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Homicides in the United States increased in 2020 by over 30 percent, on a year-over-year basis. Gun assaults and aggravated assaults also spiked, leading the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice to deem the crime surge of 2020 a large and troubling increase with no modern precedent. Tragically, the early available statistics for 2021 tell a similar tale. On the American domestic front, however, issues such as Covid, the economy, and illegal immigration still garner more headlines than the escalating rates of violent crime.

This blas attitude did not materialize overnight. Many in todays leadership class entered the public arena during a decades-long drop in crime that began during the Reagan presidency and continued well into this century. Following the widespread chaos of the 1960s and the harrowing urban crime sprees of the 1970s, tough on crime quickly became a popular bipartisan political stance. President Bill Clintons highly successfuland now oft-criticized1994 Crime Bill, which passed the House on a voice vote and the Senate by a 95-4 majority, exemplified this consensus. Confident that the new trend of plummeting crime would continue, many in the silent law-and-order-supporting majority gradually became complacent, implicitly abetting the political opportunism of emergent light-on-crime libertarians and progressives.

As the Tea Party-era Republican Party evolved into a more libertarian entity and the Democratic Party adopted an ever-more stringent identity politics, criminal-justice reformthe very inverse of the 1994 Crime Billbecame the new bipartisan fad. By the mid-2010s, George Soros had begun donating large sums of money to reshape the criminal-justice system, beginning at the district attorney level. Across many of Americas leading cities, light-on-crime district attorneys invoked prosecutorial discretion to justify non-prosecution of crimes like petty larcenyreversing the effective Broken Windows policing of the recent past.

The high watermark of the new criminal-justice reform movement was the First Step Act of 2018, an unparalleled federal jailbreak that passed the Senate by a staggering 88-12 margin. It was no big stretch to get from the First Step Act to last summers prolonged AntifaBlack Lives Matter urban anarchy.

Signs of a possible pushback have become evident. In Los Angeles, District Attorney George Gascnan archetype of what Andrew McCarthy calls the progressive prosecutor projectfaces a possible recall. And sizable majorities among all racial and ethnic demographics poll in strong opposition to the most extreme anti-law and order slogan: defund the police.

But the time is ripe for a more aggressive, sustained campaign against the de-carceral, de-civilizational agenda pushed by many libertarians and progressives alike. Citizens of all political stripes, especially conservatives, must recover and publicly advocate anew the time-tested and common-sense notion that a free and just society is impossible without a robust commitment to a strictly enforced rule of law.

Once upon a time, such an effort would hardly have been needed. Abraham Lincolns Lyceum Address, delivered 23 years before Fort Sumter, famously warned of the dangers of a mobocratic spirit taking hold among the citizenry. Almost a century later, President Calvin Coolidge observed, we are always confronted with the inescapable conclusion that unless we observe the law, we cannot be free. That a secure rule of law and a concomitant quashing of nascent anarchy is a necessary precondition for justice, human flourishing, and the common good ought to beand, not too long ago, wasas ubiquitous a belief as any in our politics.

But such a pro-rule-of-law national campaign is now necessary. Activists can start at the local level, getting involved in district attorney races to oppose anti-enforcement, de-carceral candidates. Voters should punish statewide attorneys general and federal legislators alike for throwing law enforcement under the bus and focusing their ire on the qualified immunity legal doctrine over substantive commitments to support law enforcement. Citizens should make themselves heard at city council meetings in support of more police officers on the beat, a proven and effective crime deterrent. Conservative commentators must grow comfortable calling out the excesses of light-on-crime libertarianism that come from their own side of the aisle. Republican politicians, cognizant of both the disturbing on-the-ground crime reality and the political truth that the small-government rhetorical emphasis of the Tea Party era is over, must recalibrate and shift back toward a traditional pro-law-and-order political platform. Such a platform would be both proper and popular.

We have reached the point where the pendulum has swung too far back toward decarceration, under-prosecution, and light-on-crime policies. The moral primacy of order and public safety must take precedence over fashionable peddling of pro-criminal bail reform and criminal-justice reform initiatives. We have been here before; we know what we have to do. Now its time to execute the game plan.

Josh Hammer is Newsweek opinion editor and a research fellow at the Edmund Burke Foundation. Twitter: @josh_hammer.

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Recover the Moral Imperative of Law and Order - City Journal

The nation's top infectious diseases doctor Anthony FauciAnthony FauciThe Hill's Morning Report - Presented by Facebook - Forget about comity in Congress FDA official: US AstraZeneca stockpile not in danger of expiring Budowsky: Trump should champion vaccines MORE on Thursday clashed with Sen. Rand PaulRandal (Rand) Howard PaulKentucky legislature limits governor's Senate appointment power Overnight Health Care: A number of Republican lawmakers are saying no to COVID-19 vaccines | European AstraZeneca suspensions threaten global COVID-19 response | OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma proposes B bankruptcy exit A number of Republican lawmakers are saying no to COVID-19 vaccines MORE (R-Ky.) over the need for people to continue wearing masks once they've already been infected with or vaccinated against COVID-19.

"You're telling everyone to wear a mask," Paul said. "If we're not spreading the infection, isn't it just theater? You have the vaccine and you're wearing two masks, isn't that theater?"

"Here we go again with the theater," an exasperated Fauci responded. "Let's get down to the facts."

Paul, who was infected with COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic last March, has said he is immune to future infection. As a result, he refuses to wear a mask in the Capitol and has declared he does not need to be vaccinated.

Paul argued there are no studies that show significant reinfection among people who have recovered from the virus or after vaccination.

"I agree with you, that you very likely would have protection from wild type for at least six months if you're infected," Fauci said, but pointed out there is no protection from some of the more infectious variants, like the one one first found in South Africa. The variants are a "good reason for a mask."

"You're making policy based on conjecture!" Paul said, talking over Fauci and accusing him of wanting people to wear masks "for another couple of years."

"You've been vaccinated and you parade around in two masks for show," Paul continued. "If you already have immunity, you're wearing a mask to give comfort to others. You're not wearing a mask because of any science."

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance states that those who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 should still wear a mask in public.

Paul, a libertarian ophthalmologist, has clashed repeatedly with Fauci throughout the pandemic on a wide range of topics including the idea of herd immunity and the effectiveness of restrictions.

"Let me just state for the record, masks are not theater," Fauci said, adding that "I totally disagree" with what Paul said.

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Fauci clashes with Rand Paul over masks | TheHill - The Hill

Members of the House Judiciary Committee want the entire Wyoming House to debate a bill that would legalize marijuana for adult personal use and establish a regulated retail market, voting 6-3 Friday to send the measure to the floor.

The committee advanced House Bill 209 Regulation of marijuana after about four hours of testimony from a spectrum of witnesses ranging from the states leading libertarian to the former governor of Rhode Island. Depending on the speaker, marijuana is either an addictive substance packaged for and marketed to children whose brains it re-wires, or an adult product less harmful than a beer consumed in leisure times to relax.

Witnesses ran the gamut from an anti-pot activist to a doctor, a former vice presidential candidate, a convicted drug felon, a medical patient who uses and another patient who wishes he could. The bill would regulate marijuana establishments from retail shops to greenhouses to transport and testing businesses and would allow personal cultivation and private use.

Reps. Ember Oakley (R-Riverton) and Barry Crago (R-Buffalo) cast swing votes to advance the bill to the House floor. They didnt commit to voting for its ultimate passage.

Oakley, a Fremont County prosecutor, said she was torn over the issue and warned of a variety of costs that legal use could bring. Marijuana cant be prescribed by a doctor, she said underscoring federal prohibitions, so its hard to think we would legalize it.

Crago, an attorney and rancher, is against legalizing marijuana, he said. But after being bombarded by emails both for and against, he said it is time for a whole-House debate.

Opponents raised worries. Rep. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams (R-Cody) voted against the bill for the sake of preserving the Wyoming family unit, and in support of law enforcement. Committee member Rep. Art Washut (R-Casper) opposed the bill saying if he were to challenge federal law he would start with the Endangered Species Act, not marijuana prohibitions.

Opponent Dan Laursen (R-Powell) raised questions about hospitalization rates and other issues arising in Colorado from marijuana legalization there.

Co-sponsors Michael Yin (D-Jackson), Karlee Provenza (D-Laramie) and Dan Zwonitzer (R- Cheyenne) backed lead sponsor Jared Olsen (R-Cheyenne), chairman of the committee. Ill be voting for liberty today, Olsen said as the measure succeeded.

Olsen spent a year crafting the bill, modeling it after Virginia statute, he said. He showed a map of nearby states where marijuana is used under regulations and raised the possibility of federal action to essentially decriminalize the drug possibly within a year.

Then who decides what the regulation of marijuana is like in Wyoming? Olsen asked.

Penalties for driving under the influence, supplying minors and other infractions would not change. I dont come from the camp that says I want to see the laws relaxed, he said.

The bill would tax retail sales at 30%, raising an estimated $50 million annually. Licensing will be strict, prohibiting anyone who is not a resident of Wyoming not of moral character, he said.

Were going to fingerprint em, Olsen said of marijuana license holders.

Committee members quizzed state bureaucrats before Olsen, chairman of the committee, turned to the public. Support for his bill came from several quarters.

The wholesale regulation proposed in Olsens 122-page bill is superior to the medical-only halfway approach said Lincoln Chafee, former Rhode Island governor who now lives in Jackson Hole. He inherited Rhode Islands medical-only statutes in 2011 upon becoming governor, he said over a Zoom link.

I recommend keeping as much control as possible over every aspect of this endeavor, Chafee said.

The 2012 Libertarian Party vice presidential candidate, Jim Gray, also backed Olsen, saying as soon as you prohibit a substance, you give up all your control to the bad guys. Gray, a retired California judge, continued his outspoken criticism of American drug laws.

You are not condoning the use of marijuana, Gray said of Olsens bill. You are taking a lot of money away from Mexican drug cartels, motorcycle gangs, thugs. No state in the U.S. has legalized marijuana, he said. Youre talking about regulating.

Rep. Mark Baker (R-Green River) told the committee marijuana helped him recover from a serious intestinal condition and major surgery.

Former representative Frank Lata, meanwhile, told of how Wyomings laws pushed him to addictive opioids to treat his multiple sclerosis.

Every doctor has told me, you would be much better served using marijuana, he said. Lata dismissed worries about medical testing and efficacy. Every medicine I have been on has been experimental, he said.

Utah marijuana advocate Justin Arriola told the committee a person would have to consume about 6 tons of marijuana in one session to die from it. Its almost impossible to use enough cannabis product to cause a fatality, he said.

He also countered anti-regulation witnesses who used fear tactics, he said, in rolling out a litany of evils caused by marijuana in other states.

Luke Niforatos, an anti-marijuana activist associated with the Colorado Smart Approaches to Marijuana group, claimed youth use is increasing in states that allow marijuana, an increase he tied to a more permissive attitude toward the drug. Concerning data shows increasing hospitalizations and other problems, he said.

The cartels and gangs and drug dealers have made more money than ever, he said. They use a lot of chemicals that have killed a number of endangered species of spotted owls.

State Health Officer Dr. Alexia Harrist responded to a question, saying there is certainly information out there that about one in every 10 marijuana users will become addicted. Arriola said studies show 6% to 9% of users have a propensity for addiction.

Susan Gore, founder of the Wyoming Liberty Group, opposed the bill saying, among other things, that marijuana rewires childrens brains. The bill would allow adult use only.

I had the experience of inhaling and experiencing the dopamine rush, she said of an encounter with the drug. I didnt get addicted to my experience.

My main point [is] to plead for the brains of the children of Wyoming, she said. I know that marijuana is particularly promoted to women and to children. In states where its regulated, theres an increase in damaged babies, Gore claimed.

The bill was not scheduled for floor consideration by early Monday. Thursday is the last day for bills to be considered in their chamber of origin. The committee didnt act on a second marijuana bill House Bill 82 Implementation requirements for medical marijuana, so that measure died.

Excerpt from:
Marijuana regulation bill heads to House floor - WyoFile

It is very likely that the Indian government will announce significant regulations on big internet related technology companies. It is worth thinking about how the global and local contexts will interact to determine the politics of regulation. Globally, countries from Australia to America are trying to come to terms with the power of big tech. To simplify, the world was presented with two visions of the internet technology space: California Libertarianism and Chinese Authoritarianism. Chinese Authoritarianism is going strong. The California Libertarian model had astonishing success. But it is now coming under pressure because of its internal contradictions.

There are several issues. First, many of the big tech companies were not, as they claimed, mere platforms, but began to curate and generate their own content, creating possible conflicts of interest. Second, there is a suspicion that big tech companies were acquiring more monopoly power; this was not a world of free competition. There is a curious conjunction of technology and finance here. The more companies were valued, the more they needed monopoly rent extraction to be able to justify those valuations. Hence the business model and the need to drive valuations came into direct conflict with the culture they professed.

Third, the algorithms were not subject to accountability. They were, as Frank Pasquale put it, creating a black box society. There was an irony in an opaque algorithm being the instrument of a free, open and equitable society. Fourth, while the companies had immense economic impact, their distributive implications were more mixed. They empowered new players, but they also seem to destroy lots of businesses. The news business, for example, which is the subject of regulatory concern in Australia, has revolted against these companies. These companies themselves became the symbol of inequality of economic and political power.

Fifth, these companies seemed to display the ultimate hubris: Set themselves up almost as a sovereign power. This was most evident in the way they regulated speech, posing as arbiters of permissible speech without any real accountability or consistency of standards. Whatever one may think of the necessity of banning Trump from social media, the prospect of a CEO exercising almost untrammelled authority over an elected president, which was cynically exercised when that president was on the way out, only served to highlight the inordinate power and potential of hubris these companies could exercise. Facebooks reaction to Australia is also nothing but hubris. If there is anything that characterises the politics of our age, it is the demand that economic and technological forces be re-embedded in sovereign control.

And, finally, there is also greater wariness of the effects of big tech on democracy and democratisation. The social legitimacy of California Libertarianism came from the promise of a new age of democratic empowerment. But as democracies became more polarised, free speech more weaponised, and the information order more manipulated, greater suspicion was going to be cast on this model. All democracies are grappling with this dilemma. Given that Scott Morrison called Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the Facebook issue, it might seem that the Quad might need to be an alliance against both Chinese Authoritarianism and California Libertarianism!

But these global concerns will also be refracted through different national contexts. Poland, a government veering towards authoritarianism, ironically, made laws preventing media companies from censoring tweets. In India, this global context will now be used as a pretext to advance the regimes aims. Some of these aims are unexceptionable, but they will also be twisted to unsavoury ends. India will justifiably worry about its own economic interests. India will be one of the largest bases of internet and data users in the world. The argument will be that this should be leveraged to create iconic Indian companies and Indian value addition. India can create competition and be more self-reliant in this space. Pushing back against big tech is not protectionism, because this pushback is to curb the unfair advantages they use to exploit an open Indian market.

A few years ago, India would not have thought this way because of its desire to court the United States. But the context has now changed. There is a genuine ideological push to Atmanirbhar Bharat. India can also justifiably point out that in China keeping out tech companies did not make much of a difference to financial flows or investment in other areas. Will Tesla not invest because we exercise more control over Facebook or Amazon? Second, big business in India, or rather the only ones that matter in this regulatory environment, is a votary of more protectionism; it senses a business opportunity. How much we can innovate is an open question. There is a fundamental impulse in this government to potentially control the information order as much as possible. It courted foreign tech companies so long as it suited its purposes. But the minute there is a whiff that they will be a threat to this governments idea of an information order and cultural control, the government will find ways to tame them. In the long run, it would rather deal with domestic monopolies, however badly run, to create what this column called The RSS Meets Jio World (May 1, 2019).

So as new regulations affecting tech companies are announced, it will be important to distinguish between regulations that are solving some real problems in this space, and regulation that is using this larger context to exercise more control. There are complicated issues here that genuinely need addressing. How do we enhance Indias technological capabilities? What is a better institutional structure to protect democracy and freedom from both untrammelled executive power and unaccountable corporate power? Does the new regulation of technology genuinely help create a level playing field or does it create new local monopolies?

But it will be easier to address those issues if the government showed a principled commitment to liberty, a manifest commitment to root out crony capitalism, an investment in science and technology commensurate with Indias challenges, and a general regulatory independence and credibility. We should not assume that just because big tech is being made to kneel, the alternative will be any better. Just look at television news for example: An indigenous, thoroughly broken and corrupt system that is almost totally amenable to government control. We need to grapple with the internal contradictions of California Libertarianism. But we will also need to be wary that these contradictions do not become the pretext for slowly legitimising Chinese Authoritarianism.

This article first appeared in the print edition on February 20, 2021 under the title Between California and China.The writer is contributing editor, Indian Express

Link:
Big tech regulation can solve real problems, or only increase state control - The Indian Express

There is a great deal of nonsense being written and spoken about this weeks power failures in Texas, which left a number of people dead and millions without power or potable water, sometimes for days.

Among the more prominent nonsense peddlers was the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, who blamed the mess on wind power and other renewable fuels, while warning that proposals like the Green New Deal which would zero out fossil fuels would more or less be the end of civilization as we know it. There was also Rick Perry, the states former governor, who seemed to suggest that using more renewables would lead to socialism, and Representative Dan Crenshaw, who blamed the whole thing on that liberal bastion otherwise known as California. Bottom line, Mr. Crenshaw wrote on Twitter, Texass biggest mistake was learning too many renewable energy lessons from California.

These statements were catnip to progressives, who mainly blamed the states libertarian energy system, which, they claimed, sought to keep prices low at the expense of safety.

None of the poppycock from Texas politicians is of any help to the scores of Texans who spent long hours and days freezing in their homes. It has also obscured the real reasons for the disaster and diverted attention from an important lesson: that the nations energy delivery system, not just in Texas but everywhere, needs a radical overhaul if it is to withstand future shocks and play the role that President Biden has assigned it in the battle against climate change.

Both sides have elided an interesting piece of Texas history. The person who put wind power on the Texas map was a Republican named George W. Bush. As governor, in 1999, Mr. Bush signed a law deregulating the states power market, at which point Texas started building loads of wind turbines. Wind now supplies about a quarter of the states energy diet natural gas is about twice that and Texas is far and away the biggest supplier of wind energy in the country and among the biggest in the world.

But wind, which supplies a smaller fraction of power in wintertime, had little to do with this weeks disaster. The simple truth is that the state was not prepared for the Arctic blast. A few wind turbines froze up, but the main culprits were uninsulated power plants run by natural gas. In northern states, such plants are built indoors; in Texas, as in other Southern states, the boilers and turbines are left exposed to the elements.

There are two lessons here to be absorbed and acted on. First, the countrys energy systems must be robust enough to withstand whatever surprises climate change is likely to bring. There is little doubt that a warming climate turned Californias forests into tinderboxes, leading to last summers frightening wildfires. The scientific connection between climate change and extreme cold is not as well established, but it would be foolish to assume that it is not there. (The dominant hypothesis is that global warming has weakened the air currents that keep the polar vortex and its freezing winds in check.) As the Princeton energy expert Jesse Jenkins observes in a recent Times Op-Ed, we know that climate change increases the frequency of extreme heat waves, droughts, wildfires, heavy rains and coastal flooding. We also know the damage these events can cause. To this list we should now add deep freezes.

If building resilience is one imperative, another is making sure that Americas power systems, the grid in particular, are reconfigured to do the ambitious job Mr. Biden has in mind for them to not just survive the effects of climate change but to lead the fight against it. Mr. Bidens lofty goal is to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury and to eliminate fossil fuel emissions from the power sector by 2035. In the simplest terms, this will mean electrifying everything in sight: a huge increase in battery-powered cars and in charging stations to serve them; a big jump in the number of homes and buildings heated by electric heat pumps instead of oil and gas; and, crucially, a grid that delivers all this electricity from clean energy sources like wind and solar.

This, in turn, will require from Congress a cleareyed look at the climate-driven calamities that have beset California, the Caribbean and, most recently, Texas. It will also require an honest accounting of their great cost, in both human and financial terms, and of the need to guard against their recurrence in the years to come.

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Opinion | The Lessons of the Texas Power Disaster - The New York Times