Tag: posts

Pretend for a
moment that you or a loved one is diagnosed with Ebola and the
virus proceeds to a point where death is not simply a possibility
but likely. Would you be happy simply to mark time until the
inevitable takes hold? Or would you want as many options as
possible, even knowing full well most will fail?

If we start having more conversations about the ways in which
medical regulations need to change—and need to respect individual
patient desires—we might be able to add an upside to Ebola’s
arrival in the United States.

My latest Daily Beast column argues that the arrival of
Ebola in America should encourage “a conversation about the
regulations surrounding the development of new drugs and the right
of terminal patients to experiment with their own
bodies.”

Ebola in the United States may well accelerate adoption of
so-called right-to-try laws. These radical laws allow terminally
ill patients access to drugs, devices, and treatments that haven’t
yet been fully approved by the Federal Drug Administration and
other medical authorities. The patients and their estates agree not
to bring legal action against caregivers, pharmaceutical companies,
and insurers.

You don’t have to be a doctrinaire libertarian—though it
helps—to see the value in letting people with nothing left to lose
experiment on themselves. They may get a new lease on life. The
rest of us get meaningful information that may speed up the
development of the next great medical intervention.

Read the whole thing.

The
U.S. Supreme Court turns down the vast majority of petitions it
receives without offering any sort of explanation. But in a rare
move today, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Ruth
Bader Ginsburg spoke out against the Court’s refusal to hear a
crack-cocaine sentencing case.

Jones v. United States centers on the criminal
sentences handed down by a judge to three men for conspiring to
distribute drugs. However, those men had been acquitted of
the conspiracy charge by the jury, which voted only to convict them
of distributing a small amount of drugs. The question before the
Supreme Court was whether the harsher, judge-imposed sentence
violated the Constitution.

In his dissent
today from the Court’s denial of the case, Justice Scalia,
joined by Justices Thomas and Ginsburg, explains both the stakes
and why the Court’s refusal to hear the appeal got it wrong:

The Sixth Amendment, together with the Fifth Amendment’s Due
Process Clause, “requires that each element of a crime” be either
admitted by the defendant, or “proved to the jury beyond a
reasonable doubt.” Any fact that increases the penalty to which a
defendant is exposed constitutes an element of a crime, and “must
be found by a jury, not a judge.” We have held that a substantively
unreasonable penalty is illegal and must be set aside. It
unavoidably follows that any fact necessary to prevent a sentence
from being substantively unreasonable—thereby exposing the
defendant to the longer sentence—is an element that must be either
admitted by the defendant or found by the jury. It may not
be found by a judge. [Internal citations omitted.]

The
paperback edition of The United States of Paranoia, my
history of American conspiracy folklore, comes out today. It
includes a new afterword on the post-Snowden era, so the book is
now both longer and cheaper, and it’s easier to carry
around too.

The reviewers have liked the book—and when I say “the
reviewers,” I mean pretty much all of them, at least as far as
newspapers and magazines and webzines and journals go. (You can
find some negative takes on
Amazon and
Goodreads, and I love this sour
tweet to death.) It’s enough to make a man suspect an unseen
hand is acting behind the scenes, pulling the critical community’s
strings. Some samples:

“a terrific, measured, objective study of one of
American culture’s most loaded topics” —Publishers
Weekly

“so many tasty morsels of historical marginalia that it nearly
bursts with weirdness” —The
Globe and Mail

“immensely entertaining” —The
Boston Globe

“lively and often witty…few readers are likely to get to the end
of the book without having cherished notions challenged” —Salon

“a thoroughly researched and completely readable look at infamous
and forgotten conspiracy theories and presumed cabals throughout
American history” —New
York Daily News

“It’s all too rare to come upon a writer willing to attack the
sacred cows of the right and left with equal amounts of
intelligence and flair. Walker is, thankfully, that kind of writer
and a tireless and thorough researcher to boot.” —Los
Angeles Times

“A lively, extremely interesting, and occasionally more than
slightly scary book.” —Booklist

Amazon named it one of the top 20
nonfiction books of 2013, and it made the Chicago
Tribune‘s year-end
best-books list too. A conspiracy theorist reviews it
here, and a conspiracy debunker reviews it
here. The book is also, I am informed, going to appear in the
background during an episode of CSI. Disappointingly, the
show assured me that “the person whose home it would be in is NOT
evil.”

Cops from the New York Police Department (NYPD) stormed in
during stand-up comedian Adam Newman’s act to arrest a homeless man
allegedly masturbating in the theater.

The audience quieted down for the police but like a pro the
stand-up comedian tried to talk through the incident and
incorporate it into his routine. The cops didn’t appear to
appreciate it, especially when he asked them if they really
couldn’t wait until after the set to make that arrest, responding
that he should shut the fuck up. Watch below, where the cops come
in at about 40 seconds in:

Weston made a comment about the profanity but eventually
apologized to the cops. After they left, he noted that usually he’d
go crazy on a heckler who told him to shut the fuck up but that
it’s different with cops, and he couldn’t tell them to shut the
fuck up, could he?

These cops must not have heard about the civilian complaint
review board chairman’s desire to see police
use less profanity on the job.

h/t sarcasmic

Back in his
day, Tonight Show host Johnny Carson bestrode the small
screen likea
late-night colossus, pulling in audiences that were massive and
persistent for 30-plus years at NBC.

But the future (or even the present) belongs not to broadcast
networks or even cable—it belongs to the Internet and a host of
personalities and creators that you’ve probably never heard of
unless you have teenagers or gamers in the house.

Founded in 2005,YouTube reaches
a billion unique visitors a month all over the planet. “100 hours
of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute,” claims the
service’s stats page, and “over 6 billion hours of video are
watched each month on YouTube—that’s almost an hour for every
person on Earth.”

In 1981, the music-video network MTV famously launched by airing
a short video for the two-year-old
Buggles song “Video Killed the Radio Star.” These days,
online video is slowly killing old-style TV stars and replacing
them with people who gained their fame in the new medium of online
video. Here are some of the biggest and most interesting phenoms of
that burgeoning world.

View this article.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument
today in the case of North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners
v. Federal Trade Commission. At issue is whether that state
board engaged in illegal anticompetitive practices when it used its
powers to drive non-dentists from the teeth-whitening market.

The matter arose in 2006 when the state board, purportedly
acting in a public health capacity, started cracking down on
non-dentists who offered teeth-whitening services. But on closer
examination, this action turned out to be the opposite of a
legitimate government regulation. In fact, the board had a clear
conflict of interests. Six of its eight members are licensed
practicing dentists (elected to the board by other practicing
dentists), meaning that the board’s controlling majority had a
direct financial stake in preventing outsiders from entering the
teeth-whitening market and competing for customers. “At the end of
the day,” declared
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which ruled against
the state board in March 2014, “this case is about a state board
run by private actors in the marketplace taking action outside of
the procedures mandated by state law to expel a competitor from the
market.”

Today’s case also represents a welcome departure from the
Court’s recent habit of dodging occupational licensing disputes.
For example, in 2012 the Court turned down a legal challenge to
Florida’s
preposterous law forbidding the unlicensed practice of interior
design. Despite the fact that Florida’s own attorney general’s
office admitted that “neither the defendants nor the state of
Florida have any evidence that the unregulated practice of interior
design presents any bona fide public welfare concerns,” the Supreme
Court refused to get involved. Similarly, in 2004 and again in
2013, the Court refused to settle whether or not “dishing out
special economic benefits to certain in-state industries” (in the

approving words of the 10th Circuit) justified a state’s
occupational licensing scheme.

The North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners should get no such
pass. The Supreme Court should affirm the 4th Circuit and rule
against the abusive state agency.

• The head of the
  Centers for Disease Control says other hospital workers in the
  U.S. could have Ebola and that the agency will “double down” on
  training for healthcare workers. A man in
  Los Angeles, meanwhile, tried to take a bus hostage by claiming
  to the driver he had Ebola.
• Leaked Edward Snowden documents about the
  National Security Agency program SENTRY EAGLE suggest the
  agency could’ve placed undercover agents at communications firm at
  home and/or abroad.
• Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell and his challenger, Democrat
  Alison Lundergan Grimes, appeared in their only scheduled debate
  this season. It’s the 30-year
  Kentucky senator’s most difficult re-election bid.
• The French telecom company
  Iliad is no longer seeking a majority stake in T-Mobile after
  its offer was rejected by the German telecom company Deutsche
  Telekom, which still owns a majority of T-Mobile.
• Police tried again to remove protester camps in
  Hong Kong, after hoping public pressure would force the
  pro-democracy demonstrators to clear the city’s major streets.
• After 40 days, North Korean dictator
  Kim Jong Un was seen in public, giving “field guidance.”

Follow Reason and Reason 24/7 on
Twitter, and like us on Facebook. You
can also get the top stories mailed to you—sign up
here.

Here’s Instapundit Glenn Reynolds making an
important connection between the Secret Service’s recent scandals
and the government’s handling of Ebola here.
From his USA Today column:

There’s a connection between the Secret Service’s Colombian
hooker scandal and Americans’ increased worry about Ebola. Both
have to do with trust.

Until recently, if you’d asked Americans to pick government
institutions characterized by efficiency and professionalism, the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Secret Service
would likely have been at the top of the list. In both cases,
recent evidence now suggests otherwise. And that’s especially
destructive because both agencies depend on trust to do their
jobs.

The head of the Secret Service recently stepped down in the wake
of several semi-near-misses involving the president’s safety. In
the “Colombian hooker scandal,” which involved agents and other
White House-connected folks carousing ahead of Barack Obama’s
arrival in that country, Reynolds points out the investigation was
delayed and torqued out of political considerations. In particular,
a politically connected member of the White House advance team was
not reprimanded while others were canned for the same behavior.

The CDC’s spate of problems with handling other
dangerous pathogens like anthrax, smallpox and deadly influenza
samples doesn’t inspire much confidence either.

As George
Will observed,
on Ebola, Americans want to trust the government, but can’t. And as
MSNBC’s Chuck
Todd observed,
the problem stems not just from the CDC, but from the
administration as a whole: “I think one of your challenges though
is a trust deficit that has been created over the last 18
months.”

In support of this statement, Todd listed a litany
of government defaults: The IRS scandal with its mysteriously
crashed hard drives and erased emails, Veterans Affairs’ lies about
wait times, the Secret Service’s failures, and more. And he’s
right. After so many lies and failures, we’d be fools to trust
them.

Read the whole column.

As J.D. Tuccille noted
here yesterday, generals levels of trust in the government are
at or near recorded lows. The Reason-Rupe Poll found that “70
percent of people think public officials abuse their power to help
their friends and hurt their enemies.”

I’ve written elsewhere about the troubling relationship between
levels of trust in government and calls for more
government regulation. According to a 2010 paper comparing
levels of trust in government around the world, Philippe Aghion,
Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc, and Andrei Shleifer found “one of the
central puzzles in research on political beliefs: Why do people in
countries with bad governments want more government
intervention?”

You got that? It turns out that the less people trust
their governments to do the right thing or be competent, the
more people call for the government to regulate every
aspect of their lives.

Especially from a
libertarian perspective, such findings are deeply troubling. As
government incompetency and failure becomes more self-evident, it
doesn’t mean that people want less from government. They want more
from government, ostensibly to protect themselves. And when you
combine that impulse with the heavily discounted price of
government—between 2009 and 2013, taxes covered just 66 percent of
every dollar spent by the feds—perhaps it’s no surprise the size,
scope, and spending of government keeps growing as trust or
confidence in government declines.

If the work by Aghion, et al., is accurate, one possible way
forward is to actually focus on government functions and programs
that actually work decently or tolerably well (add your suggestions
in the comments).

Use those areas as models for re-establishing trust in
government and from there make the argument that government with
clear, limited missions and functions will inspire the sort of
trust that allows people to start envisioning a world in which they
don’t need ever-bigger government to protect themselves from
slightly-less-bigger government’s actions.

On
Monday, protesters
in Ferguson, MO continued their fourth day of renewed
protests over the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager,
Michael Brown. Protestors brought signs and t-shirts with slogans
including “Black Lives Matter” and “My Blackness is Not a Weapon.”
The incident has reignited public debate over accountability and
racial bias in the nation’s police departments and the criminal
justice system more generally.

The latest Reason-Rupe poll finds 44
percent of Americans believe the criminal justice system in the
United States treats white Americans more fairly than black and
Hispanic Americans. Another 45 percent believe the system treats
all racial groups the same, 6 percent think the system favors black
and Hispanic Americans, and 5 percent aren’t sure.

When it comes to perceptions of systemic bias in the criminal
justice system, Democrats are significantly more likely to perceive
bias than Republicans and independents. Fifty-nine percent of
Democrats believe America’s criminal justice system treats white
Americans more fairly than minorities; only 35 percent think the
system treats all fairly. In stark contrast, 62 percent of
Republicans believe the system treats everyone equally under the
law, while 26 percent say white Americans are treated better.
Independents are divided with 40 percent who say the justice system
is fair, and 37 percent who believes it’s biased against
minorities.

African-Americans and Hispanics are also significantly more
likely than white Americans to perceive systemic bias. Fully 83
percent of African-Americans and 62 percent of Hispanics say whites
are treated more fairly than minorities. Only 34 percent of white
Americans agree that the system gives them preferential treatment;
instead, 53 percent believe the system treats all Americans
equally.

Younger Americans are much more likely to perceive bias in the
system than older Americans, and this cannot be fully explained by
greater diversity among younger cohorts. Among 18-34 year olds, 54
percent say the justice system is biased in favor of white
Americans, while 40 percent think it treats everyone the same.
Americans 35-54 are evenly divided with slightly more (47%)
perceiving bias than equal treatment (42%). However, among
Americans over 55, a majority—52 percent—says the justice system is
fair to everyone, 34 percent perceive a bias in favor of
Caucasians.

There is even a slight difference between men and women on
perception of bias. A plurality (49%) of women believes white
Americans are treated more fairly and 40 percent think the justice
system treats all equally. Conversely, 50 percent of men believe
the system is fair, and 39 percent believe white Americans are
treated more fairly.

Reason-Rupe also finds that Americans living in urban areas are
more likely to perceive unequal treatment in favor of Caucasians in
the criminal justice system: 55 to 37 percent. In suburban areas, a
plurality (47%) believes the system is fair to everyone while 41
percent perceive a bias against minorities. Conversely, a majority
(54 percent) of Americans in rural areas say the criminal justice
system treats everyone the same, while 34 percent perceive a bias
in favor of white Americans.

When we compare these results to the average elected official,
such as those in Congress, we find that politicians come from the
very demographic groups least likely to believe there is bias in
the criminal justice system:

The average
member of Congress in 2014 is 57 years old,
college-educated, male, and Caucasian. Using a statistical
technique, we find a person with the same demographics as the
average member of Congress has a 65% chance of believing the
criminal justice system in America is fair to all racial groups. In
contrast, a similar nonwhite female who is 40-years-old is 26
percent likely to agree.

Basically, those in elected office are most likely to come from
demographic groups least likely to detect bias in the criminal
justice system. This may help explain why Ferguson residents are so
upset—they feel those in power do not believe them nor care about
them.

This does not mean that one group is necessarily completely
right while the other is completely wrong. This also does not
suggest that racial animus implicitly drives those who don’t
perceive bias in the system. However, the very presence of these
stark demographic and partisan differences incontrovertibly merits
our close attention. Yet, these very differences are what make
constructive debate over criminal justice reform so
challenging.

America stands for equal treatment under the law predicated on
the belief that all individuals’ share inherent equal dignity.
However, these tenants are nothing more than empty promises if the
state’s most powerful tool—its police power—is misused or applied
inconsistently. If police power is misapplied, partisan and racial
perception differences make it even more difficult to have a
constructive debate about it. Until there is greater mutual
willingness to listen to the experiences of others, reform and
renewal may remain elusive.

The Reason-Rupe national telephone poll, executed
by Princeton Survey Research Associates International,
conducted live interviews with 1004 adults on cell phones (503) and
landlines (501) October 1-6, 2014. The poll’s margin of error
is +/-3.8%. Full poll results can be found here. including
poll toplines (pdf) 
and crosstabs (xls). 

Protests
in Ferguson continue today over the police shooting of an
unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown.

The latest Reason-Rupe
poll asked Americans what they thought about a number of
issues in the criminal justice system including their perceptions
of police abuse, accountability in police departments,
and racial
bias and injustice.

POLICE POLL RESULTS FOUND HERE

The latest poll finds fully 70 percent of Americans oppose the
use of racial profiling in police departments, while 25 percent
support this practice. Breaking these numbers down further, 48
percent strongly disapprove, 22 percent somewhat
disapprove, while 12 percent somewhat approve and 13
percent strongly approve.

The question was careful to avoid using the actual words racial
profiling, but described it as follows: “It has been reported
that some police officers stop motorists or pedestrians of certain
racial or ethnic groups because the officers believe that these
groups are more likely than others to commit certain types of
crimes. Do you approve or disapprove of this practice by the
police?”

Considerable demographic and even partisan differences emerge on
the practice of racial profiling.

While majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents
oppose the practice, Democrats are far more likely to oppose with
much stronger intensity. Fully 81 percent of Democrats oppose,
including 62 percent who strongly oppose; 17 percent
support the practice. Seventy-one percent of independents oppose,
including 48 percent who strongly oppose; 20 percent
approve.

A majority of Republicans are also opposed, but less so than
Democrats and Independents, with 55 percent opposed and only 28
percent strongly opposed. Thirty-seven percent of Republicans favor
the use of racial profiling including 22 who stronglyapprove.
It should be noted that tea party supporters are not significantly
different from regular Republicans who do not support the movement
(55 and 59 percent respectively oppose racial profiling,
respectively).

Using Reason-Rupe’s three-question screen¹ to
identify political groups, conservatives are the least likely to
oppose the use of racial profiling, although a majority still
oppose (53%). Libertarians are nearly twenty points more likely
than conservatives to oppose police use of racial profiling (69%),
and liberals and communitarians are the most likely to oppose the
practice, 83 and 79 percent respectively.

White Americans (28%) are nearly twice as likely as
African-Americans and Hispanics (14%) to approve of racial
profiling by the police. Nevertheless, strong majorities of all
racial groups oppose of the practice, 65 percent and 86 percent
respectively. In fact, fully 81 percent of
African-Americans strongly disapprove of this practice,
compared to 62 percent of Hispanics and 40 percent of white
Americans.

While all age groups disapprove of racial profiling, older
people do so with less intensity.  Fifty-three percent of
Americans under age 55 stronglydisapprove of racial profiling,
and 20 percent somewhat disapprove. However, among Americans over
55, only 40 percent strongly disapprove and 26
percent somewhat disapprove.

Many may find it troubling that those who support racial
profiling are also the most likely (64%) to believe the criminal
justice system in American treats all racial groups equally while
25 percent believe the system gives preferential treatment to white
Americans. In contrast, among those who oppose racial profiling, 53
percent believe the system is biased against minorities, and 37
percent believe all are treated equally. Overall, Americans are
divided in their perception of actual systematic
bias: 44
percent say the criminal justice system treats black and Hispanic
Americans less fairly than white Americans.
Another 45
percent say the system treats everyone equally under the law.
Similar partisan and demographic patterns emerge, but considerably
more dramatic.

The Reason-Rupe national telephone poll, executed
by Princeton Survey Research Associates International,
conducted live interviews with 1004 adults on cell phones (503) and
landlines (501) October 1-6, 2014. The poll’s margin of error
is +/-3.8%. Full poll results can be found here. including
poll toplines (pdf) 
and crosstabs (xls). 

_{Three Question Screen
Includes}¹_:

_{1) Next…as I read the following pairs of statements, please
tell me which comes closer to your own opinion. First, we need a
strong government to handle today’s complex economic problems; OR,
people would be better able to handle today’s problems within a
free market with less government involvement.}

_{2) Some people think the government should promote
traditional values in our society. Others think the government
should not favor any particular set of values. Which comes closer
to your own view?}

_{3) If you had to choose, would you rather have a smaller
government providing fewer services, or a larger government
providing more services?}