July 4 traffic fatalities double in Virginia

According to state police, “13 people died in accidents on Virginia’s roads during the July 4 holiday weekend.” This news emerged two days ago, but it still merits looking at more closely. If the same thirteen people had died in a terrorist strike over the holiday weekend, we would commence spending $5 trillion in response. We would spend the next few months demanding vengeance. We might be asked to change our entire way of life. But since the thirteen died in cars on our sprawling and brutally unsafe roads, we’ll do none of these things.

A site called Virginia Performs, which “shows you how the state is doing in areas that affect the quality of life for you and your family,” says Virginia had a rate of 9.6 fatalities per 100,000 population in 2009. That’s a one in 10,000 chance of dying in a traffic accident every year. After a decade, it’s one in a thousand. Over a lifetime, according to the National Safety Council, it’s one in 83.

"Highway of Death" by Analog Kid | monthlymission.org

A one in 83 chance of dying in a car crash strikes me as a profoundly good reason to extend light rail to the Oceanfront, the Naval Base, and the Peninsula. It also seems like a reason to take some of the trillions we spend fighting terrorism and spend it instead on public transit infrastructure. If that sounds wacky or incongruous, I don’t know why. It’s a statistical certainty that the money we’ve spent on the Iraq War over eight years, if used instead for a robust network of intercity high-speed trains and intracity light rail, would have saved hundreds if not thousands of American lives.

Not long before his death, David Foster Wallace asked in the Atlantic, “Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, ‘sacrifices on the altar of freedom’? In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?”

Wallace then went on to wonder, “Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price?”

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, forty thousand is a lot of deaths per year. Over the course of a single human generation, deaths at that rate add up to approximately the total number of Americans who have died in all wars throughout United States history.

Smart-growth and anti-sprawl advocates are sometimes accused of fetishizing public transit and certain kinds of development out of some arbitrary aesthetic whim. It’s not out of aesthetic whim. High-density zoning and robust, viable public transportation systems save lives.

Webb, Warner introduce bill to allow offshore drilling

See above.

Cuccinelli: U-Va. may not bar concealed weapons

Don't worry, the Hokie has a conceealed firearm. (Art | spaghettijunk.blogspot.com)

Virginia Tech to tweak gun policy after Cuccinelli opinion

There is nothing Attorney General Cuccinelli loathes like a university trying to protect its students, faculty, and staff. Last year Cuccinelli made a laughingstock of our state by ordering U.Va. to stop offering non-discrimination protections to gays on campus. This week in similar fashion he has shattered that university’s policy against firearms on campus.

As a one-time avid reader of sci-fi, I get a kick out of imagining the future, so here are my predictions. June 2012: Ken Cuccinelli issues an opinion that Virginia universities can’t have sexual-harassment policies anymore, because the policies don’t align with state law. March 2013: Ken Cuccinelli opines that state universities can’t require students to attend class or take finals, because it’s not a state law that they do so. January 2014: Ken Cuccinelli quits issuing legal opinions of any sort, because it’s no longer part of his job description as Virginia governor.

Exclusive: Norfolk drug sweep – WTKR

This breathless report by WTKR on a Norfolk drug sweep functions like a drug-war pep rally: over and over police are seen tackling and handcuffing alleged drug dealers while the reporter narrating the segment cartoonishly auditions to be the new Movie Preview Voice: “And there, buried deep in a place you don’t want to think about, was a lot of heroin.” At no point does the report ask or wonder in even the most perfunctory manner why the drug sweeps are happening or whether they’re working.

Earlier this week it was announced that, ten years after total decriminalization of drugs in Portugal, drug abuse there is down by half. That’s not just marijuana; it’s cocaine, meth, crack, heroin, etc. According to Forbes: “Drug warriors often contend that drug use would skyrocket if we were to legalize or decriminalize drugs in the United States. Fortunately, we have a real-world example of the actual effects of ending the violent, expensive War on Drugs and replacing it with a system of treatment for problem users and addicts.”

Forbes links to a report by Glenn Greenwald on Portuguese drug decriminalization that I’ve written about in this space before. Greenwald’s report cannot be mentioned often enough. I believe that if everyone in America read and considered it, we would quit spending billions of dollars and ruining thousands of lives in the vain, naïve, and stupid hope that drug use can be controlled and prevented by the government. One of the more remarkable points it makes, politically speaking, is as follows:

Next thing you know those hippies are going to kill you and steal your medicine. (Art | aamna-shariff.com)

“Notably, decriminalization has become increasingly popular in Portugal since 2001. Except for some far-right politicians, very few domestic political factions are agitating for a repeal of the 2001 law. And while there is a widespread perception that bureaucratic changes need to be made to Portugal’s decriminalization framework to make it more efficient and effective, there is no real debate about whether drugs should once again be criminalized.”

In short, public opinion has shifted even more dramatically than in regard throughout the western world to gay unions. Why? Because the result predicted by the Chicken Littles never came. There was no flocking to Lisbon for drug tourism. No surge in gang violence. No skyrocketing rates of addiction. Nothing whatsoever got worse in Portugal after decriminalization except from the standpoint of drug profiteers.

If you wish that drug abuse in Norfolk would decline by half, then watch the WTKR video, read the Forbes article, and decide which country’s method you think is working better.

Labor battle at center of Virginia Senate race

I’m finding myself less and less able to respond rationally to articles that use the ludicrous euphemism “right-to-work state.” I realize “right-to-work state” has become a common idiomatic term for places that demonize and even outlaw basic union practices that are otherwise common throughout the western world. Journalists use the term merely because it conveys a certain meaning quickly. There are even words in English whose two meanings are their own antonyms, such as sanction, livid, and inflammable. But I don’t have to like it.

One of the most disheartening things to me about living in Virginia is the general ignorance here about what unions do and why they’re beneficial to pretty much everyone except billionaires. People whom I know personally will sometimes say things like “I don’t even know anyone who’s in a union.” I guess that’s their roundabout way of telling me they don’t know me.

Who’s running in 2011 for General Assembly

Via WaPo, a comprehensive list.

Krugman: What Obama wants

Two days after President Obama seemed out of nowhere to capitulate to massive Social Security cuts, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman writes in the Times that it’s “getting harder and harder to trust Mr. Obama’s motives in the budget fight, given the way his economic rhetoric has veered to the right. In fact, if all you did was listen to his speeches, you might conclude that he basically shares the G.O.P.’s diagnosis of what ails our economy and what should be done to fix it. And maybe that’s not a false impression; maybe it’s the simple truth.”

GOP strategy would drive US to brink of fiscal ruin

I’d ditch the conditional mood and put this headline in the present perfect tense.

Happy birthday, Southern Sudan

Southern Sudan will become a nation tomorrow.

Top stories

The top stories on Google News at 7:00 AM were as follows: Deron Williams, Derek Jeter, Emma Watson, Josh Hamilton, Casey Anthony, So You Think You Can Dance, Rupert Murdoch, Skype, Horrible Bosses, and Obesity. I apologize for not having covered these stories here.