Author: Andrew Sullivan

And they say soccer has no future in the US:

PANORAMA: Look at that crowd! Can you guess how many people are in DuPont Circle? #USAvsGermany pic.twitter.com/yzx46IauK9

— Kiratiana (@Kiratiana) June 26, 2014

And check this crowd out in Boston:

Thank you to Mayor Walsh and the City of Boston for coming out to City Hall Plaza. #WorldCup #USA-GER pic.twitter.com/xUZUSqmsTz

— NE Revolution (@NERevolution) June 26, 2014

Just get ready for the crash. Losing to Germany in the rain just sucks. But right now, it’s an exciting 0-0.

… to win the World Cup. Dean Karlan offers a logical reason why you should too:

The basic principle is simple, drawn from utilitarian principles: Root for the outcome that will produce the largest aggregate increase in happiness. So I came up with a simple index, calculated by a country’s passion for soccer multiplied by its average level of poverty multiplied by its population. It’s perhaps a bit crude, simply to multiply these factors by each other, but the exercise highlights some important truths about the world. …

So which country comes out on top of our utilitarian ranking? Nigeria, which advanced out of group play Wednesday. Nigeria finishes fourth in our passion ranking, and is one of the poorest countries in the tournament. Separating it from the rest of the African countries in the World Cup is its huge population — 174 million people. Simply put, the Nigerians have a lot of very passionate, low-income people who are ready to celebrate Nigerian success. Nigeria finishes with a far higher score than any other country.

Another reason to stand in solidarity with Nigerian soccer fans is the threat of terrorism they face when they get together to watch a match:

The World Cup opened in Brazil on Thursday, June 12; on June 17, a suicide bomber set off an explosion in Nigeria’s northern Yobe state capital Damaturu. At least twenty-one people who had gathered around a public screen to watch the Brazil vs. Mexico match died. The bomber is suspected to be a Boko Haram member, though no one has yet claimed responsibility. Public viewing centers, which are popular venues to watch soccer, are currently banned in Yobe state precisely because of the potential for such an attack. There are conflicting accounts about whether those killed were at a clandestine viewing center or if they had simply gathered around a communal screen.

Still, even Boko Haram can’t scare the fans away:

A fan, Tijjani Dauda, said he prefers viewing centers to watch soccer games because being with other fans brings drama to the exercise. “Football is a spectator sport,” he told Quartz. “It is not a family sport to be watched by husband, wife and their children. If we are far from the field of play, viewing centers are adequate replacements. That is why we call them ‘local stadia.’ People bring color to the games and spontaneous analysts are a delight at the centers.”

That is perhaps why Boko Haram’s campaign of terror has not stopped the Nigerians flocking to the centers. If the group decided to attack another centre, it would have a wealth to choose from. But this is one campaign terrorists are unlikely to win because of the deep seated love Nigerians hold for soccer. “The attack has not affected the following of the World Cup in Nigeria,” Ibrahim said, although he concedes that “it will, maybe, have some effect in the states where governments have banned TV viewing centers due to fears over Boko Haram attack.” But the Nigerian soccer fan is too involved to be held back by this.

(Photo: A Nigerian fan celebrates her team’s victory over Ethiopia after a 2014 World Cup qualifying match in Addis Ababa on on October 13, 2013. By Simon Maina/AFP/Getty Images)

The one simple thing the federal government could do with respect to marijuana would be to reclassify it. As this blog has banged on about for years, the FDA’s classification of the drug as having no medical use at all and as dangerous as heroin is not just wrong; it’s insane. It violates everything we know about the drug – both in theory and practice. The usual excuse of the feds is that they don’t have enough research to come to a different conclusion, while their classification of pot as a Schedule 1 drug makes research extremely hard. So the feds have had a lovely little circular engine for maintaining Prohibition for many years now.

If you want a devastating exposure of the DEA’s anti-scientific know-nothingness, check out this exchange in the Congress from last year. Congressman Jared Polis interrogates the acting head of the DEA, Michele Leonhardt:

Perhaps because of this – and because of a huge surge in research over the last several years – things may now be changing:

U.S. regulators are studying whether restrictions on marijuana should be eased, a step toward decriminalizing the drug at the federal level.

The Food and Drug Administration is conducting an analysis at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s request on whether the U.S. should downgrade the classification of marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, said Douglas Throckmorton, Deputy Director for Regulatory Programs at the FDA, at a congressional hearing … Throckmorton wouldn’t say when he expected the FDA to complete the analysis or whether it would recommend a change.

It seems to me that whatever side of the legalization debate you are on, having the government actually basing its policies on science rather than phobias is a good thing. At some point, if this continues, the federal government that currently regards marijuana as having no medical use at all may finally catch up to a country where 22 states have already legalized the drug as medication. But I wouldn’t hold my breath. The circular logic of Prohibition takes some time to leave the bureaucratic mind.

Jacob Kastrenakes recaps yesterday’s SCOTUS ruling against the streaming-TV service:

In a 6–3 ruling, the court found that Aereo’s service violates the Copyright Act by playing back recordings of broadcasters’ TV shows – even though it legally captures those shows over the air and obtains individual copies for each viewer. Aereo had argued that it was merely providing technology that its subscribers were renting in order to watch TV, positing that the viewers were responsible for playing back those recordings. …

The ruling is one of the most important seen by the television industry since the 1984 Betamax case but in many ways will have an opposite effect, stifling one area of innovation that was beginning to force the industry out of its comfort zone. “Insofar as there are differences, those differences concern not the nature of the service that Aereo provides so much as the technological manner in which it provides the service,” the ruling reads.

Brian Barrett is disappointed:

It’s a precedent that will make the future of streaming content both stunted and confusing. And that, beyond present and would-have-been future Aereo subscribers being pretty bummed out, is the biggest concern about today’s ruling. While the decision doesn’t prevent future technologies from developing, it does set a precedent that’s going to be very hard for future cord-cutting efforts to get around.

But Kyle Chayka sees little reason for innovators to be concerned:

Importantly, the ruling is not relevant for other cloud-based services, which may have been impacted by a judgment on Aereo’s business. The Department of Justice amicus brief advised that the Aereo decision “need not call into question the legitimacy of innovative technologies that allow consumers to use the Internet to store, hear, and view their own lawfully acquired copies of copyright works.”

David Post isn’t too concerned either:

The majority is at pains, in several places, to say that the case is just about broadcast television and the re-transmission of broadcast signals. Not about cloud storage, or streaming services, or gaming platforms, or anything else. Just broadcast TV, and what you may or may not do with over-the-air broadcast signals. Congress has made a choice about those signals; anyone who re-transmits them (like the cable companies do) has to pay royalties to the broadcasters. If that’s what it means … the decision has nothing to say about any other content-delivery or content-storage platforms that deal with the vast array of non-broadcast-TV content.

Timothy Lee, however, stresses the ambiguity in the ruling:

The problem is that the court never provides clear criteria for this “looks-like-cable-TV” rule. As Justice Scalia puts it in his dissent, “it will take years, perhaps decades, to determine which automated systems now in existence are governed by the traditional volitional-conduct test and which get the Aereo treatment. (And automated systems now in contemplation will have to take their chances.)”

In the process of ruling against Aereo, the Supreme Court has created a mess that will take lower courts years to clean up. Online services that are similar to Aereo in some respects and different in others are more likely to face lawsuits, and the lower courts will have to sort out which services are similar enough to Aereo to face copyright liability.

What’s next for Aereo? They’re “probably done”:

Aereo’s backers have said there’s “no plan B” for the company in the aftermath of today’s loss. The tens of millions of dollars the company raised so far have largely gone to pay legal costs, and the road forward for the company is probably either a fire-sale of the core technology or a quick pivot into some other, DVR-like function. Aereo’s CEO claims that “our work is not done,” but it’s tough to know what that means. Without the ability to skip out on retransmission fees, Aereo’s entire business model is gone.

Alyssa warns the TV industry against complacency:

Broadcasters should not take their victory at the Supreme Court as a sign that they will be able to operate the same way forever. Instead, broadcast and cable companies should take the Aereo ruling as a stay before Congress acts to explicitly legalize competitors such as Aereo. In the time they have been given, they should move as fast as possible to respond to the clear customer demands that Aereo exposed. …

What might the market have been like if Hulu had partnered with Roku to offer not just streaming subscriptions, but a set-top box, offering consumers a complete package as an alternative to a cable subscription? Similarly, it is remarkable that Apple and a cable company have not yet been able to come to terms to bake television subscriptions into Apple TVs. AmazonBasics, the electronics line from Amazon (the company’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post), sells a range of relatively inexpensive television antennas, and the company El Gato makes a range of streaming television tuners that are not yet available in the United States.

Rather than leaving these innovations to others, cable companies and broadcasters should find ways to get on board and bring new products and services in-house.

Alecia Phonesavanh’s baby son was severely injured by a flashbang grenade when a SWAT team raided their home to bust her husband’s nephew for a petty drug sale. She tells her terrifying story:

There’s still a hole in his chest that exposes his ribs.

At least that’s what I’ve been told; I’m afraid to look. My husband’s nephew, the one they were looking for, wasn’t there. He doesn’t even live in that house. After breaking down the door, throwing my husband to the ground, and screaming at my children, the officers – armed with M16s – filed through the house like they were playing war. They searched for drugs and never found any.

I heard my baby wailing and asked one of the officers to let me hold him. He screamed at me to sit down and shut up and blocked my view, so I couldn’t see my son. I could see a singed crib. And I could see a pool of blood. The officers yelled at me to calm down and told me my son was fine, that he’d just lost a tooth. It was only hours later when they finally let us drive to the hospital that we found out Bou Bou was in the intensive burn unit and that he’d been placed into a medically induced coma.

Sullum segues from Alecia’s ordeal to discuss a new ACLU report on the militarization of American police departments, which shows that SWAT team raids are becoming standard practice for drug searches:

Examining a sample of more than 800 SWAT deployments by 20 law enforcement agencies in 2011 and 2012, the ACLU found that 79 percent involved searches, typically for drugs. Research by Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Peter Kraska has yielded similar numbers. …

Police typically justify no-knock raids and heavy firepower by claiming the target is apt to be armed. That is what they said about Thonetheva, the Phonesavanhs’ nephew, who had no weapons when he was arrested at a different location on the day of the raid that sent Bou Bou to the hospital. (There also were no weapons in his parents’ house, where the Phonesavanhs were staying.) In the ACLU’s sample that sort of outcome was common: In at least one-third of cases where a weapon was believed to be present, none was found. Police records indicated recovery of a weapon in one out of three such cases. In the rest, the records did not address that point.

Balko remarks on the disturbing trend:

SWAT teams today are overwhelmingly used to investigate people who are still only suspected of committing nonviolent consensual crimes. And because these raids often involve forced entry into homes, often at night, they’re actually creating violence and confrontation where there was none before.

When SWAT teams are used in a way that’s consistent with their original purpose, they’re used carefully and cautiously. The ACLU report finds that, “In nearly every deployment involving a barricade, hostage, or active shooter, the SWAT report provided specific facts that gave the SWAT team reason to believe there was an armed and often dangerous suspect.” By contrast …

… incident reports for search warrant executions, especially in drug investigations, often contained no information about why the SWAT team was being sent in, other than to note that the warrant was “high risk,” or else provided otherwise unsubstantiated information such as “suspect is believed to be armed.”