Tag: hit&run

For decades moral guardians have warned us about
the alleged evils of video games. They make people violent. They
make people gamble. They’re too addictive, too hypnotic, too
bloody, too risque. If they aren’t leading kids to drugs or
delinquency, they’re turning them into school shooters. And they
might even make you fat.

As part of Reason’s comprehensive “Video Game Nation”
coverage, Books Editor Jesse Walker offers some highlights from the
history of game-driven moral panics.

View this article.

The tragedy in Benghazi consisted of an organized, fatal assault
on the American consulate there that resulted in the deaths of the
American ambassador and three State Department contractors assigned
to protect him. It also includes a White House-orchestrated
cover-up involving profoundly misleading statements after the
attack, followed by an only-in-Washington cover-up of the cover-up,
Andrew Napolitano writes.

Now that the truth—that the Benghazi attack was an
al-Qaida-organized assault complete with military hardware and
sophisticated planning—has become known, Speaker John Boehner asked
the House of Representatives to form a Select Committee whose sole
goal is to get to the bottom of this and to grant it a serious
budget and a full legal and investigative staff. And so, here comes
Watergate, 21st-century style, Napolitano writes—except this time
around, innocent people died. 

View this article.

Kalyb Primm Wiley,
a second grader in Kansas City, admits he started screaming after
other students began taunting him. But he says the school resource
officer should not have put him in handcuffs when
he took him to the principal’s office. A school spokesperson said
the officer followed proper procedures and the handcuffs were
necessary to protect Kalyb and other students.

Tonight’s episode of The
Independents (Fox Business Network, 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT)
starts with a discussion of the Environmental Protection Agency’s
oversight of, um, its own employees, including
that dude who surfed porn all day, and that other one who drew
a paycheck for two-plus years while not working and pretending he
was off gallivanting with the CIA. Joining to discuss are Jehmu Greene and TV’s Andy Levy, who will also
weigh in on the advisability of news organizations being allowed to
fly surveillance drones.

Then Michael
Weiss of The Interpreter reports on the latest from
Ukraine, the co-hosts discuss the relative merits of spanking and
banning spanking; then hip-hop DJ Charlamagne tha God comes on to
preview our special Friday show, “If I Ruled the World….,” by
explaining what he’d do in power and how his professional name is
linked with dealing crack. Andy Levy and Charlamagne then discuss
Michael Jordan’s alleged teenage racism, and before you know it the
co-hosts are back talking about teen pregnancy and abortion rates,
and we’re outta here!

Follow The Independents on Facebook at http://ift.tt/QYHXdB;
follow on Twitter @ independentsFBN, (Tweet
out during the show and we might use your wit). Click on this page
for more video of past segments.

Yesterday WFAA,
the ABC station in Dallas, reported
that more than 100 people in Texas had been sickened by a bad batch
of synthetic marijuana sold under the K2 brand. Today the Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) rode
to the rescue. Together with various other federal, state, and
local law enforcement agencies, the DEA served about 200
search warrants and arrested more than 150 people
as part of “an ongoing effort targeting every level of the
dangerous global synthetic designer drug market.” Agents seized
“hundreds of thousands of individually packaged, ready-to-sell
synthetic drugs as well as hundreds of kilograms of raw synthetic
products to make thousands more,” along with “$20 million in cash
and assets.”

What’s all the fuss about? The DEA
explains that “smokable herbal blends marketed as being
‘legal’ and providing a marijuana-like high have become
increasingly popular, particularly among teens and young adults,
because they are easily available and they are more potent and
dangerous than marijuana.” According to the DEA,
then, marijuana prohibition has driven people to “easily available”
but more dangerous alternatives. The solution? More
prohibition! In 2011 the DEA administratively added
five chemicals used in pretend pot to Schedule I of the Controlled
Substances Act. The
Synthetic Drug Abuse Prevention Act of 2012 listed those
substances and added 10 more synthetic cannabinoids. A DEA
rule that took effect in February names four more.

But there are hundreds of other compounds, known and
unknown, that can mimic the effects of THC. Just the products
seized today (which included stimulants sold as “bath salts”)
contained “200 or 300 different identified chemicals,” according to
a DEA spokesman. The 2012 statute tried to address that problem by
purporting to ban, in addition to 15 specific synthetic
cannabinoids, a general class of “cannabimimetic agents,” defined
as cannabinoid receptor type 1 agonists in any of five structural
classes. But if the DEA was confident of that approach, why did it
bother to ban another four synthetic cannabinoids this year? And
why doesn’t the DEA’s press release mention the 2012 law, which
seems tailor-made for today’s busts? Instead it reaches back to a
1986 law that is notoriously difficult to enforce:

While many of the designer drugs being marketed today that
were seized as part of Project Synergy are not specifically
prohibited in the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), the Controlled
Substance Analogue Enforcement Act of 1986 (CSAEA) allows many of
these drugs to be treated as controlled substances if they are
proven to be chemically and/or pharmacologically similar to a
Schedule I or Schedule II controlled substance.  Synthetic
drug cases prosecuted under this analogue provision have grown
steadily in recent years as this problem has evolved. It has proven
to be an effective tool to combat these new and emerging designer
drugs.

If the 1986
law is adequate to “combat these new and emerging designer
drugs,” why did the DEA lobby for new legislation? Presumably
because of the barriers to successfully prosecuting people under
the analog drug law. For one thing, the substance has to be
“intended for human consumption,” which is why peddlers of ersatz
cannabis deny any such intent, typically labeling their products as
“incense.” The chemical also has to be “substantially similar” to a
Schedule I or II drug, and what that means is
anybody’s guess. Finally, it has to have a “stimulant,
depressant, or hallucinogenic effect” similar to that of a
Schedule I or II drug, or at least be represented as having such
effects. So if a guy hawks a product that contains a chemical
structurally similar to THC by urging potential customers to “buy
my simulated pot, which will get you high just like the real
stuff,” prosecuting him would be pretty straightforward. Otherwise
it might be iffy. And even if a substance qualifies as an analog in
one case, the exact same compound might not be deemed an analog in
another case, since the definition can depend on
context.

The DEA spokesman tells me I should not read too much into
the omission of the ban on “cannabimimetic agents” from the
agency’s discussion of prosecuting people for selling drugs that
are not specifically prohibited by the CSA. Federal prosecutors
will decide for themselves the best legal strategy, he says, and
some of them may try their luck with the new provision. I called
the Justice Department to find out whether there have been any
successful prosecutions under that section of the 2012 law, but I
have not heard back yet.

Prosecutorial strategies aside, does this seem like a good
way to reduce the harm caused by drug use? As KFAA explains, “K2 is
difficult to regulate because manufacturers switch up the
ingredients frequently.” And why do they do that? To stay ahead of
the law. The upshot is that a relatively benign ingredient may be
replaced on the sly with something less fun or more toxic. And as
the DEA implicitly admits, legal restrictions on
marijuana—a well-researched drug that humans have been consuming
for thousands of years, a drug that the president of the United
States
correctly calls safer than alcohol—are encouraging people to
experiment with novel chemicals that may prove
far more dangerous.

We weren’t kidding when we
said Reason would be looking at the many ways video games have
transformed from a subculture recreational activity to a cultural
juggernaut. Today, you can read and watch Reason’s “Video Game
Nation,” chock full of interviews, analysis, polls, and essays.
Check out our special game-related page
here. 

Video games are now more of a social environment than ever
(despite what critics would say about kids glued to monitors), so
Reason is opening up its Los Angeles office for a gathering and a
panel discussion with a couple of industry insiders about video
game innovations, what video games may accomplish, and what the
future holds. We’ll have food trucks, drinks, video games and free
valet parking. Here’s the basics:

• When: Thursday, May 8, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
• Where: Reason’s Los Angeles headquarters, 5737 Mesmer Ave., Los
  Angeles, CA 90230 (Map)
• Who will be there: Besides you lovely people, Reason
  magazine Editor-in-Chief Matt Welch will moderate a panel with our
  two industry guests. Craig Allen is the chief executive officer of
  Spark
  Unlimited, a Sherman Oaks-based game company that has produced
  several shooter games for consoles; he also previously worked with
  Jim Henson Interactive’s digital media activities. Joining him will
  be Tracy Fullerton, a
  University of Southern California associate professor and game
  designer. She wrote Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric
  Approach to Designing Innovative Games, and is currently
  working on an experimental game revolving around Henry David
  Thoreau’s experiences at Walden Pond.

Register
here at Eventbrite if you’re planning to attend and feel to
share our Facebook
event listing. We’re looking forward to seeing you and kicking your
ass at Street Fighter.

CNN is reporting that the African National Congress (ANC) is
likely to maintain its majority in South Africa’s first national
election since the death of its former leader, Nelson Mandela. That
means that the current president, Jacob Zuma, will almost certainly
maintain his position despite huge scandals and terrible
performance on everything from combating crime to promoting
economic growth.

CNN also reports that a new party, The Economic Freedom Fighters
(EFF), will gain ground. That too is bad news for South Africa. The
leader of EFF, Julius Malema, is an unabashed fan of Robert Mugabe,
the homicidal tyrant who has destroyed Zimbabwe.

Click above to watch Rob Montz and Reason TV’s powerful
documentary “Life After Liberation: Triumph and Tragedy in South
Africa,” which charts the dismal failure of the ANC to follow up on
Mandela’s promise of a better, freer, wealthier country.
Go here for full text, downloadable versions, and more
resources.

How bad is it? Desmond Tutu, the Nobel laureate who like Mandela
fought against the apartheid system, now says bluntly: “This
government—our government—is worse than
the apartheid government.”

Such a dismal turn of events is as unbelievable as it is
tragic.

The video originally aired on Monday. Here’s the original
text:

South African voters are headed to the polls this week
for the
fourth national election since 1994, when Nelson Mandela
was elected president after the end of the apartheid regime.

Their country represents epic history in our lifetimes. After a
decades-long struggle against brutal, state-run racial segregation,
the black liberation movement emerged victorious in the early
1990s. Led by the transcendent figure of Mandela, South Africa
swiftly dismantled the apartheid apparatus and, defying dour
predictions of a bloody race war, peacefully transitioned to
majority rule. Mandela’s government ushered in pluralistic
democracy on a continent long-defined by colonialism and autocracy.
State officials established remarkably robust constitutional
protections for individual rights.

Black South Africans would finally be afforded the economic and
social opportunities they’d been denied for so long.

Or so everyone had hoped.

Two decades later, Mandela’s promise of renewal has largely gone
unfulfilled as Mandela’s party, the African National Congress (ANC)
has maintained its huge electoral majority. The beautiful dream
animating the South African experiment is crumbling amidst ongoing
corruption, violence, and failed economic policies. As Nobel Peace
Prize recipient Desmond Tutu has said of the current regime, “This
government—our government—isworse than
the apartheid government.”

“Life After Liberation,” directed and hosted
by Rob Montz,
details the role played by political monopoly in South Africa’s
post-apartheid decline. The documentary shows how the ANC has grown
corrupt and complacent—and how widespread resentment of the ruling
political class is now fueling the rise of a populist demagogue,
Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters, who is pushing
precisely the sort of Mugabeist socialist
policies that have ruined so many other African countries.

About 10 minutes.

Produced, written, and edited by Rob Montz. Camera by Josh
Swain.

More here.

In the United States, it has probably never
been safer to be a kid. There’s no lead paint on the wall, fun
metal slides have been replaced by scratched plastic crap that even
wax paper can’t get up to dangerous speed, and crimes against
children have plummeted.

So why is Los Angeles County fretting over an infestation of
pervy, Aqualung-ish
ice cream vendors?

Yesterday, the Board of Supervisors
approved a motion pushing for background checks on business
license “applicants whose businesses regularly interact with
children.” The motion specifically singles out peddlers of
creamsicles and other cold, sweet treats as nefarious threats to
the innocent youth. That, despite a lack of evidence that innocent
youths face much of a threat at all—and the dangers posed by
background checks themselves.

The motion by
Supervisor Don Knabe (PDF) reads, in part:

We should carefully scrutinize the background of any individual
who engages in a child-oriented business to see if he or she has
been convicted of crimes against children such  as
molestation, pornography, abuse, or is a registered sex offender.
 

Ice cream truck vendors are a prime example of someone that
operates a business that caters to children as their primary
clientele, or at the very least provides them with direct access to
children who may not be in the company of an adult.

The dread scourge of ice cream vendors?

Knabe proposes that shifty-eyed would-be retailers of frozen
confections be run through Live
Scan—electronic fingerprinting—and checked against police and
FBI criminal records.

So what’s the harm if it will save just one child from
some would-be Mister Pervee?

Well…Criminal background checks aren’t perfect tools. Really,
they’re as fallible as any database, especially those run by
government employees. Last year, the
National Employment Law Project noted (PDF) that the FBI isn’t
so diligent about keeping its records current; about half of
records are missing final disposition information. That means they
reflect an arrest, but not whether a conviction resulted. As a
result of such flaws, “more than 600,000 workers a year were
potentially prejudiced in a job search as a result of the FBI’s
failure to report accurate and complete information.”

So, if LA County starts running background checks on everybody
who gets near a kid, there’s a good chance that more than a few of
them will be denied an opportunity to make a living for no good
reason. They’ll also be tainted as dangers to children.

All this, even as the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports
that “the overall rate of serious violent crime against youth ages
12 to 17 declined 77 percent from 1994 to 2010.” If you share
Supervisor Knabe’s specific concerns about sex offenders, it’s
worth knowing that “the rate of rape and sexual assault declined 68
percent.”

Fortunately, Knabe and company made the usual political move by
publicly announcing their concerns, and then skating the proposal
off for review by the Treasurer, Tax Collector, and County
Counsel.

Maybe it’ll stay frozen in bureaucratic limbo.

What might cause 23 police officers to fire 377
rounds in two volleys of gunfire into a car that held two unarmed
men, one of whom was a suspect in an armed robbery? That’s what
happened in Miami-Dade County, Florida, in December. The suspect,
Adrian Montesano, was also accused of shooting a police officer in
a trailer park after the robbery. Witnesses said the early morning
shooting scene resembled something out of the “wild, wild west,”
and that the two men in the car were alive after the first volley
of gunfire. Two cops were also hit in the shooting, in the arm,
with one also being grazed in the head. Both men, Montesano and his
passenger, Corsini Valdes, not accused of any crime, were
killed.

CBS4 in Miami has spent the last five months piecing together
what happened that day. Here’s
what they found out:

The nature of the shooting suggests the officers lost
sight of their own training and that the officers, caught up in the
heat of the moment, failed to listen to their radios or coordinate
their actions endangering not only their own lives but the lives of
the public.

It is worth saying, none of this would have happened if Adrian
Montesano had not made the decision to rob the Walgreens and shoot
a police officer. None of those officers would have been in that
backyard if it weren’t for the actions of Montesano. But that does
not absolve the officers of responsibility for their own conduct,
as well.

Senior commanders admit they are very lucky more officers weren’t
seriously hurt or killed. Even more haunting is the danger the
residents in the area faced. At the time of the shooting, parents
were getting their kids ready for school and across the street men
and women stood exposed on a Metrorail platform.

The incident is being reviewed by the Miami Dade Police
Department and the state attorney, but those reviews, according to
CBS4, could take years to complete. The robbery and subsequent
shooting of a cop, CBS4 concluded, “sent officers across the county
into a state of frenzy.” Read the rest of CBS4’s report
here.

• President Vladimir Putin today
  
  said he has pulled back Russian troops from the Ukrainian
  border and favors Ukraine’s presidential election on May 25 over
  separatist referendums scheduled for the 11^th. The
  Pentagon has said it’s seen “no
  evidence” of the troop movement and Ukraine’s acting government
  doesn’t
  trust a word of it.
• Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) accused Charles and David Koch of
  being
  “one of the main causes” of climate change. Reid, on the other
  hand, is accused of spewing vast quantities of hot gas into the
  atmosphere.
• American Idol star Clay Aiken leads the Democratic primary in
  North Carolina’s 2^nd congressional district by
  
  fewer than 400 votes.
• Former Florida governor and current candidate to reclaim the
  position, Charlie Crist, a
  Republican-turned-Independent-turned-Democrat, claims that he left
  the GOP due to
  its racist tendencies.
• Twelve-graders’ math and reading skills are
  disappointingly low and have remained pretty stagnant for the
  last four years, according to the National Assessment of
  Educational Progress’s “National Report Card.” Get ready for summer
  school, kids.
• Lions Gate Entertainment announced today that it is producing a
  live-action
  Mighty Morphin Power Rangers movie. Spandex suits can hardly
  contain the excitement of ’90s nostalgia fanatics.

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