Tag: hit&run

• Will Loretta Lynch accept the FBI’s recommendations regarding Hillary Clinton’s private email server? The Attorney General is expected to say today.
• A federal judge blocked a Mississippi law allowing clerks to recuse themselves from offering marriage licenses to same-sex couples and businesses to refuse service to gay or transgender people.
• How the U.S. military will implement its new policy on transgender troops.
• The Purge: Election Year “feints toward real-world politics … notably in how it pits a multicultural underdog coalition against a white power structure abetted by neo-Nazi mercenaries with Confederate flags and swastikas on their uniforms.”
• Californians will vote on whether to raise the tax on a pack of cigarettes by $2.
• The U.S. District Court for Southern Indiana has blocked the state’s ban on abortions motivated by the fetus’ sex, race, or potential disability.

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Attorney General Loretta Lynch met with former President Bill Clinton, whose wife, the presumptive Democratic nominee, is under FBI investigation. No big deal, right?

David Harsanyi writes:

David Axelrod, Obama’s chief political advisor, tweeted: “I take (Loretta Lynch) & (Bill Clinton) at their word that their convo in Phoenix didn’t touch on probe. But foolish to create such optics.” And it’s Axelrod’s prerogative to take the two at their word. “All I can say is Loretta Lynch is one of the most outstanding human beings I’ve ever known,” Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters. “Her ethics are above reproach. No one could ever question her strong feelings about the rule of law, and her ethics are the best.” Sen. Chuck Schumer added: “So, you have two choices, to say this didn’t matter, or she is lying. I think it didn’t matter.”

Lynch might be Mother Teresa for all we know, but we still have ethical codes for a reason. Any truly impartial attorney general would have said to the former president, “Why don’t we table this meeting until after the high-profile, politically charged criminal investigation of your wife is over.” Would that really have been so difficult?

View this article.

Steven Spielberg’s The BFG demonstrates anew the wondrous possibilities of advanced film technology in the hands of a gifted director. The movie’s digital effects—especially the mo-capped construction of outlandish characters around live-action performers, and the magical environments through which they pass—really are impressive, and sometimes enchanting. If only the rest of the picture were more so, writes Kurt Loder.

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It’s not just puritanism that animates progressives’ opposition to vaping, it’s also the love of taxes.

Steven Greenhut writes:

Taking dollars from government agencies and government-addicted nonprofits makes them as grumpy as taking the last pack of cigarettes from a habitual smoker. Even though the state passed several new laws—raising the smoking age to 21 and regulating e-cigarettes like tobacco, for instance—anti-tobacco activists have qualified an initiative for the November ballot that would go even further. The “California Healthcare, Research and Prevention Tobacco Tax Act of 2016” is, as its name suggests, all about hiking tax rates.

California has one of the nation’s lower tobacco taxes. The initiative provides a $2 per pack tax boost on cigarettes (from 87 cents to $2.87). It raises taxes on other tobacco products by an equivalent amount. I’m no fan of tax increases. And sin taxes are regressive—they impose a particularly high burden on the poor. But at least advocates are trying to do something that might improve public health by discouraging the use of a dangerous product.

But this line in the initiative suggests the anti-vaping craze is mainly about the money: “Tobacco products also shall include electronic cigarettes.” To be clear, the liquid that is heated and “vaped” is not tobacco, even though most—but not all—liquids contain nicotine. The nicotine is the point. Smokers are addicted to it. These products provide a safer way to get that fix—95 percent safer, according to Public Health England. If the initiative passes, the state will have another way to get its fix of taxes. In fact, the measure would boost taxes on vaping products by 320 percent, according to industry estimates.

View this article.

Sometime soon, the Drug Enforcement Administration is expected to announce its response to the two most recent petitions asking it to reclassify marijuana. As I explain in my latest Forbes column, the imminence of that decision has given rise to unrealistic expectations:

Rumor has it that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) plans to legalize marijuana any day now. Rumor also has it that Barack Obama is secretly a foreign-born Muslim and that the CIA had a hand in the attack that brought down the World Trade Center. Unfortunately, that first claim is about as likely to be true as the other two.

It is true that the DEA has not responded yet to a pair of petitions asking it to reclassify marijuana, which since 1970 has sat in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), the law’s most restrictive category. Schedule I supposedly is reserved for drugs with “a high potential for abuse” and “no currently accepted medical use,” drugs that cannot be used safely even under a doctor’s supervision. It is doubtful that marijuana meets any of those criteria, let alone all three. But the DEA, which has wide discretion to interpret and apply the CSA criteria, has always insisted that marijuana must stay in Schedule I until its medical utility is proven by the sort of large, expensive, randomized clinical trials the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) demands before approving a new pharmaceutical.

While such studies have been conducted with marijuana’s main active ingredient (which is how Marinol, a capsule containing synthetic THC, was approved by the FDA in 1985), and are under way with Sativex, an oral cannabis extract spray, they have not been conducted with the whole plant. The DEA’s definition of “currently accepted medical use” creates something of a Catch-22, since marijuana’s Schedule I status, together with the government’s monopoly on the supply of cannabis for medical studies, makes conducting such research difficult. But there is little reason to think the DEA, having rejected three other rescheduling petitions, will change its mind now.

Even if the DEA did decide to remove marijuana from Schedule I, the result would not be, as the Santa Monica Observer reported on June 18, “legalizing medicinal cannabis in all 50 states with a doctor’s prescription.”

Read the whole thing.

Almost two months after it happened, the Associated Press is reporting that a driver in Tesla S model car who was apparently riding it in “autopilot” mode was killed when his car crashed into a tractor trailer on a highway in Florida. The truck driver claims that the driver was  “playing Harry Potter on the TV screen” at the time of the crash and driving so quickly that “he went so fast through my trailer I didn’t see him.” There are reasons to doubt that account as Tesla Motors notes that it not possible to watch videos on the Model S touch screen. According to the AP, investigators believe that the car’s cameras “failed to distinguish the white side of a turning tractor-trailer from a brightly lit sky and didn’t automatically activate its brakes.”

The current version of Tesla’s Autopilot reminds drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and remain alert at all times. This is the first known death in over 130 million miles of Tesla Autopilot operation. For reference, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety calculates that in the U.S. there are 1.08 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. As I reported in my Reason June feature article, “Will Politicians Block Our Driverlesss Future?,” a Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study commissioned by Google estimated in January 2016 that human-driven vehicles crash 4.2 times per million miles traveled whereas current self-driving cars crash 3.2 times per million miles, a safety record that’s likely to keep improving as robocars gain more real life experience on the roads.

Demanding that self-driving vehicles be perfect in comparison to human-driven vehicles is clearly not the right standard. Better is more than good enough.

When Derrick Deanda spotted a family trapped in an overturned SUV in California, he stopped his own vehicle, got out, smashed a window on the SUV, and helped the occupants out. When paramedics arrived later to check everyone out, they checked Deanda’s blood pressure and gave him a bottle of water. He later received a $143 bill from the Cosumnes Community Services District for those services.

Almost two months after it happened, the Associated Press is reporting that a driver in Tesla S model car who was apparently riding it in “autopilot” mode was killed when his car crashed into a tractor trailer on a highway in Florida. The truck driver claims that the driver was  “playing Harry Potter on the TV screen” at the time of the crash and driving so quickly that “he went so fast through my trailer I didn’t see him.” There are reasons to doubt that account as Tesla Motors notes that it not possible to watch videos on the Model S touch screen. According to the AP, investigators believe that the car’s cameras “failed to distinguish the white side of a turning tractor-trailer from a brightly lit sky and didn’t automatically activate its brakes.”

The current version of Tesla’s Autopilot reminds drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and remain alert at all times. This is the first known death in over 130 million miles of Tesla Autopilot operation. For reference, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety calculates that in the U.S. there are 1.08 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. As I reported in my Reason June feature article, “Will Politicians Block Our Driverlesss Future?,” a Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study commissioned by Google estimated in January 2016 that human-driven vehicles crash 4.2 times per million miles traveled whereas current self-driving cars crash 3.2 times per million miles, a safety record that’s likely to keep improving as robocars gain more real life experience on the roads.

Demanding that self-driving vehicles be perfect in comparison to human-driven vehicles is clearly not the right standard. Better is more than good enough.

Derald Wing Sue is a professor of psychology at Columbia University. He’s also an early promoter of the idea of “microaggressions.” Lists of potential microaggressions, maintained by universities, used his research as a basis.

But Sue is concerned that these universities have missed the point. It was never about shaming or punishing people, he says. In fact, he doesn’t think that people who commit microaggressions are necessarily racist or sexist.

As he told The Chronicle of Higher Education:

He said he’s glad colleges have found the research useful, but he is cautious about the institutions that are taking it as an absolute. Mr. Sue said his goal had always been to educate people, not punish or shame them, if they engage in microaggressions.

“I was concerned that people who use these examples would take them out of context and use them as a punitive rather than an exemplary way,” Mr. Sue said. …

It’s worth remembering, Mr. Sue said, that microaggressions don’t always indicate that a person is racist. In fact, he said, it’s often the opposite. “People who engage in microaggressions are oftentimes well-intentioned, decent individuals who aren’t aware that they are engaging in an offensive way toward someone else,” Mr. Sue said.

Keep in mind that universities now maintain “bias response teams” that investigate students and professors suspected of saying the wrong thing. These teams occasionally recommend perpetrators for additional sanctions. But the academic who modernized the idea of microaggressions never imagined they would be weaponized in such a way.

We have hyper-offended students and administrators to thank for that.

Jason Crigger, an EMT and ambulance driver for the Kentucky-based Arrow-Med Ambulance alleges in a lawsuit that he was “verbally harass[ed]” by Breathitt County special deputy Darrell “Steve” McIntosh, who Crigger says “activated his emergency lights and siren” and detained him for several minutes while a patient returning from a dialysis treatment lay in the back of the ambulance. A fellow Arrow-Med employee recorded the traffic stop and gave the footage to WYMT-TV.

Crigger told WYMT that McIntosh “Never gave me a reason that he pulled me over,” adding that during the five minutes he was detained, McIntosh “never accused me of any traffic violations or anything of the sort. It appeared to me he just pulled me over to try to threaten and intimidate us.”

McIntosh, who is also a Jackson (Ky.) city councilman, owns a rival ambulance company and is currently engaged in a lawsuit he filed against Arrow-Med alleging fraud and overbilling. Crigger’s lawyer, Ned Pillersdorf characterized the traffic stop to U.S. News and World Report as a “pretty flagrant civil rights violation,” adding “You’re not allowed to use your official position to detain people and argue with them about a civil suit, which is what happened.”

In an interview with U.S News, Crigger says that he makes $9.50 an hour, but that the lawsuit isn’t about the money, it’s to hold McIntosh accountable for “following us around for months in his little police car”:

“He’s a bully and I hate bullies,” Crigger says. “I’ve been poor all my life, and I’ll probably be poor for the foreseeable future. I just want him to leave me and my guys alone and let us work. We don’t do this for the money, we do this to help people and now we have to worry about rogue deputy sheriffs pulling us over and harassing us.”

David Drake, the patient in the back of the ambulance who was spent and stressed from four hours of dialysis treatment, told U.S. News that McIntosh “intimidated me too in the process, whether he meant to or not.” Drake added, “He really dumped some anxiety on me. I was strapped down in the back. I can’t run, I can just pray to God he won’t go psycho.”

Breathitt County’s Sheriff Department consists of the sheriff and one paid deputy, plus four unpaid volunteer deputies, a group which includes McIntosh.

Sheriff Ray Clemons told U.S. News that he asked McIntosh about the incident and he claims “they made some kind of allegations at him or something or other, stuck their fingers up at him or something, that’s pretty much what he said.”