Category: reason

“I’m gonna have to get dirty,” says walking human-rights violation Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), who you’ll be happy to know is still the same cheery sadist we met three years ago in Sicario. Graver has been called back to Washington from Somalia, where he was happily tormenting captured pirates, and re-assigned by his arm’s-length government handlers to start a fake drug war down in Mexico. The reason why this should need to be done isn’t crystal clear – just to own the narcotraficantes, maybe—but the assignment is coming from the U.S. secretary of defense (Matthew Modine), and he has no objection to any dirty moves Graver may want to make. Happy to hear that, Graver flies off to Bogotá to reconnect with fellow hardass Alejandro Gillick (Benicio Del Toro), who is likewise much the same as he was in the first film, although possibly scarier. “No rules this time,” Graver tells him. “I’m turning you loose.” Just the words we want to hear, writes Kurt Loder.

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Police officers in Crafton, Pennsylvania, arrested a 52-year-old black man, Robbie Sanderson, for shoplifting at a CVS in September of 2016. He called them Nazis, skinheads, and Gestapo as they cuffed him.

Because of those epithets, Sanderson was charged with “ethnic intimidation.” Insulting the officers in such terms was an anti-white hate crime, from the perspective of the authorities. Sanderson had made bias-motivated “terroristic threats,” they claimed. The alleged motivation increased the seriousness of Sanderson’s crime from a first-degree misdemeanor to a third-degree felony.

That’s according to The Appeal’s Joshua Vaughn, who reports that Pennsylvania residents were charged with hate crimes for making offensive statements to police at least three other times. In each of these cases, including Sanderson’s, the hate crime charges were eventually dropped. But the threat of a hate crime conviction can still hurt. Defendants might plead guilty to other offenses, for instance, if prosecutors agree to drop a hate crime charge.

In any case, it’s absurd to think that the crime of “ethnic intimidation” was meant to include citizens who angrily rant at cops who are arresting them. “This is not what the hate crime statute was for,” says the ACLU’s Mary Catherine Roper. “This is criminalizing pure speech and that violates the First Amendment.”

Making racially biased remarks isn’t against the law. Rather, hate crime provisions enhance the penalties for offenses such as vandalism, assault, and, yes, terroristic threats. A man who beats up his neighbor might be guilty of assault, but a man who beats up his neighbor because the neighbor is black could be guilty of ethnic intimidation. Merely shouting at the cops during the course of an arrest shouldn’t count.

The cases highlighted by The Appeal present good evidence that we ought to be skeptical of hate crime laws. Although intended to protect the underprivileged from bigotry and racism, they often permit the government to quell speech that is critical of authority. In my recent testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, I noted examples from outside the U.S. where stricter prohibitions of hate crime and hate speech empowered the government to arrest people for telling harmless jokes or sharing inappropriate lyrics.

Yet one Pennsylvania news source, Pennlive.com, is concerned that Pennsylvania is too quick to drop hate crime charges:

Police logs across the state are filled with scores of similar incidents—ones in which a bias against someone’s race, ethnicity or religion are noted in the crime report. But whether it’s a failure of police to file hate-crime charges or the chargers become the go-to bargaining chip in a plea deal, these so-called hate crimes seldom make it into state crime statistics.

As a result, Pennsylvania, a state of 12.7 million, continues to have a chronically low annual reporting rate of hate crimes to the FBI.

As an example of the kind of thing that should be prosecuted as a hate crime, Pennlive.com’s editorial board recalled a 2016 incident involving a white teenager who made cruel, racist remarks about a black kid and “shared the result of his disgusting handiwork to Snapchat.” The teenager was charged with cyber-bullying and harassment, but the authorities didn’t immediately think to add a hate crime charge.

Should hate crime enhancements apply in a case where the underlying crime was itself a matter of speech? Prosecuting more hate crimes in Pennsylvania would indeed generate more reports of such offenses. But that wouldn’t tell us whether hate crimes were actually increasing or decreasing, especially if the numbers merely reflect harsher treatment of teenagers who make mean videos and people who shout epithets at cops.

The best point against hate crime laws is the one raised by Commissioner Peter Kirsanow during the hearing I attended:

He directed his questions to all of us, and invited anyone who possessed the information to answer.

“Are you aware of any data, studies, or other evidence, that shows designating a crime a hate crime deters, prevents, or reduces that crime, and second, whether designating a crime a federal hate crime reduces, deters, or prevents incidents of that crime?” he asked.

Neither I nor any of the other panelists were aware of such information, and so the panel fell silent.

Kirsanow continued. “Then, one other question: are you aware of any databases, study, or other evidence that shows designating a crime a hate crime, whether a municipal, federal, or state crime, assists in the resolution of that crime or the apprehension of the perpetrator?” he asked.

Again, silence.

“Thank you, Madame Chair,” he said, yielding the floor.

European Union inspectors have fined fishmongers in Vieux-Port, France, thousands of euros for not listing the scientific names of the fish they have for sale on their stalls. EU rules say that both the common name and the scientific name must be shown when fish are for sale.

Writer Harlan Ellison died today at age 84. In the pre-internet age when available culture was far more limited, certain figures crossed a cultural blood-brain barrier bridging various tribes attracted to underground or “rebellious” ideas. Ellison was prominent among them, earning many fans in the libertarian space without himself being a libertarian in a conventional sense.

His influence and success in the fields of science fiction (written and filmed), TV screenwriting, fantasy, and mystery are summed up well in this essay about him on Barnes & Noble.com. What Ellison sold as a public figure in his many colorful essays, interviews, and public appearances (beyond the fascination of his many dozens of great, vivid, pulsing, high-energy and high-concept fictions that underlay why we cared about him in the first place) was righteously pugnacious rebellion.

This made Harlan for many young people of my generation (and the one before and after) with a yen for genre fiction and fandom a compelling and convincing voice selling the notion that things were deeply and fundamentally wrong that needed fixing. His bill of particulars against consensus social reality might not have been the same as a young libertarian’s, but the overarching spirit of corrosive critique and the blazing spirit of the formerly bullied who bootstrapped himself with often wild bravery to fight things he thought were wrong, from civil rights abuses to perceived mistreatment of writers, a sensitive gut-fighter refusing to be stepped on, was inspirational, especially to an adolescent or pre-adolescent fan mind.

Ellison would reject the notion, but having read most of his work when I was 11-16 and having re-read a chunk of it recently, I think in literary terms he’s best considered a superlative “Young Adult” writer, one whose endless bevy of ideas that were just, in youthful parlance, supercool combined with the moral imagination of a wounded adolescent (that’s no insult) make him a writer the smart and impassioned young will be rediscovering with awe and wonder for a long time to come.

In whole, and despite many choices public and private that the sober might find objectionable, Ellison was overall a Good Thing for the world. Harlan the fiction writer and Harlan the public character were both justly heroes to many. (Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing today has a heavier take on balancing the positive and negative aspects of Ellison’s public behavior for those who admired him as a writer or public figure but couldn’t approve overall his occasion old-school rudenesses and wrath.)

Ellison was also a great booster for his adopted home city of Los Angeles, one of its most passionate and loving advocates, and he made himself widely available as a public figure around the city he and I shared for 21 years, at readings (from book stores to hot dog stands), film showings, and just hanging around as a fellow customer at the local science fiction book store in Sherman Oaks.

While he fought many public battles of a sort an outsider might find incomprehensible against the “fan mentality” he was also very much steeped in fandom and its passions and style, historically and emotionally. His sense of the fanhood from which he arose, in addition to a core sense of decency often swaddled in superficial meanness, I suspect inspired him to be as kind and open as probity allowed (and beyond—he listed his own home phone number in one of his books and continued answering it) to his fans, even as he suffered fools ungladly and understood a fair amount of comedic ballbusting was part of what one came to Harlan for.

Among many brief encounters with him, I’ve always treasured that while sidling down the aisles toward stage to talk after a Writers’ Guild Theater showing of the 2008 documentary about him, Dreams with Sharp Teeth, he stopped to notice me reading a book waiting for the show to start.

“Whatcha readin’?” he asked. I shyly showed him the old paperback of Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the 50s in my hands. He kept engaging me, for no reason other than to give a fan a thrill, for a few more rounds, in which I recall the humorous use of the term “poindexter” aimed at me. I loved it and he knew it.

Last time I saw him was a classic Harlan moment, combining commerce, fan service, and tsuris: an appearance at the Glendale Vintage Paperback Show a few years back to sign books, in which he managed to with his own refusal to rush himself or cheat fans out of a moment even for a line of hundreds, turn what could have been two hours of signing into a long day’s journey into night of aggravating waiting, a “Harlan story” that all there will tell for years, no doubt.

The last time we wrote about Harlan at Reason, when he won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award (given by the Libertarian Futurist Society) in 2015 for his classic short story “‘Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” Ellison made a YouTube video (posted below) in which he read an excerpt from what I wrote, referring to me as an “email internet…guy.”

Regardless, that my words left Harlan Ellison’s mouth will remain a proud memory and in some sci-fi sense I hope echo back in time to the 12-year-old me who actually used his published home phone number, and was gently upbraided by Ellison, who actually came to the phone for the weird kids, for bugging him for no good reason.

“If you want to call me a libertarian, I have no objection,” Ellison said in the video below. As I wrote when he copped the Prometheus, Ellison

delighted in sticking up, in fiction and life, for those squashed by societal repression. He saw himself as a rebel conscience for his community and culture. He once said his preferred self image was a cross between Jiminy Cricket and Zorro. ….”Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman,” begins with a great quote from Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” about how those who serve the state with their consciences are “commonly treated as enemies by it.” (I’d prefer the locution, serve their community by their consciences, but Thoreau is Thoreau.) [and the story’s] inspirational message of individual senses’ of life, purpose, and fun defeating grim, crabbed forces of central control acting for an alleged “social good.”

That was good enough for this young libertarian, and for young fans of all walks of life who needed a voice of loud, unshakable, colorful, imaginative and energetic courage.

Once upon a time, travel shows were stodgy as fuck. Television tourism was populated with pleasant, proper people who strolled the Champs-Élysées or the beaches of Rio to show you how to do pleasant, proper, prepackaged things.

Until the 1990s, travel shows were mostly about watching a trusted host sniffing his way through fine wineries, meandering through Baroque Period museums, lounging around four-star hotels, and indulging in the sensual pleasures of eating familiar fare with the right fork at the right restaurant, and always with the right kind of people.

Then came Anthony Bourdain. He began every show with a parental advisory warning and was 10 times snarkier than all the other hosts put together. His punk nonchalance stuck out like a middle finger to every travel show that went before him. He savaged rival chefs by name and held in righteous contempt every culinary fad and pompous ideology that stood in the way of pure food enjoyment.

I liked him immediately.

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Somewhat to my surprise as a dedicated carnivore, I enjoyed a delicious Impossible Burger for the first time last November at Farmers and Distillers in Washington, D.C. The burgers have the texture and mouth feel of a beef patty. They even had some delightful, off-the-grill crunchy charred bits. I have since happily munched a couple of more times more on these vegetarian burgers that bleed.

Produced by Impossible Foods, a Silicon Valley start-up, the burgers are made of textured wheat protein, potato protein, coconut oil, and leghemoglobin, the key ingredient. Leghemoglobin is an iron-containing molecule that occurs naturally in every plant and animal. It is the abundance of this heme in animal muscles that gives meat much of its distinctive deliciousness. The heme in Impossible Burgers is derived from soybeans and produced by fermenting yeast genetically enhanced to make it.

It is apparently the fact that the leghemoglobin in Impossible Burgers is produced by, gasp, genetically enhanced yeast that has outraged Friends of the Earth (FOE) activists. Various hemoglobin molecules are ubiquitous in nature, occurring in most organisms, including bacteria, protozoa, fungi, plants, and animals. Impossible Foods checked with numerous food safety experts, who agreed that leghemoglobin is generally recognized as safe (GRAS). The company has voluntarily filed a GRAS notice with the Food and Drug Administration summarizing the safety science behind that conclusion.

Without any significant evidence, FOE suggests that “animal replacement ingredients produced through genetic engineering” in products like the Impossible Burger may “pose unforeseen health risks.” Impossible Foods Chief Communications Officer Rachel Konrad hits back hard: “The US wing of FOE is an anti-science fundamentalist organization that wants to eliminate genetic engineering at any cost, including the lives of people, the health of the planet, and even FOE’s own credibility. This is an organization on the wrong side of history, doomed to irrelevance for failing to acknowledge and embrace reality.”

That characterization of FOE sounds about right to me.

As I reported earlier:

Other than trying to placate vegetarians and vegans, why bother creating Impossible Burgers? Founder Patrick O. Brown says that the company is on a mission to make the global food system more sustainable. The company claims that compared to cows, the Impossible Burger uses 95 percent less land, 74 percent less water, and creates 87 percent less greenhouse gas emissions.

Assuming that Impossible Burgers and other future plant-based meat competitors catch on with consumers, they will be another happy example of how human ingenuity is continuing our withdrawal from nature. These may be good reasons for people to eat Impossible Burgers, but I will happily do it because I enjoy the taste.

Come to think of it, I may take my wife out to lunch over the weekend to see what she thinks of the Impossible Burger.

The 2016 ballot initiative that legalized marijuana in California let local governments decide whether to allow growers, manufacturers, and retailers within their jurisdictions, and the claim that such businesses are magnets for crime has figured prominently in those decisions. Last September, for instance, San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman warned the city council that the “negative consequences and secondary effects” of tolerating recreational cannabusinesses would be “enormous.” To back up that claim, Zimmerman said medical marijuana dispensaries in San Diego had generated 272 police calls related to “burglaries, robberies, thefts, assaults and shootings, just to name a few,” in less than three years.

That number seemed suspect to Diane Goldstein, a retired Redondo Beach police lieutenant who chairs the board of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership (formerly Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a.k.a. LEAP). After digging into the San Diego Police Department’s call records, Goldstein says in an email, she found that Zimmerman’s claim was “a gross distortion of crime related to the licensed medical marijuana dispensaries.” So did Voice of San Diego‘s Jesse Marx, who reports that Zimmerman’s figure includes “dozens of crank payphone calls to 911 operators made in the parking lot of complexes that house dispensaries and other businesses, dozens of false security alarms and even a couple requests to tow automobiles.”

Even when the calls involved more serious incidents, their connection to dispensaries was often tenuous. On May 1, 2017, for instance, police got a call about a woman who had fallen in a parking lot, possibly as a result of a stroke. Zimmerman blamed that incident on a dispensary called The Healing Center San Diego, Marx says, despite the fact that “the address on the report belonged to a nearby pain management center.” A February 27, 2017, call about a reckless truck driver made Zimmerman’s list because police happened to meet the caller on the same block as a dispensary. Zimmerman also counted an August 30, 2016, report about “a man digging through a dumpster behind a shopping center in San Ysidro” who had threatened to shoot someone, which she pinned on the Southwest Patient Group because it was one of the shopping center’s tenants.

Marx found that just one-fifth of the calls cited by Zimmerman “actually cite a dispensary as the location of a potential crime.” They include serious incidents such as an armed robbery of a dispensary employee, a fight that was broken up by a dispensary security guard, and a guard who “appears to have fired at a group of burglars in the middle of the night.” They also include “things like graffiti and vandalism complaints, water leaks and men being refused service because they couldn’t bring a dog inside the shop.”

Zimmerman has since retired, and her bogus number did not actually sway the San Diego City Council, which voted to allow marijuana businesses that serve the recreational market. But her fake figure lives on in debates playing out across California.

“Earlier this month,” Marx notes, “Zimmerman’s stats appeared in a memo written by Oceanside Police Chief Frank McCoy to the City Council, which decided—against the recommendations of a subcommittee—not to allow retail shops. Her remarks were also cited by anti-pot activists in Imperial Beach who helped slow down marijuana regulations there.”

Marx called Zimmerman to ask about those 272 calls that supposedly demonstrated the cannabis industry’s criminogenic culpability. She hung up on him.

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly is expected to leave the Trump administration by the end of the summer, The Wall Street Journal reported today, citing people familiar with the matter.

The Journal‘s report said it’s not clear when Kelly, who previously served as secretary of homeland security, would actually leave if he does indeed decide to go. He could step down this week, or he might wait until next month, the newspaper said.

In the event that Kelly decides to leave, President Donald Trump reportedly has been consulting with his advisers regarding a suitable replacement. The two front-runners are Nick Ayers, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, and Mick Mulvaney, the head of the Office of Management and Budget and the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

If Kelly opts to step down, Trump will be forced to hire his third chief of staff. Kelly’s predecessor, Reince Preibus, was ousted from his post last July.

According to Bloomberg, about half of the people who have held top jobs in the Trump administration no longer work in the White House.

Authorities responded Thursday afternoon to reports of a shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland.

At least four people were shot before the suspect was taken into custody by police, authorities said, according to USA Today. A Capital Gazette reporter told The Baltimore Sun, which owns the newspaper, that several people had been injured.

Police were also searching the building for more suspects. According to The Washington Post, people could be seen walking out of their offices with their hands above their heads “as police cleared buildings in the area.”

“We’re doing the best we can to minimize causalities,” Lt. Ryan Frashure of the Anne Arundel Police told ABC News.

“Absolutely devastated to learn of this tragedy in Annapolis,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan wrote on Twitter. “Please, heed all warnings and stay away from the area. Praying for those at the scene and for our community.”

According to White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters, President Donald Trump has been briefed on the situation.

The graphic was simple but gripping: a black background with a wire coat hanger floating in the middle over one all-caps phrase: THE END OF ROE. HuffPost‘s editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen tweeted out the image on Thursday morning, one of a string of left-leaning media nods to the same conclusion: Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court is the beginning of a certain end to legal abortion access in America.

No one can say for sure how Justice John Roberts would go on either overturning or weakening Roe, and any number of hiccups could snag state plans to outlaw abortion, but there’s a real chance that the Court opening created by Kennedy’s departure will mean a rough patch for reproductive freedom, abortion access, and women’s autonomy in this country—and, yes, perhaps even an overturning of Roe and the outlawing of abortion in some areas.

But in a modern world where abortion is outlawed, the coat hanger is probably an ill-fitting and anachronistic symbol. The availability of easy-to-administer abortion-inducing pills and the impossibility of stopping their flow from foreign pharmacies would create a situation unlike in previous eras when it was difficult or illegal to terminate pregnancies.

Right now, the U.S. allows women to obtain what are known as “medical abortions”—the kind induced via pharmaceuticals, not surgery—through the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, using the two-step drug combo of mifepristone and misoprostol. This kind of abortion makes up a growing share of total abortions in America (a number which has been declining more or less steadily since the early 1980s).

While the regulations regarding abortion pills vary by state, most require a physician to dispense the pill. But other than confirming pregnancy and determining gestational age, there’s little (non-bureaucratic) reason why medical abortions require a doctor or even an office visit at all. Complications can certainly arise after taking the pill, necessitating further care in some cases, but these are pretty rare. For the vast majority of pregnant people who take the pill as directed, the process may be painful but can be undertaken at home.

Good morning. pic.twitter.com/sx1krY8ZvH

— Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) June 28, 2018

If abortion were illegal in parts of the country, women these days would be much more likely to attempt abortion with black-market pills than coat hangers or other more dangerous measures. That’s not to say that these pills wouldn’t be without their dangers: Any drugs bought on the black market can pose quality-control problems. But with foreign pharmacies relatively easy to order from online, and abortion pills still legal in many states, opportunities to obtain legit abortion pills in an underground market may actually be pretty expansive.

In this way, pregnant women’s options and outcomes in a post-Roe world might not be a grim or gruesome as they were in an earlier era. And efforts to actually eradicate abortion stand less of a chance than they ever have before, when the only reliable ways to terminate pregnancies involved invasive and dangerous medical procedures undertaken in specific locales. As it stands now, anyone with an internet connection and a little cash can pretty easily obtain the pills, and no special or sterile setting is required.

But this also opens up other frightening possibilities. A crackdown on either pharmaceuticals ordered online from foreign pharmacies or pills flowing between states could seriously step up the time-tested brutality and civil-liberties squelching capability of the drug war.

Many states already have criminal laws against illegally induced abortions, and women have been prosecuted under these (and anti-fetacide laws) for illegally obtaining and taking pills to induce abortion. In another instance, a mother was imprisoned for illegally obtaining the pills for her teenage daughter—and this is with legal abortion. In a country where abortion was illegal or inaccessible in some states, we could almost certainly expect to see more state laws targeting both women who self-induce abortions and (especially) people who assist them in doing so in any capacity.

We’ve already seen a recent weakening of protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the federal provision protecting internet platforms and publishers from certain legal liability for the speech of their users, or conduct resulting from that speech. As of this spring, websites and apps can be sued in civil court and criminally prosecuted by states if anyone uses them to facilitate or promote prostitution. It’s not hard to imagine Congress carving out a similar provision for any website that somehow facilitated someone obtaining abortion drugs illegally.

The same goes for laws like the Mann Act, still in frequent use to punish people who drive other adults across state lines for “immoral purposes” (usually sex work). Under a slightly revised Mann Act or something similar, we could see whole new swaths of federal agents devoted to ferreting out and stopping people from helping women in states where abortion is illegal obtain abortions in other states.

With our current state of medicine and technology, eliminating abortion anywhere in the country could prove more difficult than the pro-choice side fears—a small consolation, but a consolation nonetheless. Meanwhile, the police-state antics, disastrous policy, and rising prison populations that come from outlawing abortion could prove every bit as devastating to American women and the general state of freedom in the country as any return to back-alley abortion doctors could be.