Month: August 2014

That’s the suggestion in this
Tim Mak piece for The Daily Beast. Here’s a
fresh quote from the
Democrats’ favorite punching bag:

The militarization of police in particular is an issue the Koch
brothers view as necessary to tackle and which they have spent
years fighting, a spokesman said.

“We need to address issues such as overcriminalization,
excessive and disproportionate sentencing, inadequate indigent
defense that is inconsistent with the Sixth Amendment, and the
militarization of police,” Mark Holden, general counsel of Koch
Industries Inc., told The Daily Beast. “We have deep respect for
the moral dignity of each and every person and because of this,
we’ve worked for decades to support those who defend the full range
of individual rights.”

Also quoted in the piece are Brian Doherty,
Cato Institute criminal justice director Timothy Lynch, the
ACLU’s Kara Dansky, and me.

In the fab new print issue of
Reason (see its Millennials sub-page here), my editor’s
note—currently available to print subscribers only!—talks
about how the rise of the allegedly racist Tea Party has
contributed to a criminal-justice reform moment that might just
undo some of the worst civil rights abuses of the past 40
years.

Much more interesting than merely finding more fodder for “Team
A good, Team B bad” is the reality that single-issue coalitions can
and should spring up from all sorts of political sectors, with
pissed-off citizens pushing recalcitrant politicians to undo some
of America’s most egregriously unjust policy errors. Why, someone
should write a
book about that!

As Brian Doherty told the Beast:

It is an issue in which there is overlap between liberal and
libertarian concerns, yes, a chance for coalition building as long
as both sides don’t get injuriously punctilious about ‘playing with
the other side….Libertarians might hope it’s a teaching moment,
as you might say, about the dangers and nature of state power.

Reason on the militarization of police here.

Twitch almost certainly has
more viewers per month than any individual cable news network.
The game-streaming service
boasts more than 45 million visitors per month, all there not to
watch talking heads or actors, but their own peers playing video
games.

This week Amazon announced it would be
acquiring Twitch for nearly $1 billion dollars. The purchase of
Twitch by a major online player did not come as a surprise by
anybody who follows gaming news or is a fan of the company. There
had been rumblings that YouTube was looking to purchase Twitch and
add it to its online empire. But sources say Google’s plans were
hampered by fears of anti-trust problems (which helps illustrate
how out of whack our anti-trust regulations have gotten. Twitch has
been around less than five years. Nobody could reasonably argue
that their current domination of the game-viewing market is set in
stone and is immune to the rise of new competitors).

The news has prompted media explainers (like
this one from Vox) to spread the word to those who
didn’t know what Twitch was. Given that video games are now the
most popular form of entertainment in the world, it feels akin (to
somebody who plays games anyway) to a media outlet deciding it
needs to explain how a rock concert works.

There does seem to be a bit of cultural surprise that an
audience has developed just to watch other people play video games.
It can seem a bit odd at first. It’s different from watching
football or ballet. Most of us can’t do those things, at least not
well. The whole thing about video games is that everybody can play
them. Why watch somebody else play when you can just play
yourself?

Before getting into the reasons why Twitch is popular it’s
helpful to remind that video games have also been a very social
pastime, even before the rise of Internet social media sharing
systems. The loner gamer in the basement was never, ever a
stereotype that had roots in accuracy. Arcades were hangouts for
teens in the ’80s. Home console systems were always designed for
multiple players going all the way back to the Atari. Pong
was for two players! Video games are things that people actually do
together, and so growing ties between gaming and social media
platforms should surprise nobody.

There’s been a significant rise in competitive gaming, often
referred to as E-Sports. In Reason’s look at “Video Game Nation”
earlier in the year, we highlighted one heavy-hitter, League of
Legends:

The League of Legends community is dominant on Twitch.
At any given moment there are tens of thousands of viewers watching
some of the top players compete around the world, not just in
America. Riot Games has used Twitch to help build its audience and
streams its competitions through the service. Other major games
with a competitive base, like Starcraft II and Street
Fighter IV, also have tournaments streamed live through
Twitch.

In a sense, these games actually are very similar to watching
professional football or ballet. While anybody can play these
games, it takes a significant amount of skill and proficiency to be
really, really good at them. This is not Starcade, that
awkward effort from the ’80s to make a game show connected to the
gaming culture from back in the day:

So gamers themselves like to watch these streamers to see
amazing plays and skilled competition and even learn from what they
watch.

But that’s not all that goes on at Twitch. The site hosts
players who stream games as a way to help raise money for charity
(I’ve written about this trend
here). It’s gaming as a shared philanthropic experience, not
unlike the ice bucket challenge going around right now to help fund
research to fight ALS.

Some streamers develop enough of an audience that they can
actually make money from their gameplay, with subscribers actually
paying them and streamers making a cut from advertising (just like
people with very popular YouTube channels). There are channels
where the streamers are draws because of their personalities as
much as the games themselves (similar to many YouTube gaming
channels).

There are other useful benefits of streaming, not that it needs
to be justified for utilitarian reasons. We have reached an era of
gaming where the market is flooded with so many choices. There are
new video games released every single day. Streamers serve as
real-time reviewers allowing potential consumers to see the product
in action before they commit their money. It can be a huge boon to
indie game developers when something they’ve made catches on with
popular streamers.

It is time for the both the media and the public to stop being
surprised at the size of the gaming community and the amount of
revenue it generates. Video games are bigger than movies.

(Full disclosure: I occasionally stream games myself on
Twitch. Anybody considering tuning in should be warned that I have
turned into a middle-aged video game hipster that never plays
anything popular. Lately I’ve been playing Endless Legend,
a fantasy strategy game still in beta testing from a little-known
French indie game company. I am frequently the only person on
Twitch playing this game.)

In Paris next year, the nations of the world are
supposed to hammer out an global regime to control energy
production as a way to prevent possible catastrophic climate
change. Having covered United Nations climate negotiations for more
than two decades, I can confidently predict that there is no way
that countries will adopt a comprehensive treaty that somehow
legally binds them to make specific cuts in their greenhouse gas
emissions. As evidence, consider that when the Kyoto Protocol
emissions limits chafed, many countries, e.g., Canada and Japan,
simply ignored them and dropped out of the treaty.

Now the New York Times is reporting that President
Barack Obama is working on
a “politcally binding” international agreement to limit the
emissions of greenhouse gases produced largely by burning
fossil fuels. Such an agreement would be an end run around the
pesky constitutional requirement that treaties must be ratified by
two-thirds vote of the Senate. As the Times explains:

In seeking to go around Congress to push his international
climate change agenda, Mr. Obama is echoing his domestic climate
strategy. In June, he bypassed Congress and used his executive
authority to order a far-reaching regulation forcing American
coal-fired power plants to curb their carbon emissions….

American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement
— a proposal to blend legally binding conditions from an existing
1992 treaty with new voluntary pledges. The mix would create a deal
that would update the treaty, and thus, negotiators say, not
require a new vote of ratification.

Countries would be legally required to enact domestic climate
change policies — but would voluntarily pledge to specific levels
of emissions cuts and to channel money to poor countries to help
them adapt to climate change. Countries might then be legally
obligated to report their progress toward meeting those pledges at
meetings held to identify those nations that did not meet their
cuts.

“There’s some legal and political magic to this,” said Jake
Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an
advocacy group. “They’re trying to move this as far as possible
without having to reach the 67-vote threshold” in the Senate.

President Obama seems to be
following a script laid out in May, 2014 by former
Undersecretary for Global Affairs Timothy Wirth, who was the
Clinton Administration’s lead negotiator for the Kyoto Protocol,
and former South Dakota Senator Thomas Daschle who astutely
asserted that “the international community should stop chasing the
chimera of a binding treaty to limit CO2 emissions.”
They further noted that more than two decades of U.N. climate
negotiations have failed because “nations could not agree on who is
to blame, on how to allocate emissions, or on projections for the
future.”

Wirth and Daschle are advocating that the climate negotiators
adopt a system of “pledge and review” at the 2015 Paris conference
of the parties to the UNFCCC. In such a scheme nations would make
specific pledges to cut their carbon emissions, to adopt clean
energy technologies, and to wring more GDP out of each ton of
carbon emitted. The parties would review their progress toward
reducing greenhouse gas emissions every three years and make
further pledges as necessary to achieve the goal of keeping the
increase in average global temperature under 2°C. Since there would
be no legally binding targets, there would be no treaty that would
require politically difficult ratification. If insufficient
progress is being made by 2020 they argue that countries should
consider adopting globally coordinated price on carbon.

Wirth and Daschle have joined the emerging consensus that
schemes to prevent climate change by rationing carbon – e.g.,
imposing a cap-and-trade scheme or taxation – are doomed to
failure. Why failure? Because of the “iron law of climate policy”
argues University of Colorado political scientist Roger Pielke,
Jr.  Pielke’s iron law declares that “when policies focused on
economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reductions,
it is economic growth that will win out every time.” People and
their governments are very reluctant to give up the immediate
benefits of economic growth – more goods and services, jobs, better
education and improved health – that access to modern fuels make
possible in order to avert the distant harms of climate change.

In any case, President Obama evidently believes that addressing
the climate “crisis” is far more important than observing
constitiutional niceties like senatorial “advice
and consent” to treaties.

Israel and Hamas have
reportedly accepted a long-term truce mediated by the Egpytian
government that is mostly the same as a deal offered in the first
week of fighting that Israel accepted but Hamas declined.
Nevertheless, this time Hamas declared the truce a “victory.” The
deal will extend the distance from the coast Palestinian fishermen
can operate it and will ease restrictions on trade and travel at
Gaza’s Israel-controlled border checkpoints. Hamas also wanted an
airport and seaport in Gaza while Israel wanted Hamas to
demilitarize. These and other issues will be revisited if the truce
can last through September.

The truce is no victory for Hamas or the Israeli government, but
if it holds it will be a victory for Israelis and Palestinians
because it will bring a respite from rocket launches and
retaliatory military strikes. It’s also a victory for Egypt, which
mediated negotiations between two sides that as a matter of policy
don’t talk to each other.

While Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. “strongly
supported” the truce he also said he understood it was an
“opportunity, not a certainty,” which is certainly true. In the
beginning of the fighting, Kerry was heavily involved in trying to
get Israel and Hamas to agree to a truce but toward the end even
the Israeli left had enough of him. President Obama defended Kerry,
calling criticism of his attempts to negotiate a truce
unfair. “He has been persistent. He has worked very hard,” the
president said. Reserving judgment on Kerry’s skills as a
negotiator, his attempt to negotiate a truce was doomed from the
start. The U.S. plays too active a role, yet is not vested enough
in the situation in Israel, to have acted as an effective
negotiator.

Egypt, with which the Gaza strip also shares a tightly
controlled border, which sends aid to Gaza, and which has a 35 year
old peace deal with Israel, was far better positioned to negotiate
a truce than the U.S. America’s participation in negotiations may
have also made them harder to succeed by drawing so much public and
press attention to the process. In those conditions, Israeli and
Hamas negotiators might have been more interested in not appearing
weak in the court of public opinion.

Even Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood president (Hamas is also a part
of the broader Muslim Brotherhood movement) Mohammed Morsi
understood the role Egypt could play in getting Hamas to agree
in a truce, in one of the previous military campaigns over Gaza in
2011. Egypt’s ability and willingness to participate constructively
in matters of regional security illustrates some of the benefits of
U.S. non-interventionism. Countries like Egypt will only step up to
keep their regions stable if they are weaned off the idea the U.S.
is responsible for stability everywhere.

In that vein, Egypt, along with the United Arab Emirates, also
recently
conducted air strikes against radical Islamist militants making
gains in Libya. That country has been sliding into instability
since the West’s hit-and-run intervention in 2011 that helped an
assortment of rebels overthrow the government of Col. Qaddafi,
leaving that government’s massive weapons stockpiles for the taking
of all kinds of miltiants,
from Nigeria to Syria. Despite the Obama administration’s
contribution to this chaos, the U.S. government appeared to lament
Egypt’s “intervention” in Libya as an “escalation” of the turmoil,

according to USA Today. Yet Egypt is far more staked
in a stable Libya than the U.S. is, and their willingness to step
up there too is more evidence that U.S.
non-intervention can spur regional powers to take more
responsibilities and not, as interventionists argue, create more
chaos. In fact, that’s what interventions tend to do.

Back in July, the U.S. District Court for the District of
Columbia
struck down Washington, D.C.’s ban on carrying handguns in
public. Pointing to the Supreme Court’s recent Second Amendment
jurisprudence, the district court observed, “there is no longer any
basis on which this Court can conclude that the District of
Columbia’s total ban on the public carrying of ready-to-use
handguns outside the home is constitutional under any level of
scrutiny. Therefore,” the district court held in
Palmer v. D.C., “the District of Columbia’s complete
ban on the carrying of handguns in public is unconstitutional.”

On Monday the D.C. government filed a
new motion with that same court, asking for a reconsideration
of the July ruling “because of a number of errors of law.”
According to D.C., the district court erred both by showing too
little deference to local gun control laws and by holding that the
right to carry arms in public falls within the scope of the Second
Amendment in the first place. “The Court unnecessarily determined
that the right to carry a handgun in public is at the core of the
Second Amendment, and failed to consider both the historical
pedigree of prohibitions on public carrying and the District’s
important justifications for its prohibition,” the city’s motion
for reconsideration asserts.

It’s a weak ploy. Like it or not, Judge Frederick Scullin’s
opinion in Palmer v. D.C. is a careful piece of work.
There’s nothing in it that rises to the level of “errors of law.”
The District of Columbia should face legal reality and stop trying
to dodge the Second Amendment.

For more on D.C.’s gun control regime, see Reason TV’s “Girls,
Guns, and the Problem with D.C. Firearm Laws.”

The ice bucket
challenge has raised a huge amount of awareness for Amyotrophic
Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) or “Lou Gehrig’s Disease,” which affects
about 30,000 Americans.

Writing in The Hill, Andrew Gargano talks about an existing,
effective way to ameliorate the disease’s devastating symptoms:
Medical marijuana.

A number of studies have
shown that cannabis functions in many ways that are beneficial to
those with ALS, from serving as an analgesic to acting as a
soothing muscle relaxant. Cannabis also functions as
a saliva reducer, and so it has the ability to reduce symptoms of
uncontrollable drooling that is common among those with ALS.
Additionally, cannabis has been found successful
in use as an antidepressant, results which have also
been confirmed by
an anonymous, self-reported survey of ALS patients conducted by the
the MDA/ALS Center at the University of Washington.

Most importantly, however, is that a 2010 study found that
cannabis offered anti-oxidative, anti-inflammatory, and
neuroprotective effects when tested on laboratory mice. The
researchers found that cannabis slowed the progression of the
disease and prolonged cell survival, ultimately concluding that “it
is reasonable to think that cannabis might significantly slow the
progression of ALS, potentially extending life expectancy and
substantially reducing the overall burden of the disease.”

While this information may seem incredibly relieving to anyone
who suffers from ALS, only 34 percent of
Americans live in the 23 states, and the District of Columbia, that
currently recognize the important medical uses of cannabis.

Read the whole thing.

Hat Tip: Students for Liberty Twitter
feed.