Tag: in-the-news

The European Union has mandated that new cars be equipped with anti-speeding technology. They say that, for now, drivers will be able to override the technology. The system will calculate the speed limit based on data from the car’s navigation system or from traffic sign recognition technology and either automatically slow the car down or give the driver some sort of warning, such as a chime.

The post Brickbat: No Need for Speed appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/mgJC7Ak
via IFTTT

 

Andy Craig of the Cato Institute recently published “How to Pick a President: A Guide to Electoral Count Act Reform” an excellent overview of the problems with the Electoral Count Act revealed in the awful aftermath of the 2020 election, and how to fix them. Craig is a leading expert on ECA reform, and is his paper is a great introduction for anyone interested in these issues.

Here is the summary:

The peaceful transfer of power, regular elections, and limited terms of office are among our most precious legacies of the American Revolution. These bedrock constitutional principles are indispensable both to “insure domestic Tranquility” and to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

But as we saw in the 2020 election, operating under an antiquated rule book can pose serious risks. The Electoral Count Act of 1887 (ECA), with minor amendments since, is the statutory codification of important details left unaddressed by the Constitution’s sparse provisions for electing a president. It is in dire need of reform.

America should not have to confront a potential constitutional crisis every four years. We should have confidence that the rule of law will prevail in determining the occupant of our highest office. The ECA as it stands is woefully inadequate to provide that assurance.

There is broad agreement on the need for ECA reform. Proposals range from a broad, expansive bill that could be criticized as overly complicated and assuming a role for Congress beyond the Constitution’s limits, to a narrow, minimalist bill that could leave important problems unresolved by only making minor cosmetic changes.

There is a better middle course, built on a thorough consideration of the constitutional principles at stake. The ECA as it exists now is too flawed to save. Even if no substantive changes were to be made, a thorough rewrite is necessary to clarify the muddled and confusing language that Congress adopted in 1887. At the same time, ECA reform should respect the limits of Congress’s role, in line with the principle that the ECA is simply codifying and clarifying constitutionally mandated processes. To that end, this analysis provides a top‐​to‐​bottom how‐​to guide for an ECA reform that is both constitutionally and practically sound.

As Craig’s paper lays out, ECA reform needs to address three interrelated problems:

1. Preventing state governments from, in effect, changing the rules after election day, in order to reverse election results they don’t like.

2. Preventing Congress from throwing out electoral votes for bogus reasons (as some GOP members of Congress sought to do after the 2020 election).

3. Making it more clear that the Vice-President does not have the power to invalidate electoral votes (a step then-VP Mike Pence rightly refused to take in January 2021, despite the urging of Donald Trump).

While there is some dispute over details, there is broad agreement on these and related points among election and constitutional law experts across the political spectrum. The recent National Constitution Center project on “Restoring the Guardrails of Democracy” revealed that this is a point of agreement between the conservative, libertarian, and progressive teams that participated. The issue is covered in some detail in both the Team Libertarian report (which I coauthored with Clark Neily and Walter Olson), and the Progressive Report (written by election scholars Edward Foley and Franita Tolson). Team Conservative leader Sarah Isgur  noted their agreement in a later NCC webinar.

It also appears that ECA reform has substantial bipartisan support in Congress. But whether it can pass before the fall 2022 elections remains to be seen. For obvious reasons, reform will become harder and harder to achieve as we get closer to 2024.

ECA reform won’t cure all the ailments of American democracy. But it can eliminate some dangerous vulnerabilities for which – unlike many of our other problems – there are simple legislative fixes.

The post A Guide to Fixing the Electoral Count Act appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/ChxgHbw
via IFTTT

 

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and accompanying increase in repression within Russia itself kicked off a wave of Russian emigration, in addition to a massive flow of refugees from Ukraine. As a recent CNBC article explains, the initial wave has now been augmented by additional people, many of them skilled professionals in high tech and related fields:

Vladimir, whose surname has been removed due to the sensitive nature of the situation, is part of what he considers Russia’s “second wave” of migration following the war.This includes those who took longer to prepare to leave the country — such as people with businesses or families who wanted to let their children finish the school year before leaving….

A “first wave” of artists, journalists and others openly opposed to Putin’s regime felt they had to leave the country immediately or risk political persecution for violating the Kremlin’s clampdown on public dissent.

“A lot of people got notices saying that they were traitors,” said Jeanne Batalova, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute….

But as the war rages on, more Russians are deciding to pack up and leave.

“The way migration works is that once the flow begins and people start finding out how to do things — get a flat, apply for asylum, find a job or start a business — that prompts more people to leave. It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle,” Batalova said….

There is no concrete data on the number of Russians who have left the country since the start of the war. However, one Russian economist put the total at 200,000 as of mid-March.

That figure is likely to be far higher now, according to Batalova, as tens of thousands of Russians have relocated to Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Israel, the Baltic states and beyond….

In the tech sector alone, an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 professionals left in the first month of the war, with a further 70,000 to 100,000 expected to follow soon thereafter, according to a Russian IT industry trade group.…

The post New Wave of Russian Emigration is an Opportunity for the West – but one we Seem Likely to Flub appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/syiK9Np
via IFTTT

7/17/1862:  Congress enacts the Confiscation Act, which empowers the government to seize the property of the rebels. The Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of that law in The Confiscation Cases (1873).

The post Today in Supreme Court History: July 17, 1862 appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/qEjW5Xp
via IFTTT

26 years ago

December 1996

“You can’t understand technology without understanding how people think about technology, and, of course, you need to know the bad ideas as well as the good. That’s why I want to insert a recommendation of just one influentially bad book, Thorstein Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System (1921). Veblen ably advocates a leading myth of the machine age: the idea that material technology ‘advances’ because of people’s collective efforts, only to be manipulated and hindered by capitalists for the sake of their private profits. This idea represents a profound misapprehension of the ways in which material technology is affected by investment, market prices, and property rights. Veblen recommended that capitalists be replaced by a ‘Soviet of technicians’ that could ‘take care of the material welfare of the underlying population’—a proposal that is either chilling or comic, depending on the way you want to take it, but that is very much in the 20th-century spirit.”
Stephen Cox
“Art and Artifacts”

30 years ago

December 1992

“To put it simply, [in Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society, author Martin Sanchez] Jankowski finds it much more fruitful to think of gangs in the context of politics than in the context of crime. Gangs carry on a very taut, intense dance with their communities. Sometimes they are resented for the drugs and violence they bring. But just as often, they are looked upon as neighborhood heroes, particularly when they drive out some alien force, which they often do….Once formed, however, gangs are very careful to assess their place in the community. In particular, they are cautious not to commit petty crimes—robbery, burglary, auto theft—among the people they know. Instead, they judiciously export their crimes. Within their own neighborhoods, they specialize in services of a strong-arm variety. Gangs will torch buildings for landlords, carry out contracts against undesirables, offer ‘protection’ to storeowners, and run small gambling rackets (when not yet into dope dealing).”
William Tucker
“Hangin’ With the Homeboys”

46 years ago

November 1976

“After a decade during which liberals and the news media closed their eyes to soaring crime rates, crime finally surfaced in the seventies as a live issue. Unfortunately, the response, both in rhetoric and in government programs, generally bore little relation to the actual problem. The virtue of [James Q.] Wilson’s book [Thinking About Crime], by contrast, is its thorough grounding in reality [which] forces us to face up to some rather unpleasant truths about what is really going on.

Such as? The fact that there is really very little the police can do about the level of crime; in fact, experiments in which the amount of patrol was markedly altered showed either no change in crime rates or only short-lived changes. The fact that only a few percent of all crimes ever result in an arrest, and only a few percent of those arrested ever serve time in jail or prison. The fact that the court system serves principally to determine what should be done with the criminal in its custody—not to determine guilt or innocence. The fact that most crime is committed by many-time repeaters who are wise to the way the system works and are quite unlikely to be rehabilitatable. The fact that few if any rehabilitation programs work (and some are actually counterproductive).”
Robert Poole
“Thinking About Crime”

48 years ago

November 1974

“If you’ve never been audited, you obviously aren’t making any political waves!

This proposition is illustrated by Hank Hohenstein in the best book to date on the subject of taxes, The IRS Conspiracy. This new book shows how the political ‘bully-boys,’ with the aid of IRS Special Agents and Auditors, have fine-tuned the machinery of coercion to produce fear and quiet the wave-makers. And if you say ‘it can’t happen here’, you’ve been asleep too long, because it is happening here.”
Karl Bray
“A Conspiracy of Ideas”

The post Archives: August/September 2022 appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/5mWv3q1
via IFTTT

More than halfway through 2022, many cities and towns across America—big and small—are somehow still pretending that food trucks are some newfangled nuisances that must be regulated out of existence.

As many people (me definitely included) have explained over the past decade, opponents of food trucks typically advocate in favor of a host of nefarious restrictions on the roving restaurants, including protectionist limits on where they may sell food (often with an eye toward “protecting” brick-and-mortar restaurants), where they may cook that food (some cities don’t allow trucks to prepare food fresh on the truck), and what days and times they may operate.

While countless cities and towns have reduced or eliminated these and other restrictions, many pointless barriers remain. 

“Just to operate around metro Atlanta today, [gyro truck owner Ali] Moradi has to have seven county permits and 13 city business licenses—which add up to about $3,700 in annual fees, plus the related paperwork,” Atlanta magazine reported last month in a piece on the “red tape” and “strict municipal regulations” that encumber Atlanta-area food trucks. “It’s a lot to keep track of. Costs and red tape—plus strict municipal regulations about where food trucks can do their business—have conspired to stifle the growth of the industry in the Atlanta area, keeping trucks at the fringes of the dining scene.”

While Atlanta reports the rules are improving—a bill now on the governor’s desk would help reduce the permitting barriers—regulations there still stink. And they’re even worse and worsening in some parts of the country.

Lawmakers in Seabrook, New Hampshire, for example, voted earlier this year to prohibit food trucks and carts that had been operating at the town’s beach this summer. Officials cited a couple tangible issues arising from trucks and carts in previous years—including overflowing trash bins. But rather than, say, raise the town’s low permit fees to allow for better or more frequent garbage disposal, the town just banned the trucks altogether.

In Sioux Center, Iowa, the Sioux Center News reported this week, the city council is considering adopting new food truck regulations. While some of the proposed rules are reasonable and comparable to those found elsewhere around the country, a few others suggest the city wants to prohibit or severely curtail food trucks. Along those lines, the ordinance would require food trucks to specify which foods they’ll sell—something not required of brick-and-mortar restaurants; limits their operating hours; and requires them to stay at least 100 feet away from any brick-and-mortar restaurant in the city.

“Prohibiting food vendors is not our intent,” city manager Scott Wynja said. His comments were echoed by Mayor David Krahling, who insists the “proposed ordinance is not intended to be punitive.”

The proposed ordinance suggests exactly the opposite is true.

In Saranac Lake, New York, local lawmakers are considering adopting new rules to regulate food trucks, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise reported this week, in response to requests from food truck owners.

But comments from Saranac Lake officials suggest—like in Sioux Center—any rules the village might adopt would likely ensure those food trucks owners ply their cuisines elsewhere. One councilor (or trustee, as they’re known) suggests Saranac Lake should prohibit food trucks to help struggling brick-and-mortar restaurants. Another trustee suggested the group first “check with local restaurants” before approving any measure. Perhaps by coincidence, the Daily Enterprise reports that a third trustee owns a local restaurant.

Though Atlanta, Sioux Center, Seabrook, Saranac Lake, and many other cities and towns still target food trucks, others recognize the value food trucks bring to communities and are moving to facilitate their growth. Officials in Manassas, Virginia, are moving to codify an existing policy that allows food trucks to park at local breweries and distilleries. “The proposed adjustment is to clarify code to clearly enable food trucks for these uses,” reads a city staff memorandum on the matter, reports Inside NOVA. But for every Manassas, there’s a New Jersey. That state’s bizarre prohibition on allowing any food trucks to park at (or even to “‘collaborate or coordinate’ with”) local breweries continues apace. 

In a 2014 column, I noted that the regulatory climate for food trucks appeared to have improved markedly around the country. By almost any measure, it has done just that. But I’ve also noted, as here, that many cities and towns whose restaurant industries have been decimated by Covid, high food prices, and an economic slump have tried to help brick-and-mortar restaurants by making life harder for food trucks—rather than removing barriers and hurdles for both brick-and-mortar and mobile restaurants. Those cities and towns can and should do better.

The post Terrible Restrictions on Food Trucks Are Still a Thing appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/19Tadu0
via IFTTT

On January 1, 2022, the original Winnie-the-Pooh book fell into the public domain. That means any individual or corporation can now use the bear in new books or movies without paying a licensing fee to Disney, which has controlled the copyright to the character since the 1960s.

The next day, actor Ryan Reynolds marked the occasion with a YouTube ad for his wireless company, Mint Mobile. Reynolds read from a new book called Winnie-the-Screwed, about a bear who was paying too much for wireless service. “Like anyone with a big wireless plan, Winnie-the-Screwed just wants to keep some of his sweet, sweet money,” the book said. “But his money jar gets emptier and emptier with every monthly bill.”

In the 20th century, media companies built lucrative franchises around characters like Pooh, Mickey Mouse, Batman, and Superman. In the coming years, it will become legal for anyone—from aspiring comic book authors to actors hawking wireless service—to use these legendary characters for their own purposes. Mickey Mouse will become available for public use in 2024. Superman will fall into the public domain in 2034, followed by Batman in 2035.

For those who favor looser intellectual property laws generally and shorter copyright lengths specifically, these characters’ entry into the public domain is a long-overdue victory. But it’s also a preview of coming legal headaches and complications, especially with regard to some icons of pop culture. Though the new era will be messy at the start, the ultimate result will be a richer, more vibrant culture. Not only will there be more freedom for creators, but there will be more options for readers too.

Copyright Extensions? Oh Bother.

The Constitution requires that copyrights be granted for “limited times,” and the 1790 Copyright Act guaranteed protection for up to 28 years. The idea was to offer authors a brief monopoly to reward them for their creativity, then let creative works be freely available for the public to use.

By the time A.A. Milne published the original Winnie-the-Pooh book in 1926, Congress had doubled the maximum copyright term to 56 years. If that law had remained in force, Pooh would have fallen into the public domain way back in 1982. But in a series of bills from 1962 to 1998, Congress repeatedly extended copyright protection. It was spurred on by lobbyists representing copyright holders, such as The Walt Disney Co., which held still-valuable copyrights from the 1920s.

Thanks to those repeated extensions, some books and cartoons about Pooh are still under copyright. And that means only certain aspects of the Pooh franchise are available for public use. For example, the 1928 book The House at Pooh Corner was the first to feature Tigger. So if you want to make a cartoon with both Pooh and Tigger in it, you’ll need to either get permission from Disney or wait until that book falls into the public domain in 2024. And Pooh didn’t appear in a red shirt until 1932, so someone making a modern Pooh cartoon might want to pick a different color—at least until that copyright expires in 2028.

Indeed, the modern image of Pooh owes a lot to the cartoons Disney started making in the 1960s. Those cartoons won’t start falling into the public domain until the 2060s.

“If you’re making a new Winnie the Pooh cartoon, you need to be careful to base your drawings on the original book and not on any of Disney’s additions,” says Jessica Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan.

So for the next couple of decades at least, artists who create independent books or movies based on these famous characters will have lawyers for Disney and other copyright holders looking over their shoulders. They’ll have to familiarize themselves not only with the public domain works they’re copying, but also the still-copyrighted works they’re not allowed to copy.

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Expiring Copyright

Arthur Conan Doyle published the first Sherlock Holmes book, A Study in Scarlet, in 1887, so the character of Sherlock Holmes has been in the public domain since the mid-20th century. But Doyle’s last few Holmes stories were still under copyright when Congress started extending copyright in the 1960s. As a result, a few Holmes books are still under copyright today. Holmes’ slow shift into the public domain offers a preview of the sorts of thorny legal disputes that are likely to arise as more works come out of copyright.

In 2006, the author Nancy Springer began publishing a series of young adult novels about Sherlock’s teenage sister, Enola Holmes, solving mysteries while she searches for her missing mother. Enola’s older brothers Sherlock and Mycroft appear in these novels, but the series’ main character, Enola, was entirely Springer’s invention.

Because most of the original Sherlock Holmes stories were in the public domain, Springer and her publisher didn’t think they needed a license from the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle. The estate didn’t challenge the publication of the series for more than a decade. But it took a harder line once Netflix announced plans to make a movie based on Springer’s novels. In 2020, the estate sued both Springer and Netflix, arguing that both the books and the movie infringed the copyright of the later Sherlock Holmes books that were still under copyright.

It wasn’t the first such fight. Leslie S. Klinger, a writer and attorney specializing in genre fiction, asked a court to declare that his 2011 anthology of Holmes-inspired stories, A Study in Sherlock, could be published without licensing fees. An appeals court sided with Klinger, ruling in 2014 that the estate didn’t own the character of Sherlock Holmes—it only owned specific details from the 1920s stories that were still under copyright.

In the Enola Holmes case, the estate argued that Sherlock’s personality had undergone a dramatic transformation in those later stories. Doyle had lost his son and brother in World War I. This had supposedly caused him to give the late Sherlock Holmes greater empathy and more respect for women than the early Sherlock. He even had a newfound appreciation for dogs.

“The Springer novels make extensive infringing use of Conan Doyle’s transformation of Holmes from cold and critical to warm, respectful, and kind in his relationships,” the estate argued in its complaint.

The defendants retorted this was nonsense. Character traits like warmth and kindness are too generic to receive copyright protection, they argued. Moreover, the early Holmes wasn’t as coldly rational as the estate claimed.

For example, in the 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes discovers that a dead body was not who he feared it would be. Holmes’ assistant Watson reports that Holmes “uttered a cry and bent over the body. Now he was dancing and laughing and wringing my hand.” The next year, in the short story “The Solitary Cyclist,” Watson reports that Holmes “halted, and I saw him throw up his hand with a gesture of grief and despair” when he learned about the disappearance of a woman he was trying to protect.

James Grimmelmann, a law professor at Cornell University, isn’t impressed with the estate’s arguments. “If you’re taking basic character elements combined with things that are characteristics of all people, then you’re not copying from the still-protected stories,” he says.

We’ll never know for sure who would have won, because the parties settled the case later in 2020. And the final Holmes stories will fall into the public domain at the end of 2022, so everyone will be free to reuse the entirety of the canon beginning next year.

But the fight over Sherlock Holmes provides a preview of future battles over famous characters. One big concern for independent creators is that defending against lawsuits like this is expensive. The Doyle estate forced Netflix and Springer to hire lawyers to defend themselves in court. The threat of such litigation may have helped the estate convince others to pay licensing fees, even if they didn’t think the estate’s legal position was especially strong.

The Most Wonderful Thing About Tigger Trademarks

Disney doesn’t just control Pooh-related copyrights, it also holds trademarks for Pooh and his friends. In contrast to copyright, which protects creative works such as books and movies, a trademark protects the unique markings businesses use to identify their products. Unlike copyrights, trademarks do not automatically expire.

The trademark for Tigger, for example, covers a wide range of merchandise, from backpacks to bedsheets to bowling balls. So even after Disney loses the copyright for Tigger, it might not be legal for anyone else to sell Tigger-branded toothpaste.

In its legal battle with Netflix, the Doyle estate unsuccessfully tried to use trademark law to effectively obtain perpetual control over Sherlock Holmes books and movies. In addition to its copyright claims, the estate argued that Netflix had infringed the estate’s trademarks by giving the public the false impression that Enola Holmes was endorsed by the Doyle estate.

You could imagine Disney using a similar tactic to try to maintain perpetual control over Pooh: arguing that an unauthorized Pooh cartoon infringed Disney’s trademarks and misled consumers into believing the cartoon was produced by Disney.

But the courts have consistently rejected this gambit.

In 1949, Twentieth Century Fox produced a television program based on Crusade in Europe, a book about World War II by Dwight D. Eisenhower. Failure to renew the copyright caused the television program to fall into the public domain in 1977. A small video distributor called Dastar obtained copies of the program in 1995, removed the original credits, and sold the video as its own. Twentieth Century Fox sued, arguing that Dastar had violated trademark law by removing the original credits, thereby deceiving the public about the show’s origins.

The Supreme Court ruled against Twentieth Century Fox in 2003. Allowing trademark law to be used in this way would create “a species of perpetual patent and copyright,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote. And that’s not allowed under the Constitution, which requires that copyrights and patents be granted only “for limited times.”

The same goes for famous characters like Pooh. If publishing a new Pooh book infringes Disney’s trademark, the practical result would be little different than extending Disney’s Pooh copyright in perpetuity.

So Disney’s trademarks won’t prevent people from creating new Pooh works. But they’ll have to be careful. “You need to advertise the hell out of the fact that this is based on the original” Winnie-the-Pooh book, Litman says. “You’re allowed to truthfully advertise what you’re doing, but you want to avoid anyone thinking that this is a Disney product.”

Disney will probably always maintain control over some uses of its characters. For example, Grimmelmann says, even after Steamboat Willie is in the public domain “you can’t use Mickey Mouse as a trademark on your theme park.”

But the line between these things isn’t always clear. What about a T-shirt or a lunchbox with Pooh on it? Is that a reproduction of a public domain image, and therefore legal, or an infringement of Disney’s trademark?

In the coming decades, people will have a chance to re-imagine characters like Pooh and Batman for new generations, just as people have long created new adaptations of William Shakespeare plays and Jane Austen novels. But the repeated extension of copyright means that the process is taking a lot longer than in the past.

If we still had 56-year copyright terms, millennials would have grown up in a world where Mickey Mouse and Pooh were already free from copyright restrictions. Instead of one authorized Batman movie every couple of years, studios would be competing to produce the best Batman movies. We’d be able to look forward to independent Star Trek films in 2023 and unauthorized Star Wars films in 2034. This would be a win not just for writers, but also for audiences, who would have access to a broad range of new works that aren’t controlled by their current owners.

Instead, corporate-owned copyrights last 95 years. If a book or movie is published in your lifetime, you’ll very likely be dead before its copyright expires.

The post Why Ryan Reynolds Can Use Winnie-the-Pooh To Sell You a Phone Plan appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/u9Ywx5I
via IFTTT

7/16/2019: Justice John Paul Stevens died.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: July 16, 2019 appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/aUgimFf
via IFTTT

The first tomato you grow yourself will probably be the most expensive one you ever eat. The same is true of peppers, zucchini, carrots, and any other crops you raise. While costs do go down as you gain expertise and reuse tools and materials, your initial gardening efforts will be less a means of saving money than a commitment to a hobby. But it’s a rewarding hobby that builds skills, drives you a bit nuts, and offers you the means in uncertain times of supplying yourself and your neighbors with your favorite fruits, vegetables, and herbs.

Supply came home to me as an issue when there were no garlic bulbs to be found at the market. “The whole shipment came in rotten,” the produce manager told me. “It looked like it sat too long someplace.”

That sort of problem is all too common in a year of supply-chain disruptions featuring shipping delays and intermittently empty shelves. “About 31% of grocery products consumers browsed were out of stock in the first week of April,” CBS reported. “That’s up from 11% at the end of November 2021.”

Disruptions in fertilizer production, predating Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but exacerbated by it, raise costs to farmers. The war also interfered with the cultivation and export of grain and other products from those countries, contributing to a “catastrophic global hunger crisis,” in the cheery words of the United Nations’ World Food Program. And while the vast farming acreage of the United States will cushion Americans from the worst effects, it’s a fair bet that prices will continue to rise and the availability of some produce will remain spotty. Even expensive homegrown veggies are an alluring hedge against none.

What and how to grow depend to a large extent on where you live. I’m in Arizona, where the environment is a tad harsh and, as the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension puts it, “water is precious and expensive.” So we look for drought-resistant and desert-adapted varieties of vegetables and fruits that have a hope of surviving in our conditions.

We’ve adopted square foot gardening, a technique that divides a garden into small, intensively planted sections. The term was coined by author Mel Bartholomew, and free information is available online from the Square Foot Gardening Foundation and other sources, including Clemson University’s College of Agriculture, Forestry, and Life Sciences.

Planting in raised beds, whether store-bought or home-built, offers easier control over soil quality than planting in the ground. Clemson’s experts advise that “combining a raised bed and square foot gardening allows a reduction in space to 16 square feet for fresh foods or 32 square feet if preserving for later use” per individual for each crop, compared to 100 or 200 square feet, respectively, with a traditional garden.

For irrigation, you might try anything from drip systems to old-fashioned watering cans. My wife and I favor burying perforated, plastic soda bottles in the soil into which water can be poured. That delivers water directly to the roots instead of serving it up to the great desiccator in the sky.

You can manage the environment in your garden by building hoops over it with PVC pipe. The hoops support shade cloth to protect against the hot sun, plastic sheeting that converts the beds into greenhouses, and netting that protects against birds and other creatures that share your taste in vegetables.

But the world belongs to hungry critters, and you’ll always be fighting them. Aphids made their way into our dill until I dusted the plants with abrasive diatomaceous earth, basically dragging the little vampire bugs over the equivalent of broken glass. And just days before my neighbors planned to pick ripe peaches from their trees, pack rats stripped them bare. The last time I saw those folks, they had a bucket of rat poison in their truck and planned to lay out a vengeful buffet.

If you do everything right, you’ll gain at least a greater appreciation for farmers. But you also will eventually have something to show for your labor, like the broccoli my wife and I picked all winter and the garlic we have curing right now. It’s unlikely your efforts will replace trips to the grocery store. But in a time of uncertain supply, it’s reassuring to know that you can keep yourself and your friends fed.

The post Gardening Is a Hedge Against Supply Chain Disruptions appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/OKQSz6f
via IFTTT

From Weisenbach v. Project Veritas, decided today by Erie County (Pa.) Court of Common Pleas Judge Marshall Piccinini:

Project Veritas is a non-profit media organization founded by James O’Keefe, III. On November 5, 2020, just two days after the November 3, 2020, presidential election, it published a story claiming to have uncovered a voter fraud scheme orchestrated out of the United States Postal Service General Mail Facility in Erie, Pennsylvania. Specifically, the article and accompanying video alleged that Erie Postmaster, Robert Weisenbach, directed the backdating of mail-in ballots in order to sway the outcome of the presidential election in favor of candidate Joseph Biden. The report relied upon an anonymous whistleblower, later revealed to be Richard Hopkins, a postal employee who claimed he overhead a conversation between Weisenbach and another supervisor. Hopkins stated that Weisenbach’s motive for backdating mail-in ballots was that he was a “Trump hater,” although, in reality, Weisenbach was a supporter of President Donald Trump and voted for him on election day.

In the days that followed, Project Veritas posted two more video interviews with Hopkins where he repeated his false claims, the latter after it was reported by news outlets that Hopkins had recanted his earlier allegations when confronted by postal inspectors, although Hopkins later claimed that recantation was coerced. The story soon gained traction among those amplifying claims of voter fraud, including President Trump himself. Weisenbach was forced to leave Erie for a time after personal details, including his address, were discovered and disseminated by readers of the Project Veritas stories. Project Veritas nonetheless maintains that the stories were investigated and published consistent with standards of “professional, ethical and responsible journalism.”

Weisenbach disagrees. He brings this lawsuit against Hopkins, Project Veritas, and O’Keefe, alleging claims of defamation and concerted tortious activity. Defendants now seek to dismiss the claims before discovery has even begun by filing Preliminary Objections to Weisenbach’s First Amended Complaint. That parties frame the action in broad terms as implicating competing ideals lying at the heart of our republic. Weisenbach argues that the stories were “not investigative journalism[,]” but rather “targeted character assignation aimed at undermining faith in the United States Postal Service and the results of the 2020 Presidential election” having “no place in our country.” Defendants contend that this case raises fundamental concerns regarding freedom of the press, and that, pursuant to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, we rely not on judges or juries to root out pernicious speech, but on competition in an uninhibited marketplace of ideas where the truth will ultimately prevail.

Whatever the merits of these lofty assertions, the Court’s task today in reviewing Defendants’ Preliminary Objections is much more modest. First, the Court must decide whether it lacks subject matter jurisdiction over the claims against Hopkins in light of the Federal Tort Claims Act, which vests federal courts with exclusive jurisdiction over actions brought against federal employees who cause injury while acting within the scope of their employment. Second, in assessing Defendants’ Objections in the nature of demurrers, the Court must simply determine “whether, on the facts averred, the law says with certainty that no recovery is possible.” For the reasons that follow, the Court answers both of those questions in the negative and consequently overrules Defendants’ Preliminary Objections to the First Amended Complaint….

It is apparent that the parties perceive the events of the days following the 2020 presidential election through wildly different lenses. Today’s Opinion recounts those days through the eyes of Robert Weisenbach. [This is because in deciding a motion to dismiss, the court must assume the accuracy of a plaintiff’s plausibly pleaded factual assertions. -EV] As he sees it, Richard Hopkins was acting well outside the scope of his employment when he supplied false claims of mail-in ballot backdating to Project Veritas, and so, jurisdiction over the claims now levied against him does not lie exclusively in federal court pursuant to the Federal Tort Claims Act.

Likewise, Weisenbach’s averments are legally sufficient to make out claims of defamation and concerted tortious activity against all Defendants, even under the demanding actual malice standard. Whether Weisenbach will be able to offer adequate evidence to support his claims, and whether a jury would ultimately be willing to credit such evidence after hearing both sides of the story, remains to be seen. For now, it is enough to hold that the averments set forth in the Amended Complaint are sufficient as a matter of law to permit the action to proceed to discovery, where the truth of these claims can begin to be tested in the crucible of our adversarial system.

The opinion is 58 pages long, and I’m afraid I don’t have the time to get through it now, but I thought I’d briefly excerpt it here.

The post Postmaster's Libel Lawsuit Against Project Veritas (Over Claims of Voter Fraud) Can Go Forward appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/1Wbp69E
via IFTTT