Category: reason

Andrew Napolitano has a number of questions for
us to mull over on Turkey Day. What if another Thanksgiving Day is
upon us and because of the government we have less to be thankful
for than we did at the last one? What if at every Thanksgiving
liberty is weakened and the government is strengthened? What if
Thanksgiving’s warm and breezy seduction of gratitude is just the
government’s way of inducing us to think we should be grateful for
it? And, what if we have the right to pursue happiness no matter
what the government says?

View this article.

Australian Capital Territory
health officials have banned parents from selling homemade foods
containing meat
or dairyat school fund-raising events. A government spokeswoman
said the rules are aimed at reducing food poisoning. The government
has no data on how frequently people get food poisoning from eating
things they bought at school fund raisers.

A ReasonTV leftover worth reheating. Happy
Thanksgiving. 

Here is the original text from the Nov. 23, 2010
video: 

The Pilgrims founded their colony at Plymouth
Plantation in December 1620 and promptly started dying off in
droves.

As the colony’s early governor, William Bradford, wrote
in “Of Plymouth Plantation”:”That which was most sadd &
lamentable was, that in 2. or 3. moneths time halfe of their
company dyed.”

When the settlers finally stopped croaking, they set
about creating a heaven on earth, a society without private
property, where all worked for the common good. Everything was
shared. Especially bitching and moaning about working for the
common good. Bradford again:

“Yong-men that were most able and fitte for labour and
service did repine that they should spend their time and streingth
to worke for other mens wives and children, with out any
recompense….And for men’s wives to be commanded to doe service
for other men, as dresing their meate, washing their cloaths, etc.,
they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well
brooke it.”

With nobody working, everybody was suffering. And in
case you think nobody was working simply because they couldn’t
understand a damn thing Bradford was saying, chew on this: In 1623,
Bradford and the other leaders

“Assigned to every family a parceel of land…this had
very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so as
much more torne was planted then other waise would have bene by any
means the Govr or any other could use, and saved him a great deall
of trouble, and gave farr better contente.”

In no time at all “any generall wante of famine hath
not been amongest them since to this day.”

America would never go hungry again. So this week,
before you drift into your annual tryptophan-induced coma, don’t
forget to give thanks to the true patron of this holiday feast:
property rights.

Approximately 2.30 minutes.

Produced by Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie. Voices
by Meredith Bragg and Austin Bragg.

The
long-simmering dispute between China and Japan and, because why
not, the United States over a group of uninhabited but
resource-rich islands in the South China Sea continues to
simmer. 

NBC News reports:

China has deployed its one and only aircraft carrier
after two unarmed American B-52 bombers flew over a disputed island
chain and through what China insists is restricted airspace.

U.S. defense officials told NBC News that the Chinese had not
engaged in a provocative act or made any demands against American
or Japanese military in the region. Japan and China both claim the
island chain, in the East China Sea.

Internet users in China have
reportedly taken to mocking the ruling Communist Party as a
laughing stock for declaring an “air defense zone” and then having
it breached almost immediately, though the Chinese Internet being a
highly censored and controlled place, such mocking may be a set up
to justify more action.

Never fear, though,
Joe Biden is on it. So maybe everyone can find some common
ground by laughing at something else.

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

Last year, the city of Camden
decided to can its unionized police force in favor  of
unionized county cops who
hit the streets this April. The decision came about because the
police union would not budge on the
highly lucrative contract they had, even by police standards.
Camden cops, for example, got a 4 percent bonus for working the day
shift, and a 10 percent bonus for starting at 9:30am. On any given
day, 30 percent of the force was absent because of the liberal sick
policies. The city has been run exclusively by Democrats for
several generations, and some local leaders openly worried that
Camden, which already had the highest crime rate per capita last
year, would get worse.
But it hasn’t. In fact, crime’s gone down, as Fox News Latino

reports: 

The reorganization increased the amount of police on
the streets and incorporated cutting edge technology such as
ShotSpotter rooftop monitors. The initiative has already gotten
results, according to city leaders.

Over the summer months this year, the murder rate fell by 22
percent and crime overall was down 15 percent, according to data
provided by Camden County officials.

Cities like Detroit, which is now in bankruptcy court in part
thanks to onerous union obligations and whose police department
does not know how many
employees it exactly has or what they do, ought to take
note.

Two
years ago, in Commonwealth v. Cruz, the Supreme Judicial
Court of Massachusetts ruled
that the odor of burning marijuana is not sufficient reason for a
police officer to order a motorist out of his car. The court noted
that under Question 2, an initiative that Massachusetts voters
approved by a large margin in 2008, possessing up to an ounce of
marijuana is a citable offense rather than a misdemeanor. “To order
a passenger in a stopped vehicle to exit based merely on suspicion
of an offense,” the court ruled, “that offense must be criminal.”
Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley nevertheless is asking the
court to uphold a car search triggered by the smell of marijuana.
Among other things, he argues that such an odor counts as probable
cause because possessing small amounts of cannabis remains a crime
under federal law. In an
amicus brief filed last Friday, the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws urges the court to
reject that argument (citations omitted):

The appellant asks this Court to reverse its holdings in
Cruz and its progeny by empowering state law
enforcement to ignore the state decriminalization law and
enforce instead federal prohibition law. The appellant
would enable federal law to justify police
searches otherwise illegal under state law….

Enforcing federal prohibition—against the will of
a compelling majority of state’s voter rejection of
that policy in adopting decriminalization by
initiative—violates fundamental principles of federalism and
the state constitution’s separation of powers….

State law enforcement derives its authority from state law,
its constitution and statutes; the power of local police to
detain and arrest, within the outer limits of
federal Constitutional civil rights law, is derived from
and determined by state law. 

Local police cannot evade state law constraints in state
court prosecutions by wishing they were federal deputies and
pretending their arrestees can be brought to federal
courthouses. Allowing state law enforcement to disregard state
law, by preferring federal policies rejected by popular
initiative and this Court, eviscerates the sovereignty of the
people and federalism’s protection of state
sovereignty. 

The case involves a motorist, Anthony Craan, who was pulled over
in June 2010 by state police at a sobriety checkpoint. Trooper
Scott Irish claimed to smell “the strong odor of fresh, unburned
marijuana coming from the passenger compartment.” After Irish
mentioned this, Craan revealed that he had a plastic bag of pot in
his glove compartment, which led to car search that revealed
additional marijuana, MDMA pills, and a four loose rounds of
ammunition. But at the point when Irish decided to search the car,
all he knew was that Craan possessed less than an ounce of
marijuana, which in itself is not a crime under Massachusetts
law.

In addition to seeking refuge in federal law, the prosecutors
argue that Irish had probable cause to charge Craan, who admitted
that he and his passenger had recently smoked marijuana, with
driving under the influence, in which case going through the car
would have been justified as a search incident to an arrest. The
government also argues that the presence of a little marijuana
raises the possibility of more—perhaps enough to count as a
misdemeanor under state law. That last argument, like the one based
on the federal Controlled Substances Act, would justify a car
search whenever a cop smells (or claims to smell) pot, even though
possessing up to an ounce has been decriminalized in Massachusetts.
He would not even need a
dog.

[via
Boston magazine]

Despite government agencies, such as the Los Angeles Homeless
Services Authority, spending $82 million per year to help the
city’s homeless, Los Angeles has the second-highest homeless
population in the country at 53,800
individuals.

So
to help mitigate the problem, organizations like the Greater West Hollywood Food
Coalition serve nightly hot meals to long lines of hungry
residents in mobile food trucks parked at various parts of the
city. The GWHFC, which has been operating for 27 years staffed by
volunteers, prides itself on providing up to 200 meals per night,
as well as offering emotional support and “specific, practical
help” to its patrons when possible. Their motto is “I Am My
Brother’s Keeper.”

Not everyone is pleased with the charity’s presence though.

Two members of the Los Angeles City Council
recently proposed an
ordinance that would ban private charities and individuals from
feeding homeless people in public. The politicians behind the
legislation, Tom LaBonge and Mitch O’Farrell (both Democrats), have
said they are responding to concerns from residents who are
uncomfortable with the homeless spending lots of time around their
homes. 

One such resident, Alexander Polinsky, an actor who lives two
blocks from the popular bread line,
told the New York Times: 

If you give out free food on the street with no other services
to deal with the collateral damage, you get hundreds of people
beginning to squat. They are living in my bushes and they are
living in my next door neighbor’s crawl spaces. We have a
neighborhood which now seems like a mental ward.

Essentially, Councilman LaBonge
argued, the charitable food line is creating a public nuisance.
“[It] has overwhelmed what is a residential neighborhood,” he told
the Times. “When dinner is served, everybody comes and
it’s kind of a free-for-all.”

Opponents of the ban have expressed their frustration at what
they consider heartless, overreaching legislation. 

“This is an attempt to make difficult problems disappear,” Jerry
Jones, the executive director of the National Coalition for the
Homeless told the Times, adding, “It’s both
callous and ineffective.”

Debra Morris, a patron of the Greater West Hollywood Food
Coalition, said that the organization is “helping human beings,” as
she was seated in a wheelchair enjoying the evening’s offering of
pasta with tomato sauce. “I can barely pay my own rent.”

If Los Angeles enacts the ordinance, the Times
reports, it will join more than 30 other cities “that have
adopted or debated some form of legislation intended to restrict
the public feeding of the homeless.” Last year for instance,

Mayor Bloomberg banned food donations to the homeless in
New York City on the grounds that the city couldn’t assess the
food’s salt, fat, and fiber content. In Orlando, Florida, police
have
arrested volunteers feeding homeless people in parks
for violating a city ordinance. The National Coalition for the
Homeless calls the trend the “criminalization
of homelessness in U.S. cities.”

In the Atlantic Cities, Emily Badger
writes:

These laws…look like attempts to push the homeless out of
public view. If a city can’t get rid of these people, in other
words, maybe it can get rid of the activities that so visibly
attract them.

If the purpose of the legislation is to reduce the presence of
homeless people in public though, then why don’t cities ban
homelessness outright? It turns out that politicians actually tried
just that in Los Angeles in the early 2000’s. The city passed an
ordinance that made it illegal to sleep on the street. However, a
judge eventually
overturned it as unconstitutional. 

• The value of a bitcoin topped
  $1,000 at Mt. Gox for the first time today.
• To ease tension between China and other Asian nations over
  disputed ownership of some South China Seas Islands, the United
  States will be sending …
  Joe Biden.
• A judge has ordered a
  Sriracha chili sauce factory in California to stop whatever
  operations are causing neighbors to complain about the smell, but
  stopped short of ordering the whole thing shut down.
• A British couple has lost its fight with the UK Supreme Court
  to
  deny a room to a gay couple at their bed and breakfast because
  of their religious objections to sex outside of marriage. They were
  ordered to pay damages.
• Three have been killed in Sao Paoli, Brazil, after a
  crane collapsed at one of the stadiums being built for next
  summer’s World Cup.
• A Democratic Colorado state senator targeted for recall over
  her vote for the passage of gun control laws has
  announced her resignation. If she fought the recall and lost,
  Democrats would have lost control of the state senate. This method
  will allow Democrats to choose her replacement until the next
  election.

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J.D. Tuccille reviews Floating City: A Rogue
Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy.
The book is a memoir of sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh’s years
spent penetrating New York City’s vast underground economy, with an
emphasis on cocaine and sex. Black markets have always existed to
provide goods and services that people want and that governments
don’t want them to have, says Tuccille. Floating City is a
fascinating glimpse at just how adaptable and real those markets
are.

View this article.

On December 2, Vice President Joe
Biden will head to Asia. The news of the visit comes amid rising
tensions between China and Japan regarding sovereignty over a group
of small uninhabited islands. The ongoing dispute over the islands,
referred to in China as the Diaoyu Islands and in Japan as the
Senkaku Islands, recently intensified when China announced the
introduction of an air defense zone that covers the islands.
According the
BBC, the Chinese government has said that any planes within the
zone “must obey its rules or face “emergency defensive
measures.”

Since the introduction of the zone two unarmed American B-52
bombers have flown over the disputed islands. The
Chinese defense ministry has said that the planes were
monitored.

Commercial Japanese planes
defied the rules relating to the newly introduced zone,
ignoring Chinese authorities while flying through it.

The BBC has a map outlining the extent of the new Chinese
defense zone, shown below (the Chinese Defense Ministry and
the EIA are credited):

Yes, the islands that are the cause of all the recent fuss are
so small they cannot be seen on the map. Put together, the islands
have an area of less than three square miles. 

More from Reason.com on China here.