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Carlos Carrion, an artist who lives in New London, Connecticut, has been growing bamboo on his property for 30 years. Only recently has the city deemed it a crime. Depending on whom you ask, the city’s sudden concerns about Carrion’s bamboo patch stem from his failure to maintain it properly or from his outspokenness as a critic of eminent domain abuse and arbitrary land use regulation.

Carrion was an opponent of the misbegotten redevelopment plan that led to the 2005 Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. New London, which upheld the use of eminent domain to condemn homes that supposedly stood in the way of an economic revival that never materialized. More recently, he has turned his attention to the city’s blight ordinance, which authorizes criminal fines of up to $250 a day as well as civil fines of up to $100 a day.

Carrion defended Maggie Redfern, deputy director of the Connecticut College Arboretum in New London, who was accused of creating blight by designing an “ecological landscape” featuring native plants in her yard. A blight hearing officer sided with Redfern, declaring her yard “exactly the opposite of a ‘neglected or abandoned property.'”

Carrion has had less success defending his bamboo grove, which he says he keeps as a memorial to the Vietnam veteran who gave him the original plants. “I eat it, construct furniture…it’s a home for the birds,” he said at Redfern’s blight hearing. “The bamboo I grow is not invasive. I maintain the plants. It stays within the perimeter of my property, and yet it’s considered to be a blight?”

The city deems the bamboo a blight under Section 302.4 of the New London Property Maintenance Code, which prohibits “all grasses, annual plants and vegetation,” aside from trees, shrubs, and “cultivated flowers and gardens,” that are more than 10 inches high. Because the city says Carrion has failed to comply with the code after repeated warnings, he has been hit with $13,500 in fees and civil penalties, and the cost will climb higher if the criminal prosecution is successful.

Carrion’s lawyer, former New London Mayor Daryl Finizio, argues that the bamboo grove does not actually violate the property maintenance code, presumably because it qualifies as a cultivated garden. Carrion says he keeps the plants trimmed back so they do not invade other people’s property, a point the city seems to dispute. According to the city’s complaint, “Carrion’s entire lawn is covered with a thick growth of bamboo, the height of which extends at least 20′, extending above the power lines. The bamboo has also crept into the yard of other homes and was coming into contact with power lines themselves. The bamboo is so thick, it’s nearly impossible to traverse through.”

Impingement on neighbors’ property and entanglement with power lines are legitimate issues that could be addressed by trimming the plants. But the sheer height, breadth, and density of the bamboo seem like purely aesthetic concerns. Whether Carrion’s plants constitute a cultivated garden or a bunch of weeds is in the eye of the beholder.

Finizio suggests Carrion’s prosecution is punishment for his activism. “It seems inexplicable that suddenly Carlos Carrion and his bamboo have become public enemies No. 1 of the City of New London,” he told The Day, a local newspaper. “My client also believes that as an outspoken critic of eminent domain during those public debates in our city, and because of his outspoken involvement in other city blight cases, that he is being targeted in a retributive way by the City of New London.”

Using a blow-dryer is not particularly difficult or dangerous. Millions of Americans dry their own hair every morning without widespread reports of singed scalps or accidental electrocutions. Children use them without incident.

But picking up a hair dryer in the state of Arizona and using it to dry someone else’s hair, for money, requires more than 1,000 hours of training and an expensive state-issued license. Blow-drying hair without a license could—incredibly—land you in jail for up to six months.

America is saturated with ridiculous licensing rules that do little to protect public health or safety. They exist mostly as a way to drive-up prices and restrict employment. Cosmetology licensing laws are some of the worst offenders of common sense, and Arizona’s cosmetology licensing laws truly boggle the mind. Doing something as simple as shampooing, drying, and styling hair requires a full-fledged cosmetology license, which includes years of training in hair and skin care, makeup application, and other un-related skills.

Before applying for that license, an applicant would have to graduate from a beauty school, which can cost as much as $15,000 in tuition.

State Rep. Michelle Ugenti-Rita (R-Scottsdale) says the licensing requirement is particularly troublesome for so-called blow-dry bars—salons that offer nothing more than shampooing and styling of hair, without cutting, coloring, or other more advanced hair care.

She plans to introduce a bill to exempt workers who “dry, style, arrange, curl, hot-iron, or shampoo and condition hair” from the state’s cosmetology licensing law, as long as they do not use chemicals to permanently straighten or curl hair and do not cut hair either.

“When they told me about the scope of their business, you could clearly see that it was an impediment to them hiring, and for someone to be hired, simply to hire them for blowing out hair,” Ugenti-Rita told the East Valley Tribune this week.

That makes a lot of sense, so naturally cosmetology schools are opposed to it.

“Students go to school to get a cosmetology license,” Cathy Koluch, a member of the American Association of Cosmetology Schools and the owner of a salon in Chandler, Ariz., told the East Valley Tribune. “They are learning more than just styling hair, cutting, coloring; they’re learning the health and anatomy side of it.”

That’s exactly the problem. There’s no reason to require all those classes if a prospective salon worker wants to do nothing more than dry and style hair—something he or she would be free to do, legally, for free, at home. Charging for those skills and practicing them in a salon should not trigger onerous training and licensing requirements.

Of course a story about cosmetology licensing would not be complete without hyperbolic statements of the potential harms that could befall customers serviced by unlicensed workers.

“People come into your salon with illnesses,” Koluch says. “They could have an open wound, they could have lice. How are these people going to be trained to handle these situations?”

Anyone with an open wound on their head should probably seek professional care from someone with a different sort of license—the kind that you get after attending medical, rather than beauty, school. An unlicensed professional working in a dry bar is probably going to do the same thing that a licensed cosmetologist with 1,000 hours of training would do: tell you to go to a hospital and have your injury treated.

This sort of hyperbole is par for the course in Arizona. Unlicensed barbers are “a real risk,” Donna Aune, executive director of the Arizona State Board of Cosmetology, told a local television station in Tucson earlier this year when defending the board’s decision to investigate a student who gave free haircuts to homeless people.

Aune also shows up several times in a 2009 investigation by Tuscon.com about the “dangers” of receiving a manicure or pedicure from an unlicensed professional. And she pops up in this absurd story about a terrible eyebrow waxing accident—in a fully licensed salon, by the way—trying to pin the blame on unlicensed cosmetologists and calling for more state agents to conduct inspections.

When she’s not fear-mongering about the consequences of a bad haircut or investigating acts of goodwill, Aune is ringing up huge travel bills and dining out at the taxpayers’ expense, as the state comptroller reported in a September audit.

Cosmetology boards and lobbyists for beauty schools can justify absurd licensing laws any way they want, but they are, at last, on the defensive. Gov. Greg Ducey has indicated support for licensing reform in Arizona and Ugenti-Rita’s bill would make it easier for entrepreneurs to work in the state by undoing a pointless, punitive licensing measure.

“Requiring blow dry bar stylists to get cosmetology licenses does not protect the public health and safety—after all, people shampoo, blow dry, and style hair in their homes all the time, without any special training,” say Christina Sandefur and Jenna Bentley, of the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, a free market think tank that supports the bill.

“Arizona’s stifling regulations leave blow dry stylists without work,” they wrote in an op-ed this week. “and customers with fewer options at higher prices.”

If you need more proof that baby boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1964, aren’t quite up to living in the 21st century, look no further than this BBC interview with Tom Hanks, Steven Speilberg, and Meryl Streep, about the new movie The Post, which details the Washington Post brave and precedent-setting commitment to publishing the Pentagon’s secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, a.k.a. “The Pentagon Papers.” Despite massive political and legal pressure not to do so, Ben Bradlee and Kay Graham (played by Hanks and Streep), pushed ahead with printing secret documents stolen by Daniel Ellsberg, winning a massive victory for press freedom and almost certainly shortening the Vietnam War.

Of course that was the right thing to do, Hanks tells Sam Asi. But when Asi brings up Edward Snowden, who in 2013 revealed massive, warrantless, secret surveillance of all sorts of electronic communications among American citizens, Hanks gets tongue-tied. Skip to about the five-minute mark:

After brushing aside the Snowden revelations—”I wasn’t that surprised” that the government was spying, says Hanks—the Oscar winner plays social-media whataboutism. “Facebook makes money off of us based on what we’re interested in,” he says. “Do you think it’s wrong that Google has an algorithm that can essentially you know, say, hey, Sam only likes black suits, so we’re going to start sending you advertisements for black clothing.” When asked whether Snowden is “a traitor or not,” Hanks waves off the question, joking that it’s about his “pay grade.”

Asi makes the point that Hanks, along with Spielberg and the movie’s other star Meryl Streep, were public supporters of Barack Obama, whose secret programs Snowden opposed, and Hillary Clinton, who called Snowden a traitor. He then asks Speilberg why Hollywood was silent during Obama’s unprecedented reliance on the World War I-era Espionage Act. Obama pursued nine prosecutions, compared to just three since the law’s start under Woodrow Wilson. Snowden’s revelations were “different for me,” says Spielberg, because Snowden simply had information about agencies with the capabilities of spying on individuals and infringing on our privacy, while “Daniel Ellsberg was trying to stop the Vietnam War.” Ellsberg was a “hero,” says Spielberg, who refuses to call Snowden by the same term. “I don’t have the same information.” Streep, speaking at the end of the clip, at least grants that it’s good and “valid” that the programs and activities Snowden unmasked are now in public view.

Asi ends his segment by asking whether The Post is actually intended as a defense of a free press or “a warning” to President Trump that, you know, the media took down Richard Nixon, so watch out.

That’s a provocative question precisely because Barack Obama was, in the words of one of the journalists prosecuted by him, “the greatest enemy of press freedom” to hold the Oval Office. Of course Hanks, Spielberg, and Streep are simply representative Hollywood liberals ready to give Democrats a pass regardless of their actual policies. But more important, they are also aging baby boomers who are quick to fetishize outlaw heroes of their youth while throwing shade on younger mavericks. To the extent that they are self-absorbed and morally certain about events from their own past, baby boomers are simply playing to type. Indeed, while promoting Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg reduced World War II to a footnote to the birth of his own generation, calling it the “key, the turning point of the whole century…It was as simple as this: The century either was going to produce the baby boomers or it was not going to produce the baby boomers.”

But such generational solipsism also renders them un-serious, if not next to useless, in a 21st-century in which Millennials now outnumber boomers. Although the circumstances in which Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers will never be repeated exactly, there was nothing unique about what he did, and what’s called for by all men and women of good will. What exactly has changed about the ways in which government, especially the surveillance state, functions since Lyndon Johnson opened up the “credibility gap” and today? In the wake of Vietnam, Watergate, the Church Committee, Iran-Contra, the revelations of William Binney, Thomas Drake, Chelsea Manning, Snowden, and others, is there any reason to believe that the federal government is not duplicitous? Not at all, and it’s a shame to see three articulate, thoughtful people stumble on the altar of partisan loyalty when it comes to such a question. If they don’t have enough information on which to evaluate Snowden, that’s on them (read and watch his interview with Reason here).

To his credit, Daniel Ellsberg calls Snowden “a hero of mine.” Speaking to Reason in our December 2017 issue, he said he hopes his legacy is something like this: “I would like others to believe that they have the power—and the obligation, really—as patriots, as human beings, to reveal what they themselves know are unjustified dangers to human existence. And not simply, for reasons of career and promises to superiors, to conceal dangers of that nature. In other words, to be truth tellers.”

As a boomer myself (born near the end, in 1963), I understand that resisting generational and moral nostalgia is no easy thing. The past is past and it’s easier and quieter not to worry so much about the current moment, I suppose. But for those of us who not only want to see the future but participate in it, keeping up is the first business of the day and partisanship should be left off the to-do list altogether. If Ellsberg is a hero (and he is), so too is Snowden and all the others who put their lives on hold in order to rein in powers that dare not show their hands.

If Marie Antoinette’s excesses launched the French revolution, Harvey Weinstein’s piggishness launched the #MeToo movement. And like the second, #MeToo might have begun to correct real problems and inequalities, but is now in danger of collapsing into injustice by breeding excesses of its own.

Recently, it took down The Detroit Free Press’ liberal editorial page editor, Stephen Henderson, a Pulitzer Prize winner, for reasons that can charitably be described as flimsy, points out Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia. But a movement that throws decent men under the bus will discredit itself because it’ll create more victims than it’ll save. That’s a pity because a responsible reckoning to hold genuine monsters accountable is something that women do indeed need.

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Free speech is increasingly triggering.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

That dull roar you heard a few days ago? It came from the countless gasps of horror when The Washington Post reported that the Centers for Disease Control had discouraged the use of certain words.

According to The Post, policy analysts were told not to use seven particular terms: fetus, transgender, vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, evidence-based, and science-based. This led to stern editorials about “thought control, Trump-style,” warnings that the directive was an “attack on science,” and so on. Having the government tell people which words they may and may not use is doubleplusungood, was the widespread consensus.

And of course it is. But to borrow from Kipling, “you need not stop work to inform us; we knew it ten seasons before.” Those exercised over the news about the CDC are coming rather late to the party.

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