Activists and public health officials frequently misrepresent the relative hazards of vaping and smoking, but usually not as blatantly as celebrity doctor Margaret Cuomo did in a recent Huffington Post video. In my latest Forbes column, I explain why the video, even after it was hastily edited to remove embarrassing errors, is still dangerously wrong:
Like most professional pundits, Margaret Cuomo has perfected the art of speaking authoritatively even when she does not know what she is talking about. Unlike most professional pundits, Cuomo is in a position to cause real damage. As a celebrity doctor spreading misinformation about the hazards of vaping, she is actively discouraging smokers from making a switch that could save their lives, thereby undermining her avowed goal of A World Without Cancer.
That’s the title of a book that Cuomo, a radiologist who is the sister of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and CNN anchor Chris Cuomo (as well as the daughter of former Gov. Mario Cuomo), published in 2012. Given Cuomo’s medical degree and her experience in diagnosing and writing about cancer, any layman unfamiliar with the subject would be inclined to believe her statement, in a Huffington Post video posted last week, that “e-cigarettes will raise your risk for lung cancer but also other cancers, like liver cancer.” But as Boston University public health professor Michael Siegel (who is also a physician) was quick to point out, “there is absolutely no evidence to support this claim,” which Cuomo retracted after The Daily Caller‘s Guy Bentley asked about it.
A new, hastily edited version of the video omits the cancer claim. Also gone: claims that tin has been detected in the aerosol produced by e-cigarettes and that vaping generates hazardous chemicals that are not found in tobacco smoke (which Siegel called “an outright lie”). But the corrected video still features a statement that sums up Cuomo’s take on vaping. “Because of their chemical composition,” Cuomo says as the video begins, “e-cigarettes are at least as harmful to your health as regular tobacco cigarettes are.” A caption drives the point home: “They’re not a safer cigarette.”
How does Cuomo know that? She doesn’t, because it’s not true.
Management of the Wagtail Close care home in England have promised better training for staff after a report found that Muslim workers at the home were refusing to serve bacon to residents when requested and even refused to help them buy ham, sausage or pork pies. The report said residents had complained to senior staff but received no help.
Five years ago this week, the U.S. began its intervention in the Libyan revolts against Moammar Qaddafi. Hillary Clinton, likely Democratic presidential candidate and reasonably likely next president of these United States, had a lot to do with all that mess, being secretary of state at the time.
In a detailed and damning look back on our little Libyan adventure and its aftermath in Foreign Policy, Micah Zenko looks at what Secretary Clinton thought about what had happened and her role in it. He notes that she very much sloughs over the time period when the clear purpose, from the U.S. perspective, went from “protect[ing] civilians in Libya” to overthrowing the regime.
She has little to say about a U.S.-led NATO coalition’s role in helping the rebels along and adding both to casualties at the time and enduring trouble and chaos five years later.
Zenko sees, with merit, that the the Libya story and would-be president Hillary Clinton’s role in it is a valuable and informative “case study for the ways that supposedly limited interventions tend to mushroom into campaigns for regime change.”
Obama started on March 28, 2011, assuring us it was all about “protect[ing] the Libyan people from immediate danger and to establish a no-fly zone.… Broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.” Various other administration officials echoed that in the coming weeks.
Then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, though, “told the New York Times last month that ‘I can’t recall any specific decision that said, ‘Well, let’s just take him out,’ although at the time “‘the fiction was maintained” that the goal was limited to disabling Colonel Qaddafi’s command and control.”
Zenko details that the actual pattern of NATO’s strikes makes it hard to believe they weren’t trying to kill Qaddafi pretty much form the beginning though it was denied straight-up by administration figures.
In fact, the NATO forces were not only not sticking to enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions but actively facilitating their violation when it came to supplying arms to the rebels, which was supposed to be a no-no.
In this sense, then, it was an American intervention that at least achieved its real goal, if not one worth the expenditure of U.S. treasure and reputation, and one we should have lived to regret. As Zenko wrote:
on Oct. 20, 2011, it was a U.S. Predator drone and French fighter aircraft that attacked a convoy of regime loyalists trying to flee Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte. The dictator was injured in the attack, captured alive, and then extrajudicially murdered by rebel forces.
This sort of lying to the American people about what our military is trying to do is a long tradition and ongoing to this day in terms of our essentially combat operations against ISIS. This sort of thing, this:
gradual accretion of troops, capabilities, arms transfers, and expanded military missions seemingly just “happens,” because officials frame each policy step as normal and necessary. The reality is that, collectively, they represent a fundamentally larger and different intervention.
Clinton tried to show some warrior cojones with her famous “We came, we saw, he died” zinger. Clinton described that before an October 2015 hearing as “an expression of relief that the military mission undertaken by NATO and our other partners had achieved its end.”
But as Zenko’s article makes clear, that wasn’t the end that we the people were told was being pursued. And Clinton’s eager central role in such a game of tricking both U.S. and world opinion into not caring much about military actions by misleading us about their goals and intentions is something I hope voters don’t forget.
I wrote on some larger issues involving the penumbra of misleading secrecy surrounding American foreign policy in “Secret Foreign Policy is Bad for Democracy.” That’s still quite true, even when the secrets are kept by Democratic presidential aspirants.
Reason TV on the Obama administration’s tendency to wage wars that aren’t “really wars.”
They might seem familiar to people who remember the long, long ago (it seems) “Ron Paul revolution” of 2008 and 2012, from vaguely rockin’ rocker Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend:
This is the first time I’ve really been in the mix with a campaign,” Vampire Weekend singer Ezra Koenig told me backstage. Koenig didn’t use the word “authenticity,” but he pointed, again and again, to the decades-long consistency of Sanders’ message.
“Go back and watch his old speeches on YouTube,” he said. “It’s amazing. The one in ’91 he gave during the Gulf War gave me chills. In retrospect, it’s like he’s unveiling a prophecy. Or when [during a congressional hearing] he yelled at Alan Greenspan – Ayn Rand’s ex-boyfriend! It’s 2003, the economy is quote-unquote ‘good,’ and Greenspan comes to Congress to brag, thinking it’s going to be a softball. And Bernie just rips into him, five years before the collapse.”
Not exactly Rand’s “ex-boyfriend” there Mr. Koenig but I think I guess I get what you think you mean.
For more on the eerie links between the outsider libertarian presidential candidate and the outsider socialist presidential candidate, see from February “The Ron Paul/Bernie Sanders Connection.”
A Georgia elementary school was forced to suspend aspects of its in-class yoga routine after parents complained that administrators were indoctrinating their kids into a different religion—proving once again that Christian conservative are just as easily offended as the politically-correct left.
Yoga, the Buddhist practice of mindful stretching, is under attack everywhere from people on the left who claim it amounts to cultural appropriation. The student-government at a Canadian university successfully forced an instructor to cancel a free yoga class for disabled students, and a Native American activist convinced a county government to shut down a Florida woman’s private yoga practice (she didn’t have the right permit).
Parents were concerned about yoga’s spiritual origins.
“No prayer in schools. Some don’t even say the pledge of allegiance,” Cobb County mother Susan Jaramillo told NBC affiliate WXIA. “Yet they’re pushing ideology on our students. Some of those things are religious practices that we don’t want our children doing in our schools.”
Christopher Smith, whose sons attend Bullard, shared a similar sentiment onFacebook.
“Now we can’t pray in our schools or practice Christianity but they are allowing this Far East mystical religion with crystals and chants to be practiced under the guise of stress release meditation,” he wrote. “This is very scary.”
Is letting kids learn some de-stressing techniques really “very scary”? In any case, the school’s principal assured worried parents that no one at the school will be teaching them to say “Namaste,” so the anti-Christian brainwashing is at an end. Maybe these over-worried parents should try yoga for themselves—to calm them down.
A San Diego Naval hospital went on lockdown over reports of a person with a gun. A similar report (that turned out to be untrue) shut down the same hospital in January.
Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has been convicted by the United Nations of the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s.
Chicago’s teachers’ union has voted to have a one-day strike on April 1. Not exactly the best way to convince folks you aren’t a joke.
President Barack Obama is sticking to his travel itinerary, even dancing the tango in Argentina, despite criticism that he hasn’t dropped everything after the Brussels attack.
A North Carolina man has been arrested for not returning a copy of Freddy Got Fingered he rented in 2002. That is utterly outrageous. He should have been arrested for renting the movie in the first place.
The sudden appearance of dozens of iterations of the same message—”Trump 2016″—all over the sidewalks and buildings of Emory University has caused quite a stir. Many on campus are decrying the chalk scribblings as acts of vandalism. Libertarian writer Jeffrey Tucker, who was at Emory earlier this week, also described the messages as vandalism.
Is that a fair description of what happened? The answer seems to be yes. Emory is a private university: as such, it can set rules on what kinds of political expression are allowed on campus. Emory does have a policy on chalking: it permits it in certain places, on sidewalks, but forbids it on the walls of buildings.
Not all of the “Trump 2016” messages appeared on sidewalks. It seems clear, then, that the perpetrator violated university policies. I would note that chalking buildings is not as serious as graffiti-ing them. Chalk washes off very easily: a sudden rainstorm would cleanse the campus of most of its pro-Trump displays. So while it’s undeniably true that the perpetrator broke some rules—rules that Emory has every right to insist upon—it’s not clear that he or she caused actual, physical property damage.
In any case, it’s reasonable for the administration to attempt to figure who did this, and hold that person accountable—though I personally would not recommend a harsh punishment, since chalk is ephemeral.
But Emory students’ chief concern is not that the chalk messages violate university policy. They don’t see the chalk as mere vandalism: they consider it an act of violence.
“It was deliberate intimidation,” one student, freshman Jonathan Peraza, told The Daily Beast‘s Lizzie Crocker. “Some of us were expecting shootings. We feared walking alone.”
“I think it was an act of violence,” said another student, Lolade Oshin. “It was an active threat, intentionally meant to create opposition on campus and to segregate groups on campus that are already segregated.”
These are serious, alarmist reactions to obvious political speech. (Indeed, what could be more straightforward than “name of Republican frontrunner” + “indication of support in the upcoming national election?) We don’t know why someone wrote the message “Trump 2016” all over campus, and it’s of course possible that his aim was to frighten people. But if that was his goal, he should have failed, because the message isn’t frightening.
Students seem to suggest that the unique horribleness of Donald Trump’s policy positions renders any and all support for him racist by default. But it certainly isn’t actual racial aggression to declare one’s support so blandly. That students misunderstand this—that they actually think they are in physical danger from chalk—is concerning.
Regular readers know that I frequently make reference to over-sensitiveandeasily-offendedstudents whose fragilities have ushered in a new wave of censorship and political correctness on college campuses. What is happening at Emory certainly seems like an example of that.
But it’s also an example of rampant safety paranoia plaguing American schools—including colleges. There is no evidence—none whatsoever—that the chalk messages were harbingers of violence. There is no reason to believe shootings would ensue. College campuses, contrary to popular imagination, are (like most schools) very sheltered, safe places. College students are not subject to more assaults, murders, or rapes than the rest of the population. Attending college is not a risky proposition. For as much as students talk about creating “safe spaces,” campuses are already just about the safest spaces on earth.
This notion that privileged young people are uniquely endangered is false, and must be dispelled. Students who fear for their lives when they encounter an idea that offends them are living in fear for absolutely no reason. It isn’t healthy, and it makes it easier for authority figures to trample their rights in exchange for increased protection.
It’s the left’s worst nightmare. Several large, powerful corporations are using their economic dominance to manipulate the outcome of the legislative process in Georgia. It’s happening right now. It’s what they’ve been warning us all about since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision. This is what happens when you allow unfettered corporate speech and involvement in politics! It’s a corruption of the democratic republic. Wake up, people!
Oh, wait. They’re using their economic influence to try to kill a “religious freedom” bill that would protect faith-based organizations from having to participate or provide their services in such a fashion that runs counter to their religious beliefs. This is obviously about same-sex marriage. Churches under the bill could not be forced to perform same-sex weddings, nor could they be forced to let same-sex couples use their facilities for same-sex ceremonies.
Georgia’s legislative bodies have passed the bill and the state’s governor is now deciding whether to sign it. Now the big news is that several entertainment companies that take advantage of Georgia’s extremely friendly tax credits are threatening to pull out if the law passes. Disney has threatened to pull movie productions from the state, and the NFL has said passing the law could threaten a bid for the Super Bowl.
To be clear, this law has only a very modest effect outside faith-based organizations, mimicking the text of federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That means that an individual can challenge an application of a law on the basis of it interfering with the exercise of that person’s faith. But if the state can prove that that law furthers a compelling government interest, the person can still be forced to comply with the law. Despite what is showing up in some stories, it is far from a “freedom to discriminate” law.
This bill is a far cry from what passed yesterday in North Carolina, where legislators and the governor decided to overrule Charlotte’s LGBT discrimination protection laws entirely and also require individuals to use the restrooms of their birth gender in schools and government facilities.
Anyway, we won’t find much concern from opponents of this legislation over the impact of corporate intervention in the activities of the government. Indeed, the Human Rights Campaign has called on Hollywood to boycott Georgia if the government passes the law. This is the same Human Rights Campaign that has already endorsed Hillary Clinton, who has railed over the Citizens United decision and has made it part of her platform to select Supreme Court justices who will overturn it.
It’s within the rights of these major corporations to decide whether to do business with a state based on its political climate or for any other reason. And it’s well within their rights to lobby and publicly say so. But this is a right that is in part guaranteed by the Citizens United decision that many of the left attack at every opportunity. This is clear and obvious corporate speech that is intended to influence political outcomes via economic pressure.
Considering what just happened in North Carolina, opponents of this bill should be thinking about whether they would have nearly as much leverage to fight this legislation without Hollywood’s help. The fact that activists and corporations are on the same side in this fight does not mean that this speech is “different” somehow from corporate lobbying to pass tax breaks or subsidies (both of which Hollywood and the NFL get in spades) or to get other special deals from legislators. It’s still speech. It’s still lobbying. It is still corporations trying to control what the government does. That a particular group of activists sees itself as the beneficiaries does not change the dynamic.
A new national poll from Monmouth University explores how things would shake out in a three-way contest between Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and libertarian hopeful Gary Johnson. While support for Clinton and Trump far outpaces love for the Libertarian Party (LP) candidate, Johnson did wind up polling in the double-digits, with support pulled from both the Trump and Clinton camps.
In a hypothetical two-way race between Clinton and Trump race, 48 percent of poll respondents chose Clinton and 38 percent chose Trump. But enter Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico (as a Republican) and the current frontrunner among LP presidential candidates. With Johnson in the mix, Clinton earned just 42 percent of the hypothetical vote and Trump just 34 percent.
Johnson, meanwhile, was the top choice for 11 percent of those polled. His highest vote share came from Republican-leaning states.
Neither Clinton nor Trump were rated terribly favorably, with just 30 percent of respondents reporting favorable feelings for Trump and 60 percent viewing him unfavorably. Clinton was viewed a little better overall, with 40 percent rating her favorably and 51 percent rating her unfavorably. Johnson was viewed slightly more unfavorably (15 percent) than favorably (9 percent), but the biggest proportion of respondents said they didn’t know enough about him to form an opinion.
“A vigorous third party campaign is a very real possibility this year, but it is not yet clear what the impact could be,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, in a statement. “Including Johnson’s name in our polling seems to be more of a placeholder for voters who are not particularly thrilled with either major party choice right now.”
The poll of 1,008 American adults was conducted March 17-20, 2016.