Month: December 2016

The Food and Drug Administration issued proposed guidance in June to the food industry aiming to reduce the amount of sodium in many prepared foods. In its draft guidance, the agency stated:

Average sodium intake in the U.S. is approximately 3,400 mg/day. The draft short-term (two-year) and long-term (10-year) voluntary targets for industry are intended to help the American public gradually reduce sodium intake to 2,300 milligrams (mg) per day, a level recommended by leading experts and the overwhelming body of scientific evidence. The targets are also intended to complement many existing efforts by food manufacturers, restaurants, and food service operations to reduce sodium in foods.

The FDA further asserted:

CDC has compiled a number of key studies, which continue to support the benefits of sodium reduction in lowering blood pressure. In some of these studies, researchers have estimated lowering U.S. sodium intake by about 40 percent over the next decade could save 500,000 lives and nearly $100 billion in healthcare costs.

So, the science of salt is settled, right? Actually, no. The FDA asked for public comments on its draft guidelines and it evidently received sufficient pushback that it extended the deadline for comments until December 2, 2016. As I reported earlier more and more studies are calling into question that idea that reducing salt consumption at the population level will actually result in net health benefits. For example, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study in August 2014 finding that people who consume less 1,500 milligrams of sodium (about 3/4ths of a teaspoon of salt) are more likely to die than people who eat between 3,000 to 6,000 milligrams of sodium per day (1.5 and 3 teaspoons of salt).

The free-market think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has submitted comments that show that the FDA’s confident claim that reducing salt consumption by Americans will save lives is at best, a hope, and at worst, tragically wrong. The CEI comments to the FDA nicely summarizes the relevant scientific studies. Here is the nub of the issue:

Reduced sodium consumption affects different individuals in different ways. Only an estimated 17 to 25 percent of the population is “salt sensitive”—they experience higher blood pressure with increased dietary sodium—while 75 percent are considered salt resistant and will experience no change in blood pressure with altered dietary sodium. However, an estimated 11 to 16 percent of the population are inverse salt sensitive, which means reduced dietary sodium can increase their blood pressure. With this heterogeneity in response to salt, trying to force a population-wide reduction in sodium availability in order to reduce incidences of hypertension would be ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.

Among other evidence, CEI cites a 2014 metanalysis in the American Journal of Hypertension of more than two dozen sodium studies which concluded that risk of death appeared to be lowest among individuals consuming between 2,565mg and 4,796 mg of sodium a day with higher rates of death in the upper and lower range. The FDA itself notes that average daily consumption – 3,400 mg – is right in the middle of that range.

CEI correctly argues:

For a minority of the population, reducing dietary sodium can be an effective means of lowering cardiovascular and hypertension risk. But identifying for whom sodium restriction may be beneficial and by how much is something that individuals and their doctors must determine. For the general population, sodium reduction is, by no means, a silver bullet to reducing hypertension and has the potential to increase risks for a large portion of the population.

Treat people as individuals not just as members of an undifferentiated public health herd. Let’s hope that the FDA will heed this advice and withdraw its misguided draft guidance.

“You opposed Donald Trump, so why aren’t you freaking out?”

David Harsanyi answers:

Well, for starters, allowing liberals to determine my level of anxiety—which would be full-blown, round-the-clock histrionics—over what’s nothing more than another election would be foolish. Until it’s not. The era of Trump hasn’t even started yet, and the entire establishment keeps using the term “era of Trump” as if things have actually changed.

They haven’t. If you’re genuinely interesting in being an effective critic of the next president, acting like Adolf Hitler is pounding at your doorstep every time Trump tweets something might not be the most effective plan in the long run.

Not to mention, the left has been such an astonishing hypocrite on so many issues related to Trump that it’s a bit difficult to move forward without pointing it out. Joining activists who’ve spent years attacking the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and Tenth Amendments—and now the Electoral College—in a newfound veneration of the Emoluments Clause is a bit much. Of course, Trump should be held accountable for his potential conflicts of interest, and one hopes conservatives who value good government will stand up when tangible evidence emerges that they exist. But the critics on the left aren’t serious about the Constitution. They’re serious about the Democratic Party.

View this article.

Note: If you live in the Washington, D.C. area, please come to this event about “free speech in the age of Trump” at the Cato Institute featuring me and Flemming Rose, publisher of the “Mohammad cartoons,” on Tuesday, December 6 at 6 P.M. Scroll down for more details and RSVP information.

President-elect Donald Trump was pretty damn awful on the campaign trail when it came to free-speech issues. He said he wanted to “open up” libel laws so he would have an easier time going after newspapers that he claimed wrote “wrong” things about him. In a particularly disturbing 24-hour period last December, both he and Hillary Clinton not only called for Internet censorship as a means of combating radical Islam, they specifically gave the stink-eye to anyone talking about constitutional rights.

“You are going to hear all the familiar complaints: ‘Freedom of speech,'” said Clinton. “Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people,” said Donald Trump. More recently, of course, Trump has inveighed against flag burners, saying they should not only be put in jail for a year but stripped of their citizenship. Although his supporters routinely claim he doesn’t mean what he says (don’t take him literals, lulz!), he’s about to become the goddamn president of the United States and words—like ideas and eating dessert every night—have consequences. So I share Robby Soave’s concern that Trump, who introduced his presidential campaign by invoking the stultifying effects of political correctness, might well be worse on a range of free-speech issues than campus leftoids. (True to form of many people who invoke the horrors of PC, Trump then immediately proceeded to call Mexicans rapists, drug-and-disease carriers, etc.)

The irony of all this is that Trump has benefited mightily from the much-and-unfairly maligned Citizens United decision, which involved advertising a documentary critical of Hillary Clinton and dates back to a previous election cycle. That decision and others related to it have loosened the amount of government control over specifically political speech, weakening the ability of the political establishment to direct the flow of money and messages. Social media (can we just start calling it media already?) and othr technological innovations have helped blowhards everywhere to speak often and effectively. Trump’s willingeness to literally and figuratively shut down speech and expression with which he disagrees is of a piece with a lot of his thinking: He’s for whatever works for him but he’s not necessarily willing to extend the same rules or policies to other people. Or, perhaps worse, he doesn’t think in terms of broad principles and general rules. Like an aristocrat at a king’s court, he likes a world in which special deals are constantly being made and remade based on proximity to power, money, and so on. From his first foray into Manhattan real estate, which involved a massive and historic tax-abatement from the city of New York to his unabashed love of eminent-domain abuse for the benefit of private developers, that’s how he rolls.

Let’s assume Trump is true to his campaign blurts when it comes to speech. Fact is, as president he can’t really do much about libel laws, even as he can roll an always-already pliant press, and he’s so clueless about the Internet that he suggested tapping Bill Gates, head of a company that struggled to shift into online space, as the man for the job of locking down cyberspace. Even if he tries to suppress speech and expression he doesn’t like, the real question is whether he or anyone else will be effective. My short answer? There are many serious and important threats to free speech in America but by and large they emanate not from politics or policy per se but from cultural attitudes and social mores. In any society, individuals consciously and unconsciously subscribe to norms that limit acceptable behavior. Actual free expression, especially in the cultural sphere, is relatively recent—it didn’t really come online until the 1960s. With the advent of the World Wide Web as a mass medium in the 1990s (and the successful challenge to the bipartisan Communications Decency Act, which would have essentially regulated the internet as broadcast television), we have been taking free speech for granted. Everywhere around us, there are challenges, including political correctness, internet-outrage mobs, federal prosecutors working to chill speech, and, well, politicians such as Donald Trump. These threats will always ultimately give way to free-er speech, thanks to technology and backlash, but why should we have to wait for a pendulum swing in a free society? The biggest threat to free speech, I think, is attitudinal. As Greg Lukianoff of FIRE has argued, we’re no longer simply defending specific acts of free speech but the idea of free speech as a foundational value to a good society:

“Freedom of speech is really a sophisticated concept,” says Lukianoff. “We are so used to it in America that we sometimes forget just how sophisticated it is. Meanwhile if you have a K-12 environment or a parental environment when people are explaining that free speech is just the argument the bully, the bigot, and the robber baron make—that is morally persuasive. And if no one has ever explained to you otherwise, of course you are going to think that free speech is the mean person’s argument.”

Next Tuesday evening (December 12), I’ll join Flemming Rose, who literally put his life on the line by publishing editorial cartoons depicting Mohammad in a Danish newspaper, and the Cato Institute’s Kat Murti to discuss “Free Speech in the Age of Trump.” The event is free and open to the public (and will be livestreamed as well). I’ll recount Reason’s brush with federal subpoenas for commenter information (a classic chilling action) in the wake of a post I wrote about Ross Ulbricht’s sentencing for operating Silk Road. But I’ll be talking more about the need to revive interest in the Enlightenment and classical-liberal belief that free expression is not simply a byproduct of progress, equality before the law, innovation, human flourishing, and prosperity, but it’s very foundation.

Details on the Cato event after the jump.

Today through Tuesday, December 6, Reason is running its annual webathon. We’re asking readers of this site to make tax-deductible donations in dollars and Bitcoin to Reason Foundation, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that publishes our award-winning journalism in video, audio, and print form. Different giving levels come with different levels of swag, which you can read about here.

#CatoDigital — Free Speech in the Age of Trump

Featuring Flemming Rose, Recipient, The 2016 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty; adjunct scholar, Cato Institute; and author of The Tyranny of Silence; Nick Gillespie, Editor-in-Chief, Reason.comand Reason TV (@nickgillespie); moderated by Kat Murti, Senior Digital Outreach Manager, Cato Institute (@KatMurti).

The freedom of speech and the freedom of the press are at the core of a free society, yet we’re increasingly discovering that, while in theory, almost everyone believes in freedom of speech, in practice, few are committed to the policies that truly safeguard it.

On the campaign trail, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump called for “closing down” parts of the Internet as an anti-ISIS measure. Trump further claimed that freedom of the press was detrimental to the fight against terrorism, and demanded that libel laws be expanded to allow individuals to sue media organizations that publish unflattering stories about them. Following the 2016 election results, pundits blamed social media for creating an increasingly polarized voting public; Facebook and Google announced an initiative to go after so-called “fake news sites,” despite controversy over which sites, exactly, should qualify as fake; and more and more platforms have adopted increasingly restrictive policies regarding acceptable speech.

Nick Gillespie and Flemming Rose are among the many classical liberals who worry about the trajectory freedom of speech and freedom of the press seems to be taking. As editor in chief of Reason Magazine and Reason TV, Gillespie has faced Department of Justice subpoenas and a gag order from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. When Rose, then-culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, became the target of death threats and more after commissioning 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad to be published around an op-ed on Islam, free speech, and multiculturalism in 2006, he refused to retract his opinions, instead becoming a global activist for free speech—detailed in his book The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech, published by the Cato Institute.

On Tuesday, December 6, join the Cato Institute for a timely discussion of threats to freedom of expression, followed by a book signing and wine and cheese reception.

#CatoDigital is free of charge and a regular event series at the Cato Institute highlighting the intersection of tech, social media, and the ideas of liberty.

If you can’t make it to the event, you can watch it live online at www.cato.org/live and join the conversation on Twitter using #CatoDigital. Follow @CatoEvents on Twitter to get future event updates, live streams, and videos from the Cato Institute.

In our government’s ever-escalating war on prostitution, U.S. cops continue sinking to new lows in executing sting-ops and other ploys designed to punish people willing to pay or be paid for sex. With too many recent examples to cover individually, I’ve decided to round up a few that have stuck out over the past month. So behold: here are a few of the foolish, counterproductive, and outright cruel ways in which U.S. authorities are spending public-safety resources to further a futile crusade against consensual commercial sex between adults.

Making Women Agree to Fetish Requests Before Arresting Them

One disturbing new trend I’ve noticed of late is undercover cops posing not just as vanilla sex-buyers or women looking to get cash for sex but as prostitution clients with unusual kinks or women demanding payment in things like cheeseburgers. Then, after a sex worker or would-be client is arrested by undercover officers, the police—and the media segments that parrot them—are sure to highlight the more “weird” (read: mockable and attention-grabbing) elements of the bust. For instance, in one November prostitution sting in Ohio, a woman asked an undercover cop she thought was a potential customer to bring some nachos to the appointment. She also requested a cash payment along with the snack. Guess what the police, and headlines above her photo (which is now plastered all over the internet), emphasized? Woman has sex for nachos, of course.

What makes this latest example especially egregious is that police didn’t just publicize a true, albeit inconsequential and potentially embarrassing, detail that did at least originate in the real request. In this case, they set up a sting wherein sex workers advertising online were asked to oblige an undercover cop’s fetish request, which involved gummy worms in some way.

After one woman, whom the police-report classifies as “a known prostitute in the area,” agreed to indulge the request and told the “client” to bring the gummy worms with him, she was arrested for prostitution as well as “possessing criminal tools”—her cellphone, since she used it to arrange her date with the undercover officer. She spent the night in the Mahoning County (Ohio) jail and has a court date set for January. Media headlines about the bust made it sound like she had requested the gummy worms.

Arresting Teens for Interfering With Pre-Crime

Three Michigan teenagers have filed a lawsuit against Detroit police officers, after they were arrested in August for distracting a relative who was meeting a woman—an undercover police officer he thought was a sex worker—in a CVS parking lot to pay for sexual activity. Police said the teens, who had been parked outside a fast-food restaurant across the street where one of them worked, interfered in an official investigation when they flagged down the older man with shouts and arm gestures, prompting him to head over their way.

The cops contended that the teens had been yelling “don’t do it,” and “appeared to be discouraging the older Arabic male from talking with the decoy,” according to the police report. The young men, 17-year-olds Hassan Abdallah and Ibrahim Bazzi and 18-year-old Ali Chami, claim they had simply seen Abdallah’s relative and reacted like anyone might to get his attention. But even if the teens had somehow known that by pulling into a CVS parking-lot, the older man was intending to meet a sex worker, “so what?” asked defense attorney Amir Makled. “The objective of any law-enforcement official is to deter crime.” And if the young men “were helping deter crime… what’s going on? What’s the problem?”

Makled and fellow attorney Nick Hadous suggested at a press conference that maybe the cops were “offended” that the teens had inadvertently thwarted their sex sting, or maybe their was more to the story we didn’t know. But in any event, they and their clients wanted answers, and accountability—hence the lawsuit. “They charged these guys with interfering with police activity,” Makled told the Detroit Free Press. “In essence, they were accused of stopping prostitution in the making … these officers were just out of control.”

With Makled and Hadous’ help, the teenagers got the criminal charges against them dropped in August. In November, they filed the federal lawsuit alleging “false arrest” and mistreatment. According to their lawsuit, police officers swarmed the teen’s car and forced them out, searching it and placing them in handcuffs before impounding their car. One of the officers allegedly took a Snapchat photo of Bazzi in handcuffs. The officers then drove the teens around for a bit before dropping them off at a random Detroit street corner, “instead of a police station where their parents could safely pick them up,” and allegedly laughed as they told the teens to walk the five miles home.

Hadous called the whole situation outrageous, nothing that the teenagers could have been hurt or “had criminal records as a result of nothing—an imaginary crime.”

Arresting Teens for Something They Can’t Legally Consent To

Under federal law, a teenager cannot consent to sex for money, even if they are above the age of sexual consent in the state they live in; the federal criminal code defines anyone under 18 who is involved in prostitution as a sex-trafficking victim, even if no on else is involved and they are simply “trafficking” themselves. But this doesn’t stop state and local law-enforcement from routinely arresting teenagers for engaging in prostitution. The latest examples comes out of Southport, New York, where the local NBC affiliate recently reported that two 17-year-olds, one male and one female, had been arrested for prostitution. Why this story was important enough to make TV news is beyond me, but it’s notable that NBC reported on the story with no hint that this action might be controversial.

Funding a Ministry of Prostitution Prevention

El Paso officials have approved $31,000 in public funds to help pay the salary of a “prostitution prevention advocate” at the Center Against Sexual and Family Violence (CASFV). A statewide law pass in 2013 requires every Texas county to take a “non-adversarial” approach to prostitution, and El Paso authorities say they are compling with that law. “A lot of people think of [prostitution] as a victim-less crime, and it’s not,” said the advocate, Teresa Chavira, a retired police officer who now works at CASFV. In total, El Paso received $150,00 from the state to hire prostitution prevention staff. “The County received the grant to establish a structured nine-month program benefiting approximately 25 women,” according to KVIA.com.