HIT & RUN BLOG

Michael Kappeler/dpa/picture-alliance/NewscomBoth Trump and his mainstream critics are wrong about trade and NATO, writes Sheldon Richman. And Trump's cluelessness is no help whatever in making the case against NATO and all such alliances. He is both a NATO critic and a liability to the anti-NATO argument.

Trump, in keeping with his absurd aggrieved-America shtick, would have us believe that western Europe free-rides off the American taxpayers. The taxpayers are indeed victimized, argues Richman, but the victimizer is Amerca's ruling elite and its bipartisan imperial foreign policy.

NATO was never about protecting western Europe, writes Richman. Rather, it had (and still has) two other purposes: first, to give a multilateral mantle to essentially unilateral U.S. imperial actions; and second, to prevent other countries from forging their own peaceful bilateral relations with, previously, the Soviet Union and now Russia.

Net neutrality has internet service providers confused and scared about what they're allowed to give away for free, explains Contributing Editor Mike Godwin (progenitor of Godwin's Law and former attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation). Which is a shame, because under current law certain sites, such as Wikipedia, could be offered without charge without violating the law. Godwin wants Federal Communications Commissioner Ajit Pai to spread the word:

The best-case scenario is a world in which every American is motivated to take advantage of the internet, in which we all have access to the whole internet, and in which internet providers can afford to offer that level of service to everyone. The best way to get to that point in a hurry, though, is to get more people online and sampling what the web has to offer. Encouraging non-commercial services like Wikipedia Zero and Facebook's Free Basics can help make that happen.

Pai and, ideally, other commissioners should come out strongly and expressly—via speeches and other non-regulatory forums, including responses to press inquiries—in favor of internet providers offering zero-rated services, especially those that aren't pay-for-play. Repeatedly sending the right message can do as much as deregulation to encourage innovation of this sort.

Could ride-sharing become a widespread replacement for traditional modes of school transportation? In March, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos praised Denver's school district for providing transportation to underserved students attending both traditional public and charter schools. The program, called the Success Express, helps bus students to schools they're enrolled in outside their typical residential assignment areas, helping them exercise more choices in where to attend. But in many communities, students aren't so lucky.

In February, a report from the Urban Institute tracked how transportation issues undercut the promise of school choice in some of the places with the most educational options for students. Several cities well-known for school choice, including Denver, still face gaps in their transportation infrastructure, according to the report. Programs like the Success Express run into problems coordinating with city educational and transportation authorities, not to mention the reluctance of some district officials to let their resources benefit schools of choice, writes Tyler Koteskey.

Drawn & QuarterlyIn his latest work, cartoonist Peter Bagge (a Reason contributing editor) continues his venture into serious historical biography. The artist followed up his book-length comic about Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger (Woman Rebel) with Fire!! (Drawn & Quarterly). His topic: the Harlem renaissance novelist, playwright, and cultural anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston.

What Bagge seems to love most about Hurston, and gets across ably, is the fierce and ever-blossoming independence that led her, among other things, to celebrate the inherent values of black culture, from American southern life to Haitian voodoo, over white liberal uplifters' attempts to change them, writes Brian Doherty.

Hey, will you be listening to Sirius XM after church on Sunday? Tune into Channel 124, a.k.a. POTUS, at 3 p.m. tomorrow, and you'll hear the hour-long broadcast version of The Fifth Column podcast, co-hosted by Kmele "Never Fly Coach" Foster, Michael "Hollywood" Moynihan and the author of this blog post. Or you can hear the whole unspooled straight-to-yr-headphones biz right here:

Topics include foolish paternal attempts to play soccer, controversial if telegraphed decisions to pull out of unenforceable non-treaty climate agreements, racist anti-LeBron James vandalism, Russkies galore, and so on.

Not enough for ya? OK, here's an entertaining, NSFW episode of the great Brilliant Idiots podcast starring DJ Charlamagne Tha God and Reason-loving comedian Andrew Shulz, in which I come on at the 1:14 mark to spool out my working theory on the Russia/Trump story:

More Fifth Column stuff is availabile at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.

AmazonCongress's Constitution is a 500-page academic book about legislative authority, written over the course of a decade.

How fortunate for author Josh Chafetz, a professor of law at Cornell University and contributor at The Hill, that his topic has suddenly become rather trendy, as the general public takes a newly keen interest in the question of what leverage the House and Senate have over, say, a newly elected president.

Even America's (one-time?) TV sweetheart is wondering who's the boss in Washington?

I want to buy a copy for everyone in Congress. https://t.co/gffr3SxzDQ

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) June 1, 2017

Tune in to hear Reason magazine Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward talk with Chafetz about how what you learned in school about the balance of powers isn't quite right, the story behind why filibusters are so common these days, and why former House Speaker John Boehner (R–S.C.) is underrated.

Produced by Ian Keyser.

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Katherine: Hi, I'm Katherine Mangu-Ward, and I'm here with Josh Chafetz to record the Reason Podcast. Josh is a Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. He received his B.A. from Yale University and his doctorate in politics from Oxford. He has a new book, 'Congress's Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers'. Thanks for talking with us, Josh.

Josh Chafetz: Thanks for having me.

Katherine: Everybody hates Congress. Should Congress feel slighted or does Congress deserve it?

CC/Public DomainSeattle lawmakers are expected to vote early next week on a citywide soda tax that would add more than $2.50 to the cost of a twelve-pack of soda. The tax would undoubtedly drive consumers—at least those Seattle residents with cars and Costco memberships—to buy more groceries in the city's suburbs.

But Seattle's proposed tax is just one cog in the larger misguided, ongoing campaign against soda by lawmakers in this country.

After years of defeats, supporters of soda taxes have scored several recent victories and are increasingly on the attack. Food policy expert (and Seattle resident) Baylen Linnekin details the many problems of such movements.

Joanna AndreassonAndy Stern is a former president of the Service Employees International Union. Charles Murray may be America's most prominent right-wing critic of the welfare state. So when they appeared onstage together in Washington, D.C., last fall to discuss the basic income—the idea of keeping people out of poverty by giving them regular unconditional cash payments—the most striking thing about the event was that they kept agreeing with each other.

It isn't necessarily surprising that Stern and Murray both back some version of the concept. It has supporters across the political spectrum, from Silicon Valley capitalists to academic communists. But this diverse support leads naturally to diverse versions of the proposal, not all of which are compatible with one another. Some people want to means-test the checks so that only Americans below a certain income threshold receive them; others want a fully universal program, given without exceptions. Some want to replace the existing welfare state; others want to tack a basic income onto it. There have been tons of suggestions for how to fund the payments and for how big they should be. When it comes to the basic income, superficial agreement is common but actual convergence can be fleeting, writes Jesse Walker.

Thomas Hawk / FlickrDetroit is cracking down hard on medical marijuana.

Ever since an onerous and highly controversial zoning ordinance went into effect in 2016, 167 of about 280 dispensaries that were operating in the Detroit have been shut down by city officials, and city lawyers say another 50 will be shuttered in the coming weeks.

The root of these closures, says Joesef White, Detroit chapter leader of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, is city officials drafting regulations without concern or input from those who would have to abide by the new rules.

"The cannabis community was really not that actively involved in putting that legislation together for the city of Detroit," White said. "Ultimately what happened was that the zoning of dispensaries or cannabis related businesses was very, very restrictive."

Indeed, to legally operate a medical marijuana dispensary in Detroit requires said dispensary be located 1,000 feet away from schools, parks, libraries, day care centers, and churches. Oh, and liquor stores. A marijuana dispensary can't even be located within a thousand feet of another dispensary.

This has restricted dispensaries to operating in mostly inaccessible and undesirable industrial zones, White says. And that zoning is on top of licensing requirements that threaten even those businesses that have managed to stay open in undesirable industrial locations.

So far the city has licensed just five medical marijuana dispensaries, or one fully licensed dispensary for every 135,000 residents. Another 70 are operating under provisional permission while they go through the approval process, but the city of Detroit has stated they intend to have no more than 50 citywide.

The curtailment of the medical marijuana business and the promise of further crackdowns has taken a toll on patients, says Ron Jones, a local cannabis activist and member of Sons of Hemp.

"A lot of dispensaries that were open built relationships over the years with their patients." he tells Reason. Medical marijuana has been legal statewide in Michigan since voters passed a "Compassionate Care Initiative" in 2008.

"Now," Jones says, "by them being closed down, that kind of closes the door."

Jones and a group of dispensary owners sued the city last year over its zoning requirements, and he is currently promoting a petition that would change the licensing requirements in the city.

More sweeping efforts at reform are also underway.

On May 5, marijuana activists submitted petition language to the state requesting a ballot initiative for full recreational marijuana legalization in the hope of getting it on the November, 2018 ballot.

Full-scale legalization could force Detroit to reform some of the current regulations on the books. Full legalization or no, however White says there is plenty of work to be done on the local level.

"What we are trying to do here," he says "is find common ground and come together and help the local constituents and work with their elected officials to draft an ordinance that everyone can live with."

Ultimately though White feels history is on his side.

"Regardless of what side of the argument you're on," White says, "this marijuana issue is going to move forward. It's moving forward across the country."

• Senate Republicans continue to shrug their shoulders at the idea of taking action on Obamacare repeal.

• India tries desperately to catch up to the West in terrible renewable energy policy.

• The California State Senate passes a massive single-payer health care bill. The bill now moves on to the state assembly, but prospects of it becoming law remain uncertain.

• Cato's Christopher Preble says that America's relationship with its European allies is overrated.

"The two things you need to know about the Paris [climate] agreement are, one, it is not going to do very much to tackle climate [change]...and it is incredibly costly." So says Bjorn Lomborg, the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Make no mistake, the Danish political scientist believes climate change is happening and that human activity is the main cause.

But as Lomborg stressed during an interview with Reason's Nick Gillespie, the Paris accord and the earlier Kyoto Protocol are terrible ways to tackle the problem and the United States was right to withdraw from the treaty. If you're interested in protecting the environment and helping the world's poor, says Lomborg, there are cheaper and more-effective ways to reach those goals.

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Chris Loschiavo/TwitterAs deputy Title IX coordinator at the University of Florida (UF), Chris Loschiavo oversaw student complaints related to sexual assault, harassment, and misconduct. Meanwhile, he was busy buying BDSM, cyborg, and "erotic torture" porn using his UF email account and publicly interacting with a porn-account on Twitter. UF eventually fired him for this activity, and for potential conflicts of interest involving a high-profile student assault case. Still, the dean of students saw fit to recommend him for a Title IX position at another public university in the Sunshine State.

"Fantastic. Incredibly knowledgeable. Amazing work ethic. Strategic. Great collaboration. My very highest endorsement!!!" the recommendation stated. "Hope you get him. He will be a tremendous help to you as you continue to create Florida Poly."

All of these adjectives could truly apply—this post certainly isn't meant to imply that purchasing kinky porn or palling around with porn Twitter accounts means one can't be a hardworking, fantastic human being. And while using an account tied to a work email address to buy porn shows a lapse in judgment, it's one that would hardly be worth commenting on were it not for one thing: Loschiavo is part of a regime that threatens students for writing a porn star's name on a quiz, drives professors out of their jobs for writing op-eds that students don't like or syllabuses that they misinterpret, and offers a platform for folks to demand that schools shut down everything from the anonymous social-media app Yik Yak to performances of The Vagina Monologues to fraternities in general. Loschiavo is also the person students are to turn to for reporting sensitive matters regarding sex, violence, and discrimination. When that is your role, going the extra mile not to air your adult-entertainment habits on Twitter or to colleagues doesn't seem like too big of an ask.

When Loschiavo's firing became public, UF cited only a conflict of interest related to controversial Title IX case that Loschiavo was overseeing. (Loschiavo had done paid freelance work for a consulting firm on UF work time, and the attorney for a student in the case was associated with the same firm.) Last month, UF Communications Director Margot Winick told The Gainseville Sun that Loschiavo's employment was terminated when the university "learned he used his UF work computer account to purchase pornography." UF Dean of Students and Associate Vice President for Student Affairs Jen Day Shaw still recommended him for a Title IX coordinator position at Florida Polytechnic University, which he was hired for in April. But in May, after Florida Poly learned of his pornography purchases, it fired him for failing to disclose the information when he was hired.

The whole situation seems to have come to light thanks to the Sun, which "received public records that included Loschiavo's emailed PayPal receipts for buying pornography on eBay."

Day Shaw resigned from her positions last week after being informed her contract would not be renewed. This isn't the first time the former dean of students has been accused of questionable judgment or conduct. From the Sun:

Amy Osteryoung of the law firm Johnson & Osteryoung, which has been involved with Day Shaw in several Title IX cases, said Tuesday's announcement is a positive move. The firm last year filed a complaint with UF alleging Day Shaw mishandled the Callaway case. "The university will be a better place without Ms. Shaw. We consider this to be step one in what we hope will be more steps to come," Osteryoung said. "We have no further comment although we will have in the future."

'I'm Dying Up Here,' ShowtimeConsider television critic Glenn Garvin every stand-up comic's worst heckler with his analysis of Showtime's I'm Dying Up Here:

Somebody—Harry Shearer? Al Franken? Memory and Google both fail me—describing one of the grisly bloodbaths among the cast in the early day of Saturday Night Live once said, "It's not comedy if somebody's not crying." That's very much the idea behind Showtime's I'm Dying Up Here, a melodrama about the lives of a group of young stand-up comics scuffling through the comedy-club dives of Los Angeles as they wait for their big break.

In the world of I'm Dying Up Here, comics succeed not by telling jokes but by ripping their own hearts out on stage. They achieve authenticity not by getting laughs but by dishing their secret fears, avarices and perversions to a bunch of voyeuristic strangers. "These are tortured souls who leave it all out there every night," declares Goldie, the owner of the seedy club where most of the show takes place. "That volatility, that pain—that's the price of brilliance."

If this seems a bit of an overwrought view of, say, Jay Leno's monologues or Steve Martin's salute to King Tut, you've already zeroed in on the weakness at the heart of I'm Dying Up Here: its relentless pretension.

Hoxuanhuong/Dreamstime"Land must be considered as a global commons—conceptually by researchers and legally by the international community," argues Felix Creutzig, a climate change economist at the Technical University of Berlin. He makes this perplexing claim in "Govern land as a global commons," an article in the current issue of Nature.

Creutzig cites the arguments of the philosopher Mathias Risse, who Creutzig believes has "made a powerful case for humanity's collective ownership of the Earth." Let's briefly consider Risse's position. In his 2008 working paper "Original Ownership of the Earth," Risse begins with two intuitions: "First, the resources of the earth are valuable and necessary for all human activities to unfold, most importantly to secure survival; second, those resources have come into existence without human interference."

There is a prior question that Risse (and Creutzig) must answer: What is a resource? Surely edible plants and meat animals count. And just as surely, our forager ancestors claimed and defended territories containing wild edibles against encroachment by other groups. They had no notion that land was collectively owned by all human beings.

In any case, Risse's second claim is basically wrong. The vast majority of resources come into existence as a result of what he is pleased to call "human interference." As Creutzig and Risse both note, the 17th century British philosopher John Locke argued that before the rise of civilization, land and natural resources were notionally held in common by mankind. They do not consider deeply another of Locke's arguments: that without the application of human ingenuity, "nature and the earth furnished only the almost worthless materials." Only with the development of private property rights and the rule of law to defend them did nature's worthless materials become useful and valuable.

As Locke explained, a landowner has a strong incentive to increase the productivity of his land. By intensively cultivating it, he produces "a greater plenty of the conveniencies of life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to nature, [and] may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind." Locke also wrote that a privately owned cultivated acre in Britain produces 1,000 times more value than an uncultivated acre left in the commons in America. The same is true for other natural resources. For example, as I have pointed out elsewhere, a deposit of copper is just a bunch of rocks without the know-how to mine, mill, refine, shape, ship, and market it. Petroleum was a nuisance until Edwin Drake figured out in 1859 how to drill for it and refine it into lamp oil.

Wikimedia CommonsHere's a weird criminal justice fact: The folks who look at kiddie porn often get longer sentences than the people who molest children in real life.

Reporter Lex Talamo at The Shreveport Times just delved into this disparity, and found a dismayingly simple reason for it. Charges against actual child rapists are hard to prove. Kids can be unreliable witnesses, and often the social dynamics are thorny. The perp could be a family member that loved ones don't want to see go to jail, or the accusations can come out long after the act.

But child porn? There it is on the computer. It's a simple slam dunk for prosecutors. And so, Talamo writes:

The conviction rate in U.S. child pornography possession cases is 97 percent, according to the Crimes Against Children Research Center and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The conviction rate is much lower for offenders who commit hands-on sex crimes against children: 46 percent.

Talamo looks at the case of Nathaniel Kelly, a man found guilty of raping sisters aged 9 and 11, who were friends of the family.

At that age, they were less likely to fight back. More likely to stay silent. Easier targets.

For these rapes, Kelly got 17 years in prison.

Talamo contrasts Kelly's crime with that of Jesse Ward, a guy who shared a single kiddie porn picture with an undercover cop. A later search of Ward's computer found more than 10 such images.

A former cop and preschool teacher, Ward used a peer-to-peer network that is part of the harder-to-access dark web to share a single image of child pornography with an online undercover agent in 2007. Ward had no contact with the child victim in the image, and he had no previous criminal record.

Ward is serving 20 years for those pictures.

The argument for such long sentences is that someone, somewhere, abused a child, and by possessing the image of that abuse, the child porn viewer is supporting the abuser.

This was certainly true in the age when child porn was only available in the back of adult book stores, and the money spent on the photos went to the people involved in their creation and distribution. But now that child porn is ubiquitous—and often free—the people downloading it are no longer financially supporting the perps.

What's more, the child porn laws were written for an era when "transporting the images across state lines" meant doing a lot more than simply pressing a button. But for Ward:

The transportation charge applied because he had uploaded the image to a network from which users in other states could download it—thus crossing state lines, a distinction that gained his crime federal status.

Distribution charges carry mandatory minimums of five to 20 years behind bars under Louisiana state law. Actual, hands-on child molesting, "a lewd or lascivious act on a child under age 17," carries a penalty of 5 to 10 years behind bars.

No one is in favor of child porn. Everyone would like to see the people who create it face justice. But treating the viewing of illegal images as more egregious than physically molesting a child makes no sense.