Category: reason

Today’s lesson in why you shouldn’t build a pervasive and all-powerful surveillance state because it might one day end up in the tiny hands of a Donald Trump comes courtesy of the news that Trump could resurrect a Bush-era registration system for Muslims entering the United States.

According to Reuters, which spoke with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an immigration hardliner and key member of Trump’s transition team, the new administration could reconstitute the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. The NSEERS program was implemented after 9/11 and required people from so-called “higher risk” countries to undergo interrogations and fingerprinting when they entered the United States and were required to periodically “check in” at government offices while they were here.

Trump’s transition team is reportedly considering using the registration program as a way to meet The Donald’s campaign promise to implement “extreme vetting” for Muslim immigrants. Kobach helped develop NSEERS as a member of Bush’s Department of Justice.

The only problem with The NSEERS program—which was shuttered in 2011—was that it was completely ineffective at its stated goal: catching potential terrorists.

During the nine years that the program was in place, more than 93,000 immigrants were screened and none—not a single one—was ever convicted on terrorism-related charges.

According to the ACLU, the program “singled out immigrant men and boys from designated countries for extraordinary registration requirements with DHS, ranging from an extra half-hour of screening on arrival, through tracking of whereabouts while in the United States, to limitations on points of departure.” The scale of profiling was something not seen in the United States since the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II and “Operation Wetback” deportations to Mexico in the 1950s.

Even within the federal government’s immigration and anti-terrorism apparatuses, it was looked on as a mistake. James Ziegler, the former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Commission, told the New York Times that the program disrupted the United States’ relationship with immigrant communities after 9/11 and wasted resources that could have been better deployed elsewhere.

It’s not hard to figure out why the program failed to identify any potential terrorists. It was, by nature, targeting only law-abiding immigrants. As Reason’s Shikha Dalma wrote last year: “Expecting terrorists to voluntarily stroll to an immigration office to be fingerprinted and IDed is absurd, of course. So the entirely predictable upshot of the program was that although it managed to obtain not a single terrorism-related conviction, it did ruin plenty of lives of peaceful Muslims caught in its dragnet.”

People like Abdulameer Yousef Habeeb, a refugee from Iraq whose story demonstrates exactly how the NSEERS program was abused by law enforcement. As a refugee, Habeeb was not required to register with NSEERS, but he was stopped by border agents while traveling via train from Seattle to Washington, D.C., in April 2003. The agents wrongly accused Habeeb of violating NSEERS mandatory registration and detained him for more than a week, causing him to lose the job that he was traveling to Washington, D.C., to accept. After a lawsuit from the ACLU, the federal government eventually admitted they were wrong to have detained Habeeb.

And people like Imad Daou, a Lebanese national and graduate student at Texas A&M who was engaged to be married when he was detained for two months and eventually deported for failing to register in the NSEERS program. Though the program was no good at catching terrorists, it did help authorities deport thousands of immigrants, like Daou, who had done nothing worse than overstay their visa.

The program was suspended by the Obama administration in 2011, but Obama didn’t fully dismantle it. Instead, Vox reports, Obama simply removed all 25 “high risk” countries from the list (24 of them were in the Middle East; North Korea was the other one). All President Trump would have to do is repopulate the list and NSEERS could be up and running again.

The NSEERS program was a failure, and an abusive one at that. Even so, Trump would be on solid legal ground to bring it back.

The ACLU has promised to challenge a resurrection of NSEERS, but previous legal challenges to the program did not get very far, as federal courts gave broad deference to the executive branch on setting immigration policies.

Anyone who thinks the 2016 presidential election is about as weird as it’s going to get in their lifetimes is in for a rude awakening. Donald Trump’s primary and general election victories demonstrated there was a viable path for celebrities of all stripes to make a legitimate run for the presidency.

Kanye West may have been the first celebrity to understand this, announcing at the MTV Video Music Awards in August 2015 that he would make a run for president in 2020. His announcement came the same month he and wife Kim Kardashian endorsed Hillary Clinton. This week, Kanye West revealed that he didn’t vote in last week’s elections, but that if he had, he would’ve voted for Trump.

In a 20+ minute political rant during a concert in San Jose, California, he explained that he admired Trump’s campaign tactics. “There’s methods, non-political methods to speaking, that I like, that I feel were very futuristic,” West explained. “That style and that method of communication has proven that it can be a politically correct way of communication. And I fuck with that.”

When West told the crowd he would have voted for Trump had he voted, he was booed in response.

“That don’t mean that I don’t think that black lives matter,” West said. “That don’t mean that I don’t believe in women’s rights. That don’t mean that I don’t mean in gay marriage. That don’t mean that I don’t believe in these things because that’s the guy that I wanted to vote for.”

West stressed that no presidential candidate was going to “instantly be able to change” racism. “Stop focusing on racism,” he told the crowd. “This world is racist, okay? Lets stop being distracted to focus on that as much. It’s just a fucking fact. We are in a racist country. Period.”

West is right. As I’ve noted repeatedly, discussions around racism are the most prominent distractions that thwart police reform. A focus and debate about whether cops are racist, which ones, and how much, distracts from the work necessary to reform police unions and police departments so that violent and otherwise incompetent cops can face real accountability measures and even be removed from the department. How racist these cops are shouldn’t be relevant—if they are incompetent, prone to abuse or panic, they should not be police officers.

Trump, for his part, responded to West’s announcement last summer by noting he believed West was a fan of his. “I’ll never say bad about him, because he loves Trump,” Trump said at the time. “He goes around saying Trump is my all-time hero. He says it to everybody. So Kanye West, I love him.” Trump appeared to approve of the idea of West running.”

Trump noted that could change if West actually does run for president. “Now, maybe in a few years I’ll have to run against him, I don’t know, so I’ll take that back,” Trump added. “He’s a nice guy. I hope to run against him one day,” he said. It wasn’t wise to laugh, or to take either’s chances less than seriously.

Swastikas spray-painted on softball dugouts. Steve Bannon getting appointed to the White House. There’s been lots of spooky stuff going down in America since Donald Trump was elected president. When I reported last Friday that there had been “no violent hate crimewave” happening—emphasis on the word violent—it was to dispel widespread rumors of a post-election surge in physical attacks on gay, transgender, and non-white Americans by emboldened and bigoted Trump supporters. Thankfully, this still holds true. While the public expression of nativist, racist, sexist, or anti-LGBT sentiments may have experienced a post-election upswing, incidents of actual altercations or attacks have still been very rare.

Several of the most prominent early reports of Trump-inspired violence against people of color were later admitted to be fabrications or directly contradicted by police statements. Pointing this out seems to really anger people, who assume my intent is discredit all such reports, or to deny that there’s any bigotry among Trump supporters. Neither is true. Rather, I saw a lot of distortions being spread and a lot of people who were really scared. I heard from LGBT and Jewish and non-white friends of mine, in private communications and on social media, who honestly believed it was open season on them this week. And I didn’t want to see people I care about fearing for their very lives and physical safety because of a massive amount of misinformation floating around.

This isn’t helped by groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which states that more than 400 hate crimes have been committed in America post-election. But the vast majority of the examples SPLC gives involve incidents like one elementary student telling another that he would be deported, or a white woman laughing at a black woman who overheard her saying racist things, or a man in a car yelling “fag” as he drove by a gay couple—things that may be intolerant, unkind, and legitimately scary for those targeted, but not what most people would conjure when they hear “hate crimes” or “hateful extremism.” And pointing that out doesn’t equate to condoning these acts, or dismissing the hurt and fear they inspire in people. It is simply an attempt to separate what is really happening in America right now from what is hyperbole, hysteria, or hoax.

The bottom line is that when it comes to physical aggression inspired by this election, we are looking a little more than a dozen incidents reported, over a 10 day period, in a country of roughly 318.9 million people—none of which resulted in serious injuries.

And regarding the rash of racist or anti-Seminitic graffiti and signs popping up this week: while some was certainly meant to offend or inspire terror, other times it has turned out to be the work of anti-Trump forces who intended it as commentary on how they perceive “Trump’s America.” For instance, the message scrawled on an Elon University whiteboard post-election—”Bye Bye Latinos Hasta La Vista“—was actually “written by a Latino student who was upset about the results of the election and wrote the message as a satirical commentary,” according the school’s vice president for student life. The same for a Nazi flag that went up over a house in San Francisco last week.

In Pittsburg, California, a sign reading “You can hang a n****r from a tree / Equal rights he will never see!” was posted aside a house, and shared in a photo on Twitter November 12 by a man who wrote: “My sister texted this to me 10 minutes ago. Our democracy is being tested even in California.” This post was retweeted more than 4,200 times. But it turns out the sign was posted by a black man, on his own house, long before last week in protest of a grievance the man has with the court system. “Police said they planned to cite the man for the banner’s message,” reported the East Bay Times, “but upon further review Monday discovered that they already did so last week.”

True, these incidents make up just a small percentage of the offensive graffiti and messages reported this week, but they serve as a reminder that the most simplistic explanation—racist imagery spread by racists—isn’t always the correct one.

Below, I’ve compiled information on any reports of election-inspired attacks, stalking, robberies, or physical altercations that I could find. (It is surely not a complete representation of such incidents, but I’m also not “cherry-picking,” as some have suggested, and have included any such stories I came across.) The picture that emerges isn’t a wave of hoaxes, a wave of attacks on minorities by Trump-emboldened bigots, nor a wave of attacks on Trump supporters by intolerant liberals—though all have happened—but something much more complex.

Anti-Trump Protester Tackled at Ohio State University: A young man leading an anti-Trump rally at Ohio State University (OSU) was tackled down a flight of stairs this week. The victim, Tim Adams, suffered bruises and bumps but is OK, he told local news. His attacker, OSU student Shane Michael Stanton, was arraigned in court Tuesday on assault charges.

Stanton was initially assumed to be an angry Trump supporter, but OSU Students for Trump said he was not part of their organization and, according to the Franklin County Board of Elections, he is registered as a Democrat. Friends and classmates claimed Stanton was a big Hillary Clinton supporter, that he has Asperger syndrome, that he has a hard time sometimes in social situations, and that while they didn’t know what motivated the attack, it definitely wasn’t pro-Trump bias. The young man’s father later confirmed to the Columbus Dispatch that he does have Asperger Syndrome.

@ananavarro @TheLantern He has a mental illness and was a Hillary supporter. Get your facts straight, I know him personally. Please.

— Lucas Abreu (@lucabreu96) November 15, 2016

Adams said Tuesday that he would drop the assault report he filed against Stanton. He posted on Facebook that he had made the decision now that “it was clear that my assault was not politically motivated in the way that we previously thought, nor was it committed by a Trump supporter.”

Man Punches Hispanic Stranger on Street: In Redwood City, California, 34-year-old Michael Goggins was charged with two felony counts of resisting arrest and a misdemeanor hate crime after allegedly yelling a racial slur at a Hispanic man the day after the election, punching the man in the chest, and then biting police when they tried to arrest him. The victim was uninjured, according to police, and Goggins told them he had punched the man for being a “traitor.” Goggins remains in jail with bail set at $50,000 and a trial set for later this month.

Woman Knocked Over by Trump Supporters at Villanova: A black Villanova University said she was pushed over on her way to class by a group of white men yelling “Trump! Trump! Trump!” The university and local police are investigating the incident.

Woman Punched at Brooklyn Restaurant by Trump Supporter: In Brooklyn, a woman eating at a French bistro was allegedly punched by a male Trump supporter after fighting with him about politics. According to the Brooklyn Paper, both had been dining at Bar Tabac in Boerum Hill last Saturday when he overheard the woman and her dining companion talking disparagingly about Trump. “The man asked [bar manager Jonas Leon] to throw the women out of the restaurant, but he refused, and instead moved the gent and his companion to a different table,” the paper reported. “The guy paid his check and exited the restaurant at 6:50 pm, but then dashed back in again—nearly knocking over a kid on his way—and slugged one of the ladies in the face,” according to Leon. Another diner corroborated this version of events. The victim filed a report with police, who are investigating.

High School Girl Attacked for Pro-Trump Comment: In Woodside, California, police are investigating an attack on a female high-school student, Jade Armenio, who said she was beaten up by classmates for making positive comments about Trump on Instagram.

Boy in MAGA Hat Beaten Up at Anti-Trump Rally: In Rockville, Maryland, a 15-year-old boy was beaten up by fellow teens after he showed up to an anti-Trump rally wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat. “Hundreds of students from Richard Montgomery High School were carrying signs reading, ‘Love Trumps Hate,’ and chanting near the Rockville courthouse,” WTOP reported, when the Trump-supporting teen was attacked by multiple students. Rockville police officer Michael English said the victim had not been the aggressor. A bystander who witnessed the attack told WTOP, “they jumped him and beat him up pretty bad,” but the boy’s injuries were not serious. So far, one 17-year-old had been identified as a perpetrator and charged with second-degree assault.

Muslim Women Harassed, Robbed on Campuses: Muslim women were targets of alleged hate crimes on a spate of college campuses.

• A Muslim student at San Diego State University had her purse and car stolen by two men, one white and one Hispanic, who reportedly made pro-Trump comments and disparaging remarks about Islam.
• At the University of Michigan, police are investigating allegations that a drunk man threatened to set a female student’s hijab on fire unless she took it off.
• University of New Mexico student Leena Aggad said that a young man in a Trump shirt tried to tear her hijab off on election day.
• In Queens, 19-year-old Fariha Nizam claims she was on the bus November 10 when an elderly couple started yelling at her to take off her hijab and tried to yank it off her at one point, until “other people on the bus started yelling at this couple to leave me alone ,” according to what she posted to Facebook.

Muslim Woman Fabricated Campus Attack: In one of the first incidents to get serious post-election attention, a Muslim female student at the University of Louisiana reported that she was robbed and had her hijab ripped off by two white men wearing Trump hats. A few days later, she admitted to local police that she had made up the story.

Men Assaulted Over Trump Support in Boston, New York City, Connecticut

• In Meriden, Connecticut, two men have been charged with assault in an attack on a man holding a Trump sign.
• Boston police are looking into claims by a 21-year-old man who says he was attacked outside of a bar by someone who overheard him professing support for Trump and dissing Hillary Clinton.
• New York police are investigating a complaint from Corey Cataldo, who says he was attacked on the subway for wearing a Trump hat.

Gay Man Attacked in Santa Monica: In one story widely-circulated last week, a gay man was allegedly beat up by Trump supporters outside a bar in Santa Monica for being gay, and there were pictures of his bloodied face and body to prove it. When the man himself added more context, however, it was revealed that he had argued heatedly with Trump fans about politics inside the bar and, later, was jumped outside by unidentified people. Ball said he could not remember the name of the bar, and could not tell if his attackers were the same people he had argued with inside. Ball posted pictures of himself at a hospital, but was called into question when local police said they had received no report of the incident and had spoken to area hospitals, who also reported no such patient. Ball, who is Canadian, later provided a Calgary newspaper with a copy of a hospital discharge report from West Hills Hospital, about a 45 minute drive from Santa Monica.

Man Made-Up “Trump’s Country” Tale: A 20-year-old man in Malden, Massachusetts reported to police that he was followed from a bus station by two white men who shouted racial slurs at him, made references to lynching, and said that he was in “Trump’s country” now, forcing him to run and hide to get away from them. But according to Malde Police Chief Kevin Molis. the man later admitted to police that he had fabricated the story to help raise awareness about “things that are going on around the country.”

Towson Stalking Took Place in April: A story about two black Towson University students who were followed and harassed by white students shouting racial slurs at them made its way into myriad roundups of election-related violence (and reported on by the Baltimore Sun) after Shaun King shared it on November 10 to the tune of thousands of shares. Towson University (TU) officials opened an official hate/bias incident investigation the same day. But on November 16, the school announced that while “the student who posted about the incident on social media believed it was a recent occurrence,” an investigation by the school’s Office of Inclusion and Institutional Equity and the Towson University police “determined that the incident occurred last April, when two TU students were approached by a non-TU affiliate as they walked back to campus.”

Black Woman Threatened With Gun at Gas Station? In one widely-shared Facebook tale, Ashley Boyer, a black woman, claimed she was harassed and threatened by four white men while pumping gas at a Smyrna, Delaware, gas station on November 9. Boyer later deleted that post, stating in a subequent Facebook update that she had reported the incident to police and “charges were filed, fugitives were caught.” But neither Smyrna police nor any nearby agencies had a record of such an incident, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Brian Donner of the Delaware State Police said “there is no record of this occuring in Smyrna, if at all.”

No Record of Asian Student’s Reported Run-In With White Trump Supporters, Cops: Last week, University of Minnesota student Kathy Mirah Tu claimed on Facebook that she had beens accosted by a white man while crossing a campus bridge. Shaun King’s tweet of her story was shared more than 5,100 times within the day. “I was stopped in my tracks by a white male, who yelled at me to ‘Go back to Asia,'” Tu posted, in an update that had received more than 17,000 shares by the next day. “Shortly after that moment, I was stopped by that same man who told me ‘Don’t you know it’s disrespectful to walk away from someone when they are talking to you?'” Tu claimed the man the man grabbed Tu’s wrist and threatened to hit her but she punched him first, after which the man’s friends called the police. Tu described how the police showed up and handcuffed her but eventually let her off with a warning. Yet both campus cops and Minneapolis police deny ever responding to or receiving a report about any such incident.

Woman Attacked by Trump Fans While Catching Pokemon: A student at Ohio’s Capital University, Brittany Daughenbaugh, said she was assaulted Thursday by two white men wearing pro-Trump clothing. She was left with bruises and a concussion after allegedly being punched in the face by the men, who said, “Don’t worry, honey. President Trump says this is OK.”

Florida Student Charged for Fake Election-Night Robbery Report: A female student at the University of South Florida police was arrested this week for falsely reporting that she had been robbed by two white men on election night. The 19-year-old, Fatou Gueye, was charged with false report of commission of crimes.

Chicago Man Beaten After Traffic Incident: While white Chicagoan David Wilcox was allegedly beaten up by a mob of angry black Democrats for his political views, the truth is slightly more complicated. The altercation started over a traffic accident, not politics. Regardless of how it started, however, it does seem to have devolved into Wilcox being beaten up, as onlookers cheered, for being perceived to have voted for Trump (something he says is correct, though there’s no way his attackers and onlookers could have known that). In video of the incident, people can be heard razzing Wilcox for being a “white boy Trump supporter,” and saying “beat him, he voted Trump.” Wilcox was left with significant bruises but no severe injuries. He filed a police report but no one has been arrested in ocnjunction with the assault yet.

Some Clinton supporters are calling on Trump electors to the Electoral College to vote for Hillary Clinton instead, while others are calling for the Electoral College to be abolished.

David Harsanyi writes:

If it needs repeating, in the United States of America, we have an Electoral College, wherein the president and vice president aren’t elected directly by the voters, but rather by electors who are chosen through the popular votes from each state. Your state’s portion of electors equals the number of members in its congressional delegation—one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two for your senators. We have 51 separate elections. This is done so that every part of the nation has some kind of say over the next executive. The president, after all, is not a monarch. He does not make laws. Not even President Barack Obama was supposed to do that. Voters need to view the system as a whole to understand why this is “fair.”

Diffused democracy weakens the ability of politicians to scaremonger and use emotional appeals to take power. It blunts the vagaries of the electorate. So, naturally, the left has been attacking the Electoral College for years—including talk of a national “compact” to circumvent smaller states.

View this article.

Marrakech –The global clean energy transition has already taken off. That is the mantra repeated in countless speeches, presentations, panel discussions, activist manifestoes, open letters and official pronouncements here at the COP22 U.N. climate change conference. If true, then the problem of man-made global warming is well on the way to being solved.

For example, in his swan song on Wednesday at COP22, Secretary of State John Kerry declared, “The market is clearly headed towards clean energy, and that trend will only become more pronounced.” He continued, “The United States is right now, today, on our way to meeting all of the international targets that we’ve set, and because of the market decisions that are being made, I do not believe that that can or will be reversed.” At the High-Level Meeting on Climate Change involving CEOs and government officials on Wednesday in Marrakech, Lise Kingo, Executive Director of the U.N. Global Compact asserted: “The climate movement is unstoppable. More and more companies are taking action, and seeing new opportunities for growth and innovation.”

On Wednesday, the leaders of some 300 businesses signed an open letter urging President-elect Trump to support the Paris Agreement. In conjunction with the letter Matt Patsky, CEO of the socially responsible Trillium Asset Management firm stated, “The enormous momentum generated by the business and investment community to address climate change cannot be reversed and cannot be ignored by the Trump administration. That train has left the station and to stand in its way is folly.”

These business leaders evidently agree with Kerry’s assertion that “ultimately, clean energy is expected to be a multitrillion dollar market – the largest market the world has ever known. And no nation will do well if it sits on the sidelines, handicapping its new businesses from reaping the benefits of the clean-tech explosion.” In a press briefing on Thursday Grenada-based climate negotiator Leon Charles concurred, “The U.S. will have to decide if it wants to be stuck with old technologies or new more efficient clean energy technologies. The best way to respond to the Trump phenomenon is to continue and accelerate the momentum toward a clean energy economy.”

Of course, if renewable energy turns out to be cheaper, American companies will not let themselves be stuck with old fossil fuel technologies, but will race to invest in, create and install those sources of power. If markets are already generating the clean energy transition, then the Paris Agreement is largely irrelevant, right?

Not so fast. The government officials, businesspeople, and activists gathered at COP22 don’t actually appear to quite believe what they are saying about the profitability and inevitability of the clean energy transition they are championing. Instead, they insist that governments have got to send “signals” to the energy markets in order to assure shareholders and corporations that their investments are sound. “The private sector welcomed the signals that we sent in Paris, but they are demanding even stronger signals now – the private sector – so that they can invest clean energy solutions with even greater confidence,” explained Kerry. What sort of signals are they supposedly demanding? Subsidies, tax breaks, mandates and regulations that favor renewable energy technologies, of course. Let’s just say that such interventions in commerce do not “signal” a lot of trust in the operation of markets to produce the clean energy results that the folks at COP22 insist are already on the way.

The Marrakech Action Proclamation

On Thursday evening, the Marrakech Action Proclamation for Our Climate and Sustainable Development was agreed to by all 197 countries at COP22. “Our climate is warming at an alarming and unprecedented rate and we have the urgent duty to respond,” asserts the Proclamation. It cites the “extraordinary momentum on climate change worldwide” made during this past year and declares that “this momentum is irreversible.” And it calls for “the highest political commitment to combat climate change, as a matter of urgent priority.” The Proclamation seems to be aimed directly at President-elect Trump. According to Christian Aid’s international climate lead Mohamed Adow, the Proclamation “underlines the determination of world leaders that they will not let the election of Donald Trump hijack the important work being done to secure the safe future of our planet.”

A Trump Green Infrastructure Fantasy

Donald Trump wants to be the “infrastructure president,” observed U.N. advisor and Columbia University development economist Jeffrey Sachs during a Thursday session at the COP22 U.N. climate change conference. Sachs spun out a scenario in which the day after he takes office Trump reads the Obama administration’s Mid-Century Strategy for Deep Decarbonization which was just released as part of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change commitment process. In Sachs’ fantasy Trump immediately realizes that the Mid-Century Strategy is essentially a massive decades-long series of infrastructure projects. His competitive spirit aroused, Trump purportedly vows that the United States will build the “cleanest and greenest infrastructure in the world.” The folks over at the Niskanen Center have floated the idea that Trump might even consider a carbon tax as a way to pay for his trillion dollar infrastructure plan.

A Short Kind Word for the Paris Agreement?

Unlike the misbegotten Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement is not structured as a top-down centralized plan for the climate. I correctly predicted back in 2004 that “there will be no further global treaties that set binding limits on the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) after Kyoto runs out in 2012.” Instead, the Paris Agreement’s design is more like a bottom-up decentralized federal system for governing the atmospheric global commons. Similar to the U.S. Constitution, the Paris Agreement is largely a procedural document. It sets no binding limits on what a country must do with regard to man-made climate change. Each country decides on its own climate change commitments based on its own domestic concerns and priorities. Since each country picks its policies for its own reasons, there is possibly a greater likelihood that they will be fulfilled than when they were imposed from outside as they were under the Kyoto Protocol. In addition, the bottom-up structure means that the incentives of countries to reset their climate policies are less affected when a country, say, the United States, withdraws from the Agreement.

The Surprisingly Happy Conclusion of COP22

Unlike most of the previous COPs on which I have reported there was very little drama here in Marrakech. The participants maintained a sense of calm even despite the fact that the Trump election was somewhat disconcerting to many of them.

So, according to participants, what are the main achievements of COP22? “First and foremost it is a celebration of the entering into force of the Paris Agreement and the start of the CMA1,” declared Elina Bardram, the head of the European Union’s delegation. The CMA1 is the first official meeting of the parties of the Paris Agreement. Bardram added, “I think we have the makings of a beautiful process.” Bardram is not alone in thinking that the negotiations at COP22 have gone splendidly. U.S. special climate envoy Jonathan Pershing certainly concurred, “We have had quite a successful week here at COP22.” Grenada-based negotiator Leon Charles declared, “We believe that the most important achievement of this COP is the operationalizing of the Paris Agreement.”

Why all of the comity and good feelings? First, because Paris Agreement on Climate Change has come into force in record time – in less than year – for a multilateral international pact. So far 111 countries responsible for more than 75 percent of the global emissions of greenhouse gases have ratified or accepted it. Second, the delegates convened the first Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA1) in Marrakech. This is significant because the parties could agree on and launch various processes for creating the “Paris rulebook” by 2020.

Among other things, the Paris rulebook will set out standards for reporting, monitoring, and verifying the nationally determined contributions to addressing man-made global warming promised by signatories. In addition, the CMA1 inaugurated negotiations concerning assorted financial issues, including how much and from what sources rich countries are supposed to be obligated to pay to poor countries to help them cope with a warmer world and make the transition to low carbon energy. Thus each country’s negotiators can depart Marrakech happily imagining that the future decisions at the next COPs will go their way. For climate bureaucrats, a beautiful process indeed!

Note: This is my last daily dispatch from the COP22 U.N. climate change conference in Marrakech.

Trump has reportedly picked Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) to run the Central Intelligence Agency. Would sort of CIA director would Mike Pompeo be?

Well, for one thing, he thinks Edward Snowden should be executed:

That’s Pompeo speaking on C-Span’s Washington Journal this past February. (You can watch the full appearance here.) His comments came in the midst of a discussion of Hillary Clinton’s emails and the Benghazi scandal. Here is a transcript of his Snowden remarks:

It’s absolutely the case that we have not been able to secure all the American information that we needed to, and that we’ve had the traitor Edward Snowden steal that information. He should be brought back from Russia and given due process, and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence for having put friends of mine, friends of yours, who served in the military today, at enormous risk, because of the information he stole and then released to foreign powers.

That is, needless to say, an extremely tendentious description of what Snowden did. But many people in the intelligence world share it, and—if this is indeed the president-elect’s pick to run the CIA—it doesn’t look like that will change under Trump.

(For Reason’s interview with Snowden, go here. For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

You can’t go back to Hogwarts again, obviously—it ran out of books. But the newly devised American branch of the Harry Potter wizarding world is a feeble substitute. For one thing, there’s no Harry (or Hermione, or Ron)—no children at all, in fact, unless you count one little girl who’s basically a red herring. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the opening installment of a projected five-film franchise, is a good looking movie, with lots of Dickensian grit and gleaming Art Deco interiors; and its digital effects are unusually well-integrated. But the story is thin, and its characters short on the charm that distinguished the Potter series. The Beasts pictures will probably improve as they go along, but this is a weak kickoff, writes Kurt Loder.

View this article.

• Donald Trump has reportedly picked Sen. Jeff Sessions to be his attorney general.
• Donald Trump has reportedly picked Rep. Mike Pompeo to be his CIA director.
• Donald Trump has reportedly picked General Mike Flynn to be his national security adviser.
• Kanye West says that while he didn’t vote in the presidential election, if he had voted he “would have voted for Trump.”
• “Senate Democrats’ new leader claimed the right Wednesday to filibuster Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, making clear Democrats won’t give the president-elect much of a honeymoon on the most significant of his upcoming appointments.”
• Divorce rates in the U.S. are currently at a 35-year low.

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You might think Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who acknowledges marijuana’s medical utility, has relatively enlightened views on drug policy. But a report he released yesterday reveals that Murthy is utterly conventional in his attitude toward drinking and other kinds of recreational drug use, which he views as a problem to be minimized by the government. Facing Addiction in America: The Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health claims “addiction is a chronic brain disease” caused by exposure to psychoactive substances, even while acknowledging that the vast majority of people who consume those substances do not become addicted to them. The report describes even low-risk, harmless, and beneficial drug use as “misuse,” giving the government broad license to meddle with personal choices through policies aimed at making drugs more expensive and less accessible. Murthy argues that driving down total consumption, rather than focusing on problematic use, is the most effective way to reduce the harm caused by alcohol and other drugs. As he sees it, every drinker and drug user, no matter how careful, controlled, or responsible, is a legitimate target of government intervention.

Murthy’s report eschews the term substance abuse, explaining that the phrase “is increasingly avoided by professionals because it can be shaming.” Instead the report talks about “substance misuse,” which “is now the preferred term.” But substance misuse is just as judgmental, vague, and arbitrary as substance abuse. In fact, Murthy cannot quite decide what it means. On page 5 of the introduction, he says misuse occurs when people use drugs “in a manner that causes harm to the user or those around them.” But elsewhere (including the very next page), the report uses a much broader definition. “Although misuse is not a diagnostic term,” Murthy says, “it generally suggests use in a manner that could cause harm to the user or those around them.” Could cause harm? That definition is wide enough to cover all drug use.

Murthy does seem to think drug use is problematic even when it causes no problems. As an example of drug misuse, Murthy repeatedly cites a 2015 survey in which 25 percent of the respondents, representing 66.7 million Americans, reported that they had engaged in “binge drinking” during the previous month. “By definition,” Murthy says, “those episodes have the potential for producing harm to the user and/or to those around them, through increases in motor vehicle crashes, violence, and alcohol poisonings.” But the government’s definition of a binge—five or more drinks “on an occasion” for a man, four or more for a woman—encompasses patterns of consumption that do not harm anything except the sensibilities of public health officials. If a man at a dinner party drinks a cocktail before the meal, a few glasses of wine during it, and a little bourbon afterward, he is drinking too much, according to Murthy, even if he takes a cab home. By that standard, at least 44 percent of past-month drinkers are misusing alcohol.

Murthy also counts all consumption of federally proscribed drugs as misuse, no matter the context or consequences. As far as he is concerned, all 36 million Americans who consumed cannabis last year misused it, even if they lived in states where the drug is legal for medical or recreational purposes (which is now most states). Unauthorized use of prescription drugs also counts as misuse, whether or not harm results. “In 2015,” Murthy says, “12.5 million individuals misused a pain reliever in the past year—setting the stage for a potential overdose.” That makes the risk sound much bigger than it is. According to the CDC, there were 18,893 deaths involving opioid analgesics in 2014, the most recent year for which data are available. That year, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 10.3 million Americans used prescription painkillers for nonmedical purposes. Each of them ran a 0.2 percent change of dying as a result. For those who avoided mixing narcotic painkillers with other depressants (a typical factor in opioid-related deaths), the risk was even smaller.

Murthy also seems confused when he talks about addiction. “We now know from solid data that substance abuse disorders don’t discriminate,” he recently told NPR. “They affect the rich and the poor, all socioeconomic groups and ethnic groups. They affect people in urban areas and rural ones.” But according to Murthy’s report, “Prevalence of substance misuse and substance use disorders differs by race and ethnicity and gender.” Furthermore, “genetic, social, and environmental risk factors” increase a person’s vulnerability to addiction, while “protective factors” reduce it. Risk factors include “low parental monitoring,” “high levels of family conflict or violence,” “current mental disorders,” “low involvement in school,” and “a history of abuse and neglect.” Protective factors include “involvement in school, engagement in healthy recreational and social activities, and good coping skills.” Pace Murthy, it sounds like substance abuse orders do discriminate, since they are more common among troubled people in difficult circumstances.

The fact that everyone is not equally prone to addiction tells us that Murthy’s account, in which a “substance abuse disorder” is “a medical illness caused by repeated misuse of a substance or substances,” cannot be accurate. According to the report, “prolonged, repeated misuse of any of these substances can produce changes to the brain that can lead to a substance use disorder, an independent illness that significantly impairs health and function and may require specialty treatment.” Those cans are carrying a lot of weight. In fact, as Murthy concedes, drug use typically does not “lead to a substance use disorder”; controlled use is much more common. “For a wide range of reasons that remain only partially understood,” says the executive summary, “some individuals are able to use alcohol or drugs in moderation and not develop addiction or even milder substance use disorders, whereas others—between 4 and 23 percent depending on the substance—proceed readily from trying a substance to developing a substance use disorder.” By saying “some” and “others” instead of “most” and “a minority,” the report obfuscates the point that the vast majority of drinkers and drug users are not addicts.

Murthy’s equation of addiction with cancer and diabetes is also misleading. “Now we understand that these disorders actually change the circuitry in your brain,” he tells NPR. “They affect your ability to make decisions, and change your reward system and your stress response. That tells us that addiction is a chronic disease of the brain, and we need to treat it with the same urgency and compassion that we do with any other illness.” All experiences change the brain; that does not make them diseases. Although the medical terminology is supposed to reduce the stigma associated with drug addiction and encourage people to seek help, it is not clear that describing the problem as an illness rather than a habit makes it any easier to change. Arguably it does the opposite, by depicting harmful patterns of drug use as something that happens to people rather than something that they do.

Harry Potter fans rejoiced at the news that J.K. Rowling was about to publish a new epic trilogy of books. But in the December 2016 issue of Reason, Amy Sturgis writes that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them suffers from Rowling’s shaky knowledge of North American history:

The controversy over appropriation is a symptom of a larger problem. Rowling simply doesn’t appreciate how much she doesn’t know about North America. The woman who created the wizarding world (as opposed to the wizarding nation) appears to believe that, because she knows Great Britain, she also knows the other side of the Atlantic. Her new writings, plagued by what seem to be unexamined colonialist and nationalist assumptions, prove otherwise. Rowling’s stumbles are particularly surprising and disappointing given that in her YouTube featurette “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: A New Hero,” she proclaims that “people who feel set apart, stigmatized, or othered” are “at the heart of most of what I write.”

Where the Harry Potter series constantly subverted and reimagined the classic—but politically retrograde—British coming-of-age schooldays novels, Rowling’s new works on North America underscore her intellectual and imaginative blind spots, slapping vaguely American Indian window dressing on an otherwise unchanged Hogwarts-style institution, ignoring or running roughshod over both the continent’s politically charged and sometimes tragic past and its complex and multi-layered present, and utterly failing North American History 101 in the bargain.

In short, it’s clear that this time the real-life Hermione Granger didn’t do her homework.

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