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The Bureau’s journalists and researchers spent months engaged in the painstaking and difficult task of gathering documentation on the effects of the top secret U.S. drone program in Waziristan — producing extraordinary findings — only to find themselves and their sources, many of whom are local villagers whose children have been killed, depicted as Al Qaeda’s witting or unwitting allies the very next day in The New York Times, by some senior government official too frightened to put his name on his accusations and aided (as always) by a newspaper that has repeatedly vowed to stop these practices.

NYPD needs to crack down on dangerous driving like what killed Mathieu Lefevre, but it’s not just dangerous drivers who are at fault. Felix Salmon points to studies finding that 2/3rds of bike accidents happen because of unsafe cycling and safer biking would surely keep people alive.

Doh. A very nice call to action on traffic danger had to be watered down at the last moment by the irresistible urge to be the most reasonable man in the room by reminding everyone that “both sides” are inevitably “at fault”.

Here we have two studies uplifted by their association with the great Felix Salmon. Each time they are cited their results can be exaggerated and their credibility bolstered by their prior esteemed repeaters. Salmon quoted a book that quoted one clause from each study:

According to Mapes, a 1996 study by the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center found that “as many as a third of all bike accidents involved simply riding against the flow of traffic,” and a 2003–2004 Orlando, Florida, study found that “nearly two-thirds [of bike accidents] involved riding on the sidewalk or another unsafe choice by the cyclist.”

Do you spot the gross errors in Drum Major’s paraphrasing? It is like a game of telephone, except with adults who feign themselves more reasonable the more they garble basic facts. It is not “2/3rds of bike accidents”: in one study it is “as many as a third” and in another it is “nearly two-thirds”. (The average of that is less than half, which sounds rather different.)

And just as fundamentally, the studies do not find that accidents “happen because” of cyclist error: they “involve” some reported cyclist error. Traffic crashes often involve poor choices by several parties. This doesn’t mean that you can’t say anything based on studies of some classes of cycling error, but it does mean that you can’t assign fault based on them. To do that you would have to conduct a more detailed analysis than anyone above has had the interest to conduct. They want to declare fault but they don’t want to be bothered with the chore of determining it.

The cost of this sloppy citing is that myths undermining the Drum Major’s advocacy are reinforced. They think they are strengthening their message by sounding extra-reasonable, but really they are giving readers a reason to dismiss it: the belief that killed cyclists are usually at fault for their own deaths. It’s not some minor side question, it’s our society’s primary rationalization for the fatal status quo. It is the engine of the “culture of accepting traffic deaths”, and it has been given a shy squirt of gasoline by the same people saying it must be shut down.

Victim-blaming is the only way we can morally tolerate the regular killings of pedestrians and cyclists. When we have the courage to stop blaming the dead, the system of imperiling the living will unravel.

He says those pictures will be examined along with video of the collision, which according to NYPD records shows that the truck driver dragged Lefevre and his bike for several yards as he made an unsignaled right-hand turn.

If there is one thing I would ask NYC motorists to do just out of the goodness of their hearts, it is to use their turn signals.

Every other day I have to guess if a slowing car is going to turn right or go straight, because its operator is unwilling to lift a finger and activate the device installed expressly for that purpose. Every other week I guess wrong, and I’m caught in a bad spot.

Sometimes, the motorist will honk to indicate their displeasure with me for continuing straight through the path of their unsignaled turn. Yet I am the one in extreme danger while they are only briefly inconvenienced as a direct result of their own poor driving. The situation is completely avoidable.

Most cyclists are perfectly willing and able to pass right-turning vehicles on the left—we just need to know that is what they are going to do.

I honestly think the majority of people feel there’s little which can be done to reduce deaths/injuries caused by motor vehicles. Whenever I’ve discussed this with people, the pat answer is usually “you have to die somehow”, or “it’s the cost of doing business”. We used to think the same way about crime up until the early 1990s. It was just accepted as a fact of life that you might be robbed, raped, or even killed if you stepped out the door. The only way this was turned around was by actually significantly reducing crime rates. When this happened, people wanted them reduced even further, to the point where we went from about 2000 murders annually to around 500. I feel if some measures we take now reduce the carnage to the point where it happens infrequently enough to make the front pages, then we might have public support for reducing it even further.

So a guy kills a 14 year old, with an unlicensed vehicle, flees, and refuses a Breathalyzer and is not charged for killing another human, a teenaged human at that.

Wow.

Read the story below that one, a guy who defended himself by killing a “360-pound, machete-wielding home intruder” is getting out of jail after 4 years, and he is getting out EARLY. GAH!

But a young mom still got a wrist-slap sentence of just 60 days in jail yesterday for the 2010 hit-and-run death of brilliant and handsome young hedge-fund executive Ronen Katz.

Can you believe this is an actual sentence that was written, edited, and published in a newspaper? In 2012? Scores of pedestrians and cyclists have been run over and killed in the past year. Even in hit-and-run cases, like Lefevre’s, the police have brushed off the crime comitted. But when a brilliant and handsome young hedge-fund executive is run over on his respectable motorcycle by a poor looking black lady, then STOP THE GODDAMN PRESSES if she gets a mere 60 days in prison.

This woman deserved her 60 days. Maybe it should have been more, but we don’t know that. A trial is a good place to figure these things out, and she had one. Now what about those 130+ pedestrians and cyclists killed last year? Where is the outrage from newspapers? In the vast majority of cases there are not even “wrist-slaps” to bemoan, because our esteemed judicial process for investigating unnatural deaths is simply ignored.

Last December, Jason King was run over and killed on his way to work by a truck driver who was backing up illegally. After a Marcia Kramer segment used his death to promote a Carl Kruger bill to ban walking while listening to music or talking on cell phones, Jason’s mother, Sonia King, sent an outraged letter to CBS 2, Kruger’s office, and the Manhattan DA. She wrote: “They left the truth out of the story and used our son’s death to go for headlines and political pandering.”