Tag: hit&run

Our neighors to the north can now enjoy salmon genetically enhanced to grow faster and eat less feed. Thanks to absurd overregulation, Americans can’t.

The Atlantic salmon are enhanced using a Chinook salmon gene that enables them to grow much faster using less feed. Nature News reports that AquaBounty Technologies, which developed the fish, has now sold nearly five tons of it to customers in Canada. The company applied to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to get approval for its genetically enhanced salmon back in 1995; it took the agency til 2015 to rule that AquAdvantage salmon, as the product is known, “is as safe to eat as any non-genetically engineered (GE) Atlantic salmon, and also as nutritious.”

Health Canada approved it for sale six months later. But you still can’t buy it here in the U.S. The usual claque of anti-science activists are suing the FDA in an effort to block the company from marketing the fish. And Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, aiming to protect her state’s salmon fishers from competition, has inserted a rider in the agriculture spending bill that bans the sale of enhanced salmon until the the FDA publishes its final labeling guidelines. Murkowski claims that Americans must be warned that AquAdvantage salmon are “frankenfish.”

As a general regulatory principle, genetically enhanced foods do not have to be labeled unless they are nutritionally different than their conventional versions. Canada sensibly does not require special labels on AquAdvantage salmon.

AquaBounty is currently raising its sterile triploid salmon in an onshore facility in Panama. In June the company announced that it will expand a Prince Edward Island production facility and has acquired a fish farm in Indiana, where it plans to begin raising its enhanced fish for the U.S. market. Aquabounty sold its fish at wholesale for $5.30 per pound in Canada. In comparison, Tradex Foods reports that the current price on fresh atlantic salmon (farmed) in Miami for trimmed fillets is $4.25-$4.30 per pound.

In any case, Alaskan fishers should rest easy. The Aquabounty facility in Indiana would produce about 1,200 tons of Atlantic salmon annually. Americans annually consume about 180,000 tons of Atlantic salmon, of which 170,000 tons are imported. Only 2,000 tons of Atlantic salmon are wild-caught. Most of the 105,000 tons of Pacific salmon is wild and is caught in domestic waters.

Congress has tied the FDA’s hands with respect to the AquAdvantage salmon, but the agency could do a great deal of good by withdrawing the scientifically ridiculous draft regulations meant to govern genomically improved livestock, which the Obama administration issued on its way out of the door in January.

Personally, I dislike the flavor of salmon. But I plan to eat an AquAdvantage fillet as soon as I can legally lay hands on one.

“We don’t see business as evil,” says Steve Forbes, marking the 100th anniversary of Forbes magazine, the iconic business publication started by his grandfather. “We see it as a noble undertaking.”

And thanks to capitalism, progress in the 20th century will pale in comparison to what’s coming in the 21st. “In 2117,” he says, “we’ll be infinitely better off.”

Forbes sat down with Reason’s Nick Gillespie at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas to discuss the legacy and future of the magazine, his assessment of President Trump, and where the legislative agenda for Republicans is falling short.

Edited by Austin Bragg. Cameras by Meredith Bragg and Justin Monticello.

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• Reviews are in for Trump’s Tuesday press conference about violence in Charlottesville, and they’re not good. “Donald Trump has a very clear attitude about morality: He doesn’t believe in it,” writes John Harwood at CNBC. Here are the New York Daily News and New York Post covers for today:

• Baltimore authorities removed three Confederate monuments overnight Wednesday.
• Hope Hicks has been named the new White House communications director, The Daily Caller is reporting. She was previously the administrartion’s director of strategic communications.
• U.S. teen overdose deaths involving opioids tripled between 1999 and 2007, held steady for several years, fell again in 2012-2014, and then spiked again in 2014-2015, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
• A Ukrainian coder whose malware program was used to hack the Democratic National Committee is now working with the FBI.
• The president is spreading fake news about Amazon again.

Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt – many jobs being lost!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 16, 2017

• Vice News goes to Charlottesville:

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This morning I am sitting in the guest-host chair for Stand UP! with Pete Dominick on Sirius XM Insight (channel 121) from 9-12 am ET. Charlottesville and aftermath, plus President Donald Trump’s remarkable press conference last night, will be the main topics. Guests are scheduled to include:

* Beloved Reason Books Editor Jesse Walker, author of the always-relevant The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory. He will talk about parallels to the Greensboro massacre.

* Also-beloved free speech lawyer Ken “Popehat” White, who will talk about the many free-speech implications of neo-Nazis and Antifa thugs fighting in the streets.

* Journalist Marc Ambinder, who will talk about how close we came to nuclear war in the early 1980s.

* Movie/TV critic Carina Chocano, author of the brand spanking new You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages. She will talk about her book, from the jumping-off point of today being Madonna’s 58^th birthday.

* National Public Radio media correspondent David Folkenflik, who will talk about the bizarre triangle between the White House, Fox News, and the Seth Rich conspiracy.

It’s gonna be a great show; please call in at 1-877-974-7487.

Last week Donald Trump promised to “spend a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of money on the opioid crisis,” which he declared a “national emergency.” Judging from the president’s campaign rhetoric and his comments since taking office, which have focused on building a border wall to “stop the drugs,” much of that time, effort, and money will be devoted to erecting barriers between Americans and the intoxicants they want.

That supply-side approach has been failing for more than a century, Jacob Sullum says, and it seems doubtful that Trump will be the man to finally make it work. But he may very well succeed in exacerbating the problem he is trying to solve.

Venezuela is in free fall, fast becoming an international pariah. Resistance to a socialistic dictatorship is in the hands of the T-shirt soldiers, teenagers and young adults, many of them from what once was the country’s middle class, Maria Alba Toledo writes.

“Bubble” is a 23-year-old journalism student who set aside his studies for a “greater good.” Raised in a leftist household, he grew tired of watching poverty take over everything, including his own home.

Bubble and some 20 other resistance members call the place where they are entrenched “Mangokistan.” Los Mangos—a residential area in the port city of Guayana, in Bolívar State, in the eastern part of the country—has become a place of perpetual war.

“I left my home because my parents support the government, when sometimes we didn’t have enough to buy groceries,” Bubble tells me. “Now I live in the different places of those who back us. The truth is that we are doing this because we are tired of seeing people starving and dying of the lack of medicine. Living under these conditions is feeling helpless, like we have no future. We do not follow opposition leaders, we are not politicians. We are willing to do this even if it costs us our lives. Until Venezuela is free.”

View this article.

The Sussex, England, police department says it has sanctioned its hate crimes officer, Sgt. Peter Allan, for using his verified Twitter account to warn a local supermarket that its “feminine care” signs are sexist and should be replaced with personal care signs. “It’s an issue of gender identity. Men may use the products,” he tweeted.

President Donald Trump showed during a press event today, ostensibly to announce some plans to ease permitting processes for infrastructure building, that he can’t help himself from exhibiting sympathy with the crowds who gathered in Charlottesville this weekend to march for white supremacy.

It is shocking, on one level, to find a U.S. president unwilling to unequivocally and with any sense that he actually believes what he’s saying decry people marching under fascist emblems and shouting Nazi slogans (or in happy open alliance with those doing so, for the pedantic), one who considers it more important that you know in the same breath that he also finds fault with those who gathered in public to oppose them.

A core element of Trumpist public policy makes today’s show of sympathies a little less surprising, even thought they are policies that neither Trump nor most of his fans (or even enemies) likely consciously recognize as connected to his bizarre inability to not make sure you know he thinks some of those who march with nazis were “very fine people” (apparently because he supports their ostensible “goal” of protesting the removal of a statue from public propery of a general who fought for a nation dedicated to enslaving many of the people who live in the city and country the statue resides in).

As I wrote back in month one of the Trump administration, the tendency within him that marks him as unlibertarian and illiberal at the core (even if he might preside over, as in today’s speech, such ostensibly state-power-shrinking policies as permit streamlining) is a bone-deep sympathy with illiberal exclusionism as a policy. The Charlottesville white supremacist marchers take that exclusionism a little farther than Trump has explicitly.

What did Trump lead with in month one of his presidency? Border walls, rabid trade protectionism, Muslim travel bans. As I summed up then:

Not yet a month into his administration, Trumpism is most surely centered on a poorly considered nationalism. His administration, with each swift and relentless bit of dumb bullying over our businesses’ right to choose what to do with capital, our right to buy from abroad unmolested, other humans’ ability to move peacefully into our country, acts on the principle that it’s best if we don’t trade with people outside our borders, that the Leader gets to decide what private businesses do with their capital and resources, and that we should beggar ourselves for the sour joys of keeping fewer people not born here from coming here (in a time when that alleged “problem” barely exists).

His brand of nationalism means exclusionism, based in Trump’s case (and in that of his adviser in nationalism and former self-proclaimed leading promoter of the “alt right”, Steve Bannon, the same alt-right Trump acts conveniently confused about the nature of today) on either largely pointless fear or hostility toward foreign “others,” or refusal to understand or care about how dealing with people outside our borders benefits us, them, and the world at large.

Modern civilization fortunately requires that such illiberal exclusionism is usually expressed in what passes for polite policy debate as just (misunderstanding of) economics or unwillingness to tolerate the slightest hint of risk at whatever cost when that risk comes from foreign others. But something darker can ride along with that sort of “acceptable” illiberal exclusionism aimed at unambiguous foreigners.

The explicit targets of the exclusionist spirit might be different for Trump and all the “very fine people” who chose to march with Nazis over their alleged concern for the preservation of a statue in a particular place. But the hate and desire for separation at the heart of the “unite the right” side of the Charlottesville rally aimed at blacks, Jews, homosexuals, and all the other historic enemies of racists and Nazis is just a further, more obviously to most evil, manifestation of that same hate and mistrust of free-market libertarianism cosmopolitanism that drives Trump’s seemingly more benign trade and immigration policies.

Trump’s supporters can believe that he didn’t speak out sooner because he’s obsessed with making sure he has all the facts straight before accusing anyone of anything, even though that’s obviously not true when something is truly bothering him (and in the case of the black Central Park Five, Trump can remain sure of their guilt years after the legal system has cleared them). They can fall back on the (true) fact that Americans should be able to gather freely and express even heinous and evil ideas, as long as they are merely ideas, or that some non-Nazi may have non-defensively harmed someone that day.

But that does not relieve President Trump of the responsibility, once that incident becomes national news, of recognizing with no equivocation and no felt need to blame other people for anything that something is very seriously wrong and worth loud and consistent condemning with choosing to exercise your rights to advocate that non-whites and Jews be driven from America, which was indeed the dominant spirit of that gathering.

Why can’t Donald Trump seem to understand that in his bones when he’s given a microphone? It seems so strange. One reason may well be because Donald Trump is a very strong public advocate of the benefits, propriety, and necessity of a policy of national exclusionism, when it comes to immigrants, visitors, goods, and services. Thus he might have a hard time instantly recognizing that the modern alt-right takes that exclusionism he believes in to a place even he should have the nerve to unambiguously and unequivocally oppose without the need to make excuses or spread blame.

• Members of Trump’s diversity council call for Steve Bannon to resign following events in Charlottesville.

• The Congressional Budget Office warns that premiums could rise by 20 percent if Trump follows through on his threat to cut subsidies. Read Reason‘s coverage of the CBO’s findings here.

• A bi-partisan group of senators is pushing for the FCC to investigate the federal government’s “LifeLine” program, which aimed to provide broadband to low income households. The program reportedly handed out millions in improper subsidies, including to deceased people.

• While political tensions mount both here at home and across the globe, Donald Trump keeps playing with his Twitter profile pic. In the past week the president has changed his profile pic five times in the last two weeks.

• Speaking of twitter, President Trump retweeted and then deleted a cartoon of a train hitting a CNN reporter.

The Illinois legislature has passed a nonbinding resolution urging the state’s police departments to designate neo-Nazi and other white nationalist groups as terrorist organizations. If they’re really interested in combating white supremacy in Illinois, they’d do better to start with the white supremacists in those police departments.

A 2015 classified FBI counterterrorism policy obtained by The Intercept noted that terror investigations focused on white supremacists “often have identified active links to law enforcement officers.” And of course many officers are independently racist, without ties to outside groups. In Illinois specifically, a decades-long secret torture program in Chicago exclusively targeted African-Americans, with the cops involved regularly using explicitly racist language during their torture sessions. Whether they join white supremacist groups or not, such officers are doing the violent work of white supremacy—and the government is enabling their work.

After the car attack in Charlottesville, cops from at least two states took to social media to mock the victims. They are being “investigated” internally for their posts, but it’s highly unlikely anything will happen to them, given the broad employment protections that police officers have. Their lack of a filter as government employees in making controversial comments on public platforms reveals how little accountability they are used to having.

A white supremacist in a police uniform is more dangerous than the member of any organization Illinois legislators might want to see designated as a terror group, because a white supremacist in a police uniform is operating under the color of law. Police officers have little meaningful oversight or accountability, and they are entrusted to use force on individuals not complying with government rules.

Police links to white supremacist groups are difficult to uncover and even more difficult to break, thanks to a cop culture that values a “no snitching” code (the so-called blue wall of silence). And thanks in large part to state laws and union-negotiated rules, it’s exceedingly difficult for police chiefs to fire problem cops with histories of abuse, let alone those that may have affiliations that ought to be incompatible with police work. A recent Washington Post investigation found that the country’s largest police departments had reinstated more than 400 officers who had previously been fired for misconduct, usually after union-contract-mandated arbitration.

“It is vital that we stand in total opposition to the hatred, bigotry and violence displayed by the white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups in Charlottesville this past weekend,” Illinois state Sen. Don Harmon (D–Oak Park), who sponsored the resolution, said after his bill passed. “They are the heirs to the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis. We fought two bloody wars in opposition to their ideologies. We must continue to fight those same twisted ideologies today.”

Police departments themselves have sometimes been among the most racist institutions in American history. Decades of state lawmaking and undue deference to police union reps have turned cops into a uniquely privileged class, and have turned many of those they are sworn to serve and protect into second-class citizens.

Illinois lawmakers have the power to pass legislation to change this. But that would require challenging powerful special interests. Empty preening is easier.