Category: reason

We have edited DHS v. Regents of the University of California down to 22 pages. It will (likely) be used in the 2020 Barnett/Blackman supplement.

You can download it at this link: https://bit.ly/RegentsEdited.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3hLwaME
via IFTTT

The coronavirus pandemic has been devastating for the nation’s restaurants, as health concerns and forced closures dry up most of their business. The phased reopenings that most cities and states are now implementing are proving too little, too late for many eateries to hope of being profitable again.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has now announced the details of an executive order that would allow the city’s restaurants—which have been forced to subsist on takeout and delivery service since March—to open outdoor dining by Monday.

The Mayor’s Open Restaurants plan would let restaurants set up tables and chairs in curb lanes and sidewalks, reports the New York Post, as well as patios and backyard spaces if they have them. Come July, they’ll be able to start serving alfresco meals on streets that have been temporarily closed to traffic.

Indoor dining rooms would remain closed during this second phase of the city’s reopening.

“At a very difficult time for the bar & restaurant industry, this program will help them stay afloat,” tweeted City Councilmember Keith Powers. “It also gives us a vision for a city where we better use outdoor space and streets.

Several other cities and states have been letting restaurants spill out onto sidewalks, parking spaces, and even streets as part of a partial easing of their lockdown orders. Other jurisdictions are going farther by allowing indoor dining rooms to open, albeit with the requirement that they operate at reduced capacity and follow social distancing protocols.

The hope is that this will let businesses start making money again while mitigating the risks that come with packed dining rooms. More likely, many restaurants will be left operating in the red.

Restaurants that have had to subsist on takeout and delivery are like “a person being on 25 percent lung capacity,” says industry analyst Aaron Allen. “You can sustain that for a period of time but it’s not healthy to do it over an extended period. With a few more chairs on the patio, you just went from 25 percent capacity to 28 percent. You need to be at a minimum of 90 percent lung capacity.”

A May survey of restaurant owners conducted by the New York City Hospitality Alliance found that two-thirds of them said they would need to reach 70 percent occupancy in order to survive.

The Open Restaurant guidelines released today specify that business can place tables on the sidewalk only directly in front of their storefront, and that they must maintain eight feet of distance between their seating and the curb.

“I’m only excited for Phase Two because it gets us closer to Phase Three when we can have a 50 percent capacity indoor crowd,” one restaurant owner told the Post.

Even indoor dining isn’t necessarily a full cure, says Nick Zukin, who owns the Mexican restaurant Mi Mero Mole in downtown Portland, Oregon.

“Most floor plans pre-Covid were designed for efficiency,” he tells Reason via email. In other words, restaurants did their best to fit as many diners into their space as possible. In normal times, Zukin says, he was able to have 60 seats for patrons while still complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act requirement that walkways be at least 30 inches wide. After redesigning his floor plan to abide by the state’s social distancing guidelines—which require six feet between customers at all times—Zukin says he’s now only able to fit 20 seats in his restaurant. He’s also had to close down his bar seating.

The Portland Bureau of Transportation has created Healthy Business permits that allow restaurants to apply for permission to set up seating on sidewalks and streets. Outdoor tables would still have to be six feet apart.

That’s feasible for Zukin—his restaurant has a nice, wide 14-foot sidewalk in front of it, by virtue of being next to a light rail line. But that’s hardly typical. “Most sidewalks do not allow this. If the city strictly enforces the new outdoor seating guidelines, I would guess at least 95 [percent] of all sidewalk seating is eliminated,” he says.

Countrywide, restaurant reservations are down about 60 percent from where they were last year, according to data from the reservation website OpenTable. Even in Florida and Arizona, which have gone further in easing their lockdown orders, restaurants are down by about half.

Allen says that a lot of restaurants will be able to survive by cutting costs, slimming down menus, and experimenting with new business models and delivery options. He still predicts that 20 percent of restaurants will closer permanently without a massive government bailout.

Today, Sen. Roger Wicker (R–Miss.) and Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D–Ore.) proposed a $120 billion bailout fund for restaurants.

An analysis by Allen’s firm found that two-thirds of publicly traded restaurant chains have debt burdens high enough to put them at risk of bankruptcy.

Zukin puts his restaurant’s odds of survival at 50–50, given that he’s operating in a downtown where most nearby businesses and offices are still closed. “The suburbs with lots of parking and outdoor seating or a drive-thru window is definitely the place to be now,” he says.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3enh0LO
via IFTTT

While growing up around Philadelphia in the 1970s, I had a number of interactions with police—none of which were particularly harrowing. On the night before Memorial Day, for instance, a friend and I were drinking beer (yes, we were underage) in a cemetery by the Delaware River when we saw lights flashing and were approached by officers.

Apparently, the police had gotten a tip that someone might be stealing the brass placards from the gravestones and we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. We didn’t have any ID, so my friend handed a stuffed animal with his name on it to the officer. The policeman laughed, realized that we weren’t up to any serious mischief, made sure we were OK to drive home, and sent us on our way.

Quite frankly, I couldn’t imagine that scenario playing out in the same benign way today. I thought of that interaction as I’ve watched the angry, nationwide protests unfold over the disturbing death of George Floyd, where a Minneapolis officer placed his knee on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Many of my conservative friends, especially those who grew up in the world similar to the one I described above, have been caught off-guard by the depth of anger.

Even if some left-wing activists used the crisis to promote riots and mayhem, such mass protests do not happen in a bubble. Tens of thousands of people don’t take to the streets because of outside agitators, but because they are angry about things they’ve often experienced themselves. And many Americans—especially in minority communities—have experienced the brunt of an overall policing approach that has become overly militaristic.

Police strategies have changed dramatically in the past few decades—and not because of soaring crime. Despite recent spikes, crime rates now are much lower than at any time since the 1960s, and police can absolutely take some credit for that. I’m not naïve here. Police abuse has been a problem as long as there have been police. I’ve read about the segregated South and the way police routinely terrorized African-Americans. But something significant has happened in the years following my cemetery experience.

I point to the nation’s War on Drugs as a prime culprit. Recent commentary has correctly focused on various reasons for our current policing mess. Just as teachers’ unions make it impossible to fire bad teachers, police unions make it impossible to fire overly aggressive and even corrupt officers. Then “limited immunity” protects cops from being sued even when they violate people’s constitutional rights.

The federal 1033 program provides decommissioned military-style hardware to police departments. So, instead of sending a beat cop to deal with a routine arrest or disturbance, police nowadays like to bring out the toys—i.e., those tank-like vehicles, SWAT teams and flash-bang grenades that are more appropriate for invaders than peace officers.

But few people have talked about the war on drugs, which started in the 1980s, and conditioned police departments to behave in this more militarized way. Police first took this approach during alcohol Prohibition, as others have noted, and then stepped up the efforts after America’s leaders looked for ways to combat a spreading drug epidemic. This issue isn’t only about race, of course, given how aggressive police behave even in suburban Southern California. But these ham-fisted policies fall disproportionately on minority communities.

One of the earliest drug-war policies is “civil asset forfeiture,” which lets law enforcement quickly snatch the proceeds of drug kingpins. Police don’t need to prove that you did anything wrong before they confiscate your car or other property. The police agency merely needs to assert that the property was used in the commission of a drug crime.

“Today, the old speed traps have all too often been replaced by forfeiture traps, where local police stop cars and seize cash and property to pay for local law enforcement efforts,” wrote two federal officials who helped create the program, in a 2014 Washington Post column. “This is a complete corruption of the process, and it unsurprisingly has led to widespread abuses.” It’s led to widespread anger, too, as police mainly seize poor people’s cars rather than cartels’ assets.

It wasn’t hard to predict what would happen when police take on a siege mentality and are provided with military hardware and exempted from constitutional limitations. In a 1996 editorial, William F. Buckley’s conservative National Review wrote that “the war on drugs has failed” and is “encouraging civil, judicial and penal procedures associated with police states.”

Twenty-four years later we’re seeing the fruits of those policies, even if most observers don’t see the connection. By all means, let’s review police-disciplinary procedures, union protections, racial bias, and other causes of police abuse—but let’s not forget the way the drug war has often turned minor interactions like the one I had into violent confrontations.

This column was first published in the Orange County Register.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Ni6JUV
via IFTTT

Babyteeth is a cancer-kid movie that rises high above its weepy tradition. A 16-year-old girl named Milla (Eliza Scanlen, so good in last year’s Little Women) is worn down by the chemotherapy required to battle her disease. She thinks there ought to be more to her rapidly contracting life than what she has with her doting but distracted parents. (Her psychiatrist father, played by Ben Mendelsohn, is an occasional philanderer who keeps his wife—Essie Davis, radiating woozy cheer—in a happy but hazy state on a steady diet of antidepressants.) When Milla encounters a scuzzy street punk named Moses (Toby Wallace), she sees something good in him that no one else does—least of all her parents, who are immediately put off by his many tattoos and self-administered mullet. (Also by what they see as his inappropriate age—Moses is 23.)

The movie is a first feature by Australian TV veteran Shannon Murphy. She shot it in the leafy environs of Sydney and has given it a sweet, breezy charm. She also devises some wonderful shots—positioning Milla in a narrow slice of sunlight for a melancholy reverie and having her try to apply some newly acquired lipstick while licking a popsicle. The script, by Rita Kalnejais, is light on cliché and filled with character detail. Henry isn’t a predatory womanizer, he’s just weak; and Anna isn’t just a blissed-out pillhead—she gave up a career as a concert pianist and now sends Milla to her onetime accompanist and lover Gidon (Eugene Gilfedder) for violin lessons. There’s also a pregnant young woman named Toby (Emily Barclay), who brings winning high spirits to the story, if not a lot more.

Scanlen and Wallace, with their offbeat but undeniable romantic chemistry, give the movie enormous heart. We follow them, rooting all the way, as they spend a long night together passing through places that Milla will never visit again: a pub hung with sparkling fairy lights, a dance club where Milla, whose head has been shaved in the service of chemo, gazes in fascination at a slinky black woman in a silver body suit who has shaved her own head in the service of style (a magical moment).

Even at its most moving, the picture is never gooey, thanks largely to its sharp dialogue. When Milla has what could be her first taste of alcohol in a bar and then throws up outside, Moses is alarmed. “Are you allowed to drink on your medicine?” he asks. “It’s never come up,” she says.

You Should Have Left”

You Should Have Left is a haunted-house exercise set amid the picturesque hills and crags of rural Wales. It is here that Theo Conroy (Kevin Bacon), a wealthy L.A. banker with a deeply buried dark secret, has come with his actress wife, Susanna (Amanda Seyfried), and their six-year-old daughter, Ella (Avery Tiiu Essex), for a vacation before Susanna starts shooting a new movie in London. The family has rented a house off the Internet, a fiercely moderne structure with endless corridors and something unpleasant in the basement. Theo, a nervous wreck for reasons not immediately apparent, fires up his meditation app and sets to work scribbling insights into a therapy journal. Sometimes when he opens this book it looks like someone else has been scribbling in it, too—things like “Leave” and “You should go now.” The house, in other words, has a mind of its own.

Theo pays a visit to the creepy local village, where he tells a weird shopkeeper that he’s the new resident in the rental home on the hill. “Anything happen yet?” the man asks. (Was that the ghost of a smirk on his face?). Back at the house, dark things go bump in the night and Theo grumps a lot at Susanna, who spends much time texting on her phone. Texting whom? he wonders.

Given the movie’s source—a twisty 2017 horror novella by German author Daniel Kehlmann—it could have been more than just a riff on The Shining. In Kehlmann’s book, the Theo character is a screenwriter, which allows Kehlmann to interweave passages of the new script he’s struggling to write with the freaky narrative he’s currently inhabiting. It’s a clever idea, and it makes something fresh out of a tired genre concept.

The movie can’t quite manage that, and it leaves you wondering why writer-director David Koepp, whose name has graced many a Hollywood hit (Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, the 2002 Spider-Man), felt the need to pad Kehlmann’s story with trite inventions while discarding some of its more imaginative elements. The result is a picture that, like its panicky protagonist, spends a lot of time racing around (those corridors really are endless) without ever ending up anyplace especially interesting.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3ejVAPE
via IFTTT

6/19/1992: New York v. U.S. is decided.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2YcWfMZ
via IFTTT

There’s something for every libertarian in Tiger King, Netflix’s new docuseries on the lives and feuds of America’s tiger keepers. The star of the show is Joe Exotic, a gay, gun-toting, polyamorous former zoo owner who is currently serving out a federal prison sentence for an abortive murder-for-hire scheme targeting his long-standing rival, Carol Baskin, another zookeeper who also happens to be the target of (unproven) homicide accusations regarding her missing ex-husband.

Lovers of both animals and freedom will feel vindicated by the fact that private entrepreneurs like Exotic are helping to keep the globe’s dwindling population of tigers alive, all while making a little profit on the side. Libertarian Party enthusiasts might be glad to see their outfit name-checked heavily in the series’ coverage of Exotic’s 2018 run for the Oklahoma L.P.’s gubernatorial nomination (though they’ll certainly be relieved he came in third). Lifestyle libertarians of all stripes, meanwhile, will be pleased at the show’s depiction of the possibilities provided by private property rights, broad social tolerance, and a stiff Second Amendment.

Tiger King is a bizarre show full of bizarre people. Their idea of a good time is going to fit very few people’s conceptions of the good life. Nevertheless, it’s irresistibly charming to contemplate these characters’ ability to carve out for themselves a rich (to them, at least) life in the world of private zookeeping. That world, in turn, couldn’t exist without a laundry list of freedoms you won’t find protected in many other places in the world. America truly is, in its way, a limited utopia of utopias—attempted homicides and Federal Election Commission violations notwithstanding.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2NegGmm
via IFTTT