Tag: in-the-news

An increasing number of corporations, universities, and other organizations hold anti-racism seminars in which participants are expected to acknowledge their own racism at the start of the meetings or to write “letters of apology to marginalized people whom they may have harmed.”

Anthropologist and brand consultant Grant McCracken, who has taught at places such as Harvard Business School and worked with people such as Kanye West, says such imperatives are doubly bad. First, they don’t acknowledge the changed nature of institutions over the past half-century toward inclusion and equality and second, they leave participants feeling defamed and diminished. There’s never a good reason to say you are a racist, he writes, unless, of course, you are one.

McCracken’s work will be familiar to Reason readers, both as a contributor to our pages and as an influence on the magazine’s broad conception of culture as a dynamic, participatory process through which we all figure out who we are and what we want to become. His 1998 book Plenitude, in which he documents what he calls the “quickening speciation of social types,” remains the essential starting point for understanding the relentlessly heterogenous world in which we live.

His new book is called The New Honor Code: A Simple Plan for Raising Our Standards and Restoring Our Good Names. It explores the seeming disappearance of honorable behavior from much of our personal, professional, and public lives. Sports heroes such as Lance Armstrong not only cheat to win but lie about it while accusing others of cheating. Medical professionals such as Larry Nassar abuse their position as the USA Gymnastics team doctor to assault hundreds of young, defenseless patients. Politicians ranging from Nancy Pelosi to Donald Trump to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Ted Cruz regularly defame and lie about their opponents without evidence or fear of reprisal.

What America needs, says McCracken, is a rebirth of honor that demands we insist on basic standards of behavior, especially from those in positions of power, and that we also treat others as we ourselves would like to be treated: with respect and compassion. The New Honor Code is a rich text, drawing from McCracken’s academic research into Elizabethan England, his abiding curiosity about popular culture, and his work in corporate America. Few other thinkers can distill lessons for the future from figures as diverse as 16th-century English diplomat Thomas Elyot, Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and Canadian musician and Elon Musk partner Grimes.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3cCN8gc
via IFTTT

 

This morning, USA Today published my new op ed on the Biden administration’s impressively expansive pro-immigration agenda. Here’s an excerpt:

The new Biden administration has the most expansive pro-immigration agenda of any president in decades. In the wake of Donald Trump — the most anti-immigrant president in modern times — it was inevitable that any Democratic successor would change course. But the scope of Biden’s agenda goes well beyond merely reversing Trump’s more egregious policies. If fully implemented, it would have enormous benefits for both potential migrants and current U.S. citizens.

It is especially notable that Biden is pursuing this agenda amidst the COVID pandemic. Historically, economic crises tend to promote nativism. The last year has been a rare exception, as public attitudes have continued to become more pro-immigration.

Biden’s otherwise admirable policies do have two drawbacks: heavy reliance on executive actions, and his proposal for a $15 minimum wage that would shut many recent immigrants out of the labor market….

Some of Biden’s initiatives terminate Trump policies, such as reversing the anti-Muslim “travel bans” forbidding entry by residents of many nations with large Muslim populations….

All told, Biden’s agenda would expand legal immigration by up to hundreds of thousands of people per year, and enable many millions of undocumented migrants already here to “come out of the shadows” (as Barack Obama put it), and begin to live normal lives, fully integrated into our economy and society. These changes would transform the lives of vast numbers of migrants fleeing poverty and oppression….

The Biden policies would  provide major benefits to  American society. Bringing undocumented immigrants out of the shadows would increase their productivity and facilitate assimilation. Increasing employment visas and other migration would further expand immigrant contributions to America’s economy. Immigrants contribute disproportionately by starting new businesses at higher rates than natives, and making major contributions to scientific and other innovation….

One key weakness of Biden’s immigration agenda is the heavy — even if sometimes unavoidable – reliance on executive actions. What one president does with a “pen and phone” can often easily be reversed by the next, as Biden himself is doing with many Trump initiatives. Some of the new policies are susceptible to legal challenge. The 100-day moratorium on deportations has been temporarily blocked by a federal court, for example.

Sadly, Biden’s laudable immigration initiatives could also be undercut by his proposal for a nationwide $15 minimum wage. If enacted, it would price millions of workers out of the job market by making it unprofitable for employers to hire them, and would have a disproportionate negative effect on recent immigrants. This would both reduce immigrant workers’ ability to contribute to the economy and impede their assimilation and social mobility…. Hopefully, Congress will reject this idea.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3auxReS
via IFTTT

A marijuana legalization bill in Virginia has successfully made its way through vital committees in both the House and Senate as lawmakers rush to pass it before the state’s mid-session deadline on Friday. 

In its current form, the bill allows for adults 21 or older to possess up to one ounce of marijuana. Any amount between an ounce and one pound would be punishable by a fine. Virginians would be permitted to grow up to four cannabis plants, two mature and two immature, per household. The bill also “provides for an automatic expungement process for those convicted of certain marijuana-related crimes.”

If passed into law, the Senate bill would legalize marijuana possession by July 1, ahead of the formation of a proposed regulated market in 2023. This comes less than a year since the state passed a marijuana decriminalization law in May, which changed the penalty for simple possession from a maximum fine of $500 and a possible 30-day jail sentence to a $25 fine with no threat of jail time or a criminal record. 

During his State of the Commonwealth address on January 13, Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam expressed support for marijuana legalization and cited the tax benefits that a legal cannabis market would provide to the state.

“Just half of the annual revenue could pay for two years of quality pre-K to all of Virginia’s most vulnerable 3- and 4-year-olds,” he said.

The bill imposes a 21 percent tax on both retail and nonretail marijuana products as well as allowing for localities to levy a further three percent tax on marijuana businesses. 

Sen. Jennifer McClellan (D), who is running for governor, was quoted by the Richmond Times-Dispatch as supporting measures to end arrests for small amounts of marijuana before a legal market is established.

“If we’ve already made the moral decision that possession shouldn’t be a crime, then it’s more equitable to say we’re not going to continue punishing people for it,” she said.

Opposition to the bill centers around questions over what exactly constitutes legal use. 

“We need to make sure we have a clear understanding of when an officer can arrest you, what is needed to prosecute, what is under the influence,” said State Sen. Ryan McDougle (R), who voted against the bill in the Senate Judiciary Committee. “We haven’t even begun that debate.” 

A recent survey conducted by Christopher Newport University’s Wason Center for Civic Leadership found that 68 percent of Virginia voters were in favor of marijuana legalization with only 32 percent opposing it. The poll showed that about 80 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of Republicans were in favor of legalization. 

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/39IBsGO
via IFTTT

I have long been fascinated by the “voting paradox” in multi-member adjudicative bodies (including, but not limited to, appellate courts), cases in which there is a majority preferring one outcome (plaintiff wins, say), while there are, simultaneously, separate majorities on each issue in the case leading, logically, to the opposite outcome (plaintiff loses).

Here’s a simple example.  Imagine a 3-member tribunal (Doe, Jones, and Smith) at your local soccer club, which meets to review all disciplinary actions occurring during games in your league.  This past weekend, a player on one of the teams was given a red card and ejected from the game, and the tribunal is considering whether the foul was so flagrant that the player involved should be suspended for the entire season.  There’s a threshold question: Does the tribunal even have the power to issue such a suspension order? Jones and Smith think it does; Doe does not.  As to whether the foul would merit a suspension, Smith and Doe think it would; Jones does not.

Power to suspend?                 Suspension Warranted Here?

DOE          NO                                         YES

JONES       YES                                        NO

SMITH       YES                                        YES

A majority of the panel (DOE + JONES) would not issue the suspension. At the same time, a majority of the panel believes both that it has the power to issue the suspension (JONES + SMITH) and that a suspension is warranted on the facts of this case (DOE + SMITH).

So what should they do? What’s the right result here?

This problem turns up with some frequency in decisions from multi-member appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, and I’ve blogged about it on a number of occasions (here, here, here, and here).

I recalled all of this last week, when the Senate, by a 55-45 vote (with five Republican senators joining the 50 Democrats), rejected a motion introduced by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) which declared that is unconstitutional to hold an impeachment trial for an individual who no longer holds federal office. [My co-bloggers have exhaustively analyzed the constitutional arguments pro and con—see here, here, and here]

Some commentators have suggested that this necessarily—logically—means that the Senate will acquit ex-President Trump at next week’s trial.  As Senator Susan Collins put it: “Do the math.”  Conviction requires a 2/3 supermajority, and if 45 Republican Senators believe that the proceeding is constitutionally impermissible, that gives ex-President Trump the votes that will ensure his acquittal.

That may indeed be true for the political calculus; the final votes of the 45 Republican senators may turn out to be entirely fore-ordained, dooming the forthcoming trial to return a judgment of acquittal. Indeed, some or all of those 45 might, I suppose, refuse to participate at all in the proceedings, and abstain from a final vote, on the grounds the proceedings are not constitutionally authorized.

But it’s not some kind of logical or legal imperative; it is neither unreasonable nor illogical nor hypocritical for those 45 senators, once the Senate as a body has decided the threshold question of its power and determined that it can proceed, to participate in the deliberations at trial, to weigh the evidence, and to vote on the merits of the charge.

It’s a simple case of “issue-voting.”  In my hypothetical above, if the tribunal meets on Monday to consider the threshold question of its jurisdiction to proceed, and after deliberation it decides in the affirmative, it is not illogical or unreasonable or hypocritical for DOE to vote, on Tuesday, in favor of a suspension. “I don’t believe we have the power to do this, but the tribunal of which I am a part has decided otherwise, and it would serve no purpose for me to sit out the deliberations on the merits.”

Courts, of course, do this all the time. A 3-judge panel might hear an interlocutory appeal on the question of whether the lower court has personal jurisdiction over the defendant; if it decides 2-1 in the affirmative, the judge in the minority is not thereby disabled somehow from participating in a review on the merits should that come up at a later date.

So a vote in favor of Sen. Paul’s motion does not foreclose any senator from considering the merits of the case when it is formally presented next week.  (Interestingly, the top two Republican leaders in the Senate—Sens. McConnell and Thune—both of whom supported the Paul motion, have both dropped hints that this is in line with their own personal views on the matter, and that they will participate fully in the upcoming trial and consider the evidence presented and base their votes accordingly).

 

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3pKQwcM
via IFTTT

Pessimistic technology reporter Kevin Roose has a piece in Tuesday’s New York Times with the disconcerting yet accurately representative headline, “How the Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis.” Pegged to the twin anxieties over right-wing conspiracy theories and violence, Roose’s article contains one of the most blink-inducing paragraphs I have ever encountered in a respected journal:

Several experts I spoke with recommended that the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a “reality czar.”

Cue scores of snorting noises on Twitter about our new “Ministry of Truth.”

“It sounds a little dystopian, I’ll grant,” Roose concedes. “But let’s hear them out.”

OK, let’s. Harvard’s Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, joins the recent political-class chorus calling for a “truth commission,” and pushes for the feds to have access to Facebook/Twitter/YouTube algorithms: “We must open the hood on social media so that civil rights lawyers and real watchdog organizations can investigate human rights abuses enabled or amplified by technology.”

Stanford Internet Observatory disinformation researcher Renée DiResta advocates a centralized counter-conspiracy task force, because if federal agencies are doing that work separately, “you run the risk of missing connections, both in terms of the content and in terms of the tactics that are used to execute on the campaigns.” Various pols and pundits propose rewriting Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act while using anti-trust threats to tame Big Tech; counter-extremism specialist Micah Clark plumps for a “social stimulus,” and hate-group deprogrammer Christian Picciolini opts for the kitchen-sink approach: “We have to destroy the institutional systemic racism that creates this environment. We have to provide jobs. We have to have access to mental health care and education.”

These thought bubbles may sound like unintentional self-parody to libertarian ears, but they are common both among the people who just re-took power in Washington and the knowledge workers who are glad they did. “We’re going to have to figure out how we reign in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) warned on Jan. 13. A day earlier, Politifact founder Bill Adair and Duke professor Philip Napoli argued that Biden “should announce a bipartisan commission to investigate the problem of misinformation and make recommendations about how to address it. The commission should take a broad approach and consider all possible solutions: incentives, voluntary industry reforms, education, regulations, and new laws.”

So merely as a matter of prevent defense, it’s worth taking these ideas both seriously and literally. Starting with a point so obvious that only journalists and academics could miss it: Proposed changes to government policy should always be visualized with the opposing team in charge of implementation. Imagine as the annointer of a Reality Czar not Joe Biden, but President Ted Cruz, or President Tucker Carlson. You people do remember that the White House was the scene of insane meetings like this all of two weeks ago, right?

There are also several structural problems with tasking government to encourage and adjudicate society’s net store of capital-T Truth. Politicians (such as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris) are incentivized to embellish their credentials, fictionalize their biographies, and misrepresent their records. Government agencies, given their druthers, would rather operate like the CIA—funding essentially guaranteed, details not available on request. As our resident Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filer C.J. Ciaramella frequently reminds us, it’s the norm for bureaucrats to “flout the spirit and, quite often, the letter of federal record law.” And the last time Joe Biden was in the White House, his boss left “a blueprint on how to suppress information and get away with it.”

Truth is but one of many interests grasping for the steering wheel on the ship of state, and its lobbyists are comparatively underpaid. Realpolitik, interest-group payouts, and paternalistic efforts to shape citizen behavior all warp the common use of language and fact.

There’s a reason why U.S. officials can’t gin up the courage to call the century-old Turkish genocide of more than 1 million Armenians a “genocide,” yet are currently characterizing China’s brutal, though non-mass-murderous, suppression of its Uighur minority with a G-word even while several human rights groups do not (see also: “states that sponsor terrorism“). The Food Pyramid and its antecedents have been many things, but revealed truth is not one of them. The Centers for Disease Control, name-checked in Roose’s article, changed its recommendations on masks based more on behavioral effects than science. War is a perpetual lie-making machine, and that includes the War on Drugs.

The messy reality of overlapping bureaucracies and their conflicting interests may be one reason why pundit imagineers are tempted by “centralization” and the notion of a “czar.” It’s the eternal lure of a single magic wand. And about as childish.

“The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use,” F.A. Hayek famously observed, “never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” The more you centralize the processing and dissemination of knowledge, the greater the range and effect of potential error.

The centralization of U.S. intelligence under a single Department of Homeland Security after 9/11 was supposed to make us smarter and faster, and yet its single most visible impact on our lives is invasive and ineffective security screening at airports. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has throughout the COVID-19 pandemic kept “key virus data out of public sight,” the Associated Press reported Jan. 22, lest the little people get confused. In related news, Newsom kept outdoor playgrounds in sunny California closed for several months after a preponderance of studies had demonstrated that kids were not spreading it to one another outdoors. Science is a dispersed, contested, and constantly evolving process, not an on-off switch best entrusted to a single enlightened source.

I will let my colleagues Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Andrea O’Sullivan (twice), respectively, argue against gutting Section 230, using anti-trust against Big Tech, and giving the government access to social media algorithms, though props to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for demonstrating the dangers this week. But a final word about some kind of “truth commission.”

Here’s yet another political-class endorsement of that idea, from Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch last month:

Congress needs to create a Truth and Reconciliation process — a commission, perhaps, or even just an open forum — that will allow some or hopefully most to acknowledge Biden’s victory, state for there record that there was no election fraud in 2020, and maybe even apologize for saying otherwise.

Last year — before we had any idea the 45th president would incite an insurrection against the U.S. government — some of us called for a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address the lies and the anti-democratic policies of the Trump years. For that idea, we were vilified by some right-wingers who acted as if we were proposing a Nuremberg-war-crimes-trial kind of operation. But in fact a Truth and Reconciliation Commission — as successfully pulled off in South Africa and other strife-riven countries — is a chance for finding a common national story, for amnesty and a new beginning.

I’d be shocked if this happened, but I don’t know any other peaceful path forward.

Hyperbole aside, can you spot the flaw in this oft-used historical analogy? South Africa was a brutal racist police state. Most countries that have staged variants on truth commissions or qualified amnesties for past collaborators did so in large part because they were transitioning from authoritarianism to liberal democracy, and doing so requires immediate creative thinking about how to deal with past crimes and operate a current government without re-filling the prisons. It’s a damnably hard problem, not least because laws change dramatically in such transitions, prompting difficult questions about how to assign culpability to actions and collaborations that were perfectly legal in the Before Times.

Regardless of how darkly you characterize the Trump administration, that analogy just does not apply to the United States. Our laws, with almost no exception, are the same, and are in fact being used to prosecute hundreds of people connected with the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill ransacking. There are no pressing questions of lustration, of property-denationalizing, of teaching old civil service new codes of behavior.

Shorn of such urgencies, any proposed Truth Commission process looks more like a one-sided lecture, potentially backstopped by some government coercion aimed at those who are producing and consuming media in ways that the commissioners find distasteful. Not a very promising scenario for “reconciliation.”

Readers who’ve made it this far may be under the impression that I am blasé about the mainstream hold that conspiratorial twaddle has placed on ostensibly governing Republicans. In fact, I am not—there’s a mutually reinforcing rot in conservative politics and media, one whose main culprits are the politicians, journalists, and consumers who are either doing media literacy wrong, or making the cynical decision to pander to fantasies they themselves don’t believe in. It’s not a pretty picture, and blaming the left-leaning media is no excuse for any of it.

But what should said media do? Here is where my view diverges sharply. Journalists and media-theoreticians right now think the solution to Trumpy delusion is to deplatform even sitting U.S. senators, sic the feds on Fox News, break up Big Tech, reject “bothsidesism,” use the most maximally negative adjectives to describe Republicans, and reposition journalism as a tool for producing better democratic outcomes through applied moral clarity.

I think those approaches will backfire. Deliberately shrinking the public square is no way to persuade consumers on the edges of the debate. Injecting more moralizing into fact-gathering is unlikely to make the end product more factual. Giving the government more power over the rules and practice of free speech is, well, dystopian.

My recommendation to journalists and their cousins in government and academia will be neither popular nor satisfying, but here it is: Do your own jobs better. That’s it, that’s the memo. If government was efficient and helpful, if journalism was compelling and truthful, if the academe was relevant and unpredictable, their lectures would have far more resonance, and audience.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Lg6YCF
via IFTTT

A federal judge has ordered the state of Oregon to immediately begin offering COVID-19 vaccines to incarcerated people.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Stacie Beckerman issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday requiring Oregon to include all state prison inmates in Phase 1A, Group 2, of Oregon’s vaccination plan, which puts them in the same tier as those living and working in congregate care facilities, such as nursing homes. Oregon’s misguided vaccination rollout prioritized correctional staff and prison employees, but not inmates. Seven inmates at Oregon correctional facilities filed motions in federal court on January 21, as part of a larger class action lawsuit filed last April, seeking to compel the state to offer vaccines to all inmates.

Under current Supreme Court precedent, the Eighth Amendment guarantees access to basic health care and hygiene, but they must show “deliberate indifference” by staff to prevail in a civil rights lawsuit challenging prison conditions. Beckerman ruled that the incarcerated plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claims that being passed over for vaccines amounted to such indifference.

“The narrow question before the Court is whether prioritizing those living and working in congregate care facilities and those working in correctional settings to receive the vaccine, but denying the same priority for those living in correctional settings, demonstrates deliberate indifference to the health and safety of those relying on the state’s care,” Beckerman wrote in her ruling.

“Our constitutional rights are not suspended during a crisis,” Beckerman continued. “On the contrary, during difficult times we must remain the most vigilant to protect the constitutional rights of the powerless. Even when faced with limited resources, the state must fulfill its duty of protecting those in its custody.”

So far, 42 incarcerated people in Oregon have died from COVID-19, and more than 3,000 have been infected.

“This will save an incredible amount of lives,” Juan Chavez, an Oregon Justice Resource Center attorney who is representing the seven inmates, told The Oregonian.

Last week, The Oregonian reported on “the dire situation in Oregon’s prisons, where COVID cases have spiked dramatically, prisoners are afraid and frustrated.”

Prison and jails across the country, under pressure from an unusual alliance of prison guard unions and civil liberties groups, took unprecedented steps to reduce their populations, leading to a significant drop in the total incarcerated population. But those measures still did not go far enough to stop prisons and jails from becoming some of the biggest COVID hotspots in the U.S.

According to The Marshall Project, at least 366,121 people in prison nationwide had tested positive for the illness as of January 26, and 2,314 had died.

The Oregon Department of Corrections did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/39KNfV3
via IFTTT

The war on COVID-19 has a lot in common with the war on drugs. Just as it is unrealistic to believe we can ever achieve a drug-free society, it is unrealistic to believe we can achieve a COVID-free society. While case numbers seem to be ebbing right now, and vaccinations are revving up, the risk remains that new, more virulent and contagious strains will emerge, resistant to the vaccines and to the immunity derived from having already been infected. Humans are social animals, and as people resume the in-person interactions they psychologically need and crave, new outbreaks are prone to occur.

This pandemic has a way to go before it runs its course. Even then, we can expect COVID-19 to remain a part of life for the foreseeable future.

It is time to embrace a strategy long advocated by reformers who deal with risky substance use and addiction: harm reduction. Harm reduction is nonjudgmental. It focuses on reducing the harm associated with the use of certain drugs and away from an abstinence-based approach that so often fails. Harm reduction is not a difficult concept for medical practitioners to grasp. When doctors prescribe medications to overweight, borderline diabetic, hypertensive patients who are unable or unwilling to make the necessary lifestyle adjustments to correct their health problems, they are practicing harm reduction.

In the case of substance use, harm reduction uses methods such as needle exchange or syringe services programs, safe consumptions sites, anonymous drug testing for contaminants and potency, and medication-assisted treatment for dependency or addiction with drugs such as methadone, buprenorphine, or even pharmaceutical-grade heroin to prevent withdrawal and stabilize life.

It is unrealistic to believe COVID-19 can be eradicated. Only one virus that infects humans has ever been eradicated––smallpox––and that took 200 years. The likelihood is that COVID-19 will become endemic, making oscillating or seasonal appearances. Dealing with this reality via oscillating lockdowns is unsustainable. 

We have already seen some of the harms resulting from the abstinence-based approach to the pandemic. These harms are not only economic, though poverty is a social determinant of health. Children are losing out on developing critical social and cognitive skills due to school closures, and poor children in inner cities have been hit the hardest. Children and adults are experiencing mental health deterioration. Suicides are increasing, as are drug overdoses. Many illnesses are going undiagnosed that will lead to increases in late-stage cancer and other medical problems in coming years. Income disparities are widening. Pockets of rebellion against pandemic policies are multiplying and respect for public health and governmental institutions is fading. 

We need to move away from an abstinence-based approach and adopt measures that allow us to return to as much of a normal life as possible.

A key harm reduction tactic is vaccination. Even as new variants develop, the immunity derived from vaccination or from previous infection means that a recurrent COVID-19 infection is much less likely to be severe or require hospitalization. Vaccination also reduces spread by moving the population toward herd immunity. As vaccinations increase, it becomes reasonable for people to resume dinner parties, home gatherings, and other social activities providing all involved have been immunized—either with a vaccine or by having survived infection. 

Coexisting with the virus means mask-wearing will still make sense in dense crowds with unknown people who might be carrying the virus. And we should keep our distance from vulnerable friends or family members when outbreaks occur. It also means frequent hand-washing. This might be a good time to abandon the handshake for good. 

A centrally planned, one-size-fits-all approach will be inequitable and ineffective. Government should provide updated and accurate information so that individuals and private organizations can devise their own best practices. Restaurants, theaters, shops, and other places of business should have leeway to develop their own evidence-based safety measures, free of micromanagement from governmental authorities. The consuming public will reward or punish these establishments based on results. The same goes for protecting the most vulnerable, such as those in nursing homes. Public health agencies should provide useful guidance but should minimize micromanagement. 

As hospital wards and intensive care units begin to decompress and the number of newly confirmed cases heads down, this is a good time to think about how to live in a world in which COVID-19 is endemic—one in which viral flare-ups are inevitable. If we look at the future through the lens of harm reduction then hopefully these flare-ups will mean just a temporary inconvenience from a flu-like or cold-like illness for the overwhelming majority of us.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3axPlH4
via IFTTT

The House Republican Conference is meeting today to consider complaints against Rep. Liz Cheney (R–Wyo.), the third-ranking Republican in the House, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.), a freshman elected in November. Cheney’s sin is that she was one of 10 Republicans who voted in favor of impeaching Donald Trump for his conduct on the day of the January 6 Capitol riot. Greene’s sin is that she is a loony conspiracy theorist who has endorsed nearly every crazy idea circulating among right-wing agitators, depicting her political opponents as traitors, child abusers, Nazi collaborators, and murderers.

Cheney’s pro-Trump colleagues want her to lose her position as chair of the House Republican Conference. Democrats think Greene “should be removed from her committee assignments in light of conduct she has exhibited.” The New York Times says the debate about which of them should be punished and how is “a proxy battle for the [Republican] party’s future.” If so, it is not a battle over ideology or policy; it is a battle over which should count for more in the Republican Party: blind obeisance to Trump or a basic respect for reality.

Among other things, Greene has backed Trump’s wild claims of massive election fraud, saying the results in Georgia should be “decertified”; embraced the QAnon and Pizzagate fantasies; linked Hillary Clinton to pedophilia and human sacrifice; charged Clinton and her husband with killing John F. Kennedy Jr.; described Barack Obama as a secret Muslim who commissioned the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich; suggested that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) and other leading Democrats should be executed for treason; peddled an explanation for a California wildfire involving space lasers, the Rothschilds, and Gov. Jerry Brown; called Jewish billionaire George Soros “a piece of crap who turned in his own people over to the Nazis” and “a Nazi” who is “trying to continue what was not finished”; argued that the Parkland and Sandy Hook school shootings were “false flag” operations aimed at promoting gun control; claimed there was “never any evidence” that a plane crashed into the Pentagon during the 9/11 attacks; and declared that anyone who is an observant Muslim “does not belong in our government.”

This week Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) castigated Greene without naming her. “Somebody who’s suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.’s airplane is not living in reality,” McConnell said in a statement to The Hill. “This has nothing to do with the challenges facing American families or the robust debates on substance that can strengthen our party.”

McConnell, who last month said Trump “provoked” the Capitol riot with “lies” about the election but nevertheless voted against trying his impeachment in the Senate, warned that “loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country.” Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah), a longtime Trump critic, says the GOP has no place for “kooks” like Greene. Even House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.), a Trump loyalist who is trying to decide what should be done about Greene, concedes that some of her comments are “deeply disturbing.”

Greene, who apparently recognized herself as a purveyor of “loony lies and conspiracy theories” even though McConnell did not name her, rejected his criticism. “The real cancer for the Republican Party is weak Republicans who only know how to lose gracefully,” she tweeted on Monday. “This is why we are losing our country.”

After news outlets exposed her outré views, Greene dismissed the evidence as “a few social media posts before I ran for Congress.” She said many other people had managed her accounts and “some did not represent my views.” By Greene’s account, then, she let other people say some of that crazy stuff while speaking on her behalf, which hardly reflects well on her judgment. But unless she also hired an unhinged Greene impersonator to do interviews and appear in online videos, that excuse gets her only so far.

Trump, whose only criterion for liking people seems to be their loyalty to him, remains a fan. “I had a GREAT call with my all time favorite POTUS, President Trump!” Greene tweeted on Saturday. “I’m so grateful for his support and more importantly the people of this country are absolutely 100% loyal to him because he is 100% loyal to the people and America First.”

Greene sees all the criticism of her as a validation. “The DC Swamp and the Fake News Media are attacking me because I am not one of them,” she tweeted on Monday. “I am one of you.” For Republicans, that’s a problem.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/39KgGH5
via IFTTT

The ability to break a 50-50 tie in the Senate is important, but it does not create a true Senate majority, as I explained here.  Consequently, in those rare instances when the Senate has split down the middle, the parties have traditionally entered into a power-sharing arrangement, in which the party that holds the White House (and thus the tie-breaking vote) gets titular control of committees and the body of the whole, but not the full benefits of a true Senate majority.

Senators McConnell and Schumer have disagreed over the precise contours of a potential power-sharing deal, preventing reorganization of the Senate. This has, among other things, slowed the rate at which some committees hold hearings and votes on Biden Administration nominees, as Republican Senators still hold the gavels, as they will until a new organizational resolution is adopted.

Earlier today, Senators Schumer and McConnell reportedly reached a deal that will largely replicate the 2001 power-sharing arrangement. Membership on committees will be equal, but Democrats will be in charge and will have the ability to force nominations and bills to the floor without constantly relying upon Vice President Harris to break the tie. A new organizational resolution embodying the deal should be passed later today.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3pXQYod
via IFTTT

If you send Google a court order that finds certain online material to be libelous, Google will consider “deindexing” that material—essentially making it disappear from Google search results. The order wouldn’t legally bind Google (American court orders gotten against a particular defendant don’t bind third parties who aren’t in league with the defendant); but Google will often choose to act on it, on the theory that a court has determined that the material is false and defamatory. To my knowledge, Google doesn’t do the same for expungement orders, but people sometimes submit those orders to Google in any event.

But any successful system breeds parasites—here, attempts to procure such court orders fraudulently, or even using forgery (see this forthcoming article). Last week, a criminal complaint was filed in New Hampshire against Heidi L. Holt as to one alleged forgery:

And here is the alleged forgery (though you can see it more clearly here):

The alleged forgery was submitted to Google with a deindexing request for these pages:

https://ift.tt/2YJyn2Q
https://ift.tt/3pKYNNz
https://ift.tt/3cEfaYS [note that this article mentioned Holt only in passing as part of an arrest blotter, unrelated to the headline, and the newspaper has by now apparently removed her name]
https://ift.tt/36G97z1
https://ift.tt/3oGfKHX

Holt is charged with forgery and with tampering with public records. For similar cases from past years, see here, here, here, and here.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3jerGPS
via IFTTT