Innehållsförteckning för November 2021 från Reason

SOMETIMES WINNING LOOKS and feels like losing. This summer’s bloody, tumultuous withdrawal from Afghanistan was a predictable disaster. It was also an incredible, surprising anti-war victory. My own thoroughly jaded worldview dictated that after two decades and $2 trillion, the only two realistic options were to stay in Afghanistan forever or depart in a blaze of chaos. As it happened, we got the latter. But I would have bet a great deal on the former. The strategic and logistical failures of the botched withdrawal perfectly echoed the strategic and logistical failures of the occupation, and were made inevitable by those failures spanning four administrations. Experts have made the case that there were several junctures where pulling out would have been less painful and less costly than it turned out to…

A FEDERAL JUDGE in August sentenced Daniel Hale to 45 months in federal prison for informing the American public about secret drone killings by the U.S. military. Hale is a former Air Force intelligence analyst who shared classified documents with reporter Jeremy Scahill. Those documents, published in 2015 at The Intercept and in a book called The Assassination Complex (Simon & Schuster), revealed that secret drone assassinations in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia had likely killed untold numbers of innocent people, a fact the U.S. government had concealed. Hale’s leaks showed that drone assassinations under President Barack Obama were not what the American public believed them to be. The administration insisted that its secret “kill list” of terrorists was carefully vetted and that drone strikes were deployed only to kill targets…

AS COVID-19 BURST onto the scene in March 2020, then–President Donald Trump told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to issue an order allowing Customs and Border Protection to expel migrants on public health grounds. Although immigration advocates have decried that measure as illegal and inhumane, President Joe Biden has kept it in place. The Public Health Service Act, which Congress added to Title 42 of the U.S. Code in 1944, gives federal health authorities the power to issue orders aimed at controlling the interstate and international spread of communicable diseases. The CDC has used that authority to bar people seeking asylum from entering through Canada and Mexico. In practice, it has been used almost exclusively at the southern border. As of July 2021, more than 1 million…

IT’S FAMILY SUNDAY FunDay here at Coney Island’s Maimonides Park, home of the Brooklyn Cyclones. For the low price of $18, enjoy the up-close views of future New York Mets stars and between-innings fan contests involving potato sacks. If the kids don’t wilt in the mid-July swelter, they can run the bases on the field after the game. It’s minor league baseball at its corny, affordable best. Seven miles away as the seagull flies over the mouth of New York Harbor, the scene at Richmond County Bank Ballpark is considerably bleaker. Gawky weeds shoot up through the neglected infield dirt and mangy outfield grass where the Staten Island Yankees once roamed. Just over the chain-link fence in right field sits an overflowing dumpster. The sliver of real estate past left…

MY SUPERPOWER IS that I don’t get hangovers. Not because I don’t drink: I’ve been fallingdown drunk on multiple occasions. But I’m always fine the next morning, much to the chagrin of my groaning companions fumbling for the Alka-Seltzer. I don’t know why this is. I’ve always attributed it to some sort of Northern European genetic gift—like I’ve been built to survive in frigid atmospheres, hiking through snow with a baby on each hip, swigging from a flask of aquavit. Not everyone is well-adapted to drinking alcohol. Some quickly become nauseated, get flushed, and generally find drinking very uncomfortable. As Edward Slingerland suggests in Drunk, you might expect that to be adaptively useful, from an evolutionary standpoint. Those who don’t drink may be more productive members of society: They are…

A DECREE FROM New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio that took effect on August 17 requires businesses to ask customers for proof of COVID-19 vaccination. The city is deploying enforcers to make sure that some 23,000 restaurants and 25,000 nightlife spots across the city of 10 million comply. De Blasio presented the “Key to NYC” pass, which will also be required for entry to gyms and concert venues, as New Yorkers’ best shot at freedom. De Blasio’s edict is a deprivation of New Yorkers’ civil liberties. Although de Blasio portrayed the mandate as a ticket out of cyclical lockdowns and onerous capacity restrictions, it obviously will not bestow freedom on all New Yorkers. Those who decline to be vaccinated will be excluded from vast swaths of polite society for…

ONE OF MY mother’s uncles had a laconic response to a proposed gun ban in longago New Jersey. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll build our own.” His comment came back to me after my wife gifted our son (and me) a jig for completing an unfinished AR-15 lower receiver. Like my great uncle, we built our own. Making personal firearms is legal under federal law, if that matters to you, although local rules vary. Finishing “80 percent” receivers is a popular way to take advantage of that leeway, since the roughed-out blocks of polymer or aluminum—shaped like the part of the AR-15 rifle that contains the hammer, safety, and trigger, but solid where those parts should fit—can be purchased without the paperwork required for buying a firearm. It’s a modern take on…

THE HOUSE OF Representatives made history last December by approving a bill that would have repealed the federal ban on marijuana. Senate Democrats made history again this summer by unveiling legislation that would do the same thing. But both bills are chock-full of unnecessarily contentious provisions that make you wonder whether Democrats are serious about ending the war on weed. The Respect State Marijuana Laws Act, which former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R–Calif.) first introduced in 2013, consisted of a single sentence that would have made the federal marijuana ban inapplicable to people acting in compliance with state law. A bill that simply removed cannabis from the federal schedules of controlled substances would be similarly brief, even allowing for conforming amendments. By contrast, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act,…

One lesson of Loki is that even the most powerful cosmic demigod can be foiled by the even-more-powerful machinations of bureaucracy. The series, a streaming-TV expansion of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), follows the interdimensional adventures of the title character, a cinematic villain so beloved that Marvel’s overseers transformed him into a roguish hero. It would be more precise to say the show follows the adventures of the title characters, since it exists in a world of infinite timelines and thus infinite Lokis. Those timelines—and, eventually, those Lokis—are the raison d’etre for the Time Variance Authority (TVA), which regulates and restricts the timelines, forcing all those diverging paths to converge on what the TVA believes to be the one, true plan. Wherever there is choice, variety, and oddball plenitude, the…

The Industrial Revolution gets a bad rap in popular histories, which generally portray it as a time of worker exploitation and environmental degradation. The nightmare only came to an end, we’re told, thanks to state interventions pushed by high-minded, far-sighted reformers. Adding a more balanced understanding to this bleak picture is the Industrial Revolutions podcast from David Broker, who charts the changes to society wrought by mechanization, mass production, and scientific advancement. The story Broker tells is wide-ranging, with episodes covering everything from railroads to romantic literature. We learn that factory employment was dangerous, but also that it offered an escape from the exploitative guild systems of old. Cities in the 19th century, while foul by modern standards, were still magnets to immigrants attracted by the promise of higher urban…

FACED WITH THE prospect of an Asian nation overtaking the United States as the world’s preeminent manufacturer of vital technology, the president struck a nationalist pose. “The health and vitality of the U.S. semiconductor industry are essential to America’s future competitiveness,” he said, announcing huge new tariffs and setting the stage for subsidies to domestic microchip makers. “We cannot allow it to be jeopardized by unfair trading practices.” This was not President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump taking a stand against China. It was President Ronald Reagan responding to the growing technological prowess of Japan in 1987. A year earlier, the Reagan administration had reached a deal that was supposed to limit Japanese companies’ sales of computer chips to America. Unsatisfied with the results, Reagan decided to escalate…

AMERICAN HISTORY NEITHER began nor ended on 9/11. That day’s vile events shoved the nation down a darker path than it might otherwise have trod, but just as the attack inflicted on America was the poisoned fruit of past policy crimes and mistakes, the resultant flowering of government surveillance and information capture grew from roots set far deeper than the rubble from the Twin Towers. Within a month of the assault, a bill called the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, giving the federal government vast new snooping powers, appeared on the floors of the House and the Senate. The USA PATRIOT Act, soon to lose the USA in standard usage, was signed into law by President George W. Bush on…

AT AGE 28, Esteban Rivera purchased his first home, a duplex in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It was just off Long Island Sound and a quick 15-minute commute to his job at a home remodeling company. The idea was to live in one of the units while continuing to rent out the other apartment to the tenants—a couple with two kids—that he’d inherited from the previous owner. This straightforward plan was upended by some historically bad timing. Rivera purchased his home in March 2020, just as the pandemic hit. “Literally the world stopped,” he said. “Nothing mattered.” Rivera was temporarily furloughed from his job. Shortly thereafter his tenants, now also out of work, told him that they couldn’t make April’s rent payment of $1,375. Over the next several months, Rivera says, they…

“WE’RE NOT GOING to put a dollar figure on human life,” Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat who was then New York’s governor, declared four days after he imposed a statewide COVID-19 lockdown last year. The goal, he explained, was to “save lives, period, whatever it costs.” Ryan Bourne’s Economics in One Virus offers a much-needed rejoinder to that morally obtuse position. Bourne, an economist at the Cato Institute, highlights considerations that politicians like Cuomo too often ignored as they decided how to deal with a public health crisis more serious than any the country had faced since the influenza pandemic of 1918. Eschewing unwarranted confidence, Bourne takes no firm position on the cost-effectiveness of mass business closures or stay-at-home orders. But he does insist, pace Cuomo, that cost-effectiveness matters, and he…

A family has sued Kentucky’s Jefferson County Public Schools after their then-6-year-old daughter was dragged 1,147 feet by a school bus in 2015. The girl’s backpack got caught in the door as she stepped off. The driver did not watch to make sure she safely exited as required by the driver’s training and realized the problem only after a nearby car’s driver started honking its horn. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said the country will open its borders again and end lockdowns when 80 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. As of August, just 18 percent of the population had been fully vaccinated against the virus, one of the lowest vaccination rates among developed nations. In the meantime, the country has sent soldiers to Sydney…