Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Marin union votes to strike

June 20, 2018 Robert Fellner

Despite the fact that local government workers in Marin County receive wages higher than local government workers in over 99 percent of counties nationwide — even after adjusting for regional cost differences among the 50 states — the largest government union in Marin has formally authorized a strike, according to the Marin Independent Journal.

The dispute centers over the size of pay raises that will be provided over the next 3 years, as well as other unknown conditions. The unknown conditions reflect the fact that state law shrouds government union negotiations in secrecy, ensuring the taxpayers responsible for paying the entire cost of the eventual contract are kept in the dark.

The Marin IJ also reported that a salary survey revealed that Marin County workers are paid, on average, 7.8 percent higher more than their government peers in the Bay Area.

And this is on top of non-wage benefits (like job security, number of paid leave days, retirement benefits and health insurance) that are all significantly greater than what the average private-sector worker receives.

It is an uncontroversial fact that one of the defining features of a monopoly is its ability to obtain excess wages/profits, at the expense of social welfare.

This is true even when the monopoly in question is a labor union.

Thus, a willingness to strike despite receiving pay and benefits that are already significantly above market levels — even when that market is restricted to only other Bay Area governments — is an entirely predictable, and even rational action from the perspective of the monopoly union.

Absent a change to the state laws that grant government unions coercive, monopolistic powers, it is likely that Californians will continue to see their taxes raised in order to fund the demands of government unions.

https://blog.transparentcalifornia.com/2018/06/20/marin-union-votes-to-strike/

DISPERSED CITIES: STARTING THE 3RD DECADE

by Wendell Cox 06/14/2017

Cities (urban areas or settlements) have been around for millennia. Over that time, cities have changed in form and function. But the way that people move around the city has materially changed only twice. Walking was predominant until less than 200 years ago, then came mass transit, the automobile and now autonomous cars and some substitution for driving by online technology.

The Walking City

When walking predominated, cities had to be very dense, because things had to be close enough for pedestrian access. Walking Paris reached approximately 250,000 persons per square mile and London over 100,000 in the 17th century. The US also had dense walking cities, but they were smaller , emerged much later and never reached the highest densities of old-world cities. By 1820, New York had an estimated 50,000 residents per square mile, but a population of less than 150,000.

Indeed in 1820 urban travel was little different than in for the average resident than in the pre-urban temple center of Gobekli Tepe (Turkey) 11,000 years ago, the Caral (Peru) of 4,500 years ago or the Wangchenggang (China) of 4,000 years ago.

The Transit City

However, the second quarter of the 19th century saw the emergence of the mass transit revolution. The new the horse drawn omnibuses were affordable to many people, unlike individual horses and horse drawn carriages. Over nearly all of the next century, transit shaped the city. Services were expanded and improved. Electric streetcars and interurbans appeared. If the Census Bureau had asked a "journey to work" question in the 1900 census, the answers would have shown transit's share of mechanized to be virtually 100 percent.

During this period, transit shaped the dominant downtowns (central business districts or CBDs), as is chronicled by Robert Fogelson in Downtown: Its Rise and Fall: 1880-1950. Transit lines converged on the CBD, which was the key to its emergence as the central point of a monocentric city. Transit retained its primacy through much of the 1910s, as people who worked downtown were able to move further away.

The Automobile City

But, just as the transit city was peaking, the car began its ascent, with automobile ownership expanding rapidly in the 1920s. By 1929, 90 percent of the world's car registrations were in the United States, according to Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon. All of this made it possible to travel farther in urban areas and to live even farther from the urban core.

After the Great Depression and World War II, which slowed growth, automobile ownership expanded even more. By 1950, New York region's urban density had dropped below 10,000 per square mile and the average density among the principal urban areas in today's 53 major metropolitan areas (more than 1,000,000 population) was approximately 6,000 per square mile. By 2010, New York's urban density had dropped to 5,300, and Los Angeles had become the densest at 7,000. The average of the principal urban areas to 3,100.

Polycentricity's Short Interlude

The dominance of the automobile ended much of the need for a CBD. As people moved farther away (suburbanized), employment and commercial development also suburbanized. Large retail shopping centers appeared throughout the suburbs. Soon after, large employment centers developed outside the downtowns, such as Bellevue (Seattle), Uptown (Houston), Century City (Los Angeles) and Research Triangle (Raleigh-Durham). In 1991 Joel Garreau first brought centers like this to public attention, coining the term "edge city" in his book Edge Cities: Life on the New Frontier. It had become clear to those who were paying attention that the monocentric, CBD oriented US city was a thing of the past. There were still CBDs, of course, but most were shadows of their former selves in employment and shopping shares. American cities were increasingly referred to as "polycentric."

Dispersion: The New Urban Form

But polycentricity did not last very long. In 1997, University of Southern California economists Peter Gordon and Harry W. Richardson noted the trend toward dispersion in Beyond Polycentricity: The Dispersed Metropolis, Los Angeles, 1970-1990. In a 1998 Brookings Institution paper, they highlighted one of the most important advantages of dispersion. Traffic “doomsday” forecasts, for example, have gone the way of most other dire predictions. Why? Because suburbanization has turned out to be the traffic safety valve. Increasingly footloose industry has followed workers into the suburbs and exurban areas and most commuting now takes place suburb-to-suburb on faster, less crowded roads."

Further evidence came in 2003 from University of Nevada Las Vegas Professor Robert Lang who documented the dispersion of office space outside the CBDs in Edgeless Cities: Exploring the Elusive Metropolis.

Finally, Bumsoo Lee (now at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) and Peter Gordon published Urban Spatial Structure and Economic Growth in US Metropolitan Areas which looked at 2000 census tract data and classified employment based on job density into three categories, CBDs, subcenters and dispersed.

Among metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 population, all had most of their employment outside CBDs and subcenters. In other words, all metropolitan areas were more dispersed than polycentric or monocentric. Further, in the largest metropolitan areas, more than twice as many jobs were in subcenters as the CBDs (Figure 1).

• Among metropolitan areas with more than 3,000,000 residents, 77.9 percent of employment was dispersed, 15.0 percent in subcenters and 7.1 percent in CBDs.

• Among metropolitan areas with from 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 residents, 82.2 percent of employment was dispersed, 7.0 percent in subcenters and 10.8 percent in CBDs.

• Among metropolitan areas with from 500,000 to 1,000,000 residents, 82.6 percent of employment was dispersed, 5.6 percent in subcenters and 12.2 percent in CBDs.

Unfortunately, this research has not been updated with the results of the 2010 census. But, there is every reason to believe that the dispersion continued. A City Sector Model (Figure 2) analysis of County Business Pattern data suggests that the dispersion has continued (Figure 3). Between 2000 and 2015, 90 percent of new jobs were in the suburbs and exurbs. The largest gains were in the Later Suburbs and Exurbs, while there were losses in the Urban Core Inner Ring and the Earlier Suburbs. While there was an increase in CBD employment, exurban job growth was nearly twice as great.

This reality of the dispersed city, however, does not get in the way of media and others who talk as if the city remains monocentric. Yet in an era of new possibilities unleashed by technology --- Uber, Lyft, autonomous vehicles --- the likely trajectory is for more dispersion not less.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Top photo: Los Angeles, CBD, polycentric (Wilshire district, Hollywood and Glendale) and dispersed (the rest), by author.

Why Dense Development Might Make the Housing Crisis Worse

Posted By Adam Brinklow on Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 1:05 PM

Mike Boening Photography/Flickr

Good news if you’re in a NIMBYish mood of late: A new study from Chapman University in Orange County gives you the anti-Manhattanization rationale you’ve been waiting for. In “Building Cities For People,” author Joel Kotkin, a former San Franciscan turned urban studies fellow at Chapman, argues that increasing building density actually makes the housing crisis worse, and also makes San Francisco less likely to attract and retain anyone except the super-rich.

Kotkin contradicts the common supply-side argument that a modern metropolis can only drive down housing prices (and retain populations of working and middle class families) by building more, thus reducing scarcity and bringing supply in line with demand. That sort of thinking only makes sense to a point, he says.

“Once I started talking to developers, they pointed out that once your building gets higher than four stories, your price goes through the roof,“ Kotkin says. “That has to do with seismic safety, the switch from wood to steel frames, bigger crews of union labor, lots of things.”

In San Francisco, it also means a much longer planning and approval process. The result, Kotkin argues, is that the only way big buildings can be commercially attractive to those building them is by catering to the rich. The “pack and stack” method of approving bigger and bigger development in an attempt to relieve the housing shortage only pushes prices higher, because builders want a return on those huge investments.

“In San Francisco, townhome building can cost more than double that of detached buildings. Units in condominium can cost as much as 7.5 times” to build, according to “Cities for People.”

“It surprised me too,” Kotkin says, since it flies in the face of basic assumptions about supply and demand. But it does explain a few things, like why the world’s biggest cities have been unable to build their way out of soaring home prices. Kotkin cites East Asian cities such as Singapore — so dense that it’s a miracle light can escape its borders — as the ultimate case study. There, housing prices only come down when government steps in and converts buildings to public housing.

That’s music to the ears of San Francisco activists who oppose towering condo palaces on principle anyway. Kotkin notes that he’s a pretty middle of the road guy politically, and “very sympathetic to Libertarians, normally.” But numbers don’t respect your politics.

If the present building trends continue to proliferate, even the young Millennials who are supposed to fuel our tech economy will eventually drift away, back toward the suburbs or to cities in places like Texas, where housing costs are on average less than 30 percent of monthly take home pay. That means a city that becomes older (we have the smallest percentage of child residents of any large city), whiter (white people now count for only a fifth of suburban flight), and, of course, wealthier, since only those who can afford those giant buildings will stay.

A better solution, Kotkin argues, is to build small: wood-framed, single family houses, the type we usually call starter homes. Rather than turning the city’s disused industrial tracts into towering redevelopment complexes, we’d be better off replacing them with something that resembles the Sunset, homes that builders can afford to erect and then sell more cheaply, and homes that young couples would want to raise families in.

Otherwise, we only need to look abroad to see what the future might be. “A place like San Francisco will end up what H.G. Wells called ‘an appliance of luxurious extinction,’ home mostly to the rich and childless, plus a few of the poorest people, who qualify for public benefits,” Kotkin says. “Wells was talking about the future of London. And he was right.”

Provocative stuff. But like I said, it would explain a thing or two.

Monday, June 25, 2018

President Obama Orders Behavioral Experiments On American Public

President Obama Orders Behavioral Experiments On American Public in 2015

President Obama announced a new executive order on Tuesday which authorizes federal agencies to conduct behavioral experiments on U.S. citizens in order to advance government initiatives.

“A growing body of evidence demonstrates that behavioral science insights — research findings from fields such as behavioral economics and psychology about how people make decisions and act on them — can be used to design government policies to better serve the American people,” reads the executive order, released on Tuesday.

The new program is the end result of a policy proposal the White House floated in 2013 entitled “Strengthening Federal Capacity for Behavioral Insights.”

According to a document released by the White House at that time, the program was modeled on one implemented in the U.K. in 2010. That initiative created a Behavioral Insights Teams, which used “iterative experimentation” to test “interventions that will further advance priorities of the British government.”

The initiative draws on research from University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and Harvard law school professor Cass Sunstein, who was also dubbed Obama’s regulatory czar. The two behavioral scientists argued in their 2008 book “Nudge” that government policies can be designed in a way that “nudges” citizens towards certain behaviors and choices.

The desired choices almost always advance the goals of the federal government, though they are often couched as ways to cut overall program spending.

In its 2013 memo, which was reported by Fox News at the time, the White House openly admitted that the initiative involved behavioral experimentation.

“The federal government is currently creating a new team that will help build federal capacity to experiment with these approaches, and to scale behavioral interventions that have been rigorously evaluated, using, where possible, randomized controlled trials,” the memo read. 

That document cited examples from the U.K. which showed that sending out a letter to late taxpayers which read “9 out of 10 people in Britain pay their taxes on time” led to a 15 percent increase in compliance.

The new executive order encourages federal agencies to “identify policies, programs, and operations where applying behavioral science insights may yield substantial improvements in public welfare, program outcomes, and program cost effectiveness,” as well as to “develop strategies for applying behavioral science insights to programs and, where possible, rigorously test and evaluate the impact of these insights.”

To jump-start the programs, agencies are encouraged to recruit behavioral science experts to join the federal government and to develop relationships with researchers in order to “better use empirical findings from the behavioral sciences.”

A fact sheet sent out by the White House on Tuesday shows that researchers at numerous universities and think tanks — from MIT, Harvard, and the Brookings Institute, to name a few — have signed on to the program.

The executive order specifically directs federal agencies to develop nudge programs that help individuals, families, communities and businesses “access public programs and benefits by, as appropriate, streamlining processes that may otherwise limit or delay participation.”

This can be achieved by “administrative hurdles, shortening wait times, and simplifying forms,” the order suggests.

The initiative also urges agencies to tinker with how information is presented to individuals, consumers, borrowers, and program beneficiaries.

The “content, format, timing, and medium by which information is conveyed” should be taken into consideration as those characteristics affect “comprehension and action by individuals.”

In programs that offer choices for consumers, agencies are instructed to “consider how the presentation and structure of those choices, including the order, number, and arrangement of options, can most effectively promote public welfare.”

The order also suggests that agencies fiddle with whether to label certain expenditures as “benefits, taxes, subsidies” or other incentives to “efficiently promote” programs.

President Obama’s federal health care law, Obamacare, is replete with “nudge” language and experimentation
.

In its fact sheet, the White House noted that reminding individuals who had started to sign up for Obamacare led to a 13 percent increase in completed applications.

To help determine which presentation was more effective, the Department of Health and Human Services “sent one of eight behaviorally designed letter variants to each of more than 700,000 individuals who had already begun the health insurance enrollment process but had not yet completed an application.”

The most effective version of the letter generated the 13 percent improvement. Other less effective letters only increased enrollment rates by around four percent.

Another nudge contained in Obamacare was brought to light in the debate over whether the individual mandate contained in the law was a tax hike.

Republicans insisted that it was a tax increase, but the White House portrayed it as a penalty on the logic that the word “tax” has a negative connotation.

While the Obama administration touts nudge policies, others are hesitant to get on board.

“I am very skeptical of a team promoting nudge policies,” Michael Thomas, an economist at Utah State University, told Fox News in 2013.

“Ultimately, nudging…assumes a small group of people in government know better about choices than the individuals making them.”

China Has a Crazy Number of Ghost Cities

The Bay Area is following China's lead to build huge urban centers. The problem in China is there are no jobs and therefore no people to occupy these High Density Developments. It is no wonder why China's GDP is teetering.

Sunday, June 24, 2018

People Are Getting Dumber: The Flynn Effect Goes Into Reverse

Is it genes, or have we "started building a stupidity-inducing environment"?

Ronald Bailey|Jun. 15, 2018 2:45 pm

IdiocracyPeople are getting dumber. So concludes a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): Using military conscription data from Norwegian males born from 1962 and 1991, the authors find that the secular increase in population intelligence observed throughout the 20th century has peaked and has now gone into reverse.

Average IQs, as measured on standardized intelligence tests, increased for most of the 20th century. This astonishing fact was first reported in 1984 by the New Zealand political scientist James Flynn, when he analyzed the trend in U.S. test scores. This upward trend has since been dubbed the "Flynn effect." As a 2014 review article in the Psychological Bulletin notes, "The Flynn effect implies that an individual will likely attain a higher IQ score on an earlier version of a test than on the current version." Flynn's study revealed a 14-point increase in IQ scores between 1932 and 1978, amounting to a 0.3-point increase per year, or approximately 3 points per decade. Subsequent research found similar upward trends across most of the rest of the world.

The new PNAS study finds that the average IQ score for conscripts rose from 99.5 for the 1962 birth cohort to 102.3 for the 1975 cohort. Following 1975, the average score trended down, reaching 99.4 for the 1989 cohort (then rising slightly to 99.7 for the 1991 cohort). In other words, average IQ rose at about the same decadal rate identified by Flynn in the first sets of conscripts and then fell at about the same rate in the second sets. The researchers restricted their analysis to individuals born in Norway to two Norwegian-born parents.

About a decade ago various researchers reported that the Flynn effect had begun to reverse in some countries, with average IQ scores starting to decline again. More recently, some observers have suggested that average IQs are coming down because of dysgenic fertility—that is, because less intelligent people are having more children than smarter folks—or because of lower-IQ immigrants and their children. These trends, they argue, are now beginning to swamp the IQ-boosting effects that improvements in nutrition, education, and falling pathogen stress had during the 20th century.

In trying to figure out what could be going on, the Norwegian researchers took advantage of another IQ trend. First-born children tend to have higher IQs than do later-borns. The Flynn effect tends to narrow the gap between first- and later-borns within families. The researchers found that this was in fact occurring in the pre-1975 cohorts. After 1975, the gap between first- and later-born brothers began to grow. Since siblings share genetics and environments, this "within family" decrease tends to rule out dysgenic fertility or immigration as significant explanations for falling average IQs.

For the 1962–1975 Flynn increase period, the researchers estimate a .2 average annual IQ point increase within families and a .18 increase across families. For the 1975–1991 decrease period, they estimate a .33 annual IQ point decline within families and a .34 decline across families.

"The results show that large positive and negative trends in cohort IQ operate within as well as across families," note the researchers. "This implies that the trends are not due to a changing composition of families, and that there is at most a minor role for explanations involving genes (e.g., immigration and dysgenic fertility) and environmental factors largely fixed within families (e.g., parental education, socialization effects of low-ability parents, and family size). While such factors may be present, their influence is negligible compared with other environmental factors."

If falling average IQ scores cannot be attributed to dysgenic or immigration effects, they must be the result of some environmental effects. But what? The researchers conclude that "our results remain consistent with a number of proposed hypotheses of IQ decline: changes in educational exposure or quality, changing media exposure, worsening nutrition or health, and social spill-overs from increased immigration."

As George Mason University economist Tyler Cowan pithily puts it, "We have started building a more stupidity-inducing environment. Or at least the Norwegians have."

On the bright side, a 2018 review article by Flynn and his University of Otago colleague Michael Shayer reports that America continued to show a steady rate of average IQ gain from 1989 to 2014 at about its historic rate of .3 IQ points per year.

Saturday, June 23, 2018

You Might Have a 'Uniquely Compelling' Reason to Find Out Whether Your Government Has Placed You on a Kill List

Bilal Abdul Kareem has been nearly droned in Syria five times already. A federal judge agrees his lawsuit over the matter can proceed.

Brian Doherty|Jun. 19, 2018 11:00 am

It's just possible, Judge Rosemary Collyer of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Circuit concluded in a decision last week, that being a journalist in Syria placed on a kill list by your own government might constitute a violation of your First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights.

Fibonacci Blue on Foter.com / CC BY

The lawsuit started with Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan and Bilal Abdul Kareem, two journalists from the Middle East, who often report on terrorism-related stories. Zaidan, who has worked for Al Jazeera for over 20 years, thinks the United States has labeled him as a terrorist, apparently because his work has him interacting with so many of them (Zaidan has interviewed Osama Bin Laden, among others).

Kareem, an American citizen and freelance reporter, has been at the site of five aerial bombings while working in Syria in one three-month period.

Both believe they might be on a secret U.S. government "kill list" and sued various government officials from President Trump on down last year to find out if they are.

Judge Collyer, allowing the lawsuit to proceed at least in part, wrote that their complaint asserted being on such a kill list would be "arbitrary, capricious and an abuse of discretion" and "violates the prohibition on conspiring to or assassinating any person abroad" and "violated due process because Plaintiffs were provided no notice and given no opportunity to challenge their inclusion."

Further, placing them on the kill list "violated the First Amendment because it 'has the effect of restricting and inhibiting their exercise of free speech and their ability to function as journalists entitled to freedom of the press.'"

Kareem, the citizen, asserts on his behalf that being on the kill list "violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments because it constituted an illegal seizure and 'seeks to deprive [him] of life without due process of law.'"

The government claimed Zaidan and Kareem have no standing to sue and that this whole kill list thing is a "political question" outside the jurisdiction of the federal courts.

Judge Collyer disagreed, at least as applied to U.S. citizen Kareem. Collyer did agree that when it comes to foreigner Zaidan, who is unable to prove he was indeed on any kill list, "the Court finds no allegations in the Complaint that raise that possibility above mere speculation. Accordingly, the Court finds Mr. Zaidan has failed to allege a plausible injury-in-fact and therefore has no standing to sue."

But the legal situation for Kareem is different, the judge insisted. She noted that "two of the attacks [at or near Kareem] involved his place of work, one involved his own vehicle, one involved a work vehicle in which he had been traveling immediately before, and one hit a location from which he had just walked away."

The government insisted, well, Syria's a real violent place these days and lucky for him he hasn't been killed being surrounded by so much war. Kareem's problems, the government claimed, are not "attributable to anything more than a journalist reporting from a dangerous and active battlefield."

"While it is plausible that Mr. Kareem is not being targeted by the United States," Collyer wrote, "it is also plausible that Mr. Kareem's multiple near-miss incidents were caused by Defendants' decision to include him on the Kill List and were, therefore, caused by Defendants' actions."

Collyer was unimpressed by the government's argument that this is all military business and thus not subject to judicial second-guessing. The war aspect is irrelevant, the judge maintained, since the injury Kareem alleges is the fact that he was placed on a kill list back in D.C. "Mr. Kareem complains of an alleged decision to authorize a lethal strike against him and not a decision in the field to attempt to carry out that authorization. He wants the opportunity to persuade his government that he is not a terrorist or a threat so that the alleged authorization to kill is rescinded."

Collyer used that distinction to differentiate her decision from some precedents regarding drone attacks that were seen as more specifically about a judge's second-guessing of military decisions in the field. That's not what Kareem is trying to do here, Collyer concluded. "It remains a truism that judges are not good judges of military decisions during war. The immediate Complaint asks for no such non-judicial feat; rather, it alleges that placement on the Kill List occurs only after nomination by a defense agency principal and agreement by other such principals, with prior notice to the President. The persons alleged to have exercised this authority are alleged to have followed a known procedure that occurred in Washington or its environs."

Collyer did agree with the government that certain counts in the original suit should be dismissed, including, "whether Defendants complied with the Presidential Policy Guidance [for putting people on a kill list]," which "is a political question the Court must refrain from addressing" since the guidance itself is so vague that it "provides no test or standard that must be satisfied before the government may add an individual."

In other words, the kill list policy is so inherently arbitrary there is no way to procedurally abuse it.

Similarly, "the process of determining whether Defendants exceeded their authority or violated any of the statutes referenced in the Complaint would require the Court to make a finding on the propriety of the alleged action." But that, Collyer wrote, "is prohibited by the political question doctrine."

In other words, the court can't consider whether a government act was a good idea, merely whether it violated a specific law or constitutional provision.

Luckily for Kareem, and for the larger issue of justice in executive power, the judge reasoned that the whole kill list process might have "denied Mr. Kareem his rights to due process and the opportunity to be heard and deprived him of his First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights."

As Collyer concluded in letting those aspects of Kareem's case move forward:

Mr. Kareem alleges that the Defendants targeted him for lethal force by putting his name on the Kill List, which he deduces from five near misses by drones or other military strikes. As a U.S. citizen, he seeks to clarify his status and profession to Defendants and, thereby, assert his right to due process and a prior opportunity to be heard. His interest in avoiding the erroneous deprivation of his life is uniquely compelling.

Mr. Kareem does not seek a ruling that a strike by the U.S. military was mistaken or improper. He seeks his birthright instead: a timely assertion of his due process rights under the Constitution to be heard before he might be included on the Kill List and his First Amendment rights to free speech before he might be targeted for lethal action due to his profession. The D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court have previously held that a citizen "must have a meaningful opportunity to challenge the factual basis for his designation as an enemy combatant."

This does not mean Kareem has won his case, merely that the government has failed to have it thrown out of court. Collyer acknowledged that it is not yet settled fact whether Kareem even is on a kill list, but while "the Court finds that Mr. Kareem's allegations may be wrong as a matter of fact... Complaint presents them in a plausible manner."

Opposing drone strikes on U.S. citizens was the central point behind Sen. Rand Paul's (R-Ky.) reputation-making 2013 filibuster, and for good reason: There is nothing more tyrannical than the power to specifically target someone for murder absent any judicial proceedings, which, alas, is standard operating procedure for the U.S. government thanks to our endless and impossible Forever War on Terror.

Bureaucrats Shut Down Your Kids’ Lemonade Stands? Country Time Will Pay the Fines.

A summer promotion will cover fines and fees when your local code enforcers come calling.

Scott Shackford|Jun. 7, 2018 2:00 pm

Every summer, it seems, brings a parade of outrageous stories about petty local officials who shut down kids' front-yard lemonade stands because the little moppets don't have the right permits. But this summer things might be different as civil disobedience meets corporate marketing. Young lemonade entrepreneurs are getting some support against local bureaucrats from powdered lemonade manufacturer Country Time.

This morning the company launched an ingenious summer promotional campaign. Country Time wants your kids to open lemonade stands. If some stiff suit from city hall comes calling, Country Time will help you out by covering the costs of fines and permit fees:

This promo site provides the details. To take advantage of the offer, you need to be the parent of a child 14 or younger who has a lemonade stand. Country Time will cover fines or fees up to $300 per child. The company has budgeted $60,000, enough to help at least 200 kids, for the program, which runs through August. But the tweet says Country Time is prepared to create a fund of up to $500,000 to help more kids in future summers.

Country Time has an obvious agenda here: More lemonade stands potentially means more people purchasing and consuming its product. But the promotional stunt is a reminder that these meddling local officials are not protecting public safety but interfering in people's lives for stupid reasons and demanding to be paid for the service. Kudos to Country Time for trying to discourage this awful behavior, although in some cases $300 might not be enough to cover rapacious city permitting demands.