Category: reason

British officials believe that a British man
linked to the rebel jihadi group Jabhat al-Nusra may have
carried out a suicide bombing in the northern Syrian city of
Aleppo. If the identity of the suicide bomber is confirmed it will
be the first known suicide bombing carried out by a Briton in the
Syrian Civil War.

The man, identified by Jabhat al-Nusra as Abu Suleiman
al-Britani, reportedly drove a truck full of explosives into a
prison wall.

From the BBC:

The al-Nusra Front said Abu Suleiman al-Britani had driven a
truck full of explosives at the walls of Aleppo prison on Thursday
and detonated it.

The bombing was reportedly part of an attempted jailbreak by
fighters from the hardline Islamist groups, Ahrar-al-Sham and the
al-Nusra Front.

Heavy fighting broke out between the rebels and Syrian forces,
causing dozens of casualties on both sides.

Activists said as many as 300 inmates managed to escape, but the
Syrian government denied the report.

According to reporting from
The Telegraph, after a senior research fellow at the
International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at Kings
College in London reached out to Britons in Syria to confirm the
reports he received the following text:

Lol, yes, news travels fast. The first British brother!

The Telegraph goes on to note that Charles Lister, a
terrorism adviser at the Brookings Center in Doha, Qatar is “99 per
cent” certain that al-Britani was killed in the suicide attack on
the Aleppo prison.

Last December, I wrote about a
Sky News report on a British jihadi group fighting in
Syria. Members of the group claim that hundreds of British
jihadis are fighting in Syria. Recently, a video emerged of a
British extremist
torturing a moderate rebel in Syria. 

This week, the latest round of peace talks between
representatives from the Syrian government and some of Assad’s
opposition began. According to Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations
envoy, little
progress is being made at the talks. 

More from Reason.com on Syria here. 

Michael Sam, a defensive
lineman at the University of Missouri and top N.F.L.
 prospect, has just become a household name. While he has been
known in the college sports world as an outstanding athlete, his
new notoriety comes not solely because of his football talent but
because he publically announced on Sunday that he is gay. Though
Americans have become increasingly tolerant and supportive of
homosexuality, many people can’t help but wonder whether Sam has
damaged his career prospects by coming out in advance of the NFL
draft.

However, the Reason-Rupe poll
finds that instead Americans don’t really care if their
favorite athlete is gay. Seventy-seven percent of Americans say it
wouldn’t make a difference and another 10 percent say they would be
even more likely to support their favorite athlete. Only 12 percent
say they would be less likely to support a favored sports player
who came out as gay.

The National Football League has
released a statement that echoes the feelings of most
Americans: “We admire Michael Sam’s honesty and courage. Michael is
a football player. Any player with ability and determination can
succeed in the N.F.L. We look forward to welcoming and supporting
Michael Sam in 2014.” But it remains to be seen whether Sam’s
announcement will have any impact come draft time. Jason Collins, a
former NBA player, announced that he way gay after the last season
ended. Now a free-agent, he has yet to be signed by another team,
although NBA commission Adam Silver
says this isn’t related to his sexual orientation.

But for now, Michael Sam is feeling good. The New York Times

reports that for Sam, “coming out to his team was a positive
step, on a path that seems as if it will lead to the N.F.L.” The
Reason-Rupe telephone poll of 1,003 Americans
finds that 25 percent think having an openly gay professional
athlete would be a positive development for society while most, 57
percent, say it wouldn’t make much of an impact either way.

Full details on the Reason-Rupe poll can be found
here.

On Saturday, a police officer
in Filer, Idaho responded to a call about two dogs running around
without leashes on a suburban street. Thirty-eight seconds after
exiting his patrol car, Officer Tarek Hassani determined that one
of the animals was too aggressive and fatally shot it in the front
yard of its owner’s house. A
video (NSFW) shows the 7-year-old black labrador
convulsing and whimpering before moving out of the dash cam’s line
of sight.

The dog, named “Hooch,” belonged to Rick Clubb, who says he
suffers from Parkinson’s disease and that Hooch was his trained
service animal. At the time of the shooting, Clubb was apparently
inside, hosting his 9-year-old son’s birthday party.

Hassani
explained to another officer after the altercation ended, “I
get out to talk to the people, two dogs come around me, one of
them’s growling and snarling. I kick it. It comes back around, now
it’s growling and snarling. I kick it again. Then it lunges at me,
I’m like, fuck you. So, I just shot it.”

Although it is not visible on the video, the audio picks up the
sound of the officer’s car door opening and within two seconds, the
pet begins yelping, presumably, as Hassani acknowledges, because he
kicked it. 

Hassani gave Clubb a $100 citation for letting the dog run
at-large.

Clubb
told KTVB, “My dogs, they’d get out, yes, but you don’t have to
shoot them. There’s other ways around it besides shooting them.” He
speculated about the officer’s action,
asking the Times–News, “What if [a bullet]
had ricocheted through the window?” Clubb acknowledged, “Maybe I
deserve a ticket, but I don’t deserve a dead dog.”

Police Chief Tim Reeves
explained to a local Fox affiliate, “My decision was that
[Hassani] did a good job and he was totally justified in putting
the dog down.”

On Saturday, a police officer
in Filer, Idaho responded to a call about two dogs running around
without leashes on a suburban street. Thirty-eight seconds after
exiting his patrol car, Officer Tarek Hassani determined that one
of the animals was too aggressive and fatally shot it in the front
yard of its owner’s house. A
video (NSFW) shows the 7-year-old black labrador
convulsing and whimpering before moving out of the dash cam’s line
of sight.

The dog, named “Hooch,” belonged to Rick Clubb, who says he
suffers from Parkinson’s disease and that Hooch was his trained
service animal. At the time of the shooting, Clubb was apparently
inside, hosting his 9-year-old son’s birthday party.

Hassani
explained to another officer after the altercation ended, “I
get out to talk to the people, two dogs come around me, one of
them’s growling and snarling. I kick it. It comes back around, now
it’s growling and snarling. I kick it again. Then it lunges at me,
I’m like, fuck you. So, I just shot it.”

Although it is not visible on the video, the audio picks up the
sound of the officer’s car door opening and within two seconds, the
pet begins yelping, presumably, as Hassani acknowledges, because he
kicked it. 

Hassani gave Clubb a $100 citation for letting the dog run
at-large.

Clubb
told KTVB, “My dogs, they’d get out, yes, but you don’t have to
shoot them. There’s other ways around it besides shooting them.” He
speculated about the officer’s action,
asking the Times–News, “What if [a bullet]
had ricocheted through the window?” Clubb acknowledged, “Maybe I
deserve a ticket, but I don’t deserve a dead dog.”

Police Chief Tim Reeves
explained to a local Fox affiliate, “My decision was that
[Hassani] did a good job and he was totally justified in putting
the dog down.”

The very valuable SCOTUSblog last week
wrote up some of the gun cases up for possible consideration by
the Supreme Court soon, a few of which will be considered in a
conference by the Court later this month. The Court has notoriously
avoided the many issues unresolved by 2008’s
Heller and 2010’s McDonald
cases so far:

The Justices at their private Conference on February 21 will be
examining two cases filed by the National Rifle Association,
raising basic questions about the power of Congress and state and
local governments to pass gun control laws.  In different
ways, each of those petitions seeks to draw the Court’s attention
to the lingering issue of gun rights in public places.  The
cases are NRA v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms (13-137) and NRA
v. McCraw (13-390)……

Both of the new cases deal with laws — a federal law in 13-137,
a Texas law in 13-390 — that restrict access to handguns for young
adults eighteen, nineteen, and twenty years old.   In
separate rulings, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
upheld both laws at issue, and in the process raised serious doubts
about whether the Second Amendment even applies to gun rights
claims of those who are under the age of twenty-one but still
regarded as adults….

The petition in the federal case is a sweeping claim that lower
federal courts have been engaging in “massive resistance” to the
Court’s landmark decisions on Second Amendment rights….

The petition in the state case….is a straightforward plea
to extend the Second Amendment beyond the home, because it involves
a state law that bars almost all youths ages eighteen through
twenty from carrying a handgun in public.  Texas requires a
license to carry a gun in public, but those in that age
group are not eligible to get such a license.  The
petition in that case said that the Supreme Court in 2008 settled
that the “right to keep arms” applies within the home, so now, it
argued, it is time for the Court to decide whether the “right
to bear arms” means the right to carry them when one leaves
home…..

The Court may announce as early as February 24 whether it is
going to hear any of these cases.

The forthcoming April issue of
Reason (subscribe now!) has a
feature by me, “Five Gun Rights Cases to Watch,” which focuses on,
among other cases, NRA v. BATFE. It also
discusses another case related to restrictions on the right to
obtain carry permits, Drake v. Derejian, that has also
filed for certiorari to the Court, 

If you have a neighborhood guy or gal who helps
you sort your receipts every April, you’ll be happy to know they
can breathe a little easier this tax season.

In 2012, the IRS decided unilaterally to impose new continuing
education and licensing requirements on tax prep companies,
threatening to put little guys out of business, while protecting
giants like H&R Block.

The libertarian legal outfit Institute for Justice (IJ) helped
mom-and-pop tax prep firms
challenge the new
regs, and despite some
time in legal limbo, they’ve been
winning their way up the legal chain. 

In my inbox today, this good news from IJ: 

Today, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the IRS had
no legal authority to impose a nationwide licensing scheme on
tax-return preparers.  The decision affirms a January 2013
ruling by U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg, which struck
down the IRS’s new regulations as unlawful.  Both courts
rejected the agency’s shocking claim that tax-preparer licensure
was authorized by an obscure 1884 statute governing the
representatives of Civil War soldiers seeking compensation for dead
horses.

Here’s what the D.C. Circuit Court had to say:

“the IRS may not unilaterally expand its authority through such
an expansive, atextual, and ahistorical reading of [the
statute].”

This is pretty much the judicial equivalent of shouting “BOOM”
and dropping the mic.

And rightly so. If the new rules had been enforced, they would
have endangered the livelihoods of tens of thousands of small
businessmen and entrepreneurs, not to mention the sanity of
thousands of people who might have started prepping their taxes on
their own.

The Indian blogosphere is up in arms today against Penguin’s
decision to withdraw University of Chicago Divinity School
Professor Wendy Doniger’s 2009 The Hindus: An Alternative
History. The 700-page-plus tome offended Hindu nationalists, a scourge on humanity not quite as
bad as the Ebola virus, who took exception to its description of
the Shiv Lingam, a representation of God Shiva that Hindus worship,
as a phallic symbol, among other things.

Folks at the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti — the self-appointed
guardians of Indian knowledge — filed a suit in 2011 demanding a
ban. They charge that the book had “factual inaccuracies” and was
written with “a Christian missionary’s zeal” to denigrate Hinduism
and show it in a poor light.” Never mind that Doniger is not a
Christian and is actually a great admirer of Hinduism, which she
regards as a far more existentially profound faith than
monotheistic religions. In fact, her aim in writing the book was to
save Hinduism from misinterpretations of both hostile alien
interlocutors and nativist Hindutva boosters.

Here is a flavor of the book from a review
by Daily Beast columnist Tunku Vardarajan, former Newsweek
international editor:

A religion without a central church or pontiff — and with no
predominant sacred place (a la Mecca) — Hinduism has spawned
hundreds of competing devotional sects and theological strains. Ms.
Doniger does a deft job of tracing their few unifying tenets —
those of karma (actions) and dharma (righteousness) and a
merit-based afterlife and of holding these beliefs up to critical
examination against the obvious injustices of the caste system. Her
most beguiling chapters, though, are the ones in which she examines
the impact on the Hindus of India’s numerous foreign invaders —
from the earliest “Aryans” in the second millennium B.C. to the
imperial British, the last and perhaps greatest external shapers of
Hindu society.

But before the Indian courts could rule (and it is bad enough
that they allow such suits to even go forward), Penguin not only
agreed to pull the book from India but destroy all hard copies
within six months.

Penguin is a private publisher and can do what it wants. It
previously held the line against Islamo fascists demanding a ban on
The Satanic Verses.

It is not clear whether it is purely bottom-line considerations
that are driving it this time. But if they are, one just hopes
there is a special place in hell for it — or it reincarnates as a
cockroach, as per Hindu tradition.

The silver lining in all this, as Doniger told England-based
Salil Tripathi last night, is that in the age of Internet, Penguin
can’t actually ban the book. “Anyone with a computer can get the
Kindle
edition from Penguin, NY, and it’s probably cheaper, too.”

So go for it dear readers. It’s for a good cause.

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the
technology development wing of the U.S. Department of Defense, is
looking to
install “black boxes” in soldiers’ brains to help revive
memory.

Since 2000, an estimated 280,000 soldiers endured brain
injuries. If soldiers could be furnished with the device, the
complex black box technology could potentially trigger memory and
mitigate brain loss suffered in combat.

While DARPA, naturally, set its sights on military applications,
implications for dementia and alzheimers patients stirs excitement.
Geek
predicts the neurotechnology “could become a key ‘upgrade’ for
humans in the coming decades.”

But even advocates admit the technology faces a long, uncertain
climb. Especially since neuroscientists are still not sure how
memory works. Bloomberg
reports, “It’s still far from certain that such work will
result in a device.”

While potential applications are exciting, they are limited.
Geoff Ling, Deputy Director of DARPA’s Defense Sciences
office, 
explained to Bloomberg:

The DARPA initiative isn’t designed to recover the type of
memories used to recall a person’s name. Instead, it would help
wounded warriors recover ‘task-based motor skills’ necessary for
‘life or livelihood.’

They hope the tax-funded implants will help patients remember
how to do simple, everyday activities like “tie their shoes and
perhaps eventually operate machinery or fly planes” Ling said.

DARPA has a history of sponsoring some weird technology. Think
wall-climbing suits
called “gecksin,” inspired by geckos. But its research also
helped lead to the Internet. It recently closed a
contract with IBM for “self-destructing” technologies and
launched a plan to “revolutionize web search.”

Earlier, Nick Gillespie
took the “Stalin apologists” at the New York Times to
task for what constituted a drive-by ideological shooting:
wondering why “liberal” Chinese dissident Xia Yeliang, who wants
more personal freedom and less government control for his country,
would take a job at the “ultraconservative” Cato Institute, which
favors more personal freedom and less government control for
everybody. He quoted
Mediaite‘s  Andrew Kirell dismantling Times‘
scribbler Tamar Lewin’s bizarre characterization of Cato, and
borrowed the “Stalin apologist” line came from the title of a

book about Walter Duranty, long the New York Times‘
representative in the Soviet Union, and a well-known shill for the
brutal communist regime. But you don’t have to go back that far to
find a soft spot at the Times for brutal regimes.

On April 12, 1990, while communism was collapsing throughout
much of the world and the reality of its crimes becoming undeniable
to even the worst red-flag-waving dumbshit cheerleaders, the gray
lady ran a weird piece about a financially struggling Los Angeles
retirement home full of aging communists. Under the bizarrely
off-key title, “Political
Idealists Trying to Hold Back the Night,” came the tale of old
lefties watching the curtains drawn on their preferred political
system.

Waldemar Hille joined the Communist Party 48 years ago believing
that the movement would create a more compassionate and humane
America.

Today, as Communism falters in Europe, the 82-year-old Mr. Hille
is fighting to preserve ”an important people’s institution,” a
retirement home for political activists….

Mr. Hille, a pianist who worked with the singers Paul Robeson
and Pete Seeger (and was blacklisted along with them in the
McCarthy era), now considers himself a ”humanist” more than a
Communist. But he remains critical of the American system.

”Organized capitalism is an evil thing in itself,” he said in
an interview in a shady courtyard of the Spanish-style residence
home. ”It’s profits versus people.” He feels the changes in
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union are good ”if they reflect the
will of the people.” He is sure his hero, Lenin, would have
approved.

Can you imagine a similarly
misty-eyed treatment of a bunch of gray-haired German-American
Bundists? Can you imagine such a piece appearing at a
hypothetical moment when millions of people were escaping the
oppression of collapsing Nazi regimes?

Granted, none of the people quoted in the article explicitly
endorsed Stalin, but a taste for Lenin instead is like a
preference for Goering or Mussolini over Hitler. You really don’t
get points for that.

Yes, that article appeared in 1990, but that was at a
particularly inopportune moment to sympathetically profile aging
champions of fading totalitarianism, and decades after the
newspaper should have learned from Duranty’s crimes.

Which is why any ideological criticism from the New
York Times needs to be taken with a huge grain of
salt—preferably a grain that hasn’t been extracted from a mine by
political prisoners.

“House of Cards” is
hardly a flattering portrait of the political animal—so why are
D.C.’s political animals so crazy about the show? As Ezra Klein
notes, the show’s vision of D.C. power brokers “efficiently and
ruthlessly carrying out complicated plans” is at odds with the
“fractious and bumbling” reality. The people actually running the
show can’t set up a functional healthcare website or prevent a
29-year-old contractor from walking off with the NSA’s “family
jewels.” Schemes with a lot of moving parts are generally beyond
their capability. That may be why D.C. pols enjoy the show so much.
It’s a Beltway power fantasy, an embodiment of Washington’s id. “I
wish things were that ruthlessly efficient,” President Obama has
said of the show: “It’s like Kevin Spacey, man, this guy’s getting
a lot of stuff done.” Gene Healy see what he means, though he’d
feel more comfortable if he hadn’t added that last bit.

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