Category: reason

Today,
nearly a year after Adam Lanza murdered 20 children and six adults
at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the
state’s attorney managing the investigation of the massacre, Steven
Sedensky, issued a report that
refutes or casts doubt on several theories about Lanza and his
horrifying crimes. A few highlights:

1. Did Lanza have a grudge against the
school?

“The shooter indicated that he loved the school and liked to go
there….As best as can be determined, the shooter had no prior
contact with anyone in the school that day. And, apart from having
attended the school as a child, he appears to have had no
continuing involvement with SHES….The evidence clearly shows that
the shooter planned his actions, including the taking of his own
life, but there is no clear indication why he did so, or why he
targeted Sandy Hook Elementary School.”

2. Did mental illness make him do it?

“The shooter had significant mental health issues that affected
his ability to live a normal life and to interact with others
[including social awkwardness and a lack of empathy that his mother
described as Asperger syndrome]….What contribution this made to
the shootings, if any, is unknown….The shooter’s mental status is
no defense to his conduct as the evidence shows he knew his conduct
to be against the law. He had the ability to control his behavior
to obtain the results he wanted, including his own death.”

3. Could he have been stopped if only people had paid
attention to warning signs?

“Those mental health professionals who saw him did not see
anything that would have predicted his future
behavior….[Investigators] have not discovered any evidence that
the shooter voiced or gave any indication to others that he
intended to commit such a crime…[In high school,] he was not
known to be a violent kid at all and never spoke of
violence….Despite a fascination with mass shootings and firearms,
he displayed no aggressive or threatening tendencies.”

4. Did obsessive playing of violent video games warp his
mind?”

“He played video games often, both solo at home and online. They
could be described as both violent and non-violent. One person
described the shooter as spending the majority of his time playing
non-violent video games all day, with his favorite at one point
being ‘Super Mario Brothers.’…The shooter liked to play a game
called ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ (DDR)….He regularly went to the
area of a theater that had a commercial version of the DDR game in
the lobby. In 2011 and up until a month before December 14, 2012,
the shooter went to the theater and played the game. He went most
every Friday through Sunday and played the game for four to ten
hours.”

5. What about drugs?

“No drugs were found in the shooter’s system….Reportedly the
shooter did not drink alcohol, take drugs, prescription or
otherwise, and hated the thought of doing any of those things.”

6. Could a better background check system for gun buyers
have stopped him?

“All of the firearms were legally purchased by the shooter’s
mother. Additionally, ammunition of the types found had been
purchased by the mother in the past, and there is no evidence that
the ammunition was purchased by anyone else, including the
shooter.”

• Enrollment through Colorado’s insurance exchange
  is
  barely half the projected worst case scenario, which officials
  say will make it difficult for the state “to deliver on promises
  made to Colorado citizens” and jeopardize the program’s revenue
  stream. The American Lung Association and the American Cancer
  Society, both supporters of the Affordable Care Act, nevertheless
  
  oppose Obamacare’s tobacco surcharge, arguing it will push
  smokers out of insurance policies and make it even more difficult
  for them to quit.
• National Security Advisor Susan Rice is in
  Afghanistan, where she is
  expected to meet with Hamid Karzai to discuss the post-2014
  security pact between the two countries.
• The U.S. government
  reportedly turned a larger profit on student loans,$41.3
  billion, than all but two companies worldwide, Exxon Mobil and
  Apple.
• State police in New York have
  acquired 32 SUVs so that troopers can more easily peer into
  cars to catch drivers who are texting.
• A Texas man has been in
  prison for more than 30 years despite having his conviction
  overturned and a new trial ordered in 1980.
• A couple in the Florida Keys were
  mistakenly shipped 11 pounds of marijuana to a rental property
  in Louisiana. They turned the marijuana in to local police in
  Florida, who say the couple could’ve been arrested had cops
  discovered the marijuana while the couple was unknowingly driving
  it back to Florida.
• Microsoft
  acknowledged a “very small number” of customers purchased Xbox
  Ones with serious disc reading issues. No blue screens
  reported.

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Peter Orszag was the director of the White House
Office of Management and Budget for the first year and a half of
the Obama administration. Other than President Obama himself, he’s
the person most identified with the argument that health reform was
necessary to save the government money. Ira Stoll wants to know why
Orszag has gone so quiet since the disastrous launch of
Healthcare.gov and Obamacare.

View this article.

Republicans are not happy about the
deal relating to Iran’s nuclear program that was announced over the
weekend. The deal includes,
among other things, Iran halting uranium enrichment above 5
percent and neutralizing “near-20% enriched uranium”.

House Majority Leader
Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has expressed concern about the enrichment
allowed in the deal, saying “Loosening sanctions and recognizing
Iran’s enrichment program is a mistake, and will not stop Iran’s
march toward nuclear capability.”

Sen.
Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) has a statement on his website that reads
in part:

By allowing the Iranian regime to retain a sizable nuclear
infrastructure, this agreement makes a nuclear Iran more likely.
There is now an even more urgent need for Congress to increase
sanctions until Iran completely abandons its enrichment and
reprocessing capabilities.

Sen. Ted Cruz
(R-Texas) says that he agrees with Israeli President Benjamin
Netanyahu, who called the deal “a historic mistake.” A statement
from Sen. Cruz begins:

According to the interim agreement regarding Iran’s nuclear
program that was reached this weekend in Geneva, not one centrifuge
will be destroyed. Not one pound of enriched uranium will leave
Iran.

So, what is all this fuss about uranium enrichment, and why does
it matter?

Less than one percent of natural uranium is uranium-235, the
isotope needed for nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Enriched
uranium is uranium that has had the percentage of uranium-235
increased, which can be done by using centrifuges.

Low-enriched uranium (3.5
percent to 5 percent) can be used for nuclear power. In order
to develop a nuclear weapon highly enriched uranium (about
90 percent) is needed. With this in mind, it initially seems
that the requirements that Iran halt enrichment at 5 percent and
dilute or convert uranium enriched at 20 percent greatly reduces
the risk of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon.

However, the deal only requires Iran to not install any new
centrifuges, not have them destroyed. This means that Iran could
renege on the deal and work towards a so-called “nuclear breakout.”
According to
David Albright, president of the U.S. Institute for Science and
International Security, once the enrichment conditions of the deal
are met “the breakout time – how long it would take Iran to produce
sufficient highly-enriched uranium for one atomic bomb – would
lengthen from at least 1-1.6 months to at least 1.9-2.2 months if
the Iranians used all their installed centrifuges.”

The New York Times has a good graphic illustrating the
deal and its impact on uranium enrichment, which can be seen

here. 

The fact that Iran could still develop a nuclear weapon through
aggressive uranium enrichment once the new deal is implemented is
what has Republicans, not to mention Israeli officials, concerned.
An unnamed official from Netanyahu’s office summarized the concerns

as follows, “The agreement makes it possible for Iran to
continue enriching uranium, permits Iran to keep centrifuges that
would allow it to create fissile material for nuclear
weapons.” 

Yesterday, Iranian President
Hassan Rouhani said that his country would never seek a nuclear
weapon.

Netanyahu and some Republicans may not be happy with the deal,
which has not eliminated the possibility of Iran developing a
nuclear weapon. That said, the diplomats involved in the deal
deserve some praise for managing to come up with any deal at all
given the far from ideal relationship between Iran and the West,
particularly the U.S. 

It should not be surprising that Netanyahu isn’t a fan of the
recent deal. It is very unlikely that there are any conditions
under which Israel and Iran would realistically be able to meet to
discuss Iran’s nuclear program, especially given that
Netanyahu has said that Israel is willing to “act alone” to
ensure Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon and has called
President Rouhani a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

That Republicans are critics of the deal should not be a
surprise, there is a Democrat in the White House. As
Fred Kaplan has rightly pointed out, “Had George W. Bush
negotiated this deal, Republicans would be hailing his diplomatic
prowess, and rightly so.”

So the U.S. (by which we mean Germany,
France, England, Russia, China, and the U.S.) and Iran are striking
a deal about nuclear development in the Peacock Kingdom and U.N.
sanctions.

One odd byproduct? An aligning of interest between Israel and
Saudi Arabia, which are hardly friendly to one another. Yet both
countries – along with a number of other Sunni-majority states in
the Middle East – are absolutely opposed to the United States
cozying up to Iran.

The Saudis now fear Obama may be tempted to thaw ties with
Tehran by striking a deal to expand inspections of its atomic sites
in return for allowing Iranian allies to go on dominating Arab
countries such as Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. That such a bargain has
never been publicly mooted from within the Obama administration has
not stopped Saudis voicing their concerns.

“I am afraid in case there is something hidden,” said Abdullah
al-Askar, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in Saudi
Arabia’s advisory parliament, the Shoura Council. “If America and
Iran reach an understanding it may be at the cost of the Arab world
and the Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia.”

More here.

As Ed Krayewski

noted earlier today, Israel – or at least its elected leader,
Benjamin Netanyahu – is apoplectic at the deal. And
as Matt Welch wrote, hawkish elements in the American GOP are
trying to wrap any deal with Iran in the mantle of appeasement and
Munich Redux. Given that a majority of Americans are interested in
seeing the United States play a more limited role in disputes
around the globe, it’s going to be tough sledding for hawks to push
the idea that we need to be bombing Iran even as we negotiate with
the country. Funny how a decade-plus of failed foreign wars have
made everyone but neocon hawks rethink U.S. foreign policy, isn’t
it?

Which isn’t to say that Obama is a good spokesman for American
interests. He’s a trigger-happy character himself, who tripled
troops in Afghanistan, tried to stay in Iraq past the original
withdrawal date (something he’s succeeding at in Afghanistan
incidentally), unconstitutionally dispatched American forces over
Libya, and was all set to bomb Syria until wiser, cooler heads won
the battle of public opinion.

And then there’s John Kerry, our secretary of state. As Hawkeye
Pierce once said of Col. Henry Blake, the hapless commander of the
good ol’ fashioned M*A*S*H 4077 in that awful TV series that lasted
five times longer than the Korean War, I honestly believe John
Kerry could get held up via the mail. 

Is Iran a trustworthy negotiating partner? Kind of a weird
question coming from people in a country that was bugging the phone
of Angela Merkel and other allies, but no, Iran isn’t trustworthy.
Which doesn’t mean you don’t negotiate with them – it just means
you trust but verify, as Reagan counseled with the Soviets.

The Hill, citing a behind the paywall
Wall Street Journal story, reports that National Security
Agent director Keith Alexander offered to resign over the Edward
Snowden revelations that Alexander had overseen a massive
warrantless surveillance program aimed against American citizens.
From
The Hill:

The National Security Agency’s director, Gen. Keith Alexander,
offered to resign from his post shortly after Edward Snowden began
leaking classified government documents, according to
The Wall Street Journal.

According to the report, the Obama administration rejected his
offer.

Snowden, a former NSA contractor, began disclosing documents
detailing the agency’s surveillance programs in June.

Top administration officials’ confidence in Alexander was
shaken, the Journal reports, because he oversaw the agency
during the security lapse, an unidentified former senior defense
official told the paper. 

But an Alexander resignation, the official added, would indicate
Snowden won, and wouldn’t solve the security problem.

Certainly wouldn’t want to be seen as admitting to violations of
the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans to remain secure in their
persons and papers against unreasonable search and seizure.

Rather than merely accepting Alexander’s resignation, President
Obama should have fired him and that
bald-faced liar to Congress, James Clapper, the Director of
National Intelligence. Frankly, it appears that President Obama
doesn’t fire incompetent and mendacious minions out of fear that it
will make him look weak. Actually, the opposite is true. In
addition, the president should immediately
pardon Edward Snowden.

“For the third year in a row the (member)
countries have found a new way to say absolutely nothing,” asserted
Oxfam director Winnie Byanyima, as the U.N.’s annual climate change
conference limped inconsequentially to its end on Saturday in
Warsaw. The 19^th Conference of the Parties (COP-19) to
the U.N. Framework Convention of Climate Change (UNFCCC) was
supposed to set out a roadmap toward completing a global treaty
that would bind all countries to some kind of commitments to reduce
their greenhouse gas emissions after 2020 at the Paris COP-21 in
2015. No commitments were made and no clear roadmap was adopted at
the Warsaw talks. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald
Bailey looks forward to achieving similar results when the U.N.
climate change conference convenes next year in Lima, Peru.

View this article.

Amrit
Marajh, the 28-year-old accused of sucker-punching Shmuel Perl, a
24-year-old Orthodox Jew, in the side of the head on Friday in the
Borough Park neigborhood of Brooklyn, has been
charged with assault, which makes sense, and aggravated
harassment as a hate crime, which is harder to figure out. Leave
aside the question of whether a criminal should be punished extra
severely when he is motivated by bigotry. (He shouldn’t.)
According to
ABC News, Perl said he “heard his alleged attackers daring each
other to punch him out minutes before one actually assaulted him.”
Hence the assault has been described as the latest example of “the
knockout game,” a pastime supposedly sweeping the nation in which
young assailants dare each other to knock out randomly selected
targets with a single punch. But if the victims are picked at
random, as the knockout game supposedly requires, can they also be
selected based on their ethnicity or religion? ABC does not
mention any anti-Semitic slurs or other evidence that Marajh
was looking for a Jew to attack, and neither do the accounts in

The New York Times, the New York
Daily News, or
The Jewish Press. So why the hate crime charge? The
Daily News story suggests that Perl just happened to
be walking down the street at the wrong moment:

Amrit Marajh, 28, had just left a bar on McDonald Ave. on Friday
with four friends and was talking about boxing when the knockout
game came up, police sources said. 

“You can’t do that,” one member of the group said as they came
upon Shmuel Perl, 24, according to a source.

Marajh allegedly said, “Yes I can, I’ll do it to this guy right
now!” before punching Perl in the face, leaving him bruised.

Marajh’s lawyer, by contrast, told the Daily News “this
had nothing to do with the knockout game.” Also in dispute: whether
the knockout game is actually a thing. “Police officials in several
cities where such attacks have been reported said that the ‘game’
amounted to little more than an urban myth,” the
Times reports,
“and that the attacks in question might be nothing more than the
sort of random assaults that have always occurred.” For
example:

Much news coverage of reported knockout
attacks includes 2012 footage from a surveillance camera in
Pittsburgh of James Addlespurger, a high school teacher who
was 50, being swiftly struck to the ground by a young man
walking down an alleyway with some friends. Yet the Pittsburgh
police said the attacker insisted the assault was not part of any
organized “game.”

“This was just a random act of violence,” Police Commander Eric
Holmes said in a televised interview last year. “He stated that he
was just having a bad day that day.” The assailant saw Mr.
Addlespurger, the commander said, “and decided this was a course of
action he was going to take.”

Once such crimes are relabeled, of course, young thugs who are
inclined to attack people for no particular reason may start using
the new terminology, thereby retroactively validating it. If Marajh
and his friends really were talking about “the knockout game,” they
were probably discussing what they’d heard from news outlets hyping
this supposedly new trend.

Amrit
Marajh, the 28-year-old accused of sucker-punching Shmuel Perl, a
24-year-old Orthodox Jew, in the side of the head on Friday in the
Borough Park neigborhood of Brooklyn, has been
charged with assault, which makes sense, and aggravated
harassment as a hate crime, which is harder to figure out. Leave
aside the question of whether a criminal should be punished extra
severely when he is motivated by bigotry. (He shouldn’t.)
According to
ABC News, Perl said he “heard his alleged attackers daring each
other to punch him out minutes before one actually assaulted him.”
Hence the assault has been described as the latest example of “the
knockout game,” a pastime supposedly sweeping the nation in which
young assailants dare each other to knock out randomly selected
targets with a single punch. But if the victims are picked at
random, as the knockout game supposedly requires, can they also be
selected based on their ethnicity or religion? ABC does not
mention any anti-Semitic slurs or other evidence that Marajh
was looking for a Jew to attack, and neither do the accounts in

The New York Times, the New York
Daily News, or
The Jewish Press. So why the hate crime charge? The
Daily News story suggests that Perl just happened to
be walking down the street at the wrong moment:

Amrit Marajh, 28, had just left a bar on McDonald Ave. on Friday
with four friends and was talking about boxing when the knockout
game came up, police sources said. 

“You can’t do that,” one member of the group said as they came
upon Shmuel Perl, 24, according to a source.

Marajh allegedly said, “Yes I can, I’ll do it to this guy right
now!” before punching Perl in the face, leaving him bruised.

Marajh’s lawyer, by contrast, told the Daily News “this
had nothing to do with the knockout game.” Also in dispute: whether
the knockout game is actually a thing. “Police officials in several
cities where such attacks have been reported said that the ‘game’
amounted to little more than an urban myth,” the
Times reports,
“and that the attacks in question might be nothing more than the
sort of random assaults that have always occurred.” For
example:

Much news coverage of reported knockout
attacks includes 2012 footage from a surveillance camera in
Pittsburgh of James Addlespurger, a high school teacher who
was 50, being swiftly struck to the ground by a young man
walking down an alleyway with some friends. Yet the Pittsburgh
police said the attacker insisted the assault was not part of any
organized “game.”

“This was just a random act of violence,” Police Commander Eric
Holmes said in a televised interview last year. “He stated that he
was just having a bad day that day.” The assailant saw Mr.
Addlespurger, the commander said, “and decided this was a course of
action he was going to take.”

Once such crimes are relabeled, of course, young thugs who are
inclined to attack people for no particular reason may start using
the new terminology, thereby retroactively validating it. If Marajh
and his friends really were talking about “the knockout game,” they
were probably discussing what they’d heard from news outlets hyping
this supposedly new trend.

“What we’ve witnessed in the past 25 or 30 years is just
incredible,” says Iron Chef Geoffrey
Zakarian about the culinary revolution in America. “We’ve
birthed 30,000 or 40,000 restaurants. I used to go to Europe every
year to get experience [and ideas]. I don’t go to Europe anymore. I
go to Oregon, I go to Washington. I go to Louisiana, I go to Little
Rock. I go to Austin. I travel New York City. I don’t go to Europe
anymore.”

In a wide-ranging interview with Reason’s Nick Gillespie held at
The Lambs Club on November 5, the night before the
annual Reason Media
Awards, Zakarian talks about why America’s cuisine has become a
hotbed of innovation and experimentation, how tough it is to make
it in the restaurant business under the best of circumstances, and
how food nannies are preventing even-better cuisine. “I can’t use
[raw milk] cheese without running afoul of the health inspectors,”
he says.

View this article.