The sudden revaluation may be an attempt to crack down on the black markets that have long existed in the corners of North Korea's centralized economic system. Defending the monetary change, which was imposed against a background of rampant inflation and widespread poverty, an official at the country's central bank told a pro-Pyongyang paper in Japan that "in the future, a large share of economic activities will be subject not to the market, but the planned supply and distribution system."
Underground currency exchange thrives in the Hermit Kingdom, as official exchange rates ignore much of the won's weakness. South Korea's Yonhap News reports that the "hundred-to-one" revaluation already has benefited that persistent black market, as citizens hurried to exchange their savings for Chinese yuan or American dollars. Last year a similar devaluation in Zimbabwe cut 10 zeros from the Zimbabwean dollar but failed to prevent Zimbabweans from deserting the currency en masse in favor of foreign denominations. r
The post Black market money appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>According to the Des Moines Register, the city's pro-camera faction argues that the plan is "about safety, not money." Police Chief Judy Bradshaw told the Des Moines City Council in late July that cameras at high-risk intersections throughout the city will "have paid for themselves" in lives saved. Yet Des Moines police officials project that their new cameras could pay for themselves—and then some—in a more conventional way as well, with each camera bringing about $100,000 in annual revenue to the municipality.
One city councilman said he approved of the idea as long as it was "budget neutral." But other cities in the state have struggled to stick to budget neutrality once the cameras, which cost about $60,000 each, are up and running. According to the Sioux City Journal, nearby Davenport, Iowa, collected more than $1 million in revenue from 13 speeding and traffic light cameras between 2004 and 2007.
The post Camera Cash appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The microblogging site Twitter, founded in 2006 and therefore young even by Internet standards, has become a forum for protesters who have few other means of safe communication with the outside world and each other. CNN and other news organizations relied heavily on Twitter for information about what was going on inside the closed country as protests against the regime turned into violent clashes between police and protesters.
In 2004 Johnson depicted Iran's expat dissenters as a "fractious electronic vanguard" with organizational troubles. "The only times in recent memory that the expatriate opposition has even gathered around the same table," he wrote, "have been during periods of major crisis for those still in Iran—when the regime has cracked down on dissent." June's election was just such a crisis. Overseas sites like those run by the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran (daneshjoo.org) and the secularist Marze Por Gohar Party (marzeporgohar.org) have become clearinghouses for information, pictures, and videos about the protests and the regime's bloody suppression of political opposition and public assembly.
Some overseas dissidents were actively engaged in the uprising: Marze Por Gohar's Roozbeh Farahanipour, who was interviewed by Johnson, snuck into Iran in early July to participate in the protests. "I am proud of our people," he told the conservative webzine FrontPage. "They have reached their boiling point and will not be kept down any longer." Rather than fomenting revolution from without, expatriates like Farahanipour have found themselves supporting and chronicling an indigenous wave of political discontent—an uprising aided by 21st-century tools, against a regime with a medieval disdain for self-government and liberty.
The post Iranian Rebellion Grows on the Web appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Robert, forever tarred as Father of the Bomb, spent the remainder of his unhappy days trying to atone for his atomic sins. Fate was more merciful to Frank, and Cole ably describes his new career as a science educator. The Exploratorium, Oppenheimer's museum of hands-on experiments in San Francisco, represents a very different kind of science than atomic weaponry-science as a life-affirming process of exploration, not a quest for better means of destruction.
The post Briefly Noted: After the Bomb, the Museum appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In June an advisory committee recommended that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tighten restrictions on the use of the painkiller acetaminophen in both over-the-counter and prescription medications. In a study conducted between 1998 and 2003, the FDA concluded that overconsumption of acetaminophen was "the leading cause of acute liver failure."
At issue are "combination medications" such as Tylenol Allergy, which mix acetaminophen with other drugs. The panel worried that combination medications make it difficult for consumers to gauge their total acetaminophen intake, increasing the risk of liver damage. In a lopsided vote, panelists recommended reducing the highest dose allowable in over-the-counter medications. But the panel split on its most controversial decision, approving by a thin margin a recommendation to ban the combination of acetaminophen and narcotics.
Such a prohibition would pull prescription painkillers such as Vicodin and Percocet off the pharmacy shelves. The FDA already has ordered the pharmaceutical industry to add prominent liver-damage warnings to medication containing acetaminophen.
The problem of acetaminophen overdoses may be exaggerated. The FDA estimates that 400 Americans die from the drug each year. That's a tiny fraction of the 200 billion doses of acetaminophen sold nationwide last year. According to the FDA, "many cases of liver injury with acetaminophen result from self-harm, i.e., intentional selfpoisoning." Rather than taking effective and commonly used painkillers off the shelves, perhaps the FDA should consider a large-print label reading "Do Not Use to Commit Suicide."
The post Killer Painkillers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Niedzviecki's new book, The Peep Diaries (City Lights), is a sympathetic profile of the geniuses, eccentrics, and normal folks in what he calls the world of "Peep"'"revelation via electronic interconnectivity on a previously unimaginable scale. The desire to see and be seen isn't new, but it is newly tech-powered. Through Facebook, Twitter, blogs, reality TV, and YouTube, we're sharing more of our private lives and learning more about strangers' than ever before.
Niedzviecki avoids the doomsaying that plagues so much commentary about sociotechnological change. While he discusses Peep's troubling implications for privacy, surveillance, and criminal justice, he also recognizes that interconnectivity can be empowering, educational, and entertaining. Peep's potential to add value to our lives deserves such reflective appreciation.
The post Enjoy the Peepshow appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Sexual abuse," the commissioners wrote, "makes correctional environments more dangerous for staff as well as prisoners, consumes scarce resources, and undermines rehabilitation. It also carries the potential to devastate the lives of victims." The commission suggested several ways to reduce the problem, including more careful investigations of prisoner complaints, legal changes making it easier for abused prisoners to sue negligent authorities, and segregation of populations at greater risk for abuse, such as sex offenders and minors.
The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, which created the commission, requires the attorney general to implement some kind of rape-reducing reforms within a year of the report. A bill that would have made it easier for raped (and otherwise abused) prisoners to sue for redress—the Prison Abuse Remedies Act, sponsored by Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.)—died in committee last year.
The post Scars Behind Bars appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This, after the blogger's colleagues defended the program—which the Senate deemed worthy of a $2 billion expansion today—as "too little to lose sleep over" and praised it as "a surprisingly quick and easy win" on the basis of happy testimony from an uncle who owns a car dealership. (I know a few glaziers who would love to get in touch with that blogger.)
Anyway, this nugget of clunker-rage is worth quoting in its entirety:
Just wanted to throw in my two cents on this cash-for-clunkers business as I seem to be at odds with my fellow bloggers. It's a ludicrous waste of taxpayer money wrapped in offensively cynical packaging. If you want to save the environment and/or reduce America's dependence on foreign oil there are about a million things you can do before you resort to a $3 billion boondoggle. You can sit around and fiddle with the numbers so it sounds like we're going to eventually save petrol, but of course the proponents of the programme don't try to puzzle out how much we'd save if we just raised the petrol tax like a normal country. Because of course the point isn't to help the environment, the point is to help the car dealers. So why can't we just say that? Is our sense of entitlement so swollen that we not only think we deserve handouts at every turn but we need to be praised for taking them? I'm with the cranky commenters who find the whole thing grotesque.
Huzzah!
Check out Reason's rapidly expanding archive of C-4-C coverage here.
The post But, Mr. Economist, Tell Us How You REALLY Feel appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As a former employee and part-owner of an illegal (and yet very profitable) lawn-care operation, I'm particularly sensitive to stories about the overweening enforcement of licensing requirements against children. Check out this one from Tulare, California:
The story began Monday morning when Daniela and her stepmother, Marisa Earnest, set up shop at Cartmill Avenue and Hillman Street in north Tulare. The lemonade was freshly squeezed and priced at $2 for a 32-ounce plastic cup.
Richard Garcia, a Tulare code enforcement officer, happened to be at the same intersection to remove illegal signs left behind by someone selling tetherball poles.
Garcia told Daniela and her stepmother that their lemonade stand—on the northwest corner of the busy intersection—was not safe, and also that they needed a business license to sell lemonade….
"[Garcia] wasn't out there on lemonade patrol," said Frank Furtaw, Tulare's code enforcement manager. Garcia was merely applying the city's code enforcement laws equitably, Furtaw said.
Cue the vice mayor of Tulare, who is obviously still honing his not-being-a-hypocrite skills:
Vice Mayor Philip Vandegrift said a compromise—possibly asking lemonade stand operators to pay a nominal fee or establishing a license fee waiver for children under a certain age—could be the outcome of Daniela's experience.
However, the city needs to enforce vendor laws, Vandegrift said, "otherwise we'll have people on every corner."
But Vandegrift doesn't want to take away lemonade stands from children. For many, it represents their first opportunity to flex their entrepreneurial muscles.
"I had many a lemonade stand as a kid right in front of my home," he said.
In 2005, Nick Gillespie noted a similar incident in Massachusetts.
The post Lemonade is Not a Crime appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The New York Times, which has definitely been grokking the interactive display for some time now, posted a fun chart a couple of days ago detailing information from the American Time Use Survey—a minute by minute account of what Americans are doing, which can be broken down along lines of race, age, education, employment status, etc. (Obligatory libertarian disclaimer: This very cool survey was conducted by the Department of Labor using your tax dollars. Enjoy it, because you paid for it.)
Some conclusions: The unemployed sleep later in the day (and get a total of one hour more sleep) than their employed counterparts. Old folks watch a lot of television. The higher the level of education you've already attained, the less likely you are to spend time on more education and the more time you're likely to spend working. People at retirement age don't tend to be travelling at the same times (early morning and mid-afternoon) as younger people who have to commute to and from work. Your first child imposes an average "family care" time cost of about an hour and a half daily, but the marginal time cost of parenthood seems to decrease pretty sharply after your second (and subsequent) children.
Alright, so these aren't exactly earth-shattering demographic revelations. Still, it's interesting to see them compiled in a visually appealing format that makes possible some limited comparisons of different demographic groups.
Link via Neatorama.
The post What Were You Doing at 3:30pm Yesterday? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>DC Mayor Adrian Fenty (D) is proposing to eliminate restrictions on the use of $50 million from the city's Ballpark Revenue Fund. He wants to use the money to pay down the city's deficit.
The Fund—filled by a tax on local businesses—was established to service the debt on the shiny new baseball stadium that the District's residents were forced to buy (and that has been sucking at baseball, failing to stimulate the local economy as promised, and refusing to pay its bills ever since). The city council votes on the idea tomorrow.
Fenty, by the way, was against public financing of stadiums, before he was for it, before he was against it again.
The Tax Foundation's David Splinter sorta-kinda defends Fenty's proposal by noting that dedicated funds can encourage waste:
While protecting funds may help approximate a user fee, it could also lead to wasteful spending. For example, an appropriately set tax on cars could exactly pay for the road damage they cause. If the road tax is set too high then roads may be unnecessarily repaved just to spend down the dedicated fund.
The Foundation claims that this story reveals "the difficulty in making tax dollars less fungible." Of course, if the city council hadn't promised away taxpayer dollars to fund the stadium in the first place, the debate would just be academic. Alas.
Reason has been a stadium skeptic since the beginning. Back in 2005, Dennis Coates lamented the sweetheart deal DC gave to Major League Baseball, and Matt Welch catalogued the lies upon which Nationals Stadium was built. Reason.tv asked whether publicly financed stadiums are really worth the cost:
The post "Dedicated" Stadium Fund Not so Dedicated After All appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>While at Disney, little Jeremiah picked up a Pirates of the Caribbean toy gun and sword, and was hoping to bring them back to North Carolina.
But his mom says that when she and Jeremiah tried to go through security at Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport earlier this week, the toys were taken away.
"It's very upsetting because at one point I had told one of the employees, 'You know this is not a real weapon,' and he said 'Yes, I understand that, it doesn't matter,'" said mom Maria Edge.
Lest you now begin to feel bad (not likely) for TSA officials hamstrung by absurd regulations prohibiting toy weaponry on aircraft:
Edge said she became even angrier when she claims that not long after the TSA officers had confiscated the items, she saw the officers playing with the toy sword and gun.
The article reports that Disney sent Ramirez replacement toys when they learned about the incident.
Reason has covered TSA excesses in the past—nary a nipple ring, laptop, or container of hot peppers is safe. Some of it even ends up on eBay.
The post Transportation Safety: So Easy, It's Like Taking Toys from an Orphan appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Police in Mobile, Ala., used pepper spray and a Taser on a deaf, mentally disabled man who they said wouldn't leave a store's bathroom.
The family of 37-year-old Antonio Love has filed a formal complaint over the incident on Friday.
Police tell the Press-Register of Mobile that officers shot pepper spray under the bathroom door after knocking several times. After forcing the door open, they used the stun gun on Love.
Police spokesman Christopher Levy says police didn't realize Love had a hearing impairment until after he was out of the bathroom. The officers' conduct is under investigation.
Apparently, in a moment of clarity, the magistrate refused to book Love on "charges including disorderly conduct." Good for him.
Stay tuned for a web article tomorrow from Jacob Sullum on the long, proud history of disorderly conduct arrests in America.
In the meantime, check out Reason's (well, mostly Radley Balko's) archive on the many "isolated incidents" of police misconduct here.
UPDATE: Jacob Sullum blogged about this incident (with more detail) here.
The post "Police Use Taser on Deaf, Disabled Alabama Man" appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Tom Watson, a Labour party lawmaker who is one of the House of Commons' most active bloggers, said Twitter could be a valuable tool for Britain's Labour government.
But he said the guidelines showed how levels of familiarity with the Internet varied widely in the government's Whitehall offices.
"There are some very bright, digitally enabled civil servants who unfortunately have to write these documents for their bosses, the mandarins, who still get their secretaries to print off their e-mails so they can read them," Watson told the BBC.
Here's to a tweeting Britain: may it enjoy one, two, many Hoekstras.
The post Have @ it, Parliament! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sign The First: We learn that the gub'mint is developing a robot capable of refueling by eating human corpse "biomass" scattered on the battlefield. Then, the robot's designer issues a non-denial denial, failing to show that the robots aren't capable of eating flesh and simply claiming that they aren't intended to do so:
RTI's patent pending robotic system will be able to find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment. Despite the far-reaching reports that this includes "human bodies," the public can be assured that the engine Cyclone has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips—small, plant-based items for which RTI's robotic technology is designed to forage. Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI.
Does anyone believe that, once the robots gain sentience, the Geneva Conventions will even be worth the consumable biomass upon which they are printed?
Sign The Second: The U.S. Army is also developing a programmable code of ethics for its new robot warriors. Says h+:
"My research hypothesis is that intelligent robots can behave more ethically in the battlefield than humans currently can," says Dr. [Ronald C. Arkin, director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Georgia Tech]. "That's the case I make."
Analogous to the use of radar and a radio or a wired link between the control point and the missile, Arkin's "ethical controller" is a software architecture that provides, "ethical control and reasoning system potentially suitable for constraining lethal actions in an autonomous robotic system so that they fall within the bounds prescribed by the Geneva Conventions, the Laws of War, and the Rules of Engagement."
This is a totally original idea and nothing could possibly go wrong with it.
Sign The Third: Dozens (!) of people smarter than you are becoming worried by the possibility that our machines will soon outsmart and kill or enslave all of us. The New York Times reports:
Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society's workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone….
The researchers—leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists who met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Monterey Bay in California—generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet. But they agreed that robots that can kill autonomously are either already here or will be soon.
Featured in the Times article is a picture of a robot plugging itself into a wall jack to recharge, with this classic caption: "Servant now, master later?"
Sign The Fourth: Roboraptor.
We are Roomba-ing our way to Armageddon, people.
Reason's Jesse Walker wrote about real, live cyborgs in July 2005, and Brian Doherty covered robotic combat (for fun and profit) here. Peter Suderman wrote about man, machine, and the curious techno-politics of Terminator Salvation.
The post Ted Kaczynski Was an Optimist appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A few internet people have noticed that, according to a poll conducted by Time Magazine, comedian Jon Stewart is now America's "most trusted newscaster." (Not exactly a new meme.)
Cue all sorts of kvetching about the death of American journalism, or the broader American intellect, or whatever.
But whence this factoid? The Time poll in question was an unscientific online affair, and almost a third of the 9,409 votes came from "abroad." Since when were easily hacked, anonymous click polls considered reputable sources?
The poll was one in a series. Other questions in the series have yielded some pretty interesting "facts": Bing is more popular than Google, Hermione is America's favorite supporting character from Harry Potter, and Congress should pass a resolution honoring Michael Jackson as a "global humanitarian." Also, Iowa (or a poll-script writer in Iowa) apparently has a mile-wide contrarian streak and a crush on Katie Couric.
The poll, then, is hardly ironclad proof that Jon Stewart is America's new "most trusted man." More likely, it just makes sense to some observers that America would wholeheartedly trust a comedian to deliver the nightly news. Idiocracy, man. It's so true.
In noting Walter Cronkite's death, Reason's Jesse Walker danced on the grave of the three-network system that fostered "the man America trusted." Michael C. Moynihan told us all about what's wrong with Stewart here.
The post Jon Stewart: America's New Cronkite, According to Dubious Online Poll appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>According to The Washington Post, President Obama is inviting Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley to meet at the White House, for what can only be some strange sort of presidential group healing session. There is obviously nothing that this man cannot fix:
Obama said the remark he made Wednesday during a nationally televised news conference "unfortunately… gave an impression that I was maligning" the officer. He said he hoped the public debate surrounding the events would be "a teachable moment" for the nation.
Obama said he had spoken privately by phone with the officer, Sgt. James Crowley, and the White House said Obama later spoke with Gates. Obama invited Gates to join him and Crowley at the White House in the near future, officials said.
Obama did not say whether his conversation with Crowley constituted the apology for his remarks that some police officials and union leaders have demanded.
In other news, Obama wants to know…is everything OK at home? Do you just need to talk to somebody? He's just a phone call away, you know. Just a call. Stop by whenever.
The post Hail to the National Conflict Resolution Mediator appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The smart money earlier this month—or at least a fair portion of it—was on the prediction that some slam-dunk scandal about to hit the news would explain Sarah Palin's bizarre announcement that she'll be resigning as Governor of Alaska. The prediction made sense, though a lot of its appeal came from pure Palinfreude. Even writers who didn't endorse it still gave it airplay.
Thus far, though, that prediction has fallen flat. A few new ethics complaints have surfaced since she announced her resignation: allegations about per diems taken under inappropriate circumstances and unsubmitted gift disclosure forms. But for someone with Palin's history, this sort of stuff is small cheese. None of it is more damaging than the half-dozen scandals that she weathered during her governorship and vice-presidential candidacy.
As Palin prepares to leave office this weekend, the question remains: Is the other pump yet to drop? Or was the psychic force of the blogosphere not enough to manufacture another good reason to kick around Sarah Palin? (I'll hedge my bets and avoid giving an answer. It's Friday afternoon, prime time for attempts to bury bad news. Knowing my luck, the mega-scandal will hit in the next two hours.)
Two weeks ago, Reason's Peter Suderman gave three plausible (and scandal-free) explanations for Palin's behavior: Her ambition, her incoherence, and her paranoia.
Cathy Young wrote about Palin and the future of American conservatism here.
The post The Palin Mega-Scandal That Never Was (Or Is Yet to Be) appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>To dampen your enthusiasm, the Associated Press dug up a few choice quotes from heartless capitalists unwilling to pay workers anything north of starvation wages:
At Bench Warmers Bar and Grill in the southeast Kansas farming town of Chanute (pronounced sha-NOOT), owner Cathy Matney has decided to let some of her dishwashers go rather than pay all 22 of her employees more.
"It's bad timing," said Matney, whose waitresses and cooks will have to pitch in with scrubbing pots and pans. "With the economy like this, there's a lot of people who are out of work and this is only going to add to it."
Ryan Arfmann, who owns a Jamba Juice shop in Idaho Falls, Idaho, will be cutting hours to his staff, which is made up largely of college students, high schoolers and homemakers who want to make a few bucks.
"Am I going to fire anybody, no," Arfmann said. "But kids understand there's going to be hours cut."
Meanwhile, onward marches the fine Washington tradition of completely ignoring the possibility of unintended consequences:
Backers of the increase say it's long overdue for millions of the nation's working poor. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., authored the 2007 minimum wage legislation, which increased pay for the first time in a decade.
"A higher minimum wage helps working families' budgets and results in increased spending on local business, which is good for everyone," Miller said in an e-mail. He did not say whether he would have pushed to raise the minimum wage in an economic climate like the current one, and he did not immediately respond to a message left Thursday with his spokesman.
Nothing, nothing, about this plan could possibly go wrong.
Steve Chapman wrote about this dangerous minimum wage increase yesterday:
If you're a minimum wage employee, your job will pay more, but only if it still exists. These days, most companies are scrutinizing every position on the payroll to make sure it's worth the cost. Raise the toll, and some employees will find they are no longer valuable enough to make the cut.
The post Minimum Wage Goes Up, Up, Up Like a Flying Machine appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>While the state wrestles with a $26 billion deficit, the celebrity turned Republican governor posted the video as a thank-you to constituents for their ideas on how to pay down the massive deficit, particularly one suggestion to autograph and then auction off state-owned cars.
"Hey guys, I just want to say thanks very much for all the great ideas you're giving me," he said. "You come up with great ideas. Why not just sign the cars since you're a celebrity governor? Sign the cars and sell it for more money….That's exactly what we're going to do."
In addition to Ahnuld, the list spotlights Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, fined $25,000 by the NBA for twittering complaints about referees; Alice Hoffman, publicly shamed after she twittered attacks on a reviewer who didn't like her new novel; and Pete Hoekstra, who tweeted possibly sensitive information about a trip through the Green Zone in Baghdad.
A decent list, but how could ABC possibly have forgotten Hoekstra's other Twitter error, comparing House Republicans to twittering Iranian revolutionaries?
The post Pete Hoekstra: Still a Meme, and Don't Forget It appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Barack Obama's drive for healthcare reform suffered a setback on Thursday when Senate leaders said they would not be able to pass the measure before leaving for a monthlong August recess.
The day after Obama's prime-time news conference to sell the healthcare proposal, congressional leaders struggled to ease doubts about the plan and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the full chamber would not take up the bill until after its monthlong recess that begins on August 7.
"We'll come back in the fall" to work on the bill in the full Senate, he told reporters.
Given the way Obama has framed the healthcare debate—as one of almost apocalyptic urgency—Reid might as well admit that he's comfortable being chauffeured to work over the dead bodies of uninsured children strewn about in the streets. It'll be interesting to see how Obama responds to the news that this can't-wait-another-month reform will…have to wait another month.
Check out Reason's healthcare archive here.
The post About that August Healthcare Reform Deadline… appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If you're interested, the logo of your choice could go lunar for as little as the minimum $46,000 bid. (Hurry! Bidding started two days ago.)
Dig a little deeper into the website for "Moon Publicity, LLC," and you'll see that they've put some thought into the longer-term implications of scraping the Nike Swish into the Sea of Tranquility. Specifically, it will save us all from the coming mass extinction:
Space travel is more than just footprints and flags; it is vital to our survival. Just as we back up hard drives in case they crash, we need to back up mankind on other worlds.
Who will do it? Governments? Forty years ago man walked on the Moon. Where have we walked since? It is time that we find a way. Creating images on the Moon provides a commercial incentive for turbo charging space travel technology. Shadows are only the beginning. These advancements will eventually place robots on other worlds building space stations and planting crops.
The full Moon will always be the same. Shadow Shaping only works during partial phases of the Moon using shadows that blend with its natural beauty. If shadows form a logo during a quarter moon, it will be a small price to pay for saving mankind.
It's almost enough to bring a tear to the eye, isn't it? Carve away, gentle heroes. Carve away.
In Reason, Ron Bailey recently wrote about going back to the moon, and how it won't be permanent until it's profitable.
The post Great Moments in Space Entrepreneurship: "Shadow Advertising" on the Moon appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the background: Dr. No's bill to allow Congress to audit the Fed (which now has more than 250 co-sponsors). The Economist interviewer calls the bill "potentially quite dangerous" because it "weakens the Fed's political independence." Listen to it yourself:
Via The American Conservative's "Post Right" blog.
Two weeks ago, Reason's Tim Cavanaugh blogged the death-by-procedure of a Senate-side proposal to audit the Fed.
The post <em>The Economist</em> and Ron Paul on Auditing/Abolishing the Fed appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The BBC has some pretty graphics charting, on the basis of information from various UK municipalities, the growth of CCTV on Airstrip One. It's not pretty:
One of the most dramatic revelations is that both the Shetland Islands Council and Corby Borough Council—among the smallest local authorities in the UK—have more CCTV cameras than the San Francisco Police Department….
The borough of Wandsworth has the highest number of CCTV cameras in London, with just under four cameras per 1,000 people. Its total number of cameras—1,113—is more than the police departments of Boston [USA], Johannesburg and Dublin City Council combined.
The kicker: This follows the revelation that there are "almost one million fewer CCTV cameras in the UK than previously thought."
Also, check out this Beeb video on the ambiguities of CCTV—how many cameras there are, how effective the system is at stopping and solving crimes, and how large the opportunity cost of surveillance spending is.
Link via Boing Boing.
Reason has been onto this surveillance thing for a while. Senior Editor Radley Balko blogged about a CCTV music video last year, and Brendan O'Neill wrote about the (British) right to "excessively noisy sex" for Reason in May. Way back in 1997, Brian Taylor wrote about the arrival of limey-style CCTV in America.
The post England's Green and Surveilled Land appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The apology and pledge [to obtain usage rights to music in the future] were released today along with an announcement of a settlement with Browne over a federal copyright infringement lawsuit filed last year in Los Angeles. Browne sued McCain and the national and Ohio Republican parties for using part of his song Running on Empty to mock Democrat Barack Obama's proposed energy policies in an internet advert….
The musician's suit stated that Browne was concerned that use of his music would cause people to conclude he was endorsing McCain, even though the 60-year-old singer is a self-described liberal.
Chuck Berry, The Foo Fighters, and Van Halen have all been down that brambly path already. If this keeps up, soon the background music at all Republican campaign events will just be a loop of "McCain-Palin Tradition" and "Raisin' McCain." Strongest case for loose IP laws ever.
In the August-September print edition of Reason, Damon Root noted (briefly) Hank Williams, Jr.'s long tradition of political remixes.
The post Getting Sued by Musicians: A McCain-Palin Tradition appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>To call von Stauffenberg a libertarian would be wildly inaccurate. "Catholic conservative aristocrat" would be more accurate (see pic at right for evidence). And his associates were a mixture spanning the entire non-Nazi German political spectrum, including some less-than-savory bits. That aside, their work—the attempted assassination of one of the great tyrants of the 20th century—was surely a blow struck in defense of liberty and humanity, and worth remembering as such.
There aren't any awe-inspiring pictures or videos or obscenely detailed interactive online exhibits to accompany this anniversary, but the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin has an English-language website with plenty of information on the Resistance and their July 20 coup.
The post Screw the Moon Landing. Celebrate (Would-Be) Hitler Killers! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yesterday, National Geographic offered a more civil and comprehensive (if ultimately less-satisfying) response to the long-legged theory that the moon landing was faked on a Hollywood sound stage. Dragging up eight old canards based on pictures from the Apollo 11 moon walks, National Geographic quickly dispenses with ("busts") them:
You can tell Apollo was faked because…the American flag appears to be flapping as if "in a breeze" in videos and photographs supposedly taken from the airless lunar surface.
The fact of the matter is…"the video you see where the flag's moving is because the astronaut just placed it there, and the inertia from when they let go kept it moving," said spaceflight historian Roger Launius, of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.
As comforting as it might be to imagine that all of the Apollo program money is stuffed into a NASA-sized mattress somewhere in Houston, it just ain't so. The moon landing really did happen. It really did cost that much.
Last weekend, Matt Welch interviewed one of the real "myth busters," Adam Savage, at the Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas. Reason.tv has the footage here. Ron Bailey explains why America won't be going back to the moon until it's profitable here.
The post Moon-Landing Myths appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For the past four years, NASA has been on a path to resume lunar exploration with people, duplicating (in a more complicated fashion) what Neil, Mike and our colleagues did four decades ago. But this approach—called the "Vision for Space Exploration"—is not visionary; nor will it ultimately be successful in restoring American space leadership. Like its Apollo predecessor, this plan will prove to be a dead end littered with broken spacecraft, broken dreams and broken policies.
Instead, I propose a new Unified Space Vision, a plan to ensure American space leadership for the 21st century. It wouldn't require building new rockets from scratch, as current plans do, and it would make maximum use of the capabilities we have without breaking the bank. It is a reasonable and affordable plan—if we again think in visionary terms….
Now, I am not suggesting that America abandon the moon entirely, only that it forgo a moon-focused race. As the moon should be for all mankind, we should return there as part of an internationally led coalition. Using the landers and heavy-lift boosters developed by our partners, we could test on the moon the tools and equipment that we will need for our ultimate destination: homesteading Mars by way of its moons.
The piece gives few plausible justifications for bankrolling Mars mission preparations during the worst recession since the 1930s, and just after the federal deficit has crossed the trillion-dollar threshold. It's not clear how "thinking in visionary terms" will make a trip to Mars at all "reasonable" or "affordable."
Aldrin's cliché-as-argument approach is nauseating, and there ought to be a law against repeated, non-ironic Star Trek puns. But how is this schlock any worse than the ideas that have driven space policy for 50 years?
In obviously related news, today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission launch. As Reason's Ron Bailey pointed out, the total cost of the Apollo program was about $150 billion in 2008 dollars. The return on our investment: half a ton of moon rock (and some kick-ass photos).
For further reading, check out the Reason space policy archive.
The post To Mars or Bust! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano—last seen worrying about a generation of disaffected right-wingers suffering from The Paul—is reportedly considering scrapping the post-9/11 color-coded warning system. For nearly eight years, it has kept the politically useful fear of terrorism at the front of our minds by informing us all whether the terrorist threat was a high tangerine, or merely an elevated school bus. (Remember the one time that it was red? Me neither.) Bloomberg:
The U.S. Homeland Security Department has appointed a task force to conduct a 60-day review of the nation's color-coded terror-alert system.
The 17-member panel "made up of Democrats and Republicans, elected officials at the state and local level, security experts, law-enforcement officials and other professionals" will assess the system and suggest "any improvements that are needed," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said.
"My goal is simple: to have the most effective system in place to inform the American people about threats to our country," she said in a statement posted today on the department's Web site.
No word yet on what might replace the color-coded warning system.
Back in the primeval darkness of 2004, Reason's Nick Gillespie ranted about the politicization of terror alerts. He also punned off of the chart here.
The post No More "Orange You Glad" Terrorism Policy Puns appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>National Public Radio's "On The Media" did a short segment on Friday with Wales about the kidnapping. It's worth a listen. Wales discusses some of the ethical questions surrounding news suppression in a WikiWorld:
[Wikipedia's editors have] never considered ourselves a wide-open free-speech forum where people can post speculative things. We just look at it and we say, well, yes, there was one report here—and a couple of blogs—but it wasn't reported anywhere else, so, who knows. Now, of course, I knew that it was true because The New York Times contacted me to ask what could be done about it. But it's not my obligation to report everything I know, just as it wouldn't be for anybody….
We have the sort of deeper question, which I've struggled with…which is the question of, well, what really is the best thing to do here? The New York Times told me that they were acting on advice that it would be best if it was kept quiet, and I just chose to believe that.
This could work as an after-the-fact justification for censorship, depending on how reputable you consider the sources originally cited to be. That question is still wide open. If the sources were reliable, Wales and other editors were engaged in the selective suppression of properly verifiable and topical information about Rohde—raising the sorts of questions about ethical wiki management that I discussed in my previous post about the Rohde affair. Otherwise, they were just enforcing one of Wikipedia's core content policies (albeit with unusual vigilance).
NPR link via the estimable (and unlinkable) Logan Dobson.
The post Who Watches the Wikipedians? (Cont'd) appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In other words: Some of those in armed forces are also those who burn crosses—at least on the Internet. (Zack de la Rocha almost nailed it, I guess.)
The Stars and Stripes reports:
On Friday, the [Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)] will present its findings to key members of Congress who chair the House and Senate committees overseeing the armed forces and urge them to pressure the Pentagon to crack down.
"In the wake of several high-profile murders by extremists of the radical right, we urge your committees to investigate the threat posed by racial extremists who may be serving in the military to ensure that our armed forces are not inadvertently training future domestic terrorists," Morris Dees, SPLC co-founder and chief trial counsel, wrote to the legislators. "Evidence continues to mount that current Pentagon policies are inadequate to prevent racial extremists from joining and serving in the armed forces."
One servicemember on the site announced that he had been in the Army for five years, and that he "will do anything to keep our master race marching." Comments like these suggest more than just casual racism—a lot of the content seems like the expression of deeply-held beliefs by committed white supremacists. The whole thing is disturbing even if it's probably not very widespread.
The U.S. military's policy against racial extremism in the ranks is similar to its policy regarding homosexuality. Both policies are framed as safeguards against forces—racism and sexual tension—that could undermine unit cohesion.
Since "don't ask, don't tell" was implemented in 1993, about 12,000 servicemen have been discharged for revealing their homosexuality. The lackadaisical enforcement of the ban on white supremacism means that few, if any, white supremacists have gotten the boot. Which is more dangerous to unit cohesion: a gay man, or a neo-Nazi?
Mike Riggs told Reasoners what's wrong with "don't ask, don't tell" a year ago.
The post Southern Poverty Law Center Exposes White Supremacists in the Military appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The lawsuit … asserts that DOMA is unconstitutional because it interferes with the commonwealth's "sovereign authority to define and regulate the marital status of its residents" and also alleges that DOMA exceeds Congress's authority because Congress does not have a valid reason for requiring Massachusetts to treat married same-sex couples differently from all other married couples.
The Associated Press mentions that, back in March, a gay-rights advocacy group based in Boston also filed a lawsuit against DOMA, claiming that it discriminated against gays by denying them federal benefits available to heterosexual couples.
Thus Western Civilization's long, slow death-struggle continues apace.
Read Massachusetts' entire complaint here.
Reason has been all over this whole "gay marriage" thing for some time. Steve Chapman defended the federalist case for gay marriage, Cathy Young filed a dispatch from the gay-marriage culture war, and Jacob Sullum pointed out the pitfalls of fighting for gay marriage through the courts.
The post Massachusetts Mounts 10th Amendment Case Against DOMA appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Apparently the original aural assault wasn't enough, because America's youth only picked up the pace of violations. Now, the hip-hop Cassandra of Copyright is back to update his message for the post-floppy generation. According to Cory Doctorow, "it's a doozy":
Taking a page out of The IT Crowd's playbook, suggesting that copying your friends' music, movies and code will lead to you being imprisoned and then forced into brutal slavery by other cons (seriously)….
I wonder if anyone at the [Business Software Alliance] ever sits down and says, "You know, if we keep making stuff like this, eventually people are going to start thinking that giving us money for software only funds more efforts to imprison their loved ones, and thus they should really pirate stuff, if only to starve us of cash for these batshit excursions into private law."
Check out a preview of the new video in all its cheesy glory here. But first, enjoy the original:
Check out Reason's vast intellectual property coverage archive here.
The post Don't Copy that DVD-ROM appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The tale comes mostly from his first wife, Najwa, who recounts one particular encounter with vintage American culture shock:
There was one incident that reminded me that some Americans are unaware of other cultures. When the time came for us to leave America, Osama and I, along with our two boys, waited for our departure at the airport in Indiana. I was sitting quietly in my chair, relaxing, grateful that our boys were quiet….
I saw an American man gawking at me. I knew without asking that his unwelcome attention had been snagged by my black Saudi costume…
I took a side glance at Osama and saw that he was intently studying the curious man. I knew that my husband would never allow the man to approach me…
The New Yorker's Steve Coll admirably resists the urge to conclude that this awkward moment (which, I imagine, is common for Muslim men carting burqa- or hijab-clad wives around in fly-over states) is, like, so important to understanding bin Laden's mind:
Not a particularly consequential experience, perhaps, but surely one that has a life in Osama's memory and imagination—and another indication, among many available in his life, that he should be understood not only as a self-isolating radical imbued with millenarian religious narratives, but also as a modern and globalized figure whose experiences and outlook belong very much to our age.
To the unknown, uncouth fellow who looked askance at Mrs. bin Laden that one time 30 years ago in Indianapolis: Thanks.
(One more bit of crazy bin Laden family trivia: Osama's niece Wafah Dufour did a spread in GQ and is both Ivy-League educated and smokin' hot.)
The post Coming to America appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Meanwhile, advocates and opponents of gay sex bans are busy playing hot-potato with the legacy of colonialism and western influence in India:
Some religious leaders quickly criticized the ruling. "This Western culture cannot be permitted in our country," said Maulana Khalid Rashid Farangi Mahali, a leading Muslim cleric in the northern city of Lucknow….
"This legal remnant of British colonialism has been used to deprive people of their basic rights for too long," Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Rights Program at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. "This long-awaited decision testifies to the reach of democracy and rights in India.
I'm not exactly sure what sort of permissive "Western culture" Mr. Maulana Khaldi Rashid Farangi Mahali is imagining, but gay sex only became legal in my home state of Virginia in 2003, and "carnally know[ing] any male or female person by the anus or by or with the mouth" remains a felony (by dint of a probably unconstitutional law) in the Old Dominion.
Reason's Managing Editor Jesse Walker covered the Lawrence case here, and contributor Cathy Young considered it here and here.
The post Gay Sex is Now Legal in New Delhi appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Wikipedia page history shows that [the day after he was kidnapped], someone without a user name edited the entry on Mr. Rohde for the first time to include the kidnapping. [Times investigative reporter Michael] Moss deleted the addition, and the same unidentified user promptly restored it, adding a note protesting the removal. The unnamed editor cited an Afghan news agency report. In the first few days, at least two small news agencies and a handful of blogs reported the kidnapping…
On Nov. 13, news of the kidnapping was posted and deleted four times within four hours, before an administrator blocked any more changes for three days. On Nov. 16, it was blocked again, for two weeks….
Most of the attempts to add the information, including the first and the last, came from three similar Internet protocol addresses that correspond to an Internet service provider in Florida, and Wikipedia administrators guessed that they were all the same user.
"We had no idea who it was," said [Wikipedia founder Jimmy] Wales, who said there was no indication the person had ill intent. "There was no way to reach out quietly and say 'Dude, stop and think about this.'"
It's hard to say whether this makes new media (or new ways of managing media) look bad. Given a situation in which "lives were at stake"—that is, in which the nearly-anarchic quality of Wikipedia's management threatened to put Rohde in more danger by publicizing his situation—Wales compromised and used top-down censorship to suppress news of the kidnapping. It is remarkable, and a little bit reassuring, that Wales and his editors had such a difficult time censoring the site's more ornery, persistent users. Rohde's case, however, also exposes an interesting kink in Wikipedia's model of content control. Usually, it's possible for decentralized governance to keep content on a medium-sized leash, but decentralization requires public discussion about what is or isn't worth including. What should be done when the subject is so sensitive that preventing public discussion of it has to be the entire aim of content control? It looks like we have Wales' answer.
In June 2007, Reason's Associate Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote about Wales, Wikipedia, and the changing World Wide Web.
The post Who Watches the Wikipedians? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The movie features two new, controversial autobots named "Skids" and "Mudflap." They shuck and jive in what amounts to an updated-for-the-21st-century Al Jolson routine. They speak in gangsta slang. One sports a golden tooth. Both are excitable and diminutive enough to draw comparisons to chimpanzees. The insensitivity is shocking, shocking, in our fine, post-racial age.
And, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Bay is unapologetic:
Director Michael Bay insists jive-talking twin robots were only meant for laughs.
"It's done in fun," he said. "I don't know if it's stereotypes—they are robots, by the way. These are the voice actors. This is kind of the direction they were taking the characters and we went with it."…
"Listen, you're going to have your naysayers on anything," he said. "It's like, is everything going to be Melba toast? It takes all forms and shapes and sizes."
Let us momentarily appreciate two philosophical oddities: film characters that are simultaneously racist and race-less, and critiques of the racial politics of a Michael Bay movie.
Sadly, Reason has covered Michael Bay in the past. Check out Managing Editor Jesse Walker's take on Michael Bay's moral vision here. David Weigel reported on the first Transformers movie and petty copyright enforcement here.
The post Do Autobots Dream of Electric Blackface? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Woe betide those who would force Congress to justify legislation with reference to the Constitution. At best, according to Andrew Grossman of the Heritage Foundation, it's just an educational exercise:
Though the Act could not guarantee the constitutionality of legislation, it would have a significant effect on Congress. Most clearly, when invoked it would shift debate to fundamental questions of the rule of law. There is an educational value to this exercise that stands to attract additional Members, over time, to the "constitutional caucus."
Most importantly, requiring legislation to state the basis of its authority would reveal the hollowness of the constitutional doctrine underlying so much congressional action. Every bill would be an opportunity for Americans to think seriously about our constitutional order, the wisdom of its design, and the consequences of departing from its strictures.
Even in his pessimism, Grossman seems hilariously optimistic about a bill that, if passed, would probably be as effective at "educating" members of Congress (and the public) as the Constitution already is at constraining them.
It's a nice thought, anyway.
At Reason: Jacob Sullum covered Coburn's delightful obstructionism, Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote about his war on pork, and Dave Weigel asked whether Coburn is "an extreme social conservative, a libertarian hero, or both?"
The post An Inconvenient Constitution appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last week, the ACLU published a study condemning federal laws that are designed to prevent charities from providing "material support" for terrorism. Those laws, the report says, "are in desperate need of re-evaluation and reform." Among other injustices, they "punish wholly innocent assistance to arbitrarily blacklisted individuals and organizations, undermine legitimate humanitarian efforts, and can be used to prosecute innocent donors."
The ACLU often refers to federal terrorism watch lists as "blacklists"—which, in effect, they are. But focus on the whole phrase, "arbitrarily blacklisted individuals."
An essential component of the ACLU's complaint is that poorly managed watch lists make it easier for the government to harass or destroy innocent Muslim-American charities. For years, the ACLU has criticized those lists—as they are applied both to organizations and to individuals.
But, for years, the ACLU has also effectively endorsed those lists—for money.
Former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer writes about the organization's watch-list hypocrisy in her new book, Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity and the ACLU. Most of the story, though, was already part of the public record.
In 2004, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero signed the organization up for the Combined Federal Campaign—a government program that facilitates charitable giving by federal employees. Participation, Kaminer wrote, was expected to net the ACLU about $500,000 a year.
But the contract included a distressing requirement: The ACLU would have to check its employee rolls against federal watch lists.
It's already illegal to employ anyone on the government's Specially Designated Global Terrorists or Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons lists, but that doesn't mean that the ACLU had to volunteer compliance with those laws in exchange for money—especially when the ACLU was and remains concerned about the effect of watch lists on civil rights and liberties.
When the ACLU signed onto the CFC, it became complicit in government practices that its new report says "are neither fair nor effective, and are undermining American values of due process and fairness."
You begin to feel doubly bad for the Muslim-American charities. They are racked by federal watch-list laws—and their strongest ally is an organization that sold out its own principled opposition to those laws.
Perhaps criticizing the ACLU on these grounds is nitpicking. The group's obeisance to objectionable federal watch-list laws was merely symbolic, after all. The CFC contract entailed no greater responsibility than that which the law already mandated.
But civil-liberties advocates work daily in a world that understands how important symbolism can be. With good cause, the ACLU often nitpicks federal policies that amount only to marginal violations of civil liberty—because rules are rules, and the government should deliver fully on its promises to respect our rights.
Well, ideals are ideals, and the ACLU compromised theirs for half a million dollars a year. A pittance, really, but apparently enough to override principle.
Bill Flanigen is Reason's 2009 Burton C. Grey Memorial intern. This article originally appeared in the New York Post.
The post The ACLU's Sellout on Watch Lists appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>To begin with, every correctional agency must have a written policy mandating zero tolerance for all forms of sexual abuse in all settings, whether it is operated by the government or by a private company working under contract with the government….
Thoroughly screen all new job applicants…to prevent hiring, retaining, or promoting anyone who has engaged in sexual abuse….
Strict limits on cross-gender searches and the viewing of prisoners who are nude or performing bodily functions are necessary because of the inherently personal nature of such encounters….
Facilities have a duty to thoroughly investigate every allegation of sexual abuse without delay and to completion, regardless of whether or not the alleged victim cooperates with investigators….
The Commission urges that individuals under the age of 18 be held seperately from the general population.
To recap: Have zero tolerance for sexual abuse, don't hire people with a history of sexual abuse, don't allow cross-gender observation of nude prisoners, fully investigate alleged sexual abuses, and separate adult and juvenile prisoners.
If these suggestions seem obvious to you…well, they should. Perhaps you'd be interested in a career in corrections?
To my mind, there are two possibilities here. Either the commission has wasted years of funding and produced a vanilla, restatement-of-the-conventional-wisdom report, or the extent of safety problems in America's prisons beggars belief, making a novelty out of even the most conventional policy prosposals. Given the prevalence of stories like this, I'm inclined toward the latter conclusion.
Reason writers have covered prison rape and the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission here, here, and here.
The post Step One: Tell Guards and Prisoners That Rape is Against the Rules appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hardin, Montana, and Manistique, Michigan, have two problems in common: not enough jobs and a prison sitting empty nearby. Enter Obama. The President's (imperiled) plan to close the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before January of next year presented a potential solution. All those detainees needed a new home, so a few enterprising souls in Hardin and Manistique hatched an idea: Move the detainees into their prisons. The ailing towns would get jobs and a substantial chunk of revenue from the federal government, the expensive prisons would get put to use, and Harry Reid would no longer be forced to release every captured member of Al Qaeda directly into your neighborhood.
Sounds like a decent plan, until you ask some local politicians. First, Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) on the Hardin proposal:
There is opposition to the Gitmo resettlement plan. Some locals have complained bitterly and other politicians in Montana have expressed deep reservations. "We're not going to bring al-Qaida to Big Sky country. No way. Not on my watch," a local senator, Max Baucus, told Time magazine.
Next, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI/Twitter) says that moving the detainees to Michigan is a "really bad idea." Other local pols echo his concern, including Michigan's Secretary of State and Attorney General.
In fairness, these politicians sound no dumber than some of the decidedly anti-terrorists-in-my-backyard citizens who were asked to comment. Check Manistique resident David Vaughn's measured reaction (in the same article as Hoekstra):
"I think it is an ill-conceived idea. Why would we want to bring more terrorists into our country? Who's to say the relatives of these people wouldn't come over?"
Meanwhile, Florence, Colorado, home to more than 300 terrorists, wouldn't mind accomodating a few more.
A couple of weeks ago, I noted the first stateside transfer of a Gitmo detainee. Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum tore apart the logic behind the Guantanamo "state of mind" back in January.
The post Not on Max Baucus's Watch. No Way. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>University of Michigan economics professor Mark Perry tries (in vain) to parse the logic of a UAW parking lot where only "American-Union made" cars are welcome:
First of all, is that really legal in the U.S. to engage in such blatant "vehicle discrimination/vehicle profiling" based on a car's national origin? Is there really much difference between a sign that says "No Mexicans allowed on our property" and the sign above that essentially says "No cars built by Mexicans allowed on our property"?
Follow Perry down the rabbithole as things get even more confusing. What about cars made by unionized Canadian auto workers? Cars assembled in both Canada and the United States? Cars manufactured in the United States by foreign companies?
There's a metaphor for the futility of automobile industry protectionism somewhere around here.
Check out more of Reason's (unionized) car commentary here and here.
The post The Vexing Details of Vehicle Discrimination appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Constitution does not empower the federal government to confine a person solely because of asserted "sexual dangerousness" when the Government need not allege (let alone prove) that this "dangerousness" violates any federal law.
A commenter at Sentencing Law and Policy (linked above) points out probably the strangest element of the law in question (18 USC 4248): It allows the government to detain "sexually dangerous" persons regardless of their crime:
Section 4248 does not require that the potential committee has ever been convicted of a federal sex offense, or indeed ANY sex offense. All it requires (on this issue) is that the govt prove, by clear and convincing evidence, that the person has at some time in his or her life engaged in child molestation or sexually violent conduct (both as defined by BOP regs).
Reason's Kerry Howley and Jacob Sullum took on the post-incarceration abuse of sex offenders here and here.
The post A Never-Ending Sentence for the Sex Crime You Have Yet to Commit appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>[I]t's hard to see how implementing a form of civic death helps former inmates reintegrate into society. Even if one grants that certain morally challenged offenders—murderers, say—do not belong in the voting booth, surely we could have judges determine who is fit to vote on a case-by-case basis, rather than excluding all criminals in the blanket laws of state constitutions.
Unfortunately, Appel overstates his case. What standard would those judges use to determine which criminals deserve to be enfranchised? Appel doesn't answer that question, probably because answering it would drain rhetorical force from his writing. ("Let Criminals Vote" becomes "Don't Let Criminal X Vote. Do Let Criminal Y Vote.") Describing such a standard would mean writing at length about the classes of wrongdoers who surely don't deserve the right to vote, and he wants to write about the classes who do. Even when he's acknowledging that some disenfranchisement is just, he only does so in a hypothetical: "If one grants…"
The real problem with the criminal justice system is not that it disenfranchises criminals, but that it disenfranchises too many criminals. As long as Appel believes that "citizens should be denied basic rights only when a clear threat is posed to the public good," the burden of proof should rest on the government to prove that a criminal or class of criminals doesn't deserve suffrage. As it stands, the system defaults on stripping so many criminals of the franchise that it risks punishing minor crimes disproportionately.
There are probably good arguments for disenfranchising lots of criminals. Appel doesn't dwell on that fact (though I think he knows it). Giving up the conceit that we should enfranchise all criminals is a good first step toward developing fair standards that could enfranchise most of them.
The post Let (Some) Criminals Vote appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"German investors have always preferred to hold a lot of personal wealth in gold, for historical reasons," said Thomas Geissler, the owner of the company. "They have twice lost everything."…
"There has definitely been more interest because of the financial crisis," Mr Geissler said.
"Gold is a good thing to have in your pocket in uncertain times."
Sounds like at least one Kraut smells what Ron Paul is cookin'. Geissler plans to install 500 of these machines throughout Europe. Different amounts of gold will be available—the FT mentions a 1-gram wafer and a 10-gram bar—but, for now, all amounts come with a hefty mark-up. So don't get too excited:
When the Financial Times bought the cheapest product it was dispensed in an oblong metal box labelled "My Golden Treasure", with a certificate of authenticity signed by Mr Geissler but no receipt and the wrong change. Mr Geissler said he hoped to have a more advanced machine later this month.
Gold prices from the machines—about 30 per cent higher than market prices for the cheapest product—will be updated every few minutes.
If you're willing to pay that much to escape the evils of fiat currency (and the idea of gold-for-cash transactions without receipts doesn't bother you), then get thee to a vending machine!
(Link via the estimable and unlinkable Jared Walczak, who notes in an e-mail that "this obviously falls somewhat short of the libertarian dream of installing heroin vending machines in schools.")
The post The ReLOVElution Will Be Vended appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The laws prohibiting material support for terrorism are in desperate need of re-evaluation and reform. These laws punish wholly innocent assistance to arbitrarily blacklisted individuals and organizations, undermine legitimate humanitarian efforts, and can be used to prosecute innocent donors who intend to support only lawful activity through religious practice, humanitarian aid, speech, or association.
Focus on "arbitrarily blacklisted individuals." An essential part of the ACLU's complaint is that poorly managed terrorism watchlists make it easier for the government to abuse or destroy innocent Muslim-American charities. It's worth noting these specific criticisms, because a few years ago the ACLU agreed voluntarily to screen its own employees using the federal terrorism watchlists. According to Wendy Kaminer, a former ACLU board member, the organization has for years been giving what amounts to a paid endorsement of terrorism watchlists. Her new book, Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity, and the ACLU, recycles the story that she originally told in a 2006 HuffPo post:
[I]n early January '06, the ACLU's Board of Directors (of which I am a dissident member,) authorized Executive Director Anthony Romero to sign an entirely voluntary contract with the Bush Administration pledging to comply with federal blacklisting laws. Why? The ACLU is taking this pledge for money—an expected $500,000 per year. A promise to comply with blacklisting laws is required as a condition of participation in the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC), a giving vehicle for federal employees and a soliciting vehicle for qualifying charities. (Every year, federal workers are provided with a list of charities to which they can choose to contribute through the CFC.)
The above describes the tail end of what was actually a two-year controversy at the ACLU (where I worked as an intern for part of 2007). The New York Times first reported on it in July of 2004.
The Combined Federal Campaign's website confirms that, in 2005, participating organizations were required to check their employee lists against government terrorism watchlists—including the same registry of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons that the ACLU slags in its new report on charities.
Technically, it's illegal to employ anyone on a terrorism watchlist, so the ACLU is obligated to comply with the law even if it isn't part of the Combined Federal Campaign. That doesn't mean, though, that the organization had to sign a contract with the Bush administration, or that (as Kaminer alleges) Romero had to expose the organization and himself to liability. From Worst Instincts:
By volunteering our compliance [with the CFC watchlist requirement], we were risking additional liability for noncompliance, if we were found to have intentionally misled the government when we promised to obey the law…. Romero assured the board, and reportedly informed the government, that he would not check the watch lists, leaving unanswered questions about how he intended to keep his promise to boycott anyone named on them and continue to qualify for CFC funds.
All this for $500,000 a year. A pittance, but apparently enough to override principle.
The post Watchlists: Bad for Muslim-American Charities, Great for Employee Screening at the ACLU appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Virginia follows the federal prison system, as well as states including California, Texas, Michigan and Colorado, in instituting smoking bans in prisons over the past few years. Maryland has banned tobacco products at all 24 state prisons, inside and out, since 2001.
The Old Dominion is actually further behind the curve in banning smoking than the article implies. Almost every other state (and the federal government) has at least a partial ban on jailhouse smoking. So far, dire predictions of violence at the hands of nicotine-deprived prisoners have come to little—a few French Canadian troublemakers aside. (Smuggling and cranky guards, however, both abound.)
Since righteous libertarian outrage might be wasted defending the right of a convicted felon to his Pall Malls, let's instead consider this a teachable moment in economics. Check out this article from The Wall Street Journal that Reason's Jesse Walker noticed back in October 2008. When the federal prison system banned smoking in 2004, it also deprived prisoners of their best as-good-as-cash medium of exchange. Enter foul-tasting fish:
Mr. Levine and his client were prisoners in California's Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex. Like other federal inmates around the country, they found a can of mackerel—the "mack" in prison lingo—was the standard currency.
"It's the coin of the realm," says Mark Bailey, who paid Mr. Levine in fish. Mr. Bailey was serving a two-year tax-fraud sentence in connection with a chain of strip clubs he owned. Mr. Levine was serving a nine-year term for drug dealing. Mr. Levine says he used his macks to get his beard trimmed, his clothes pressed and his shoes shined by other prisoners. "A haircut is two macks," he says, as an expected tip for inmates who work in the prison barber shop.
Check out more of Reason's coverage of smoking here.
For some excellent commentary on tobacco law outside of prison, check out Reason contributor Jacob Grier's run-down of a recent online back-and-forth about bars, bans, and "market failure."
The post The Prison Mackerel Economy Comes to Virginia appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Who will mourn for the beleaguered Canadian censors? Jennifer Lynch, the Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, is oddly insecure in the face of criticism. In Canada's popular Globe & Mail newspaper, Lynch defends her Commission's mandate to punish Internet speech that could "expose an individual or a group of individuals to hatred or contempt" and responds to critics:
I believe critics of human-rights commissions and tribunals are manipulating information and activities around rights cases and freedom of expression to further a new agenda. This agenda posits that rights commissions and tribunals, and the attendant vigilance over all the rights and freedoms Canadians now enjoy, no longer serve a useful purpose. In this way, the debate over freedom of expression has been used as a wedge to undermine and distort our human-rights system.
How dastardly of them to…present arguments. For her part, Lynch offers an astoundingly weak justification for censorship, explaining that it's all about "balance":
Tolerance and open-mindedness are ideals to which Canadians have subscribed, and are part of the quest for equality that has come to define our country all over the world. They are the foundation of the Canadian Human Rights Act, whose promise is to give effect "to the principle that all individuals should have an opportunity equal with other individuals to make for themselves the lives that they are able and wish to have" without discrimination….
There is no hierarchy of rights with some rights having greater importance than others. They work together toward a common purpose.
It is up to legislators and courts to find the appropriate balance that best protects the human rights and freedoms of all citizens.
Nevermind that Lynch's job is to create that hierarchy of rights, privileging a right not to be offended over a right to free expression; that her commission has the disturbing freedom to pick and choose which vaguely-defined rights (and rights-holders) will be recognized and protected; and that free expression and a right not to be offended are fundamentally incompatible and can never be consistently "balanced." If this is the best Lynch has, she should expect many more manipulative critics with their distortions and wedge arguments in the future.
For a firsthand account from one man at the business end of Canadian human rights law enforcement, see Ezra Levant's feature in the June print edition of Reason.
The post Defending Canada's "Human Rights" Commissions appeared first on Reason.com.
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