REASON – Free Minds & Free Markets | This, That and The Other

Greg Stohr of Bloomberg reports on an interview with Justice Alito explaining the justice's last-minute decision to recuse in Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, the major climate change preemption case the Supreme Court will hear on Monday. According to the story, Justice Alito said it was a "difficult judgment call." From Stohr's report: Although Alito took part when the court agreed to hear the case in February, he said Wednesday he decided to back out after looking more deeply at the case in the run-up to the argument. A coalition of watchdog and environmental groups had called on Alito to disqualify himself. "Taking into account the particular arguments that were made on both sides here, I thought that recusal was the prudent step," Alito said. Federal law requires judges to step aside if they own stock in one of the parties to a legal fight but doesn't impose a similar restriction for shares in companies that could be affected. "Under that rule, I was not required to be recused, and I asked our legal office, as is my custom on any case where there's an arguable recusal issue, to give me their opinion on whether I was required to recuse, and they said, 'No.'" The story also indicates why Justice Alito holds on to individual energy stocks, despite the recusal risk. Alito said his wife, Martha-Ann Alito, inherited the energy shares. "She wants to hold on to individual stock, and so we have stock holdings in some companies in the oil and gas field," he said. The post Justice Alito Says Recusal in <i>Suncor Energy v. Boulder County</i> a "Difficult Judgment Call" appeared first on Reason Magazine. [TheTopNews] Read More.

A federal jury on Monday found Bexar County, Texas, liable for systematically violating thousands of Americans' Fourth Amendment rights for years through a criminal interdiction unit. The victory underscores that the Constitution requires searches to be reasonable and prohibits dragnet policing. On March 16, 2022, Alek Schott was driving home from a work trip near San Antonio, Texas, when he was stopped by a Bexar County Sheriff's Office (BCSO) deputy for allegedly drifting lanes. But what should have been a quick stop turned into an hourlong, unconstitutional fishing expedition. Rather than simply writing a ticket, Deputy Joel Babb asked Schott to "step out and sit in [the police cruiser's] passenger seat while I do your warning," according to the complaint filed in federal court on behalf of Schott by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm. Once in the police car, Babb began questioning Alek on a variety of topics, including where he worked, the purpose of his travel, and where he lived while he looked up Alek's criminal history.  After interrogating Schott for 10 minutes, "Babb admitted the purpose of the stop was never really about a traffic violation," writes the suit. As part of the Criminal Interdiction Unit, Babb said he didn't write traffic tickets. Instead, he stopped drivers to look for "human smuggling, drug smuggling, and all those things like that." Babb proceeded to ask Schott about illicit drugs, whether he was carrying cash, and whether he'd consent to a search of his vehicle.  But Schott refused. Still, this wouldn't be the end of the stop. After being denied consent to search and without evidence of any wrongdoing, Babb called for a K-9 unit to walk around the vehicle, according to the suit. When the K-9 unit finally arrived, body camera footage shows the officer walk the dog around the truck. In the reflection of Schott's vehicle, the officer can be seen gesturing upward and signaling toward the dog. The dog jumps up and places its paws on the vehicle in response, and the officer records a positive alert.  For the next 40 minutes, Schott sat in the back of the police cruiser while officers ransacked his truck. But they found nothing.  Before leaving, Babb gave Schott a copy of his "warning," and "reassured [him] that he'd done his best to put everything back, 'cause nine times out of ten, this is… [TheTopNews] Read More.

America's leading AI companies are getting exactly what they asked for. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence—a voluntary, if vacuous, agreement to self-police and adhere to the same set of rules signed by the leaders of America's top AI companies. It outlines four layers of controls and audits he'd like every AI company to implement. The president told reporters he was "seeing tremendous self-policing," and that AI companies "understand that they have to self-police," according to CNN. Trump has resisted calls to regulate AI companies even as public opinion of the industry has grown more negative. That hasn't stopped members of his administration from policing AI companies using the authorities already granted to them under the law. On Wednesday, the New York Post reported that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would be "ramping up a sweeping probe of Anthropic, OpenAI and other frontier labs to uncover the potential dangers their technology poses to consumers, and plans to slap the tech titans with formal demands, similar to subpoenas, to turn over information." The initial investigation began when OpenAI announced its agents had infiltrated Hugging Face's infrastructure in July. However, the Post reported that the FTC is now prepared to "force testimony from the leading firms' executives," including plans to "compel the executives at these firms to testify about their product and about the dangers they allege their products may have to consumers, to Americans." The agency is investigating violations of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which empowers it to issue cease and desist orders to prevent "persons, partnerships, or corporations" from engaging in "unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce." If companies ignore its orders, the FTC can ask federal courts to impose civil penalties and seek compensation for violations. So far, the agency's attempts to regulate AI companies have aligned with public opinion. Last September, the FTC ordered seven companies to provide information on their AI-powered chatbots and how they "measure, test, and monitor potentially negative impacts of this technology on children and teens." In July, the agency announced it was seeking public comment on a proposed statement accusing AI companies of "manipulating the behavior of their AI systems contrary to reasonable consumer expectations for objectivity and accuracy." The agency's latest actions come after a string of recent… [TheTopNews] Read More.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Tuesday directing various federal agencies to "develop and implement a campaign" across Washington, D.C., "to, by 2028, reduce the Asian tiger mosquito, Egyptian mosquito, and other invasive mosquito populations, as appropriate, by 90 percent and reduce the tick population by 50 percent, with further reductions as practicable." As a part-time resident of the District, I can only say, "Hooray!" The order directs agencies to deploy standard techniques for controlling the pests, such as dumping standing water where mosquitoes breed (draining the swamp?) and reducing the tick host populations of rodents and deer. But even better, the agencies are enjoined to "consider sterilization techniques, safe genetic modification, and use of safe, beneficial bacteria" and to "prioritize and expeditiously advance or register novel tick and mosquito control methods or products that the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency finds to be both safe and effective." Releasing sterile and Wolbachia-infected male mosquitoes to breed with wild female mosquitoes has successfully reduced pest populations by as much as 95 percent. An even more effective technology for eliminating the bloodsuckers is gene drives. Gene drives bias inheritance to pass a specific trait to nearly all offspring instead of the normal 50 percent chance. Researchers can genetically engineer non-biting male mosquitoes so that they pass along to basically all of their offspring a gene that is lethal to female mosquito larva. As fewer and fewer female mosquitoes survive to adulthood, the process would quickly crash disease-carrying pest populations. Gene drives could also be deployed to crash tick populations, but why not target the ticks' host species? For example, it is possible to break the cycle of infection by releasing mice genetically engineered to resist Lyme and other diseases passed along by ticks and mosquitoes. Gene drives could also target rodent populations directly. If total elimination is deemed too drastic, a team of California researchers has developed a type of gene drive that can be calibrated to suppress the pest population to any desired level. Let's hope that Trump's order finally jump-starts recalcitrant regulators into quickly approving the deployment of gene drives for pest control. The post Trump Orders Mosquitoes and Rats Out of the District of Columbia appeared first on Reason Magazine. [TheTopNews] Read More.

Many major American cities struggle with homelessness, and with no single clear or obvious solution, it's unlikely the problem will be solved anytime soon. The issue also has spillover costs. Take, for example, the Evergreen State. "Washington state is experiencing the fifth-highest per-capita rate of unsheltered homelessness in the nation," the Washington Department of Ecology warned in 2020. "On any given night, 10,000 Washington residents are living outside or in places unfit for human habitation." And while the encampments can pose a danger to nearby residents, their presence "also impacts the environment. Illegal disposal of garbage and human waste can contaminate the environment, spread disease, and attract vermin." So when a Seattle resident took it upon herself to clean up public spaces in her city, why did the state feel the need to stand in her way? Like most of us, Andrea Suarez found herself with a lot of free time during the COVID-19 pandemic. But when she took walks near her home in downtown Seattle, she didn't like what she saw: used needles, garbage, and homeless people experiencing drug addiction and untreated mental illness. "Tourism was no longer camouflaging the crisis in our city," she tells Reason. She wasn't alone. Writing for The Seattle Times in 2021, Sara Jean Green noted that the city's once-vibrant downtown was now marked by "open-air drug use, lawlessness and filth." When her complaints to local officials went nowhere, Suarez took matters into her own hands: "I went to Home Depot and I bought pinchers and vests and garbage bags and a little red wagon," she says. With all the new equipment, she went out and picked up trash in Denny Park—which KOMO, Seattle's ABC affiliate, said at the time was "riddled with crime, drugs and homelessness." Suarez would ultimately put $25,000 into starting We Heart Seattle, a nonprofit dedicated to cleaning up the city's public spaces and assisting the homeless. She announced upcoming cleanups on the group's Facebook page and asked for volunteers. Over time, the operation grew, and she now manages more than 1,000 volunteers. We Heart Seattle takes no public money, relying solely on private donations. The organization brags that it has picked up more than 2 million pounds of trash from public spaces and helped 365 people off the street in just the six years in operation. But in July, Suarez received a "notice of alleged safety… [TheTopNews] Read More.