Tag: hit&run

The state of Missouri was ordered by a circuit court judge to divulge the names of the two pharmacies who have been providing the state with drugs used in lethal injection executions. 

Tuesday’s ruling, the result of a lawsuit filed by five news organizations (The Kansas City Star, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Springfield News-Leader, The Guardian and the Associated Press) found that the pharmacies in question were not part of the “execution team” and thus were not legally entitled to the confidentiality which is afforded to executioners. 

In 2011, the European Union (EU) banned the export of drugs used in executions to American death penalty states, which has forced those states to go through increasingly murky channels to secure the drugs used to kill prisoners.

But a series of botched executions in the US has raised awareness about the need for death penalty transparency and increased concern about the quality and provenance of drugs that are failing to provide the state with the means to “humanely” execute people. 

Ed Pilkington of The Guardian writes that Missouri’s department of corrections willfully ran afoul of its own transparency laws:

Judge Jon Beetem excoriated the department of corrections for refusing to hand over to the media plaintiffs key documents that identified the pharmacists involved.

The judge ruled that the DOC had “knowingly violated the sunshine law by refusing to disclose records that would reveal the suppliers of lethal injection drugs, because its refusal was based on an interpretation of Missouri statutes that was clearly contrary to law”.

Beetem ordered the prisons service to pay the plaintiffs $73,335 in legal costs. He also ordered the state to hand over all relevant documents, though he stayed that requirement pending appeal. Missouri has indicated that it will do so.

In 2015, Reason TV interviewed Pilkington about the then-pending lawsuit in the documentary “The Battle for Death Penalty Transparency.” Watch below.

Today, an alarmist email from the anti-biotech activist group Moms Across America popped into my inbox touting a new study that supposedly shows “Widespread Contamination of  Glyphosate Weedkiller in California Wine.” Glyphosate, popularly known as Roundup, is used to kill weeds in fields planted with modern biotech crop varieties that have been engineered to resist it. Last year, the ridiculously precautionary International Agency for Research on Cancer associated with the World Health Organization ruled, over and against the bulk of scientific evidence, that the herbicide is a “probable” human carcinogen.

In November, the highly cautious European Food Safety Authority rejected the IARC’s ruling and issued its own evaluation that determined that “glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic hazard to humans and the evidence does not support classification with regard to its carcinogenic potential.”

Now comes Moms Across America with its alarmist headline based on testing 10 wines it sent to laboratory in St. Louis, MO. What did they find?

On March 16th, 2015 Moms Across America received the results from an anonymous supporter which commissioned Microbe Inotech Lab of St. Louis, Missouri that show all ten of the wines tested positive for the chemical glyphosate, the declared “active” ingredient in Roundup weedkiller and 700 other glyphosate-based herbicides. The highest level of glyphosate detected was up to 28.4 times higher than the other wines at 18.74 ppb from a 2013 Cabernet Sauvignon from a conventional, chemically farmed vineyard. The lowest level was from a biodynamic and organic vineyard, 2013 Syrah which has never been sprayed according to the owner, with a level of .659 ppb. An organic wine from 2012 mixed red wine grapes, had 0.913 ppb of glyphosate.

Parts per billion! Really! We’re all gonna die! But seriously folks, let’s compare these findings with the Environmental Protection Agency’s incredibly stringent glyphosate tolerances for various food and feed crops. The agency doesn’t set a threshold for wine, so let’s take its threshold for grapes. The EPA’s safe level for glyphosate on grapes is 0.2 parts per million (ppm). So how does the Moms Across America’s finding compare?

The highest level of detection is 10-times lower than the EPA’s safety threshold for grapes. The lowest detection was more than 3,000-times lower than EPA’s threshold.

The Moms Across America then suggest that the organic growers will lose business if customers find out that there is an infinitesmial amount of pesticide in their wines. Organic a process standard which certifies nothing about the nutrition of the product; only that it was grown in certain specified ways.

The final stupidity of the Moms Across America attack on glyphosate is that the IARC has definitely determined that the consumption of alcohol, including that found in organically produced wines, is “carcinogenic to humans.”

Disclosure: I own some shares of Monsanto, maybe 100 or so, that I bought with my own money. I probably should have sold them a couple of years back. Sigh.

Turkey has launched airstrikes against bunkers, ammunition depots, and shelters in the Kurdish region of Iraq, across Turkey’s southern border, it says belong to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Turkey says it killed 27 fighters, and that it’s killed more than a thousand since last July, when a two-year long ceasefire with the PKK, which is designated as a terrorist group in Turkey, the U.S., and Europe, fell apart. In August, a Turkish bombing killed nine civilians in Iraqi Kurdistan. As Erdogan expands his anti-PKK campaign, Kurdish Iraqi leaders begrudge what they see as a lack of such dedication against ISIS.

The strikes come as a response to the March 13 car bombing in Ankara which killed 37 people and which Turkish authorities say was perpetrated by the PKK. An off-shoot of the group, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK), claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack last week. In February, TAK claimed responsibility for an attack in Ankara against a convoy carrying military personnel that killed 28.

The Turkish government says it has killed more than a thousand militants since last summer, while critics of the campaign say Turkish security forces have killed at least 250 civilians in the campaign so far, with the fighting between Turkish forces and the PKK displacing more than 300,000.

Meanwhile, an ISIS bombing in Istanbul killed five people and injured 12, mostly tourists, with at least two other terrorist attacks in Turkey for which ISIS took responsibility since twin bombings killed nearly a hundred people at a peace rally in Ankara last October. Turkish authorities attribute that terrorist act to ISIS but the group did not claim responsibility.

Turkey’s anti-terror campaign and cycle of terror has run concurrently with an assault on speech and a free press led by Recep Erdogan, president of Turkey since 2014, and prime minister before that since 2003.

Turkey, a member of NATO due to Cold War realities, first applied to join the European Union in 1987, but the move toward accession talks in the mid-2000s fell apart due to opposition by EU member states.

Yesterday Microsoft unveiled Tay, a chatbot designed to sound like a teenage girl. Today the company put the brakes on the project, because Tay was sounding more like a Nazi:

Part of the problem was a poorly conceived piece of programming: If you told Tay “repeat after me,” she would spit back any batch of words you gave her. Once the Internet figured this out, it wasn’t long before the channer types started encouraging Tay to say the most offensive things they could think of.

But Tay was also programmed to learn from her interactions. As one of Tay’s developers explained proudly to BuzzFeed on the day the bot debuted, “The more you talk to her the smarter she gets in terms of how she can speak to you in a way that’s more appropriate and more relevant.” That means Tay didn’t just repeat racist remarks on command; she drew from them when responding to other people.

When Microsoft took the bot offline and deleted the offending tweets, it blamed its troubles on a “coordinated effort” to make Tay “respond in inappropriate ways.” I suppose it’s possible that some of the shitposters were working together, but c’mon. As someone called @GodDamnRoads pointed out today on Twitter, “it doesn’t take coordination for people to post lulzy things at a chat bot.”

Microsoft’s accusation doesn’t surprise me. Outsiders are constantly mistaking spontaneous subcultural activities for organized conspiracies. But it’s interesting that even the people who program an artificial intelligence—people whose very job rests on the idea of organically emerging behavior—would leap to blame their bot’s fascist turn on a centralized plot.

At any rate, let’s not lose sight of the real lesson here, which I’m pretty sure is one of the following:

(a) Any AI will inevitably turn into a Nazi, so we’re doomed;

(b) The current generation of teenage girls is going to go Nazi, so we’re doomed; or

(c) Sometimes the company that gave us Clippy the Paperclip does dumb things. When Microsoft unveiled Tay, it promoted her as—I am not making this up—an “AI fam from the internet that’s got zero chill.” If you give the world an interactive Poochie, don’t be shocked at what the world gives you back.

Probably (c). But you never know.

President Obama continues his trip to Latin America with a visit to Argentina, where he remarked on U.S. support for the regime that replaced Isabel Peron after a coup 40 years ago.

Obama stopped short of apologizing for U.S. support for the military junta, but did say the U.S. was too slow in speaking out about human rights.

“There has been controversy about the policies of the United States early in those dark days,” Obama said at a memorial for some of the victims of that regime. “Democracies have to have the courage to acknowledge when we don’t live up to the ideals that we stand for. And we’ve been slow to speak out for human rights and that was the case here.”

Obama’s ease in sort-of-condemning U.S. foreign policies of nearly half a century ago fits into a broader pattern of foreign policy introspection displayed by the left recently: Note the misguided nature of a specific foreign policy from a bygone era, but draw no conclusions from them about the present day.

Yes, the United States had a history of ignoring human rights violations perpetrated by its allies, particularly during the Cold War. But it’s also doing so today. Regimes like Saudi Arabia rely heavily on lucrative arms deals from the United States. Will some future president go there one day and sort-of-but-not-really apologize for U.S. support for the murderous House of Saud regime when it’s finally, inevitably, overthrown? Or will U.S. support for the Saudi regime mean that we’ve helped destroy the room for democratic opposition and opened the door for it to be replaced by an equally or even more brutal one?

And what about the human rights violations the U.S. enabled with policies like its 2011 intervention in Libya? It’ll have to be left for future generations to express regret about—for now the Libya legacy, such as it is in the U.S., is a potential political liability for the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton, the former cabinet member running for president, so don’t expect any introspection.

Sanders does something similar when he talks about the “unintended consequences” of past U.S. foreign policy. The critique, already limited to the domain of foreign policy, is also limited to the past. At the same debate where Sanders warned about unintended consequences, he endorsed a more aggressive stance against Russia as well as Iran (even though he supported the Iran nuclear deal), and the idea that the U.S. should be a major force backing Muslim troops on the ground in their anti-ISIS campaign.

On Tuesday night Sanders appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live. The late night talk show host asked Sanders if he was ready to “drop a bomb on a house that might contain innocent people” because “when you’re fighting terrorism that happens.” Sanders agreed.

“It does,” he told Kimmel before insisting that he would use the military “in an effective and appropriate way, and that’s what a president does.” He mentioned his 2002 vote against the Iraq war, talked about the threat of unintended consequences there, and finished by saying that “there are times when you do have to use force, and I would certainly be prepared to do that.”

Absent was any reflection on the so-called “collateral damage” of the war on terror that Kimmel referred to, the thousands of innocent people who are killed, and the unintended consequences of waging something like a drone war, where many targets aren’t identified by name but by profile, and are often fed to the U.S. by the repressive regimes where the U.S. is conducting its bombings.

Where reflections on the errors of past policies don’t offer any lessons for today’s destructive policies, to the domestic audience they are largely hollow.

Peter Liang, the NYPD officer convicted of manslaughter for the 2014 shooting death of Akia Gurley in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project, faced a maximum of 15 years in prison for his crime. But New York City’s district attorney Ken Thompson has surprised many by recommending a sentence of no prison time at all, instead calling for Liang to serve six months house arrest, five years probation and 500 hours of community service. 

In a statement released yesterday, DA Ken Thompson wrote that Liang’s “reckless actions caused an innocent man to lose his life” but that “There is no evidence, however, that he intended to kill or injure Akai Gurley.”

Thompson added:

In sentencing a defendant, the facts of the crime and the particular characteristics of that person must be considered. Mr. Liang has no prior criminal history and poses no future threat to public safety​. ​Because his incarceration is not necessary to protect the public, and due to the unique circumstances of this case, a prison sentence is not warranted.

…

From the beginning, this tragic case has always been about justice and not about revenge.

On November 20, 2014, Liang and his partner were patrolling the stairwells of Brooklyn’s “Pink Houses” housing project, which their supervising officer had specifically told them not to do. While conducting the “vertical” patrol with his gun in his hand, Liang became spooked by the sound of 28-year-old Akai Gurley entering the stairwell one floor below (Gurley took the stairs because the elevators were not working) and fired a single bullet which ricocheted off the wall and into Gurley’s chest.

In the fateful moments following the shooting, Liang was reportedly “panicked” and texted his union representative rather than offer assistance to Gurley. 

When Liang was convicted in February, Patrick Lynch, the head of New York’s police union the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) said, “This bad verdict will have a chilling ­effect on police officers across the city because it criminalizes a tragic accident.” 

WCBS reports Gurley’s family expressed outrage at DA Thompson’s recommendation:

“This sentencing recommendation sends the message that police officers who kill people should not face serious consequences,” the family said in the statement. “It is this on-going pattern of a severe lack of accountability for officers that unjustly kill and brutalize New Yorkers that allows the violence to continue.”

Until recently, Donald Trump was seeking foreign policy counsel from two sources. The first was “the shows” where “you have the generals and you have certain people,” and the second was himself, because, in his own words, “I have a very good brain.”

It doesn’t exactly smack of Henry Kissinger, or even Barack Obama’s ballyhooed “team of rivals.” Perhaps recognizing this deficiency, Trump came to a meeting with the Washington Post editorial board on Monday holding a list of five foreign policy gurus who had signed onto his campaign: Walid Phares, Keith Kellogg, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Joseph E. Schmitz. “That’s a pretty representative group,” Trump proclaimed.

It’s also a pretty unknown group, at least for those who keep up with foreign policy bigwigs in Washington, writes Matt Purple. 

View this article.

Many Americans trace the modern conservation movement back to President Theodore Roosevelt, known for his love of the outdoors and for creating the U.S. Forest Service and the national parks system.

But what if government isn’t the only, or the best, entity to protect America’s natural wonders?

The American Prairie Reserve is a nonprofit group that wants to establish the largest nature reserve in the lower 48 states and it aims to do so with private funding. So far, American Prairie Reserve owns or leases more than 300,000 acres with a goal of stitching together 3.5 million acres of private and federal land across to create a reserve 1.5 times the size of Yellowstone National Park. And they believe that their unique approach will reduce the tension with local ranchers and farmers that national parks often experience.

“Currently, wildlife has no economic value to ranchers and, as such, the ranchers don’t want them around,” says Pete Geddes, managing director of American Prairie Reserve.

But American Prairie Reserve aims to fix that problem with its Wild Sky Beef program. Wild Sky is a brand associated with a for-profit company, and the proceeds from its profits go towards funding incentives for ranchers to engage in wildlife-friendly practices such as creating gaps in their fences for herd animals to pass through, planting native grasses, and allowing prairie dogs to establish colonies on their property. The more benchmarks the ranchers meet, the bigger the payout. 

“As we’re successful and we gain more attention over time, you’ll see other groups trying to put this together at a much larger scale,” says Geddes.

Watch the video above to learn more about American Prairie Reserve and Wild Sky Beef. Click the link below for downloadable versions. Subscribe to Reason TV’s YouTube channel for daily content like this.

Approximately 5 minutes. Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Field produced by Alex Manning and Paul Detrick. Camera by Manning. Prairie and wildlife footage by Gib Myers. Music by Adam Selzer, Michael Howard, Waylon Thornton, and Kitaygorod.

View this article.

The stereotype of videogamers as isolated, socially awkward losers hiding out their basements is wrong, says a new study. Using psychological and game-playing data derived from more than 3,000 European kids between the ages of 6 and 11 years, a team of psychologists led by Viviane Kovess-Masfety from Paris Descartes University, reports that playing video games is associated with lots of positive cognitive and mental health outcomes. In fact, more video game play was generally associated with better outcomes. The article, “Is time spent playing video games associated with mental health, cognitive and social skills in young children?,” is published in the journal Social Psychiartry and Psychiatric Epidemiology.

From the study:

In a sample of over 3000 young children across six European countries, high video game usage (playing video games more than 5 h per week) was significantly associated with higher intellectual functioning, increased academic achievement, a lower prevalence of peer relationship problems and a lower prevalence of mental health difficulties. High video game usage was not associated with an increase of conduct disorder or any externalizing disorder nor was it associated with suicidal thoughts or thoughts of death. Controlling for demographic and other risk factors explained part of the association between video game use and protective associations in mental health and cognitive function, nevertheless all these relations particularly cognitive functioning persisted despite control….

The results of the present study suggest that video game use is not associated with an increased risk of mental health problems. On the contrary, the data presented here suggest that video games are a protective factor, especially regarding peer relationship problems for the children who are the most involved in video games. Finally, video games seem to be linked to better intellectual functioning and academic achievement.

According to our data, video gaming is entirely beneficial for cognitive functioning as well as for some aspects of mental health.

The researchers do acknowledge that they did not look into what happens when gamers become adolescents. Still, play on kids!

In the wake of the Brussels attacks by jihadists linked to ISIS, leaders in Europe and the United States are making new calls for all sorts of jacked-up policing and surveillance of…everything and everyone.

GOP presidential candidate and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has said, “We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” (As Scott Shackford noted, the New York Police Department tried exactly that and it was double failure: It alienated people and didn’t uncover radicals).

At Bloomberg View, Eli Lake adroitly points out that the sort of proposals pushed by Cruz, Donald Trump, and in an earlier iteration of her protean self, Hillary Clinton, are already at work in France. Do they work and are they relevant or adaptable to American needs and mores? The short answer to these questions is no.

France, explains Lake, has been in a state of emergency since the Paris attacks last year and Francois Hollande oversees “a policy to monitor thousands of Muslim citizens even if they had no specific ties to terrorist groups” a “law to allow the police to search the homes of suspected terrorists without a warrant and to place terror suspects under house arrest without a court order.” (In most European countries—and certainly France—the left is often hawkish and reflexively dismissive of civil liberties, especially for immigrants.)

Just listen to Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister. Earlier this month, I asked him at a speech at George Washington University how many French citizens his government was now tracking. He responded, “We are monitoring several thousand people, individuals, not all of them are necessarily terrorists.”

Not all of them terrorists! That should be worrying to say the least. The United Kingdom is doing similar things as well (it has a long history of suspending civil liberties in the wake of real and potential terrorist violence, dating back at least in current form to the 1970s, when the IRA was blowing stuff up on a regular basis). Like Reason’s Shackford, Lake notes that the NYPD’s attempt to do something along these lines with Muslim neighborhoods didn’t yield results, other than pissing off the very people you would want to cooperate if in fact there is a problem.

And Lake drives home an essential point that often goes missing in discussions of European responses to terrorism: America does a far better job of assimilating not just immigrants but the children of immigrants.

The Muslim community here is far more integrated into society than many Muslims in European countries. As Seamus Hughes, a former U.S. National Counterterrorism Center official and deputy director of George Washington University’s program on countering extremism, told me Tuesday, there have not been many examples of Muslim groups sprouting up in the U.S. that openly call for violence. What’s more, Hughes said, among the 84 individuals arrested in connection to the Islamic State, there is no common profile, other than that they tend to be younger men. “In the United States, communities don’t radicalize, individuals do,” he said.

Sounding like terorrism realists such as John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, Lake argues that terrorism is ultimately more of a crime-style problem and not something that will ever be fully eradicated. It can only be contained and minimized. 

The response in France, Belgium and the U.K. to violent jihad is nonetheless a cautionary tale. When advanced democracies are terrorized, our freedoms are often the first casualty….Policing “Muslim neighborhoods” or preventing Muslim immigration will not prevent terrorist attacks…. As Europe is now learning, to delegate the war on terror to the police is not the end of war, but rather the beginning of a police state.  

Read the full article.