Tag: news

Via the Washington Free Beacon comes a
link to this new study from the Special Inspector General for
Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The title kind of gives it away:

POPPY
CULTIVATION IN AFGHANISTAN: AFTER A DECADE OF RECONSTRUCTION
AND OVER $7 BILLION IN COUNTERNARCOTICS EFFORTS,
POPPY CULTIVATION LEVELS ARE AT AN ALL-TIME
HIGH 

There’s this:

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
(UNODC), Afghan farmers grew an unprecedented 209,000 hectares
of opium poppy in 2013, surpassing the previous peak
of 193,000 hectares in 2007. With deteriorating security in
many parts of rural Afghanistan and low levels of eradication
of poppy fields, further increases in cultivation are likely in
2014. 

As of June 30, 2014, the United States has spent
approximately $7.6 billion on counternarcotics efforts in
Afghanistan.

Whole
report here.

Free Beacon account here.

For countless students at public schools all over
the country, expulsions, arrests, and felony charges have gradually
become the norm for slight or even accidental rules infractions.

The Wall Street Journal ran an excellent story
detailing why and how this became the case.

The problem is a familiar one for Reason readers:
Paranoia over school shootings prompted authorities to crack down
on perceived criminal activity—consequently, students are dealt
unbelievably harsh punishments for things that shouldn’t even count
as crimes, like
writing stories about guns or keeping pocketknives for
protection.

A sobering statistic sheds light on the problem: Between 1997
and 2007, the number of police officers patrolling schools
increased by 55 percent, according to The Journal.
Criminologist James Alan Fox notes that schools dove head-first
down a slippery slope:

In recent decades, a new philosophy in law enforcement had been
applied to schools. It was “deal with the small stuff so they won’t
go to the big stuff, and also it sent a strong message of
deterrence,” said James Alan Fox, the Lipman Professor of
criminology at Boston’s Northeastern University.

The zero-tolerance approach started as part of the 1994 Gun-Free
Schools Act, Mr. Fox said, but it expanded to other weapons, then
to drug contraband and “finally into ordinary violations of school
rules, disrespect, skipping. It eventually became an across the
board response to discipline.”

It’s worth mentioning that violence in schools did decline
dramatically over the last two decades. I’m not certain how much of
that should actually be attributed to police omnipresence, given
that violence declined nationwide, not just in schools. But it
would be reasonable to think some amount of policing had a positive
impact on the extreme end.

That does not justify what’s happening now. Today, schools are
relatively safe environments for kids; there’s no excuse for
treating students like prisoners of war. Students are being
educated in an environment of absolute non-freedom and petty
authoritarianism. Administrators have all the power to ruin their
lives over arbitrary enforcement of stupid rules. And the police
are always on scene to turn an infraction into a criminal
matter:

In Wake County, N.C., Mr. Perry was trying to avoid a
water-balloon fight at school when he was taken into custody,
according to a complaint filed with the Justice and Education
Departments by Legal Aid of North Carolina charging that minority
students are disproportionately disciplined. The Education
Department is investigating discipline in the school system, a
spokesman said.

The teen, his mother and the complaint all agree that
authorities didn’t identify any criminal activity until Mr. Perry
volunteered he had a small pocketknife he had used to carve a tree.
“I didn’t even know I had a knife. I just threw on my pants that
day,” he said.

The knife led to a weapons charge and a suspension. The charge
was dropped, according to his mother, Lynn Perry. The suspension
and time spent at court hearings left him short of the classes he
needed to graduate, Ms. Perry said. Now she worries whether he can
get into college. “It’s been a complete nightmare, and we can’t
afford to get this stuff expunged,” she said.

Not so long ago, it would have been considered perfectly normal,
even appropriate, for a teenage boy to carry his pocketknife with
him. Now
it’s a criminal offense that can completely derail a young
person’s future.

If there is a silverlining to any of this, it’s that absurd zero
tolerance stories are increasingly turning people against
overcriminalization, and a growing coalition of parents, experts,
and lawmakers want to roll back the policies.

I recently discussed zero tolerance policies with Cam and Co on
NRA News. Watch that interview
here.

Amanda Henderson of Cleburne,
Texas should have made sure her dogs were securely locked up.
Otherwise, her six-month-old pit bull, Maximus, might still be
alive.

Maximus and two other pit bulls escaped Henderson’s property
while she was shopping for school supplies for her kids in August.
Officer Kevin Dupre responded to a call and shot Maximus several
times, killing the pet.

Henderson, who says she never received an explanation of what
happened, just came forward to local media about the incident
because she recently got her hands on Dupre’s body camera, and she
says it contradicts his official account of what took place.

You can watch and judge
for yourself whether or not the officer’s action appeared to be
justified. Warning: The video is graphic:

Dupre’s police report reads, “I raised my duty weapon to the ready
position – pointed at the growling dog’s head. As soon as I lifted
my pistol, the dog began coming up the hill, continuing to growl
and display its teeth…I fired three shots at it.”

Henderson
sees something different take place. “You see the dogs are
happy and playing, they don’t even realize [Dupre] is there until
he calls them over. They say there’s more to the story, but there’s
no more there. There’s no reason he couldn’t have used a
tranquilizer, pepper spray, a taser instead.”

In fact, an animal control officer collected one of Henderson’s
other dogs without problem. That dog was also caught on Dupre’s

body camera, trotting right up to the other officer and obeying
commands to follow. The third pet was “secured without incident
before the shooting” according to the Cleburne Police
Department.

Over the weekend, some 10,000
people liked a Facebook page titled “Justice for Maximus,”
which planned a protest on Saturday.

The police department, which acknowledges it does not train
officers to deal with loose dogs, insists that the “the short
video” of the shooting “does not tell the whole story” of the dog’s
“aggressive” behavior toward Dupre. However, yesterday the
department announced that it was conducting an internal
investigation. And, “we’re also talking to another possible,
independent, group about doing a review,” says Mayor Scott
Cain.

The department doesn’t know how long the investigation will
take, but in the meantime, Dupre is on paid administrative leave as
of Friday. 

Pennsylvania Supreme Court
Justice Seamus McCaffery was suspended with pay by the Supreme
Court for sending unwanted sexually explicit e-mails and
pornographic images to  employees at the Attorney General’s
office, and then trying to coerce another justice into backing him,
saying he wasn’t “going down alone.”

The court didn’t suspend McCaffery with pay because the Judicial
Conduct Board hasn’t filed formal charges, a reason cited in the
dissent. The Express Times
reports:

Entering a dissenting opinion, Justice Debra McCloskey Todd
said, in part: “No independent investigative body has made any
findings regarding merits or credibility, and, unlike the
suspension of Justice Joan Orie Melvin, no criminal proceedings
have been instituted.” Orie Melvin and her sister, Janine Orie,
were found guilty last year of using court and legislative staffers
to help Orie Melvin get elected, a violation of campaign laws.

The conduct board lacks the resources and manpower for the
“enormous effort” of the investigation ordered into McCaffery’s
conduct, [Chief Justice Ronald] Castille wrote.

“The most recent misconduct of Justice McCaffery — forwarding
sexually explicit pornographic emails to employees of the Attorney
General’s Office (and, in one instance, an email depicting a naked
100-year-old woman as the target of a sexually explicit joke and a
video of a woman in sexual congress with a snake that is clearly
obscene and may violate the Crimes Code Section on Obscenity) — has
caused the Supreme Court to be held up to public ridicule,”
Castille wrote. “This conduct deserves the immediate action as
implemented by this court today.”

Among the images sent by McCaffery, according to The
Times, one of the images showed a woman having sex with a
snake that could be illegal.

h/t Irish

One of the problems my son ran
into when he still attended a brick-and-mortar school is the
current mania for turning every damned
arithmetic problem into the equivalent of a New York cabbie
taking a rube tourist to Rockefeller Center via Staten Island. Why
go the direct route when you can run up the meter?

There’s widespread agreement in the U.S. that
math is being taught badly, though experts disagree over
whether it’s Common Core’s fault or whether the education
establishment is blowing the teaching of math without assistance
from the controversial new standards. Either way, it’s
easy to find
recent examples of math problems seemingly designed to turn
numbers into an
incomprehensible mystery (see one
delightful example pictured).

Fortunately, my son is now homeschooled—or,
technically, attends a private online school. He uses online
lessons and offline texts and workbooks to learn, coached by his
mother and me. The lessons are means to an end; he takes them as
needed, and can take as much or little time as necessary, until he
demonstrates his mastery of a topic in a unit assessment test. Then
he moves on. Find your vocabulary set a breeze? Then skip the
review lessons. Stumped by long division? Then spend a few hours
working it out.

And when the approach recommended by the book comes from
education-establishment bizarro land, we can explain (not ask
permission) in a conversation with his homeroom teacher (really, an
advisor/contact at the school) that we won’t be taking the scenic
route across a mathematical Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Instead, my
wife taught Anthony basic long division as she learned the subject.
He has my mind for math which is, admittedly, missing a few
circuits, so that was challenging enough. So she spread the lesson
over two days. And she had him work at it repeatedly.

And he passed his unit assessment with 100 percent. Even better,
he said he liked math. Last year he cried over his
homework.

School doesn’t have to suck, when the lessons are tailored for
kids’ learning style, and the pace matches their ability to absorb
any given skill or bit of information. It’s easiest to do that when
you
don’t have somebody else’s education philosophy of the moment
forced on you.

What’s really going on with Obamacare premium
prices? Are they going up? Going down? Well, ah, yes. The best
answer is that it’s complicated; it depends on which premiums
you’re looking at, in what areas of the country, and
when. 

Back in September, a Kaiser Family Foundation study
found that, based on a study of 16 major metro areas, that
“benchmark silver plans”—the second cheapest plans in the middle or
“silver” tier of health insurance available through the law’s
exchanges—would drop by 1 percent, on average. Plans in some
places, like Nashville, would rise, but overall the price was going
down just a little.

Great news! Obamacare premiums are going down! Or are they?

Last week, Jed Graham of Investor’s Business Daily
reported that, after looking at premium prices in the largest city
in 15 different states, plus Washington, D.C., he found that the
cost of the cheapest “bronze” plans—the lowest tier of coverage
available on the exchanges—would rise by 14 percent next year.

In some cities, Graham reports, they’ll go up
by a lot more than that:

In Seattle, the cost of the cheapest bronze plan, after
subsidies, will soar 64%, from $60 to $98 per month, for
individuals at this income level. Some other cities seeing notable
gains include Providence (up 38%, from $72 to $99 per month); Los
Angeles (up 27%, from $88 to $111); Las Vegas (up 22%, from $100 to
$122); and New York (up 18%, from $97 to $114).

Of the people who picked bronze-level plans, Graham notes, 39
percent picked the cheapest option. So this could impact quite a
few people.

Depending on how you measure it, then, plan premiums are either
going down or up in various parts of the country.

What we still don’t really know, though, is what the overall
picture looks like, either in terms of the plans that are on offer
or the plans that people are actually picking for themselves.
That’s because a lot of information about premiums and subsidy
amounts, especially in the federal exchanges, is
on hold until the middle of next month.

Only then will we actually get a complete look at the various
costs and options. The timing isn’t an accident either. Last year’s
open enrollment period started in October. This year’s open
enrollment, and thus the release of the information it makes
available, was
delayed until just after the election.