extremes to which the authorities are prepared to go in using repressive laws to silence peaceful debate, including on Facebook,” Amnesty International’s Josef Benedict said in a statement.

This sort of repression should be a reminder of the importance of the First Amendment. As hate-crime laws are coopted to cover classes of people like police officers, it’s easy to imagine how hate-speech rules could be similarly deployed. Pai’s persecution also highlights the importance of protecting anonymity online. The rise of trolling has led to calls to eliminate anonymity on the internet; Facebook has made it difficult to use the site without revealing your identity, even as it also becomes a tool and traffic hub for activism. Facebook is free to run its own network the way it wants, but opponents of anonymity need to understand that anonymity doesn’t just protect trolls; it protects people from troll governments.

Please share your totally appropriate and not-at-all insulting comments about the Thai king in the comment thread below.

Police and witnesses in Barcelona are reporting that a van crashed at high speed into a crowd into a tourist-oriented part of the city.

Initial details are obviously very sketchy. BBC has been able to talk to witnesses to the crash and is updating information minute-by-minute live here. Police have reported fatalities and injuries but the numbers have not been released. Police are hunting for the driver. BBC also passed along a report that two gunmen have entrenched themselves in a bar.

As always, be very careful about accepting early reports as factual. We’ll update this post as facts become available, if necessary. Catalan Police are saying the attack was terrorism.

UPDATE 1 p.m.: Local media outlets are saying there are 13 dead.

UPDATE 1:15: Catalonia Police so far are acknowledging one dead and 32 injured, 10 seriously.

Nevada is home to casinos, impulse weddings, legal brothels, and, as of July 1, recreational weed.

Despite its reputation, Nevada has never been anything close to a free market paradise. Everything from the Las Vegas taxi industry to prostitution is controlled by a handful of politically-connected companies licensed to operate by the government.

This means exorbitant prices and unnecessary hassles for customers and businesses. And the latest industry to take hold—legal weed—is no exception.

Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval (R) recently declared a state of emergency because the state’s 37 licensed marijuana shops were running out of inventory. Why? The law legalizing recreational cannabis sales in Nevada granted an 18-month monopoly on distribution to liquor wholesalers, who lack the experience and infrastructure to transport marijuana. And most are too afraid to enter the market because they’re regulated by the federal government, and cannabis is still illegal on the federal level.

The absurdity of the situation is playing out at Essence, a marijuana dispensary just north of the Vegas strip, which started out as a medical marijuana facility. When it was selling medical weed, owner Armen Yemendijian had his employees move inventory from the grow house to the storefront themselves. Now that the store is selling recreational marijuana, that’s no longer an option.

“Our cultivation facility is no more than a couple of miles from our dispensary,” says Yemenidjian.

Legal weed could be a huge boon to the state economy, while providing tourists a rsafe way to have even more fun in Vegas. But politicians need to stop using every “Sin City” vice as a means to reward special interests.

Watch the video above, or click the link below for downloadable versions.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller and Justin Monticello. Music by The Underscore Orkestra, Tri-Tachyon, and Chris Zabriskie.

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Studies show students in schools of choice have more respect for the rights of people they don’t like.

Tyler Kotesky writes:

After last weekend’s deadly ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, school choice has taken some of the blame.

Jennifer Steele, an associate professor of education at American University, interviewed by The Hill, argued Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ school choice advocacy could fuel the social tensions behind the clashes.

“The purpose of schooling is to expose people to diverse ideas and experiences,” Steele said. “By allowing people to opt out of public schooling, we risk having a more fragmented society and in the wake of the events in Charlottesville, that’s really an increasing concern.”

I share Steele’s concerns about the state of our civic culture. A bedrock of our democracy and a societal norm we’ve established is respect for the rights of people with whom we disagree. James Alex Fields violated this core American value when he ran his car over dozens of protestors last week. Preventing that kind of heinous violence in the future means teaching our kids to disagree peacefully rather than using force.

Evidence makes clear Steele’s concerns about school choice are misplaced. In eight of 11 empirically rigorous studies, comparing children in schools of choice and traditional public schools, students in schools of choice were more likely to support the civic rights of their most hated opponents. Three find no visible effects. None indicate school choice has a negative impact on tolerance.

View this article.

Another Twitter flare-up from President Donald Trump this morning is going to command the news cycle for the day. Trump began ranting about Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) and Jeff Flake (Arizona), consistent critics of Trump’s behavior. Trump called Graham a publicity seeker and expressed happiness that Flake was facing a primary opponent.

And then Trump decided to wade back into the Confederate monument debate, after having been blasted on all sides yesterday. A trio of tweets to get your morning started:

Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

…can’t change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson – who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

…the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

Trump knows all about removing art that will be missed and cannot be replaced. When Trump was building his tower in New York City he had destroyed art deco friezes a museum wanted to preserve because it delayed the demolition of a skyscraper that needed to come down.

Trump also has a monument to a civil war battle that never happened at his golf club in Virginia.

As for the slippery slope contention—that this will lead to the tearing down of non-Confederate memorials because people are offended—Eric Boehm and Ronald Bailey have both explained effectively here at Reason how easy it is to draw a line between American historical figures who have owned slaves or have done other bad things versus those who waged war with the United States in order to preserve slavery.

It is worth noting that Trump is hardly an outlier in not wanting monuments to come down. An NPR poll released this week showed that 62 percent of Americans want these statues to remain “as a historical symbol.” A remarkable nugget from the poll: Even more African Americans (44 percent) want them to remain than want them removed (40 percent). Unsurprisingly, more African Americans were unsure what to do with them (16 percent) than white people (8 percent) or Latino people (11 percent) polled.

There are many ways to interpret these results that have nothing to do with support for the Confederacy. The results may say more about the unease of many Americans with what appears to be censorship (even when it’s not actually censorship).

Perhaps it would be easier if these statues were not in the hands of government, and the social cost of the controversy shouldered by private individuals. And as an added bonus, it wouldn’t cost taxpayers to deal with it. I joked on Twitter that cities should sell the Confederate statues to people who care so much about preserving them and redistribute the money back to its citizens.

In Los Angeles, a memorial for Confederate soldiers at Hollywood Forever Cemetery was just removed at the request of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the group who placed the marker there at the 1920s. Yes, there was some social pressure to remove it, obviously, but private people making the decision about whether to display such a memorial is preferable to government officials deciding the correct way to remember our Confederate history and Civil War.

Despite the breadth of the current political divide, it appears that there is at least one thing that all politicians can agree upon: energy sector cronyism. The only real dispute is over the preferred beneficiaries.

Under President Barack Obama, green energy subsidies were given out like candy. The failure of solar panel company Solyndra is well-known, but the problem extends well beyond the shady loan deal and its half-billion-dollar cost to taxpayers.

Between 2010 and 2013, federal subsidies for solar energy alone increased by about 500 percent, from $1.1 billion to $5.3 billion (according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration), and all federal renewable energy subsidies grew from $8.6 billion to $13.2 billion over the same period. Congressional Budget Office testimony before Congress further reported that 59 percent, an estimated $10.9 billion, of energy-related tax preferences in 2016 went to renewables.

Subsidies have come down from their 2013 peak, thanks to the expiration of some of the post-financial crisis “stimulus” programs, but so-called green energy—solar in particular—still receives vastly higher subsidies on a per- kilowatt-hour basis. However, that didn’t stop the largest U.S. solar panel manufacturer, SolarWorld, from filing for bankruptcy earlier this year despite $115 million in federal and state grants and tax subsidies since 2012, along with $91 million in federal loan guarantees, writes Veronique de Rugy.

View this article.

• President Donald Trump took to Twitter this morning to defend his Charlottesville statements from criticism by “publicity seeking Lindsey Graham,” “the Fake News,” and “Flake Jeff Flake.”
• “President Donald Trump’s decision to double down on his argument that ‘both sides’ were to blame for the violent clashes at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was driven in part by his own anger — and his disdain for being told what to do.”
• New poll: 51 percent of Americans “disapprove of the job Donald Trump is doing as president.”
• “In an interview he said he believed was private, Stephen K. Bannon described the alt-right as a ‘collection of clowns’ and lashed out at rivals in the Trump administration.”
• In the past three days in the Philippines, police have killed 58 suspected drug users or dealers.
• Hong Kong student activists Joshua Wong, Alex Chow, and Nathan Law have been sentenced to six to eight months in prison.

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