Tag: news

Cindy Cohn at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation addresses the New York Times’ eternal
agonizing over its internal decision to delay, by 13 months, a
major 2005 story about warrantless wiretapping by the Bush
administration. That decision still raises doubts about the
Times’ relationship with government officials, and led to
Edward Snowden bypassing the gray lady when looking for a willing
outlet for this year’s revelations about NSA spying (that’s NSA
honcho, Gen. Keith Alexander, pictured). Cohn takes issue with
Times’ staffers conclusions that all of this intrusive
surveillance is now legal, arguing that the Obama administration
relies on tortured interpretation of the law to intercept phone and
Internet communications. But Cohn is letting herself get caught up
in an side-show argument that ought to be left to the increasingly
irrelevant scribblers at fading media institutions. In fact, it
doesn’t matter if the government’s vast surveillance schemes are
legal. What matters is that the spying is despicable and should be
fought, frustrated, and sabotaged by anybody with the means to do
so.

In an
article on the controversies and debates swirling around the 2005
article, Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan quotes
Eric Lichtblau, one of the authors of the article, on the
fallout.

Given the law of unintended consequences, and a fair helping of
irony, the publication of the warrantless eavesdropping story
resonates now in quite another way: The furor it caused prompted
the Bush administration to push hard for changes in the laws
governing surveillance.

“Our story set in motion the process of making all this stuff
legal,” Mr. Lichtblau said. “Now it’s all encoded in law. Bush got
everything he wanted on his way out of office.”

There may be public outrage over the latest wave of surveillance
revelations, but the government has a helpful defense: Hey, it’s
legal.

Hold on there,
writes Cohn. Not so fast.

Not so.  The government’s claims of “legality” are wrong,
have been strongly criticized by national security
law professors, and are currently being challenged in court by
EFF, ACLU, and EPIC, among others. The Times disserves its audience
by repeating them as if they were true.

In fact, the ACLU has a hearing in New York this Friday,
November 22, in its key challenge to one of those “legal” claims:
that the NSA’s indiscriminately collecting telephone records is
“legal” under a convoluted interpretation of the section 215 of the
2001 Patriot Act that mentions neither telephone records nor the
NSA. To try to make it fit, the government attempts to redefine the
limits on production of “relevant” things to allow the collection
of massive amounts of “irrelevant” information. In other words, by
a plain reading of the statute, what the NSA is currently doing in
collecting massive amounts of telephone records on an ongoing basis
is not legal.

Cohn is likely correct, I think. The feds have stretched Section
215 well beyond the breaking point, relying on secret
interpretations of that law, as well as on executive orders that
they won’t even release to the public. Chances are, given an honest
judge, federal surveillance will eventually be found to have gone
beyond the limits of the law.

But should we be satisfied if the judicial system proves
accommodating to the silly putty theory of legal interpretations?
Or what if Senate and House leaders slap themselves on the
forehead, say “our bad,” and pass legislation that really
does authorize the snooping? Does that make it all
right?

As I’ve
written before, the answer is: No fucking way. The surveillance
is intrusive, violates privacy, and empowers untrustworthy state
officials with information that is too easily abused. That is, it
should be illegal because it’s unacceptable; it’s not unacceptable
because it’s (presumably) illegal. We shouldn’t tolerate the
surveillance state whether or not Congress dots the president’s
“i”s and crosses his “t”s for him.

I hope the ACLU, EFF, and EPIC are successful in their legal
challenges to government surveillance for tactical reasons—it’s a
path to victory over the snoops. But that doesn’t mean we should
stop fighting the surveillance state even if politicians extend the
cloak of legal rectitude to cover its transgressions.

A legal surveillance state still needs to be drowned in
the creek.

It never fails. Whenever a
president’s approval ratings tank, out come the deep think pieces
about how the president’s personality flaws explain his political
dilemma and ours. Obama’s is his introversion, the experts say.
It’s a common trope — and as a congenital introvert, Gene Healy is
sick of it. He argues that, simply put, Obama is a terrible
president.

View this article.

It never fails. Whenever a
president’s approval ratings tank, out come the deep think pieces
about how the president’s personality flaws explain his political
dilemma and ours. Obama’s is his introversion, the experts say.
It’s a common trope — and as a congenital introvert, Gene Healy is
sick of it. He argues that, simply put, Obama is a terrible
president.

View this article.

Via Alan Vanneman
comes a link to this NY Times story about cities bulldozing blight
rather than trying to rehab it. A snippet:

Large-scale destruction is well known in Detroit, but it is also
underway in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Buffalo
and others at a total cost of more than $250 million. Officials are
tearing down tens of thousands of vacant buildings, many habitable,
as they seek to stimulate economic growth, reduce crime and blight,
and increase environmental sustainability….

[M]ore than half of the nation’s 20 largest cities in 1950 have
lost at least one-third of their populations. And since 2000, a
number of cities, including Baltimore, St. Louis, Pittsburgh,
Cincinnati and Buffalo, have lost around 10 percent; Cleveland has
lost more than 17 percent; and more than 25 percent of residents
have left Detroit, whose bankruptcy declaration this summer has
heightened anxiety in other postindustrial cities….

At least one city that has taken a pioneering approach to
confronting diminution has found that accepting shrinkage does not
mean problems go away. Youngstown, Ohio, once a bustling steel city
of 170,000 but now with only 66,000 people, has sought to head off
collapse by tearing down thousands of vacant houses — 3,000 so far
and 10 more each week.

Read the whole thing.

As someone who has lived in and spent time in shrinking cities
such as Buffalo and Cleveland, I understand the appeal – and quite
possibly the effectiveness – of clearing out huge swaths of vacated
land (that assumes, of course, that eminent domain powers are not
abused).

But if working on
Reason Saves Cleveland taught me one thing, it’s that there’s
no simple solution to urban decline. Some of it is simply
historical – the Northeast is not going to dominate American
business and culture that way it did 100 years ago and cities such
as Cleveland or Buffalo or Detroit will never regain their earlier
populations or the density at which they lived. Read
more on that topic here.

But it’s also clear that private and public sector boosters are
always more interested in laying big bets on giant development
deals that won’t transform a city or region even if they happen to
work out perfectly. What makes and keeps places livable and
attractive are the smaller-ticket items, such as quality of basic
services such as roads, law enforcement, business climate, schools,
taxes, and regulations. These aren’t sexy items but they are the
things that actually keep cities thriving.

Watch Reason TV’s #AnarchyinDetroit playlist to learn how
residents are taking their bankrupt city back, block by block:

The singer Lady Gaga told a local New York
morning radio DJ that she had been addicted to marijuana.
People first
reported:

“I have been addicted to it and it’s ultimately related
to anxiety coping and it’s a form of self-medication and I was
smoking up to 15-20 marijuana cigarettes a day with no tobacco,”
she said on Elvis Duran and The Z100 Morning Show. 

“I was living on a totally other psychedelic plane, numbing myself
completely, and looking back I do see now that some of it had to do
with my hip pain. I didn’t know where the pain was coming from
so I was just in a lot of pain and very depressed all the time and
not really sure why,” she said. 

Does it sound like maybe she was taking prescription pain pills
too?
Subsequent
reports don’t appear to mention it. Lady Gaga recently broke
her hip on stage, and at the end of the People write up of
the interview she’s quoted:

“The truth is that I can break, and I did. I was not
very good at breaking. I lost everything that I love. I
was in a wheelchair for six months. I did a lot of drugs and took a
lot of pills,” she admitted. 

But Gaga said she plans to “fight” her addiction, and challenge
herself to create music without the aid of mood-altering
substances. 

“I do put that pressure on myself; I have to be high to be
creative. I need that, that’s an error in my life that happened for
over 10 years. Can I be brilliant without it? I know that I can be
and I have to be because I want to live, and I want my fans to want
to live.” 

The Drug Policy Alliance
notes:

According to a federal Institute of Medicine study in
1999, fewer than 10 percent of those who try marijuana ever meet
the clinical criteria for dependence, while 32 percent of tobacco
users and 15 percent of alcohol users do. According to federal
data, marijuana treatment admissions referredT by the criminal
justice system rose from 48 percent in 1992 to 58 percent in 2006.
Just 45 percent of marijuana admissions met the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders criteria for marijuana
dependence. More than a third hadn’t used marijuana in the 30 days
prior to admission for treatment.

Drug courts are
often a paradox, trapping non-violent “offenders”with the
choice of being criminals or sick. The danger with comparing
marijuana to the perfectly legal tobacco and alcohol is the desire
of some authoritarians to
ban it all.

As Brian Doherty
noted about the feds characterizing spending on a purported
cure for marijuana addiction as something with a clear medical
need, “there is certainly a clear institutional need on the part of
the drug treatment industry, Big Pharma, and an American government
on all levels that is going to be more and more troubled by the
realities of human beings enjoying smoking a plant that hovers
between commodity, medicine, and menace.”

A review in the Washington Post,
incidentally, is not interested in Lady Gaga’s latest studio
effort, criticizing her for making statements about culture only in
“the most cartoonishly broad strokes.” 

The Associated Press is
running a terrific and long investigative article, “The
Secret, Dirty Cost of Obama’s Green Power Push,” on the
environmental downsides of the ethanol fuel mandate. From the
AP…

…the ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the
environment than politicians promised and much worse than the
government admits today.

As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped
out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and
polluted water supplies, an Associated Press investigation
found.

Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more
than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined —
have vanished on Obama’s watch.

Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine
prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the
soil.

Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of
which seeped into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened
the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can’t
survive.

The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many
scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad
environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it,
highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any
negative impact.

Farmers planted 15 million more acres of corn last year than
before the ethanol boom, and the effects are visible in places like
south central Iowa.

Besides these negative effects, it is doubtful that producing
corn ethanol has much, if any effect, on reducing the greenhouse
gas emissions that are thought to be contributing to man-made
global warming. Nevertheless, industry lobbyists fought hard to get
the EPA to jigger the numbers so that ethanol would look good in
this respect. As the AP explains:

Writing the regulations to implement the ethanol mandate was
among the administration’s first major environmental undertakings.
Industry and environmental groups watched closely.

The EPA’s experts determined that the mandate would increase
demand for corn and encourage farmers to plow more land.
Considering those factors, they said, corn ethanol was only
slightly better than gasoline when it came to carbon dioxide
emissions.

Sixteen percent better, to be exact. And not in the short term.
Only by 2022.

By law, though, biofuels were supposed to be at least 20 percent
greener than gasoline.

The AP reports that the EPA bowed to lobbyist pressure and
changed its assumptions, i.e., boosting its estimates of average
yields to 230 bushels per acre and corn prices leveling off at
$3.22 per bushel. In the 2013 bumper crop year, the U.S. Department
of  Agriculture estimates yields will be just over
160 bushels per acre and corn prices are currently around
$4.30 per bushel.

It is worth your while to read the entire depressing article.
For more background see my 2010 article about my
visit to an ethanol plant in Aberdeen, SD. Also see Reason
TV’s 2008 video in which I outline the harms of ethanol
subsidies below: