Tag: hit&run

Several week ago, Jessica Dever-Jakusz resigned
her position as a police officer in Tempe, Arizona. A memo from the
police chief confirming her resignation led to a public records
request, which revealed that Dever-Jakusz had told an alleged drug
dealer she was having sex with that she and two other females
buying “Molly” (MDMA,
mostly, kinda) from him were undercover cops investigating him.
Cops found out what happened when the target of the investigation
showed up at a police station to tell them.
The Arizona Republic explains:

The report said the suspect went to a police substation
and told officers about Dever-Jakusz’s statements about two or
three days later. He told police he was not “emotionally tied” to
Dever-Jakusz, though the affair started in August. The undercover
buys with the suspect started in June, the report said.

While revealing her identity to the suspect, Dever-Jakusz said her
“ex,” a Chandler police officer, was “looking up a bunch of stuff”
on him, the report said. She suspected his motivation was “for
other than a legitimate purpose as a law-enforcement officer,” the
report said.

Chandler police confirmed last week that Officer Garrett Dever is
the subject of an internal-affairs investigation and is married to
Jessica Dever-Jakusz, but refused to release other details until
the investigation is complete.

The report did not say why the suspect came forward, but it said
his decision to divulge Dever-Jakusz’s statements to police made it
impossible for them to file charges against him for drug sales to
Dever-Jakusz.

The department apparently considered Dever-Jakusz, a 14-year
veteran, a “shining star.” She was “hand-picked” by supervisors for
an
unnamed reality show where she was sent to Switzerland, along
with another officer, earlier this year.The police report said
Dever-Jakusz believed investigators were joking when they first
asked her about the affair with the alleged drug dealer,
according to the local CBS affiliate.

In their report, the Tempe Police Department recommended to
county prosecutors that Dever-Jakusz be charged on two counts of
“hindering prosecution”. The alleged drug dealer had been targeted
for four months before his visit to the police station appears to
have ended it, for now.

More Reason on the “Molly” panic
here and how drug criminalization lowers the quality of MDMA
available on the market and hurts consumers
here, and you can add scorned lovers who carry badges as
another reason you should worry about government surveillance even
if you have “nothing
to hide.”

h/t sarcasmic

The market is fine for some things, people
will say, but other activities are too important to be left to the
market. Or too complicated. Or too fundamental to our democracy.
John Stossel points out that we let people sell blood. And sperm.
And eggs. Why not kidneys? Why not privatize everything?

View this article.

That’s the headline on the
World Meteorological Organization’s
press release for its latest
Greenhouse Gas Bulletin report issued just before the
19th
Conference of the Parties (COP-19) of the U.N. Framework
Convention on Climate Change convenes later this month in Warsaw.
The release notes:

The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a new
record high in 2012, continuing an upward and accelerating trend
which is driving climate change and will shape the future of our
planet for hundreds and thousands of years.

The World Meteorological Organization’s annual Greenhouse Gas
Bulletin shows that between 1990 and 2012 there was a 32% increase
in radiative forcing – the warming effect on our climate – because
of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other heat-trapping long-lived gases
such as methane and nitrous oxide.

Carbon dioxide, mainly from fossil fuel-related emissions,
accounted for 80% of this increase. The atmospheric increase of CO2
from 2011 to 2012 was higher than its average growth rate over the
past ten years, according to the Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.

Since the start of the industrial era in 1750, the global
average concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by
41%, methane by 160% and nitrous oxide by 20%. What is happening in
the atmosphere is one part of a much wider picture. Only about half
of the CO2 emitted by human activities remains in the atmosphere,
with the rest being absorbed in the biosphere and in the
oceans.

Interestingly, the GHG Bulletin notes that the amount
of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has increased by 32 percent
since 1990. Yet global average temperatures have been
more or less flat for the last 15 years. Curious.

Heads up: I will be writing daily dispatches from the COP-19
in Warsaw from November 18 to its end on November 22.

Anti-biotech luddites tried to scare the
citizens of Washington State into voting for the I-522 initiative
that would have mandated labels on foods containing ingredients
derived from genetically modified crops, even those crops are as

safe or safer than conventional or organic crops. Styled as a
“right to know” initiative, the scientifically dishonest proponents
of labeling actually hope that confused consumers would mistake
them as “warning labels,” and thus avoid purchasing foods made from
cheaper and more environmentally
friendly biotech crops.

All the votes are not yet in – a lot of in Washington State
residents vote by mail, but the trend looks promising. As
Politico
reports:

Washington state’s GMO labeling measure appears to be going down
in defeat, early results show.

With slightly less than a million votes counted, the current
tally on Ballot Initiative 522, which would require the labeling of
foods that contain genetically modified organisms, show those
opposed leading by about 536,000 (54.8 percent) to 442,000 (45.2
percent). The figures represent about a quarter of the state’s 3.9
million registered voters, but not all of the votes have been
counted.

The delay in the final vote total is due to the fact that
Washington is a mail-in ballot state, and it will count any ballots
postmarked by Nov. 5, even if those ballots arrive at the end of
the week. As a result, the tally on election night often only
reflects about 60 percent of the votes that ultimately will be
received, according to Brian Zylstra, a spokesman for Washington’s
Office of the Secretary of State.

If that holds true in this election, with 997,566 ballots
counted on election night, another 665,044 could be in the
mail.

Here’s hoping that good sense will ultimately prevail among
Washington voters and this scientifically ignorant measure fails.
It’s a pity that the food and farming industries have to
waste so much money to counter this egregious anti-biotech
propaganda.

In a new
column up at The Daily Beast, I look upon the avalanche of books
about John F. Kennedy coming out to mark the 50th anniversary of
this assassination and despair.
Here’s a snippet:

Each fall since November 22, 1963, regular programming is
pre-empted and whole rainforests are clear-cut to bring us books
filled with the latest minor (and often delusional) variations on
who killed Kennedy and why; the supposedly transformative effect of
the “Camelot” years on contemporary geo-politics and, more
plausibly, the hat-wearing habits of the American male; and
counterfactuals about just how awesome—or awful—JFK’s second term
would have been.

Whatever emotional immediacy, contemporary relevance, and news
value this all once inarguably possessed, can we now admit that the
topic has grown thinner than the post-1963 resume of Kennedy
impersonator Vaughn Meader? It now lives on mostly as a sort
of repetition-compulsion disorder through which the baby
boom generation (born between 1946 and 1964) seeks to preserve its
stultifying cultural hegemony even as it slowly—finally!—begins to
exit the stage of American life on a fleet of taxpayer-funded
Rascal Scooters.

Read the whole thing.

What we know—based on decades of research—is that
publicly financed sports stadiums are a sucker’s bet for everyone
except the rich team players and their even richer owners. But some
recent research suggests smaller clubs and smaller facilities might
not be the economic sinkholes their bigger cousins are. The work
comes from Nola Agha, an assistant professor of sports management
at the University of San Francisco and arrives at what Agha terms
“an unexpected outcome”: Certain types of teams and facilities can
produce gains in regional income (albeit small ones: about $67 to
about $117 per capita). Agha cautions that her research doesn’t
include any cost-benefit analysis, “so there is no implication that
cities should invest in AA or rookie stadiums.” Still, writes A.
Barton Hinkle, the economic case against sports stadiums used to be
open and shut in every instance. Now, in some cases, it is simply
open.

View this article.

Every month University of Alabama in
Huntsville climatologists John Christy and Roy Spencer report the
latest global temperature trends from satellite data. Below are the
newest data updated through October 2013:

Global Temperature Report: October 2013

Global climate trend since Nov. 16, 1978: +0.14 C per decade

October temperatures (preliminary)

Global composite temp.: +0.22 C (about 0.40 degrees Fahrenheit)
above 30-year average for October.

Northern Hemisphere: +0.23 C (about 0.41 degrees Fahrenheit)
above 30-year average for October.

Southern Hemisphere: +0.22 C (about 0.40 degrees Fahrenheit)
above 30-year average for October.

Tropics: +0.04 C (about 0.07 degrees Fahrenheit) above 30-year
average for October.

(All temperature anomalies are based on a 30-year average
(1981-2010) for the month reported.)

Go here
to download monthly global temperature data since 1978.

Four years ago, serial-entrepreneur Craig Zucker had a hit
product on his hands: Buckyballs, desk toys comprised of
supercharged mini magnets, which were flying off the shelves and
into the shopping carts of fidgety-handed customers. Zucker’s
company, Maxfield & Oberton, had sales of $10 million in
2009. 

Zucker’s troubles began last year, when the
federal Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) filed an
administrative complaint that sought to ban and recall the product
on the grounds that it was dangerous for children. It’s true that
if swallowed, these powerful tiny balls can cause internal bleeding
because they seek to find other magnets when lodged in a person’s
bowels or intestinal tract. But banning the product was
“statistically ridiculous,” as
a report in the Huffington Post explained. There were
22 reported incidents of ingested Buckeyballs from 2009 to October
2011, or one for every 100,000 sets sold. That means the product is
orders of magnitude less risky than dogs, tennis, skateboarding,
and poisonous household chemicals. And the product was clearly
marked, “Keep Away from All Children.”

View this article.

Yesterday
Colorado voters overwhelmingly
approved Proposition AA, which authorizes a 15 percent excise
tax and a special sales tax of up to 15 percent (intially set at 10
percent) on marijuana products sold by the state-licensed stores
that are scheduled to open next year. The margin, 65 percent to 35
percent, was almost exactly the same as the margin by which voters

rejected an income tax hike aimed at boosting funding for
public schools. Most of the annual revenue from the marijuana
excise tax—the first $40 million—likewise is earmarked for a school
construction fund. Since marijuana consumers currently are a
relatively small minority (around
12 percent of the population), these results are not terribly
surprising. Given the choice, voters will always prefer that other
people pick up the tab for their stuff.

All of the proposed local taxes on marijuana also passed by big
margins. Denver voters
authorized an additional sales tax by a margin of  more
than 2 to 1 (69 percent to 31 percent). The tax is initially set at
3.5 percent, but the city council has leeway to raise it as high as
15 percent. By a vote of 67 percent to 33 percent, Boulder voters

approved a 3.5 percent sales tax that can be raised as high as
10 percent. Littleton voters
approved a 3 percent sales tax by a vote of 64 percent to 36
percent.

The upshot is that marijuana will be the most heavily taxed
consumer product in Colorado by far, taxed at a
much higher rate than alcohol even without taking local taxes
into account. That situation is hard to reconcile with Amendment
64’s
aim of taxing marijuana “in a manner similar to alcohol,” and
it surely makes no sense in light of the two products’
relative hazards, which were a major theme of the legalization
campaign. If legislators take full advantage of their new tax
authority, marijuana in Denver, the center of the retail cannabis
industry, will be hit by a 15 percent excise tax plus sales taxes
totaling 38 percent (including standard and special state and local
taxes). With taxes that high, the state-licensed outlets may have

trouble competing with the black market and with homegrown
marijuana. (Colorodans are allowed to grow up to six plants at home
and share the produce, one ounce at a time, “without
remuneration.”) Legislators may find that if they set taxes too
high, the result will be less revenue rather than more.

Yesterday
Colorado voters overwhelmingly
approved Proposition AA, which authorizes a 15 percent excise
tax and a special sales tax of up to 15 percent (intially set at 10
percent) on marijuana products sold by the state-licensed stores
that are scheduled to open next year. The margin, 65 percent to 35
percent, was almost exactly the same as the margin by which voters

rejected an income tax hike aimed at boosting funding for
public schools. Most of the annual revenue from the marijuana
excise tax—the first $40 million—likewise is earmarked for a school
construction fund. Since marijuana consumers currently are a
relatively small minority (around
12 percent of the population), these results are not terribly
surprising. Given the choice, voters will always prefer that other
people pick up the tab for their stuff.

All of the proposed local taxes on marijuana also passed by big
margins. Denver voters
authorized an additional sales tax by a margin of  more
than 2 to 1 (69 percent to 31 percent). The tax is initially set at
3.5 percent, but the city council has leeway to raise it as high as
15 percent. By a vote of 67 percent to 33 percent, Boulder voters

approved a 3.5 percent sales tax that can be raised as high as
10 percent. Littleton voters
approved a 3 percent sales tax by a vote of 64 percent to 36
percent.

The upshot is that marijuana will be the most heavily taxed
consumer product in Colorado by far, taxed at a
much higher rate than alcohol even without taking local taxes
into account. That situation is hard to reconcile with Amendment
64’s
aim of taxing marijuana “in a manner similar to alcohol,” and
it surely makes no sense in light of the two products’
relative hazards, which were a major theme of the legalization
campaign. If legislators take full advantage of their new tax
authority, marijuana in Denver, the center of the retail cannabis
industry, will be hit by a 15 percent excise tax plus sales taxes
totaling 38 percent (including standard and special state and local
taxes). With taxes that high, the state-licensed outlets may have

trouble competing with the black market and with homegrown
marijuana. (Colorodans are allowed to grow up to six plants at home
and share the produce, one ounce at a time, “without
remuneration.”) Legislators may find that if they set taxes too
high, the result will be less revenue rather than more.