Tag: hit&run

Thai police arrested a man
in Bangkok for
reading 1984 in public. The arrest was part of a
crackdown on protests of the May 22 military coup.

Last week Denver police
raided and shut down Maryjane’s Social Club, one of the
few places in Colorado, aside from private residences, where people
could legally smoke pot. Or so it seemed. Maryjane’s did not
advertise and was open only to paying members, but in the eyes of
Denver officials that was not sufficiently private. Rob Corry, a
Denver attorney who is representing one of the club members cited
for public marijuana consumption on Friday, argues that the city’s

compromise with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, which allowed
its “Classically Cannabis” concerts to proceed as invitation-only
events, should apply to clubs like Maryjane’s as well. “This is an
identical situation,” Corry told A.P. “It’s not even close to being
a gray area.”

The city does not see it that way. Daniel Douglas, a lawyer who
works in the Prosecution and Code Enforcement Section of the Denver
City Attorney’s Office, concedes that consuming marijuana in a
genuinely private club would be legal. “If consumption is not
public,” he says, “then it is not against the law.” But to qualify
as a private club, Douglas says, an organization would have to
satisfy the “balancing test” set forth by the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the 3rd Circuit in
U.S. v. Lansdowne Swim Club, a 1990 discrimination case.
That test includes factors such as the club’s selectivity, its
history and mission, the formalities it observes, whether it
advertises for members, whether its facilities are used by
nonmembers, the control that members have over the club’s
operations, and whether the club generates profits for the people
who run it.

Douglas notes that a Colorado appeals court applied the 3rd
Circuit’s test in a
1999 decision involving the Hide-A-Way Spa, an Adams
County bath house “where nude female attendants provide[d] services
to adult male customers,” including “‘finger-tip powder’ rubs,
saunas, and shared bubble bath or hot tub treatments.” In an effort
to escape state and local restrictions on “nude entertainment
establishments,” the spa’s owners restyled it as a private club.
The appeals court rejected that characterization, concluding that
the spa, although renamed the Phoenix Club, was in practice “open
to the public,” since it seemed that anyone who walked in and paid
a $5 fee could become a member and thereby take advantage of the
spa’s services (which carried additional charges). The court cited
ads for the spa in Denver-area newspapers, which “indicated that
the establishment had been in business at the same location for
over 19 years and gave no indication that it was a private club.”
It also noted that “the club did not keep an active roll of its
members,” that “there were no membership meetings or club
activities as such,” and that “the club did not really provide any
services other than those involving a female nude entertainer.” The
court found that “the record supports the trial court’s conclusion
that defendants’ attempt to pass off the Phoenix Club as a private
club is a sham.”

The city’s position, I gather from Friday’s raid, is that
Maryjane’s Social Club is likewise a sham. It’s not clear where
that leaves other Denver cannabis clubs, such as iBake (pictured
above). This issue may ultimately be resolved by the courts as a
result of challenges by the club members or managers. But
Maryjane’s status as a private club is relevant only if the city is
correct that any marijuana consumption in a place open to the
public violates a
Colorado law that makes it a petty offense to consume marijuana
“openly and publicly.”
Amendment 64, which legalized marijuana for recreational use,
left that prohibition in place, saying decriminalization does not
apply to “consumption that is conducted openly and publicly.” But
as I
pointed out last week, the city’s interpretation of that
language makes it difficult for people to exercise the rights
protected by Amendment 64, especially if they are visiting Colorado
and do not own or rent a home there. 

Iraq has lost metaphorical and real ground in its
ongoing dispute with the Kurdish regional government over oil
exports—the first
thing I wrote about here more than two years ago. Back then
Iraq’s central government was busy trying to coerce foreign oil
companies into not making lucrative deals with the stable
government in Arbil. And now, as Reuters
explains:

Baghdad has cut the KRG’s budget since January over the dispute,
arguing the sales are illegal, and has repeatedly threatened to sue
any firm that buys oil from the autonomous region.

But since the KRG took control of the northern oil hub of Kirkuk
amid the retreat of the Iraqi military from the Islamic State-led
insurgency, the autonomous region has been emboldened.

On Thursday, the president of Iraq’s Kurdish north asked the
region’s parliament to prepare the way for a referendum on its
long-saught goal of independence.

The Kurdish people have never had an independent country of
their own. Turkey, which also has a geographically contiguous area
populated by Kurds, has long opposed the creation of a Kurdish
state—quelling rebellions at home and fearing an independent state
carved out of Iraq would make it harder for them to manage their
Kurdish majority. Apparently no more. A spokesperson for Turkey’s
ruling party said earlier
this week the country was ready to welcome an independent
Kurdish state. Turkey, fore one, appears to be choosing stability
over sectarianism.

Last
weekend, I traveled to speak and hang out at the Free State Project‘s annual
hootenany, which is called PorcFest (short for Porcupine Freedom
Festival). It was a great and excellent time and I hope to write up
something about in the next few days.

Here’s
a nice writeup of the event and the FSP by The
Economist‘s Emily Bobrow:

In the jovial atmosphere of PorcFest, where idealists bond over
their shared mistrust of rules and big institutions, the prospect
of a future New Hampshire that can do without such things seems
far-fetched. Tech geeks (who still dominate the Free State
movement) enjoy home-made “bananarchy” ice cream while prattling on
about the power of crypto-currencies. “Bitcoin can topple
governments and end war,” gushes one fan.

Others are more realistic. “I’m an incrementalist,” explains
Jason Sorens, the subdued intellectual who dreamed up the Free
State Project while he was getting his PhD from Yale. Now a
lecturer at Dartmouth College in Hanover, he is eager to use New
Hampshire to test libertarian theories about enlightened
self-interest and reciprocal altruism, small government and large
networks of voluntary institutions. “We don’t have all the
answers,” he says, “but it’s worth the experiment.”

The “Bananarchy” ice cream was pretty damn fine, btw, but even
better was the “Who Will Build My Rocky Road.”

Read the whole thing.

There is no other way to interpret the hissy fits it is
throwing. In both instances, I note in my column in The
Week, the Supreme Court upheld the
liberties of religion, speech and association enshrined in the
First Amendment. But it did so on grounds so narrow so as to not
even be worth chugging a Sam Adams for this July 4.

Hobby Lobby challenged Obamacare’s mandate that companies offer
contraceptive coverage even in violation of their religious
beliefs. I note:

Yet instead of simply affirming the owners of Hobby Lobby’s
broad constitutional right not to be forced to violate their
religious beliefs, the justices ruled in the company’s favor only
because not doing so would have violated the Religious Freedom and
Restoration Act.

All that the act requires is that before violating someone’s
religious liberties, the government demonstrates that it had no
other way to achieve its ends. In this case, the “conservative”
justices questioned neither the end — provision of contraceptives —
nor whether it was a “compelling state interest.” These fanatics of
limited government ruled only that because there were
less-religious-liberty-busting ways to achieve contraceptive
coverage — for example, by the government directly funding it as
it’s doing for religious universities and hospitals — the mandate
did not meet the RFTRA test.

None of this, however, prevented the left from throwing a
collective hissy-fit. Social media erupted into tiresome taunts
of fascism.

As for Harris vs. Quinn in which a mom sued Illinois’ public
unions for garnishing the state subsidies she receives for taking
care of her disabled son, one would have thought that standing up
for the mother would be a no-brainer for the left. But, apparently,
letting her keep her money, according to Salon‘s Joan
Walsh, is a victory for the “one percent” and the “plutocrat
carte.l”

I cannot do justice to Walsh’s twisted logic in a few words, so
just go and read the damn column
here – and then weep tomorrow about how unhinged the left has
become in this country.

New York City Mayor Bill De
Blasio (D), who ran on a promise to reduce inequality, is allowing
upper middle class professionals with household incomes as high as
$193,000 to tap into government housing subsidies so they can
continue living in posh areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

In a city in which one in five households lives below the
poverty line, writes Jim Epstein, applying limited government
resources to such a purpose is obscene.

View this article.

• The NSA’s XKeyscore
  surveillance system’s source code
  was leaked. If you care about your online privacy and use
  things like the Tor network, the NSA classifies you as an
  “extremist.”
• Bureau of Labor Statistics data indicates that employers
  
  added 288,000 jobs to the economy in June. Sounds great,
  except, at the same time a
  record high 92,120,000 Americans 16 and older didn’t
  participate in the labor force.
• “We
  don’t discuss veterans. We do not work for veterans. … Our
  customer is the VA central office, the White House and the
  Congress,” a whistleblower says. “We actually put incoming
  applications aside so we could focus on the [Obamacare] related
  applications that came in over last summer.”
• After facing a potential $54,000 deficit due to federal lunch
  guidelines, one school board president in Milwaukee says he’s
  ditching the program  “pushed by and large by Michelle Obama,
  who last I checked
  has been elected by no one.” Burn!
• Toronto Mayor Rob Ford announced that he’s tried “every drug you
  can probably think of.”  Either this is a bold
  reelection strategy, or he was on drugs when he said it.
• Saudi Arabia deployed
  30,000 troops to the Iraqi border. 
• 
  Thousands are fleeing the North Carolina coastline as
  Hurricane Arthur is expected to hit it tomorrow.

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For the better part
of a decade now, folks have been fretting about “boomerang” kids,
the 20- and sometimes 30-something children of boomers who’ve come
flocking back to their parents’ nests under the duress of a poor
economy. “Everybody’s
moving into their parents’ basements,” The Washington
Post warned in 2012. “A rising share of young adults
live in their parents homes,” Pew Research trumpeted last year.
“One
third of millennials are living with their parents,” the
headlines read in June. 

The dire pronouncements tend to be based on U.S. Census Bureau
data, which does show an increasing number of young adults—more
than half of those under 25, according to the most recent data—to
be living with their parents. But Derek Thompson at The
Atlantic tears
through this gloomy prognosis with one simple fact: The Census
counted students who live on college campuses as living in their
parents’ homes. 

The share of young people living “at home” is at a half-century
high because more young adults than ever before are going to
college: 

As you can see in the graph (above) the share of
18-to-24-year-olds living at home who aren’t in college has
declined since 1986. But the share of college students living “at
home” (i.e.: in dorms, often) has increased. So the
Millennials-living-in-our-parents meme is almost entirely a result
of higher college attendance. 

That’s crucial to know, because the share of 25- to 29-year-olds
with a bachelor degree has grown by almost 50
percent since the early 1980s. More than 84 percent of
today’s 27-year-olds spend at least some time in college and now 40
percent have a bachelor’s or associate’s degree. More young people
going to school means more young people living in dorms, which
means more young people “living with their parents,” according to
the weird Census. 

Millennial generation doomsaying is fun and popular because it
allows young folks to feel aggrieved and older folks to feel
schadenfreude, writes Thompson. But if we’re going to lament Gen
Y’s prospects, than we should at least focus on the real reasons
today’s kids are not okay—like unemployment: The
latest jobs report shows that about 40 percent of unemployed
workers are millennials.

Even this isn’t quite as scary—or at least not as singularly
scary for young adults—when you put it into perspective. When (if)
the job market improves, young adults will likely have an easier
time slipping back into it than their older counterparts simply by
virtue of being younger and cheaper,
said Dan Schawbel, founder of Millennial Branding management
and consulting firm.

Meanwhile millennials are only barely less employed than Gen
X’ers, who make up 37 percent of unemployed Americans. The oldest
Gen X’ers turn 50 next year, while the youngest hover around age
35. This is the generation in the prime of their “prime earning
years.” Whither the concern for Gen X everybody?

William Binney worked at the National Security Agency (NSA)
for 40 years, and warned about the agency’s constitutional
violations of people’s right to privacy and due process before and
after leaving the NSA in 2001. In 2007 his home was raided by the
FBI during a leaks investigation. This week Binney testified before
a special committee of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, that is
looking into the NSA’s spying activities in the country and
Germany’s own intelligence services’ complicity in those
activities.

Deutsche Welle reports:

Testifying, Binney accused the NSA of having a “totalitarian
mentality” and wanting “total information control” over citizens in
breach of the US constitution. It was an approach that until now
the public had only seen among dictators, he added.

Mass collection was “senseless” and did not help in
counterterrorism, and actually hindered the agency’s capabilities,
Binney said.

The NSA represented the “greatest threat” to American society
since the US Civil War of the 19th century, Binney added.

German media also report that the NSA targeted Internet users
who encrypted data or tried to remain anonymous on the
Internet.

Watch a Reason TV interview with Binney from earlier this year
below:

School district officials in Philadelphia are
taking aim at rules requiring teacher layoffs and placements to be
done based on seniority–the same kind of provision that was
recently deemed unconstitutional in California. Unsurprisingly, the
Philadelphia Federation of Teachers says they can’t do that. Reason
Foundation policy intern Ethan Roberts examines the controversy and
argues that Philadelphia students, teachers, and parents deserve
better than seniority-based staffing delivers. 

View this article.