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10 Dec 09
Big Blighters: How developers use "blight" as a pretext to get the land they want
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But most states still allow condemnation
of property deemed to be “blighted,” and many of them define that
condition so broadly that it has become a synonym for
coveted, as illustrated by two recent New York cases.
30 Nov 09
The Consumer Is Not the Customer: Both parties promise to preserve one of the central problems of the health care system
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Three-fifths of Americans, the share with employer-provided
health insurance, are in the same situation. Since someone else
buys insurance for them, using money they would otherwise receive
as wages, they are in no position to shop around and typically do
not know the true cost of their coverage. This disconnect between
payment and consumption is one of the central problems with the
health care system, contributing to insecurity, rapidly
escalating costs, and the general lack of choice and competition.
Yet both Democrats and Republicans insist on preserving it.
25 Nov 09
These Boots Are Made for Talking: The fuzzy math and goofy logic of government-goosed employment
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But the most fundamental flaw in the president’s stimulus hype is
the notion that more jobs are always better (which also underlies
his claim
that global warming will be a boon to the economy as long as we
spend lots of money to mitigate it). According to this standard,
if the government really did find a supplier who spends 520
man-hours to deliver one pair of work boots, it should buy as
many as possible.
Salvia and Salivation: Is this trip worth a warm mouthful of spit?
Jacob Sullum tries Salvia divinorum, and reports.
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The alcohol-based tincture tastes awful, like
chlorophyll mixed with gasoline, and it stings, even when diluted
(per the instructions) with a bit of water. -
The smoked method is much easier, especially with a water pipe,
and more rewarding. Within a few seconds the world is vibrating,
reverberating, echoing. Familiar objects are transformed. Looking
down at my bent leg, I see a stoop on a city block lined with
brownstones. Beyond the cityscape, the shoes sitting on the floor
of my office resemble comical cartoon characters. Looking out the
window, I stare at the knot on an oak tree, where I see the head
of a human-sized cat wearing a knight’s helmet, a wizard with a
flowing beard, and a wolf with glowing eyes. I can make the
images shift at will. - 1 more annotations...
24 Nov 09
Joose It Up! (While You Can!)
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The Food and Drug
Administration is
threatening to ban alcoholic beverages that contain caffeine,
saying the combination has not been proven safe. -
In any event, the FDA has no power to stop the mixing of such
politically incorrect cocktails, or to bar the preparation of
scary innovations like "Irish" coffee or Rum and Coke
(street name: Cuba Libre). All it can do is make an empty gesture
by arbitrarily banning the newer (and therefore presumptively
more dangerous) drinks, which offend professional meddlers less
because of their pharmacological action than because of their
producers' brazen speech.
23 Nov 09
The Salvia Ban Wagon: How does terrible drug policy get made? The mad rush to criminalize a pschedelic herb provides a textbook case.
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The
endless repetition of a few anecdotes that supposedly demonstrate
salvia’s dangers—most conspicuously, the story of a Delaware
teenager’s 2006 suicide—has found a receptive audience among
politicians who automatically assume that an unfamiliar
psychoactive substance must be a menace. And since these
lawmakers bridle at the notion that anything good could possibly
come from altering your consciousness, they see no downside to
banning salvia before it becomes a problem. -
In a 1961 salvia ceremony, Wasson drank a foul-tasting mixture of
leaf juice and water under the guidance of a curandera. “The
effect of the leaves came sooner than would have been the case
with the mushrooms, was less sweeping, and lasted a shorter
time,” he reported. “There was not the slightest doubt about the
effect, but it did not go beyond the initial effect of the
mushrooms—dancing colors in elaborate, three-dimensional
designs.” - 5 more annotations...
18 Nov 09
How Could He Have Strangled Her Without a Permit to Carry a Handgun?
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In an effort to rebut the idea that allowing law-abiding
Americans to carry handguns in public helps prevent crime,
the Violence Policy Center has begun compiling a list of
homicides committed by people with carry permits. -
even if
the total number of homicides by permit holders is twice the
number tallied by VPC, the rate is remarkably low. - 1 more annotations...
16 Nov 09
Hasan Had a Carry Permit (and Other Irrelevancies)
Jacob Sullum responds to critics of his column, "The Folly of Unilateral Disarmament."
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Next Pennington notes that Hasan qualified for a Virginia
concealed carry permit in 1996, since at that point he had a
clean record. I'm not sure what that's supposed to
prove. Is Pennington suggesting that the lack of
a permit deters mass murderers from carrying
their weapons in public? The general problem with legal
restrictions on gun possession (as I'm sure Pennington has heard)
is that criminals do not obey them, while their law-abiding
victims do. -
"The death
toll from [gun accidents] far outstrips the body counts at
Fort Hood and Virginia Tech," Thomas writes. But this
comparison is meaningless. The total number of fatalities
from gun accidents in 2006, the latest year for which the
CDC
has data, was 642. That is indeed greater than the
fatalities at Fort Hood and Virginia Tech combined, but so
what? The total number of homicides by gun in 2006 was about
12,800*. If arming more victims and bystanders prevented even 1
percent of those deaths, the benefit would far outweigh any
deaths from additional accidents. - 1 more annotations...
11 Nov 09
The Folly of Unilateral Disarmament: At Fort Hood "more guns" assuredly were "the solution to gun violence."
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Neither Smith nor the other victims of Hasan’s assault had guns
because soldiers on military bases within the United States
generally are
not supposed to carry them. Last week’s shootings, which
killed 13 people and wounded more than 30, demonstrated once
again the folly of “gun-free zones,” which attract and assist
people bent on mass murder instead of deterring them.
05 Nov 09
No Legal Remedy for Government-Arranged Torture of Innocent Travelers
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On Monday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit rejected Maher
Arar's attempt to hold federal officials responsible for his
"extraordinary rendition." Arar, a Canadian telecommunications
engineer, was detained during a 2002 layover in New York
based on mistaken suspicions that he had ties to Al Qaeda.
After holding him for two weeks, American officials shipped
him off to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and
tortured. The Canadian government, which supplied the
erroneous information that led to Arar's detention and
rendition, later cleared him of any involvement in
terrorism -
On Monday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit rejected Maher
Arar's attempt to hold federal officials responsible for his
"extraordinary rendition." Arar, a Canadian telecommunications
engineer, was detained during a 2002 layover in New York
based on mistaken suspicions that he had ties to Al Qaeda.
After holding him for two weeks, American officials shipped
him off to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and
tortured.
Mandatory Savings? Requiring people to buy medical insurance will fuel health care inflation.
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What industry
wouldn’t welcome a law that forces everyone to buy its product?
But the insurers also argue that a mandate will help
control costs, and the president agrees. Judging from the
experience in Massachusetts, which imposed its own insurance
requirement in 2006, they’re both wrong. -
There are several reasons why mandatory insurance, contrary to
Obama’s promises, has been accompanied by rapidly escalating
costs. First, when you subsidize something, people tend to
consume more of it. - 2 more annotations...
03 Nov 09
The Peril of Palatability: A former FDA chief sounds the alarm about dangerously delicious food.
Jacob Sullum reviews <em>The End of Overeating</em>, by David Kessler.
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Kessler is
the sort of crusader who spares no effort to uncover the obvious. -
Kessler fearlessly accuses major restaurant chains of a crime
they brag about, relying on unnamed “insiders” to reveal that
comestible pushers such as Cinnabon and The Cheesecake Factory
deliberately make their food delicious—or, as he breathlessly
puts it, “design food specifically to be highly hedonic.” Kessler
certainly has the goods on the corporate conspiracy to serve
people food they like. - 3 more annotations...
21 Oct 09
Myocardial Infractions: A government-commissioned report promotes smoking bans by tweaking the evidence.
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Since then 10 other studies have attributed substantial
short-term reductions in heart attacks to smoking bans, and last
week an Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee
endorsed their findings. But a closer look at the IOM
report, which was commissioned by the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, suggests its conclusions are
based on a desire to promote smoking bans rather than a
dispassionate examination of the evidence. -
The largest study of this issue,
which used nationwide data instead of looking
at cherry-picked communities, concluded that smoking bans in
the U.S. "are not associated with statistically significant
short-term declines in mortality or hospital admissions for
myocardial infarction." It also found that "large short-term
increases in myocardial infarction incidence following a
workplace ban are as common as the large decreases reported in
the published literature." - 2 more annotations...
19 Oct 09
CDC-Commissioned Report Says More Evidence Is Needed to Decide Whether Smoking Bans Are Good (Just kidding)
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The
report, which an Institute of Medicine committee
issued yesterday, concludes, per the
press release, that "smoking bans reduce the risk of heart
attacks associated with secondhand smoke." -
As with the 2006 surgeon general's report
on secondhand smoke, the press release goes farther than the
report itself, which in turn draws conclusions that are not
justified by the evidence it presents. - 7 more annotations...
02 Oct 09
The Right to a Guilty Verdict: Obama's empty promise of due process for terrorism suspects
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In July the Defense Department's top lawyer declared that the
president has the authority to detain people accused of belonging
to or assisting terrorist groups even after they're acquitted.
The only point of prosecuting them, it seems, is to create an
impression of due process while continuing Bush detention
policies that Obama has repeatedly condemned. -
In a
May speech the president said these prisoners "cannot be
prosecuted" because there is not enough admissible evidence
against them but cannot be released because they "pose a clear
danger to the American people."
09 Sep 09
Drug Control Becomes Speech Control: A federal prosecutor treats pain treatment advocacy as a crime.
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When Siobhan Reynolds thinks a doctor has been unfairly targeted for such a prosecution, she tries to counter the official narrative by highlighting the patients he has helped and dramatizing the conflict between drug control and pain control. But now the government has turned its reinterpretive powers on Reynolds, portraying the pain treatment activist's advocacy as obstruction of justice and thereby threatening the freedom of anyone who dares to suggest there is more than one side to a criminal case.
15 Jul 09
The Right to a Guilty Verdict: Obama's empty promise of due process for terrorism suspects
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Last week the Defense Department's top lawyer declared that the president has the authority to detain people accused of belonging to or assisting terrorist groups even after they're acquitted. The only point of prosecuting them, it seems, is to create an impression of due process while continuing Bush detention policies that Obama has repeatedly condemned.
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"In our constitutional system," Obama says, "prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man." Yet under the principles he and his underlings have laid out, the choice of how to treat a given terrorism suspect—whether apprehended here or abroad, on a battlefield or off, now or in the future—is entirely up to him.
16 Jun 09
Drug Control Begets Gun Control: The violence in Mexico is caused by prohibition, not firearms.
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Instead of acknowledging the failure of drug control, Obama is using it as an excuse for an equally vain attempt at gun control.
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But as Fox News and Factcheck.org have shown, the percentage cited by the president greatly exaggerates the share of guns used by Mexican criminals that were bought in the United States. Fox estimates it’s less than a fifth, while Factcheck.org says it may be more like a third.
- 3 more annotations...
10 Jun 09
Covering Their Butts: Why it's misleading to say the FDA is regulating cigarettes
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The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which the House approved in April and the Senate is expected to approve today, includes a censorship provision that speaks volumes about the law's effectiveness. It prohibits manufacturers from making "any statement directed to consumers" that "would reasonably be expected to result in consumers believing" a tobacco product "is regulated, inspected or approved by the Food and Drug Administration."
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The bill, which President Obama supports, authorizes the FDA to regulate tobacco products. Yet it says "consumers are likely to be confused and misled" if they know the FDA is regulating tobacco products. They might mistakenly believe that FDA regulation makes these products safer, for example, when the opposite is the truth.
- 3 more annotations...
27 May 09
War: What Is It Good For?: Martial rhetoric is not enough to justify preventive detention.
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as President Obama showed in the speech he delivered the same day, he still clings to the language of war when discussing terrorism. Like his predecessor, he uses such rhetoric selectively, to justify departures from standard legal procedures when they prove to be inconvenient.
"Let me be clear," the president said early in his speech. "We are indeed at war with Al Qaeda and its affiliates."
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an institutionalized system of preventive detention, justified by a war that Obama concedes will never come to a definitive end, could be worse than Bush's ad hoc unilateralism.
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