Month: February 2014

When most people
think of secession, they think of the type of disturbing
events unfolding in the Ukraine. But efforts to break up
political boundaries could be coming to California, albeit in a
laid-back and peaceful manner, as Silicon Valley venture
capitalist Tim Draper circulates an initiative to chop up
the state into pieces. No U.S. state has been divided since the
Civil War. But, as Steven Greenhut notes, this idea sounds less
antiquated after considering that just one of California’s 58
counties is larger than nine U.S. states and four of them
combined. 

View this article.

On February 13 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit

invalidated a San Diego County, California requirement which
allowed for the issuance of conceal-carry gun permits, but only
when the gun owner had “good cause” to carry a concealed weapon.
And according to county officials, “one’s personal safety is not
considered good cause.” That restriction, the 9th Circuit ruled,
eliminated “the only way that the typical responsible, law-abiding
citizen can carry a weapon in public for the lawful purpose of
self-defense,” and therefore amounted to an unconstitutional
infringement on the Second Amendment.

In a petition filed
yesterday, California Attorney General Kamala Harris has urged
the 9th Circuit to wipe that gun rights ruling off the books. “This
case adopts a theory of the Second Amendment with sweeping
implications for the constitutional permissibility of hitherto
routine state and local regulation of the public carrying of
dangerous weapons,” the California petition argues, and it also
“inappropriately discounts legislative policy judgments to which it
should defer.”

Harris is seeking what’s known as en banc review,
meaning the state of California has requested that a full panel of
9th Circuit judges reconsider the case (this month’s ruling was by
a 3-judge panel). Should the 9th Circuit refuse to review en
banc, the state’s next move would be a petition asking the
U.S. Supreme Court to step in and overturn the ruling.

In 1979, a Michigan State
student named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared from campus.
Egbert was a Dungeons & Dragons fan, and the media latched onto
speculations that he had died in the campus’ steam tunnels while
playing a live-action version of the game. A moral panic over
role-playing games was just getting underway, and the rhetoric
around the case tended toward the Gothic. “We’ve sat here many an
hour, all of us wondering—is Dallas the dungeon master,” a private
detective hired by Egbert’s family
said at one point. “Or if he isn’t the dungeon master, is there
some other dungeon master who has pulled all of us into this game
by using him as some sort of pawn?”

Such speculations turned out to be
untrue: Egbert had taken a bus to New Orleans, where he
attempted suicide for reasons unrelated to the game. (A year later,
he would succeed in killing himself.) But as the D&D panic
progressed in the early ’80s, the story became a sort of
half-remembered cautionary tale for parents nervous about this
strange new hobby. Rona Jaffe wrote a novel, Mazes
and Monsters, that was loosely inspired by the most lurid
accounts of the case. And in 1982, that book became a
made-for-TV movie. Vague recollections of the televised Mazes
and Monsters mixed with vague recollections of Egbert to form
a hazy folk memory: not a precise tale with names and dates, but a
legend about a guy who got lost or died or something because a game
had taken over his life.

I’ve embedded the movie below. The protagonists, a collection of
troubled college kids alienated in different ways from their
families, get drawn into a role-playing game the way characters in
other movies get drawn into drugs. (Indeed, the whole thing is
stuctured like an anti-drug picture.) One of the students—played by
a young Tom Hanks, whose only other notable credit at this point
was the sitcom Bosom Buddies—loses the distinction between
fantasy and reality, becoming convinced that he really is the
cleric he plays in the game. By the end of the picture (SPOILER
ALERT) he has stabbed a man, come close to killing himself, and
lost his original identity permanently. The film makes some small
attempts at balance, suggesting that the game can help less fragile
people work through their fears. But when the best you can say
about a pastime is that it’s potentially therapeutic but dangerous,
that’s ultimately just one more parallel with an anti-drug
film.

The script is clumsy even by ’80s TV-movie standards—when the
screenwriter wants to tell us that a character has an IQ of 190,
for instance, he does it by having the boy’s mom randomly mention
the fact while greeting him—and the acting is mostly awful. (Hanks
isn’t bad for most of the movie, at least in comparison to the rest
of the cast, but his performance goes over the top when his
character loses his mind.) If you don’t think you can sit through
the whole thing, jump to 1:07:10 for a particularly potent bit of
fearmongering dialogue. Then go to 1:32:19 to check out the
climax atop the World Trade Center, a scene that echoes those
urban
legends where LSD convinces people that they can fly.

Bonus link: That’s the secular version of the D&D
scare. For the Christian version, I give you Jack T.
Chick.

Bad news for those who want choice and convenience in hiring
rides out of Seattle,
from GeekWire:

The City Council today voted 5-4 to cap the number of
drivers active on each system to 150 at any given time during the
day. That means Lyft would be allowed 150 drivers at one time —
same goes for Sidecar and UberX.

This isn’t quite set in stone yet. The full Council will meet
again March 10 and make an official vote, though since every
councilmember voted at today’s committee meeting, the decision
isn’t expected to change.

It wasn’t like old-fashioned “rile up the people” lobbying
wasn’t done, and successfully, by UberX on behalf of themselves and
the idea of e-hailing ride services.

As
this Seattle Weekly story explains, they got local
heroes from the Seahawks to Macklemore publicly on their side, and
just as concerned fans, not paid lobbyists. 

According to Uber Seattle General Manager Brooke Steger, the
rules Seattle’s taxi committee seems poised to impose “are some of
the most devastating” the company has seen proposed in any market.
“Being from here, and thinking about how open-minded and
progressive this city can be,” Steger says of the proposal, “to me
it’s shocking.”….

Steger says the “Seahawks have been wildly supportive of us,”
and that many of the players utilize Uber’s services. Of
Macklemore’s endorsement, she says the Grammy winner reached out to
the company to see how he could help, and that all the support he’s
provided on social media has been of his own mind…

With its message effectively out, the question now for Uber and
Seattle’s other ride share outfits is how effective the rallying
will be….

“I can’t say how effective it’s actually going to be,” Steger
says of Uber’s PR efforts. “Just based on what I’ve seen, we have
the support of the people.”

It’s very unlikely that even the politicians actually
believed for a second that they were doing the will of the people
with this restriction. It’s pure protectionism on behalf of
entrenched business interests and against consumer interest. Alas,
it’s still politics as usual.

My October article on California’s statewide
regulation–not as draconian as Seattle’s proposal–of
e-hailing services.

[Hat tip: Paul Gambill]

Conway, SC is a small city, with a population of about 16,000.
Many residents work in tourism-related jobs in nearby Myrtle Beach.
The drugs and gangs have made them feel unsafe at home. Dianne
Davis, 56, said she tries “not to let the dark catch me” and
described other Conway residents as barricading their doors with
two-by-fours.

“I want to be able to stand on my porch,” Davis said. “I have a
beautiful garden.”

“There are a lot of gangsters running around in that area,”
Jimmy Richardson said of the neighborhood where Huckabee Heights is
located. Richardson is the chief state prosecutor for Horry County,
which includes Conway, and a resident of the city himself.

To South Carolina’s top federal prosecutor, however, the
troubles in Conway present an opportunity. U.S. Attorney Bill
Nettles is testing out a novel approach to dealing with
drug-related crime, one that aims to clean up the streets by
looking beyond mass arrests and incarceration. Conway is the third
city in South Carolina to implement a version of the plan, and
federal prosecutors in other states and the Justice Department are
watching closely. If the program’s success continues in South
Carolina, it could become a model for law enforcement across the
country.

Read the whole article
here.

For some unknown reason neither
Disney park ever makes the list of gay-friendliest cities in
America. Having a Main Street is not enough to qualify, apparently,
but the parks are full of gay people. Last year Disney named an
openly gay man
president of Walt Disney World in Orlando. And while the parks
insist they are not officially connected to the annual “Gay Days”
activities, visitors to the park on those days will plenty of
representations of rainbows on the
merchandise.

So Disney’s really gay, which for many folks is like saying
water is wet, but there are some who still have an old Liberace fan
level of denial about it.

Disney’s also all about volunteering to the point that it had to
incorporate an obnoxious pun into the affair (“VoluntEARS” – get
it?) and has a whole big program for it. Through a program titled
“EARS to You” (get it?) the company donates money to charities of
their employees’ choosing and to places where they volunteer.

In 2013, under a significant amount of cultural pressure, the
Boy Scouts of America ended its ban on gay boys participating in
the program. But they kept the ban on gay men serving as adults as
troop leaders and such. Once an openly gay scout turns 18, he’s
out. This halfway decision wasn’t enough for Disney. Walt Disney
World is cutting off funding for troops in the Orlando area.
 An area scout president sent out a
letter that is making the media rounds:

We recognize that many Scout Units have received financial
support over the last several years from this grant opportunity and
are sad to see it go. The National BSA Council has reached out to
WDW to try to resolve the situation, however, according to WDW,
their views do not currently align with the BSA and they are
choosing to discontinue this level of support.

We will continue to keep an open line of communication with
them, but at this time, are unable to reverse their decision. If
you are a WDW employee and have any concerns or questions about
your volunteer service, I encourage you to reach out to your direct
supervisor.

So the pressure hasn’t eased up on the Scouts to finish what it
has started and just let gay people participate in all capacities.
It’s not clear how much money the Boy Scouts stand to lose, but
Walt Disney Company boasted
$370 million in total giving last year (though that includes
product donations and in-kind support, not just cash).

Nick Gillespie, an Eagle Scout,
wrote last year about how he doesn’t allow his sons to
participate because of the Boy Scouts of America’s policy of
exclusion.