Category: reason

John Stossel is not surprised that mobs shriek at Trump administration officials in restaurants and that Maxine Waters wants more of that. “I’ve watched this happen at American colleges,” Stossel writes.

One example: Heather Mac Donald is a Manhattan Institute scholar who wrote the book The War on Cops. At UCLA, when she was allowed to give her “Blue Lives Matter” speech, many in the audience stormed the stage. These protestors drowned out any possible questions.

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Ten years ago this week, the Supreme Court for the first time explicitly recognized that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to armed self-defense. Since then the Court has revisited the subject only twice, while it has heard about 45 cases involving the Fourth Amendment and about 60 involving the First.

That stark disparity reflects a failure noted by critics on and off the Court. After waiting more than two centuries to acknowledge that the Second Amendment imposes limits on legislation, the Court has passed up dozens of opportunities to clarify the extent of those limits, leaving the task to lower courts that are often hostile to gun rights.

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The security video from the Manatee County, Florida, school bus shows Anabelle Hunting, 5, crying as another student repeatedly slaps her and pulls her hair and other students throw a plush toy belonging to Hunting around the bus. But bus aide D’Mari Martin does nothing to stop the bullying of Hunting, who reportedly suffers from developmental delays and a communications disorder. Instead, she’s more intent on finding her missing phone. The school system did not notify Hunting’s mother of the attack for over a week and charged her $60 for a copy of the video.

The legal team for Ross Ulbricht, currently in jail for life without parole for crimes associated with the launching and operating of the darkweb site Silk Road, sees hope in a Supreme Court decision last week.

The Court decided in the landmark case Carpenter v. United States that law enforcement can no longer assume information voluntarily given to third parties—in that specific case, cell phone records—has no Fourth Amendment protection at all, as per earlier doctrine from the U.S. v. Miller (1976) and Smith v. Maryland (1979) cases.

As Damon Root reported at Reason, Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision had him declaring the Supreme Court has officially “decline[d] to extend Smith and Miller to cover these novel circumstances. Given the unique nature of cell phone location records, the fact that the information is held by a third party does not by itself overcome the user’s claim to Fourth Amendment protection…Whether the Government employs its own surveillance technology…or leverages the technology of a wireless carrier, we hold that an individual maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements as captured through [cell site location information].”

This has huge implications for Ulbricht’s still-pending petition to the Supreme Court to rehear his case, his lawyers assert in a supplementary brief they filed after the Carpenter decision came down.

As the brief from Ulbricht lawyer Kannon Shanmugam says, with Carpenter “the Court expressly rejected the government’s ‘primary contention that the third-party doctrine adopted by the Court in the context of telephone calls in Smith v. Maryland…should be applied to new categories of information made available by ‘seismic shifts in digital technology.” (Shanmugam, it should be noted, has a healthy record of successful Supreme Court appeals.)

That same thinking should affect how the Court judges the Fourth Amendment implications of the manner in which the government got information key to their conviction of Ulbricht, Shanmugam writes. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld Ulbricht’s conviction, “deemed itself ‘bound’ to apply Smith to modern technology absent this [Supreme] Court’s intervention.”

While Ulbricht’s case involved computer records and not cell phone records specifically, Shanmugam believes that “in light of this Court’s refusal to apply Smith in Carpenter, reconsideration of the Second Circuit’s reasoning is plainly warranted. Accordingly, the Court should grant [Ulbricht’s] petition for certiorari.”

As Shanmugam explained in a still-pending cert petition to the Supreme Court, Ulbricht’s case is “an appropriate companion case to Carpenter because the Internet traffic information at issue here is broader in important ways than the cell site location information at issue in Carpenter. In addition to allowing the government to determine when petitioner was accessing the Internet from the privacy of his own home, the information gathered by the pen/traps here permitted the government to determine the websites to which petitioner connected, the length of the connections, and the port of transmission of the data. As this Court has recognized, the collection of such Internet information could reveal ‘an individual’s private interests or concerns.'”

Yesterday the Food and Drug Administration approved Epidiolex, an oral cannabidiol solution made by the British company GW Pharmaceuticals, as a treatment for two forms of severe, drug-resistant epilepsy. Although a synthetic version of THC, marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient, has been legally available as a treatment for nausea and appetite loss since 1985, this is the first time the federal government has given its blessing to a medication derived directly from cannabis.

The plant itself is still listed in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, meaning it has a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. In light of the FDA’s decision, that designation is clearly no longer appropriate for cannabidiol (CBD), which is not psychoactive but has shown much promise as a medicine.

Patients who received CBD in three randomized, double-blind clinical trials saw much bigger improvements than patients who received placebos. In a study of 225 patients with Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome, for example, the median number of “drop seizures” (which can cause falls) during a 28-day period fell from 85.5 to 44.9 in the high-dose group (a decrease of 49 percent), from 86.9 to 50 in the low-dose group (43 percent), and from 80.3 to 72.7 in the placebo group (21 percent). In a study of 120 patients with Dravet Syndrome, the median number of convulsive seizures over 28 days fell from 12.4 to 5.9 in the CBD group (a drop of 52 percent) and from 14.9 to 14.1 in the placebo group (5 percent).

“The difficult-to-control seizures that patients with Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome experience have a profound impact on these patients’ quality of life,” said Billy Dunn, director of the Division of Neurology Products in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “In addition to another important treatment option for Lennox-Gastaut patients, this first-ever approval of a drug specifically for Dravet patients will provide a significant and needed improvement in the therapeutic approach to caring for people with this condition.”

Twenty-five of the 29 states that allow medical use of marijuana specifically recognize epilepsy as a qualifying condition. Another 17 states officially allow the treatment of epilepsy with low-THC, high-CBD cannabis oil, although they do not necessarily provide a legal way to obtain it.

Did you ever notice that elite athletes seem to be getting…older? You’re not imagining things. In 2016, Peyton Manning won a Super Bowl for the Indianapolis Colts at the ripe old age of 39. A year later, Tom Brady did the same thing at the same age for the New England Patriots (boo). This year, tennis great Roger Federer became the oldest man to be ranked number one (he’s 36). His female counterpart, Serena Williams, has won more Grand Slam tennis titles than anyone and was ranked number one in 2017 when she was 35. She also faced off against her 36-year-old sister Venus in that year’s Australian Open final.

The new book Play On: The New Science of Elite Performance at Any Age, explores and analyzes why today’s professional athletes aren’t just sticking around longer but are often getting better as they get older. And it’s not simply pros, says Jeff Bercovici, the San Francisco bureau chief of Inc. and a former staffer at Forbes. The rest of us are upping our games as we move into middle age and beyond, he writes, increasing our “healthspan,” or years at or near the top of our physical condition even as we live longer. Rich in detail and humor (Bercovici memorably documents his ordeals at some of the nation’s top conditioning clinics), Play On is ultimately a book about self-improvement and taking control not just of your life but your body and mind, too.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Bercovici talks to me about everything from blood-doping, by which athletes seek to increase their endurance, to Silicon Valley’s current penchant for “blood boys” (don’t ask).

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Audio production by Ian Keyser.

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Digital free speech and access activists are raising alarms that new European Union regulations under consideration will lead to massive internet censorship and a costly enforcement system that could crush innovation and competition.

It’s all about online copyright enforcement and the harsh measures that content creators like media outlets and entertainment companies want the European Union to adopt in order to try to stop the uncontrolled spread of their works. So far it seems that the European Union is agreeing with the big dogs. Last week the European Parliament’s Legislative Affairs Committee voted to advance a “Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market.”

That inscrutably innocuous name for legislation hides a far-reaching proposal that has two components that are causing heartburn for organizations like Creative Commons (devoted to helping people more freely share content online) and the digital activists of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Article 11 will grant media outlets he authority to require anybody potentially excerpting even just snippets of their content to pay them a fee or get a license first, greatly expanding how much content is covered under copyright law. We’re talking about examples like the previews of chunks of text and photos that show up when you share a link on a social media outlet like Twitter or Facebook.

Spain and Germany have previously attempted these kind of regulations at the behest of entrenched media outlets trying to protect their turf as the internet disrupts their revenue models. In Spain, the attempt to use copyright as some sort of link tax backfired terribly, prompting Google to respond by dumping Spanish media outlets from news searches. It did not open up new revenues of income for Spanish media outlets but actually reduced access. Whatever the financial solution to media disruption might be, it’s certainly not trying to nickle-and-dime people for links.

A pack of more than 160 scholars sent a letter to the E.U. warning against the passage of Article 11, saying the impact would be to “likely impede the free flow of information that is of vital importance to democracy.” The transaction costs of sharing information would be greatly increased and this would end up blowing back on “journalists, photographers, citizen journalists and many other non-institutional creators and producers of news, especially the growing number of freelancers.”

But the problems of Article 11 are small potatoes compared to the potential impacts of Article 13. In the United States, we have the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which exempts online platforms from liability for copyright infringement for content posted by third-parties as long as they take this content down when copyright holders request it.

The DMCA has already resulted in a lengthy history of horrible censorship in practice, as the takedown request system gets abused to shutter fair use of content and parodies and to censor criticism.

Article 13 is the DMCA on steroids. Rather than waiting for takedown demands, Article 13 would require platforms that allow users to post and upload content to automate a system of filtering out material that has been submitted to a database as copyrighted. How would an automated system be able to determine whether copyrighted material is being published legally? The answer is that it probably won’t do a good job, and that’s a huge cause for concern. Timothy Vollmer at Creative Commons warns that this will have significant consequences for online speech:

Article 13 will limit freedom of expression, as the required upload filters won’t be able to tell the difference between copyright infringement and permitted uses of copyrighted works under limitations and exceptions. It puts into jeopardy the sharing of video remixes, memes, parody, and code, even works that include openly licensed content.

While some might look forward to a word without memes, there are some serious, serious problems here in that the punishment will fall now on platforms because the system is stacked against them. Cory Doctorow at EFF warns how it could blow back against sites like Wikipedia:

Article 13 punishes any site that fails to block copyright infringement, but it won’t punish people who abuse the system. There are no penalties for falsely claiming copyright over someone else’s work, which means that someone could upload all of Wikipedia to a filter system (for instance, one of the many sites that incorporate Wikpedia’s content into their own databases) and then claim ownership over it on Twitter, Facebook and WordPress, and everyone else would be prevented from quoting Wikipedia on any of those services until they sorted out the false claims. It will be a lot easier to make these false claims that it will be to figure out which of the hundreds of millions of copyrighted claims are real and which ones are pranks or hoaxes or censorship attempts.

Article 13 also leaves you out in the cold when your own work is censored thanks to a malfunctioning copyright bot. Your only option when you get censored is to raise an objection with the platform and hope they see it your way—but if they fail to give real consideration to your petition, you have to go to court to plead your case.

Now think about the costs for any sort of internet start-up, or even an existing smaller company, which “provide[s] to the public access to large amounts of works or other subject-matter uploaded by their users,” that they will need to pay to comply with these rules. Just as Section 11 entrenches the control of media information distribution to a small group of established companies, Section 13 will further entrench control over online content sharing with the biggest companies who can afford to absorb and automate the costs of compliance. Edima, the trade organization that represents online companies, has a massive chart showing who could be affected by Section 13. It includes dating apps and sites, meaning they’d have to run all your pictures through a database to make sure you aren’t pretending to be Brad Pitt or Scarlett Johannson online. They could get sued if they don’t catch you!

When the European Union adopted expansive and expensive online data privacy regulations, observers warned that rather than reining in the influence of tech giants like Google and Facebook, it would actually allow them to strengthen their control of online spaces. And that’s exactly what’s happening. Those tech giants have the money and the lawyers to deal with the complex, confounding regulations. Others in the tech sector are not so fortunate.

Both of these articles, despite extremely loud opposition from online experts and tech companies, passed the committee in very split votes. So at least some members have a sense of the potentially terrible consequences. There’s still a lengthy and complex negotiation process to move the directive through the European Parliament. That body is likely to vote next on July 4 and could potentially make changes if there’s enough opposition.

Americans in five states are heading to the polls on Tuesday to vote in primary elections. A handful of races in Colorado, Maryland, New York, Oklahoma, and Utah, as well as a few primary runoffs in Mississippi and South Carolina, carry a national weight.

A Candidate for the House Freedom Caucus

The House Freedom Caucus suffered a noticeable loss earlier in the month after Rep. Mark Sanford (R–S.C.) was defeated by state Rep. Katie Arrington in the Republican primary for South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District. In the face of this loss, a challenger in the state’s 4th Congressional District is offering to take Sanford’s place.

Former state Sen. Lee Bright is competing against state Sen. William Timmons in a primary runoff for Rep. Trey Gowdy’s (R–S.C.) soon-to-be vacant seat. Gowdy announced at the beginning of the year that he would neither seek reelection nor “any other political or elected office.” Gowdy, who worked as a federal prosecutor before his time as a politician, said his skills “are better utilized in a courtroom than in Congress.”

Upon announcing his run, former State Sen. Lee Bright promised that his first action in the House would be joining the Freedom Caucus. Bright said he “would be honored to join” just before touting support for legislation that would introduce congressional term limits.

Bright has received endorsements from members of the Freedom Caucus as well as from conservative and libertarian organizations such as the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, and the National Association of Gun Rights. Timmons has also received significant endorsements, ranging from Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) to several South Carolina politicians.

Mitt Romney Seeks a Comeback

Mitt Romney and Utah state Rep. Mike Kennedy are facing off to see who will take over Sen. Orrin Hatch’s (R–Utah) Senate seat. Hatch (R–Utah) announced his retirement in January after spending over 40 years on Capitol Hill. Hatch promised in 2012 that his seventh term would be his last, but a few of his comments regarding an eighth term led to speculation over whether or not the sentiment was sincere. Hatch ultimately made his decision, but not without dropping Romney’s name first.

“I can see why he might not want to do it, but I can also see why if he did it, it would be a great thing for America,” Hatch said earlier in the year, as reported by the Deseret News.

For the past year, Romney, who was previously a Massachusetts governor and the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, made himself clear that he wasn’t finished with politics just yet. Should he win Tuesday’s primary against Kennedy, he’s expected to beat Salt Lake County Councilmember Jenny Wilson, the Democratic nominee.

President Trump Makes His Endorsements

President Trump gave his “full endorsement” to Rep. Dan Donovan (R–N.Y.), the incumbent in the race for New York’s 11th Congressional District. Donovan faces former Rep. Michael Grimm (R–N.Y.), who held the seat before pleading guilty to tax evasion in 2014.

While Grimm’s prison time and felony conviction followed him on the campaign trail, Donovan’s campaign enjoyed a tweet published by Trump in May.

There is no one better to represent the people of N.Y. and Staten Island (a place I know very well) than @RepDanDonovan, who is strong on Borders & Crime, loves our Military & our Vets, voted for Tax Cuts and is helping me to Make America Great Again. Dan has my full endorsement!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018

Donald Trump, Jr. and Rudy Giuliani, who is currently fulfilling a role as Trump’s lawyer, followed suit by recording robocalls for Donovan.

Trump also endorsed Romney back in February, despite a history of personal disagreements between the two. Still, the president called Romney a “great Senator” on Twitter.

.@MittRomney has announced he is running for the Senate from the wonderful State of Utah. He will make a great Senator and worthy successor to @OrrinHatch, and has my full support and endorsement!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 20, 2018

Lest you thought we were finished with tales of unfathomable incompetence on the part of Broward County, Florida, authority figures, consider this: The first Marjory Stoneman Douglas security guard who spotted Nikolas Cruz on campus and took no action to detain him was previously suspended for sexually harassing students.

Due to his inaction during the shooting, Medina was initially reassigned to an administrative position elsewhere in the Broward County school system. But on Tuesday, the superintendent finally decided to terminate his employment.

Andrew Medina worked as an unarmed security guard at Stoneman Douglas. In 2017, a disciplinary panel recommended that he be fired for sexually harassing two female students. (One of those students, Meadow Pollack, was later killed in the shooting.) But school officials decided to suspend Medina for three days instead, according to CBS News.

On the day of the shooting, Medina was the first school official to spot Cruz—who was no longer welcome at the school, and known to be a threat. He did not confront Cruz, and apparently failed to realize that Cruz was armed. He took no action, other than radioing another unarmed security guard, David Taylor, to inform him that Cruz was headed his way. When the shooting started, Taylor hid in a janitor’s closet, according to The Sun Sentinel. He was initially reassigned as well, but has now been fired.

Unlike School Resource Officer Scot Peterson—who also proved to be incompetent—neither Medina nor Taylor were armed. But if Medina wasn’t aware that Cruz was armed, he should have pursued him. If he was aware, but was afraid to approach, at the very least he should have made a “code red” call. He did not.

It seems fairly clear that the school district’s first impulse was to merely transfer Medina into a different role, and only changed course due to outrage from parents—including Pollack’s father—who just recently learned about the sexual harassment episode. It’s astonishing that a school guard could sexually harass a female student, and then utterly fail to prevent her death, and still find employment within the district. But that’s public schools for you.

Just hours after the stock market absorbed a big hit on Monday—major indices dropped by more than a full percentage point—President Donald Trump took to the stage in South Carolina to assure everyone that his trade policies were not to blame.

“It’s all working out great,” Trump told thousands of his supporters at a campaign rally for Gov. Henry McMaster (R).

That assessment is not widely shared. If the signals from the stock market were not strong enough, more than 200 state and local Chamber of Commerce chapters sent a letter to senators on Tuesday condemning the White House’s anti-trade policies. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in Congress are signaling that they might be ready to limit Trump’s ability to unilaterally impose new trade barriers.

None of that, though, seems to be giving Trump pause. On Monday, the president took the opportunity to threaten a further escalation of his trade dispute with the European Union. In response to the Trump administration’s decision to hit steel and aluminum exports from the E.U. with tariffs, the European government slapped a number of iconic American products like motorcycles and whiskey with retaliatory tariffs. The consequences of these tit-for-tat tariffs are becoming obvious, with Harley-Davidson announcing on Monday that it would shift some manufacturing jobs to Europe.

On Monday, Trump suggested once again that his administration could slap tariffs on cars and trucks imported from Europe. The Commerce Department is already engaged in an investigation of such a policy.

“They send the Mercedes, they send BMWs, they send everything. We tax them practically nothing,” Trump said. “I told them, ‘here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna charge a tariff on steel until such time as you straighten out your act.'”

Someone should probably have told Trump that BMW’s largest manufacturing facility in the world is right there in South Carolina. The automaker’s Spartenburg plant employs more than 9,000 people and produces more than 40,000 vehicles every year.

Fact-checking aside, Trump’s determination to press forward with an unnecessary, counter-productive trade dispute is now facing greater headwinds from the markets, special interests, and from Republican members of Congress.

If Congress needs another reason to act, Trump gave it to them last night. The president’s promise to “charge a tariff on steel until such time as you straighten out your act” belies the White House’s claim that steel and aluminum tariffs are a matter of national security. This isn’t just semantics. Under the terms of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962—the federal law that Trump has invoked to impose steel and aluminum tariffs—the president has the authority to impose tariffs without congressional approval, but only for national security purposes.

Trump’s comments on Monday night reveal (again) that the president clearly sees the tariffs not as a national security matter, but as a means of gaining leverage over America’s trading partners.

In a letter to the White House on Tuesday, more than 200 state and local Chamber of Commerce chapters said they were “deeply concerned” by Trump’s use of those unilateral trade powers. Such actions, they warned, “may not be in the national interest.”

“It is now also increasingly clear that the way the steel and aluminum tariffs have been used will result in retaliatory tariffs from our largest trading partners and closest allies, and that retaliation will have serious negative economic impacts on the United States,” the letter states.

These groups are urging lawmakers to back a proposal by Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) that would require congressional approval of all tariffs—including those imposed on supposedly national security grounds. Corker tried unsuccessfully to get that proposal attached to the National Defense Authorization Act earlier this month, and now is trying to rally support for including it as an amendment to the Farm Bill, Politico reported.

He might have a better shot at it this time, as opposition to the tariffs is mounting.

“We’ve crossed the Rubicon,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) told Politico earlier this week. “It’s going to do and is already doing real damage, so I think we’ve got a responsibility to stand up and push back.”

Trump clearly is not going to back down from a misguided trade policy that risks American jobs and prosperity. Getting to 60 votes in the Senate is never an easy task, but it might be the best hope for stopping the administration’s ill-informed protectionism.