Tag: in-the-news

4/22/1992: Planned Parenthood v. Casey argued.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3tJiAyW
via IFTTT

It’s 2021 and more U.S. women are using—or at least admitting to using—marijuana while pregnant. In 2016, around 7 percent of pregnant women in a national survey said they used marijuana in the past month, up from 3.4 percent in 2002 and 3.9 percent in aggregated data from 2007-12. Should public health authorities be worried?

Probably not. Shaky science makes measuring the effect of a mom’s marijuana use on fetal development difficult, but the best available evidence suggests fears about fetal risk, while not unwarranted, are often overblown.

Studies on marijuana use during pregnancy are inconsistent and inconclusive. But cannabis is not known to be teratogenic—that is, to cause birth defects—in humans. The bulk of scientific evidence suggests that risks posed to developing fetuses are relatively minor and babies exposed to marijuana in utero still fall within normal ranges of outcomes.

A 2020 review looked at longitudinal studies on “the impact of prenatal cannabis exposure on multiple domains of cognitive functioning in individuals aged 0 to 22 years” and found that “evidence does not suggest that prenatal cannabis exposure alone is associated with clinically significant cognitive functioning impairments.” Researchers did note some differences—”those exposed performed differently on a minority of cognitive outcomes (worse on < 3.5 percent and better in < 1 percent)” — although “cognitive performance scores of cannabis-exposed groups overwhelmingly fell within the normal range.”

A 2016 review of studies on potential ties between in utero marijuana exposure and adverse birth outcomes—things like low birth weight and preterm delivery to miscarriage and stillbirth—found “maternal marijuana use during pregnancy is not an independent risk factor for adverse neonatal outcomes after adjusting for confounding factors.” Instead, any increases in adverse outcomes appeared “attributable to concomitant tobacco use and other confounding factors.”

Sussing out the effects of marijuana from the effects of other risky behavior presents a problem. “Illegal behaviors tend to cluster so women who use marijuana are more likely to use other drugs,” Emily Oster, author of Expecting Better and Brown University economist, explained in her Substack Parent Data. “Reporting on use is hugely biased and we are likely to identify only a (very non-random) subset of women who use.”

As marijuana becomes increasingly accepted, studies on its effects are likely to improve. “The best new evidence on this comes from a 2019 study out of Canada,” Oster writes. Matching women who used cannabis with demographically similar women who didn’t, researchers did “find evidence of worse birth outcomes among the cannabis users,” including “an increased risk of prematurity and NICU transfer. The increases are moderate but statistically significant: preterm birth occurred in 10% of cannabis users and 7% of non-users.” An August 2020 study from the same authors found marijuana use correlated with slightly higher incidences of intellectual disability and learning disorders, as well as higher chances of having autism spectrum disorder. “The percent increase is large—about 50%—and significant,” Oster points out, though the researchers do note that the overall incidence rate is still small.

Though the researchers tried to demographically match participants between groups, it can still be hard to totally compensate for the ways marijuana users may differ from non-users. For instance, marijuana users may be more likely to have partners who use, too, and dads who smoke pot prior to conception may have sperm changes that correlate with higher autism risk.

Ultimately, correlational studies like these raise important possibilities but have major limitations. Some are done not during pregnancy but by later asking women to recall behaviors during their pregnancy, which ups the likelihood of unreliable information. They also often fail to differentiate between consumption methods, timing, and dosage, so we can’t know if any and all marijuana use triggers a specific outcome or if it’s only produced by certain methods of consumption, THC content, frequency, or at certain stages of pregnancy.

The biggest problem is that it’s hard to isolate specific factors like marijuana consumption. The population of women who not only use marijuana during pregnancy but are also willing to admit to researchers that they do may differ from those who don’t.

An Australian study published in 2020 found differences in birth size and length, head size, and gestational age at birth in the offspring of women who had still used marijuana at or after 15 weeks. But “the mean age and socio‐economic status of women who continued to use cannabis were lower, and their mean anxiety and depressive symptom scores higher than for other participants; the proportions who consumed alcohol, used other illicit drugs, or were smoking at 15 weeks of pregnancy were also higher.” (Notably, “neonatal outcomes for babies of women who quit before or during early pregnancy were not significantly different from those for infants of women who had never used cannabis.”)

A review of evidence published in February 2020 “points to the possibility of lower birth weight, diminished IQ and more behavior problems among children whose mothers used cannabis during pregnancy, but notes it is very difficult to separate the marijuana use from other demographics or other variables,” writes Oster.

Another 2020 study purported to show children exposed to marijuana in the womb had a range of “attention, thought, and social problems” later in life by looking at data on 9- to 11-year-olds in a large longitudinal study. But since women who admit to using marijuana during pregnancy are different in myriad ways from those who don’t, there could be a range of differences in the heritable traits or early childhood experiences of their offspring, which could be responsible for subsequent cognitive differences.

When public health officials in the U.S. say that “no amount of marijuana use during pregnancy…is known to be safe,” this should be taken with a heaping grain of salt. Phrases like “known to be safe” or “proven to be safe” are frequently applied to the consumption of all kinds of substances—alcohol, artificial sweeteners, certain foods, prescription and over-the-counter drugs, even nutritional supplements—during pregnancy. This is because studies directly testing the safety of these substances for pregnant women can’t ethically be done. Hence, a huge range of legal and illegal substances aren’t “known to be safe” for developing fetuses, but that doesn’t mean they’re known to be harmful.

We know some substances to be unsafe during pregnancy—drinking lots of alcohol, smoking tobacco, consuming too little folic acid. Marijuana isn’t one of them.

With the limited evidence available, it may make sense for most pregnant women to avoid marijuana to minimize possible risks to their offspring. But the best choice for one woman and her baby won’t be the best choice universally. For women who have extreme morning sickness that makes getting adequate nutrients through food and vitamins difficult, and for whom marijuana mitigates nausea, using cannabis might make sense. Likewise, women with certain mental health conditions helped by marijuana may deem it safer than their usual prescription drugs.

Ultimately, pregnant women should make these decisions for themselves, in consultation with their doctors. Unfortunately, the state doesn’t always see it this way.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3aywNrc
via IFTTT

Under ordinary circumstances, no self-respecting Floridian would consent to someone intentionally unleashing mosquitoes on their neighborhood. But a genetically engineered version of Aedes aegypti created by the bioscience firm Oxitec is changing that. The company’s Friendly male mosquitoes pass a genetic self-destruct code to all of their blood-drinking and dengue-transmitting female offspring, which over time suppresses the local Aedes aegypti population. The Florida Keys Mosquito Control District is undertaking a collaborative pilot project using Oxitec’s Friendly mosquitoes in small areas of the Florida Keys in spring 2021.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3eotaVD
via IFTTT

Hope Cozart says her 11-year-old son Maddox was given an in-school suspension and confined to an isolated cubicle for more than a week at Raymond Mays Middle School in Troy, Texas, because he wore his hair braided atop his head. Cozart says school officials told her the hairstyle violated a rule in the student handbook that says boys’ hair “may not be worn in a ponytail, top knot, bun, or similar styles.” Troy Independent School District Superintendent Neil Jeter told a local TV station he could not comment on disciplinary actions taken against any student.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3xfXE56
via IFTTT

The 9/11 attacks gave us the heightened security theater now on display in all U.S. airports. Day after day for the last two decades, Transportation Security Administration agents have patted down travelers from teens to the elderly, looking for weapons that nobody expects to find. While airplane cockpit doors are now locked to prevent hijackings, the pat-downs remain.

And now we have pandemic hygiene theater to give uninformed people a false sense of control and sustain their fear of the virus.

Think of the number of hours that schools, restaurants, and other businesses spend wiping down surfaces to prevent COVID-19 transmission even though we’ve known since last July that this wiping isn’t necessary. Yet Americans continue to spend untold hours and dollars wiping surfaces to provide the appearance of virus protection to their patrons.

In Arlington, Virginia, my kids’ schools have implemented overly stringent and frankly illogical measures that create barriers to accessing an effective education. For starters, the schools have only welcomed back a subset of their student population for two days a week for in-person education. They’ve also reduced the number of actual teaching days from five to four, during which the kids get only half of the education time they used to get. But they do spend time and energy wiping down surfaces and making students wipe their desks. They’re also instructed daily to “limit touching of surfaces to only when is necessary.”

That isn’t the only form of hygiene theater some schools perform.

Every morning I must fill out a form for each of my kids, assuring the school that they have no fever, yet the school still has temperature checks at every entry point of the building. The alleged need for temperature checks is one stated reason for why kids cannot be taught on site more than two days a week and why more kids can’t be brought back for in-person instruction.

These theatrics continue even though Anthony Fauci admitted last August that temperature checks “are notoriously inaccurate.” Nobody should be surprised. We’ve known for months that up to 40 percent of Americans with COVID-19 are asymptomatic.

Our schools also claimed that they couldn’t bring the kids back last fall because students must stay six to 10 feet apart. I’m reminded of this every morning when I electronically agree to my kids following the safety standards. That’s 4 feet more than even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended for months. And even the origin of that 6-feet rule is mysterious. It’s twice the length recommended by most countries and the World Health Organization.

Adding insult to injury, the CDC finally changed its guidelines from 6 to 3 feet, yet Arlington schools still require distances of at least six to 10 feet and universal mask use. Never mind that teachers have been prioritized for vaccination, and research shows that schools don’t increase COVID-19 spread in the community.

And as the Manhattan Institute’s Connor Harris notes, the evidence behind some of these mask mandates “turns out to be quite weak.” The “widespread use of masks throughout the United States and Europe has failed to stop massive pandemic waves in the fall and winter,” he observes, adding that “preliminary signs also suggest that mask mandates may be causing considerable harm. Several state governments have recently rescinded their mask mandates, and a look at the science suggests that more should consider following.”

Likewise, for a number of valid social-development and health-related reasons, Harris’s colleague John Tierney concludes that “mask mandates are especially cruel to young children.” As Tierney’s research explains, “The CDC’s policy placates the leaders of teachers’ unions but flouts the guidance issued jointly by UNICEF and the World Health Organization.”

These theatrics play out in a world where many of us reuse our face masks such as the one we keep in our car, reuse surgical masks many times, or wear masks below our noses. There are many actors starring in this daily health drama. The same applies to the number of Americans who continue to wear masks outdoors despite evidence that transmission rarely takes place outside. And the same will be said of those who, although vaccinated, will continue to wear masks long after we reach herd immunity.

While some of these examples may seem silly, hygiene theater has huge costs and wastes precious resources. It also keeps Americans unjustifiably scared of the virus while promoting the delusion that with enough such measures, we can finally live in a world free of risks.

COPYRIGHT 2021 CREATORS.COM

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3xfIJI0
via IFTTT

I just got a mass mailing today informing me that this is Alcohol Awareness Month; and in the spirit of alcohol awareness, I thought I’d recommend Fidencio Clasico Mezcal:

I’ve come to like Mezcal a good deal recently, and this is very tasty; flavorful but mellow, and worth the $40-$50 you’re likely to have to pay for it. Thanks to my colleague David Ginsburg for recommending this one (and in turn to his son and my former student Lev Ginsburg, who I’m told was the source of the information).

I appreciate that some people view Alcohol Awareness Month as a means of making people aware of (among other things) the “dangers of alcohol misuse.” That’s a worthy cause, since there are indeed many such dangers.

But I expect that most of our readers are well aware of that feature of alcohol. Learning about tasty alcoholic beverages, on the other hand, is News You Can Use. Please make us aware of other good alcohol in the comments.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3n7WyU6
via IFTTT

Today was my last substantive class of the semester. I hope you’ve enjoyed my lectures. In the fall, we should all be back on campus.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3x9Z7db
via IFTTT

Conservatives feel besieged in the culture war. Large corporations that previously seemed at least somewhat ideologically more sympathetic to Republican views have moved openly left. Amazon, Starbucks, American Express, and countless other big businesses criticized Republican efforts in Georgia to restrict voting rights, and Major League Baseball (MLB) moved the All-Star Game out of the state.

In response, conservatives are considering retaliation: Republicans might strip the MLB of its antitrust exemption and repeal certain tax breaks. The intellectual leaders of the new political right also occasionally discuss loftier schemes: breaking up large companies like Amazon entirely, taking away the broad liability protections enjoyed by Facebook and Twitter, and various legislative remedies.

The problem for the opponents of “woke capital” is that many of these proposals would either fail outright or cause worse problems than the ones they intend to solve. For instance, vesting the federal government with enhanced power to split apart massive tech companies on antitrust and anti-monopoly grounds—an approach favored by Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.)—would do little to tackle the issue of social media sites censoring conservative users. But it would expand the state, empower traditional media, and in general harm the profits of private businesses, which is probably why it’s a strategy beloved by progressives in the mold of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.).

Indeed, the Senate held a hearing today to confirm Columbia University law professor Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Khan, who was nominated to the post by President Biden, is a Warren progressive who thinks Amazon is anticompetitive in nature and should be split into several different entities. It is the Democratic Party that’s truly coming for woke capital—not because of the wokeness, but because of the capitalism part.

Richard Hanania, an expert on partisanship and ideology, has an excellent Substack post, “Why Is Everything Liberal?” exploring the subject of how woke capital came to be. Hanania’s post is essentially an extended rumination on Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: Any organization that is not explicitly rightwing will eventually become explicitly leftwing. Hanania points out that the U.S. is roughly split between conservatives and liberals as evidenced by our national election outcomes, but liberals dominate in terms of who donates to campaigns, shows up for rallies, and becomes extremely active in politics. He presents some evidence that the least invested and most invested people tend to be liberals; conservatives are moderately invested, and vote for Republicans, but otherwise prioritize things like making money and having families.

“Those who identify on the right are happier, less mentally ill, and more likely to start families,” writes Hanania. “But in the end, the world they live in will ultimately reflect the preferences and values of their enemies.”

That’s because their enemies are highly interested in capturing influential positions in politics, government, the media, universities, and even within corporations. In order to force Coca-Cola to take a progressive stance against Republican positions on voting, climate change, and antiracism, a person who cares about those things doesn’t actually have to take over the entire company: Consumer or low-level staffer, they simply have to make a lot of noise. A small number of employees at media companies have managed to leverage human-resources-adjacent concerns about safe workplace environments against their ideological foes, replicating a process that is already well underway on university campuses.

Thus far, the conservative opposition to this phenomenon has largely taken the forms of complaining and then threatening vast government action. Hanania explains why this is impractical: “Do you want to give government more power over corporations?” he asks. “None of the regulators will be on your side.” The people who staff the regulatory bureaucracies are Lina Khan types: They’re there to battle capitalism, not woke-ism.

There clearly is something that can be done about woke overreach, to the extent that part of the problem is caused by bad government incentives. Republicans would probably benefit from a strategy of freeing businesses from the regulatory burden of appeasing their most easily offended employees. And lawmakers should stop forcing taxpayers to subsidize baseball stadiums—not because the government needs to punish the MLB, but because it is not the role of the government to fund private stadiums.

The conservative war on woke capital will fail because the weapons of the regulatory state are progressive by their very nature. Conservatives should consider strategies that actively shrink the state, if they ever take power again.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3sEukBF
via IFTTT

When you subsidize something, the old adage goes, you’ll get more of it.

But some ideas make so little economic sense that even the largest corporate subsidy ever awarded by a state government isn’t enough.

It’s been obvious for quite some time that Wisconsin’s highly touted deal with Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn was going to fall well short of the lofty promises made by the project’s supporters. Then-President Donald Trump, for example, predicted in 2018 that the planned factory on the outskirts of Milwaukee would be nothing less than “the eighth wonder of the world.”

Exactly how short it will fall is now official. In filings with the state, Foxconn says it now plans to employ 1,454 people and invest about $672 million into its still-under-construction factory in Mount Pleasent, Wisconsin. That’s a long way from the $10 billion that the company initially promised to spend building a plant that would have employed 13,000 workers. In response to the amended contract, the state will recover $2.77 billion of the subsidies originally promised to Foxconn—though the company will still receive $80 million from Wisconsin taxpayers, according to a statement from Gov. Tony Evers.

But recovering those subsidies won’t bring back the residential neighborhood that was flattened to make space for the factory. Developers bulldozed 75 homes, some of which were seized through eminent domain, because why should mere houses full of people stand in the way of the eighth wonder of the world?

The town of Mount Pleasent invested more than $1 billion in the project—effectively mortgaging its entire future on the promise of thousands of new jobs and the tax-paying residents who would come to fill them. Those jobs won’t be coming, but the town did have its credit rating downgraded.

The Foxconn folly was the brainchild of former Gov. Scott Walker, a one-time darling of the Republican Party who has now vanished from the political scene. From the outset, the deal didn’t make sense. Foxconn promised to make Wisconsin a hub for the manufacturing of HD television screens and other high-tech products, but the company never explained how it planned to make the math work. Besides the relatively higher cost of American labor, there were serious supply chain and logistical issues to be overcome for a factory that was, as TechCrunch put it in 2019, “essentially [in] the middle of nowhere, without the sort of dense ecosystem of suppliers and sub-suppliers required for making a major factory hum.”

Even if the dubious economics somehow worked out, the state wasn’t going to come out ahead.

The state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau, a number-crunching agency similar to the federal Congressional Budget Office, calculated that it would take the state until 2043 to recoup the $3 billion handout, which was the largest such subsidy in Wisconsin history. Even if all 13,000 promised jobs went to Wisconsinites, the tab would be more than $230,000 per job created, the bureau found.

A separate analysis conducted by the Mercatus Center, a free market think tank based at George Mason University, found that the higher taxes needed to cover the cost of Foxconn’s tax breaks would “decrease Wisconsin’s long-run GDP by about $20 billion over the 15-year life of the handout.”

It would have been a bad deal no matter what, but it didn’t take long for Foxconn’s promises to spiral downward. The Verge has a useful rundown of the various revisions applied to the original plan in recent years:

The company spent years pivoting wildly from idea to idea. The enormous “Gen 10.5” LCD factory specified in the contract became a far smaller Gen 6, then was canceled, then came back. The company announced it was building something called “the AI+8K+5G ecosystem,” to be developed in a network of “innovation centers,” buildings that the company purchased only to leave empty. It looked into building fish farms, exporting ice cream, storing boats. It announced plans to build coffee kiosks and ventilators that never moved forward. Most recently, it said it would build electric cars — though maybe, the company acknowledged, that will happen in Mexico.

Now, the official story is that Foxconn will use the factory for “economic investment activities related to locating and operating a technology and manufacturing ecosystem,” according to the company’s new contract with the state. In short, it doesn’t seem like anyone knows exactly what, if anything, will be manufactured in Mount Pleasent.

The entire saga provides an obvious lesson about the wasteful mistakes that state governments make when they throw tax dollars at businesses that promise to create jobs. The best way to create jobs in any state, of course, is to provide a stable economy with comparatively low taxes and a light regulatory touch for all—not to provide special treatment for some and stick others with the bill.

But there’s also a lesson here for politicians who would pursue economic nationalism through greater industrial policy at the federal level. Trump saw the Foxconn deal not only as a way to create jobs, but as proof that reorienting supply chains was a matter of political will rather than economics. The factory, he said in 2018, was evidence that his policies were “reclaiming our country’s proud manufacturing legacy.”

If the largest subsidies ever offered to a foreign company were insufficient to make the Foxconn deal work, maybe that says something about the ability of our political leaders to steer the economy. But you can be sure they will keep trying.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3tDZqe4
via IFTTT

A jury this week convicted former Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) Officer Derek Chauvin on all counts for the murder of George Floyd, but one case can’t fix a series of broken systems. While Minneapolis has compensated the Floyd family and Chauvin has been convicted, few cases of police misconduct conclude in favor of their victims.

To help more people abused by police get justice, the U.S. must reform qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that makes it perniciously difficult to hold police officers accountable in civil court when they violate your constitutional rights.

It’s remarkably rare for a police officer to face criminal charges for the misuse of force. We know that Chauvin had 22 complaints filed against him by the time he was arrested for Floyd’s death, and that he was allowed to remain with the MPD through all of them.

When it comes to fatal encounters, we have a slightly better idea of the disparity: Only about 139 officers since 2005 have been charged with murder or manslaughter in relation to an on-duty shooting, though about 1,000 fatal shootings occur each year. Of the officers charged, a small minority are convicted.

Counting fatal encounters omits many more victims of police misconduct who live to tell about it. The data we do have paints an incomplete but unsettling picture, as police departments often refuse to make public reports against officers. A report from ProPublica is instructive: “In 2018, the [Civilian Complaint Review Board] looked into about 3,000 allegations of misuse of force [in the New York Police Department],” wrote Eric Urmansky last summer. “It was able to substantiate 73 of those allegations. The biggest punishment? Nine officers who lost vacation days.”

In other words, people whose rights are violated by police can’t always count on the criminal courts or even police departments to reprimand their employees; civil suits are often the only avenue to justice. Yet thanks to qualified immunity, those individuals often find that road blocked off, too.

The legal doctrine, manufactured by the Supreme Court, protects government officials from federal civil rights lawsuits if the official’s specific behavior was not “clearly established” as a rights violation in a precedent handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court or by another court within the same federal circuit. In other words, for a plaintiff to sue a police officer in federal court, a prior plaintiff must’ve already sued over the exact same violation and won. Any plaintiff who sues after being harmed in a remotely unique way risks being told that the officer who harmed them could not have been expected to know they were violating the Constitution.

Federal judges, meanwhile, are able to agree that someone’s rights were indeed violated, while in the same breath making it legally impossible for them to sue the violator. Convincing a judge to deny qualified immunity simply allows the plaintiff to press forward with their lawsuit.

Consider a decision delivered by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which granted qualified immunity to two cops in Fresno, California, after the men allegedly stole $225,000 while executing a search warrant. In theory, the officers should know stealing is wrong, the court noted, but without a court precedent on the books expressly saying so, they couldn’t be expected to know. The men were never charged in criminal court, and the victim was legally barred from suing.

Consider a more recent case. Two plainclothes officers in Cleveland, Ohio, assaulted and arrested a man who happened to be standing outside his own house. They then turned around and charged him with assault, booking him in jail for several days, although the charges were eventually dropped. The cops were never charged with any criminal wrongdoing—for the bogus charges or the beating—and the victim, Shase Howse, had no way of suing. The Supreme Court last month declined to hear his case.

There are many such stories—those who survive malicious or negligent encounters with state actors with almost no hope of criminal accountability and a remote hope for justice in the civil sphere. There was the 10-year-old who needed orthopedic surgery after Coffee County, Georgia, Deputy Sheriff Matthew Vickers shot him while aiming at the boy’s non-threatening dog, leaving the family to bear those medical costs themselves. (The Supreme Court also refused to hear that case.) There was the man who sustained a lasting eye injury after an officer allegedly kneed him 20 to 30 times after he’d been subdued. There was the 15-year-old boy shot on his way to school, the surrendered suspect who cops sicced their police canine on, the man whose car was ruined during a bogus drug search.

Chauvin might seem like an example unbefitting of this discussion—the City of Minneapolis settled with Floyd’s family for a reported $27 million. Had the case not been filmed and highly publicized, as in the above examples, that might not have happened.

“Incredibly, had the city not chosen to settle the lawsuit, Derek Chauvin would have had a very plausible chance of getting the suit thrown out on qualified immunity grounds—even after being convicted of murder,” says Clark Neily, vice president for criminal justice reform at the Cato Institute. “There is no preexisting case in the Eighth Circuit under which it was ‘clearly established’ that pinning a suspect under one’s knee for nearly ten minutes until they lose consciousness and their heart stops beating violates the Fourth Amendment.”

The video footage here was the game-changer—something that victims aren’t always afforded. It’s also something that government officials may take issue with. In 2014, officers in Denver, Colorado, attempted to force a bystander to delete a film he took of them beating a suspect during an arrest. Though a federal court ruled those cops violated the First Amendment in doing so, it gave them qualified immunity.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3dEQEa1
via IFTTT