Inhaltsverzeichnis für November 2016 in Reason

At the end of August, the U.S. Department of Agriculture bought 11 million pounds of cheese —that's a cheese cube for every man, woman, and child in America—in order to bail out the nation's feckless cheesemongers. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack touted the aid package, worth $20 million, as a winwin: "This commodity purchase is part of a robust, comprehensive safety net that will help reduce a cheese surplus that is at a 30-year high while, at the same time, moving a high-protein food to the tables of those most in need." (Most of the federal government's new stockpile will go to food banks.) This bailout of Big Cheese came on top of an $11.2 million infusion earlier in the month to dairy farmers enrolled in a 2014 federal financial…

Contrary to Donald Trump's fearmongering, violent crime has fallen dramatically over the last two decades. VIOLENT CRIME RATE (per 100,000 inhabitants) SINCE 1995... 45% ...the rate of murder and non-negligent manslaughter decreased from 8.2 to 4.5 per 100,000 people in the U.S. 44% ...the rate of aggravated assault decreased from 418.3 to 232.5 per 100,000 people in the U.S. Why do these numbers stop with 2014? That's the last year for which we have full data from the FBI. Preliminary reports suggest there was a small (1.7%) increase in crime during the first half of 2015. But that information is incomplete, and we won't know until later whether this is a change in the trend or just a momentary blip. SOURCE FBI, "Crime in the United States," 2014.…

Retired Major Neill Franklin spent 34 years with the Maryland State Police and Baltimore Police Department. Today he serves as executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a nonprofit that advocates an end to the war on drugs. Reason TV's Nick Gillespie sat down with Franklin at FreedomFest in Las Vegas in July. For a video version of this interview, visit reason.com. Q: Do blacks and whites have dramatically different experiences with police? A: Absolutely. Historically in this country, the police have never really been the friends of the black community. We're only a couple hundred years out of slavery, and the slave patrols—mainly in the South—were rounding up runaway slaves and so on, and much of our policing was born out of that. Q: You're pulled over and…

In a weird blast from the 1930s, the presidential campaign trail this year has become a hotbed of anti­free trade sentiment, with candidates on both sides of the aisle promising to renegotiate or even renege on agreements with key U.S. trading partners like Mexico and Canada. In an August speech, GOP nominee Donald Trump went after his Democratic opponent by saying that Hillary Clinton "has supported the trade deals stripping [Detroit], and this country, of its jobs and wealth. She supported Bill Clinton's [North American Free Trade Agreement], she supported China's entrance into the World Trade Organization, she supported the job-killing trade deal with South Korea, and she supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership [TPP]." Trump hates the TPP. Speaking in June at a campaign rally in St. Clairsville, Ohio, he told…

Gary Johnson reached into his pocket to make a point about the emancipating wonders of modern technology, and then panicked. "Where is my iPhone? Oh my gosh, where is it?" We were in the middle of an extraordinary scrum on 4th Street in Cleveland, 100 yards from the entrance to the Republican National Convention, interviewing the Libertarian Party presidential nominee live on Facebook while a crush of curious GOP delegates, cops, and lookie-loos pressed in closer to eavesdrop and take pictures. Johnson would later remark to a Politico reporter that the mob scene was the most attention he had ever received, but at the moment he was distracted and inconsolable. "This is a shocker to me, I gotta tell you," he said while the feed kept streaming to tens of…

"Less Marx, More Mises" read signs held by some of the protesters who filled the streets of Brazil's cities on March 15, 2015. With a headcount estimated at more than a million, the demonstrators were calling for an end to Dilma Rousseff's disastrous populist presidency. An organization of libertarian millennials called Movimiento Brasil Libre, or the Free Brazil Movement, led the charge. With the country crippled by recession and a corruption scandal dominating the headlines, the demonstrators expressed their anger in explicitly libertarian terms. The Free Brazil Movement is the activist wing of the country's surging libertarian movement. Founded in 2013, the group played a key role in ending 13 years of left-wing Workers' Party control. Two months after the first massive protest, the Free Brazil Movement led a 33-day,…

At first glance, HBO's The Night Of looks like a typical crime show. The eight-episode miniseries follows a single case— the murder of a young woman in Manhattan—through its investigation and prosecution, from the booking cell to the courtroom. We see police and prosecutors zero in on a suspect, Nasir Khan (Riz Ahmed), a young Pakistani man connected by strong circumstantial evidence. In that sense, it plays like an eight-hour episode of Law & Order. But the series, written by crime novelist Richard Price and screenwriter Steven Zaillian, offers more than just a case to be solved: The show follows Khan, a gentle young man from Queens who doesn't seem to have the demeanor to have committed the crime, as he is subjected to the brutality of imprisonment at Rikers…

DIY Detroit, by Kimberley Kinder, University of Minnesota Press, 248 pages, $24.95 In 1950, roughly 1.9 million people lived in Detroit. Fewer than 700,000 are left there today. In the bankrupt, crime-ridden city, the government has largely lost the ability to provide the services it once promised. And so residents have taken to plowing streets, picking up trash, and maintaining public facilities on their own. "When public schools performed poorly, parents looked to homeschooling alternatives," Kimberley Kinder writes in DIY Detroit "When public libraries closed, residents set up mobile book shares. When ambulances were unreliable, neighbors organized dial-a-ride phone trees to get people to hospitals." And when streetlights failed, a computer programmer named Ellison tells Kinder, people started to "leave their porch lights on all night." DIY Detroit is filled…

It's Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Ene- mies, by Mary Eberstadt, HarperCollins, 192 pages, $25.99 In December 2015, the state of Oregon seized the contents of Melissa Klein's checking and savings accounts. A judge had ordered the bakery owner to pay $135,000 as punishment for declining, on the basis of her religious beliefs, to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. She objected, pledging to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court if necessary, so the state's labor commissioner took the money by force. One month earlier, a black teacher named Madeline Kirksey lost her job at a Texas day care center, allegedly for refusing to call an anatomically female 6-year-old student by a boy's name. Question: What do these two incidents have in common? Answer: It depends…

Martha Rayner likes her students to get realworld problem-solving experience. The 57-yearold attorney, who teaches at Fordham University School of Law, also represents men being held indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay. "It soon became clear that this was like nothing I or any of the other lawyers had encountered, ever," she says of that work. "From a pedagogical standpoint, I felt that I had to involve students." And so she created an International Justice Clinic at the school and ran it from 2006 through 2009. "Captured, Tortured, and Left to Rot at Gitmo" on page 36 is Rayner's tale of one of her clients, a Yemeni father who has spent 12 years and counting in custody of the U.S. military. Contributing Editor J.D. Tuccille, 50, loves the wide open spaces on…

A Belgian court has fined a Catholic nursing home 6,000 euros for refusing to allow a resident to be euthanized on its premises. The court ruled that only individuals, not institutions, have a religious right to refuse to take part in euthanasia. Iberia Parish, Louisiana, Sheriff Louis Ackal was caught on tape threatening to shoot a federal prosecutor between his "Jewish eyes." Ackal is currently being charged with directing deputies to beat inmates in the jail's chapel, where there are no security cameras. The Pennsylvania State Police have agreed to pay $195,000 to settle a wrongful imprisonment suit brought by Alexander Bernstein, who was held in jail for almost a month after a field drug test falsely showed homemade soap he was carrying in his vehicle to be cocaine. Police…

The day after one of Donald Trump's campaign speeches about cracking down on illegal immigration, National Review columnist Jay Nordlinger, a lifelong conservative who "ceased being a Republican" the moment Trump sewed up the GOP nomination, lamented via Twitter that "people you could never have guessed would be gullible—are. Falling for cons. Re immigration, for example." But many of the #NeverTrump conservatives currently agonizing over the future of their party are deluding themselves over its past: Republicans have been falling for immigration cons—and perpetrating many of their own— since long before the real estate outsider vaulted to the front of the GOP presidential field by accusing Mexico of "sending" to the U.S. "people that have lots of problems," including the problem of being "rapists." Years after Trump exits the political…

St. Petersburg, Russia —Did legislation in the United Kingdom and the United States inspire Russian authorities to adopt strong new domestic spying laws? Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the anti-encryption and data monitoring "Yarovaya Law" on July 7. Named after Irina Yarovaya, the ultraconservative legislator who pushed for it, the legislation is styled as an "anti-terrorism" measure. Among other things, it mandates that internet service providers and other telecommunications companies store all telephone conversations, text messages, videos, and picture messages for six months. In addition, telecom companies must retain customers' metadata— that is, information about with whom, when, for how long, and from where they communicated— for three years. Under the Yarovaya Law, providers of telecommunication services—such as messenger apps, social networks, email clients, and websites that encrypt their data—are…

The protagonist is a mentally unstable young man who hates his corporate job, is instructed by an imaginary character to start an underground society, and organizes a nonviolent terrorist attack in order to wipe out credit card debt. No, this isn't Fight Club , but fans of the 1999 film will notice many resemblances between it and USA Network's Mr. Robot, which debuted its confident second season over the summer. (The film and show even share an affection for the Pixies anthem "Where Is My Mind?") Mr. Robot stars the captivating Rami Malek as 28-year-old hacker genius Elliot Alderson, a cross between Tyler Durden and Edward Snowden. It grapples with familiar themes like the erosion of privacy and the perils of Too Big to Fail banking. Such a stale premise…

The brains behind Funny or Die reportedly had high hopes that Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal: The Movie (released first to their website and then to Netflix in August) might nab them an Emmy, but it didn't make the cut. The premise is that in 1988 the future Republican nominee directed, produced, and starred in a movie version of his bestselling book, but it was never aired— until now. The main problem with the 50-minute film, which is subdivided into "chapters" with names like "The Art of Marrying a Gorgeous Immigrant," is that Johnny Depp as the narcissistic real estate mogul fails to be anywhere near as unlikeable as the real thing. Even when he's telling his wife to shut up or bragging about the size of the…

Border patrol settles Get Out, Stay Out C.J. Ciaramella After border patrol agents subjected a New Mexico woman to a series of unwarranted body cavity searches, she received a $475,000 settlement from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The incident occurred in 2012. The woman, a 54-year-old U.S. citizen identified only as Jane Doe, was returning to the U.S. on foot at El Paso's Cordova Bridge point of entry when a drug-sniffing dog "alerted" on her. Border agents then subjected Doe to a strip search. After finding no drugs, the agents transferred her to the University Medical Center of El Paso, where she was shackled to an examination table. Hospital staff performed rectal exams, stool samples, vaginal probes, and a CT scan on her without her consent or a warrant. After…

It's been 20 years since then­First Lady Hillary Clinton published her best-selling book on child development, It Takes A Village. In the April 1996 reason, cognitive scientist Gwen J. Broude noted the contradictions between Clinton's vision of child rearing and the tightly knit communities her book's title referenced. "The kinds of villages to which the proverb refers are small, homogeneous, and kin-based," she wrote. "They are little platoons. People know each other, interact with each other on a day-to-day basis, and form voluntary associations in which I watch your child and you watch mine. By contrast...the village that Hillary Clinton has in mind is Uncle Sam." In 2016, Clinton's policy vision still moves the responsibility for child welfare from organic networks to government programs. But now she speaks as the…

The first time Paul Fields was sentenced for a marijuana offense, he got probation. The second time, he got 100 days in jail. The third time, he got more than 15 years in prison. That astonishing escalation was caused by a federal sentencing provision aimed at "career offenders," defined as people with two prior convictions for felonies involving drugs or violence who are convicted of a third such felony. Without that enhancement, Fields, who never hurt anyone and never even got to sell any of the marijuana from the 256 plants police found at his home in Jonesborough, Tennessee, would have faced a minimum sentence of five years. A recent report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) recommends that Congress revise the career-offender provision to focus on violent criminals, which…

Barack Obama's first official act in office addressed not the economy or health care but Guantanamo. In a moment of high drama, surrounded by a phalanx of retired military brass, the president signed a series of executive orders acknowledging that "the individuals currently detained at Guantanamo have the constitutional privilege of the writ of habeas corpus," providing that the executive branch would undertake "a prompt and thorough review" of whether the "continued detention" of the men at Guantanamo "is in the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and in the interests of justice," and ordering that "the detention facilities at Guantanamo...shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order." Obama issued a separate executive order banning…

Col. Frank H. Schwable was an Annapolis graduate with 23 years' service in the U.S. Marine Corps and a chest full of medals won as a combat pilot in the Pacific during World War II. His commanding officer in Korea testified that Schwable "was one of the brightest, finest, most conscientious, and, during the war, one of the bravest officers I have ever known." Sent to South Korea as a staff officer, he yearned for a combat command and volunteered to fly reconnaissance missions. On July 18, 1952, his plane mistakenly drifted over enemy lines and was shot to pieces. Schwable and his co-pilot successfully bailed out of the plane before it crashed but were captured by Chinese troops within minutes. Schwable did his best to not give anything away…

Cue drool over the insane perfection of the metaphor by gentrification documentarians Marc Levin and Daphne Pinkerson. Their resulting film, Class Divide , airs on HBO on October 3. Asking kids to parrot the necessary clichés about race, class, and mobility is a highrisk strategy. This out-of-themouths-of-babes tactic can go terribly wrong in unskilled hands. What saves the piece is that, unlike their adult counterparts, kids from both sides of the tracks are refreshingly uninterested in scoring points against evil landlords, the corrupt capitalist system, lazy welfare queens, or other boomer bogeymen. They seem to be genuinely trying to figure out how to behave productively and ethically in a city full of such startling contrasts, rather than looking for someone to blame.…

The counterculture of the 1960s and '70s summoned by the word groovy is saddled with a reputation as overly mystical and viewing science with suspicion. A wonderfully varied new anthology—Groovy Science (University of Chicago Press), edited by David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray—demonstrates that hippies in fact brought science and technology to bear in their own ways, for their own goals. Some of those ways are still mere curiosities, like physician John Lilly's attempts to talk to high dolphins and psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky's hugely popular attempts to rewrite standard history and astronomy to justify the Bible. But some efforts inspired by the quest for individual or communal grooviness, from surfboard production to artisanal cheese to ecologically minded industrial design to home birthing, used personalized knowledge and technology to make the…