Tag: hit&run

Tomorrow’s the big day in the U.S. of A, and what
better way to celebrate our independence than with some real
firepower? That’s probably what one unnamed, entrepreneurial
77-year-old Cleveland resident thought. Unfortunately for him, he
lives in a state that essentially bans the detonation of anything
stronger than a sparkler, and now he may be facing felony
charges.

The Plain Dealer
reported yesterday:

A citizen tipped off police that the Cleveland man … was
illegally selling fireworks. Detectives bought two boxes of
assorted fireworks for $100 from the Cleveland man. After the
purchase, the man told the undercover officers he could get
them bigger fireworks, [Second District Commander Thomas] Stacho
said.

Detectives followed him to the 8700 block of Pleasant Valley
Road in Parma, Stacho said. He opened the garage to what looked
like a store, shelves lined with hundreds of fireworks, ranging
from small firecrackers and sparklers to professional grade
explosives and H-100 firecrackers. …

Police and prosecutors are taking the cases against the
[77-year-old and another man] to a Cuyahoga County Grand Jury and
are seeking a felony indictment. The men have not been arrested or
charged.

His loot added up to about $100,000 worth of fun. Now the cops
will have the pleasure of “detonat[ing] the confiscated fireworks
in a large hole in an undisclosed location.”

While Cleveland police officers like Stacho pat themselves on
the back for staging “one of the largest fireworks seizures any one
of us are aware of or remember in the city,” it’s worth reflecting
on the situation’s absurdity: a senior citizen could face
prison time for conducting business that less than two hours’
drive away across the Pennsylvania border wouldn’t warrant a
written citation (albeit, with the proper licensing).

Ohioans aren’t the only ones burdened by such prohibitions.
The Washington Post
highlights the fact that “roughly 1 in 9 Americans lives in a
state that bans all consumer fireworks.” Those would be Delaware,
Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. Additionally, “five states
— Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Ohio and Vermont — allow only sparklers
and/or novelty fireworks. And Arizona allows only novelty
fireworks.”

I’d say it’s unfortunate for residents of those states, but
having participated in many such fireworks displays, I know it’s
all the more titillating to celebrate Independence Day in direct
defiance of bad laws. 

Picking up on something Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote here
this morning:

To younger members of Gen X and
older millennials, [Saved by the Bell] is part of the
childhood canon. I think we all died a little inside yesterday in
the Reason D.C. office when we realized that none of our interns
and a few of our youngest staffers had no idea who Jessie Spano
was. By a quick show of birth years, we pipointed 1990 as the crack
in this generational divide. I shudder to ask them about the Soup
Nazi—though I suppose Seinfeld is a show you’re more prone
to watch in reruns as an adult than Saved by the Bell.
(Another show launched in 1989, The Simpsons, is still
airing after all these years.)

I was watching some old episodes of The Simpsons with
one of my kids the other night, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt
quite as decrepit as I did when I realized that “Marge vs. the
Monorail” is 21 years old. Put another way: The gap between now
and “Marge vs. the Monorail” is larger than the gap between “Marge
vs. the Monorail” and the fall of Saigon. I would have told my
daughter that, but then she would’ve asked “What’s a Saigon?” and I
would’ve felt even older. It was bad enough that I had to explain
who Leonard Nimoy was. He isn’t even dead yet.

A new wave of press censorship has arrived in
Great Britain, exemplified by a growing movement in favor of a
state-led investigation into the culture and ethics of the tabloid
media. And as Brendan O’Neill reports, this campaign to enforce
tighter state regulation of the press has received the surprising
support of top British liberals.

View this article.

• A routine conference call
  between Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran’s campaign and the press
  
  “descended into madness” after being hijacked by activists
  supporting Cochran’s opponent, Chris McDaniel. Just before the
  call, conservative blogger Charles C. Johnson had tweeted out
  details of the call asking his followers to “crash it with me.”
  They contend that Cochran is guilty of fraud, though the
  accusations seem scurrilous so far.
• States are
  backing out left and right from Common Core standardized
  testing requirements. The high cost and dubious purpose of the
  tests has united everyone from conservative think tanks to teachers
  unions against them. “The federal government has a lot of blame
  here,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten
  told POLITICO.
• The United Nations Security Council
  turned down a request from Netflix’s House of
  Cards to film its upcoming third season inside the U.N.
  chambers. Russia apparently said no.
• Dinesh D’Souza and Bill Ayers
  debated whether the United States is a fundamentally good
  nation on Fox News’ The Kelly File.
• Better Call Saul, AMC’s spin-off of critically and
  commercially beloved Breaking Bad,
  will serve as a prequel, interlude, and sequel to the original
  TV series.

This week marks
the 25th anniversary of the debut of Seinfeld. Popular
wisdom holds that Seinfeld was “a show about
nothing.” And of course this isn’t exactly true—the show was
about relationships, social niceties, narcissism, and modernity.
More specifically, it was a show about the conflation of these
things.

Unlike the characters on Friends—our other 1990s
über-sitcom—the Seinfeldian gang wasn’t so much a
makeshift urban family as a group of people who found each other’s
company varying degrees of advantageous and esteem-boosting. These
were not good people, to put it mildly. “Seinfeld
was defiantly not lovable,” writes Matt Zoller Seitz in New
York, describing the world they inhabited as “a kind of
open-air prison of social ritual”. 

But Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine dissected, in minute and
unflinching detail, all the quirks and agitations of daily life
that generally went unremarked upon. They pointed out the absurdity
of situations we’d all found mildly flabbergasting. They said the
things we all wished we could (or someone would, at any rate) say,
before the Internet came along to satisfy these sort of
wish-fulfillment needs. 

In reruns, Seinfeld works best when its central
conundrums hinge more on interpersonal dynamics than technology. I
now find it delightful how many issues could apparently arise from
answering machines. At the time, though, these types of things were
surely novel dilemmas. Which is why, right now, the best tweets
from the “Modern Seinfeld” Twitter account are the ones
about technology (“Kramer creates an app that gives you ideas for
other apps”).

Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) isn’t
affiliated with Jerry Seinfeld or NBC (and Larry David apparently

isn’t a fan). It’s a parody account, based on the simple
premise: “What if Seinfeld were still on the air?” The
account—launched in
2012—is run by comedian, playwright, and TV writer Jack Moore,
who currently writes for a new ABC show called Manhattan Love
Story and was an editor for Buzzfeed, and Josh
Gondelman, a web producer for John Oliver’s Last Week
Tonight and writer for New York
magazine. The @SeinfeldToday tweets that seem the most spot on
and clever to me are probably the ones that best typify the
answering machine phenomenon—in 15 to 25 years, our star-crossed
text messages and Instagram issues will seem quaint, it not
completely unrecognizable: 

Jerry gets paranoid about his girlfriend’s past when her iPhone
automatically connects to the wi-fi at Newman’s apartment.

— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) June
3, 2014

Elaine’s BF notices she has no Instagrams with black people. She
awkwardly tries to take pics w/ black co-workers to prove she’s not
racist.

— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) April
28, 2014

Jerry’s GF always smokes an e-cig in bed. GF:”But it’s vapor.”
J:”You say that like vapor’s something I want. I don’t want vapor!
No vapor!”

— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) April
16, 2014

Jerry’s girlfriend won’t stop saying that she “literally can’t.”
“What?! Can’t what?! Finish your sentence!”

— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) March
18, 2014

George swipes right for every woman on Tinder. E:”What if you’re
not attracted to her?” G:”If she’s attracted to me, I might
be!”

— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) December
21, 2013

Jerry’s Twitter’s hacked. People like “Hacked Jerry” better.
George tries to get trampled on Black Friday so he can sue.
Everyone is polite.

— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) November
30, 2013

Kramer and Newman search Brooklyn for a McDonald’s rumored to
carry the McRib year-round. A Twitter troll slowly drives Jerry
crazy.

— Modern Seinfeld (@SeinfeldToday) April
25, 2013

A Twitter troll slowly drives Jerry crazy… There’s
something immensely sad about this (entirely plausible) plot point.
In New York, Seitz mentions how Seinfeld catchphrases
today would be made into ample memes and gifs.
Seinfeld was—in its time, at least—saved from the
gif. Which brings us to a much shorter-lived show that also debuted
in 1989, in August: Saved by the Bell.

To younger members of Gen X and older millennials, this is part
of the childhood canon. I think we all died a little inside
yesterday in the Reason D.C. office when we realized that none of
our interns and a few of our youngest staffers had no idea who
Jessie Spano was. By a quick show of birth years, we pipointed 1990
as the crack in this generational divide. I shudder to ask them
about the Soup Nazi—though I suppose Seinfeld is a
show you’re more prone to watch in reruns as an adult than
Saved by the Bell. (Another show launched in
1989, The Simpsons, is still airing after all these
years.)   

Since I’m just digressing at this point, I’ll point you to some
of Reason’s Seinfeld coverage from way back (#TBT!).
Here’s Charles Oliver in
2000, smacking down the idea that “Homer Simpson and Jerry
Seinfeld (are) symbols of a spiritual rot in American popular
culture.” And here’s Nick
Gillespie writing about the show in 1995, back when it was
still “difficult to think of (TV) as a possessing an aesthetic
dimension.” If Seinfeld aired today, it’s hard to imagine
it even making the top 10 or 20 indicators of cultural rot list;
but I can see Alyssa Rosennberg writing think pieces about its
gender dynamics and Salon’s contrarian takes on George’s
hairline. The biggest differences for a modern Seinfeld probably
wouldn’t be the technology or types of problems our characters
confronted but the cultural conversation around it. 

Last week, the Obama administration released a
long-anticipated legal memo. It consists of 40 highly blacked-out
pages, the conclusion of which is that the president can order the
CIA to kill Americans who are present in foreign countries and who,
in the opinion of high-level government officials, pose a threat to
Americans but may be too difficult to arrest.

Conveniently, the memorandum never mentions the Fifth Amendment
to the Constitution, which famously commands that if the government
wants the life, liberty, or property of any person, it can only do
so via due process. As we mark the anniversary of America’s birth
as a free nation, Andrew Napolitano notes that our Founders
thought they were establishing a society based upon
natural rights and the rule of law—but perhaps they were wrong.
Perhaps we have merely gone from an inherited tyrant to an elected
one.  

View this article.

A Texas judge has sentenced
Clifford Hall to six months in prison for delinquent child support
payments. Hall thought he was making the payments, but a clerical
error by
his employer kept the money from reaching the child’s
mother. When Hall found out about the error, he not only made sure
the back payments got to her but gave her an extra $1,000. That
didn’t satisfy the judge, nor the appellate court which upheld the
ruling.

BlaBlaCar, a ridesharing app based
in France, just raised $100 million in a round of investments from
venture capitalists, cementing itself as a major player in Europe’s
sharing economy.

Here’s how it works: When one of the 8 million registered users
is making a long trip, they open up the app and look for someone
that is heading in the same direction. Each passenger has to pay an
average of $25, and the app suggests pricing so that the users
don’t bicker too much over the costs. The average trip arranged
through BlaBlaCar is 200 miles long, but rides can be as long or
short as necessary. It’s like Uber for highway hitchhikers, with
similar accountability mechanisms where passengers and drivers can
rate each other.

French startups received $1.03 billion in venture investments in
2013, making BlaBlaCar’s $100 million investment nearly a tenth of
last year’s total. The firm, founded in 2006, took off as gas
prices rose and smartphones became more pervasive.

Peer-to-peer services are
catching on worldwide. The advantages of not having to go
through a third-party for lodging and transportation are becoming
increasingly apparent to individuals. As technology continues to
make peer-to-peer transactional services a more viable sector of
the economy, expect traditional businesses to amp up their attacks
and further emphasize the excessive regulations that are currently
in place. Just this month, thousands of taxi drivers across Europe

protested Uber and related apps by blocking traffic in downtown
areas. But BlaBlaCar’s director for Spain and Portugal, Vicent
Rosso,
told the Spanish newspaper El Pais that BlaBlaCar’s
business has nothing to do with the activities that taxis across
Europe have been protesting recently:

“First of all, I want to stress that we have nothing to do with
Uber. The Public Works Ministry also made it clear in its
release: we are simply a platform that helps individuals share
travel expenses. From BlaBlaCar’s viewpoint, there is no need for
new regulations.”

The Independents is
on tonight at 9 p.m. ET on the Fox Business Network, with a
re-airing at midnight. Matt Welch is still on vacation. But
comedian Sherrod Small will be filling the middle chair.

This evening’s show will begin with a discussion of a new poll
asking people who they think America’s worst recent president is.
Panelists Jimmy Failla and Richard Fowler will join in, and stay on
to talk about the public’s views on privacy vs. safety, the
possibility of alien life on World UFO Day, and the gender pay gap
in President Barack Obama’s very own White House.

Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education (FIRE) will come on board to share the big news about
FIRE’s all-in legal battle against campus speech codes.

There will be a Topical Storm, with puppies, rabbits, Russia,
the U.N., and Netflix series House of Cards all showing up in the
mix.

Finally, the show will feature Ron Paul talking about American
foreign aid to Israel, as well as a Kmele-Foster-centric Keepin’ It
Kmele segment on the 50^th anniversary of the Civil
Rights Act.

It’s on! Tonight! At 9 p.m. on the Fox Business Network. Tune
in! 

A former Ottawa Hills, Ohio police officer who was found guilty
earlier this year on a count of felonious assault for fatally
shooting an unarmed motorcyclist in the back in 2009 was sentenced
this week to ten years in prison, according to the local
NBC affiliate. He faced up to an 11 year sentence and will have
to spend a minimum of three years in jail because he was found
guilty of a gun-related charge.

Video* of the shooting below:

*It’s nt in Canada, the YouTube user is wrong.