Month: August 2014

The New York Times recently published a

fascinating story and
Q and A with Jeffrey Kessler, a lawyer on a quest to bring down
the NCAA’s restrictions on paying players. The lawsuit centers
squarely on how such restrictions hurt players who never see a dime
of the money they earn for their schools. Kessler believes
conditions are right to abolish the faux-amateurism of college
sports once and for all:

[Kessler:] “Our case is directed specifically at the core
restrictions that prevent schools from deciding for themselves how
they want to treat their players. What we are seeking to do is
remove the shackles so that the schools can decide themselves what
is the fair and appropriate way to take care to their players.

If you have a school like Texas that earns close to $200 million
for their football or basketball programs, you might decide it is
fair to give some of that to the players who are generating the
money once you are no longer stopped from doing so.”

Kessler uses direct—some would say libertarian—language in his
attacks on the NCAA. He considers the organization to be a criminal
“cartel” that prevents schools from giving players market-based
compensation:

[NYT:] In a recent decision in the O’Bannon case, the
judge ruled that schools should make scholarships cover the full
cost of attending, but also set up trust funds for athletes that
are potentially limited to $5,000 a year. Is that a good enough
result?

[Kessler:] The market should decide what’s
the result. If a school wants to offer $5,000 a year to their
players, they can do that. And if another school wants to offer a
different number, they can do that. Someone might say, “Let’s put
it in a trust fund.” Someone else might say, “I’m going to pay
through increased health benefits or insurance.” Someone else might
say, “I’m going to give you enhanced scholarships.” That’s what
markets decide.

Q. In your scenario, couldn’t we see schools engaging in
bidding wars for teenagers?

A. The players won’t get one dollar more than
the markets decide they are worth. Schools will make different
decisions. Some schools will not want to do this at all.

The Ivy League doesn’t offer athletic scholarships — that’s not
going to change. The idea here is, let schools decide, let’s not
have a cartel decide. That’s what’s illegal.

The complicating factor is that colleges exist in a world filled
with other market distortions that would frustrate any
great sports liberation. Most obviously: State universities get
some of their funding by coercing taxpayers, and even though their
athletic departments are often separate financial entities, that
boundary is sometimes blurred.

The best way to undue all this market confusion is to privatize
the universities entirely, of course.

But it’s an interesting lawsuit, nonetheless.

“Swatting” has been highlighted
in the press when celebrities have been targeted, but that’s only
part of the story. Tech-savvy pranksters have called the police
claiming to be at a home or building engaged in violence, sometimes
claiming to have shot other people and threatening even more
violence. But it’s a scam, and police send SWAT teams out to
respond in force to peaceful people living their lives and put
everybody at risk.

Though the swatting of celebrities gets much more attention,
they aren’t the only targets. Popular gamers who have YouTube or
Twitch channels have also been targeted. These Internet celebrities
may be unknown to the general populace, but many of them have
thousands—even millions—of fans, and gaming is obviously a popular
recreation for technophiles, even the sinister hacker types.

Furthermore, calling in a SWAT raid on a gamer who streams play
online may result in the raid being captured live on web cam,
something the swatter probably finds even more amusing. That’s
exactly what happened Wednesday to Jordan “Kootra” Mathewson of
Littleton, Colorado. His streamed session of
Counter-Strike at his studio in an office building was
interrupted when a SWAT raid came storming in. Alt weekly
Westword posted the contents of a press release detailing

what the swatter told the police:

Littleton Police received a 911 call at 11:27 am this morning
reporting a shooting and hostages at 1221 W. Mineral Avenue.
Littleton Police, Littleton Fire Rescue and law enforcement from
multiple agencies responded. There were no victims discovered after
the initial search of the building by entry teams. A second search
of the building confirmed that there were no victims and no shots
fired at the location. Police are questioning several employees of
the office building who are cooperating with investigators.

Nearby schools and buildings were all evacuated.

Here’s the video below. Take note of how they treat Mathewson
(and what happens when they discover they’re being streamed live on
the Internet):

I suppose it’s a “training issue” that police officers for some
reason believe “acting like a threatening asshole to any other
human being you encounter” is synonymous with “gaining control of a
situation.” These reactions are exactly the kinds of things
swatters are hoping for. Because the police have developed this
reputation for violent, over-the-top reactions to everything, they
are actually reinforcing the value of using swatting as a way to
torment others.

The defense would be, “What if it were real?” The police can’t
simply ignore these calls. In a sad irony, these are actually the
kinds of calls that SWAT teams were invented to help deal with. But
I suspect that’s one of the reasons that inspire such an explosive,
credulous response from police. Data shows that SWAT raids are
hardly ever
used for actual hostage situations any more. Every real hostage
or violent situation where the police can play the heroes can be
used as a counterargument to calls for police demilitarization.

As much as law enforcement agencies complain about the growth of
hackers instigating unjustified SWAT raids, their own stormtrooper
mentality of responding to every single interaction with the public
certainly doesn’t help matters.

Bravely, the state government of California is

on the verge of banning the sale of Confederate flags… by the
state government of California. Both houses of the California
legislature voted in favor of the bill by a large margin and Gov.
Jerry Brown (D) is expected to sign it. The bill’s sponsor claimed
the legislation was meant to fight “the ugly hatred of racism.”

Political commentator John McWhoreter, who has described himself
as a “cranky,
liberal Democrat,” provides the right context to see the bill
for what it is, a largely symbolic effort that’s not actually
“making a real difference in black lives (and deaths).” An excerpt,

via The Daily Beast:

If we are really OK with ourselves, we do not require that our
environment be perfectly free of any visual evidence historically
connectable to ills of the past. Beyond a certain point—and I say
we’re beyond it—it’s time to live in the present and look
forward.

And no, not forward in the sense of pretending racism doesn’t
exist. I mean forward in working on racism-related issues that are
susceptible to constructive address—which flag-banning is not—and
making a real difference in black lives (and deaths).

When we talk about “fending off” racism, we need to fend off the
kind of thing that happened to people like Michael Brown, John
Crawford, Eric Garner, and Ezell Ford all within the past month’s
time. 

The whole column is worth a read here.

I would add only that the state’s move to ban Confederate flags
from being sold by the state government doesn’t go far enough.
Given California’s serious fiscal problems, the state shouldn’t be
in the business of running gift shops at museums in the first
place. It’s a function that could easily be relegated to the
private sector. Renting out museum gift shops would probably create
more revenue for the state, and a stable source since it won’t be
based on the government’s ability to run a profitable gift
shop.

Also of note to stress the hypocrisy of the California
legislature for deciding that in the month police brutality and
racism have become a national issue they would tackle the sale of
Confederate flags at government stores: In addition to Brown,
Crawford, Garner, and Ford, who was killed in Los Angeles, there
were at least two other questionable deaths at the hands of police
in California in just the few weeks
after the Brown shooting: 19-year-old Diana Showman was shot by
a cop in San Jose who said he mistook a power drill in her hand for
an Uzi, and 36-year old Dante Parker, an employed, married, father
of two died in police custody after being Tased.

There’s also the
beating of a woman by an officer of the California Highway
Patrol earlier this summer. He is not on patrol duty but continues
to collect a paycheck after being caught on tape wailing on a
woman. And last week a sheriff’s deputy in Kern County, California,

received probation and 480 hours of community service for
killing two pedestrians while driving his patrol car in excess of
85 miles an hour and striking and killing two pedestrians. His
negligence will cost taxpayers more than $8 million but
California’s civil service laws make it almost impossible to fire
him for the action. The inability of police departments to
appropriately discipline and dismiss problem cops makes it
virtually impossible to effectively combat police racism. Given the
power armed government agents have to use violence against
residents, which they tend to use disproportionately against black
ones, California’s legislators need to focus on civil service
reforms that will make it possible to “fend off the ugly hatred of
racism” where it’s at its most lethal, in police forces around
California and the country.

LAPD Deputy Chief Stephen Downing (Ret.)
writes:  It is sad that it took a police killing and
the excessive deployment of a military presence by local law
enforcement in Ferguson, Missouri to focus national attention upon
a problem that has been metastasizing within American law
enforcement since the early 1970s.

The militarization of local law enforcement was seeded by the
Nixon administration’s declaration of the war on drugs in the early
1970s, and took root in the 1980s as result of President Reagan’s
escalation that poured millions into the drug war, shifting the
focus of local law enforcement away from violent and property
crimes to mostly small-time drug offenders.

Read this article.

Last December, Federal Judge Clark Waddoups struck down a
central part of the Utah law banning polygamy. Yesterday he issued
the rest of his ruling, dealing not with the statute itself but
with the husband and wives at the center of the case—Kody, Meri,
Janelle, Christine, and Robyn Brown, stars of the reality show
Sister Wives. Nate Carlisle of The Salt Lake
Tribune
reports:

Waddoups in December struck the section of Utah’s
bigamy statute that can be applied when someone “cohabits with
another person” to whom they are not legally married. Utah law made
such a union a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
Waddoups said the ban violated the First and 14th amendments to the
Constitution.

Waddoups let stand the portion of the statute that prevents someone
from having more than one active marriage license.

In the final portion of his ruling Wednesday, Waddoups found the
Utah County Attorney Jeff Buhman violated the Browns’
constitutional rights when he oversaw a 2010 investigation into
whether the Brown family was committing bigamy. At the time the
Browns lived in Lehi. They have since moved to Nevada. Buhman
eventually decided
not to file criminal charges, but Waddoups said the
investigation stifled the Browns’ rights to free speech, religion
and equal protection.

Waddoups ordered Utah to pay the Browns’ attorney fees as a result
of that finding.

Utah’s attorney general says he plans to appeal the ruling; if
he does, I hope he loses again. As I wrote
when Waddoups’ earlier decision came down:

The case is drenched in the politics of
polygamy, but in one important way it isn’t about polygamy at all.
The Browns all live together, but only one of the wives has a
marriage license. To the extent that their family departs from
American marital norms, it is a private arrangement unrecognized by
the state. The Browns’ household is more like the informal and
contractual gay unions that have
existed for decades than the fully recognized same-sex
marriages that many states are beginning to allow today.

And that’s all that is now legal. Previously, Utah considered a
person guilty of bigamy if, “knowing he [or she] has a husband or
wife or knowing the other person has a husband or wife, the person
purports to marry another person or cohabits with another person.”
It is the final part of that restriction—the bit about
cohabitation—that comes into play here. If a dozen roommates in San
Francisco decide to set up a polymorphous polyamorous partnership, the law
would have nothing to say about the matter. (The building code
enforcers might object, I suppose. But that’s a separate issue.)
Utah’s rules are different, and they are different because of a
long legacy of prejudice
and religiously targeted persecution. Pointing to this persecution
and to a history of selective enforcement, Judge Clark Waddoups
ruled that the portion of the statute prohibiting cohabitation
violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty.
Pointing to other matters of law, such as the fact that Utah no
longer has common-law
marriages, he ruled that the ban on “purport[ing] to marry
another person” should apply only to someone attempting or
pretending to acquire more than one marriage license. That puts
households like the Browns’ in the clear.

So Utah is not about to start recognizing group marriages. It’s
just going to stop bringing criminal charges against people who
have done nothing more than establish their own unlicensed big-love
homes.

To read the rest of that article—including my argument that this
decriminalization will make it easier, not harder, to act against
abusive households—go
here.