Category: reason

French army
chief Admiral Edouard Guillaud has said that French troops should
be allowed to pursue Al Qaeda-linked fighters beyond Mali,
where the French military has been engaged in operations against
Islamic militants since January this year.

Speaking to Europe 1 radio, Guillaud said, “I think we should
hunt them down everywhere. That’s why we are working with our
neighbours Niger, Burkina Faso, and Chad, and also cooperating with
Algeria so that there is no sanctuary for them.”

From
Euronews:

PARIS (Reuters) – French troops should be allowed to hunt
down al Qaeda-linked militants beyond Mali’s borders, French army
chief Admiral Edouard Guillaud said in a rare interview on
Thursday.

Nine months after they were scattered across the Sahara by waves
of French air strikes, Islamists in Mali are making a comeback –
naming new leaders, attacking U.N. peacekeepers and killing two
French journalists.

Follow these stories and more at Reason 24/7 and don’t forget you
can e-mail stories to us at 24_7@reason.com and tweet us
at @reason247. 

Look at
recent history, writes Sheldon Richman. In 2003 Iraq’s government
had no nuclear weapons. The U.S. government invaded, and before
long Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was hanging from a rope. In
2011 Libya’s government had no nuclear weapons. The U.S. government
led NATO on a bombing campaign to help a group of rebels, and
before long Libyan Col. Muammar Qaddafi lay dead on a roadside.
Today Syria has no nuclear weapons. The U.S. government and NATO
are currently aiding rebels seeking to overthrow President Bashar
al-Assad. On the other hand, North Korea has nuclear weapons, and
Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un appears safe from any regime change
sponsored by the U.S. government and NATO. Lesson for foreign
leaders who are in the doghouse with the U.S. government: Get a
nuke. But Iran is not building a bomb.

View this article.

A few days old but just came to my attention this morning, a

Wall Street Journal apologia from former Federal
Reserve worker Andrew Huszar (he “managed the Federal Reserve’s
$1.25 trillion agency mortgage-backed security purchase
program”) on how QE wasn’t necessarily good for me or
thee:

As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for
executing the centerpiece program of the Fed’s first plunge into
the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The
central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main
Street. But I’ve come to recognize the program for what it really
is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time….

The Fed said it wanted to help—through a new program of massive
bond purchases. There were secondary goals, but Chairman Ben
Bernanke made clear that the Fed’s central motivation was to
“affect credit conditions for households and businesses”: to drive
down the cost of credit so that more Americans hurting from the
tanking economy could use it to weather the downturn. For this
reason, he originally called the initiative “credit easing.”

Huszar was called in to help the Fed navigate new waters of
economic intervention:

In its almost 100-year history, the Fed had never bought
one mortgage bond. Now my program was buying so many each day
through active, unscripted trading that we constantly risked
driving bond prices too high and crashing global confidence in key
financial markets. We were working feverishly to preserve the
impression that the Fed knew what it was doing.

It wasn’t long before my old doubts resurfaced. Despite the
Fed’s rhetoric, my program wasn’t helping to make credit any more
accessible for the average American. The banks were only issuing
fewer and fewer loans. More insidiously, whatever credit they were
extending wasn’t getting much cheaper. QE may have been driving
down the wholesale cost for banks to make loans, but Wall Street
was pocketing most of the extra cash….

Trading for the first round of QE ended on March 31, 2010. The
final results confirmed that, while there had been only trivial
relief for Main Street, the U.S. central bank’s bond purchases had
been an absolute coup for Wall Street. The banks hadn’t just
benefited from the lower cost of making loans. They’d also enjoyed
huge capital gains on the rising values of their securities
holdings and fat commissions from brokering most of the Fed’s QE
transactions. Wall Street had experienced its most profitable
year ever in 2009, and 2010 was starting off in
much the same way.

Huszar says he was unhappy with that result, and quit.

Where are we today? The Fed keeps buying roughly $85 billion in
bonds a month…

And the impact? Even by the Fed’s sunniest calculations,
aggressive QE over five years has generated only a few percentage
points of U.S. growth. By contrast, experts outside the Fed, such
as Mohammed El Erian at the Pimco investment firm, suggest that the
Fed may have created and spent over $4 trillion for a total return
of as little as 0.25% of GDP (i.e., a mere $40 billion bump in U.S.
economic output). Both of those estimates indicate that QE isn’t
really working.

Reason on
quantitative easing.

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Join Reason’s own Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, and some of most
interesting speakers around for a spectacular week in the western
Caribbean on board the brand-spanking new Celebrity Silhouette!
Beginning February 9, 2014, you’ll embark on a seven-day cruise
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will be: 

• Skeptical Environmentalist Bjorn
  Lomborg,

• Historian Johan Norberg,

• Author and former Reason Editor in Chief
  Virginia Postrel

• Reason Editor in Chief Matt
  Welch,  

• ReasonTV Editor in Chief Nick
  Gillespie, 

• Reason Science Correspondent Ron
  Bailey, and

• Reason Senior Editor Jacob
  Sullum

We’ll be traveling in style on the Celebrity Silhouette, and
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Make your reservations now and start planning how free minds and
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register today, visit www.reasoncruise.com.

This president’s
announcement today that the White House will allow health
insurance companies to continue selling plans that do not meet the
Affordable Care Act’s minimum criteria—millions of which have
already been subject to cancellation notices—is likely to be a
pivotal moment in the political fight over the 2010 health law.
It’s the moment in which President Obama, prodded by his own party,
is making his first, tacit admission that Obamacare is
unworkable.

It may not seem that way at first, because the most immediate
impact of the move is to stave off political pressure. The
announcement comes in response to growing urgings from
congressional Democrats to take action in response to health plan
cancellations that have occurred, and are expected to continue
occurring, as a result of Obamacare. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and
five other Senate Democrats
said this week that they backed a bill that would require
insurers to continue offering plans into 2014. A separate bill
offered by Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) would have simply allowed
insurers to keep offering plans that do not meet Obamacare’s
requirements.

Today’s announcements gives Democrats a response to complaints
about plan cancellations. The White House has heard their
complaints, they can say, and is doing something about it.

What the administration is really doing, though, is attempting
to shift the blame. Insurers have spent months if not years
preparing for the changes and requirements enacted under Obamacare.
They will have a difficult time turning on a dime and extending
cancelled policies.

But now when people lose their plans, the White House and its
Democratic allies in Congress will be able to argue that this isn’t
a result of their law. It’s the insurers fault. As one insurance
industry source
tells Buzzfeed, “This doesn’t change anything other than force
insurers to be the political flack jackets for the administration.
So now when we don’t offer these policies the White House can say
it’s the insurers doing this and not being flexible.”

Yet this isn’t just a political fix. It’s also a major policy
concession—and a potentially serious problem for the law’s
operating scheme. Allowing healthy people to stay on their current
low-cost health plans will mean that the pool of people who get
insurance through Obamacare’s exchanges will be sicker and more
expensive. This year’s premiums were set on the expectation that
noncompliant plans would be cancelled, and that the cancellations,
in combination with the mandate to purchase coverage, would create
a market for plans sold in the exchanges.

So Obama is creating a long-term policy problem in order to
solve a short-term political problem. Even if this temporarily
reduces some of today’s political pressure, those long-term policy
problems will rebound to create additional political problems as
time goes by.
Premiums will rise, and plans may withdraw from the market. At
the same time, insurers, who have been targeted by the
administration for blame and had their assurances about the state
of the law upended, will be less likely to cooperate with the
administration. They are already frustrated with the
administration, and this will hasten the break between them. The
opposition of insurers will add a new layer of opposition that the
administration must contend with in order to make the law—which is
built around the goal of making insurance coverage
accessible—work.

The White House is making this fix unilaterally, as an
“administrative fix” without Congressional approval, and probably
without clear legal authority. Even ignoring legal questions, it’s
an admission that the health law cannot work as designed,
especially in light of the now-lengthy history of administrative
tweaks of dubious legality.

But more than that, the tweak highlights the fundamental tension
between the law’s politics and its policies.

The law was sold on the repeated presidential assurance that
anyone who wanted to keep his or her existing health plan could do
so. That promise was made so often and so forcefully because it was
necessary to build enough support to pass the law, and—as we’ve
seen in this week’s Democratic defections—to maintain sufficient
political support for the law after it passed. Administration
political aides
rejected more nuanced, accurate language because they believed
it wouldn’t help sell the law.

But the result of keeping that promise is the destabilization of
the law’s fundamental policy scheme, which requires healthy people
on low-cost insurance to purchase more expansive, more expensive
coverage in order to balance out the costs of sicker
individuals.

In other words, the law can’t work if it does live up to its
presidential promises. But it can’t maintain political support if
it doesn’t. The two are incompatible. Obama’s announcement today is
an implicit acknowledgment of that incompatibility—an admission not
only that the law doesn’t work, but that it can’t and won’t.

Capping off a lawsuit running since 2005, the U.S. District
Court for the Southern District of New York today
granted summary judgment to Google  to end the case
of Authors Guild v. Google.

Choice excerpt from the decision:

by helping readers and researchers identify books, Google
Books benefits authors and publishers. When a user clicks on a
search result and is directed to an “About the Book” page, the page
will offer links to sellers of the book and/or libraries listing
the book as part of their collections…..The About the Book page
for Ball Four [whose author is one of the parties suing Google
Books], for example,provides links to Amazon.com,
Barnes&Noble.com, Books-A-Million, and
IndieBound….

A user could simply click on any of these links to be
directed to a website where she could purchase the book. Hence,
Google Books will generate new audiences and create new sources of
income. As amici observe: “Thanks to . . . [Google Books],
librarians can identify and efficiently sift through possible
research sources, amateur historians have access to a wealth of
previously obscure material, and everyday readers and researchers
can find books that were once buried in research library
archives.”

The full decision in Author’s Guild v.
Google as a whole gives a pretty good mini history of
Google’s book scanning projects and a good defense of its many uses
to literary and scholarly achievements and culture. But the legal
nub of why Judge Denny Chin decided the authors can go pound sand
and Google triumphs is:

I assume that plaintiffs have established a prima facie
case of copyright infringement against Google…Google has
digitally reproduced millions of copyrighted books, including the
individual plaintiffs’ books, maintaining copies for itself on its
servers and backup tapes…..Google has made digital copies
available for its Library Project partners to download…..Google
has displayed snippets from the books to the public….Google has
done all of this, with respect to in-copyright books in the Library
Project, without license or permission from the copyright owners.
The sole issue now before the Court is whether Google’s use of the
copyrighted works is “fair use” under the copyright laws. For the
reasons set forth below, I conclude that it is.

The Judge then breaks down the four factors usually
considered in “fair use” determinations and finds Google wins.
(This excerpt doesn’t deal with all four points):

The use of book text to facilitate search through the
display of snippets is transformative….to a broad selection of
books. Similarly, Google Books is also transformative in the
sense that it has transformed book text into data for purposes of
substantive research, including data mining and text mining in new
areas, thereby opening up new fields of research. Words in books
are being used in a way they have not been used before. Google
Books has created something new in the use of book text….Google
Books does not supersede or supplant books because it is not a tool
to be used to read books. Instead, it “adds value to the original”
and allows for “the creation of new information, new aesthetics,
new insights and understandings.”…

Google does not sell the scans it has made of books for
Google Books; it does not sell the snippets that it displays; and
it does not run ads on the About the Book pages that contain
snippets. It does not engage in the direct commercialization of
copyrighted works…Accordingly, I conclude that the first factor
[basically, is the use transformative?] strongly favors a finding
of fair use.

And the Judge thinks Google Books isn’t hurting the book
sales business:

plaintiffs argue that Google Books will negatively impact
the market for books and that Google’s scans will serve as a
“market replacement” for books…..It also argues that users could
put in multiple searches,varying slightly the search terms, to
access an entire book….Neither suggestion makes sense. Google
does not sell its scans, and the scans do not replace the books.
While partner libraries have the ability to download a scan of a
book from their collections, they owned the books already — they
provided the original book to Google to scan. Nor is it likely that
someone would take the time and energy to input countless searches
to try and get enough snippets to comprise an entire book. Not only
is that not possible as certain pages and snippets are blacklisted,
the individual would have to have a copy of the book in his
possession already to be able to piece the different snippets
together in coherent fashion….

a reasonable fact finder could only find that Google Books
enhances the sales of books to the benefit of copyright holders. An
important factor in the success of an individual title is whether
it is discovered — whether potential readers learn of its
existence….Google Books provides a way for authors’ works to
become noticed, much like traditional in-store book
displays….Indeed, both librarians and their patrons use Google
Books to identify books to purchase…..Many authors have noted
that online browsing in general and Google Books in particular
helps readers find their work, thus increasing their
audiences. Further, Google provides convenient links to
booksellers to make it easy for a reader to order a book. In this
day and age of on-line shopping, there can be no doubt but
that Google Books improves books sales…..

Google Books provides significant public benefits. It
advances the progress of the arts and
sciences, while maintaining respectful
consideration for the rights of authors and other
creative individuals, and without
adversely impacting the rights of copyright
holders. It has become an invaluable research
tool that permits students, teachers, librarians,
and others to more efficiently identify and
locate books. It has given scholars the ability,
for the first time, to conduct full-text searches
of tens of millions of books. It preserves books,
in particular out-of-print and old books
that have been forgotten in the bowels of
libraries, and it gives them new life. It
facilitates access to books for print-disabled
and remote or underserved populations. It
generates new audiences and creates new sources
of income for authors and publishers. Indeed, all
society benefits.

It’s a court decision so there are lots of interesting
complications in the whole thing, but that’s the jist. Google Books
as it stands can keep on truckin’ without compensating authors.

Capping off a lawsuit running since 2005, the U.S. District
Court for the Southern District of New York today
granted summary judgment to Google  to end the case
of Authors Guild v. Google.

Choice excerpt from the decision:

by helping readers and researchers identify books, Google
Books benefits authors and publishers. When a user clicks on a
search result and is directed to an “About the Book” page, the page
will offer links to sellers of the book and/or libraries listing
the book as part of their collections…..The About the Book page
for Ball Four [whose author is one of the parties suing Google
Books], for example,provides links to Amazon.com,
Barnes&Noble.com, Books-A-Million, and
IndieBound….

A user could simply click on any of these links to be
directed to a website where she could purchase the book. Hence,
Google Books will generate new audiences and create new sources of
income. As amici observe: “Thanks to . . . [Google Books],
librarians can identify and efficiently sift through possible
research sources, amateur historians have access to a wealth of
previously obscure material, and everyday readers and researchers
can find books that were once buried in research library
archives.”

The full decision in Author’s Guild v.
Google as a whole gives a pretty good mini history of
Google’s book scanning projects and a good defense of its many uses
to literary and scholarly achievements and culture. But the legal
nub of why Judge Denny Chin decided the authors can go pound sand
and Google triumphs is:

I assume that plaintiffs have established a prima facie
case of copyright infringement against Google…Google has
digitally reproduced millions of copyrighted books, including the
individual plaintiffs’ books, maintaining copies for itself on its
servers and backup tapes…..Google has made digital copies
available for its Library Project partners to download…..Google
has displayed snippets from the books to the public….Google has
done all of this, with respect to in-copyright books in the Library
Project, without license or permission from the copyright owners.
The sole issue now before the Court is whether Google’s use of the
copyrighted works is “fair use” under the copyright laws. For the
reasons set forth below, I conclude that it is.

The Judge then breaks down the four factors usually
considered in “fair use” determinations and finds Google wins.
(This excerpt doesn’t deal with all four points):

The use of book text to facilitate search through the
display of snippets is transformative….to a broad selection of
books. Similarly, Google Books is also transformative in the
sense that it has transformed book text into data for purposes of
substantive research, including data mining and text mining in new
areas, thereby opening up new fields of research. Words in books
are being used in a way they have not been used before. Google
Books has created something new in the use of book text….Google
Books does not supersede or supplant books because it is not a tool
to be used to read books. Instead, it “adds value to the original”
and allows for “the creation of new information, new aesthetics,
new insights and understandings.”…

Google does not sell the scans it has made of books for
Google Books; it does not sell the snippets that it displays; and
it does not run ads on the About the Book pages that contain
snippets. It does not engage in the direct commercialization of
copyrighted works…Accordingly, I conclude that the first factor
[basically, is the use transformative?] strongly favors a finding
of fair use.

And the Judge thinks Google Books isn’t hurting the book
sales business:

plaintiffs argue that Google Books will negatively impact
the market for books and that Google’s scans will serve as a
“market replacement” for books…..It also argues that users could
put in multiple searches,varying slightly the search terms, to
access an entire book….Neither suggestion makes sense. Google
does not sell its scans, and the scans do not replace the books.
While partner libraries have the ability to download a scan of a
book from their collections, they owned the books already — they
provided the original book to Google to scan. Nor is it likely that
someone would take the time and energy to input countless searches
to try and get enough snippets to comprise an entire book. Not only
is that not possible as certain pages and snippets are blacklisted,
the individual would have to have a copy of the book in his
possession already to be able to piece the different snippets
together in coherent fashion….

a reasonable fact finder could only find that Google Books
enhances the sales of books to the benefit of copyright holders. An
important factor in the success of an individual title is whether
it is discovered — whether potential readers learn of its
existence….Google Books provides a way for authors’ works to
become noticed, much like traditional in-store book
displays….Indeed, both librarians and their patrons use Google
Books to identify books to purchase…..Many authors have noted
that online browsing in general and Google Books in particular
helps readers find their work, thus increasing their
audiences. Further, Google provides convenient links to
booksellers to make it easy for a reader to order a book. In this
day and age of on-line shopping, there can be no doubt but
that Google Books improves books sales…..

Google Books provides significant public benefits. It
advances the progress of the arts and
sciences, while maintaining respectful
consideration for the rights of authors and other
creative individuals, and without
adversely impacting the rights of copyright
holders. It has become an invaluable research
tool that permits students, teachers, librarians,
and others to more efficiently identify and
locate books. It has given scholars the ability,
for the first time, to conduct full-text searches
of tens of millions of books. It preserves books,
in particular out-of-print and old books
that have been forgotten in the bowels of
libraries, and it gives them new life. It
facilitates access to books for print-disabled
and remote or underserved populations. It
generates new audiences and creates new sources
of income for authors and publishers. Indeed, all
society benefits.

It’s a court decision so there are lots of interesting
complications in the whole thing, but that’s the jist. Google Books
as it stands can keep on truckin’ without compensating authors.

Earlier this month, four prominent climate
change activists sent an
open letter to their fellow environmentalists urging them to
drop their opposition to nuclear power as a zero-carbon energy
source. The response was, to say the least, pusillanimous. Ted
Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, founders of the pro-progress*
Breakthrough Institute, have now called out in a great column,
“The
Great Green Meltdown,” the nuclear naysayers among the
“mainstream” environmentalist groups for their casuistical
rejection of this climate-friendly energy source:

Nuclear energy today is broadly recognized by scientists,
scholars, and analysts as an environmentally positive technology
with risks, such as they are, overwhelmingly outweighed by its
environmental benefits. Such is the consensus on this question that
mainstream environmental leaders no longer attempt to contest
it.

And so, in response to the letter from climate scientists, and
the
airing of Pandora’s Promise on CNN, the NRDC and CAP
led a chorus of green spokespersons claiming that their
opposition to nuclear was based not on environmental but rather
economic grounds.

“What’s weird is that the environmental movement is being held
up as an obstacle,” green jobs advocate Van Jones told Wolf
Blitzer. “Don’t blame us! Nuclear power is incredibly
expensive.”
NRDC’s Dale Bryk told a CNN audience that the reason the United
States wasn’t building nuclear was because “the market is not
choosing nuclear.” Her colleagues, Ralph Cavanagh and Tom
Cochran wrote
at CNN.com, “No American utility today would consider
building a new nuclear power plant without massive
government support.”

But rather than obscure the dogmatism that underlies green
opposition to nuclear energy, the economic arguments further
revealed it. Having demanded policies to make energy
more expensive, whether cap and trade or carbon taxes, greens now
complain that nuclear energy is too expensive. Having spent
decades advocating heavy subsidies for renewable energy, greens
claim that we should turn away from nuclear energy because it
requires subsidies. (emphasis added) And having spent the
last decade describing global warming as the greatest market
failure in human history, greens tell us that, in fact, we should
trust the market to decide what kind of energy system we
should have. 

It was hard, at times, to tell whether the claims made about
renewables in particular were purely cynical or just delusional.
The Sierra Club’s
Brune claimed that declining US emissions over the last five
years had been achieved thanks to wind and solar, a claim
that has no plausible basis in fact. US emissions are down
thanks to cheap gas, not renewables. Indeed, since the last US
nuclear plant came on line in 1997, nuclear has avoided more
emissions through simply increasing energy generation
from existing nuclear plants than have been avoided by
wind and solar power combined.

If an environmentlist is not in favor of nuclear power
(preferably liquid thorium reactors), then he or she is simply not
serious about halting any man-made global warming.

The whole column is worth your time.

*Noted because so many modern “progressives” actually oppose
technological progress.

No issue in
recent years has polarized Americans as much as Obamacare. It
produced a party-line vote in Congress, a near-fatal court battle,
a revolt by states that refused to run exchanges or expand
Medicaid, dozens of House votes to repeal it and, now, a bungled
launch that could be its undoing. It’s a barroom brawl that never
ends. Steve Chapman says that it didn’t have to be this way,
pointing to examples of other once-controversial issues solved by
federalism.

View this article.

It’s hard not to wonder whether the
interest by some senators to bring fear mongering on Iran back to
the forefront of Washington’s agenda is related to what a shit job
that body’s done on everything from developing a federal budget to
passing the mess that Obamacare has revealed itself to be as is in
the first place. It’s certainly also possible that Secretary of
State John Kerry is so far down the rabbit hole of “the White House
is never wrong” that he can’t make a credible argument in favor of
an Administration policy even when that policy is sound.

Whatever the case, John Kerry was apparently not successful in
convincing Senate hawks that renewing sanctions while negotiations
with Iran have not yet collapsed is a bad idea. In fact,
Republicans
reportedly stormed out of yesterday’s briefing while Democrats
didn’t want to comment.
Via Foreign Policy:

“It was solely an emotional appeal,” Sen. Bob Corker
(R-TN) told reporters after the briefing. “I am stunned that in a
classified setting, when you’re trying to talk with the very folks
that would be originating legislation relative to sanctions, there
would be such a lack of specificity.”

“Today is the day in which I witnessed the future of nuclear war in
the Middle East,” said Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), a staunch Iran hawk.
“This administration, like Neville Chamberlain, is yielding large
and bloody conflict in the Middle East involving Iranian nuclear
weapons.” Kirk added that he felt the briefing was
“anti-Israeli.”

The vituperative GOP response was matched by relative silence by
exiting Democrats.

“I’m not gonna comment,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA).

“No comment,” said Tim Johnson (D-SD), the chairman of the Senate
Banking Committee.

Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) declined to answer questions about sanctions
as he ascended a congressional escalator. 

“Was this a helpful briefing?” asked The Cable.

“Yes. Very helpful,” said Reid.

When asked how so, Reid did not elaborate.

Corker, Kirk and the rest can read a case against new Iran
sanctions not rooted on emotional appeal
here. John Kerry’s welcome to lift from it, no footnotes
necessary.

They can all also read more Reason commentary on Iran here.