Category: Public safety & health
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Courts Authorizing “Reverse Location” Warrants in Virginia
Big brother Google is watching you. Back in October, 2018, Forbes reported that a Virginia court had authorized the FBI to use a “reverse location” warrant to try to solve a series of crimes in Henrico County, Va. This warrant, also known as a geofence warrant, allows police to compel Google to provide all cellphone…
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Get the Shots
As if the anti-vaccination lunancy were not bad enough, now we have the Governor of Kentucky declaring that, not only is he opposed to his state’s mandatory chicken pox vaccination requirement, he sent his nine children to a “pox party”, so they could contract the disease while they were children. They were “miserable for a…
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Scary Figure of the Day: 500,000 Alcoholics in Virginia
An article today about Virginia’s habitual drunkard law — the Legal Aid Justice Center wants federal courts to declare it unconstitutional — noted the extraordinary fact that there are 500,000 alcoholics in the state. The Richmond Times-Dispatch article did not cite a source, but the number is consistent with America’s Health Rankings data showing that…
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When Businesses Welcome Regulations
by Richard W. Hall-Sizemore The recent news that the General Assembly may not confirm Governor Ralph Northam’s appointment for director of the Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation (DPOR) triggered one of my longstanding complaints. It is not about Jay DeBoer, the beleaguered appointee; I know nothing about his record as director of this agency.…
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Why I Can Hardly Wait for Self-Driving Cars
Del. Richard P. Bell, R-Staunton, has identified one of the most pressing public safety issues of our time: distracted driving. But his solution bothers me. According to WCVE News, he has re-introduced a bill requiring drivers to keep both hands on the wheel at all times. Let’s be perfectly clear: People texting and yakking on…
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A Peek inside the Board of Barbers and Cosmetology
One might imagine that a meeting of the Virginia Board for Barbers and Cosmetology would be a pretty dull proceeding. But The Virginia Mercury found the board discussing some issues that, to my mind, point out the absurdity of a system that allows established practitioners of a profession to regulate themselves — and others who…
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Charlottesville’s Path to Polarization, Part 2
by Reed Fawell III This is the second of five posts on the events surrounding the white nationalist protests against efforts to remove the Lee and Jackson statues that occurred in the spring and summer of 2017 in Charlottesville, Va. The facts asserted are based on the narrative found in the “Independent Review of the…
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Charlottesville’s Path to Polarization, Part 1
by Reed Fawell III This is the first of five posts on the events surrounding the white nationalist protests against efforts to remove the Lee and Jackson statues that occurred in the spring and summer of 2017 in Charlottesville, Va. America’s national and local media constantly make references to the August 11/12, 2017, white nationalist…
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The Hidden Expense of Police Body Cameras
When police departments began equipping their officers with body cameras, I thought it was a great idea. Capturing a video record of police encounters could settle a lot of controversies. It never occurred to me that reviewing the video would be so exorbitantly time consuming that local prosecutors would have to hire additional employees —…
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Which is a Greater Public Safety Issue: Fires or Pedestrian Fatalities?
Municipal governance, like life, is full of trade-offs. One would think that a Class 1 fire suppression rating from the Insurance Services Office would be an unalloyed blessing. After all, a Class 1 rating ranks a fire department in the top 1% in the nation, which translates directly into lower homeowners insurance rates for residents…
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Weighing the Coal Ash Options
Meeting EPA deadlines constrains Dominion’s options for disposing of coal ash at four of its power stations. Under Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules published in 2014, Dominion Virginia Energy must find a way to safely dispose of nearly 30 million tons of coal ash within 15 years. After intense controversy over how best to proceed,…
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The Economic Cost of Virginia’s Opioid Epidemic
The rate of drug overdose-related deaths is lower than Virginia than it is in the United States as a whole — 16.5 deaths per 100,000 compared to 19.8 nationally — but that is about the only morsel of consolation that can be derived from a special focus on the opioid crisis in the 2017 State…
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Show Me the Data
I’ve been pondering Vivian E. Thomson’s book, “Climate of Capitulation: An Insider’s Account of State Power in a Coal Nation.” Thomson, a University of Virginia professor who served on the State Air Pollution Control Board during the Warner and Kaine administrations, stresses the high cost of air pollution in human health and mortality. Her treatise…
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Probing the “Insurance Coverage” Numbers
With Governor Terry McAuliffe making another bid to expand Medicaid via a budget amendment, the publication by the StatChat blog ten days ago of data on the extent of insurance coverage in Virginia couldn’t be more timely. The blog post is content to present the data with little commentary or explanation of what’s happening, however,…
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Dams in Virginia: How Many Are Deficient?
Speaking of deficient bridges (see previous post), how about deficient dams? The potentially disastrous erosion around the Oroville dam in California, which prompted the evacuation of 188,000 people living down river earlier this week, prompted two correspondents to raise the issue with Bacon’s Rebellion. John Butcher passed along an article noting that the Oroville dam…