Category: reason

In Ukraine’s Crimean region, tensions
continue to rise as hundreds of heavily armed men began patrolling
two airports and are blocking road access with military vehicles.
Who they are, though, remains unclear.

The Minister of Internal Affairs issued a statement describing
the action at Simferopol, a civilian airport, and Sevastopol, a
military airbase, as an “armed invasion and occupation in violation
of all international treaties and norms. It is a direct provocation
of armed bloodshed in the territory of a sovereign state.”

Acting President Oleksandr Turchynov
said that that “judged by our special services” that although
they bear no insignia, the gunmen surrounding these locations are
“professional soldiers.”

Daniel Sanford of the BBC speculates
that “they could be a pro-Russian militia or they could be Russian
troops,” because “they don’t want to say who they are but are being
helped by pro-Russian activists, who are keeping cameras at a
distance.

Although the Russian government has previously threatened
intervention, has been running military exercises near the border
this week, and is reportedly both
flying military helicopters in Ukrainian airspace and blocking
Balaklava Bay with an armed ship, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet
denies any involvement in the airport standoffs.

The region has a large ethnic Russian population and some want
to
break entirely from Ukraine.

Meanwhile, ousted fugitive President Viktor Yanukovych, whose
whereabouts were unknown after he fled the capital one week ago,
has reemerged in Russia. He spoke at a press conference in
Rostov-on-Don rejecting foreign military intervention in Ukraine’s
domestic affairs, but said that
“Russia should and must act.” He
blamed the nation’s instability on western powers and the
opposition, describing the latter as “pro-fascist activists” and
“bandits.” Yanukovych also said he won’t participate in the
presidential election in May 2014, calling
the decision to move the vote from February 2015 as “unlawful,”
though he also assured that he remains Ukraine’s legitimate leader.
Opposition leader Vitali Klitschko today confirmed
that both he and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko will
run.

For more Reason coverage of Ukraine, click
here.

Strictly speaking, Maryland
lawmakers aren’t overtly planning a gift to cigarette
smugglers, but that’s certainly going to be the ultimate result of
a proposal to massively hike taxes on all sorts of tobacco
products. The share of cigarettes supplied in the state by the
black market more than doubled from 2006 to 2011 under the pressure
of politicians’ appetite for other people’s money. That can only
continue to grow if
SB 589 becomes law and gives the state the fourth highest
cigarette tax rate in the country.

According to Jeremy Bauer-Wolfe at
MarylandReporter:

The Senate Budget and Taxation Committee heard testimony
Wednesday on
SB 589, which would increase the tobacco tax rate from $2 for a
pack of cigarettes to $3. The bill also calls for steep hike on all
other tobacco products — from 30% to 95% of the wholesale
price.

Products affected would include cigars, roll-your-own, and forms
of smokeless tobacco.

The bill would give Maryland the fourth highest tobacco tax
rates in the nation. No. 1 is New York at $4.35 per pack of
cigarettes. (Cigarette smugglers nabbed by comptroller’s agents
coming through Maryland from 30 cents-a-pack Virginia are often
headed to New York.)

According to estimates by the Mackinac Center for Public
Policy, which tracks tobacco taxes and smuggling, 25.76 percent
of Maryland’s cigarettes come from the black market, up from 10.38
percent in 2006 (the state doubled cigarette taxes in 2007). Not
only is it logical to expect that a further hike in taxes would
increase illegal sourcing of tobacco products, but Mackinac’s
Michael D. LaFaive and Todd Nesbit were even kind enough to suggest
by how much:

We also modeled for Maryland the impact of a recently proposed
50 percent hike in its excise tax, from $2 per pack to $3. If such
an increase were enacted in Maryland, the proportion of smuggled
cigarettes consumed by its smokers would leap from 26 percent of
the total market to 52 percent, and would actually result in a net
decline in tobacco tax revenues.

In New York, with the highest taxes in the country, the black
market already supplies 60.94 percent of the market, so a
52 percent share seems quite plausible if Maryland lawmakers move
forward with their attempted mugging of the state’s smokers. To
beat the taxman, smokes are smuggled in from low-tax jurisdictions,
from out of the country, or manufactured off the books and
under the legal radar.

Legislators really are the gift that keeps on giving—to people
who find economic opportunity in restrictive laws and high taxes.
Participants in the underground economy may want to consider
settting aside a few bundles of smoke-infused cash as thank-you
campaign donations to legislators. If they didn’t already do so to
get to this point, that is.

Here’s a moving little documentary about how VHS machines, a
shadowy entrepreneur, and a ubiquitous voice-over translator gave
the oppressed, audio-visually starved Romanians living under
Ceausescu a little dynamic glimpse of what freedom might look
like:

Director Ilinka Calugareanu adds some thoughts
here. Link via the Twitter feed of Kmele
Foster.

I wrote about the integral role of movies and culture in
Romanian politics (both before and after Ceausescu) in this

2005 Reason piece, which details how the show Dallas
was miraculously smuggled into the dictator’s shrinking TV
schedule. For more on J.R.’s liberatory role, watch this Reason.tv
vid:

In “Is U.S. Economic Growth
Over?,” a 2012 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic
Research, the Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon
argued that the country was in for 25 to 40 years of very slow
growth. In particular, Americans in the bottom 99 percent of the
U.S. income distribution could expect only 0.2 percent annual
increases in their real per capita disposable incomes. Faltering
technological innovation contributes substantially to the fall off
in future growth. Gordon has just published another study,“The
Demise of U.S. Economic Growth: Restatment, Rebuttal, and
Reflections,” in which he seeks to bolster his earlier conclusions.
Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey thinks Gordon
is too pessimistic about the trajectory of technological progress,
but admits that the economist has a point when it comes to the
doleful direction of the economic headwinds.

View this article.

“Let me put it this way: If one year from now, you’re not using
Dark Mail, it’s because you enjoy knowing the NSA is reading your
emails,” says Ladar Levison, founder of Lavabit, the email provider used by
former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

After Snowden’s identity became known, Levison shut down
Lavabit, posting the following message on the company website:

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become
complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from
nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After
significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I
wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my
decision. I cannot.

Levison was prohibited from discussing any details of the case
until last October, when the court unsealed a portion of the
documents. The unsealed records reveal that the FBI was demanding
access to Lavabit’s Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) keys, which would
essentially allow the agency access to all messages on Lavabit’s
server. While the FBI was ostensibly targeting only a single user,
Levison was unwilling to sacrifice the privacy of his other
400,000+ users.

He is still not allowed to discuss the identity of the user the
FBI hoped to target.

Levison sat down with Reason TV’s Zach Weissmueller at the
Messaging
Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) conference to talk more about
his decision to fight the federal government, his thoughts on
Edward Snowden, and his vision for Dark Mail, a collaborative effort with
Silent Circle, another
encrypted email service that shut down in the wake of Snowden’s NSA
revelations. 

Click the link below for downloadable versions.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by Sharif Matar.
Approximately 15 minutes.

Subscribe to Reason TV’s
YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new
material goes live.

View this article.

Every year around Christmastime, some cousins,
friends, and I partake in a bar crawl around our hometown. The
first year, this included the local strip club (located behind the
town’s public library, because we’re classy like that). But when we
tried to return the following year, the elderly barmaid/bouncer
refused to let me in. Everyone else she would allow, but she was
certain it was illegal for Ohio drinking establishments to accept a
Washington, D.C., driver’s license as valid identification. And
though we tried to reason with her—I had just come from
the bar across the street, which seemed to find my ID perfectly
acceptable—this lady was nothing doing. 

I bring this up because one might assume an official agent of
the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be smarter
than your average 70-year-old barkeep at an Ohio strip club. But
then one would assume wrong. In what is surely my favorite tale of
TSA incompetence in recent memory, a TSA agent at the Phoenix
airport
didn’t think that D.C. drivers’ licenses counted as valid ID,
owing to the fact that D.C. isn’t a real state.

According to the Washington Post, D.C. resident Ashley
Brandt was attempting to fly home last week when she ran into a
little glitch going through security. After taking a look at her
D.C. license, a TSA agent told her, “I don’t know if we can accept
these.” Did Brandt perhaps have real identification, like a U.S.
passport, with her?

“She didn’t seem to know that it was basically the same as a
state ID,” Brandt
told the Post. “The whole thing was kind of ridiculous
and strange. Apparently in Arizona, they’re not sure we’re all
right.”

The befuddled agent called out to a manager, who assured her
that, yes, the TSA does accept D.C. licenses as identification. Now
if only someone could convince that bartender for me … 

(H/T
Boing Boing) 

California State Sen. Rod Wright, a Democrat
representing Inglewood, was convicted in January of eight counts of
voter fraud and perjury for lying about whether he lived in his
district. Though he has taken a
leave from his position, he is still technically a state
senator. Republicans have attempted to remedy the situation with a
resolution to expel Wright from the Senate, only to have Democratic
Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg shift the resolution to
committee to block it.

Republicans are amazed at the decision, with Sen. Steve Knight
pointing out that its unprecedented for a state lawmaker to be
convicted of felonies and not have resigned by this point.
Hilariously, Steinberg seems to think that there’s a chance that
the judge could overturn the verdict, so they shouldn’t act too
rashly. From the
Sacramento Bee:

Permanently expelling Wright is premature, Steinberg said,
because the action couldn’t be undone and Wright is planning to ask
the judge to overturn the jury’s guilty verdicts. He is scheduled
to be sentenced May 16.

“Senator Wright has already left the building. And unless the
judge sets aside the jury’s verdict, Senator Wright will not be
coming back,” Steinberg said during his floor speech.

Steinberg acknowledged that judges almost always uphold juries’
verdicts, but said Wright is not technically convicted until the
judge finalizes the jury’s verdicts.

“The integrity of this institution cannot tolerate a convicted
felon in its ranks. But at this point in time Senator Wright is not
a convicted felon,” Steinberg said.

If Wright goes and if State Sen. Ron Calderon, recently charged
by the feds for
corruption, gets convicted, the Democrats will lose their
supermajority in the legislature, thus giving Republicans a little
bit more influence on lawmaking.

In an interesting counternarrative,
John Hrabe at CalNewsroom writes about how, despite this one
lie about where he lived, Wright was very good at challenging his
own party on its love of regulation and the impact on California
citizens and was a supporter of gun rights. He also supported

legalizing online gambling in California.

One of the most interesting public opinion phenomenons of the
last several months has been the rapid shift against the
president’s health care law amongst the people it was supposed to
help the most—the uninsured. Unfavorable views of Obamacare
continued to rise amongst those who lack insurance this month,
according to the
latest health tracking poll from the Kaiser Family
Foundation.

Shortly after the law passed in 2010, a 57 percent majority of
the uninsured said they approved of Obamacare. And views of the law
were divided fairly evenly as late as last fall. But since the
rollout of the exchanges began last October views have become far
less favorable amongst those without coverage. The Kaiser poll now
finds that amongst the non-elderly uninsured, 54 percent say they
do not approve of the health law while only 22 percent say they
favor it, a split of 34 points. 

You can’t make this stuff up.
Mother Jones has credulously published, “Study:
Global Warming Will Cause 180,000 More Rapes by 2099.” The MJ
article is citing a new study from the
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management that
purports to calculate that future man-made global warming will fuel
higher crime rates in the United States over the rest of the
century. The study projects:

Between 2010 and 2099, climate change will cause an additional
22,000 murders, 180,000 cases of rape, 1.2 million aggravated
assaults, 2.3 million simple assaults, 260,000 robberies, 1.3
million burglaries, 2.2 million cases of larceny, and 580,000 cases
of vehicle theft in the United States.

Crime and higher temperatures do correlate, but there are likely
to be some mitigating factors over the next century. Maybe those
seeking sexual satisfaction or indulging in violent sexual
fantasies will turn to the animatronic delights of highly
responsive sex robots. With regard to property crimes, perhaps
every physical possession will be connected to a vastly elaborated
Internet of Everything and stolen items would simply refuse to
cooperate with thieves or they might alert passersby that they have
been feloniously taken. And why steal vehicles when nearly everyone
rents cheap self-driving automobiles on demand? 

Finally, keep in mind that while average temperatures in the
United States have
increased since the 1970s, the crime rate (including rape) has

been falling for nearly two decades.

Great first person narrative from Bill Bradley at Next
City dramatizing
a point I wrote about last month, on
“Petty Law Enforcement vs. The Poor,” as a guy is taken to jail
for jogging in a park at night when it turns out a bill he paid to
the state years ago wasn’t processed properly.

Excerpts:

There were 11, myself included, from the 72nd precinct and a
scattering of other perps from precincts across Brooklyn [in the
system that morning]. Only three of us were white. Everyone was in
for various petty and pointless crimes: Unpaid speeding tickets,
hopping a turnstile, outstanding summons. New York’s misdemeanor
courts are essentially debtor’s courts. Keep a dude out of work for
the day so he’ll pay his tickets…..

All of the people in my holding cell awaiting a hearing were
“little fish.” One, a 28-year-old who grew up in various Brooklyn
housing projects (Red Hook, Gowanus), “got out of the hustle” and
landed a job as a courier for a corporate building on Madison
Avenue. “I don’t have to think about cops no more,” he told me. “I
got my 9-to-5, my steady check and my girl at home.” He was worried
that his morning in jail, after he’d been arrested for trespassing
in his girlfriend’s friend’s apartment building (which he had been
invited to, but the cops were having none of that), might
jeopardize his job. Another man was concerned that if he didn’t see
the judge before the court adjourned for lunch at 1pm he, too,
might lose his job.

“The court system reveals its true class hatred by the fact that
it’s scheduled to fuck mostly with working class people,” [Legal
Aid Society lawyer Danny] Ashworth said. “The people who are trying
to scrape together some lawful existence.”

Ashworth said the majority of the offenders he sees are
low-income residents and young men of color….

Ashworth did not mince words with his assessment of the police
department’s bias. “There’s so many ways to get snagged,” he said.
“And what that means is, the officers can pick and choose who is
going to pay. They can look at a guy’s car. They can size up who’s
inside the car. They make these implicit class and race judgments.
And who winds up getting tagged most of the time? Police want a
certain class and group of people walking around in a constant
state of fear. Always looking over their shoulder. They want,
basically, a state of terror instilled in the mindset of certain
classes and races and groups of people.”…..

Young black and Latino men account for only 4.7 percent of the
city’s population. In 2011, they accounted for
41.6 percent of all stop-and-frisks….