Category: reason

When the Rev. Jim Jones brought his Peoples Temple to Guyana, some of the settlers formed a soul/funk band called the Jonestown Express, which played concerts around the community up until the mass murder/suicide that wiped out the colony in November 1978.

Jonestown is on my mind today, because Mark Lane—mostly remembered these days as a JFK conspiracy writer, but he was also Jones’ attorney—died this week at age 89. With that news in the air, I’ll post one of the most darkly incongruous musical performances of the 1970s: the Jonestown Express, just seven months before the massacre, performing the song that begins “I believe the children are our future…”

More than 900 people died at Jonestown, including 190 under the age of 13.

And Lane? According to this old Mother Jones profile, written by a rival assassinologist, he escaped by telling a guard, “If you kill us, there will be no one left to tell of the glories of Jonestown.” Upon returning to the States, Lane then embarked on a speaking tour titled “The Jonestown Horror: An Eyewitness Account.”

(For the full concert recording from which this track was taken, go to this site and scroll down to tape #Q174. For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

In an interview with Fox News last night, Donald Trump issued a thinly veiled threat against The Washington Post, suggesting that the paper’s investigations into his background were in fact part of a tax dodging scheme, and hinting that as president, he would crack down on such behavior. Trump’s remarks were a clear attempt to intimidate his political critics, and they should terrify anyone who is concerned about abuse of government power, executive overreach, or freedom of the press.

Trump’s threat came in response to a question about whether he was ready for the rigors of a campaign in which both his likely general election competitor, Hillary Clinton, and news outlets like The Washington Post would be digging into his past. Here is what he said:

Every hour we’re getting calls from reporters from The Washington Post asking ridiculous questions. And I will tell you, this is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos, who controls Amazon. Amazon is getting away with murder, tax-wise. He’s using The Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don’t tax Amazon like they should be taxed.

He’s getting absolutely away—he’s worried about me, and I think he said that to somebody, it was in some article—where he thinks I would go after him for antitrust. Because he’s got a huge antitrust problem because he’s controlling so much. Amazon is controlling so much of what they’re doing. And what they’ve done is he bought this paper for practically nothing. And he’s using that as a tool for political power against me and against other people. And I’ll tell you what, we can’t let him get away with it.

So he’s got about 20, 25—I just heard they are taking these really bad stories. I mean, they, you know, wrong, I wouldn’t even say bad, they’re wrong. And in many cases they have no proper information, and they’re putting them together, they’re slopping them together, and they’re going to do a book.

And the book is going to be all false stuff because the stories are so wrong. And the reporters—I mean, one after another. So what they are doing is he’s using that as a political instrument to try and stop antitrust, which he thinks I believe he’s antitrust, in other words, what he’s got is a monopoly. And he wants to make sure I don’t get in. So, it’s one of those things. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you what. What he’s doing’s wrong.

Trump has offered plenty of evidence throughout the campaign that he is a bully who personalizes even the mildest criticism and has no respect for freedom of the press. But even still, this is deeply worrying stuff.

Trump is singling out a media company for its reporting into his candidacy, and then suggesting that the investigations are an attempt the paper’s owner to avoid a federal investigation into another one of the owner’s businesses, Amazon, under a Trump presidency—an investigation that Trump, by saying that Amazon’s behavior is wrong, implies he might undertake. 

As with nearly all Trump remarks, it is a kind of word salad. But even still, it is difficult to read this as anything other than a threat to use the power of the federal government to crack down on a bothersome political critic.

As he has throughout the campaign and his public life, Trump is advertising his authoritarian tendencies. He has a history of berating companies that outsource operations (those that do can “go fuck themselves“) and threatening them with unspecified “consequences” should they leave the country.

And he has repeatedly praised strong authoritarian governments, saying that although the Chinese government’s 1989 massacre of student protesters at Tiananmen Square was “vicious,” it was also an effective response to what he described as a “riot.” “They put it down with strength” Trump told Playboy in 1989. “That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”

Trump’s admiration for authoritarian strength has been most visible in his praise for Russian leader Vladimir Putin, saying last year, “I’ve always felt fine about Putin. He’s a strong leader, he’s a powerful leader,” and praising Putin’s political popularity. And, most tellingly, he has defended Putin against charges that he has had bothersome journalists killed.

“He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” is how Trump responded when MSNBC host Joe Scarborough brought up Putin’s habit of killing critical journalists. When pressed further, Trump equivocated. “Well I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe.”

Trump is not floating the possibility of violence against The Washington Post. But there is no doubt that his statement last night was a threat—a threat, to be clear, from a major party nominee for president to use the might of the federal government to target the business operations of a critic for the crime of reporting. It may be a mild form of Putinism, but it is Putinism all the same.

• Democratic leaders want Bernie Sanders to drop out of the presidential race and they are turning up the pressure in the hopes of getting the Vermont socialist to quit and thereby clear the path for Hillary Clinton. But Sanders is refusing to budge. “Please do not moan to me about Hillary Clinton’s problems,” Sanders told MSNBC.

• “The Obama administration is planning to issue a sweeping directive telling every public school district in the country to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity.”

• Are Republican leaders starting to rally around Donald Trump?

• Mustafa Badreddine, Hezbollah’s top military commander in Syria, has been killed.

• The world’s oldest person, 116-year-old Susannah Mushatt Jones, has died.

Follow Reason on Twitter, and like us on Facebook. You can also get the top stories mailed to you—sign up here.

You’re probably aware by now that modern pre-election polling is struggling against some massive methodological challenges, from plummeting response rates to the difficulty of trying to differentiate between people who will show up to vote on Election Day and those who just say they will. But poll takers sometimes err in ways that are far more basic than all that. A panel yesterday at the annual American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) conference pulled back the curtain on some of the challenges survey researchers have to contend with long before the interviewers ever start dialing.

The session, titled “Writing and Formatting Questions to Improve Data Quality,” was a reminder that, unsexy as it may sound, it’s possible for things to go badly awry if a survey questionnaire (the “instrument,” in pollster jargon) isn’t designed with enough care.

One major problem with data quality arises when a lot of telephone poll respondents give “uncodable” answers—say, replying with “a few” rather than giving a number when asked how many times he or she has done something in the last year. Turns out those inadequate responses are more likely to be the fault of problems with a question’s phrasing than they are to be purely the fault of the respondent, according to Amanda Ganshert, Kristen Olson, and Jolene D. Smyth of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL).

Earlier this week I explored how question wording can (not necessarily intentionally) influence the results of a poll, for instance by using a frame that nudges people to be more or less supportive of a given policy. As the UNL researchers pointed out, though, another easy-to-make mistake is to write a question that has a poor fit between the so-called “question stem” and the answer options.

An example would be an item that implicitly calls for a yes or no response—”do you or does someone in your household own the home in which you live?”—but then in fact expects the respondent to select from a series of non-binary choices, like “we rent our home,” “we have a mortgage on our home,” “we own our home outright,” etc. Mismatches like that can be discouraging or confusing to people, thus leading to less accurate responses or even causing large numbers to give up on the survey altogether.

Another panelist, Stephanie Wilson of the National Center for Health Statistics, found that not giving a respondent an obvious way to register that he or she doesn’t know the answer to a factual query can also lead to bad results. Her research uncovered that most people recall very little about things like the names of the medical procedures they’ve had done recently or the reasons for them. But if you as the pollster don’t make it clear from the wording of a question that respondents are welcome to admit their ignorance—and sometimes, distressingly, even if you do explicitly give them that option—they’ll very often reason their way to a plausible answer (“my doctor didn’t actually tell me the purpose, but why would he have ordered a chest X-ray unless he was screening for lung cancer?”) rather than reply that they aren’t sure.

It probably goes without saying that if wild guessing is prevalent—and there’s reason to suspect it is—it can really throw off the accuracy of a study.

The good news is that yesterday’s panel proves smart people are working hard to understand these problems and develop best practices to avoid them. The bad news is that, when you’re waist-deep in an election year, people tend to spend more time hyperventilating over the latest SHOCK POLL result than scrupulously evaluating the outfits’ question-wording choices.

Doughy shlub David (Colin Farrell) has just been dumped by his wife. Soon he finds himself on a bus with a bunch of other hapless singletons, being driven off to a big resort-like hotel on the banks of a wide bay. There he’ll have 45 days to locate a new mate among a full house of other loveless losers. Should he fail to do this, he will be turned into an animal in the hotel’s Transformation Room. It can be an animal of his choice, however. Pressed to select in advance, David picks a lobster. “I’ve always liked the sea,” he says.

In his first English-language film, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos extends the disturbing, poker-faced surrealism of his 2009 Dogtooth to examine the routine superficiality of human attraction and the possible impossibility of true love. Farrell, here sporting a modest paunch and a melancholy mustache, never cracks a smile; but despite occasional tentacles of horror creeping in, the picture is often darkly funny. This is not a movie like too many others. Or any, in fact, writes Kurt Loder.

View this article.

The family of a Denver woman whose husband killed her after eating marijuana-infused taffy has sued the manufacturer who made the candy and the retailer who sold it. The Denver Post says the case “appears to be the country’s first wrongful-death lawsuit against the recreational marijuana industry,” and it surely won’t be the last. But any lawsuit that blames marijuana for murder faces steep obstacles because causation is virtually impossible to prove when a cannabis consumer does something that cannabis consumers almost never do.

Kristine Kirk, a 44-year-old mother of three, died on April 14, 2014, after her husband, Richard, shot her in the head. He had been behaving oddly, jumping in and out of windows and raving about the end of the world, after eating a few bites of Karma Kandy Orange Ginger taffy that he bought that evening at Nutritional Elements, a marijuana store on South Colorado Boulevard in Denver. The lawsuit, which was filed by Kristine’s parents and sister on behalf of her three sons, argues that Nutritional Elements and Gaia’s Garden, which made the candy, failed to adequately warn Richard about the hazards of consuming too much.

According to Richard Kirk’s public defender (who has since been replaced by a private attorney), the clerk at Nutritional Elements, after learning that Kirk was an inexperienced user, did caution him against taking too large a dose, and Kirk ate more than recommended. It’s not clear exactly how much. The entire taffy contained 100 milligrams of THC, which state regulators count as 10 doses. But Kirk did not eat the whole thing, and when his blood was tested after the murder the THC concentration was just 2.3 nanograms per milliliter, less than half the level that is presumed to impair drivers under state law (but which may not in fact indicate impairment, especially in regular users). Assuming Kirk was an infrequent cannabis consumer, it is still possible that he ingested enough THC to have an unpleasant experience. But bad trips rarely end in homicide.

The lawsuit nevertheless argues that Nutritional Elements and Gaia Gardens had a duty to warn Kirk that too much THC can trigger paranoia, hallucinations, and psychosis. It says the defendants “negligently, recklessly and purposefully concealed vital dosage and labeling information from their actual and prospective purchasers, including Kirk, in order to make a profit.” At the time of Kirk’s purchase, edible manufacturers were required either to list the THC content of each product on the package or indicate that the product had not been tested. New regulations approved after the murder mandate THC testing, impose a 100-milligram limit on the amount of THC in a single package, and require that each 10-milligram dose be wrapped separately or clearly marked.

The rules, which took effect in February 2015, do not mandate the sort of warnings about psychiatric side effects that Kristine Kirk’s relatives say are necessary. But they do require a warning about the lag between ingesting an edible and feeling its effects: “The intoxicating effects of this product may be delayed by two or more hours.” The lawsuit argues that Richard Kirk ate too much taffy because he did not realize how long the delay might be.

“While nothing can bring their parents back, this lawsuit will seek justice and change in an edible industry that is growing so fast it failed these young kids,” said the family’s attorneys. “Edibles themselves are not the evil. It is the failure to warn, the failure to properly dose, the failure to tell the consumer how to safely use edibles, that is the evil.”

The challenge for the plaintiffs is connecting that alleged failure to Richard’s decision to retrieve a pistol from his safe and shoot his wife, which requires showing that marijuana made him do it. As University of Denver law professor Sam Kamin noted in an interview with the Post, “We don’t hold liquor stores responsible, and we don’t hold vodka producers responsible, for drunk drivers.” The challenge for Kristine’s relatives is even harder, since alcohol demonstrably affects driving ability, but there is little scientific basis for the idea that marijuana causes murder.

“The plaintiffs will need to establish, among other things, causation—in other words, that the ingestion of defendants’ edibles caused the incident and the proposed warnings would have made a difference,” note Abby Sacunas and Leigh Ann Benson in an analysis on the website of Cozen O’Connor, a law firm specializing in product liability defense. “Causation in this type of case, like in food contamination cases, is likely to be an incredible hurdle given, for example, the variability of individual reactions and the inherent destruction of the product when ingested.”

The lawsuit’s claims resemble the criminal defense that Richard Kirk seems to be planning. Kirk, who was charged with first-degree murder, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and his lawyers appear to be laying the groundwork for claiming that marijuana triggered a temporary psychosis that rendered him incapable of forming the intent required for conviction. But that defense seems inconsistent with Colorado law, which says “the voluntary ingestion of alcohol or any other psychoactive substance” cannot be the basis of an insanity defense. The lawsuit likewise says Kirk, who is also named as a defendant, bears responsibility for putting himself in a position where he lost control of himself.

Police argue that Kirk knowingly and deliberately killed his wife, with whom he had been fighting bitterly for weeks. Kristine’s relatives, by contrast, say he did not intend to kill her and had no way of knowing how he would react to the THC-treated taffy. They cannot blame Nutritional Elements and Gaia Gardens for her death without letting Richard off the hook. 

New legislation snaking through Sacramento would make eminent domain easier to use in California.

Steven Greenhut reports:

In 2014, Brown signed a law that creates Enhanced Infrastructure Financing Districts—like redevelopment, but limited to infrastructure. Last year, he signed Assembly Bill 2, which expands the process to urban renewal. It has more limits than redevelopment (all affected districts must agree to the tax diversion, for instance), but the new laws did not restrict eminent domain. Now, Assembly Bill 2492 is moving through the Legislature.

It is billed as “clean up” legislation for AB2, but “will expand the number of communities and neighborhoods in which the government can exercise its power to forcibly seize private property from unwilling sellers,” wrote the California Alliance to Protect Private Property Rights. The group refers to the bill as the “Donald Trump ‘Wonderful’ Land Grab Bill.”

That’s a reference to Trump’s interview with Fox News last October, in which he said, “I think eminent domain is wonderful—if you’re building a highway and you need to build, as an example, a highway and you’re going to be blocked by a holdout… and you need a house in a certain location because you’re going to build this massive development that’s going to employ thousands of people.”

View this article.

Even if some e-cigarette companies survive the shakeout caused by onerous new federal regulations, they will not be allowed to talk about the main selling point of their products. In my latest Forbes column, I explain how and why the government is suppressing information about the health advantages of e-cigarettes:

The e-cigarette regulations that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unveiled last week pose a grave threat to products that have the potential to dramatically reduce smoking-related disease and death. The most obvious problem for the e-cigarette industry is that manufacturers of vaping equipment and e-liquids must persuade the FDA that allowing their products to remain on the market is “appropriate for the protection of public health”—a challenge that will be prohibitively expensive for all but the biggest companies and may prove impossible even for them. A lawsuit filed this week by Nicopure Labs, which sells e-liquids and vaping hardware, highlights another troubling aspect of the FDA’s regulations: censorship of potentially lifesaving information about e-cigarettes.

Read the whole thing.

An Austrian woman attacked by four migrants from Afghanistan in a train station says when she reported the crime police officers told her she should not have been using public transportation after 8 p.m. and told her to dye her blonde hair another color.