Category: reason

While the Russian military
violates the sovereignty of Ukraine and threatens war by sending in
soldiers, occupying the neighboring nation’s airspace, and
surrounding the Crimean peninsula with warships, the government has
been conducting
a parallel propaganda
war.

The Daily Beast
highlights a few of the false claims by state-run news outlets:
video presented as “’skirmishes’ on the streets of Crimea” turned
out to be footage of government snipers slaughtering opposition
protesters the week before; pictures purportedly of Ukrainians
defecting en masse to Russia were actually from the
Polish-Ukrainian border (and live
feeds of the Russian-Ukrainian border seem to confirm this);
another video said to be right-wing militants from western Ukraine
was completely staged.

It’s not just internal propaganda. The government-funded RT
produced a cartoonish video pushing Kremlin
rhetoric that the hundreds of thousands of
diverse, multi-partisan Ukrainian opposition–which protested
nonviolently for months until their authoritarian leader approved
the use of live ammunition against civilians–are overwhelmingly
fascists. “Fascist” is a go-to accusation Russian politicians and
media use when silencing both foreigners and but domestic,
pro-democracy critics.

The government has also censored
pro-Ukrainian social media in Russia, while the military makes
conspicuous calls for veterans to band together as “tourist
units” and vacation in Crimea.

All of this works, except when it doesn’t.

Many Russian citizens and ethnic Russian in Crimea are adamant
about developing closer ties between the two and
blame the west for destabilizing Ukraine, but according to
Radio Free Europe, “independent opinions polls conducted before the
crisis show that an overwhelming majority of Russians opposed
Russian meddling in Ukrainian politics as well as a possible
military intervention in the country.”

Some have become vocal and active opponents of the invasion,
since Ukraine has not provoked violence. The independent Moscow
Times
critiques that Russia was hoping to provoke a “’Georgian
scenario’ in Crimea. In that conflict, Russia invaded
Georgia in 2008 because that country’s troops attacked Russian
servicemen, providing the perfect casus belli.  But no
such attacks took place in Crimea.”

Yesterday, nonviolent anti-war protests took place in Moscow and
St. Petersburg. Around 350 people were arrested in Moscow,
according to The New Republic. Another
Ukrainian-sympathetic rally with as many as
1,500 participants similarly shut down last week. Meanwhile, a
larger pro-war demonstration went undisturbed.

Even the Consul General of Russia in the Crimea admitted that claims
that Russian citizens were killed by Ukrainians–one of the pretexts
for the invasion–was unfounded. 

Radio Free Europe points
out that the “a number of Russian luminaries, including
rock musician Yury Shevchuk, have also delivered
unusually harsh criticism of the Kremlin,” and suggests that
” rift in public opinion between educated, city-dwelling
Russians and those living in small towns with only limited access
online news sites.”

Read more Reason coverage of Ukraine here. 

One of the few memorable
moments at last night’s largely dreary Oscar ceremony came when
Bill Murray, onstage to present the cinematography award, gave an
unscripted shout-out to the late
Harold Ramis, Murray’s frequent creative partner from the ’70s
through the early ’90s. The reactions to Ramis’ death haven’t quite
faded from the press yet: Besides the coverage of Murray’s tribute,
yesterday saw Salon publish a critique
of Ramis’ work by the liberal pundit Thomas Frank. Frank, while
acknowledging that he enjoys Ramis’ movies, argues that liberals do
not “own the imagery of subversion and outsiderness” and that
Ramis-style comedy can be adapted to other political ends—indeed,
that several of the writer/actor/director’s pictures are open to
libertarian or even conservative readings. The evolution from the
anti-square humor of Animal House and Caddyshack
to the anti-EPA humor of Ghostbusters is a natural
progression, Frank writes, not a rupture.

I can’t really disagree with that, since I wrote
pretty much the same thing last Thursday, albeit from a
different political perspective. Indeed, I wrapped up my post by
saying my observations were “old hat, really, whether you’re a
libertarian pointing out those continuities to praise them or a Tom
Frank type pointing them out to attack them.” Frank was probably
plotting his piece already as I wrote that. Or maybe I’ve stumbled
onto the blogger’s equivalent of chanting “Candyman” into a
mirror.

Frank also adds some arguments that I didn’t make. Some are
sharp: He’s absolutely right that the old-money/new-money conflict
at the heart of Caddyshack fits snugly with the
supply-side worldview. Some are less impressive: He attempts to
find a special ideological meaning in the fact that College
Republicans were making anti-Mondale “Fritzbusters” jokes during
the ’84 election, an effort that runs aground on the fact that
Democrats were doing Reaganbusters
gags in the same campaign. Everyone was making
Ghostbusters references that year. It was like all those
forced references to selfies and hashtags today.

And Frank gets off a clever line when he writes that “the
fraternity at Dartmouth which served as one of the models for
‘Animal House’ has of late become a kind of pipeline into the
investment-banking industry” right after he quotes one of the
movie’s most famous bits of dialogue—the part where one of the
Delta House crew says, “You fucked up. You trusted us.” You can see
the seeds of an interesting comparison there: If Animal
House blurred the boundary between anti-authoritarian fun and
entitled assholery, there are people on Wall Street who whose
rhetoric blurs the boundary between desubsidized deregulation
and subsidized moral hazard. Frank, alas, isn’t
keen on drawing that distinction either.

The American Conservative editor Daniel
McCarthy has a
blog post up outlining what he sees as the three outcomes
Russian President Vladimir Putin may be considering relating to the
ongoing crisis in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula in the Black
Sea.

McCarthy believes that the first and most preferred outcome
Putin may be working towards is “the strongly pro-Russian peninsula
remains part of a Ukraine that is effectively subservient to
Russia’s interests, no matter who is in charge in Kiev.”

The second possible outcome Putin may be working towards,
McCarthy argues, is that Russian activity in Crimea is viewed as an
example of what might happen to eastern Ukraine if Ukrainian
officials don’t “play ball the Russian way.”

McCarthy goes on to say that Putin may be trying to save what he
can from Ukraine having come to the conclusion that the situation
in Ukraine cannot be resolved in a way that will be beneficial to
Russian interests.

At the moment Russia is making it clear that Russian forces are
not going to be leaving Crimea any time soon, and has warned
Ukrainian forces in Crimea that they face attack if they do not
surrender by 03:00 GMT.

McCarthy highlights something interesting, which has been
mentioned a lot recently in coverage of the crisis in Ukraine; the
east of Ukraine, and its interest to Russia.

In the last few days and weeks, some in the media
have made much of the supposed political and cultural split in
Ukraine, with maps like the one to the right (showing how
Ukrainians voted in the 2010 presidential election) being shown as
an example of the divisions in Ukraine. 

However, this east-west split in Ukraine that has been recently
discussed is perhaps not as simple as it might initially appear to
be.

Over at
Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty Glenn Kates points out that
attempts to broadly define eastern Ukraine as culturally distinct
from western Ukraine are problematic, and shows that in the areas
surrounding the city of Kharkiv, which is located in eastern
Ukraine, the majority of people say Ukrainian is their native
language. Kates goes on to say that an attempt to split eastern
Ukraine from Ukraine would be opposed by many in the east and that
polling shows that most Russian speakers in Ukraine feel loyal to
Ukraine, not Russia:

Any effort to break eastern Ukraine from Ukraine proper would
meet resistance not only from the western half of the country, but
from wide swaths of Ukrainians living within those regions (This is
a good time to note that past polls have indicated that a majority
of Russian-speakers living in the country have also expressed
loyalty to Ukraine and not Russia. Also, some people who identify
themselves as Ukrainian-speaking may speak Russian in their
day-to-day lives).

Map of most common native languages in Ukraine
based on 2001 census to the right (Ukrainian in blue, Russian in
red).

Over at the
Kyiv Post, Ilya Timtchenko points out that maps
like the one above from the 2010 presidential election do not
reflect the current situation:

The problem is that much of the media’s referenced information
is coming from the outdated 2010 presidential elections or even
from 2004 Orange Revolution data. During the past seven months, the
picture has dramatically changed. As for the past month, the harsh
division is simply not there anymore.

Most of Ukraine’s citizens who represent the nation’s cultural
and intellectual society have held a view directly opposite to
mainstream Western media.

Timtchenko concludes:

The “divided Ukraine” narrative is seductive in its simplicity
and disastrous in its ramifications. Sure, it’s easier to consume.
But it’s also wrong—and it contributes to Putin’s plan to bring
catastrophe to a nation that is struggling for democracy and human
rights.

It should be noted that McCarthy does not cite the supposed
divisions between east and west Ukraine as a reason why Russia may
be using the situation in Crimea as a veiled threat to eastern
Ukraine. Of course, given the geographical reality of the
Russia-Ukraine border eastern Ukraine is more at risk of Russian
aggression than the west.

More from Reason.com on Ukraine here.

On Friday
the New York City medical examiner’s office released
autopsy results indicating that the actor Philip Seymour
Hoffman died accidentally on February 2 from “acute mixed drug
intoxication” involving cocaine, amphetamine,
and benzodiazepines as well as heroin. The combination of
heroin and benzodiazepines, a class of drugs that includes Valium
and Xanax, presumably was what killed him, since both depress
respiration. The stimulants may have masked the effects of the
depressants, leading Hoffman to consume more than he otherwise
would have.

Drug combinations like this are typical of deaths attributed to
heroin or other narcotics.
Data from the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN)
indicate that “multi-drug deaths” accounted for most fatalities
involving opiates or opioids in 2010: 72 percent in surburban New
York, 83 percent in Los Angeles, and 56 percent in Chicago, for
example. Back in the early 1990s, the share of
heroin-related deaths reported by DAWN that involved other
drugs was even higher, 90 percent or more. (Note that the numbers
in the table are misaligned and need to be shifted downward.) In
short, when someone dies from what is described as a heroin
overdose, the actual cause is usually a fatal mixture of two or
more substances, frequently including depressants such as alcohol
or prescription tranquilizers.

That fact can make it difficult to assign legal blame for an
“overdose” death. Under federal law, for instance, a drug dealer
faces a 20-year mandatory minimum sentence when “death or serious
bodily injury results from” consumption of his product. In January
the Supreme Court unanimously
ruled that when a death involves multiple drugs, the
prosecution has to show that the one supplied by the defendant was
a necessary or independently sufficient factor.

Under New York law such a case is
even harder to make. According to a
1972 decision that was upheld by the state’s highest court, a
drug dealer is not guilty of criminally negligent homicide merely
for supplying heroin and syringes to someone who died after
injecting the narcotic. Prosecutions for criminally negligent
homicide have been upheld in cases where the defendant played a
more active role in someone’s death—for example, by injecting
heroin or urging excessive alcohol consumption in the context of a
drinking game. The musician suspected of supplying heroin to
Hoffman, Robert Vineberg, has been
charged with felony drug possession, but so far he has not been
accused of homicide.

Given the circumstances of the typical heroin-related death,
avoiding risky drug combinations is an obvious harm reduction
measure that should be promoted by anyone interested in preventing
such fatalities. Yet it is rarely mentioned in the aftermath of
high-profile overdoses such as Hoffman’s, perhaps because of a bias
against advice that aims to make drug use less dangerous rather
than eliminate it completely. As I have
argued, that all-or-nothing attitude may also help explain why
Hoffman was so reckless once he fell off the wagon.

In an industrial part of the Bronx known as Hunts Point,
Giuliani-era zoning restrictions helped carve out a sort of mini
red light district. But recently the
city has been passive-aggressively targeting the area’s strip
clubs by going after their liquor licenses, according to
The New York Times. 

The move is part of a broader citywide crackdown on the strip
club industry: 

In the last several years, community leaders have found
increasing success petitioning the State Liquor Authority to revoke
the liquor licenses of numerous strip clubs in New York and deny
the applications of new clubs. The opponents cite crime, noise or
other quality-of-life issues, or highlight a club owner’s lack of
qualifications or possible criminal ties.

In other words, community leaders are trumping up charges and
relying on insinuations in order to use the state to shut down
businesses of which they disapprove. It’s an old trick, but
apparently still an effective one (cities tend to be all too happy
to find reasons to shut down strip clubs, anyway).

According to the Times, some clubs have continued to
operate sans alcohol—which does, as a result of other bizarre strip
club regulations, have the advantage of allowing dancers to be
fully nude. “But the resulting loss of customers makes clear that
the presence of alcohol is far more important than the absence of
pasties,” the Times notes cheekily.

Alcohol prohibition also zaps a major source of revenue for both
clubs and dancers (who at many clubs rely on earning a percentage
of the price of drinks that customers buy them). Bronx community
leaders are, of course, delighted by this. “They can’t make any
money if they don’t have a liquor license,” Rafael Salamanca, the
district manager of Bronx Community Board 2, gloated to the
Times. 

Going after their liquor licenses is easier in some cases than
others, however. For clubs where violence and trouble haven’t
manifested, the city is seeking out increasingly obscure and
technical reasons to deny or revoke alcohol privileges. The club
Platinum Pleasures had its liquor license revoked because it failed
to surrender it while temporarily shut down for construction and
for receiving $126,880 from “an unidentified interest.” The New
York Supreme Court upheld the State Liquor Authority’s decision to
revoke the license last week (the
building may now become a church).  

“I feel like we’re being censored,” said Jeff Levy, the
executive director of the Association of Club Executives of New
York, a trade and advocacy organization for the industry. “Just
because the community board or legislators don’t like this type of
entertainment doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

Community group and
politicans cite increased crime and other nuisances in areas
surrounding adult entertainment venues. But research on the issue
has been mixed. While studies funded by city governments and values
groups do tend to find correlations between strip clubs and crime,
numerous
studies have also shown the opposite. For instance, a 2004
Florida study found “rates of nude and semi-nude businesses” in
various counties
were not associated to increased property crimes, violent crimes,
or instances of rape.

University of California-Santa Barbara professor Daniel
Linz, who has done substantial research on the issue, says there
are problems with many of the studies that do purport to show huge
crime increases in areas around sexually-oriented businesses.
“Those studies that are scientifically credible demonstrate either
no negative secondary effects associated with adult businesses or a
reversal of the presumed negative effect,” he
told Salon in 2012. “We’ve done crime map after
crime map after crime map of many cities and there just aren’t
clusters of crime around [strip clubs]. Most crime in most cities
tends to occur around high schools.” 

Advocates of public education routinely
assert that greater government money and control are required to
fix what ails America’s schools. But as A. Barton Hinkle reports, a
public-private education partnership in Richmond, Virginia points
to a better solution: Forget the top-down formulas dictated by
bureaucrats in Washington or New York and focus on individually
tailored programs that treat every student differently.

View this article.

Club Med, of all places,
surveyed British parents to find out if they would take their kids
out of school for a vacation in defiance of laws that levy pretty
stiff fines on families that do just that. Almost half of
respondents said damned straight, some time with the family come
before staring at the chalkboard. That’s a nice reaffirmation of
healthy priorities, despite penalties that have cost some parents
the equivalent of a thousand dollars.

From a Club Med
press release:

Nearly half of parents (48%) would take their children out of
school to go skiing if it was cheaper, Club Med can reveal from
their official Ski Report-Skiing Together, Winter Sport Holidays
for Families, released today.

Despite the threat of fines from local authorities, British
families are keener than ever to take children out of school to
avoid the most expensive travelling weeks.

The findings from Club Med show that school isn’t always the
most important priority, but half of parents (48%) are inspired to
go skiing to challengetheir children to learn new skills.Over 40%
of parents choose skiing because it encourages them to bond as a
family, whilst over a quarter choose skiing for the physical
benefits–showing that children’s best interests are in mind even if
it means skipping the national curriculum.

Under the provisions of the Education
Act of 1996, parents have to ask school officials’ permission
to remove their kids from class outside a narrow range of
circumstances. Earlier this year, the Sutherland family, from
Trench, Telford, was
slapped with a £630 ($1,053) penalty for taking the wee ones to
Greece for a week without permission while school was in
session.

Stewart Sutherland, who chose a foreign country, ancient
culture, and the cradle of western civilization over hours in a
classroom, understandably said officials “don’t live in the real
world.”

I didn’t take my son skiiing or to Greece, last week, but I did
pull him out of school for two days so he could feed a tiger at a
safari park and tour Sinagua Indian ruins with his grandparents.
Fortunately, I didn’t need permission to give him a little
enriching family time.

It sounds as if a lot of British families might make the same
wise choice, even if they break a few rules along the way.

Out: Forcing minorities to
endure humiliating, pointless stop-and-frisk treatment from New
York City cops. In: Destroying minorities’ public education
opportunities by killing charter schools.

Have we already hit the “Miss me yet?” reformation stage of
nanny jerk ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg? Perhaps among education
reformists. Bloomberg may have been down on letting New Yorkers
make choices about how much soda to drink, but he was a fan of
school choice and charter schools.

Bill de Blasio is not so big of a fan. Toward the end of last
week, de Blasio announced the city would not allow three new
charter schools to share space with public school buildings. The
agreements were backed by Bloomberg toward the end of his
administration, but de Blasio isn’t having it. From
Fox News:

While dozens of charter schools’ deals with the city remain
unaffected, the four affected schools had already hired principals
and teachers, and were in the process of recruiting pupils. In
addition to the Harlem school, the move leaves in the cold two
affiliated schools run by the nonprofit Success Academy Charter
Schools, headed by de Blasio’s former City Council colleague Eva
Moskowitz.

“Explaining to students and families that they won’t have a
school next year is the most heartbreaking thing I’ve done at
Success Academies,” Moskowitz said in a statement. “No parent
should have to go through this.”

Charter schools do get a share of tax money to operate, but they
don’t get public funds to pay for locations or facilities. Thus,
this sharing (or sometimes full school takeovers) is a way for
charter schools to keep costs down, which helps make them more
available and accessible to the poor. And the poor are the
customers for these schools. Moskowitz isn’t running some
fly-by-night charter operation, either. Her Success Academy schools
do well. New York Daily News
notes:

Success Academy 4 children are 97% black and Hispanic. More than
three quarters are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price
lunch. Even so, a stunning 96% of the school’s kids passed the
tough new state math exam. Fifty three percent passed the English
exam — putting them in the top tier of all schools across the
state. …

At nearby PS 76, 8% of kids passed their state math tests, and
6% in English. At nearby PS 149, 3% of kids passed in math, and 7%
in English. At nearby Frederick Douglass 2, 3% of kids passed in
math, and 9% in English.

De Blasio’s attitude toward charter schools may make him the
darling of the
United Federation of Teachers, but it’s putting him at odds
with a growing number of Democratic leaders, including President
Barack Obama, who
praised a Harlem charter school in a recent speech promoting
so-called “Promise Zones” for poor communities.

There’s a well-publicized rift in the Republican Party on how
they should approach social issues and pork-filled defense
spending. But there’s a much less publicized rift in the Democratic
Party about charter schools, which despite what detractors
connected to education unions say, are growing more and more
popular among the parts of the Democratic base that don’t work for
the government (and even among some who do). The fight may not have
broken the party open wide like what we’re seeing among Republicans
because the battles are taking place on the state and local levels.
It’s definitely a conflict to watch, though, as charter school
popularity continues to grow.

If you feel like delving deep into school choice issues on this
dismal Monday, watch Reason TV’s recent hour-long panel discussion
from National School Choice Week, featuring National School Choice
Week President Andrew Campanella, Reason Foundation Director of
Education Policy Lisa Snell, former Arizona Superintendent and
education reformer Lisa Keegan, Pacific Research Foundation
Educational Director Lance Izumi, and California Teachers’
Empowerment Network founder Larry Sand:

“Coding Boot Camps Can Get Students Jobs; No Wonder CA is
Busting Them (Nanny of the Month 2-14)” is the latest video
from ReasonTV. Watch above or click on the link below for video,
full text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and more Reason
TV clips.

View this article.

Monday afternoon, Robert
Duncan will report to Mendota Federal Prison in Fresno,
Calif., to begin a two-year prison sentence. His crime? Working for
a medical marijuana business that was legal under California state
law. Not owning it; not profiting from illegal sales. Merely for
being employed by the business.

The collective of dispensaries Duncan worked for, known as
MediZen, was raided by federal authorities in 2011 during a
crackdown on medical marijuana providers by the Obama
administration. 

Read the article
here.

More:
‘I’m Going To Prison For Working At A Pot Shop That Was Legal In My
State’